Ezra says that my position on exit from the public school system makes no sense:
Her argument, in a nutshell, is, "Either you agree that poor kids should be allowed to exit until the system works for them, or they don't." What? Since when do libertarians think making something cost money is the same as prohibiting you to do it? Poor kids can exit the system. They just need to become rich kids. But does Megan apply this theory widely? Does she agree that the Federal Government should pay for all Americans to have health insurance from any insurer, either public or private, that they want, at least until Aetna begins working better? Because if she does, then I've massively misunderstood her writing up till this point. If she doesn't, however, then her constant screech of hypocrite throughout this argument makes no sense -- particularly given that she has awesome, employer-funded insurance, while all millions of Americans are trapped on the individual market.
But this . . . makes no sense.
We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day. Affluent parents get to choose which system they participate in; poor parents don't. I think poor kids also have a right to exit the schools if they aren't--as they are not--getting a decent education.
The critique also fails because the fact that I think (as I do) that the government should buy education for those who cannot does not mean that I think it should buy every other good out there. There are many goods that poor people can't afford to buy. Some of them we think of as basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to secure for themselves, like food and housing. Some of them are not basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to buy, like BMWs. As a society, we've decided that education is one of those goods, and I wholeheartedly agree. That's why, when the government system doesn't work, I think it has an obligation to provide those without means a way to exit the system, just as when the local county mental hospital has a fire, the government has an absolute moral obligation to put the patients somewhere else rather than forcing them to squat in the ruins because they're planning a big new building that will be available no later than 2031.
But that doesn't mean I think the government needs to allow us to exit from every system that is less than ideal. I can only buy pants at about four stores in America, and that's a damn shame, but it doesn't cry out to heaven for (government imposed) justice. The fact that Ezra believes that universal health insurance is also a good the government should supply does not impose on me the need to agree with him--and indeed, as I've said at unfortunate length, I don't. The "gotcha" only works if I really, secretly, in my heart of hearts, think healthcare is in the same class of goods as education. The notion that deep down, libertarians really know that liberals are right is widespread, but guys, I swear: honest, way down deep, in the uttermost depths of our souls, we really do think your ideas about domestic social programs are dead wrong.
What's even weirder--and Ezra is not the first person to bring this up--is that Medicaid works on my model, not theirs. Medicaid recipients meet the income barrier, and then they go to any doctor who will take their Medicaid card. No one forces them to go to the nearest doctor, or asks them to apply to the doctor lottery. That's what the NHS does, and almost everyone in the liberal health care policy establishment, including, IIRC, Ezra, agrees that it is a really bad system for providing health care. At least, I think that's what they believe, because every time the NHS comes up, they rush to assure me that when we have national health insurance, it won't be some crappy, government-run system like the NHS; it'll be like France where you get to (wait for it) choose your doctor and have the government pay. It's almost like the government was giving you a voucher or something.
What I want to know from Ezra, and other liberal policy wonks who support a France-type system is: why is education special? I have a model for what goods the government should buy versus what goods the government should actually provide directly; it has to do with geography, non-excludability, and transaction costs. But what is your model for saying that education is in a special class of goods that are rival and excludable, have ordinary levels of transaction costs, and yet nonetheless need to be provided directly by the government? Any of the problems that distinguish education from other goods, like inelastic demand, information asymmetries, and performance measurement difficulties, apply to health care as well, perhaps more so. So why do you want healthcare by la Sécurité sociale, but education by the NHS?
Hey you promised no more vouchers. Even a prizefighter gets a break between rounds.
You do realize that you just equated the education of our children with pants shopping?
The Democratic presidential candidates are not proposing a medical plan like the one used in France. Instead, they're pushing an adaptation of the health plans used by the Dutch and the Swiss. Their plans involve a) a requirement that everybody have health insurance, and b) a subsidy for those who need one if they don't have a job with medical benefits. Megan knows this as well as I do. If she dislikes a Dutch style plan, she should say so and explain why. Her conflating of universal medical insurance with a "French style system" or a "single payer" system is at best sloppy, at worst dishonest.
So you want to eliminate public schools entirely?
Actually, I believe she contrasted the two, not equated them.
"There are many goods that poor people can't afford to buy. Some of them we think of as basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to secure for themselves, like food and housing. Some of them are not basic goods that everyone should have the opportunity to buy, like BMWs."
Decent health care is more like a BMW than food or housing (or education)? I think most people would disagree with you, and Ezra's criticism of your basic argument holds. You espouse decent education for everyone as a higher principle -- but abandon that same higher principle when it comes to something like decent health care. Which means that your argument isn't motivated by principle at all, but rather ideology.
"What I want to know from Ezra, and other liberal policy wonks who support a France-type system is: why is education special?"
Ezra is being totally consistent; it's you who aren't. Government-funded public eduction provides a basic level of decent education for all--if people want more or better eduction, they can pay to go outside the system. Liberals want the same thing for health care, which you oppose. Why?
As for your arguments as to why many public schools don't provide a decent education, you see it all as politics, which strikes as woefully simplistic.
I doubt Ezra has a theory on why for education production should be socialized, but not for health care. I expect it's just path dependence.
"We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day."
Thats nice, but your missing something....
Its not true. They can be home schooled. They don't have to GO to school. They don't HAVE TO BE THERE at all.
Thats the premise of your argument. And it corrupts everything that follows.
Steve, the point is, the mechanism by which the French government, and other government systems national health care advocates promote, is that they give you the money to purchase care. They don't provide the care themselves. Everyone pretty much seems to realize that the systems that do provide the care themselves, via highly-centralized geographically based systems, are a disaster.
