Public School Choice vs. Private School Vouchers

A Forum — June 8, 2001

Until the 1990s, students had little choice of which school they attend unless their parents were wealthy enough to pay for private education. Some parents had the wherewithal to choose where they live based on the areas with the best schools, but others did not have this luxury. The school choice movement has attempted to address this issue by allowing students the choice of which school they would like to attend. Whether the vehicle of choice is magnet schools, charter schools, or vouchers for private schools, advocates of choice seek to improve the public school system by allowing students to pick among several competing education providers. According to this line of thinking, individual students will pick the schools that best serve their needs, and schools will constantly be driven to improve by competition for students.

The American Youth Policy Forum brought two leading researchers with opposing views on school choice to Capitol Hill to debate this issue. The debate pitted Terry M. Moe, a professor and senior fellow in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of School Vouchers and the American Public, against Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and author of All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools through Public School Choice. USA Today education reporter Tamara Henry served as the moderator for the discussion, which included ample time for audience questions after ten minute opening remarks by each participant.

Terry Moe started the debate with a brief discussion of why he advocates a publicly financed system of vouchers that can be used by students to attend the private school of their choice. According to Moe, a voucher system is especially important for students from poor families, who are "trapped in bad public schools." Moe presents vouchers as a fundamental right for all students to gain access to equal educational opportunity, and also a strategy to use school competition to drive education reform. "When parents are allowed to choose which school their kids attend," he says, "it puts schools on notice that they must perform well or they will lose kids and lose money." Yet Moe is careful to explain that his voucher proposal is not a pure "free market" reform of education. His plan is mixed system of public regulations, accountability, and private vouchers, which will ensure that it promotes education equity at the same time it prompts school reform. Proposed regulations in Moe’s school choice plan included: school admissions by lottery, equal dissemination of information about voucher availability and school performance, and assignment of vouchers only to students from low-income families. Answering the challenge of critics who simply want to infuse school choice within the existing public system, Moe argues that providing vouchers for private schools is the only way to provide real choice. Private education, in his view, is diverse, dynamic, and less vulnerable to the problems of political partisanship and bureaucratic red tape. "We should think of vouchers not as an alternative to the public school system, but as an integral part of a new system of public education."

In the spirit of diplomacy, Richard Kahlenberg first outlined the points on which he and Moe agreed. Both feel that it is "unfair to trap kids in bad schools;" both believe that gradual reforms of high poverty public schools have not worked and that radical changes must be made; and finally, both believe that private schools do a better job of educating poor kids than current high poverty schools. But Kahlenberg does not advocate a publicly-funded private school voucher program. Instead, he argues that public school choice can be used to create majority middle-class schools that provide many of the same benefits of private education (e.g. better funding base, high expectations, rigorous curriculum, and positive peer interactions conducive to academic success). Within this public choice plan, each school would have a focus or theme such as arts education or computer technology to attract students from diverse racial and economic backgrounds who are interested in the theme. Though he acknowledges some academic benefits to private education, Kahlenberg critiques voucher programs for supporting private schools, which can drain motivated students from high poverty schools and also segment the education market by religion and race. Because he sees private schools as less diverse than the public education system, Kahelberg warns that private school voucher programs run the risk of "undercutting the social cohesion fostered by public school student diversity."

During the question and answer period, Moe and Kahlenberg addressed how their school reform models would deal with a diverse set of issues, including: overcrowding, transportation needs, special education, teacher quality, socio-economic tension, and rural education. Moe believes that voucher programs could solve these problems by providing funds for additional facilities, transportation for students from low-income families and additional resources for students with special needs. Kahlenberg argues that public school choice could address these issues as well and that the if schools are integrated by class at an early age, socio-economic tensions diminish over time. To support this point, he cites class-based integration initiatives in LaCrosse, Wisconsin and Cambridge, Massachusetts that begin in first grade and have witnessed little overt class conflict. Moe also points to local voucher programs to support his claim that such programs raise minority academic achievement, citing the two oldest experimental voucher programs in Cleveland, Ohio and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

At the conclusion of the forum there was no consensus from the audience or the panelists concerning private school vouchers or public school choice. Several audience members did voice the opinion that a third panelist, one who favored school reform within the existing structure of zoned neighborhood schools, would have rounded out the panel on choice. For this position, policymakers, parents, and teachers will have to attend future AYPF forums where this and a wide range of other educational reform strategies will be discussed.

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