Customer Reviews

The Case Against School Vouchers

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The Case Against School Vouchers, by Edd Doer, Albert J. Menendez and John Swormley is an enlightening book that I would reccommend. This text gives persuasive arguments against school vouchers for private schools. The first thing to impress me about this book was the 85 year combined knowledge and expetise of the authors. They were also able to state their case based on facts and reasearch rather than opinionated rhetoric.

When I first read this book, I admittedly read through the eyes of someone ignorant of school vouchers and the heated debate about the subject matter. I was very surprised to learn that this subject of controversy "has raged on since the early nineteenth century."

In the introduction the authors give 20 points of argument against tuition vouchers. Out of the 20, I was in agreement with 19. The authors brought up the point that vouchers promoters complain about being double taxed.(Once for the taxes which pay for public school and again for tuition of private school.) I thought this to be true and looked forward to the authors giving a heathy rebuttal; however, they did not. The authors do on the other hand offer some eye opening facts about private schools including the percentage of children who attend private school in the United States and the consensus of the American population(When asked the question properly.)

While reading the introduction, I found myself perplexed. I was sure that state funds should not be used to pay for private school; but how does the state mandate a curriculum for the students in private schools? How does the state ensure every fourth grader has been introduced to the same subjects of learning such as Math, English, Social Studies, and Science with out the contributions of funds? As I read on, I found the section on text books. This in my opion seemed to be the most capturing part of the book. The book discusses how some text books used in private schools use biased or sarcastic tones when conveying lessons. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Franklin D. Roosevelt are remebered in a less than glowing light. Other text books teach "praise of J. Edgar Hoover because he understood the importance of maintaining America's traditional moral values." Other text books teach that "most labor strikes in our history have been immoral."

This book adresses another compelling issue: parental choice. Should parents be able to choose the school their child attends? The author does a brillant job of posing both sides of the issue.

Overall, the book has many page turning points and is laced with facts and reasearch. The authors are careful to present research from various polls and organization from differnect states and years.

Their argument is strong and succinct. They present the argument in a professional tone and let their work and research speak for itself. I highly recommed this text.

I picked up this book with an open mind to see the argument against school choice. I am still waiting. The Authors of this book display an invincible arrogance about the intelligence of legislators and buraucrats compared to parents, constantly offering the opinion that parents are simply too stupid or immoral to seek the best education for their child. The authors go on to praise the value of an education, as if proponents of vouchers somehow wanted to end education. Finally, the authors failed to rebut the arguments about the dangers of school bureaucratization forcefully offered by Chubb/Moe's "Politics, Markets and America's Schools." A book no serious student of education policy should take seriously

As a strong proponent of vouchers, I bought this book hoping to see a solid presentation of the best arguments that the other side has to offer. I hoped for a book that would carefully examine the arguments used in favor of vouchers, analyze them, and attempt to rebut them using sound logic.

What I got was something else entirely. This book presents only the surface of the case against vouchers, with no real effort to dig into the complexities of argument and counter-argument at deeper levels. A significant portion of the book is devoted to issues of religious liberty, using arguments the Supreme Court has since rejected in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (and completely ignoring the pro-voucher side's arguments for why vouchers are good for religious liberty). Ironically, another chapter is virtually a direct assault on religious liberty, appealing to bias against viewpoints expressed in some fundamentalist textbooks as a reason to reject vouchers. Even more ironic is the authors' double standard regarding academic freedom. On one hand, they view it as a threat to academic freedom if individual schools (horror of horrors) choose teachers with beliefs, values, and viewpoints compatible with those of the families they serve. On the other, they decry vouchers as dangerous because some schools might not agree with their concept of "the major tenets of American democracy." The authors' attitude that academic freedom is important when exercised to disagree with a church, but not when exercised to agree with a church and disagree with them, is almost Orwellian. What the authors are really saying is that government's power to tax and spend should be used as an excuse to censor the education of about nine in ten of America's children. Such huge-scale censorship is what I regard as violating a major tenet of American democracy.

Other arguments point to tradeoffs a voucher system has to face, except that's not how the authors present the tradeoffs. Instead, the authors condemn vouchers as if the worst possible choice would always be made, or as if the fact that tradeoffs exist were itself sufficient to discredit vouchers. As a case in point, children wouldn't automatically get into their families' first choice of schools in a voucher system, especially if schools are given a choice of which students to accept. But how would that actually make a voucher system worse than the existing public system? Do we guarantee families their first choice of schools, be it public or private, now? Similarly, if private schools could skim off the smartest and best-behaved students and still get just as much money per student as public schools, of course the results would be catastrophic for public schools. But adjustments in the voucher amount could give public schools correspondingly greater funding to address whatever greater challenges they face. Again, the authors fail to address the full complexity of the issue.

Finally, I can't skip over the book's resorting to classical anti-voucher smoke and mirrors. The honest wording of the voucher question is, "Should we use everyone's tax money to pay for every child's education, or only to pay for the education of children who attend government-run schools?" But in the very first sentence of the introduction, the authors word it as, "Should public funds be used to support nonpublic education?" On the surface, they make it look like a voucher system unfairly takes from one group (the public) and gives to another (the nonpublic). But the reality is that the people running "nonpublic" schools are part of the public, and the children who attend those schools are part of the public. Thus, the truth is exactly the opposite of how they make it appear: it is only by funding "nonpublic" schools as well as "public" ones that we fund education for the entire taxpaying public (which is, after all, the source of public funds).

If you're a member of the anti-voucher choir and want to be preached to, or if you want a surface skim of arguments used against vouchers, this book might be worth something to you. But if you want to get into the real meat of the debate, forget it...

Don't waste your money. You've heard all these arguements before from those that benefit from the status quo in government run education. Our schools are in crisis, but any alternative is viewed as a threat.