To put it another way, the way the NHS provides care looks an awful lot like our public school system; and everyone thinks the NHS sucks because it provides care the way our school system provides schooling.
If Megan met one tragically sick person without healthcare (or had one in her, y'know, family), this pie-in-the-sky Randian bullshit would end. Forthwith.
Pardon me for being uncouth, Megan, but you seem a bit of a shit, and you can go fuck yourself.
This is eactly why I like Yglesias more than Ezra. At least Yglesias tries to appeal to a libertarian's sensibilities.
plus didn't Ezra have a post saying he wished there were less black people in D.C. so their would be more book stores. just joking about that, kind of.
I’m having trouble following your argument. First, you say that Education is different from Healthcare because “We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day.”
This suggests that if we did not force children to go to school, then Education would be like Healthcare. This makes it look like you think children should not be forced to go to school. Just like in Healthcare, we should allow them to exit the system, either by buying into a better one, or dropping out completely.
But then you say that you believe that “government should buy education for those who cannot [afford it].” So you’ve ruled out allowing kids to drop out of the system entirely.
Now, I agree with this – I think all children should be required to attend school – but your Education and Healthcare positions are now contradictory. Two make them consistent, you’d have to argue one of two things:
So, one of your two position is going to have to change, or you’re going to have to explain why you believe that zero access to healthcare is ok but zero access to education is not.
As for my position, I’m skeptical of vouchers because I believe it will force people to drop out of the system completely, since they will not be able to buy upwards (not enough private schools, and you’ll destroy the public schools). So, my position is that BOTH Healthcare and Education should be required.
Megan McArdle:
"Steve, the point is, the mechanism by which the French government, and other government systems national health care advocates promote, is that they give you the money to purchase care. They don't provide the care themselves. Everyone pretty much seems to realize that the systems that do provide the care themselves, via highly-centralized geographically based systems, are a disaster."
Lots of liberals like the VA system. Do you think it is a disaster?
Decent health care is more like a BMW than food or housing (or education)? I think most people would disagree with you,
Speaking as someone who is on track to spend at least $1000 out-of-pocket on basic healthcare this year (physical, two additional physician visits + antibiotic for a severe sinus infection, vision examination and corrective materials, annual dental)...no, no I do NOT agree.
Insurance is supposed to insure against the unexpected. Routine healthcare expenditures and mild illnesses that come around predictably are a normal part of human existence just as food purchases are. The fact that these health plan items have been conflated with health insurance by government-imposed distortions on the market that have arisen and eveolved since WWII, merely confuses the lexicon and thoroughly hinders an appropirate understanding of what they are and how they are paid for.
The "everyone" that Megan refers to does not include the British public. If the Brits thought that the NHS sucks, they'd abolish it. Churchill, Eden, MacMillan, Douglas-Home, Heath, Thatcher, and Major all had the opportunity to privatize British health care, and they all decided that doing so would be too unpopular. David Cameron, the current Tory leader, feels the same way.
Anyway, this is a side isssue. Megan knows that nobody is proposing a British style health system here, and she also knows that Kucinich is the only presidential candidate in favor of a French style system, i. e. Medicare for all age groups. For some reason, she persists in mislabeling the health plans proposed by Senators Clinton, Edwards, and Obama. There are good arguments to make against their proposals, but she isn't making them.
Stan wrote: The "everyone" that Megan refers to does not include the British public.
Ever, y'know, talk to any Brits about their healthcare system, Stan?
I have, and the sense I've developed is that their system isn't changing is for the same reason ours isn't changing: better the devil you know, etc. Doesn't mean it's all peaches and cream.
The fact that Ezra believes that universal health insurance is also a good the government should supply does not impose on me the need to agree with him--and indeed, as I've said at unfortunate length, I don't. The "gotcha" only works if I really, secretly, in my heart of hearts, think healthcare is in the same class of goods as education.
But Megan, you do! You've already said, multiple times, that you think people who are too poor to afford lifesaving and basic health care on their own should be subsidized by the government so they can afford it. Now you say here: "The critique also fails because the fact that I think (as I do) that the government should buy education for those who cannot does not mean that I think it should buy every other good out there." But you DO think it should buy health care for those who cannot!
I don't even understand why you're retreating from that position in this post. It's completely unnecessary to your argument. It's just making me and, I'm sure, others very confused about what it is you do or don't believe regarding government's role in ensuring health care for the poor. Are you really sure you know what you think about this? You've made several of these placeholder posts lately, like "what I think about healthcare is complicated and will be addressed in a future post". If you haven't entirely worked it out, that's fine, and you should say so, rather than pretending you have some perfect and consistent position.
Stan -
Megan hasn't mentioned any proposal by the candidates. She's talking about the system that health policy wonks on the left would prefer, if it were politically possible, and she's doing so to make a point about education policy . . . unless you are trying to argue that liberals are even more confused than Megan is making them out to be, and that they should support an educational system that (in line with the health care plans of Clinton etc) would require parents to send their children to private school.
Two arguments for treating education differently than food, medical care, etc:
1) People with limited incomes who can manage a budget are likely to budget food, clothing, shelter, and medical care for their kids, but leave out education, because people who undervalue education tend to wind up in low-paying jobs or with no jobs.
2) Externalities: Education not only benefits the kids, but also society as a whole - employers need educated employees, educated people get better jobs, pay higher taxes, and are less likely to commit crimes or draw welfare, etc. Therefore a government subsidy for education makes sense as a Pigouvian reverse-tax.
