The Core Knowledge Blog

A federal voucher program that enables nearly 2,000 D.C. children to attend private schools is “facing an uncertain future in the Democrat-controlled Congress and may well be heading into its final year of operation,” reports the Washington Post. Kevin Carey on this and other school choice news at The Quick and The Ed.

“In recent months, almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, the school voucher movement has abruptly stalled,” writes Greg Anrig in the Washington Monthly, thus becoming the latest member of that mainstream media to take notice of Sol Stern’s piece, “School Choice Isn’t Enough,” from last winter’s City Journal.

“One simple reason why voucher supporters have become disillusioned is that the programs haven’t delivered on their promises. School choice advocates claimed that vouchers would have two major benefits: low-income kids rescued from dysfunctional public schools would do better in private schools; and public schools would improve, thanks to the injection of some healthy competition.

Personally, I’ve always felt that the least compelling argument for school choice in general, and vouchers specifically, is to unleash market forces to improve all schools. As a teacher and a parent, that’s beside the point, and betrays a mindset that values institutions above children. If Smackdown Elementary School stinks, and families have the option to go to The Valhalla School, which is great, try telling those families that choice has failed because Smackdown Elementary still sucks. “I know,” they’ll reply. “Thank goodness I don’t have to send my child there anymore.”

Anrig, the Century Foundation’s vice president for programs, and the author of The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, seems content to ascribe the failure of vouchers to the standard demographics-is-destiny line or argument. Buried deep in the piece is a remarkable paragraph that is probably not higher up because it serves merely to gainsay his entire argument. Still, he deserves credit for including it:

“The conservative infatuation with vouchers did contribute to one genuine accomplishment,” notes Anrig. “The past thirty years have been a period of enormous innovation in American education. In addition to charter schools, all kinds of strategies have taken root: public school choice, new approaches to standards and accountability, magnet schools, and open enrollment plans that allow low-income city kids to attend suburban public schools and participate in various curriculum-based experiments. To the extent that the threat of vouchers represented a “nuclear option” that educators would do anything to avoid, the voucher movement helped to prompt broader but less drastic reforms that offer parents and students greater educational choices.”

Oh. That all? Well, other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

If it walks like a voucher and it quacks like a voucher then it’s probably a voucher, says Alex Koppelman in Salon, on President Bush’s pitch for a $300 million “Pell Grant for Kids” program, which would allow low-income kids in failing public schools a chance to attend a private or religious school. That’s the instant conventional wisdom in a nutshell, with no one in the commentariat giving the plan a hope in Hell, whether they like the idea or not:

Writing for National Review Online, Checker Finn notes Senators Bob Packwood and Pat Moynihan proposed something almost identical in 1979. “To date, Congress has scorned this very good idea. Odds are that will happen again with the President’s new plan — and that will be a pity indeed.”

USA Today points a 2004 proposal of Lamar Alexander’s as the model for Bush’s plan, noting it never passed a congressional committee. The paper’s “Reality Check” points out that “Bush has proposed a federally funded private-school voucher each year since 2001. His only real success so far: a five-year pilot program narrowly approved by Congress in 2004 for students in the District of Columbia.”

“If unrestricted federal education grants are kosher for college students, why not for grades K-12 too?” asks the Wall Street Journal, noting as nearly everyone does that Pell grants are essentially vouchers, with the decision about where to spend the money in the hands of parents and students. The Journal is even stronger than Finn on the idea’s chances, giving the idea no chance of getting anywhere “because K-12 education is dominated by a union monopoly that can’t abide parental choice.”

The New York Times dismisses the President’s idea as “the latest effort by his administration to channel tax dollars to low-income parents to help them send their children to private or religious schools,” and quotes Ted Kennedy and Randi Weingarten pouring cold water on it

In the blogosphere, eduflack tips his hat to the POTUS’ choice of monikers. “It was a bold move, and a bold choice of words,” he writes, “since one can’t imagine that former U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell would ever put his name on an educational program from this President.”

Eduwonk, one step ahead as usual, sees the proposal as evidence that Ed Secretary Spellings “has it in for charter schools.” By linking vouchers to declining Catholic school enrollment Bush and Spellings “may have sabotaged any chance at compromise” and expansion of federal support for charters.