It seems that Terry McAuliffe is the latest Democrat to send his children to an elite private school while opposing vouchers for poor students. McAuliffe sends four children to Potomac School, where tuition is well over $30,000 per year, and one to a different private high school. In choosing private schools for his kids, he joins Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and many other democratic politicians. In addition to sending their children to private school, many of these Democratic politicians attended private school themselves. Al Gore attended St. Albans school, Joe Biden went to Archmere Academy, Nancy Pelosi went to the Institute of Notre Dame, … It seems that when they have a personal stake in the matter, many Democrats feel that private school is preferable to public school.
Yet the Democratic Party remains almost totally opposed to voucher programs that would allow poor students to escape from failing public schools and attend private schools. Such voucher programs have a proven record of success:
This report collects the results of all available empirical studies using the best available scientific methods to measure how school vouchers affect academic outcomes for participants, and all available studies on how vouchers affect outcomes in public schools. Contrary to the widespread claim that vouchers do not benefit participants and hurt public schools, the empirical evidence consistently shows that vouchers improve outcomes for both participants and public schools.
Now most Democrats that I encounter say that they are concerned about income inequality and about lack of opportunities for the poor to rise up the economic ladder. If they’re so concerned about such things, why do they continue to support a system that lets rich children get a good education in private school, but leaves many poor children stranded in public schools that the government itself classifies as “failing”?
To respond to a few of the common responses:
The argument that vouchers will help those, mostly rich, who already send their kids to private schools. In this post, I listed some of the largest voucher programs and showed that they are only available to the poor and some slice of the middle class. They do not benefit the rich at all, so this argument is flatly wrong.
The argument that vouchers hurt public schools. As the study I linked to says, the scientific evidence shows overwhelmingly that when voucher programs are created, the result is beneficial for nearby public schools.
So why do Democrats continue to support a system that provides a high-quality private school education to the rich while leaving many poor children trapped in failing public schools?
Well, in all the discussion, you have to keep in mind that private-school parents pay the same taxes for public schools as everyone else - proportional to property value, usually.* If they choose to pay more to send their kids to non-public schools, they are both paying their share of those schools and reducing the load on them.
Except in California, where the joke property tax doesn’t pay for anything.
You misunderstand the California system, which is more tragedy than farce. Property tax rates are not that unreasonable. What is unreasonable is that once you are in a house your taxes go up very slowly over time, based on the price of your house when you move in. Thus my property taxes are maybe 10 - 15% higher than when I moved in, though the value of my house has doubled as has my salary over the past 15 years. But what is worse is the inequity. My friend two doors down who moved in 30 years ago pays a lot less than I do, and my friend next door who moved in about 2 years ago pays a lot more, though his house is smaller than mine. Even worse, the same system applies to businesses.
Therefore more government income comes from more volatile income and sales taxes, which is one of the reasons for the big shortfall when the economy tanked.
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I don’t see a contradiction. You can be in favor of a public service (schools, hospitals, police, housing, garbage collection, etc.) and simultaneously be a fan of their respective private options. Maybe you think those options are superior, they are more convenient to your needs (for instance, maybe a private school won’t penalize a student for having more than a couple of unexcused absenses, like a public school will), or family/cultural/religious traditions are better served by the private option.
Vouchers detract resources from public schools. You can’t truly be in support of improving public schools for everyone while simultaneously trumpeting a program that would funnel financial and human capital into the private alternatives. And sorry to step into the fallacy territory, but where does it stop? If I don’t like how my local precinct polices and in fact have had several break-ins and physical assaults, shouldn’t I be reimbursed for the private security guard I hire to watch over me? Why shouldn’t I, as a child-free person, be entitled to a refund for all the taxes I pay for someone’s children? The grabbing hands and self-centered whining wouldn’t stop just at education, and society would be the ultimate victim.
I do wish our public officials would directly support public schools, though. I don’t like the message it communicates when they don’t, and it’s hard for me to take their pro-education rhetoric seriously when they have no skin in the game.
I can tell you why I am not that happy with the idea of vouchers. I haven’t done a lot of research on the topic though. It seems to me, as an ignorant voter, that if we give people money to send their kids to private school then that money must come from somewhere. Maybe if I was to crunch the numbers it could be proven that the decrease in public school population might offset the money spent - that’s not my job and I dont find your link convincing.
As it is, I have a hard time believing that so many others have done that number crunching and have proven to themsleves that this is a money saver. In fact, all the people I know who want vouchers just want the the government to help them pay for their kids to go to private schools.
At the end of the day, I’m going to wait for someone to give some hard evidence that vouchers work before I get behind them. Even then, the rich will still send their kids to the better private schools, because they can, those with vouchers will get whatever is available after that and public school will be for all those who cost too much for private institutions to handle. The fact that the wealthy can afford to do things the rest of us can’t has no baring on how publics funds should be spent.