Of course, these are only good arguments for limited government subsidies for education, not for putting 100% of the cost on taxpayers, nor for sending kids to schools run by the government - especially when those schools are now failing to bring even 50% of their students up to grade level while spending more than fifteen times as much now as in 1920.
Megan, be gentle. Ezra's opposition to vouchers is based on tribal loyalties, not reason. (Yes, there are reason-based arguements against vouchers, but since Ezra has never used them he must care about them).
As you found out when your piece was booted from that conservative mag when you qestioned the supply side mantra, tribal identity trumps logic and reason.
If you force him to choose between his tribe and your reasoning you will merely make him less open to reason on the issues where he does have a reason-based stance and would be amenable to argument.
Megan McArdle writes: " I have a model ..." Well, no. Right to exit is a slogan not a model.
Ezra Klein was right to describe Megan McArdle's posts yesterday as "really unconvincing, but really pissed-off and insulting arguments for vouchers." Over the course of six posts Megan McArdle provided invective not information.
Let's consider some real-world examples of vouchers in action and not an airy, fairy world built on slogans.
The Milwaukee experiment gives $6,501 vouchers to poor children to go to a private school that is not allowed to charge them more than $6,501. Megan McArdle's school charges over $30,000. How many Milwaukee voucher students would Megan McArdle's school accept?
The 2000 California ballot offered Proposition 38 which provided for universal $4,000 vouchers usable in either private or parochial schools. Furthermore, it essentialy forbade any future regulation of private schools by enforcing a 75% supermajority on changes to existing laws and regulations. A $4,000 voucher would not have helped poor urban children attend Megan McArdle's school or any other private non-parochial school.
The reality, as Megan McArdle (and her parents) knows full well, is that many parents send their children to private school precisely so they do not meet poor children. These parents do not want these poor children in their schools regardless of whether or not they have vouchers. And the schools do not want them either - except for a couple of nice looking, clean-cut children to demonstrate diversity in the school brochure.
Consequently, in any full-blown voucher system, such as California Proposition 38, poor children using their voucher to move to a private school would almost certainly end up attending a private school surrounded by their peers from public school minus a few of their wealthier classmates whose parents took the money and ran. We end up therefore with a situation where we have converted the public school system to a private system that is more expensive, is less regulated and which is demographically worse off. Way to go voucher advocates!
The only people who would benefit under this system are parents who already send their children to private school or who would provided they received a sufficient bursary. The poor, cynically used as lobbying fodder by voucher advocates, would be worse off. It is utterly despicable of the American right, and I consider Libertarianism to be hard right, to use the poor to justify Government handouts to affluent Americans.
"We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day. Affluent parents get to choose which system they participate in; poor parents don't. I think poor kids also have a right to exit the schools if they aren't--as they are not--getting a decent education."
How is it fair that only students whose parents care about their education would use vouchers (presuming that vouchers actually help students)? Isn't that even more unfair to the children with parents that don't care? How is it fair to leave any students in this school if it's so terrible?
I think the underlying reason voucher advocates take this position is that vouchers don't work as well if everyone gets them. This is because the real magic comes from separating the students by capability and characteristics, not from sending them to school with a different capital structure. A Catholic school doesn't have to admit a student with a criminal history. A public school does.
If you took an entire student body from a troubled public school and sent them to a private school with voucher dollars, how would their performance improve? No one knows because we don't measure improvement caused by education, all we do is take static measurements of groups of students.
Most of the measures we use to evaluate schools are evaluations of the student body at a point in time, not how a school improves that student body. We compare this years 4th graders to last year's 4th graders instead of measuring how much knowledge was gained in the 4th grade. A school shows improvement if this year's class is better than last year's class. This is why school districts can feign improvement by changing school boundaries. This is why private schools look better on static measures- they choose who they let in.
Countries all over the world, including the USA, impelement variation in education such as Germany's Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium. Don't make it dependent on the parents- change the public school system to make it so that bad students are not allowed to bring schools down. Change it so that all students are placed in individualized environments where they are able to proceed as fast as they are able and not be held back by anyone else.
The health care analogy falls down because in education we are only looking at the quality of different populations of "patients" from year to year, ignoring their initial conditions. When we have effective teacher and curriculum measures, we start tracking what improvements they can effect in their "patients". Until then, I don't think you can definitively say that changing the capital structure of a high school with lots of students that are doing badly is going to have any effect on its performance.
From all of your arguments it seems you care more about parents having the right to send their children to religous education at taxpayer expense than about the success of the students themselves. The fact that religion is the most segregated aspect of American life makes this whole thing repugnant if you extend the line of reasoning. Throw out the possibility of vouchers going to religous schools if you even want people to thing seriously about this approach to improving education in the large.
There was an article in yesterday's NYTimes about housing vouchers (section 8 voucehrs). They are used by about 270,000 NYC residents according the the Times articles.
These housing vouchers have not meant the end of pubic housing projects: they existed before and still exist. I am guessing that many/most/all (?) of them were a lot less than wonderful before and continue to be a lot less than wonderful.
Also, that the rather small monetary amount of the housing vouchers means that people continue to live in the same neighborhoods as before, and continue to live in sub-standard housing
So to the extent that the experience with housing vouchers can be extended to education vouchers (a judgment I'm not qualified to make), it suggests:
1. that the public school system will continue to exist much as before
2. vouchers may not enable that many people to get access to quality education because they tend to opt for local solutions that may have many of the same problems as the government-run version
On the other hand, if I had terminal cancer -- which is about where many of our inner-city pubic schools now stand -- I'd be a lot more likely to try alternative medicine remedies than to sneer at them.
