Public Schools, Private Schools

Excellent post by Freddie deBoer at Balloon Juice on the thinking behind "choice" and school vouchers.

I said before that I think part of the point is not merely to hurt public education in order to move towards a privatized system, but also to erode the foundations of pluralistic society. I think that’s a big part of this. Public education is, at its heart, a radical and beautiful idea. It’s not merely that everyone should have access to education, and that we should all pay for it. It’s the idea that children from across class, racial, ethnic, and other boundaries can come together and work and learn together. They don’t merely learn the knowledge and skills that school teaches them, but how to operate in a democracy where everyone is not alike. Seeing that a multicultural, pluralistic society can work—not perfectly, not without angst, not without effort—is an essential part of a civic education. And that knowledge contributes to the understanding that society is a supporter of individual flourishing, not a threat to it, and that what ultimately benefits the individual is what benefits all of us. Urban people tend to be more liberal in part because they see every day the necessity of people working together to provide for the common welfare, which often means effective government. That in part is what vouchers threaten, as they contribute to the division of children into smaller and smaller subsections where they lack the ability to meaningfully interact with others from across the broad American range of difference, and to see the necessity of shared sacrifice.

“We’re all in this together” is a fundamental liberal insight. It’s everyone’s right to send their children off to private school for whatever reason they see fit, and many do so for exclusively enlightened motives. But to say that the public is obligated to pay for it, without real accountability and absent any meaningful evidence of superior outcomes, is nuts.

At one point he discusses the fact that no one would consider a voucher system for things like public transportation or defense spending, but we're already seeing that starting to happen: the Ryan plan for Medicare, which is, undoubtedly, a voucher system, using taxpayer funds to pay for private insurance. (And also, by the way, inserting a middle-man between the payer (the government, which is to say, us) and the provider, the same broken system we have now in health-care coverage in general.)

Read the whole thing. It's clear-eyed and very intelligent, although one point he makes that needs further emphasis: you have every right to have your child educated in private schools. You have no right to take my money to pay for it.