Today's guest columnist if Richard M Oldrieve. He teaches children with learning disabilities at Marion Sterling Elementary School in Cleveland, Ohio. An earlier version of this column appeared in the Washington Post on October 21, 1996, and this version is printed with the Post's permission.
We must get away from designing systems that work only with the best of the best.
As a teacher in the Cleveland public schools, I find much to be optimistic about in the short term. Recently, our contract negotiations were settled without a strike, and Cleveland citizens passed the first property-tax increase in 13 years. However, the Ohio experiment that has given 2,000 Cleveland children vouchers so they can use public money to attend private schools makes me fearful, especially since I hear people calling it the wave of the future.
Ever since Milton Friedman introduced vouchers in the 1970s, economists have waxed eloquent about the advantages that a competitive marketplace would bring to the educational community. What economists and business academics always fail to mention is the universally acknowledged downside to the competitive marketplace: Four out of five small businesses go bankrupt in their first five years of operation. What will happen if market schools follow this pattern?
In the business world, when a failed business goes belly-up, the owner declares bankruptcy and finds another job to earn money to pay off the debts. In a world of vouchers, the people who started a failed school will not be the only losers; the students will also pay. They'll probably come to school one day, after several weeks or months of rumors and worsening morale, and find the doors locked. Then what? In most cases, they will need to go back to the public schools they left and try to pick up there. So even if we, as a nation, decide to help students escape flawed urban schools through vouchers, we still must have public schools to take in the free-market refugees.
Voucher advocates may concede my point about failed schools being tough on students, though they will probably mumble something about the price of progress. Then, they'll go on to argue that the whole point of voucher schools is to find out what ideas work best and franchise them to the public schools. The flaw in this logic is that when academics study the successful one out of five businesses, they invariably find an energetic entrepreneur with a vision who is able to recruit talented employees. (Similarly, if you study a successful magnet school in an urban school district, you will generally find an energetic principal with a vision who recruits talented teachers from other schools in the district.)
But even among the businesses that survive, few are successfully franchised because the original entrepreneur usually designs the business around his or her own creative and recruiting talent. A successful franchise like McDonald's needs to be designed to work with average managers who recruit average employees.
We can't stop marketplace economists and politicians from ignoring these realities and touting voucher schools as the answer to all our problems. But if we really mean to solve these problems, I suggest that teachers, school administrators, education professors, business leaders, politicians, and the public focus their energies on developing educational reforms that are designed to work with average principals, average teachers, students from impoverished backgrounds, and parents who, for whatever reason, won't or can't enroll their children in a magnet, charter or voucher school.
We must stop arguing about ivory-tower propositions that are designed to win a few education professors tenure and a few politicians an election.
We must stop the illusory debates that fool a few urban parents into believing a $2,000 "scholarship" will allow them to enroll their children in an elite prep school when, in many instances, the voucher wouldn't even pay tuition at such a school for the month of September (assuming the school admitted the kid in the first place).
We must stop pretending that private schools are cheaper for any reason other than lower teachers salaries when, in Ohio, for example, the state pays private school transportation and special education costs and, in the case of religious schools, the sponsoring church pays the financial administration and building maintenance costs.
We must stop pretending that private schools are better when almost every study that matches and tracks children from similar socioeconomic backgrounds finds that private and public schools yield substantially the same results.
Yes, there are huge problems with urban education, but solutions won't be found by ignoring the problems of the marketplace. In order for our current generation of students to succeed, we must get away from designing systems that work only with the best of the best and start designing schools that will succeed with the 95 percent of the principals, teachers, students, and parents who currently depend on our inner-city schools.