Private Schools Don't Want an All-Private-School-Voucher Future

the whole point of American private school is keeping the poor kids out

An NYT piece on the relentless march of Republican-powered “school choice” states the obvious:

In campaigning for the bill, supporters did not dwell on old arguments that promoted choice’s potential to improve public education through competition, or on the belief that academic achievement would improve in private schools.

Instead, Gov. Greg Abbott and allies emphasized parental rights and personalized learning. They also leaned on the culture war issues that have dominated the Trump era, arguing that vouchers would allow families to escape liberal teachings on gender, sexuality and race.

This has been one of the most obvious shifts in ed reform debates since the high-water mark of liberal zeal for school reform during the middle of the Obama administration. Private school vouchers became more directly right-wing coded as liberals doubled down on charter schools, and as they did, school quality improvements ceased to be a central argument in their favor. In part, this was because conservatives cared about other values, in part it was because “freedom” and “choice” proved to be a more effective sales pitch, and in part it was because the research record regarding school vouchers is truly dismal. I must admit that, as much as I hate the whole agenda - public funds should be used for public schools, not private enterprise, and particularly not for religious indoctrination - there’s something refreshing about this abandonment of equality jargon as a justification for ed policy. Typically school reform types hold on to their justice rhetoric like death.

It makes me think of a bit of a counternarrative that I’ve heard about charters over the years, actually. Charter schools have been wrapped up in liberatory language for so long it’s hard to extricate the concept from that packaging. Core to that promise is the “no child left behind” element, the idea that the school reform movement has a deep moral duty to save each and every kid and that the various tools school districts and states have used to shuffle poorly-performing students off the books are immoral.¹ It’s for that reason that longstanding and serious concerns about how charter schools manipulate their student bodies are so morally challenging for the movement; if it’s true that the best charter schools develop that reputation by getting selective with admissions in a way public schools can’t, it directly undermines their claims to being part of a righteous reform movement. But as the years have passed since my first book came out and I’ve talked to more and more people from various places in the educational landscape, I’ve heard from a few charter-adjacent people - a half-dozen parents maybe, a handful of teachers and administrators - who actually affirm the very thing that I’ve been accusing charters of for years: that they exist as a tool to prune incoming student bodies, using various tricks to keep out the students who are hardest to educate. A few brave souls have told me, in fact, that such exclusionary behavior is exactly the point.

Exactly the point, that is, because in this telling it’s precisely the universal guarantee of public education that ruins everything. To hear these rare advocates tell it, a central problem with struggling schools and districts is that the students who don’t care and don’t want to be there are disruptive of the whole enterprise, ruining it for everyone else. This is a hard matter to prove empirically - like just about everything else in the research record, the evidence for peer effects is far more muted than you’d guess based on rhetoric - but certainly in the broader social sense feels intuitively compelling. It’s hard to run a school with violence issues, hard to give adequate attention to students who need it when constantly diverted to behavioral problems, hard to justify using resources on students who plainly don’t want to be there. So for those charter advocates, the selection bias is a feature, not a bug. The whole point is to give the kids who care a chance to escape from the places that have to warehouse the kids who don’t.

I think that this is also quietly at play with the deeper question of whether school really has much impact on quantitative metrics at all. As I tell people all the time, parents have almost literally zero sense of a given school’s educational quality, despite evincing total confidence in that understanding; I personally believe that school quality (as defined as the ability to manipulate quantitative metrics and relative placement in the performance distribution!) is largely illusory, but even if you don’t agree, sorting out what’s input and what’s output is really challenging. I often want to ask parents who are sending their kids to Montessori or whatever if they’re really confident that it’s going to result in better learning outcomes for their kid; I suspect that they know that their kid is going to flourish anywhere. (Parents tend to understand the inelasticity of school outcomes when it comes to their own kid, even if that reality remains untenable as a broader observation; they don’t expect their child to bounce around from A student to D and back again, they expect their child to perform as well as they always have.) Which again speaks to a part of all this that usually goes unspoken, for obvious reasons: a lot of parents, even progressive parents, just don’t want their kids to go to school with the wrong sort. Sometimes that’s explicitly racist and classist. More often, I suspect, it’s inchoate and vague. But still powerful.

Which brings me to private school generally. One important point about American education that I think often goes under the radar: private school teachers, in general, get paid less than their public school counterparts. Often a lot less, with typical estimates for median pay gap around $15-$20k a year. And even this is a little distorted, given that the priciest private academies will often pay dramatic outlier salaries to their teachers, bending the average up. This is all true despite the fact that there isn’t any particular pedagogical difference between public and private; while there are specific private school traditions like Montessori that have some systematic pedagogical differences, private schools generally teach the same material in about the same way as public. (You’ll note that ed reform boilerplate is almost always about teacher hiring and firing decisions, tenure, pay, “accountability,” etc. - that is, administrative issues, not pedagogical.) So why would private school teachers accept such a scenario, making much less money than their public counterparts while doing more or less the same thing in the classroom?

