Guest Post by Morbo
Proponents of education privatization assert that once the public school “monopoly” is broken, scads of privately run institutions will compete among themselves to serve the children trapped in troubled public schools.
Fat chance. Many private schools serve wealthy suburbanites and aren’t interested in low-income students from the inner city, no matter how many vouchers those kids have. Even Catholic schools, which are supposedly a cheaper private alternative, demand the right to cherry-pick students.
A woman named Katie Davis learned about this the hard way recently when she tried to find a private school in Washington, D.C., willing to take a bright 13-year-old she called Luke. Davis chronicled her frustrating experiences in a recent Washington Post column.
Davis, who runs a D.C.-based youth group called the Urban Rangers, reported that Luke is “extremely bright in math and science but he needs help in reading and writing.” Still, Luke’s grade point average is 3.2, which means he’s no slouch academically.
According to conservative theory, private schools should have been lining up to serve Luke. After all, Washington has a voucher plan pushed through by President George W. Bush and congressional Republicans. Surely free-market forces have unleashed a torrent of new schools?
Ah, no. In fact, Davis found the voucher system hard to navigate and soon realized that many private schools were not interested in Luke. Some private schools in the city simply don’t accept voucher students at all. Others will take them but impose additional tuition, steep application fees and other costs. Still other private schools require pre-admission testing or impose a cumbersome application process — obviously designed to allow them to weed out any kids they don’t want.
I have to wonder why private schools that are eager to take our tax money through vouchers are allowed to do these things at all? Why continue to let them cherry pick? Why permit additional fees? Why allow pre-admission testing? Why not simply say, “If you take a dime of voucher money, your school will meet the following conditions” and ban all of that stuff?
That would offend hyper-capitalist ideology, and that’s not what Bush and the GOP are all about. Thus, Davis and Luke were tossed into the treacherous waters of the educational free market.
Davis wrote about visiting one private school with Luke and being shown the door after a 10-minute interview. “I’m sorry,” the admissions director told her. “It’s really nice what you are trying to do for him.”
Davis was shocked. The admissions director hadn’t even looked at Luke’s test scores or allowed him to visit any classrooms.
To her credit, Davis would not give up.
“I began to sort through ways to apply for financial aid. I spent six hours filling out the federal tuition voucher forms — $7,500 for tuition and book fees. This job must be done in person in a downtown office. Then you must have a form notarized and return it. What could this process be like for parents who don’t read or speak English well? Or for parents for whom missing a day or work means missing a bill payment? Maybe these difficulties help explain why not all the tuition vouchers were awarded in the District last year.”
Excessive paperwork could be the reason why vouchers are left unclaimed, but I think Davis put her finger on a more likely reason when she pointed out that, even with the voucher money, Luke came up thousands of dollars short in covering the tuition at the private schools he visited. How many poor, inner-city parents can cough up money like that?
Reading Davis’ piece, one can’t help but admire her gumption. She finally found a private school for Luke but isn’t sure where’s she will find the extra tuition. The free-market doesn’t seem to be serving Luke so well.
More to the point, what about all of those D.C. kids who don’t have an advocate like Davis? What’s to become of them?
Conservatives herald vouchers as a great “experiment” in education. Isn’t it interesting that it’s always the poor and politically less powerful who get the experiments? Affluent people in the suburbs don’t have to tolerate experiments; they get well funded, well performing public schools. In other words, it’s bootstrap capitalism for the poor and genteel socialism for the rich.
North and west of D.C. lie Montgomery County, Md., and Fairfax County, Va., two of the wealthiest suburbs in America. Can you imagine a parent in one of those counties jumping through even a fraction of the hoops David did to get their children educated? It would never happen. The politicians see to that.
But those same politicians have little to offer the urban poor. They treat education as if it exists in isolation — privatize the schools and everything will be OK. In fact, the problems of urban education are all bound up with the systemic problems of urban America. Yet when was the last time you heard a political leader even mention the phrase “urban renewal”? It sounds so 1960s.
A serious discussion of how to tackle the problems of urban America would raise uncomfortable questions. We might have to talk about big projects with big price tags. We might have to rebuke corporate America for abandoning huge sections of our cities, leaving people with little viable commercial activity and limited job prospects. We might have to reexamine our formula for funding public education. We might have to reconsider our nation’s failed “war on drugs.”
Conservatives and their anti-tax legions don’t want to do any of that, so they pretend that a $7,500 voucher is going to help all the Lukes of the world — at a time when even most Catholic schools charge tuition of at least $10,000 a year.
Luke deserves what people in affluent suburbs take for granted: a well functioning public school system that demands excellence and is held accountable for its failures. The free market is not going to give him that.
The free-market is an excellent vehicle for some things — like producing 900 different brands of breakfast cereal. To date, it hasn’t shown itself up to the task of ensuring decent educational options for poor kids.