When voucher proponents start talking about coupling vouchers to rules forbidding schools from turning children down, I'll begin taking them more seriously.
Show me a voucher system that is likely to guarantee access for everyone, and I'm likely to support the experiment.
Talk about vouchers without some mechanism to enforce access, and I think you're just going to end up disenfranchising even more children than the current system does.
Clearly, there is something seriously wrong with the school system, if it manages to produce people who can somehow log on to the internet and type reasonably grammatical sentences, but by all appearances can't read.
My guess is vouchers would help kids from well-functioning poor families and marginally hurt kids from disfunctional poor families. Having come from a well-functioning poor family and having attended parochial schools (which were full of kids from poor families that were determined to escape lousy public schools), I tend to be sympathetic to vouchers. But I don't think they will do much to solve the problems associated with educating poor kids from disfunctional families.
We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day. Affluent parents get to choose which system they participate in; poor parents don't. I think poor kids also have a right to exit the schools if they aren't--as they are not--getting a decent education.
I'm sorry, I'm unaware of the law that literally keeps anyone from exiting the public school system. Please cite.
What you mean, obviously, is that poor children lack the financial resources to exit, not that they are forbidden to do so, which was Ezra's main point. When you say that rich parents have the option denied to the poor, what you mean is that they have more money, which is a tautology. That the rich have more options in life than the poor may be a startling revelation to sheltered libertarian types, but it's been readily apparent to everyone else for some time and is not really unique to education in any way.
Suppose well-off parents are hypocritical by exiting the public system while opposing vouchers. If vouchers are implemented, they will still have more options; they will send their kids to the top tier of private schools, while the newly bevouchered poor will send their kids to the lousy private schools they can afford (if they can afford even that). Would the rich parents then not still be hypocrites, since they are not advocating equal opportunities for rich and poor? They still have much better options, for exactly the same reasons (i.e., they have more money). I see no moral distinction between this scenario and the existing one. When would the hypocrisy end, short of total redistribution of wealth?
matt m: your point is too interesting and original for this or perhaps any blog. Please rethink your argument so that it fits more easily within our boring, predigested worldviews.
The Democratic presidential candidates are not proposing a medical plan like the one used in France. Instead, they're pushing an adaptation of the health plans used by the Dutch and the Swiss. Their plans involve a) a requirement that everybody have health insurance, and b) a subsidy for those who need one if they don't have a job with medical benefits.
But that would make Megan's point regarding Education even stronger, not weaker. The equivalent of the Dutch or Swiss system in education would be:
a) require all parents to send their kids to school through age 16, and
b) a subsidy for those that need one if they can't afford the tuition payments themselves.
So if you think that's a good way to handle health insurance, why not education?
Many of the arguments presented above by voucher opponents make the fairly heroic assumption that the new private schools that would arise in response to this opportunity would be lousy.
I fail to see any reasoning or evidence behind this. If you give me a classroom with 20 students, each of them with a $6000 voucher, I believe that a small community based school (certainly for K-8, though 9-12 is harder since it involves lab faciltiies for physical sciences) could do quite well with this amount of money.
Being small and community-based would limit overhead, you don't need an elaborate facility, and certainly there would be enough left over to hire qualified instructors.
I suspect the school would have to cut back on some things, arts and sports for starters. That's a loss, but one I certainly would endorse if the school did a better job on basics or reading, math, history etc.
Other things like school psychologist and special education would also have to go, and that is a real problem as it would mean that the school simply could not serve special needs students (who are a non-trivial proportion of public education students).
But the fact that vouchers are not a panacea for all does not mean that they are not worth implementing for those they wuld help.
And please, drop the canard about it being a boon to wealthy parents. As has been stated repeatedly throughout this discussion, means-test them so that they don't go to anyone with an income above x .
I think the point here is rather simple. There are three types of goods when it comes to government:
1) Things the government shouldn't get involved with at all
2) Things the government should pay you to buy
3) Things the government to build for you directly.
Without generating conflict, we might say:
#1) includes things like iPods
#2) includes things like food if you can't afford it
#3) includes things like roads
The debate here is whether education is #2 or #3. The debate over health care is whether it should be #1 or #2. For my money, I don't see why education is closer to building roads than it is to buying food for the poor.
Excellent post. but it's "la" Sécurité sociale.
gene writes:
And please, drop the canard about it being a boon to wealthy parents. As has been stated repeatedly throughout this discussion, means-test them so that they don't go to anyone with an income above x.
California, the most populous state in the Union, has had two voucher iniatives in the last two decades. Neither of them was means tested. If voucher advocates want me to restrict my arguments to means-tested vouchers they should first ensure that only means-tested vouchers are offered as a political choice. And until then, I will continue to discuss the practical reality of the voucher systems I have been offered - they were not means-tested.
A lot of people point out a lot of reasons why vouchers are unlikely to cure all our education ills. And I would agree. What I don't understand is why thats a reason to oppose vouchers. Vouchers would be better than our current system; hence I support them.
Remember we class segregate now! The upper classes either send their kids to private school or move to the land of 1/2 million dollar homes and the accompanying good public school district.
Theese schools use their selection power now to keep kids with serious problems out.
Vouchers mean that some kids who would otherwise be unable to can escape their squalid urban school for one of theese.
Yes, the voucher kids will by and large be going to 5 to 6 thousand dollar tuition Catholic schools instead of 30 thousand dollar tuition elite prep schools, but thats still better than before.
