Where I now live, I pay a water bill. In my previous home, water was covered by city taxes. It varies from place to place.
You could come up with almost any comparison you want. Almost any public service (paid for by taxes) can be supplemented with a private version (paid for by individuals). My point is that individuals who choose the private version should pay for it themselves rather than expect public support.
The public pays for roads; if you want to use a private toll road, you don't get a voucher for that.
The public pays for parks; if you want to visit a private park, you don't get a voucher for it.
The public pays for police officers; if you want private security, you don't get a voucher to pay for it.
I don't see why education should be any different. AND THIS DOESN'T MAKE ME A HYPOCRITE.
I don't think this quite works. Parks are nice, but I don't think they're an entitlement--I could deliver a stirring paean to the joys of public parks, but a UN campaign to provide more playgrounds in the third world wouldn't move me the way that a plea for education or malaria eradication would.
Police and roads, on the other hand, generally are viewed as public goods. (Yes, yes, anarchocapitalists--I know. You may excuse yourself to study hall for the rest of the period with a copy of Anarchy, State and Utopia and two cans of Red Bull.)
But they are public goods that the affluent actually use. There are no wealthy people, even ones living in gated communities, who never share highways with the hoi polloi. No matter how wealthy you are, you still rely on the police to ensure that you don't get mugged walking into a restaurant, or smashed by a drunk driver as you motor out to the Hamptons. That's because they are true public goods, as economists use the term: something from which it is impossible (or in the case of public streets, impractical) to exclude others. Once they exist, everyone, including the affluent and the powerful, benefits from them, and benefits from improving them.
On the other hand, wealthy people can and do send their kids through sixteen or so years of private education. One can make a good argument that in the long run, education is a public good--that the network effects of a highly educated populace benefit everyone, including the affluent. But protecting people from muggers is a tangible benefit in a way that protecting them from a 0.0001% fall in GDP thirty years hence is not.
Politically, education is less of a public good than a positive right. (A positive right I endorse, by the way). And that positive right is to a minimum standard of decency, which America's largest school districts are not providing. If the government is unable to provide that service, then the poor should have the same right as the rich: the right to look for a better option. I find myself struggling to understand why so many people think that exercising school choice through a tax-subsidized real estate purchase is "supporting the public schools", while exercising it through a voucher is horrible and destructive.
Will it be perfect? No it will not. And if it does work, it will take a long time for the system to adjust to competition. But we've been doubling down on the current system for 30 years with no result.
I find myself struggling to understand why so many people think that exercising school choice through a tax-subsidized real estate purchase is "supporting the public schools", while exercising it through a voucher is horrible and destructive.
Actually, it's pretty easy to understand.
The first choice doesn't endanger the Public Schools Teacher's Union, the second one does.
Caring about poor / middle class kids is a "nice to have", caring about the NEA is important. That's because the former are powerless, and the latter are powerful, and, given a choice, lefties always support the powerful against the powerless.
It's an inherent part of being pro-Government.
Well, we agree on quite a bit, Megan--in particular, the idea that education is a public good which the society should be committed to provide to all citizens. And we agree that many of our public schools have serious problems and need improvement. But we differ about what to do about it.
First, an aside--you're wrong if you think no rich people use public schools. My family and I lived in Chappaqua, one of the richest towns in New York, for 17 years. Our kids went to school there. Practically everyone in town attended the public schools, including the children of Wall Street traders and corporate lawyers earning seven-figure salaries. And why not? Plenty of those students, including my kids, went on to Ivy League schools.
But that's not a typical public school system, of course. What should we do to fix the systems that are in trouble? Seems to me we ought to apply the solutions educational experts and involved families have mostly advocated--early education, longer school days and years, smaller classes, and more equitable funding of school districts (less tied to real estate values). These changes would make a big difference, though putting them in place will be politically difficult. More parental involvement is also very important, and merit pay for teachers may be beneficial if it can be implemented fairly.
By comparison, vouchers are at best a terribly indirect solution. As I said to another commenter on your earlier post: If your public water system is broken, would you hire engineers to fix it? Or would you give out tax rebates so people could buy bottled water and hope that, eventually, the "competition" would somehow make the public water system better?
If the government is unable to provide that service, then the poor should have the same right as the rich: the right to look for a better option.
Joe Strummer once sang: "You have the right to free speech, as long as you are not dumb enough to actually try it!"
Rights are only as valuable as they are actionable. You can grant me the "right" to fly to the moon. I have no capacity to do so, so it means nothing.
Positive Externalites!
As a libertarian, this is where I draw the line on government involvement.
Vouchers make sense because the utility of children attending school is spread beyond the individual or family.
Likewise I would support health insurance vouchers for the same reason.
The other thing I don't get about the opposition is that a well targeted voucher program would certainly HELP the public schools. By well targeted, I mean a voucher program that goes mostly to kids who would otherwise go to public school, as opposed to kids who would go to private school (like mine) even without the voucher.
As long as the voucher costs less than the marginal cost of educating that kid in the public school (which is almost certainly the case since 1) in the long run, all costs are marginal and 2) even in the short run, the biggest cost of education is salaries and fewer students implies fewer employees) then the public school system SAVES MONEY when the kid goes to a private school, leaving more money for those who stay.
Megan,
I would like to thank you for giving me my "Ah hah!" moment of the day. I had never heard the term "positive right" before, which sent me on a mad Wiki adventure through the concepts of positive and negative rights (and how those may different from public goods).
I'm not sure what your aspirational motivations (if any) are in blogging, but if one them is to expose people to new ideas, you succeeded today.
Thanks!
Karl Weber,
if your public water system was overstaffed with engineers for years and still not fixed, wouldn't you want some of your money back to offset paying the guy to truck in your water?
(and here I was afraid I wouldn't get to use my left-handed analogy stretcher this week)
What is the source of this positive right?
None of Karl's analogies are on point.
Private roads, parks, and security are all supplementary to their corresponding public good. These analogies break down because the issue isn't vouchers for the Princeton Review.
His initial water example is closer, but still fails for the following reason: everyone uses water, but not everyone is in grades K-12. Very few parents can foot the yearly bill for their children's education. Thus, the water analogy only works if the point is to argue that the government shouldn't pay for education at all.
Michael, I don't follow your logic. If my water analogy leads to the conclusion "that the government shouldn't pay for education at all," does that mean you think my argument suggests that the government should get out of the water business? How so?
I would have had more respect for this response if you had tried to make an argument about the police force rather than parks. Too easy.
By the way, we seem to have lost the thread of my main point here. It's fine to argue about school vouchers, pro and con. But my response was mainly designed to respond to the totally unfair contention made in Megan's original headline about "the hypocrisy of Democratic politicians" who oppose vouchers.
