What Can We Really Expect from Large-Scale Voucher Programs?.

PROPONENTS of educational vouchers offer beguiling promises of the benefits sure to follow if private schools are made available to all parents. The natural assumption is that private schools will open their doors to any parent who knocks. New schools will spring up in the private sector. Public schools, sluggish from years of domestication, will be jolted to life by competition from private schools and propelled toward long-needed reforms. In this article, we question whether these things will happen. Our answers and speculations come from a recent survey of private schools in California. Historically, private schools have existed in a sheltered niche, serving a special, hand-picked clientele. School vouchers raise the prospect that the niche will expand, setting in motion the free market scenario sketched by advocates of school privatization. Milton Fredman proposed many years ago that, if all parents were given money to purchase education for their children, new markets would develop. Soon after, Christopher Jencks advocated vouchers for children in the inner cities to help them find alternatives to public schools. More recently, John Chubb and Terry Moe have recommended voucher programs, on both state and national levels, as the solution to failing public school organizations.(1) Nevertheless, the voucher programs that have been tried thus far have been of limited scope. The Milwaukee choice program, for example, restricts participation to a few of the district's low-income students and to nonreligious private schools.(2) Statewide choice programs usually place severe limitations on the transfer of public money to the private sector. In Minnesota, for example, vouchers can be used only for students who are at high risk of school failure.(3) KEY QUESTIONS ABOUT LARGE-SCALE VOUCHER PROGRAMS If California voters pass the Parental Choice in Education initiative in November 1993, their state will become the first one to enact a statewide voucher program. Similar ballot initiatives were defeated in Colorado and Oregon.(4) Under the terms of the California initiative, every school-age child in the state would receive a $2,600 voucher, which would accompany any child who chooses to move to a private school.(5) Children already enrolled in private schools could not use their vouchers for the first two years of the program. Any private school, religious or nonreligious, with an enrollment of 25 students would be eligible to redeem vouchers, provided it complies with state laws and regulations governing private schools. In May 1992 Californians were intently following the voucher initiative as proponents vigorously collected signatures in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to qualify the proposal for the November ballot. The media were preoccupied with the controversy. At that time, the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) mailed a survey to all private schools eligible to participate in the program. Because many media commentators predicted at that time that the initiative would qualify for the November 1992 ballot, the questions had less of a hypothetical feel than is typical of such surveys. More than a thousand (37%) of the schools receiving questionnaires returned them. The percentage breakdown by school affiliation, school level, geographic location, and average student enrollment for responding schools was almost identical to the breakdown on these four counts among all eligible schools statewide. For example, Catholic schools constituted 26.7% of the survey respondents and 26.1% of private schools statewide.(6) Our analyses of the findings of the survey bear directly or indirectly on the following questions: 1. Will students currently enrolled in public schools find openings in the private sector, and, if they can, will public schools be adversely affected? 2. Will vouchers put a private school education within the reach of low-income parents? …