How can we improve U.S. education?
One answer that gets a lot of applause is to introduce some form of private enterprise. Some people call for vouchers--using public money to pay for children to attend private, and largely unregulated, schools. Others tout charter schools, which are set up under state law to be independent of state and local control though they are funded by public money. Either way, supporters say, we would bypass the regulation that is strangling education. And we'd create competition among schools, causing excellent schools to flourish, good, new schools to spring up, and bad schools to close--just the way it happens in the business world.
All this sounds good, but voucher programs are rare and charter school legislation is relatively new. So we haven't had a chance to test these confident assertions against real-life examples of how the market works. Now, though, we are beginning to get some striking evidence about the down side of market schools.
In Los Angeles, a charter school for troubled teenagers was closed last year by the district. According to stories in the Los Angeles Times, district funds were used to lease a $39,000 sports car for the principal and pay for his private bodyguard. Expensive furniture was purchased for the administrative floors, and a "secret retreat" was held to the tune of $7,000. The district started investigating the school's finances when an auditor found a discrepancy between the number of students the school was claiming--and receiving payment for--and the number that appeared on the rolls. By the time the school closed, four teachers were left to teach more than 200 students, and there was $1 million worth of unpaid bills. The school had a board of directors,
but its members apparently did not pay much attention to how things were going with the students--or how the school district's money was being spent.
In Milwaukee, two schools in its voucher program for low-income students recently shut their doors, and, as I write, two more are in danger of closing. Competition? No, poor financial management, according to stories in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The principal at one of the failed schools was charged with passing $47,000 worth of bad checks. The other school ran out of funds and was reportedly unable to pay its teachers for several weeks. The financial problems in all four schools, three of which were new this year, arose when they enrolled fewer students than they had counted on. An official in the state education department said that administrators of the new voucher schools could have used training in financial procedures and school administration but that legislation governing these schools did not permit his department to offer it.
No one should be surprised. These charter and voucher schools are the educational equivalent of small businesses. Many of them are new, and everybody knows that the failure rate for small businesses over the first several years is very high. (According to the Small Business Administration, 53 percent of small businesses fail within 5 years of starting up, 79 percent by the end of IO years.) Failure is usually related to what has troubled these schools--financial problems and, often, lack of experience in running a business.
The difference is that when a small business fails, it's the owners who pick up the tab. When a voucher or charter school goes out of business, it is the taxpayers' money that is thrown away. But the chief victims are the students; they are the ones who lose school time that cannot be replaced. John Witte, the evaluator for the Milwaukee voucher project, put it this way when a school closed during the first year of the experiment.
There are those who would argue that the failure of that school is to be expected in a market system of education. Whether one believes that that expectation outweighs the fact that approximately 150 children essentially lost a year's education is a value issue that we cannot resolve. Whatever one's values are, the price was high and those families involved.
The costs and implications of charter and voucher school failure do not stop here. Where do students go when their school has shut its doors? Must taxpayers also spend money to keep public school spaces for youngsters in voucher and charter schools in case there are school closings? If not, would we put them in classes that might already be filled to overflowing? Or send them to a school with available space, no matter where the school was located? Or should we make them wait in line until the following year--the way voucher and charter schools would do?
The people who want us to embrace vouchers and charter schools pretend that doing so is as easy as saying "free enterprise." The failures in Los Angeles and Milwaukee remind us that these ventures are risky--and that all the risk falls on the people who have no influence over the outcome.