You may favor vouchers--fine. But the fact that someone opposes having the public pay for everyone to attend private schools doesn't make them hypocritical--even if they use private schools themselvs.
The "hypocrisy" charge is pure Republican talking point.
Josh Lyle--Actually, if I could apply for a refund for my tax dollars that were mis-spent, wasted, or used for downright destructive purposes, there are a lot of expenditures I could point to, including plenty from the Pentagon (where much more of my federal taxes go than to education).
Unfortunately our system doesn't work like that. Yet somehow the right has convinced some people they should be angrier about education than about any other government program.
Karl_Weber: Some of us here would appreciate it if you would read Megan's posts more thoroughly before responding, so that you don't claim she "agrees with you that education is a public good", when she specifically dismissed that claim and reclassified it as a positive right.
Just a "heads up".
Let's review:
Poor people can't afford to buy non-horrific education for their children. You can.
Poor people can't afford to move to the school district where you have fled to in order to avoid them. You can.
Poor people don't get to deduct the rental cost on their apartments. You get to deduct your money rental costs so as to help you buy that home far, far away from the rabble.
You want the poor to have precisely zero alternatives until whatever school they're stuck with can be bothered to get its act together ... "for their own good".
Yes, Karl_Weber, that makes you the hypocrite on this one.
I actually have no problem with you wanting to move away from the rabble. What I do object to, deeply, is trying to throw blatantly false rationalizations around to justify it.
And FWIW, if the water utility started sending extrement through the pipes and into your home, then YES, you'd probably want to stop paying for that privilege so you can spend the money on getting water some other way. (It doesn't suprise me that you aren't capable of envisioning competition in running water provision, btw.)
. . . And that positive right is to a minimum standard of decency, which America's largest school districts are not providing.
"Largest school district" is a pretty bizarre euphemism here, when what you're actually talking about are urban school districts with large populations of poor students, black students and hispanic students (including the various intersections between these racial and economic categories).
Fairfax County VA, for example, has an enormous public school system — 12th biggest in the nation! — but still manages to 150 point the national average on the SAT.
Person,
Nice of you to make up a quote ("for their own good") and pretend I wrote it, so as to justify your conclusion that I am a hypocrite who wants the poor to have zero alternatives to bad education.
You may think of poor people as "rabble," but I don't. I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Brooklyn (Brownsville). And I attended the public schools there. So I know what the hell I am talking about.
I don't believe vouchers will help the vast majority of poor people. Evidence from existing voucher programs suggests I am right. Instead I would favor working to improve public school systems through the methods I mentioned in my comment.
You have the perfect right to disagree. But attacking me personally, when you know nothing about me, doesn't suggest you have a lot of faith in your arguments.
@Karl_Weber: Actually, if I could apply for a refund for my tax dollars that were mis-spent, wasted, or used for downright destructive purposes, there are a lot of expenditures I could point to, including plenty from the Pentagon (where much more of my federal taxes go than to education).
Okay, the Pentagon is wasteful. Point granted. But its waste does not deny you a positive right that other Americans get, as is the case with education. (Assuming you can ever get your head around the difference between a public good and a positive right.) Whatever the stupid "defend America" policies the Pentagon enacts, other Americans have to deal with just the same.
When that difference no persists, you would probably agree with voucher proponents. Specifically, assume the Pentagon paid terrorists to start blowing up American homes and apartments. Thenhome fortifications necessary to protect from these terrorists that poor Pentagon policies cause (as only the rich can afford a decent education). In that case, a reasonable request might be: "Wait -- let me have my share of defense revenues back so I can afford to fortify my home too."
Karl W,
I agree with Megan that education is more of a positive right, which I also support.
However, I disagree with your analogy to a public water system. Water is an undifferentiated commodity while education is highly differentiated. It is also a public good as economists (and Megan) describe.
If your water delivery system were broken, I'd expect your city to hire an engineer. However, there is no "food delivery" system in any town I know. Food is highly differentiated and, though we don't let people starve, we don't have a public food system to provide it. Rather, we give them vouchers (food stamps) to provide access to some minimum.
Megan focuses on the right of exit to improve schools. She's right as far as she goes, but she ignores another important aspect: a private system lets people who value different aspects of education all achieve their goals.
Some people might want a school with lots of extracurricular activities or music and arts. I, for one, would rather my kids spend more time on math and science. By moving to a voucher system we can accommodate different values for different kids.
@Karl_Weber: I don't believe vouchers will help the vast majority of poor people.
You mean, you don't believe it will help the price premium that your home gets from being in a good school district.
Instead I would favor working to improve public school systems through the methods I mentioned in my comment.You have the perfect right to disagree. But attacking me personally, when you know nothing about me, doesn't suggest you have a lot of faith in your arguments.
This, of course, is in contrast to the good faith you show in telling the poor to, you know, just sit tight until we feel like letting your kids have a decent education.
Re "'For their own good'" -- those were scare quotes, not direct quotes, and if it mischaracterizes your position, I would love to apologize; but if that were the case, I think you would have objected on those grounds instead, right?
Colin,
I follow the way you differentiate water from food. As you, there is no public "food delivery" system, and so we avert large-scale hunger by providing vouchers to enable to poor to get at least minimal nutrition. Are you saying, by analogy, that we should abolish the public school system altogether in favor of vouchers, on the expectation that private schools would spring up sufficient to fill the vacuum? Just trying to follow your logic here.
Person,
I don't claim to be a mind-reader, so I won't pretend I can know what you think and feel about things you haven't mentioned. I'd appreciate your extending the same courtesy to me.
Actually I would certain not advocate that the poor sit tight and wait for society to provide better schools. I would like to see them organize and fight for the schools they deserve--just as citizens need to fight for all aspects of decent and competent governance.
And by the way, when I advocate more equitable school funding, that means (among other things) taking money away from rich school districts (like the one I now live in) and giving it to poorer ones (like the one I grew up in). I would happily vote for a candidate who supported such a plan, against my own self-interest (narrowly defined).
You are the only one making sneering remarks about the poor, Person--not me.
Roads aren't public goods. They're both rivalrous (come 5:00 PM, anyway) and excludable. Perhaps the term you're looking for is natural monopoly.
Karl,
I agree with you that my statement that you flagged is pretty unclear. I'll try again:
In your water bill example, in one city you paid directly and in another you paid via taxation. Most can easily afford to pay for the full cost of their water either way, so the difference in the method isn't material for our purposes. Education is a different matter. Switching from vouchers/public school (like city-paid water) to private payment just isn't possible - the difference is the amount of subsidy.
I don't think that your water analogy logically leads to the conclusion that the government shouldn't pay for education. But neither is it useful for the argument you're trying to make.