The answer, of course, is that private schools screen out the hardest-to-educate kids, making the job of a teacher much more attractive. I don’t think this is some libelous argument. The costs of private school alone tend to make the student bodies much easier to manage, many have onerous application processes that can require a transcript review and/or testing, many have requirements regarding past attendance and behavior, and with a few exceptions related to federally-prohibited discrimination, they can refuse any students they choose. Private schools also rarely offer special education services unless they are specifically dedicated to that task, and practically speaking they have far less onerous standards to meet if parents allege that their special education student’s needs aren’t being met. (Special ed is, for the record, the biggest source of supposed cost and efficiency advantages that private schools have over public; special ed cost public schools $50 billion a year… a quarter century ago.) In general, private school student bodies are far richer and whiter than public, with dramatically lower behavior and attendance problems and with more engaged and dedicated parents. This is what private school teachers are getting in exchange for lower salaries; it’s just a far easier job thanks to the differences in who you’re teaching.

And so consider now the longstanding libertarian dream of getting rid of government-funded and run schools altogether and just distributing money to parents to pay for private schooling. This doesn’t work for a variety of reasons, and the special ed point is a good example of why; like a lot of government-funded enterprise, K-12 schooling relies on pooling money together to pay for costs that are unequal from student to student. (That is to say, a kid/the parents of a kid who’s not in special ed, doesn’t have serious behavioral problems, and doesn’t require remediation are in a certain sense subsidizing those who do.) There’s also the fact that, as the NYT piece says, in many contexts the introduction of private school vouchers simply incentivizes local private schools to raise their prices. But those private school teachers and their worse salaries, worse job security, and lack of labor power point to the bigger problem: the whole enterprise of private school is built on exclusion. Parents don’t like private school despite the fact that private schools exclude certain kinds of students. They like private schools because they exclude certain kinds of students. Switch the United States to an all-voucher system, and suddenly you’re threatening both what parents like about sending their kids to private school and what private school employees like about working in them.

This, again, is a case of where having a big educational network has helped me hear the quiet part out loud. Talk to some people involved in the world of private education, and you’ll note a great deal of ambivalence towards the idea of a vastly larger world of vouchers. Of course they’d like to get their hands on some tax dollars. But very few are eager to simply become the workforce of a new de facto public school system; that’s not what they got into private education for, and it’s certainly not why most parents like private schools. I know that some will treat this as a terribly inflammatory set of statements, but it’s simply the case that what defines the sales job for private school is the fact that it is not public school.

And voucher programs already underline that fact. The Times piece points out that “new schools founded to take advantage of private-school choice policies have sometimes struggled to find their footing and shut down quickly, sending students back into public education.” Why are new schools necessary when voucher programs have tended to remain limited in size, relative to public schooling? Because in general, private schools that accept vouchers are not necessarily giving up any of their usual right to selectivity - meaning that parents might be newly armed with money, but unable to spend it at the schools of their choice. An inevitable outcome of a vast new voucher system is going to be a mushrooming number of shitty, fly-by-night schools that exist simply to sop up loose voucher cash. The “good” private schools will remain out of reach to most families, which is imperative for those schools, because their status as “good” schools depends on having good student bodies, that is, on their continuing to exclude marginal students. And once we understand this, we’re really putting a ton of weight on the value of CHOICE in and of itself. Is that really what parents crave, choice? Or is it the choice to get into a good school? And are they prepared to grapple with the question of whether good schools are good precisely because they exclude the hardest-to-educate students?

Two things that sit in tension with each other: government-funded and run universal education for all children is one of the best things this country ever did, and exclusion has always been core to education and how it functions. I am a big, big fan of compulsory public education for children, even though I think that students should be able to drop out sooner than policy currently allows. That surprises some people, given that I think that different individual students have different individual levels of academic potential and this potential seems largely static. But that’s only a knock against universal education if you think the point is for everyone to become an academic star, which is the opposite of what I think. The fact remains, though, that for most the world’s history, before reformers like John Dewey spread the gospel of universal potential, very few assumed that education had an egalitarian purpose at all. Education, for much of the world’s history, has been fundamentally about preparing an already-blessed elite. And while that assumption came packaged with all manner of noxious attitudes, the rise of egalitarian educational rhetoric has brought with it the many distributional paradoxes I’m forever pointing out. It remains true that there’s only room for 1% of students in the academic 1%, and that it will never be possible for every student - and every school - to be above average.

High school kids who get rejected from their dream college might cry for the missed opportunity. But they still don’t wish that the school would drop all of its selectivity and start accepting every student who applies; part of what they dreamed of, after all, was being blessed by that selectivity. Something like that is happening with private school too, where more and more vouchers are inevitably going to make plain the reality that what parents want for their kids is precisely to set them up in an ivory tower that those other kids can’t climb into.

1. This is of course one of the central ironies of the story of 21st century education reform: No Child Left Behind, which codified this thinking in law, was passed largely thanks to the supposed “Texas miracle,” a period of improved test scores in Texas schools that was achieved… through creative accounting that hid the worst-performing students.