Yes, lost of public school kids won't get out, either because the private schools won't take them or because their families aren't motivated enough to jump through the requisite hoops of the voucher program. BUT some public school kids will get out, and they will be better than before.
And the kids still in public school won't be appreciably worse off. The school district has less money, but only by the amount of less kids. Some of the better kids are gone, and maybe they would have helped drag their cohorts up a bit, but that seems unlikely as most of theese schools are beyond the tipping point.
Also this is where the hypocrisy/moral repugnance point comes in. Because you are saying that poor kids should only get government support for their education if they try stick to that heroic and largely doomed struggle to drag their failing urban school up, while no child of means will ever have to bear that cost, because they can buy a good school without government help.
"Since when do libertarians think making something cost money is the same as prohibiting you to do it?"
Touche,
Megan isn't acting like a "pure" libertarian demanding the whole public system be shut down immediately.
She has wisely separated the issues of government funded education and government run education.
But I'll tackle the question myself. (Megan I think touched on this, but I'll risk being redundant.)
It's not just that going private costs money. The current system that gives free education to all who choose the public system despite their wealth.
This acts as a predatory pricing scheme, which kills off competition.
This has in essence not only trapped the poor into public schools, but also much of the middle class, due to options drying up due to monopolistic practices.
A lot of people point out a lot of reasons why vouchers are unlikely to cure all our education ills. And I would agree. What I don't understand is why thats a reason to oppose vouchers. Vouchers would be better than our current system; hence I support them.
TomO - Do you support a tax increase so we can run the voucher experiment without taking resources away from the public schools? If so, you and I are on the same page.
I support keeping per pupil revenue for public schools the same (with some adjustment for fixed costs).
Most voucher programs I have been aware of apply only to people currently in public school and are heavily means tested. There is no need for a tax increase with theese programs because public schools only lose money to the extent they avoid costs by not having the student (and often less than that).
If we were to enact a broader voucher program that included people not presently in public schools I would agree that you would need to increase spending by the amount of the voucher times the number of students not in public schools. I would support a tax hixe to generate that revenue.
Caveat to all the above, I realize that the public schools will get left with some of the more costly special needs students, so you would have to take the money/per pupil amount off of the median student as opposed to the mean student.
As a side issue I am generally in favor of increase education spending and have voted for increased taxes to support it every time I had the chance. I just don't see why the question of whether we should allow vouchers or provide only public schools should be held hostage to the question of how much we should spend.
NDM - You keep suggesting that all voucher proposals are akin to the California proposal that was defeated by a popular vote of approx. 70-30. But in the real world, just about all American voucher programs are focused on poor or disabled kids. Moreover, many commenters here have said, time and time again, that they're happy to means-test vouchers.
I understand that, for rhetorical purposes, you find it more congenial to act as if the defeated California proposal is on the table here, but it's not.
In answer to anony-mouse, yes, I have talked to British people about health care. The ones I talked to were upper middle income academics with mixed feelings about the NHS, but public opinion polls show overwhelming support for the present system. I've also talked to Dutch people about their system, with the same result. By contrast, the American public, by a two to one ratio, favors some form of universal coverage here. As far as your comment about medical problems being part of everyday expenses, you're not considering medical catastrophies, the largest single cause of personal bankruptcy.
In answer to TLW, it is not clear to me that liberal-left policy wonks all favor a "French style system". I'm liberal-left, if not a wonk, and I don't. I'm afraid of a single authority making decisions about coverage, and for that reason I favor a Dutch style system like the one Romney instituted in Massachusetts.
TomO writes:
Most voucher programs I have been aware of apply only to people currently in public school and are heavily means tested.
California Proposition 38 was a universal school voucher program that was neither means-tested nor restricted to currently public school students.
Education is much more of a positional good than health care.
More importantly, K-12 education involves inculcating minors with values that will influence how they behave as adult citizens. Vouchers make it easier for fringe parents to opt out of the majoritarian values. Is that a bug or a feature? That depends on what the fringe values are.
If vouchers mean some youngsters being indoctrinated as radical islamists with government money, most American taxpayers are going to be very unhappy.
Stan wrote: As far as your comment about medical problems being part of everyday expenses, you're not considering medical catastrophies, the largest single cause of personal bankruptcy.
First, IIRC the study which that hearkens from was citing gambling addiction as a "medical cause" of bankruptcy, which greatly corrupts the point.
But assume for the sake of the argument that it's true anyway. Catastrophic insurance and high-deductible HSAs are not particularly inaffordable, and with good reason: they're insuring against the unexpected, not coughing out another payment every time somebody gets the sniffles.
What IS increasingly unaffordable is the kind of gold-plated employer health plan that arose us during the WWII wage controls and still haunts today, because people got used to the idea that a routine physician's visit was something that someone else should be paying for, not realizing that the cost was really just a deduction from wages, with an additional deduction for the provider's overhead.
Now that rising healthcare costs and a much larger elderly population have exposed that kind of arrangement as merely a convoluted way of buying several extra accountants, they realize -- surprise, surpise -- that healthcare is expensive. But they still want someone else (surprise, surprise) to pay for it.
NDM; some googling later... Prop 38 was rejected seven years ago, probably why I hadn't heard about it. Existing voucher programs in the U.S. (Cleveland, Milwaukee, D.C.) are restricted and means tested. To debate prop 38 specifically you would have to tell me more about what you don't like about it. While it didn't include a tax increase (I don't know the state of California's budge in 2000, so one may not have been necessary at the time), it did mandate that California spend at least the national average per pupil, so it did mandate an increase in spending.