Now, I rather suspect that school vouchers will be little more than middle class welfare unless all state schools are privatised in the sense that they can go bankrupt, and will not be bailed out.
I guess it is technically true that roads, even in highly urbanised areas are both rivalrous (obviously) and excludable (you could make it illegal to drive on them without permission).
So, not actually a public good except that their excludability (like pretty much everything) is a function of the legal context.
Michael B,
I'm still not totally sure I follow you--sorry. But since you raise the point about the amount of the subsidy needed to pay for education being so much greater than the cost of paying for water, let me note that I think this is a serious weakness of the argument that vouchers can be a major force for educational reform.
My understanding is that the amount of money provided in any proposed voucher scheme--usually in the neighborhood of $5,000--is not enough to pay for private education, expect possibly at a highly-subsidized school (such as some parochial schools). Doesn't this drastically limit the number of students who can benefit from vouchers?
In the extreme case, if you gave $5,000 vouchers to every student and then shut the public schools, would it actually be possible to launch enough private schools to educate all the kids? I don't think it would--especially not if the $5,000 is the total sum allocated for school costs.
If this is correct, then the voucher concept is really just a red herring that distracts us from the inescapable job of actually making the public schools better.
Oh, yeah, imagine I said something wise about deadweight costs in choosing whether or not to make something excludable.
I suspect that the reality is that any workable scheme will be weak at excluding the non-payers (as with the London congestion charge) because the costs of enforcement are high. If that is the case, roads ought to be funded by the public, or by some kind of mechanism that is partially private, like a mutual system which means that free-riders lose out on some of the benefits.
Thanks for the spirited back and forth, and thanks to Megan for the bandwidth.
Gotta go make dinner for the wife--she works hard and deserves a little semi-competent home cooking. You can now demolish my arguments any way you like without receiving even a feeble response on my part . . .
Karl,
I'm not saying we should abolish the public schools, but I wouldn't feel terrible if they disappeared, replaced by private[*] schools that students attend with a public subsidy.
I would start with transferring part of the subsidy we already give from the schools into vouchers for the children. I'd start with students in the worst districts (probably the poorest kids), but gradually expand it to all students.
[Aside: even if we don't agree, I appreciate the non-vituperative conversation. I think the comments at this blog can be a cool place for conversation from the left and the right. (Okay, from all four corners of the Nolan chart.)]
I think both Karl's and Megan's points are very good, and this is the kind of discussion I'd love to see more of on this blog -- fair and substantive and well reasoned.
Karl is right that it's not "hypocritical" for people who oppose vouchers to send their kids to private school. They're not only paying for the free public schools so other people's kids can attend them, they're also paying extra for a private school so their kids can attend it. There is no moral difference between this situation, and one in which everyone gets a voucher for $6000 but some people send their kids to schools that cost $38000. If there were vouchers for $6000 or even $10000, would Megan accuse Republicans who send their kids to $38000 private schools of "hypocrisy" unless they pushed to have the vouchers raised to $38000?
On the other hand, Megan has a strong argument that if actually existing public education, as opposed to theoretical future public education, is failing a large segment of the population, then we are doing those kids active moral harm by refusing to let their parents choose where they can go to school. I think one main problem is the risk of destroying good, functional public school systems by defunding them if you switch to a voucher system.
Here, Karl W, let's see if I can help you understand:
1: Politician says "I want to help [group of people]"
2: Politician decides that the schools [group of people] send their kids to aren't good enough for his kids, sends them to private school instead.
3: Politician opposes giving [group of people] vouchers that would allow them to send their children to better schools.
4: Since "getting a good education" strongly correlates with "having a decent life", by denying those children a chance to get a decent education, he (and you) are making it much harder for them to have a decent life.
Conclusion: Politician does not, in fact, care about [group of people]. Because if he did, he would want them to have the same opportunity for their children that he has for his children.
That simple enough for you to understand?
Greg Q:
if you say you want to help Iraqis, and you send your kids to an American private school, are you obligated to push to give every Iraqi family $30,000 a year so they can send their kids to American private schools? Or are you a hypocrite?
Awaiting your reply,
brooksfoe
I think one main problem is the risk of destroying good, functional public school systems by defunding them if you switch to a voucher system.
Why would parents in a functional school system pull their kids out of it to use the vouchers? And for that matter, why would we choose to implement vouchers where the schools are actually good?
See, the link you're missing, Greg, is this:
-- Politician supports dramatically improving the quality of public education so local public schools would be good enough to send anyone's kids to.
You may think this goal is naive or unrealistic. But that, then, is the argument you should be making. It's not about hypocrisy. A lot of people think the idea that vouchers will provide a better education for poor kids is naive and unrealistic, too, and that supporting them is basically a way of morally justifying giving up on providing a decent education for poor kids -- especially given that they're politically unlikely to be approved. If you're a conservative, of course, you can send your kids to private school, vote to defund public schools, say "But I support vouchers!", and have a clear conscience. Some might say that was hypocritical, too.
You could come up with almost any comparison you want. Almost any public service (paid for by taxes) can be supplemented with a private version (paid for by individuals). My point is that individuals who choose the private version should pay for it themselves rather than expect public support.
This is soooo dumb-butt.
The objective of the government should be to provide the best quality service for the taxpayers' money. And it should do that by following management practices that are known to be good, not bad.
The statement above effectively is: we the government can provide any crap level of service using such known-to-be crap management practices as may be convenient for us, using your tax money ... and if you don't like it, go out and spend your own money on better, but keep paying us your taxes that we'll continue to waste.
Here's the comparison I come up with, from real life, not some hypothetical...
Sweden has a 100% voucher public school system -- anyone can open a school to compete with the original public schools -- everybody supports it and takes it as the norm,, even the teachers unions have come around to supporting it, it's a big success result-wise, and has produced exactly the beneficial effects predicted from competition that reformers expected.
I can put only one link in per comment, but for a paper examining the effects of the voucherization Google this:
"School vouchers in practice: Competition won’t
hurt you!"
Hey, for another comparison, Sweden has contracted out to private businesses the operation of its public transit systems, to give its taxpayers more for their tax money.
But if transit service is lousy and overpriced in NYC, people are supposed to go out and buy their own buses, right?
Sweden has private accounts in social security too.
Sweden --- far too right wing for US Democrats.
And for that matter, why would we choose to implement vouchers where the schools are actually good? - Rob
I haven't seen people argue that vouchers should only be implemented in areas where public schools are failing, but that would be a stronger proposal than a universal voucher program.