Yeah, some time in my 50 years there I must have failed to pay attention to how Jarvis-Gann corroded the seventh-largest economy on Earth. Yay, tax protesters.
That may be true, but it does nothing to allay the blatant hypocrisy of wealthy Democratic politicians. The question is not about who’s paying how much, but about who’s allowed to get a good education. Currently McAuliffe and people like him are allowed to give their kids a great education, but the vast majority of the poor are not. The question is, if Democrats truly believe that inequality between the rich and the poor is a huge problem that needs to be addressed, why do they oppose letting poor children escape failing public schools and attend private schools?
Is the topic the viability of the voucher system, or the hypocrisy of those who oppose them yet send their children to private schools? It is totally possible to argue against former and for the latter, or vice versa, y’know.
I consider myself to be far left of most Democrats, and I went to private school for 11 years of elementary and high school (also college, I guess, that’s a different subject).
I think we’re paying taxes for education for the education of societies youngsters in general. Why does a family get vouchers so they aren’t paying twice, but I have no children … I’m willing to pay, too? Let’s all pay taxes and fund education, whether we have kids or not, whether we want to send our kids to public or private school. If you want your kids to go to private school, you just have to pay more. If you want your kids to learn Creationism instead of Evolution, you pay more. As far as I’m concerned, educations benefits society overall, not just students and their parents. We all pay for that. My mother took a full time job to send me to Catholic school. She also put a disadvantaged Hispanic child through the same school. That was her choice … she paid for it.
They also support food stamps while purchasing food themselves.
They’re against vouchers because vouchers take money away from the public schools. Schools have a large fixed cost - what the local public school saves by having one less student is not equal to the money that gets taken away by one less student.
McAuliffe pays for his kids to go to public school, *and *to private school.
I don’t like it much, but I don’t see it as hypocrisy.
The problems of the US education system are so vast that no single collective of politicians is going to fix it. I don’t see it as hypocritical that they don’t send their kids to schools failed by decades of poor decisions if they can afford otherwise; the cycle has to break somewhere.
Put another way: I don’t think any politician now in office is responsible for the education system being in its current state, nor is there much of anything most of them can do to fix it. They are applying band-aids the way everyone who can afford it is: by paying a huge amount of their wealth to educate their kids to a better level. If that’s hypocritical, the word has become meaningless.
Maybe they are trying to help the public schools not fail so there is nothing to escape from?
Another issue with the vouchers is there is little to no oversight of these vaunted private schools. Are they really any better than their public-funded counterparts in terms of educating kids? Also, I think a lot of taxpayers of all stripes would have an issue with public dollars going to all kinds of religious schools, IMHO.
I’m generally opposed to taking public tax dollars and giving them to private for profit institutions, which is exactly what many of the proposed voucher programs allow. If the programs only allowed funding to regulated nonprofit institutions I’d look at it differently. Also I don’t agree stealing money from public schools to fund voucher programs is a good long term solution. Id much rather see failing public schools fixed rather than replaced.
The wealthy Democrats you mention pay taxes which fund public schools and pay out of pocket for their childrens education, I don’t see how their actions are hypocritical.
This. This is the elephant in the living room. A lot of the voucher movement wants to have kids taught religious beliefs (creationism near the top of the list) and at government (taxpayer) expense. The home-schooling movement also includes a lot of this, but at least they aren’t demanding tax money to pay for it.
19 studies is not ‘dozens.’ I hate to be nit-picky but those kinds of overstatements are what sets off alarms whenever I hear advocates for new programs that channel money into other people’s pockets. Your site uses the word scientific an awful lot but doesn’t mind descending into plenty of partisan pleading, which makes me think the document isn’t as rigorous as it would have us believe with all it’s sciencey wordplay.
You asked why some people don’t support vouchers. I’m only going to do so much studying to convince myself that a dubious system is a good idea. Your site does not do that for me.
The problem with school vouchers much like the problem with many other seemingly reasonable Republican ideas is that it is simply a cover for their actual goal. In this case that would be to funnel tax money into religious institutions.
There isn’t a “US education system”- it’s almost all at the state and local level, with periodic Federal meddling.
The biggest problem isn’t vouchers, or the lack thereof, it’s that public schools have to try and be everything to everyone. They’re supposed to be serious, acacdemically oriented college prep schools for the smart/average kids, schools that prep people for service and manufacturing jobs for the average/slow kids, day care for the segment of the population who neither care about their children or their education, as well as act in loco parentis for a large segment of the population who don’t teach their children basic life skills or behavior (and I’m not talking special-ed here).
This is expected all within one district, frequently within one building, and probably sometimes within a single classroom.
Is it any surprise that schools fail at most of these in some fashion? Vouchers would allow the segment of the poor and middle class to concentrate at private schools intended primarily for academic success, and divorce themselves from the day-care and other non-academically oriented ones. While I don’t doubt that this might work in terms of the most students achieving academic success and the cost for that success, it would sort of leave the others to sort of wallow in their own wretchedness, with less money than before.