21st Century Robin Hoods

The newly-elected Republican governors of several states are attacking public education on several fronts. Making national headlines, of course, is Scott Walker in Wisconsin, who is attempting to strip public sector unions' ability to collectively bargain. A bill being considered in the Ohio legislature does the same thing, in addition to eliminating guaranteed sick days and pay increases for experience. Chris Christie in New Jersey is considered by many the leading Republican presidential hopeful (despite his continued denials he will run) because of his aggressive "standing up to" unions in his effort to slash public employees' pensions. Rick Scott in Florida is advocating a voucher system for all of the state's school-age children, reducing per-student spending from $7,000 to $6,000, thereby saving $2.6 billion annually. Maybe I'll tackle collective bargaining and unilateral benefit-slashing in another post. I'm interested in vouchers today.

First, let's examine who Governor Scott's proposed system would benefit. Florida taxpayers, of course, would get $2.6 billion in savings - that's $140.54 per year for each of Florida's 18.5 million residents. Although if he doesn't simultaneously give each individual a $140.54 tax credit, any tax savings will disproportionately benefit those who pay more taxes - i.e., the working upper class. Nationally, the top 1% of taxpayers (people earning more than $364,000), pay 21% of income taxes (earning 39% of gross income), so they'd each  get over $2,900 per person of tax savings benefit. The next 9% would get $511 each. For the bottom 50%, this $2.6 billion windfall results in $36 in reduced taxes. [1]

Of course, the biggest economic benefit would accrue to those who are already sending their children to private school. They receive an immediate $6,000 bonus. And don't forget - that $6,000 is completely untaxed. No federal income tax, no payroll tax, no unemployment insurance, etc. So it's more like $10,000 pre-tax. In summary, Floridians earning $365,000+ and sending two children to private school receive approximately $23,000 in benefit from this tax savings, whereas the 75% of Floridians earning less than $62,000 receive less than $110 in benefit. But wait, there's more.

Kids who now go to magnet schools outside their "home area" generally take a bus to their home school, then another one to the magnet school, if a parent or nanny doesn't drive them. Total commute time can be as much as 2 hours each way in some cases, and is more than 1 hour in virtually every case.

Suppose you are the single parent of a 16-year-old child. Because you dropped out of high school, you work for near-minimum wage -- say $22,500 a year. You want something better for your daughter. Of course you can't give her a car, so she's in for a 2-hour round-trip commute if you use your voucher to send her to a better school. Unfortunately, she also has after-school obligations that you can't relieve her of -- either baby-sitting younger siblings while you work at your second job, or working at a part-time job of her own. (The part-time job isn't for hair weaves and high heels -- it's so she can buy the clothes she wears to school, and that her younger sister will be wearing two years from now.) Let's say that job is a 4 hour shift at McDonald's. Unfortunately, your work schedule means she has to walk to the job and wait for you to pick her up after her shift... call it another hour. If she gets 8 hours of sleep (one less than is recommended for teens), that leaves two hours for everything else, including homework.

Given that, how will your child be able to keep up with a rigorous academic curriculum in a class full of kids whose parents or housekeepers drive them to and from school, hire private tutors for when they're falling behind, and insist that they forgo jobs in favor of study? Moreover, those kids' applications for college will be filled with extracurricular activities, volunteering in the community, interesting (and expensive) hobbies like photography or astronomy, and all the other items college admissions boards love to see. Your daughter's will have 3 years' work experience at McDonald's. So your best option is probably to keep her at her "home" school.

That school is already performing poorly because of underfunding, outdated infrastructure, inability to attract and retain the best teachers, and lack of community support (in large part because most people in the community, including you, cannot afford to spend the time to become deeply involved in the school [2]). Now, some higher income families who previously couldn't economically justify private school or a public magnet school will flee the poorer school for a different one. The school they're leaving just got worse.

Meanwhile, consider the other end of the spectrum. Suppose you run "Blue Blood Academy of the Arts and Sciences," which charges $17,000 tuition annually in order to fund state-of-the-art science labs, notebook computers for every incoming 9th grader with wireless access throughout the campus, smart boards in every class room, a guest lecture series featuring well-known artists, scientists and politicians, and a 2,000 seat theater on par with the best venues in the city. You already turn away applicants. Now, every parent just got a $6,000 per child voucher that can only be used to pay for schooling. How much do you raise tuition? And what will you spend that money on?