Some people would pull their kids out of good public school systems if the marginal cost of sending them to private school dropped because they could get vouchers to do it. As those kids were pulled out of public school, enrollment and funding would drop, and it would be the richest (and therefore the best academically performing, statistically) students who pulled out first. Gradually cream-skimming would erode the quality of the public system. Currently in places like Montgomery County, MD you have public school systems attended by top-scoring rich kids. Vouchers could gradually take those kids out of the public system and exacerbate class stratification.
Private schools in the Netherlands, for example, get public funding. But the price is 1. much greater government involvement in regulating private schools and 2. greater social pillarization which leads to religious strife.
"true public goods, as economists use the term...
"One can make a good argument that in the long run, education is a public good -- that the network effects of a highly educated populace benefit everyone, including the affluent."
No, you can't. That seat in the classroom is both rival (only one person gets to sit in it) and excludable (you don't get in it if you don't meet X requirements).
That makes the seat in the classroom and the education that is served to it no more of a "public good" than a seat in a movie theater and the entertainment that is served to it.
If education was a public good, schools and universities -- even public ones -- couldn't charge fees and tuition and set admission requirements that keep many from receiving it.
National defense is a public good, everybody in the nation benefits from it and there is no way to keep anybody in the nation from benefitting from it along with everyone else.
You can make the case that education has positive externalities that benefit the community in general in addition to the benefits it provides for the individual who receives it, but that's a rather different thing, and there is significance in the difference.
Yes, "public good" is probably the worst-named thing in all of economics, making everybody believe it is something that is "good for the public". Whoever came up with it should be bull-whipped.
And normally I wouldn't be so anal as to mention all this ... except when the lead-off phrase is: "true public goods, as economists use the term..."
The thing that bugs me about the "public goods" thing is that for most of the issues it comes up in regards to, it's tautological. Almost anything can be a public good if you choose to make it public.
For example, defense isn't a public good. You can have private armies that only defend certain areas from attack and exclude other areas. It's rival and excludable. "National" defense is a public good only because it's defined to include the entire nation. But that's tautological.
Same with public parks. Parks aren't a public good. Your backyard is a private park - rival and excludable. A public park is a public good, but only because it's public. But that's tautological too.
Education isn't a public good. But universal education is a public good. It's non-excludable because if you deny education to anyone, it's no longer universal. But that's tautological. Just like national defense. And defense is no more "non-rival" than education is: if you spend a lot on the Navy, you have less to spend on the Department of Homeland Security.
There's a certain usefulness to the term "public good". But as applied to broad questions of national policy it's mostly a way to obscure decisions about whether or not to make some good public to appear as though there were some natural state in which such a good exists.
defense isn't a public good. You can have private armies that only defend certain areas from attack and exclude other areas. It's rival and excludable.
Incorrect. If an army defends an area it can't exclude some individuals, and not others, within that area from its protection.
"Rival and excludable" applies on an individual, per person, basis.
The significance is, that is the condition needed to make markets work in the classic, "individual pays a price or doesn't get the product" manner.
A lighthouse signal is a public good -- there is no way to make only individual, "subscribing" ships see it, any passing ship can see it and use it -- free ride on those who pay for it.
A traditional AM/FM radio signal is a public good. Broadcasters can't charge individual listeners for it or cut it off to them, so they have to pack advertising into it or have fundraising drives.
Scrambled radio and cable TV signals that go through decoders are not public goods -- the providers can make customers pay on an individual basis, so HBO is commercial-free.
There's no tautology in those things.
Education isn't a public good.
Correct.
But universal education is a public good. It's non-excludable because if you deny education to anyone, it's no longer universal.
Incorrect. That's no different than the government deciding for some reason to pay to give everyone HBO, or all the potato chips they want, or a pony, or an apartment. Government-subsidized provision of a non-public good.
Governments in fact do that with lots of things -- like education!
And the point is that with non-public goods it is almost always more efficient to provide the item -- even universally -- through market mechanisms.
Such as Sweden's universal school voucher system, where the voucher money follows the individual student to the school of the individual student's choice, causing school operators to provide a varied market of options for students to choose from -- instead of the money being dropped down from the top through a big monopoly bureaucracy that spends it according to the choice of its members and the politicians.
Even with public goods it is sometimes more efficient to have markets provide them -- such as broadcast radio and TV and sometimes lighthouses. But there are more things to figure out, like how to handle the "free rider" problem.
Incorrect. If an army defends an area it can't exclude some individuals, and not others, within that area from its protection. - Jim Glass
An army which wants to assert control over a territory and doesn't like some of the individuals within that area tends to remove the individuals from the area. See "fortified hamlets", "internment camps", "ethnic cleansing" etc. "National defense" is a concept predicated on the idea that there is a nation-state and that every citizen of that nation-state is entitled to reside in the nation-state. So when the armed forces that assert control over the nation-state deny entry to other armed forces, they have to leave citizens of the nation-state alone. This is a guarantee extended by the kind of government we happen to have. It is part of our particular social contract. There is nothing natural or inherent about it. In Somalia, Lebanon, Bosnia and Afghanistan, armed forces operate to protect some individuals and not others within a territory all the time. When you say the words "national defense" you have already included a concept of armed force as a public good in your use of the word "nation". This is tautological.
Some things are very hard to turn into private goods -- the classic drive-in movie example, or radio waves, as you say. Other things, like information, are essentially public goods but are turned into private goods through laborious legal systems because we believe there are positive externalities to making them private. But for most of the things we discuss, when we call them a "public good" or a "private good" simply reflect the choices we have made and the structures our society has adopted for distributing them.
Actually I think it's usually a fireworks example rather than a drive-in movie; the drive-in movie is more about how you turn a big open display into a somewhat porous private good.
Megan's argument seems absurd on the face of it. Clearly, granting school vouchers to kids who don't currently go to public schools anyway is going to cost a lot of money? Where should that money come from? Taxes on the poor and the middle income? Obviously not. It should come from taxes on the rich. But clearly taxes on the rich are just creating a middleman for vouchers, in that the rich could just pay private schools directly and eliminate the government. Of course, taxing the rich to make up for the shortfall would probably mean taxing all the rich, including those without school age children, so it would certainly benefit rich people with children while transfering much of the burden of educating their children to other rich people. This seems silly and redundant, since rich people already subsidize private education for other rich people by donating money to the rich kid schools they graduated from themselves. Turning this into a government program seems wasteful and an unnecessary intrusion into the choices rich people with kids already have.
Megan doesn't understand that the public school system exist to educate the "masses", meaning those without the means to afford a private education. This benefits the rich by providing an educated work force for them to exploit once they get out of school. That's what enables them to send their kids to private schools in the first place.
