MORE ON VOUCHERS from Uncertain Principles. My response: I disagree that vouchers are a cop-out, a way for parents to slough the hard work of raising children off onto others. UP at times sounds like he considers all non-homeschooling (or, more likely, all non-homeschooling that involves any discussion or teaching of ethics) as a cop-out or abdication of parental responsibility. Beyond that, though, vouchers help parents but don’t take the responsibility for child-rearing away from them–in fact, vouchers give parents more choices, and thus more responsibility in directing their children’s education.

On the practical level, vouchers often don’t cover the entire price of a private education at the school of the parents’ choice–so while vouchers make it possible for kids to attend schools their families couldn’t afford on their own, there typically is still some work to be done, pennies to be pinched, sacrifices to be made and so forth. Vouchers aren’t a guarantee that the perfect school will open up, take your kid (although fears that private voucher-taking schools will “skim the cream”–taking the good kids but leaving the problem children in the struggling public schools–are very much exaggerated–that’ll be the subject of a later post), and train him up in the way that he should go, with no work on your part. They just make the educational choices of the poor more like those of the rich.

What vouchers do offer is the ability (and therefore the responsibility) to make a choice. Parents who are content with the public schools can choose to keep sending their kids there; many will. But the fact that they can choose to a) use their voucher money to attend a cheap private school for free, or b) use the voucher money, plus savings of their own, to attend a less cheap private school they couldn’t afford before, means that parents will be able to be more involved in directing their children’s education, not less. Yes, that education will still take place outside the home. But I really have no problem with that. And I just think it’s unrealistic to think that parents who had previously been valiantly teaching their kid morals in the home will stop doing that because now the kid’s teachers will share their beliefs. That definitely didn’t happen in my family, when we switched from public school to lefty secular private school (thus reinforcing the family’s beliefs); and I don’t know of anyone it did happen to.

(And I note that the way the family makes choices about education–for example, sending the kid to a Jewish school because Judaism is central to the family’s life–is a good way to teach kids what the family values and honors. Sometimes that honor will be more in the breach than in the observance, as when a not-terribly-religious Protestant family sends the kids to the local Catholic school because it’s cheap and has “good morals.” But even that decision tells you something about the good things the parents want for their children, even if the parents themselves aren’t acting as perfect models. But that’s really just a side note on the uses of hypocrisy.)

If the claim is more that “the lament about the lack of moral guidance provided in public schools” is a cynical cover for people who don’t want public schools to succeed anyway, all I can say is that it’s precisely that lack of moral guidance that has led many parents (not just conservative Christians, by the way…) to pull their kids from public schools. This is a grassroots concern, not a RNC talking point.

I may or may not get around to dealing with the question of how much vouchers (or different versions of voucher plans) will cost as vs. current costs of public schooling. I will get into questions of whether this is just an I’ve-got-mine-Jack call to abandon public schools instead of doing the hard work of fixing them. (For the moment I will note only that building strong private schools, and strong private-school+parent relationships, etc., is also hard work, though it’s a lot easier than working around many public school bureaucracies! I think the hours-frustration-drama-effort/payoff ratio is often though by no means always better with private schools–you may be spending less time working to “fix” your school, but that’s because it’s less broken.) I may get into whether and how public schools will benefit from voucher systems, and whether any good effects will be lasting; and I’ll definitely blog about the argument that we shouldn’t have vouchers because the most dedicated parents will pull their kids out of public schools, leaving only the least-involved parents. But the main thing I’d like to say in response to UP’s posts is that he seems to be concerned that vouchers will make parents less involved in their children’s education, especially their children’s moral education, and I just don’t see how that’s true.