The right question about school choice

Dishonest polling again

Phi Delta Kappa, a national public school advocacy organization, recently released its annual education poll, claiming once again that American support for school vouchers is low and declining -- from 38 percent last year to 36 percent this year. These results are highly misleading, telling you more about the people asking than answering the question. And the Indiana University Center for Evaluation and Education Policy might be following in PDK's footsteps. In 2003, CEEP asked Indiana residents who had heard of school vouchers whether they supported the idea; 57 percent favored vouchers, with only 24 percent opposed. But CEEP is part of IU's Department of Education, whose main revenue stream is training future public school teachers, so it has a vested interest in finding school choice unpopular. Private school teachers in Indiana need no education degrees, so vouchers could make college education departments obsolete.

After that first year of positive findings, CEEP took a year off -- asking Hoosiers how much they knew about vouchers, but not about their attitudes toward them. The next time it asked about attitudes toward vouchers, it used a different wording. In 2005, CEEP asked only about a targeted voucher program for students in failing schools. Such programs tend to enjoy less public support than universally available ones; sure enough, only 48 percent of respondents favored them with 44 percent opposed.

Support for school choice varies dramatically based on how survey questions are phrased. Between 1970 and 1991, Phi Delta Kappan magazine periodically asked Americans the following: "In some nations, the government allots a certain amount of money for each child for his or her education. The parents can then send the child to any public, parochial or private school they choose. This is called the "voucher system." Would you like to see such an idea adopted in this country?"

The public reacted cautiously at first, but eventually warmed up to the idea. From 1981 on, every time Phi Delta Kappan asked the question, those in favor outnumbered those opposed. By 1991, support had reached 50 percent, and opposition had fallen to 39 percent. That was the last time they asked the question.

But it wasn't the last time the question was asked. The following year, the Gallup polling organization asked it again, and the public's reaction was more positive than ever: Seventy percent of respondents said they supported school vouchers and only 27 percent opposed them. PDK subsequently revised its question as follows: "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" This new wording, in use since 1993, emphasizes that the program would be financed "at public expense" without drawing respondents' attention to two highly relevant facts: that vouchers are economical and that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld their constitutionality.

A study published in January by the Cato Institute and the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation found that the Washington, D.C., school voucher program saves taxpayers money and would continue to do so if it were expanded to include all children in the District. And when Cleveland's voucher program went before the Supreme Court in 2002, the majority ruled that it permitted "genuine choice among options public and private, secular and religious," and so did not run afoul of the First Amendment.

Not surprisingly, PDK's revised wording elicits considerably lower support than its original question. On this year's survey, 36 percent favored the idea, while 60 percent opposed it. To demonstrate the bias of Phi Delta Kappan's current phrasing, the Friedman Foundation commissioned its own poll in August 2005, asking: "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose any school, public or private, to attend using public funds?" A solid 60 percent of Americans surveyed were in favor of such a program, while only 33 percent opposed it. A 2004 Gallup poll found that of those who knew about school vouchers, nearly one-and-a-half times as many supported them as opposed them, but 62 percent of respondents didn't know enough to say.

Phi Delta Kappan and CEEP could do their part to remedy that knowledge gap by using PDK's original question wording when asking about vouchers. In doing so, they would ensure that at least their own survey respondents were informed of established school choice programs. We shouldn't hold our breath. Phi Delta Kappa is a self-described advocacy organization for the public school monopoly, and the Center for Evaluation and Education policy has a vested interest in the status quo. It's unlikely either group would want to remind people that in other places, families enjoy real educational choices, and schools have to compete for the privilege of serving them.

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The school choice movement's greatest failure

Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times jumped on the July 15 release of a new study by the National Center for Education Statistics. The WSJ's headline was particularly dramatic: "Long-Delayed Education Study Casts Doubt on Value of Vouchers."

No, it doesn't. And it is a failure on my part, as well as a failure of the school choice movement as a whole, that the media don't understand why. Taking the study entirely at face value, what it says is this: Private school students consistently score better in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) than public school students, but their advantage essentially goes away if you apply a particular set of controls for the differing student characteristics between the two sectors (things such as wealth, race, etc.).

Okay, you say, but if private schools don't significantly outscore public schools, what's the point of school voucher programs or other reforms that would give all parents access to the public or private school of their choice? Why, in other words, is the Journal's headline wrong?

It is wrong because the point of voucher programs is to create a competitive education industry, and the existing population of U.S. private schools does not constitute such an industry. A vigorous, free market in education requires that all families have easy access to the schools of their choice (whether public or private); that schools are not burdened with extensive regulations on what they can teach, whom they can hire, what they can charge, etc.; that consumers directly pay at least some of the cost of the service; that private schools not be discriminated against financially by the state in the distribution of education funding; and that at least a substantial minority of private schools be operated for profit.

This set of conditions does not exist in any state in the nation. Instead, American education is dominated by a 90 percent government monopoly that is funded entirely through taxation. The private sector occupies the remaining 10 percent niche, is almost exclusively operated on a nonprofit basis, and is forced to charge thousands of dollars in tuition in the face of the "free" monopoly schools that spend an average of $10,000 per pupil per year. This is not a market, and no study was necessary to point this out.

Competitive markets are characterized by innovation, inexorable improvements in cost effectiveness and the quality of goods and services, and the rapid growth of the most successful providers. None of this has occurred in the U.S. private education sector, precisely because that sector does not constitute a competitive market.

The last great innovation to transform classroom instruction occurred during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson (the invention of the chalkboard, around 1801). Since that time, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a student from the mid 1800s would immediately recognize a modern classroom setting. The most sought-after private schools enroll only about a thousand more students today than they did a century ago.

This degree of stagnation is unheard of outside of the education sector, because it is only there (at least in liberal democracies) that market activity has been so thoroughly extinguished by government monopoly provision. Hence, the NCES study of our current small, non-market niche of private schools does not allow any generalization to the sort of outcomes to be expected from a truly free market in education--and the creation of such a market is the primary justification for voucher and other school choice policies. That justification extends well beyond academic and cost-effectiveness benefits.

A free market in education allows all families to obtain the sort of education they want for their own children without having to foist their preferences on their neighbors. That, in turn, eliminates the endless cultural conflict that accompanies one-size-fits-all, state-run systems (think school prayer, book selection and censorship, the teaching of human origins, etc.). If I were better at my job, and if the school choice movement as a whole had a more effective media machine, this fact would be widely understood, and we wouldn't see fallacious headlines like the one cited above.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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