So, there are reasonable arguments for a school voucher system for poor and middle income parents, but including those already rich enough to send their kids to private schools in that system has no real rationale. If rich people do want to pay the extra taxes to make that happen, then fine, but I don't think they want to do that. If poor and middle income people want to pay the extra taxes to do that, fine, but I don't think they want to do that either. We are left having to exclude rich people from the system, and that doesn't work either, since it's a free public system. So I don't see how vouchers can ever really work, unless there simply isn't a class of rich people to begin with.
Let me address the silliness of people arguing against the water company example. Where I live there is city water available, and it's very cheap due to subsidization, but many homeowners elect not to use it. Instead, lots of people either use their own private wells, which give higher quality water, or they have water trucked in. No one has ever suggested that everyone in my town should get "water vouchers" to supplement the private owners who choose to get their water from some other source than the city water system. It would be considered crazy nonsense. Those who don't use the city water system see no reason why they should get such a voucher, in that their choice not to be a part of the system is their own.
Likewise, I'm sure many people in cities elect to buy drinking water from private companies in order to get higher quality water than what comes out of the tap, even though tap water is usually much cheaper due to subsidization of public water works projects. Should they get vouchers to subsidize that?
Colin,
"Some people might want a school with lots of extracurricular activities or music and arts. I, for one, would rather my kids spend more time on math and science. By moving to a voucher system we can accommodate different values for different kids."
For one, this only works in densely populate areas where it's even practical to have a number of competing schools within a reasonable distance from one's home. Secondly, there's no reason why communities can't make such choices available within the public school system itself, without any need to resort to vouchers. If public schools were organized as competing entities, this would work fine, without the need to create vouchers to subsidize the education of those outside the system.
A compromise system would be a voucher program that could only be used at schools, public or private, which charged all parents only the price of the voucher, rather than merely subsidizing rich kid schools.
conradg, I think to be fair to the argument, you have to imagine you live in a country where rich people live in neighborhoods with water treatment plants and have good clean water, but poor people generally live in neighborhoods that have untreated water full of parasites and pollutants that cause long-term toxicity. Rich people who live in poor neighborhoods have to drink bottled water, and some rich people drink bottled water even though the tapwater is perfectly fine. And the government-provided water is paid for with local taxes, there's no usage fee.
The question then is, should poor people be given government water vouchers which they can use to buy bottled water? Or should the government keep struggling to provide clean water to poor neighborhoods, even though it's failed so far?
The reasons why it might not work are more pragmatic than the simple one you suggest.
Jim Glass,
You like the Swedish system? Are you willing to pay Swedish tax rates to support it? I bet not.
The whole issue here is money: who is going to pay for a massive voucher system that really does deliver quality education to everyone? Unless you are willing to raise taxes sufficiently to pay for such a system, it's utterly hypocritical to champion it.
brooksfoe,
Your analogy makes some sense, except that where I live the public water is fine, no parasites etc. It's just that some people choose to use private wells for personal reasons, some economic, some due to higher quality, some due to practicality. If the system were as broken as you suggest, then yes, some kind of private competition would be necessary, and vouchers might be a solution. But a better solution would be for the local people to simply respond to the needs of the community and create a better water system. Which, in fact, they do. But even so, some people are going to want to choose to opt out of that system.
What happens with private schools is that no matter how good the public school system is, some people will pay for the "extra" of opting out and educating their kids in an exclusive community. This is fine, but it makes no sense to offer public subsidies for it. Where the public school system is really broken, very, very few rich kids even live in the district, and thus it isn't the driving rationale behind a voucher system. The effort to improve the system in such areas will not be helped in the least by subsidizing rich kids' education at private schools. The problems in such areas is usually not the schools themselves, but the kids in such schools, who come from broken down families and communities. Giving them the choice to go to private schools isn't going to make them any less broken. Giving the better kids from better families in such communities the choice to go to different schools isn't going to change the situation either if everyone else has the same choice.
What makes private schools substantially better than public schools, in both good and bad communities, is elitism. Private schools enjoy an elite clientele of parents and kids who care about education and try to make the most of it. What we are really talking about is a segragationist sysem, based not on race, but on the desire to make the most of the educational system. What we really are talking about is leaving a whole lot of kids behind, and putting the "good" kids in private schools, while leaving the "bad" or "dumb" kids in public schools. This really does nothing to address the problem of what to do with kids who don't perform or behave well in school, or who have sucky parents and live in sucky neighborhoods.
Jim Glass, I think you're using an unnecessarily restrictive definition of public good. Public health is, to my mind at least, a genuine public good, even though things like vaccination or tuberculosis treatment are rival and excludable. Once an infectious disease has been prevented or cured, you can't exclude those who benefit from not being infected by them; that's why we pay for it collectively.
Similiarly, if you could prove that most of the benefit of education was not internalized, you could make an argument that universal education was a public good. I doubt that it is, but I think it would be possible to so argue.
brooksfoe,
Your Iraq analogy is most amusing. So, you're saying that Democrat politicians see the people they claim to be "working for" as, effectively, members of another country? Not "their people", just some poor shlubs they want to help?
Interesting.
-- Politician supports dramatically improving the quality of public education so local public schools would be good enough to send anyone's kids to.
Yep. And then they'll tap their heels together three times, say "there's no place like a public school", and everything will be better.
Question: where is it that politicians have actually accomplished this goal? Nowhere? Then claiming that they're "really going to accomplish it this time" is fraud.
At least, it would be fraud if anyone was dumb enough to believe them. Since no one is actually that dumb, it's just dishonesty.
There are a hell of a lot of private schools that provide decent educations for less than what the public schools charge (let alone for the fantasy numbers you're throwing around.
There are thousands of children a year whose futures are being destroyed because people like you care deeply about the teacher's unions, and not at all about the students, and so condemn those children to crappy public schools.
I can't yet stop you from destroying those lives. But I can point out that that is what you are doing.
I think you're confusing what may be a good policy from the charge of hypocrisy...keep in mind your commentor's last statement:
I don't see why education should be any different. AND THIS DOESN'T MAKE ME A HYPOCRITE.
Go ahead and argue for vouchers if you want but all you're doing is arguing that a particular policy would be a good idea. A politician that opposes that policy would simply be one with a bad idea. If he sent his kids to public school it wouldn't make his ideas any less bad anymore than a voucher advocate would be more right if he himself used private schools for his kids!
I'll say it in caps - IT WOULD ONLY BE HYPOCRITICAL IF OBAMA GOT A TAXPAYER VOUCHER FOR HIS KIDS TO ATTEND PRIVATE SCHOOL THAT HE OPPOSED GIVING TO EVERYONE ELSE!
Boonton screams:
I think you're confusing what may be a good policy from the charge of hypocrisy
Wrong.
Barack Obama does not believe the Public Schools are good enough for his kids. (If he did, he would send his kids to those schools.)
