Politics of School Vouchers

School vouchers have been one of the most politically divisive public policy issues relating to education in modern times. “A recent poll shows that 42 percent of adults favor voucher initiatives while 56 percent oppose them” (Education Week, n.d.), indicating that there is both substantial support and substantial opposition to this concept.  Only a few years ago the future of vouchers was one of the highest visibility public policy debates and once voucher advocates won the Supreme Court case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris which established the constitutionality of the voucher program in Ohio, the future of vouchers seemed bright.  Nonetheless, vouchers are no longer a central aspect of the policy discussion, and have been marginalized as a tool for reform as No Child Left Behind and charter schools have taken center stage in education policy.  This paper details the political history of school vouchers in the United States and aims to provide an understanding of where vouchers stand in the current Webmail political landscape.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, was the first person to outline the concept of school vouchers in his 1955 essay on “The Role of Government in Education”.  For him vouchers represented a compromise which worked towards his libertarian ideals of smaller government and increased individual freedom (Friedman, 2005).  Some libertarians, such as Murray Rothbard, critiqued Friedman’s stance on vouchers as being statist since he was open to working with the government (Doherty, 1995) .  Though Friedman acknowledged in a 1995 interview that “I would like to see the government out of the education business entirely,” he said he saw “the voucher as a step in moving away from a government system to a private system” (Doherty, 1995).

While Friedman’s argument for vouchers was premised upon the libertarian belief that less government and more individual freedom are good things, the concept of vouchers also appealed to conservative Republicans.  As a result, they have been the political force pushing most actively for vouchers over the years.  The market principles that are utilized, the reduction in the size and role of government, and the net effect of lowering taxes by putting money back into citizens’ hands are all concepts in line with traditional Republican thinking. Many voucher supporters believe that exposing schools to market forces improves the quality of education by forcing schools to compete, and thus makes the public education system and bureaucracy much more efficient and effective.  Similar gains have been seen when public bureaucracies have been forced to compete with the private sector in areas such as higher education and postal service, and the assumption has been that this approach would lead to similar success in the general field of education (Friedman, 2005). 

Though Friedman introduced vouchers as a concept during the 1950s, it wasn't until the 1980s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, that they really were broadly discussed. This process was aided by Friedman's television series “Free to Choose” in 1980, one episode of which was focused on educational freedom, but was spearheaded by policy makers in Washington D.C.  Thus, it was the Republican Party that played the most central role in bringing this policy discussion to the national level. Another reason why Republicans have been strong supporters of vouchers is that vouchers enable members of the Christian right, who are predominantly Republican, to utilize their tax dollars for tuition to the private religious schools which they often prefer.  This has proved a key element in generating political support for vouchers, while also serving as a cause of friction with groups who want to see greater separation of church and state.   

There are many groups which are highly critical of vouchers.  Groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and teacher’s unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) all have criticized vouchers as a policy.  These groups, as well as many others, have spent significant resources lobbying against vouchers politically and fighting them in court.  The NEA, the largest labor union in the US and the larger of the two teacher unions, has itself spent millions lobbying against school vouchers.   Assuming as accurate the estimate by Myron Lieberman of Bowling Green State University “that local, state, and national teachers unions collect $1.3 billion in dues annually” (Alt, 1998), these groups have a great deal of political clout.  They are major supporters of the Democratic Party.  Speaking with regards to the DC voucher program, the first federally supported voucher program in the country, Roland Martin, a journalist and political commentator,  said that “the teachers union has a death grip” (2009) on both the Congress and the District of Columbia City Council.  This is a common belief which speaks to the perceived power of the unions in Washington.

Opponents of vouchers base their arguments on a number of different grounds.  The ADL argues in their article “School Vouchers: The Wrong Choice for Public Education” that these programs subvert the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, are unpopular, and threaten to undermine our system of public education (n.d). Some critics argue that vouchers detract from the quality of public school options, while not necessarily providing enough money for people to attend private schools.  Many also argue that the weakest and most vulnerable children, our disabled, our poor, our emotionally challenged, will be left behind in these weakened schools, abandoned in the system (Vouchers, 2007).