Matt M:
No one knows because we don't measure improvement caused by education, all we do is take static measurements of groups of students.
Look up "NELS" or "value-added assessment."
From all of your arguments it seems you care more about parents having the right to send their children to religous education at taxpayer expense than about the success of the students themselves. The fact that religion is the most segregated aspect of American life makes this whole thing repugnant if you extend the line of reasoning.
Take a look at this summary of the actual research on how vouchers affect integration: http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/docs/Segregation_Cleveland.pdf
McLean:
People with extreme fringe values are already pretty likely to drop out of the system, because if they have enough passion to adopt values that far out of the mainstream they are likely to be willing to endure the costs of home schooling or private education (see for example the Amish).
Also, I am just not that worried that there is a significant audience for radical islam in the u.s.
Or this: http://hpi.georgetown.edu/scdp/DCSupp-FirstYear.html
What's your evidence that vouchers in DC or anywhere else -- which can be used at Catholic schools -- have led to increased segregation?Looking at Ezra's and other leftist anti-voucher blogs; this is what I understand. Leftists see the voucher money as normally belonging to the government (i.e. they take the snapshot at a point after people pay their taxes, but before it gets disbursed to the schools); where-as us pro-choice advocates see it at an earlier stage; before people pay the taxes. So we see vouchers as getting our money back for services we did not consume, whereas anti-choice advocates look at it as government handouts for (what they perceive as) poorly performing schools.
anony-mouse, if Congress passes a universal coverage plan the insurance package for people not covered by their employers will be a Massachusetts type barebones policy, costing $175/month for an individual. This type of insurance covers medical catastrophes, but requires sizeable out of pocket expenditures for ordinary medical expenses. Expecting anything more generous to come out of Congress is absurd because of the relatively even split between the parties.
The Milwaukee voucher program isn't restricted to former public school students. Anyway, how do you restrict a program to former public school students, if the program applies to kindergarteners? And why would voucher advocates believe that the parents who had already been scrimping and saving to put their kids in a private school wouldn't be entitled to a voucher, presuming they satisfied the means test?
The Georgetown study is actually pretty weak in its analysis of segregation. In any school system where 84% of the students are from one ethnic group it is almost inevitable that most of them would be in "segregated" schools. It should not therefore be a surprise that if a small number of them were to leave the school system they would end up in a less segregated school. That is an effect of elementary math and not social policy.
The Georgetown website also contains a draft report on the "Second Year Evaluation of the Systemic Effects of the DC Voucher Program." I would not describe this report as a stunning endorsement of the voucher program – indeed, the authors even use the word "disheartening."
We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day. Affluent parents get to choose which system they participate in; poor parents don't. I think poor kids also have a right to exit the schools if they aren't--as they are not--getting a decent education.
Let me get this straight.
You aren't arguing for a system that educates every child.
You're arguing for the right of kids to drop out?
In any school system where 84% of the students are from one ethnic group it is almost inevitable that most of them would be in "segregated" schools. It should not therefore be a surprise that if a small number of them were to leave the school system they would end up in a less segregated school. That is an effect of elementary math and not social policy.
Well, yeah. That's precisely why it's rather odd for people to claim that voucher programs in inner-city DC, inner-city New York, inner-city Cleveland, inner-city Milwaukee, etc., are going to somehow *increase* segregation. As you point out, it's mathematically unlikely that religious schools could be any more segregated than most inner-city public schools already are. See, e.g., http://mumford.albany.edu/census/2003newspdf/jsonlineSeries/012203jsonline.pdf
where-as us pro-choice advocates see it at an earlier stage; before people pay the taxes.
That's just completely wrong. Vouchers aren't a tax credit. You don't get them if you don't have kids, and you don't get to avoid paying your taxes.
They're cash-equivalents, just like food stamps.
Speak for yourself, I'm not forcing anyone to go to school. Why do you insist that they be forced to go to school?
That's precisely why it's rather odd for people to claim that voucher programs in inner-city DC, inner-city New York, inner-city Cleveland, inner-city Milwaukee, etc., are going to somehow *increase* segregation.
The mathematically-induced desegregregation in the DC voucher experiment tells us absolutely nothing about the effect on segregation of a large-scale voucher program. I think it is quite likely that a large-scale voucher program would increase segregation in any large ethnically-diverse city.
But shouldn't I be free to opt out of paying for your preferred education system if I think it's a bad plan?
But shouldn't I be free to opt out of paying for your preferred education system if I think it's a bad plan?
Uuuummmm, NO. But this being a democracy you can always vote for your preferred education system.
TomOAs a side issue I am generally in favor of increase education spending and have voted for increased taxes to support it every time I had the chance. I just don't see why the question of whether we should allow vouchers or provide only public schools should be held hostage to the question of how much we should spend.
Because if the vouchers end up not solving anything, and you've taken resources away from the public schools, you've now made the situation even worse than it was before.
So, yeah, before I could support a voucher experiment, I'd need some assurances that we're not stripping resources from the public schools.
ndm,
What's your justification for making me pay for things I don't approve of?
Do you feel the people are entitled to do what they want with me if they get enough votes?
So, yeah, before I could support a voucher experiment, I'd need some assurances that we're not stripping resources from the public schools.
So we can try vouchers only if public schools are funded on a lump sum basis, and get to keep 100% of that funding even if 100% of their students move elsewhere and only an empty building is left?
The answer to Megan's question is almost embarrassingly simple: the Medicaid model is the most realistic possibility for those of us who favor universal healthcare.