Barack Obama is opposed to the government doing something that would allow poor kids to escape those crappy Public Schools. (He opposes the government giving the parents of poor kids vouchers which they could use to send their children to private schools.)
Barack Obama claims he gives a damn about those poor kids who he's condemning to the crappy Public Schools. (He knows that the kids can't afford to go to private schools without the vouchers.)
Barack Obama is a liar. (If he actually cared about those kids and their futures, then getting them a good education would be more important than sucking up to the NEA. It's known that they're unlikely to get a good education at the public schools. In fact, it's so unlikely that, even with all the advantages he and his wife can give their kids outside of school, he's still not willing to risk their futures by sending them to those schools. But while he's not willing to risk his children's future, all those poor kids get tossed under the bus).
People who bitch about the gap between the rich and the poor, but then turn around and support policies that make the gap worse, are hypocrites.
They're also vile, sleazy, scum.
I'm very late to the party, and someone may have already made this point, but the anti-voucher argument above completely ignores the fact that we often avoid the government-direct-pay method for providing services in favor of a voucher-style model. We don't require recipients of Social Security checks to spend their government cash in state-owned supermarkets they're assigned to based on their address. We don't require Medicare insureds to get their treatment in government-owned hospitals they're assigned to based on their address. Both Social Security and Medicare are essentially structured as voucher programs. I don't see why education should be any different
Because competition could make a good education situation even better, either by replacing good schools with even better schools, or perhaps more likely by spurring the already good schools to improve.
Jasper,
"We don't require recipients of Social Security checks to spend their government cash in state-owned supermarkets they're assigned to based on their address."
Your analogy is wrong. We don't require SS recipients to spend their money on anything at all. They can put it in the bank if they like. They can spend it on crack and whores if they like. A voucher system would require them to spend it on specific government approved things, such as, say, education.
You're closer to a voucher system with medicare and medicaid. However, those systems forbid medical providers from charging more for their services than medicare will pay out. Hence, not all health care providers accept such payments. This is how a sane voucher would operate. If you want to spend more because you're rich and get better services, you have to opt out of the system, rather than use it as a supplement.
Greg Q
Your hysterical rant:
Barack Obama claims he gives a damn about those poor kids who he's condemning to the crappy Public Schools. (He knows that the kids can't afford to go to private schools without the vouchers.)
Is disproven by a simple thought experiment.
Imagine Obama supported a $4,000 a year voucher. But suppose, aside from crappy public schools, there was only one private school willing to take the $4,000 voucher as full payment for tuition. All other private schools charge more so a truely poor parent wouldn't be able to afford them. Now suppose it turns out that one private school is crappy too.
Now is Obama a hypocrite for not supporting a $5,000 voucher? How about a $6,000 one?
Here is the fact, you are a hypocrite if you demand something of others that you don't demand of yourself. If Obama was collecting a voucher but against it for others then he would be a hypocrite. Obama supports your right to use your own funds to buy a private education and he does his. That's not hypocritical. You're free to argue that vouchers are a good policy but failing to support a policy you happen to think is a good idea hardly makes you a hypocrite.
Jasper-
I'm very late to the party, and someone may have already made this point, but the anti-voucher argument above completely ignores the fact that we often avoid the government-direct-pay method for providing services in favor of a voucher-style model. We don't require recipients of Social Security checks to spend their government cash in state-owned supermarkets they're assigned to based on their address.
Problem is that as Megan said education often is a public good. We don't want to give a social security recipient credit at a state supermarket. We just want them to have money to do with as they please. Ditto for Medicare. Yes others benefit indirectly (kids who don't need to use their income to care for parents, we feel good knowing seniors aren't starving to death in the streets) but the benefit falls mostly with the individual. Contrast this to police. We don't give people vouchers to hire their own personal muscle. The taxpayer/voter wants a say in how the police force is run. I would say in most jurisdictions this follows for public schools.
Tim
Because competition could make a good education situation even better, either by replacing good schools with even better schools, or perhaps more likely by spurring the already good schools to improve.
Interesting, do you think this can be said of Medicare/Medicaid's impact on the heath system? Those programs, after all, are essentially vouchers. You go to the doctor you want....if a doc is good he gets lots of patients, bad ones get less. A doc doesn't have to accept either if he doesn't want to.
Greg Q,
I really don't understand your and Megan's charge of hypocrisy for Obama sending his kids to private schools. Obviously he does so because he can personally afford to do so. He opposes vouchers because he doesn't think that solution will work. The cost of sending everyone to the same quality of school that he can afford, because he makes more money than most people, would be astronomical. If you advocate such a program, you must also advocate the taxes to pay for such a program. Where will that tax money come from? Soaking the rich? Soaking the very people who can't afford expensive private schools to begin with? If you can't advocate such a tax system, but advocate such a voucher system, you are a hypocrite yourself. If you think it's fine for Obama to use his vouchers to make it cheaper to send his kids to expensive private schools, but only give poor people enough to send their kids to cheap schools without nearly the same resources as Obama's school, then hypocrisy has lost its meaning.
In the real world, a voucher system won't pay for a 38,000 education. It will pay for a 6,000 education. So we end up in the same situation as we are in now, with rich kids getting a superior education at elite schools, and poor kids getting a crappy education at crappy schools. The only differences is that now we are subsidizing rich kids, and thus giving poor kids less money for their education, unless there is a corresponding tax increase on the rich to pay for the subsidy they receive. Also, now poor kids can send their kids to cheap private schools, which we have no reason to believe will be any better than the public schools they already attend. We are also left with a class of kids who can't even get into private schools with vouchers, because they can't perform or behave up to their standards. This isn't really a solution. Reforming our schools is a good think, but the reason many city schools suck has nothing to do with them being public systems rather than private systems. It is because the culture in poor city neighborhoods is not geared towards education the way it is in wealthier districts. Privating schools in such districts is certainly worth experimenting with, but thinking it doesn't work is not hypocrisy. It's just facing reality.
Your analogy is wrong.
conradg: Like most analogies it's not perfectly precise, because, like most analogies, it's being used to compare things that are not identical. If they were identical there wouldn't be a need to compare them. It's certainly not "wrong."
They can spend it on crack and whores if they like.
That would be illegal in most jurisdictions.
A voucher system would require them to spend it on specific government approved things, such as, say, education.
Just as Social Security and Medicare money must be spent on things "approved by the government." I think you'll find plowing your Social Security check into Al Qaeda donations gets you into trouble with the government. Similarly, I think you'll find that the government won't agree with your wish to spend Medicare cash on that highly effective pain killer known as heroin.
However, those systems forbid medical providers from charging more for their services than medicare will pay out.
Your point?
This is how a sane voucher would operate.
Don't follow you at all here. "Sane" is a word describing an attribute of human beings, not inanimate objects or government programs.
