Customer Reviews

Choosing Equality: School Choice, the Constitution, and Civil Society

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The idea of vouchers has been around for years. But the reasons behind this idea were never sufficiently compelling to get the idea of vouchers taken seriously.

That has begun to change and Viteritti's book is the most thorough and eloquent enunciation of the new raison d'etre behind school choice.

Viteritti casts the question in terms of equality. Why should poor and minority children be so often forced to attend schools that perpetually fail to provide a good education?

It's hard to answer that question. The best one can do is to complain that these schools can't do better because they are underfunded.

But Viteritti and others show that the connection between funding and high achievement is conditional- unless the money is spent wisely, it will do no good. There are numerous examples of inner-city schools where per pupil funding is as high as it is in the suburbs. Yet, achievement remains very low.

In light of this, it only seems reasonable to give those children who want to go elsewhere the opportunity to do so. There aren't enough seats in public schools, so private schools must become the outlets.

It's a well written book and it makes a lot of sense. If you put the kids first instead of the schools and those employed there, you are liekly to come to the same conclusion as Viteritti.

I support vouchers, but if I did not this book would not convince me to do so. It provides some interesting accounts of the history of school financing and of recent conflicts over vouchers, but it is difficult to have confidence in the accuracy of these accounts, because of the author's transparent bias. Studies and arguments that support Viteritti's conclusions are generally accepted at face value, while those counter to his conclusions are criticized at length or simply dismissed out of hand. The "good guys - bad guys" tenor of the writing if off-putting. Beyond this, the reasoning from empirical assumptions is often flawed. For example, he notes a decline in test scores among public school students over the years, and concludes from this that public schools are doing a worse job of educating students, ignoring alternative explanations -- for instance, that public school students increasingly come from home environments that impede their learning, as the number of children living in poverty and in single-parent homes has dramatically increased. But the largest problem with the book, in my view, is that while the author initially, and commendably, claims to have the welfare of poor children as his principal objective, for most of the book his primary concern is actually with the religious freedom of parents, and with not offending any parents by suggesting some might not be expert at choosing schools for their children. There is a good case to be made for state funding of private schooling, but I do not think this is it.