School Vouchers and Issue Framing

A report was recently released which tends to show that students are private schools are not getting a better education than students at public schools. This report naturally calls into question the utility of school vouchers and conservative plans for our public school system.

But that is not the real problem.

The thing that really gets me is the false dichotomy that conservatives have forced on us regarding schools. Vouchers are a beautiful example of how framing the issue produces outcomes.

The rhetoric on the issue goes something like this: Schools aren't performing very well, based on some measure. In order to improve performance, you would have to bring every school with low funding up to the level of schools with high funding, which are the ones that do better, presumably. But more public funding won't help schools that don't perform well. The only other option is to introduce market-based reforms into the school system.

I recently noted a version of this argument in the The Daily Texan, the undergraduate student newspaper at the University of Texas:

Given the strong evidence that Texas education is in dire straights, the question then becomes, "How can we fix this broken system?" Our state's children are far too important to leave many of them languishing in poorly run and ineffective public schools. Some claim the solution lies in funding: If only the Texas government pours enough money into the insatiable education bureaucracy, our children will receive the education they deserve.

As the numbers indicate, this is a pipe dream that attempts to merely cover the gaping problems in our education system with green paper. The most logical solution is not to feed the bureaucratic beast but to train it and make it more limber by introducing market forces into public education and giving our lowest income families some control over their children's educational fate.

My italics.

The problem, of course, is that this is an entirely false dichotomy. The issue is framed such that the only two choices are "pouring more funding into the system" and "introducing market forces."

The most obvious reforms are excluded from the debate. I am not an education policy wonk, but it seems clear to me that there are a lot of things we can do to change the way the public school systems work, and improve them, without turning it over to markets. Very broadly, we could change the way schools use public money in order to ensure that is used as effectively as possible. We could change employment rules to ensure that bad teachers are weeded out. We could change how the school year is organized so that kids spend more time in school. And we could introduce public vocational training in the place of traditional high schools after the German model.

I have to give credit to a conservative friend of mine who inadvertently brought this to my attention. We were discussing the report released last week, and I wanted to deny the premise that schools are failing on the basis that private schools were doing no better. He naturally pointed out that American students compare poorly to students from other countries. The problem--for him--is that many of the countries that do better than us (likely) have robust public school systems that succeed even without market forces.

Thus, I would suggest that every one of us first get our heads out of the grooves created by the conservative framing of the issue, and second that we take a look around for ways to improve our schools that are related to neither significantly increased spending nor introducing markets.