If you want to spend more because you're rich and get better services, you have to opt out of the system, rather than use it as a supplement.
I don't follow you here either. We most certainly do allow rich people to both use Medicare and spend their own money on healthcare.
The taxpayer/voter wants a say in how the police force is run. I would say in most jurisdictions this follows for public schools.
Boonton: I have no idea why you think a voucher system would be inconsistent with a substantial degree of regulation and control over the institutions eligible to receive voucher money. One could obviously envision legislation mandating various eligibility criteria.
Jasper,
Isn't it kind of odd vouchers are a 'national issue' when there's no need for them to be. Education in the US is remarkably local. With all the red states out there and red counties and red towns isn't it kind of odd almost no one votes to adopt a voucher program or even a really scaled down version of one? Often when it is voted on it is imposed on someone else's school district (i.e. one that is in really bad shape?)
The usual explanation from the right on this is an all powerful teachers union but seriously how can that be? People often vote down tax increases, school budgets and a host of other proposals that the union would very much like to see pass.
I think the answer is that voters like having a say in the schools. They like deciding on where schools are, what they teach, and even if they should get a new football field. They like that control and why shouldn't they? It is after all the taxpayers money to begin with!
The problem is that many voucher supporters forget this and start acting like it is the parents money. Quite often it isn't. School taxes are usually paid by people who aren't parents or by people whose children are out of school. Voucher supporters take things a step too far, turning vouchers into some type of civil right when all they really are is a simple policy idea that is probably good in some cases and not good in others.
The speeches about how wonderful markets are & how good private schools can be also miss this point. The problem is that markets work because when you spend your own money you are heavily invested in not wasting it. It's one thing to watch your kid slack off on homework....it's another thing to see him do that two days after that $5,000 check just cleared out of your bank account! Voucher supporters often miss this essential aspect of private schooling. It's not the same when you're spending someone else's money which is what public school users and voucher users will be doing....
Now let me be clear, I'm not saying I'm against vouchers. I think in cases where the public schools are very bad they are probably a good idea and I don't mind some experiments with them but I see no reason to treat them as a 'right' or to castigate skeptics as 'enemies of children' anymore than I would demean anyone who is skeptical of an educational fad....which is what vouchers are.
Boonton - Yes when people are spending their own money they are usually much more careful about it than when people are spending other people's money. OTOH people often care more about the education of their kids than they do about many purchases. And even when its not "spending your own money", your still adding an element of competition. To use an analogy to another program, food stamps might not exactly be a capitalist solution to a problem. People are not spending their own money. But the solution is much better than having a government food distribution system.
Jasper,
What I mean to say about your analogy being wrong is: Social Security is not a voucher system, and has nothing to do with a voucher system. Part of the reason for this is that SS is not designed to target any particular problem other than retirement benefits. Vouchers are by definition designed to target a particular need. You can have school vouchers, you can have food stamps, you can have health care vouchers/insurance, but you can't target "retirement", because there is no such service. Giving people monthly cash to spend however they wish isn't a voucher system, plain and simple. So there simply is no possible voucher analogy that applies.
What you fail to address is how universal vouchers will actually change anything meaningful in the educational system. I can certainly see using vouchers as an experiment in certain failing districts, but I don't see how it does any good in the overall picture.
Boonton makes the best point of all: if vouchers are so good, why don't red state school districts adopt them? The teachers unions have no power to stop elections from happening. If voters want vouchers, they just have to vote people in who support them, or do ballot initiatives. It seems pretty obvious that people in even the most republican of districts don't want vouchers, and the reasons are pretty obvious too - it costs too much money, and the public loses control over what gets taught. Like Boonton, I'm all for experimenting with the idea, and see what happens. But shouldn't the people doing the experimenting be the people doing the advocating, which is mostly Republicans and red staters?
Tim Fowler
To use an analogy to another program, food stamps might not exactly be a capitalist solution to a problem. People are not spending their own money. But the solution is much better than having a government food distribution system.
Fair point, however we do not have 'police vouchers' that allow you to hire your own private body guards. My point is simply that vouchers are at best only a hypothesis that may or may not work...or more likely work in some cases and not others.
The problem with competition is that it works....works to meet the desires of the person who has control of the money. "Police vouchers" don't work to increase justice because the people who get them will have an incentive to hire bullies to push other people around....which is why the mafia and other types of 'private police' only seem to work when all the clients have plenty of money.
Some potential problems with vouchers that I can see: Grade inflation ("you're not giving my son a C, I'll take my $5,000 voucher and $2000 tuition payment and go elsewhere!"), fly-by-night schools (a problem with student loans....something that shouldn't be because in those cases people still have to pay the loans back!), outright fraud (give us the voucher, we give your kid the A and give you $2000 cash back on the side), 'non-school schools' (football, football, football....10 minutes reading/writing...etc.). Another problem, lack of a check on wacko parents. Today wacko parents are 'checked' in the sense that sending kids to public school offers an opportunity for abuse or disturbing behavior to be noticed. With vouchers wacko parents can gravitate towards schools that are less about education and more about reinforcing wacko beliefs.
Do I think most parents would go for this? No but the essence of conservatism is to be careful with radical change because you have no idea how a complicated system really, really works. It's very easy to end up breaking more things than you fix. It's quite reasonable to want to see vouchers done on only a small scale and experimentally and see how these factors all play out. But it is also reasonable to get worried by rhetoric that seems to implicitly assume 'market forces' mean vouchers can't fail, that vouchers are a right and anyone opposed is 'holding down children'. Notice how this type of self-assured, the theory can't go wrong type of rhetoric was last seen being touted 90 years or so by socialists.
No you're only importing some market forces and a lot of distortions on the education system. We at least know a lot about the downside of the distortions that exist in the current system, we really know little about the distortions of replacing the current system with a radical voucher proposal.
conradg
It seems pretty obvious that people in even the most republican of districts don't want vouchers, and the reasons are pretty obvious too - it costs too much money, and the public loses control over what gets taught.
It need not cost any money. A county or state could start with a tiny voucher...say $500 a person that either goes to the private school or public school.
Conrad, Jasper, etc.
The average private school tuition is less than the average cost to send a child through the public school system (as scored by the amount of money the school district gets per student) every place I know of.
The average private school does a better job of educating kids than do the public schools, pretty much every place I know of.
Therefore you set the voucher equal to the public school per pupil cost (or even 80% - 90% of it, so long as the amount is at or above the average private school tuition), and let the parents decide where their kids will go.
You lefties hate that idea, because 1: you've sold your souls to the NEA, 2: must public schools act as centers of left-wing political indoctrination, and you don't want to lose that.
The fact that this screws over the lives of poor kids stuck in crappy schools is irrelevant to you, because you don't actually care about them.