It'd be great if choice played a role in this debate, but it doesn't. People get sick, people need medical care - these are fact of _nature_. it is good to be healthy and bad to be sick. where's the choice in that again?
Libertarians love to pretend that states can be ambivalent about goods and bads ... that they should only be focused on rights...and this makes sense right up til the moment when they're asked why we should care about rights at all.
Stuart: That's precisely why it's rather odd for people to claim that voucher programs in inner-city DC, inner-city New York, inner-city Cleveland, inner-city Milwaukee, etc., are going to somehow *increase* segregation. As you point out, it's mathematically unlikely that religious schools could be any more segregated than most inner-city public schools already are.
As with ndm, I am not thinking of inner city public schools. I was talking about the inappropriateness of vouchers in all geographic areas as a general solution. Still, your argument is backwards- the excerpt from the Georgetown study omits a crucial factor: did the public schools become more or less segregated as a result of the vouchers?
Simple question- today, are religious schools or public schools more representative of the distribution of people in their geographic area? Simpler question, are religious schools or non-religious private schools more open to students from a diversity of cultures? Let's not deny the facts here, religions are tribal.
So many of the voucher advocates do not live in inner cities, one would think it hypocritical of them to suggest vouchers as a general solution, and then to only offer examples from inner city environments as justification for their desire to have me pay for their children's religious indoctrination.
While vouchers certainly have many positive aspects, extending them to religious schools is inviting abuse on many levels. Will there be a Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays chapter at the local Catholic High School?
Simple question- today, are religious schools or public schools more representative of the distribution of people in their geographic area?
Would you mind checking out the links I provided above, and then, if you disagree, try to come up with better evidence? It's a bit tiresome to repeat myself. Thanks.
Megan,
If so many people favor this project why don't they fund it themselves? Why no exit for dissenters?
Stuart said:
Look up "NELS" or "value-added assessment."
I'm quite familiar with it, but thanks for the pointer. I should have followed with: Now show me someone using it these arguments about how much better different schools are.
I hate anecdotal evidence, but some people find stories compelling, so here's three:
One defining educational experience of my life was showing up to the first day of public school in 4th grade and being given a 12 section test of all the math concepts that you were supposed to have learned in 3rd grade. Whichever topics you missed, you had to sit through a two week class of people learning that topic. If you passed those, you moved onto the 12 pre-tests for 4th grade. Whichever of those you failed, you sat in a two week class for. And so it went. No one went forward until they could pass the test on a topic. No one was forced to sit through a class on something they already knew. By the end of the year we were working through the 7th grade concepts. I got three years of education for the price of one. I decided I never wanted to be held back by other students again.
Two, I went to one of best high schools in the world. It was public, but with very limited admissions.
Three, I see poor parents who really care about schools moving into too small apartments in good parts of town to get into the right school boundary, "Slums of Beverly Hills" style. They want classes that are at the right level for their kids and are willing to sacrifice and squash a few roaches to get it. As long as the school system is geographically based, the best thing to do is move. If nothing else, it shows the kids that you care about their education enough to give up some comforts for yourself. Government handouts don't have quite the same effect on your children's motivation.
No, I like hearing anecdotes and personal stories, which usually provide a better explanation for people's personal views than anything else. We all can't help extrapolating from our own personal experience, whether or not it is representative of anything else.
On NELS: Look up "NELS" and "private schools." Even Google will show some results (many journals, as you surely know, don't have their contents online for free). Or see this for an example: http://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php/44147.pdf
Ah, a mere two comments before an "it's for the children" popped up. He should run for office.
Stuart Buck:
So we can try vouchers only if public schools are funded on a lump sum basis, and get to keep 100% of that funding even if 100% of their students move elsewhere and only an empty building is left?
Not at all. If vouchers ended up emptying our school buildings, then we would could conclude that the voucher experiment was a success, and we could safely reduce or eliminate funding for the public system.
But, until the success of the voucher experiment is proved one way or another, I think it's pretty poor contingency planning cut the funding legs out from the existing system.
(I'm assuming here that voucher proponents are authentically interested in improving education and not just on some anti-public school system crusade).
OK, so you don't think that public schools have a perpetual right to a lump sum of funding. But define "cut the funding legs out." For example, what if a public school with 1,000 kids has 30 that are lost to a voucher program. Are you suggesting that there would be devastating effects if that school lost per-pupil funding for those 30 kids? What's the evidence for that?
Megan
*We force kids to go to school. We are literally keeping them from exiting the system: between the ages of six and 16, they have to be there eight hours a day. Affluent parents get to choose which system they participate in; poor parents don't. I think poor kids also have a right to exit the schools if they aren't--as they are not--getting a decent education.*
1. So what? This might be relevant if you could show that public school was a net harm to the kids, worse than just letting them roam the streets 8 hours a day or hang out at home in front of the TV. I doubt you could argue this except for maybe 1% of the most horrible of horrible public schools.
2. So what again? Many states 'force' car owners to have insurance to drive. It doesn't follow that because the state isn't giving you a voucher to buy any insurance policy you want that low income car owners are being 'forced' to buy the cheapest insurance out there.
As a society, we've decided that education is one of those goods, and I wholeheartedly agree. That's why, when the government system doesn't work, I think it has an obligation to provide those without means a way to exit the system, just as when the local county mental hospital has a fire, the government has an absolute moral obligation to put the patients somewhere else rather than forcing them to squat in the ruins because they're planning a big new building that will be available no later than 2031.
But this isn't the rhetoric of the voucherites. To them vouchers are a right no matter what. If there wasn't a fire at the county mental hospital it doesn't follow that everyone is entitled to a 'healthcare voucher' because maybe they could purchase better mental healthcare if only they had more money.
