Pajamas Media is kindly hosting a debate on school vouchers between myself and Megan McArdle for the next three days.
What would a full scale voucher program look like?
In today’s piece, I argue it might resemble the pre-school model in this country, which is largely a private enterprise subsidized by tax-credits. Middle-class, suburban kids have plenty of great educational choices for their toddlers, but urban and disabled kids have fewer and more expensive options. I fear that that a full scale voucher program would have a similar outcome.
Check out the posts about vouchers on TAPPED last week.
Tomorrow, Megan responds. And I’ll come back with a response the day after that.
Apt. 11d 
Congratulations! Good luck.
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I haven’t read Laura’s PJM long post, but I would suggest that any voucher program start with the bottom first (as has been the practice with every US voucher program I know of). There’ve been a number of voucher programs aimed at urban kids, but I think that there are other low SES pockets that need more attention: rural districts, Indian reservations, English language learners, and poor children in middle class schools.
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Laura, I’m not sure what you are talking about as ‘full scale voucher program’ – do you mean one in which you got your $11000 and there was no public school to which you could send your kid? And you are scurrying around between the suddenly crowded Catholic schools and the ones starting in the basement of every Full Gospel Tabernacle and mosque, trying to figure out which one would be the least worst?
My guess is that public schools would remain, in those areas where they have anything like the confidence and support of parents. And there would be criteria which the voucher-accepting schools would have to meet, in terms of telling the kids about math and New Jersey history.
For me, I favor vouchers on very much the terms Megan McA first put forward. I am a happy suburban parent, putting my kids into the neighborhood school. The schools are good, and they are an enormous benefit for me – my kids are connected to the kids in the neighborhood, the teams draw from the same area.
It’s not just the education which makes us happy here: this is a big middle class financial benefit for us – we are actually putting into retirement savings just about the same amount of money we would have to spend for tuition at the local private schools, about $70000 a year. So – a comfortable old age, all due to the local schools.
People who live in less good school districts are paying a lot of money for a bad product, having to pay for it twice to send their kids somewhere else (or having to accept that their kids will be damaged by their school environments). It’s spectacularly damaging to children who are not fortunate enough to live in the swell school districts.
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I think the level of chaos could be kept down by starting small and with kids at the bottom, and very gradually increasing the number of voucher-eligible children. That way the number of good new private schools would have a chance to keep pace with the number of families with vouchers.
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