Choosing More Than Choice

Campus Report ^ | January 23, 2008 | Louisa Tavlas

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Choosing More Than Choice

by: Louisa Tavis, January 23, 2008

In opening his City Journal article “School choice isn’t enough”, Sol Stern is careful to assert that he resolutely supports the practice of giving tuition vouchers in order to promote educational independence. Indeed, he states that tuition vouchers’ competition-based ideology would be key in forcing public schools to improve, at the risk of losing their students to, say, urban Catholic schools. Stern muses: “Since competition worked in other areas, wouldn’t it lead to progress in education too?”...

Since the first voucher program was established in Milwaukee 15 years ago, the meticulously scrutinized programs have heralded both academic and social benefits for voucher students. This, Stern emphasizes, justifies the vouchers’ moral and civil rights arguments. The voucher programs have since been the weapon of choice for the so-called “incentivists,” whose ideology is essentially capitalism translated into the classroom. Fittingly, incentivists stringently rely on the market’s “invisible hand” in prompting much needed improvement in public schools by way of competition and, naturally, incentive....

1) in recent years, Massachusetts has marked an improvement in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests superior to those of almost every other state,

2) in 2007, it received top scores in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading,

3) the rate of improvement of the state’s average scale scores is far higher than that of most other states during the course of the past 15 years.

After listing these impressive statistics, Stern drops the bombshell: “The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credit, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers.”...