I'm fine with trying vouchers in areas where the public schools are bad but that is no different than trying any other experiment. That doesn't make skeptics evil people who are condemming kids to anything.
What I want to know from Ezra, and other liberal policy wonks who support a France-type system is: why is education special? I have a model for what goods the government should buy versus what goods the government should actually provide directly; it has to do with geography, non-excludability, and transaction costs.
I would say the truth is that it has nothing to do with education being a 'special good' but in who it benefits. It obviously benefits the children and then the parents of those children but it also benefits the community. In other words the actual taxpayers who are not quite the same set of people as 'the children' or 'the parents'. These people see benefits that may sound harsh but are real nonetheless. They indoctrinate the young with their values. They keep them off the streets during business hours, they spawn a workforce that ensures future economic growth they can benefit from, and they support property values. In other words, a 50 year old who either will never have kids or whose kids are already grown still has a very direct interest in his community's schools and what they do.
With vouchers you are basically saying the taxpayer's interest will be reduced to almost zero. Aside from a very top level type of ability to assert their interests (say "Charles Manson; private tutor" may not be able to cash in vouchers), they have no say at all. Perhaps there are dysfunctional communities where things are so bad that the interests of parents will overlap the interests of taxpayers enough that vouchers are the best solution but many communities are not dysfunctional. This is why, IMO, vouchers seem to be quite popular when its about somebody else's children. Even deeply red states seem reluctant to do what you would think would be quite easy....just abolish all the school districts and local property taxes and give everyone a voucher.
I would say medical care is different in that despite what we may think, we don't really care. We care about our own medical care and our family's medical care but to be honest, go two houses down the street and our level of interest drops to near zero. With such a good we are more inclined to say let the gov't give everyone money to go buy whatever they think is the best care (within limits of course).
With vouchers you are basically saying the taxpayer's interest will be reduced to almost zero. Aside from a very top level type of ability to assert their interests (say "Charles Manson; private tutor" may not be able to cash in vouchers), they have no say at all.
Boonton: That's just silly. The taxpayer's certainly have a lot more than "zero" interest in how, say, portable federal post-secondary education dollars are spent by student loan recipients going to college. We The People, acting through our representatives, have come up with regulations we deem necessary to insure that such money is not wasted. Why wouldn't we be able to do the same when the benefit recipients are 15 instead of 22, and why couldn't such regulations work?
The fact is, there are no arguments against making public K-12 dollars portable that are grounded in technical feasibility. There are simply too many examples of various government programs where the benefits are portable, and where non-governmental actors supply the good or service. In fact, that's the way nearly all government benefits programs are structured. The arguments against making education dollars portable are entirely grounded in politics, not technical feasibility.
It's not about waste Jasper but control. We don't control college funds because we don't want to. We don't control how Medicare receiptants use their benefit because we don't want to.
It seems, though, communities want to control their schools because they DO want to. They want a say in what the school does, when its open, what it teaches and so on and they want it on the local level. Don't believe me? Why are vouchers such a tough sell even in the Reddest of Red States? If the taxpayers are paying for it, they are under no obligation to you to give you a 'voucher' to opt out of what they pay for.
By the way Matt M:
Have you seen this? Apparently longitudinal studies exist after all.It seems, though, communities want to control their schools because they DO want to.
Boonton: I agree with you here. The objection to allowing students to choose their own schools at heart has nothing to do with whether or not such a model works, or would yield improvements. In reality the objection is of a rather more political nature: control.
Still, it seems to me an awfully myopic way to go about doing things. After all, why should one be upset if one's neighbor's child attends a school that opens at 7am, and one sends one's own child to a school that opens at 8am, when the 8am opening time is what one prefers. It seems to me if what one really wants is control, the best way to go about it is to have a system whereby "control" is brought down to the lowest possible level: that of the individual consumer.
I live in Manhattan and send my daughter to private school. Next year it will cost $30,000 or so. I also pay full freight in local taxes, so I am beyond reproach in the voucher debate.
Why do I spend so much on my daughter's education? Because the public schools are full of poor blacks and hispanics, and they are, by and large, much stupider than I would like for my daughter's classmates to be. The people who want vouchers want them for the same reason that I spend $30,000 on a private education -- they want to get away from the kids that would be their children's classmates otherwise. The public education bureaucracy where I live has its shortcomings, and there are many poor teachers, but they are not the core of the problem. The core of the problem is the students. Most cannot be educated beyond a minimal level, however wonderful their teachers.
Vouchers, like so many issues that divide liberals and conservatives/libertarians, don't matter very much. If a school district becomes majority black, the whites will leave, not because they are racist (though they may be, as I am), but because their children will not educated adequately, because the schools will be aimed at kids with an 85 average IQ rather than a 100 average IQ. Vouchers then become a palliative for the small number of black and hispanic parents who want their children to have a good education and have children who can benefit from a good education. On the whole, I suspect vouchers are good, but ultimately they are rather inconsequential.
It's the keypushers of the world who account for the failure of school choice to date, not the left-liberal naysayers. Though if the left-liberals would pause a minute to consider who their true friends (libertarians like Megan) and adversaries (inegalitarians like keypusher) are and switched sides in the debate, there might be hope.
How can you believe that everyone deserves money from the government to attend 12 years of school but that people have no right to basic health care? That makes no sense... It sounds like status-quo bias... Conservatives have very grudgingly already accepted public funding for education, but are still gritting their teeth over the idea that poor people should get health care. But where is the consistency?