Let's assume the following things:
(1) America needs an educated workforce to compete in the global economy
(2) America's students are, on average, slipping further behind each year in every objective measure of academic preparedness
(3) Students in America's top secondary schools are currently competitive with students from other countries (at least, less uncompetitive than the bulk of our students). I make this claim based on the fact that America's top universities are recognized as the best in the world, and the American students those universities admit -- the vast majority of whom are from very competitive high schools -- do about as well as foreign students.

Given that, look again at the voucher program. It quite clearly provides an enormous economic and educational benefit to the wealthiest families (who don't really need it) at the educational expense of the poorest (who desperately do). And by "poorest," I don't mean the 2% or 5% or even 10% of families at the far edge of the economic spectrum -- I mean the 50% of families below the median income. How can that possibly improve our strength as a nation?

Vouchers are the political equivalent of a magic trick -- watch as I fold a $10 bill in half, turning it into a $20. The "bottom line," which ex-businessmen turned politicians love to invoke, is that spending $2.6 billion less on education in Florida will result in a Florida educational system that is $2.6 billion less effective than it is now. If funding goes away, the programs supported by that funding would go away. The benefit students receive from those programs would go away. No amount of hand-waving and shell-shifting can change those facts. Budget shortfalls over the past several years have already caused administrators to trim budgets and eliminate wasteful spending, so the $2.6 billion that vanishes will not be $2.6 billion in wasted or unnecessary or duplicative programs. It will be $2.6 billion in programs that are vitally important to maintaining a system at its current level of proficiency. At a time when the need to improve American education has never been clearer, vouchers are a major restructuring which will obviously and inevitably take education in the opposite direction.

Supporters of a voucher system would have you believe vouchers will make public education a competitive marketplace, and the competition thus engendered will magically improve all surviving competitors (weeding out the ones that can't compete). But education isn't laundry detergent. People "choosing" cheaper, less effective education don't just have slightly less sparkling clothes, they impose a cost on society in the form of reduced earning (and tax-paying) power, higher incidence of criminal behavior, higher incarceration rate, and poorer productivity, affecting America's global competitiveness. Unlike laundry detergent, people are not free to choose any one they desire -- education is rationed both economically, in the case of private schools, and geographically in the case of public schools which must admit local students prior to non-local ones. The "best" schools are filled to capacity now, and there's no factory to churn out more. Moreover, businesses whose revenues drop do not, in the short term, focus on product improvement -- they focus on cost-cutting. School administrators would be under greater pressure than ever to cut costs, resulting in fewer training days for teachers [3], fewer resources such as paper [4], books for students [5], and classroom technology, fewer electives such as art and music, and fewer after-school activities such as clubs and athletics. Teachers with lower salaries would be favored over those with more experience. Staff reductions would mean teachers would shoulder even more of the administrative burden than they currently do, further reducing the amount of time they can spend tutoring students and planning and preparing high-quality lessons.

Vouchers won't cause the public education system to suddenly become a competitive marketplace, feeding dollars to the best schools as smart consumers vote with their children's feet. Some schools might get slightly better. A very small percentage might get dramatically better. But the vast majority of schools would get somewhat worse, and some would get dramatically worse. Overall, it is impossible to conclude that any objective measure of student performance would increase, on average, under a voucher system. Don't get me wrong - public education desperately needs dramatic restructuring, possibly even restructuring that makes it look more like private enterprise. But don't let the rhetoric fool you. Vouchers are nothing more than (yet another) way to steal from the "poor," (the 75% of people making less than $62,000) and give to the rich (the 1% making more than $364,000). The exploits of the merry band of Rick Scott, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, et al., make Robin Hood's aspirations seem both puny and pathetic. These men have turned their considerable rhetorical skill and the marketing muscle purchased by donations from the very rich to objectives such as stealing $2.6 billion from middle and lower class Florida taxpayers in one fell swoop. It is impressive, even as it is tragic.


[1] Florida figures estimated based on national data - http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/22652.html.
[2] At the middle school my son attended in an affluent part of a large city, the president of the PTA was the nanny of one of the children. The PTA was extremely active, with most members able to devote several hours a week to it.
[3] At the school where I teach, paid training days have been eliminated for the remainder of the year.
[4] Since mid-January, we have been placed on a "700 page" monthly paper quota. That may not sound restrictive, but trust me, it's about 1/3 what I need.
[5] We have only classroom set of Algebra II and Geometry textbooks, so students cannot take them home to study. The workbooks available to each student provide practice problems but no instruction, so if they're lost and their parents can't help, their resources are limited.