D.C. Vouchers Aren’t Vouchers

For me, the Heritage Foundation is unavoidable. Not because it’s a player in education policy–George W. Bush’s 2001 push to expand federal control over K-12 schools effectively killed retrograde education conservatism, and Heritage has had little to offer on the topic since. I can’t escape it because I live at the intersection of 5th and D St. NE and Heritage is on the north side of Massachusetts Avenue between 3rd and 2nd. Every working day for the last nine years I’ve walked by the Heritage entrance in morning and again at night.

For a while there were a lot of SUVs with Texas plates and dark-tinted windows parked outside but things are quieter these days. Still, they’ve expanded steadily over the years. First they took over the adjacent building and turned into a dormitory for their interns. (In the summer they wear the preppiest clothes imaginable; it’s like a rainbow sherbet explosion, with bow ties.) Then they started a huge multi-year project to retrofit the building’s brick facade in columns and grey limestone. They’ve re-sodded and then re-ripped up the small front lawn on at least three separate occasions, including the last few weeks, closing the sidewalk and forcing pedestrians out into heavy rush hour traffic. It’s inconvenient and annoying but I take comfort in the fact that it also looks really expensive, and as such represents money not spent on pursuing delusions of imperial conquest or preventing poor people from getting life-saving medical procedures. Maybe if they’d gone with a cheaper grade of stone cladding or less polish on the brass bell logo embedded above the entrance, they could have peeled a few votes off the health care bill. This thought pleases me as I dodge homicidal taxis during the walk home.

But in fairness Heritage has entered the education arena this week, by buying advertisements at the Union Station Metro stop promoting the DC voucher program. Issue ads like this are a peculiar DC phenomenon; they often involve companies insisting that they’re the opposite of what you (rightly) think  they are (clean coal!) or bidding for some kind of mind-bogglingly expensive defense contract. The Heritage voucher ads are titled “Let Me Rise” and feature pictures of local African-American children. This reflects less a comprehensive concern for the welfare of minority children on the part of the Heritage Foundation and more a desire to poke Democrats with civil rights-ish words and images while promoting the last tiny surviving vestige of retrograde education conservatism.

The Washington Post editorial board, meanwhile, has published something like 40,000 separate items on this subject in the last year. This is part of their program of leavening a baseline center-left orientation with occasional nuggets of hard-right foolishness, for credibility purposes.

Here’s what I think everyone is missing: The D.C. voucher program is not a voucher program. It is merely what it is officially said to be: the D.C. “Opportunity Scholarship Program.” This is a case of politically palatable euphemism inadvertently aligning with reality. Let me explain why:

Vouchers, as conceived by Milton Friedman and promoted by free market enthusiasts ever since, are a  way of funding public education without automatically supporting government schools. They’re conceptually straightforward: take whatever amount of public money is being given to government schools on students’ behalf and give it to their parents instead. Market competition and attendant consequences ensue. It’s a simple idea and–crucially–has to stay that way in order to work.  All the money needs to go toward vouchers, so public schools have no choice but to compete, and private firms have sufficient incentive to enter the market.

The DC voucher program is nothing like this. It’s limited to a small number of students. The amount of money is only a fraction of what public schools receive. And when students use their vouchers to attend a private school, the money doesn’t come out of the public school budget. As a result, there is no competition and no incentives for institutional change. No new private schools have sprung up to meet the new demand created by voucher students. The regular public schools have continued as they would have otherwise. There are no market dynamics to speak of. How could there be? The private schools participating in the program each accept a relatively small number of students and no student learning results are released to the public that might inform parental choice. The program is precisely and only what it officially purports to be: a program that provides annual scholarships to some low-income families to help them defray the cost of education.

In this light, Democrats and various education interest groups are being cruel and selfish by trying to cancel the program. There’s no point–all they’re doing is hurting children. At the same time, the Heritage Foundation is wasting its money on these advertisements, just as various school choice advocates are wasting their time and attention. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program is not a “pilot” or “experiment,” the success or failure of which will offer any evidence about the wisdom or effectiveness of school vouchers, because the scholarships are not vouchers.  A legitimate voucher pilot would involve taking all of the education funding in a big and dense enough geographic area and turning it over to parents with a guarantee that the arrangement will persist for a number of years. There’s no real middle ground; you either give vouchers a try or you don’t. I note that no elected officials at the federal, state, or municipal level appear to be in any hurry to do this.