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| | | Educational Vouchers: A Review of the Research Alex Molnar This document combines excerpts from two reports: "Smaller Classes -- Not Vouchers -- Increase Student Achievement" (Harrisburg, Pa.: Keystone Research Center, March 1998); and "Smaller Classes and Educational Vouchers: A Research Update" (Harrisburg, Pa.: Keystone Research Center, June 1999). Both documents are available on the website of the Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation at http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CERAI | ||||||||||
| | | Table of Contents - Exercept 1 Table of Contents - Exercept 2 | ||||||||||
| | | In the early 1870s, demoralized by their crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, many French citizens angrily blamed the public school system for their woes. They declared that it was "the Prussian teacher [who] has won the war."1 To improve the schools, and presumably France’s prospects in the next war, a French parliamentary commission in 1872 recommended a religious school voucher plan remarkably similar to the ones currently being proposed in the United States. In 19th century France, however, hostility to the idea of providing public money to church schools was so widespread that the French Assembly never took up the plan. Just over 100 years later, with the U.S. trade deficit at record levels, the authors of A Nation at Risk declared that America was headed for a disastrous defeat in a global economic war.2 As in nineteenth-century France, the public schools were called to account. A Nation at Risk helped make the belief that the U.S. system of public education is a catastrophic failure an article of faith in the nation’s school reform deliberations. In so doing it helped set the stage for school voucher proposals in the late 1980s and 1990s. Until the 1980s, the constitutional prohibition against church-state entanglements, public opposition to the use of tax funds for religious schools, and a lack of a generally available alternatives to public schools kept voucher proposals on the fringes of American school reform. Educational vouchers were first proposed in the United States in 1955 by economist Milton Friedman.3 Friedman argued for providing parents with vouchers and allowing them to choose any school, public or private, for their children to attend. In his view, an educational market would be more efficient at allocating educational resources than a system of government-run schools. Friedman’s idea initially drew scant attention and little support. The private school choice plans proposed in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s were not motivated by a desire to create competition and an educational market. These plans grew out of opposition to court-ordered desegregation in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.4 The Virginia legislature in 1956 passed a "tuition-grant" program and in 1960 a "scholarship" plan that provided students with tax dollars to pay the tuition at any qualified non-sectarian school in their district. The Virginia laws and other "freedom of choice" plans passed by southern legislatures expressly sought to help maintain segregated school systems. Since the late 1950s, private school choice has moved into the mainstream school reform debate. Private school vouchers have found support among three groups:
In the late 1960s, the Democratic administration of President Lyndon Johnson embraced the idea of vouchers. At the time, the voucher constituency included not only some political conservatives and segments of the business community, but also "de-schoolers" influenced by the writing of Ivan Illich,6 progressive and black nationalist "free schoolers,"7 social critics of the public education bureaucracy such as Paul Goodman,8 and liberal academics like Christopher Jencks.9 The chance to craft "regulated" voucher plans -- ensuring that the poorest recipients got the largest vouchers -- appealed to many liberals. The administration of President Richard Nixon subsequently advanced the Johnson proposal. However, little local enthusiasm emerged for the idea. Minneapolis, Rochester, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Gary, and Seattle all rejected the opportunity to participate. Only Alum Rock, California, tried the voucher plan, implementing it in the public school system with disappointing results and subsequently abandoning it.10 In 1971, the Panel on Non-Public Education of the Nixon administration’s Presidential Commission on School Finance proposed "Parochiaid," which would have provided public money to religious schools. In the same year, the Supreme Court raised the legal barriers to government support for church schools. It held 8–0 in Lemon v. Kurtzman that distribution of tax dollars to private schools had to meet all of the following three tests to be constitutional: its purpose is secular; its main effect is to neither advance nor inhibit religion; and it does not excessively entangle the state with religion.11,12 Although "Parochiaid" died for lack of sufficient political support and the threat that it would be ruled unconstitutional, the idea of spending tax dollars on education at church-affiliated private schools remained alive. Indeed, the "Parochiaid" debate rehearsed many of the current arguments over private school vouchers and their use to pay tuition at religious schools.13 In 1983, 1985, and 1986, the Reagan administration tried unsuccessfully to move voucher legislation through Congress. By turning the federal government’s means-tested Chapter 1 program into an individual voucher pro-gram,14 the 1985 effort sought to re-establish the link between vouchers and "empowering" the poor, which had attracted liberals in the 1960s and 1970s. Continue with the Next Section Educational Choice Enters the Mainstream
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