Bye, have fun. I'm off for the weekend.
Oh, as for "why is this a national issue?"
1: There's a Federal Department of Education (created by Democrats, of course). I'd like to see it killed. Failing that, i'd like to see it do some good.
2: There's this National Union that fights vouchers, and draws on National resources in order to do so. Defeating it will take National resources, too.
Greg Q
The average private school tuition is less than the average cost to send a child through the public school system (as scored by the amount of money the school district gets per student) every place I know of.
You need to compare cost to cost. Near me a Catholic school recently closed. The paper said the tuition was something like $4000 a year but that only covered half the cost, the rest covered by the Church, donations etc. Megan's example of an exclusive private school cost $38K per year. It doesn't seem possible to pull off decent education for much less than $10K per year public or private. That shouldn't be surprising, education is very labor intensive and not given to capital improvements.
1: There's a Federal Department of Education (created by Democrats, of course). I'd like to see it killed. Failing that, i'd like to see it do some good.
Has nothing to do with vouchers and only provides a fraction of school funding which is almost entirely provided by local and then state taxes.
2: There's this National Union that fights vouchers, and draws on National resources in order to do so. Defeating it will take National resources, too.
In other words you are advocating a Federal takeover of education to ram your pet idea down everyone's throat.
Greg Q,
I don't know if we can accurately judge the cost of a genuine public/private voucher system. As Boonton points out, many private schools are subsidized already. Average costs are not meaningful, in that private schoosl do not have to provide education to special needs kids, or kids with behavioral problems, etc. They select only the better kids for admission, which public schools cannot do.
As much as you need to think that lefties like me hate vouchers, and are in league with the NEA and teachers' unions, it's simply not so. I am not categorically opposed to vouchers. If it can be demonstrated that they work, I'd be all for them. As I've said, I think districts should experiment with them, and see what happens. The idea that we should simply transform the entire education system overnight without careful experimentation and testing is not a conservative approach, it's a radical form of idealism that is likely to fail.
To find out if the average private school really can outdo the average public school, given equal responsibilities and requirements, would be an interesting experiment to run. I'm all in favor of some district, city, county, or even state giving it a try. As I suggested, why not do so where conservatives and Republicans have a clear electoral majority and can push through whatever bills or ballot initiative are necessary to make this happen. Stop bitching at liberals for preventing this from happening, when conservatives can easily make the demonstration of the superior results obtained by vouchers in any number of states or localities.
"The fact that this screws over the lives of poor kids stuck in crappy schools is irrelevant to you, because you don't actually care about them."
Listen, poor families in poor districts can easily go to their school boards and demand vouchers, and elect officials who will institute vouchers. It isn't lefties or school unions who are preventing this from happening. I used to talk this issue over with my children's public school teachers when they were younger (they're in public universities now), and the teachers were fully in support of a genuine voucher system that let run things their way. They would have loved to set up their own schools if vouchers were actually set up properly. I'd have no problem with that at all. But it takes political will to make it happen, and thus far very few voucher systems have been tried.
Boonton,
I fail to understand how even a modest voucher system, such as a $500 voucher, would not cost any money. Obviously those students already attending private schools would all get $500 that the district was not previously paying out. So even if no current public school students opted to use their vouchers, the program would cost extra money. The only way I could see it working is if it were limited to students who previously had been enrolled in public schools.
Bye, have fun. I'm off for the weekend.
conradg
I fail to understand how even a modest voucher system, such as a $500 voucher, would not cost any money. Obviously those students already attending private schools would all get $500 that the district was not previously paying out.
You're right, but there's a couple of ways you could do a voucher system on the cheap:
1. Some districts have very few attending private school making the diversion trivial.
2. You could do vouchers for kids already in public schools...specifically I'm thinking of ones enrolled in schools with sustained records of failure.
3. You could do vouchers for public schools only letting the public schools set different prices based on demand (naturally this only works in areas where you have enough kids to have several schools...since schools are very local the impression I get is even in very dense areas like NJ there doesn't tend to be a lot of room for multiple schools to compete with each other...people seem fine with commuting long distances to work but don't like sending their kids long distances to school...for the most part).
Boonton - re:"Fair point, however we do not have 'police vouchers' that allow you to hire your own private body guards."
Most of what the police do, is to capture criminals, deter criminals, and general keep the peace. Protecting one person or a small group is mostly a private good. Keeping the peace in general is a public good.
Its also the public good that is perhaps the most core function of being a government. If you can't generally keep the peace and provide some deterrence to private attack (or an organized attack from the outside), there isn't much point in even having a government.
Not that there is no public benefit from educating most of the population, or no private good effect of police protection, the categories are not absolutes in most cases. But education is mostly a private good, most of the benefit, and esp. the direct benefit, goes to the person who receives the education.
The main reason while "police vouchers" don't work isn't the possibility that private security forces could bully people (although I suppose there is some concern about that as well), but because the police provide a public good.
As for your drawbacks from vouchers. Grade inflation is a general problem, but there isn't any evidence that vouchers make it noticeably worse. Can you show any evidence that "fly by night schools" are a significant problem (or for that matter that they are worse than the worst public schools)? "Non-school schools" wouldn't be providing the service that the vouchers are for, and would be, and have been, excluded. (A school could stress its athletic program, but it would still have to provide education). As for whacko parents they would be about as likely to be detected if their kids go to a private school as a public one.
Re: "A county or state could start with a tiny voucher...say $500 a person that either goes to the private school or public school."
That would achieve little. Even an efficient school is going to cost much more than that per person. The point to vouchers is to provide competition, not just to have vouchers, or even to promote private schools. If the current public schools responded to the vouchers with improvement they might wind up maintaining a very large market share, but $500 vouchers aren't going to do much for competition.
Another form of competition that doesn't involve vouchers or tax credits, is having public schools compete for students, and having the funding follow the student.
Since I can't put more than one link in a post without it being flagged as possible spam, I suggest checking out the links I posted here
http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=24951046
Jim Glass, I think you're using an unnecessarily restrictive definition of public good...
Well, it's too late to do battle defending my honor on that point, now that this thread has faded into history and is unlikely to be read by anyone not stumbling upon it by accident it the archives.
But for the historical record, I will point out that the belief that "public education" -- or even plain old "education" -- provides societal benifits on the order of a "public good", although hugely popular, seems to be grossly exaggerated on the basis of the evidence.
Milton Friedman, champion of vouchers and all, notably swung around in his later life to the belief that education throws off a lot less in the way of positive externalities for the benefit of society than the educated like to believe.
Arnold Kling looks at some research on thisthat concludes ...
"The closeness of the estimates of the social return to the private return suggests that US schooling generates little to no external return."
and advises...