When it comes to education reform, all too often, school vouchers and Republicans go together like soap and water, ham and eggs, dumb and dumber. Vouchers are another example of how hard it is for the GOP to grapple with the realities of American life across the lines of class, sex, race and religion.
At a time when we need to reinvent our educational system, too many Republicans grab vouchers as their quick-fix way to close the disparities between the quality of the teaching received by kids at the bottom and those who are in the middle or upper classes. They disdain the messy politics of fighting with teachers' unions or the entrenched bureaucracies of school boards and city halls, and turn to vouchers as a way to avoid the ugly political battles that reforming public education for all kids would entail.
What has always amazed me about the voucher approach to education reform is how few children it would actually help. Republicans are supposed to be the party of business, those who look upon our version of free-market capitalism as one of the great boons in the history of creating, providing and profiting from goods, from the essential to the frivolous. While I, too, am proud of our version of capitalism -- primarily because the history of our nation is the history of its ongoing battle to bring together ethics, morality and the profit motive -- I always wonder why Republicans don't apply the problem-solving logic of the business world to the issue of education and school vouchers. Specifically, I don't know why the party of business seems to have no ability to do math when thinking about public education.
The trouble with vouchers, like all hot air theories, is that those who support them obviously have no idea what it actually takes to do anything of significance in the arena of improving the quality of public education. They rely on the belief that once people start checking their kids out of the public schools and have other choices, public school boards will begin shaping up, in order to compete with the bustling business arriving in the private schools.
The problem is that millions of kids -- many of them white and affluent -- have packed off to private schools around the country, with very little reaction from public education. There's no reason to think that the threat of a comparative handful of poor and minority kids leaving will cause a state of emergency.
And it would be a comparative handful. That's why I tell Republicans to do the math: There's no way for private and parochial schools to absorb the literally millions of students right now struggling in substandard public schools. Right here in New York, as in many places across the country, the private and parochial schools are jam-packed and there are already substantial waiting lists. This is a very good time to be in the private school business.
Even if people were given vouchers amounting to $25,000 per year for each of their children, where would those kids go to school? (And most voucher proposals are much smaller, offering somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000 per student.) Are we actually supposed to believe that there would, suddenly, as if from the skies above, appear the number of schools and teachers to meet the demands imposed by all of these children? The Republicans have more than a basic math problem with their vouchers proposal.
In the world of business, planning for change occurs quite differently. Out there in the vaunted private sector, when one is supposed to be moving a product toward consumers, business people don't look up to the heavens for solutions and throw out ideas like vouchers. They study what works, they test their products, they move deliberately, they market and then they try to bring good ideas to scale. Theory is set aside in favor of objective facts arriving from engagement in the field, not pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.
Similarly, those who really care about improving education for poor children try to learn from what works and expand it to whole systems. One such example is the KIPP Academy, a public school that exists in the educational hellhole of New York's Bronx. The KIPP crew (KIPP stands for "Knowledge Is Power Program") has been called upon to oversee curriculums of many states in order to bring them into shape and to propose new methods of teaching to significantly increase student achievement.
Why? Because the KIPP Academy has a real track record. Its achievements are in objective plain sight. KIPP has brought its kids up to a top-line standard, knocking down the expected high dropout rates, teenage pregnancy, poor performance and school violence. Interestingly, there are states in the South and the Southwest that have hired the KIPP brain trust to reform their public school systems.
Republicans who so love school vouchers should take a lead from those Southern and Southwestern states. One of them is Texas, whose Republican governor owes his popularity, in part, to the fact that he bypassed easy answers like vouchers to do the tough work of reforming the state's public school system.
George W. Bush may not be a genius, but when it comes to education, he's smarter than most Republicans -- he did the math on vouchers, and opted to try to help millions of kids, not the handful who might benefit from vouchers.