The NEA published a list of 5 talking points explaining why they disagree with voucher programs. They claim that there is no link between vouchers and gains in student achievement, that vouchers undermine accountability for public funds, vouchers do not reduce public education costs, vouchers do not give parents real educational choice, and that the public disapproves of vouchers (Five Talking Points on Vouchers, n.d.).  Concern for civil rights is yet another issue as private schools can decide who they choose to accept and thus can discriminate during the selection process. (School Vouchers: The Wrong Choice for Public Education, 2009)

Currently, opinions about school vouchers have become divided largely along party lines, though there are some notable exceptions.  As Andrew Gelman wrote when reviewing the data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, “You can also see that support for vouchers roughly matches Republican voting, but not completely.”(2009).  Interestingly, vouchers seem to be most popular with wealthy white Catholics and evangelicals as well as poor African-Americans and Latinos.  Amongst white respondents, the more affluent people were the more likely they were to support vouchers, but amongst nonwhites it was the poorest who were more supportive (Gelman, 2009).  This provides an interesting set of political allies as these poor nonwhite voucher supporters have generally been Democrats, while the majority of white voucher supporters have been Republicans.  Nonetheless, these groups have worked together in many instances in seeking or implementing voucher programs. 

President Obama has generally viewed vouchers with skepticism. When he visited Milwaukee, the site of one the most significant school voucher programs in the nation, during the 2008 presidential campaign he promised to keep an open mind about the issue (Winters, 2008).  More recently, Obama has indicated that he does not believe that the Opportunity Scholarship Program in Washington D.C. should be continued, although Arne Duncan, his Secretary of Education, has acknowledged that the students currently in the program should be able to complete their schooling without removal from their current school (Martin, 2009).     

Though it was not a central issue in the campaign, John McCain’s education agenda included expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship Program in Washington D.C.  Given the relatively small size of the program (it serves roughly 1700 students), its inclusion in McCain's platform perhaps speaks more to the political power of the concept rather than its practical application as a policy tool.  Nonetheless, McCain’s position, as well as the existence of the program in our nation’s capital, has served to highlight the anti-voucher positions of the President and many Democratic congressmen such as Illinois Senator Richard Durbin.  “Earlier this year, Mr. Durbin inserted language into a spending bill that phases out the program after 2010” (Dick Durbin and D.C. School Vouchers, 2009), though he has recently tempered his rhetoric a bit.  Nonetheless, he still wants increased accountability in schools receiving vouchers which is a politically sticky wicket (Dick Durbin, 2009). 

Most private schools actively resist any threat to their independence and autonomy, and mandating high levels of accountability or standardized testing in these schools would like cause many schools to refuse vouchers.  As Paul Rebuck, the Director of Admission at the private school Milton Academy, notes, “Though we have accepted students who come with school vouchers, we would have to think carefully about accepting these students if it led to significantly decreased independence and autonomy for our school”.  If Senator Durbin’s goal is to destroy voucher programs, adding this layer of external government oversight would be one way to potentially achieve this as many private schools would no longer participate.  

School vouchers were once a promising and politically viable education policy proposal but the political momentum behind them has dissipated.  Currently,  vouchers are no longer at the center of discussions of educational policy.  Jodi Grant, the Executive Director of the Afterschool Alliance and former General Counsel to the Senate Budget Committee, feels that “The reason vouchers have disappeared from the table is because we have a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President who don’t support it, but I don’t feel the idea of vouchers is dead at all”.  If vouchers are to make a resurgence in the current political climate, this must come as the result of credible research powerfully proving their efficiency and effectiveness.  Without the benefits of vouchers being clearly established by strong research, it is unlikely that vouchers will make a major resurgence in the near future, or at least until there is a turning of the political tide in our nations’s capital.