Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 1 | Scholarship for Social Change, page 6

Among the most common criticisms about voucher programs and proposals are that the value of vouchers is typically set too low to cover education costs at most private schools; that voucher systems will sap money from public schools and create private schools that aren’t demonstrably better or accountable to public standards; that voucher programs will attract the most able students and leave behind public schools filled with physically disabled, learning disabled and low-IQ students; that vouchers will destroy the idea of the common school by increasing segregation along racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic lines; and that city voucher programs do not provide any real choice among public schools because suburban school districts do not participate. Voucher opponents stress these risks while proponents minimize them—often adding that some tradeoffs must be accepted to gain the benefits that competition can bring.

Unfortunately, says Hoxby, this debate swirls around flawed voucher experiments and proposals, and not the well-designed voucher systems that she believes are possible. “The reality,” she says, “is that these plans started as a grammmmmsroots thing, not with school finance experts and economists and institutional experts trying to design and test an exemplary voucher system.”

And that is exactly what Hoxby is working on now as a Carnegie Scholar. Her work builds on the Friedmans’ model and would create competition not only among urban, but also suburban schools, charter schools, as well as private and religious schools. Competition is, in her view, the best path to school reform. Her prior research indicates that competition spurs educational improvements, including improved student achievement and greater appreciation for good teaching.

Under Hoxby’s ideal voucher system, families could send their children to the schools of their choice—and they would have a meaningful choice of public and private schools in a multi-district region, metropolitan area or state. To promote such widespread participation of schools, this system would provide schools with adequate resources—vouchers would cover the specific costs of each student’s individual educational needs. Hypothetically, then, Bob’s voucher would have extra money for a special educa-tion program; Jane’s voucher would cover costs associated with a hearing disability; Jim, a typical student with no special needs, would have a voucher covering average per-pupil costs for a regular education student; and Susan, who comes from a poor family, would have a voucher that reflected the extra cost of enriching her education. Vouchers could reflect virtually any education-related expense, ranging from transportation to the cost of teaching students who haven’t yet learned English.

The system Hoxby proposes is vastly different from the controversial programs and proposals that offer a limited number of students a limited number of school choices with a one-size-fits-all voucher—priced as though every child had identical educational needs that could be met with a few thousand dollars. And unlike some voucher systems in place now, Hoxby’s would leave it up to parents to decide, by their choice of programs and teachers, which schools grew and which ones closed. “It’s important to allow unpopular schools to close, rather than continue our current practice of rewarding failing schools with more money.”

A key feature of Hoxby’s voucher system is that it is designed to be impossible for any group of students (disabled, poor, minority) to be segregated involuntarily. That is, such a group would have to want to self-segregate in order for segregation to occur. If, after introducing this system, policymakers still perceived that some socially desirable goal was not being met, the vouchers could be adjusted. For example, students could be given incentives to segregate themselves less than they are inclined to if left to their own devices: students would get larger vouchers if they attended schools with greater racial diversity. But Hoxby isn’t sure such social engineering would be needed if groups cannot be segregated against their will.

Hoxby’s system would also revolutionize school finance. Under the current system, school districts divvy up federal, state and local funds among schools according to rough estimates of the student body and its educational needs. Under Hoxby’s plan, the same public funds would be apportioned to students, based on their individual educational needs. School districts that have similar per-pupil spending could easily participate in such a regional voucher system, including many cities that have high educational expenditures. For the voucher plan to work in areas with large discrepancies in per-pupil spending, tax reforms of some kind would be needed.

Hoxby has almost completed a computer model for the voucher plan. The hard part, she says, is going to be obtaining the data she needs from a metropolitan area to create a real-world simulator of the voucher program. When that is in place in early 2003, educators and policymakers could see exactly how the system would create individual vouchers and promote school competition across their school districts.

And contrary to George Bernard Shaw’s pronouncement that “if all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion,” Hoxby believes that a consensus among economists is developing about this approach to school choice. “For economists, the controversy is essentially disappearing, in that there is growing agreement that a voucher plan can be designed to do whatever you want it to do.”

Michael deCourcy Hinds is the Corporation’s chief writer. Previously, he was a national correspondent for The New York Times and he also wrote citizens’ guides to social issues at Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization.

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