TheAgitator.com
Surfing the Atlantic
Sunday, September 22nd, 2002The October issue of the Atlantic Monthly is magnificent, even by AM standards. If you don’t have a subscription (and you should), this month’s cover story is at least excerpted online. It’s William Langewiesche’s concluding piece on the “American Ground” series, an utterly fascinating, exclusive look at the rebuilding of Ground Zero.
Also online: this stellar essay from Jonathan Rauch, detailing how school vouchers might save urban neighborhoods — even if they fail to save urban public schools. Rauch then delves into how vouchers natural allies — redistributionist liberals — have fallen slave to the teachers’ unions, and missed a golden opportunity. An excerpt:
The strongest argument for school vouchers is moral. It is simply wrong for rich, predominantly white liberals to insist that poor, predominantly minority children attend dysfunctional and often dangerous schools that rich, predominantly white liberals would never allow their own children to set so much as one foot in. It is callous for rich, predominantly white liberals to continue to tell inner-city parents, year after year, “Urban schools must be fixed! Meanwhile, we’re outta here. Good luck.”
Rauch goes on to detail how public schools have tied property taxes to the quality of education — and how incredibly and unfortunately interconnected urban migration patterns and public education have become.
Who would lose, then, if vouchers broke the link between homes and schools? Wealthy suburbs. “They’re losing the people who used to stretch to afford housing in that areaâ??motivated parents,” Nechyba told me. They would also lose the taxes those people pay. And they would lose much of the school-related premium in their property values. No wonder suburban voters look on vouchers with icy disdain.In many respects vouchers are the perfect liberal program. They help to equalize opportunity across class lines. They stand a good chance of improving the public schools. Even if they did not improve the public schools, they could help to revitalize and integrate poor neighborhoods.
The tying of schools to houses is a historical accident that has undermined the economic integrity of cities. The tying of liberal loyalties to public-school-employees’ lobbies is a historical accident that has undermined the moral integrity of liberalism. Vouchers could untie both knots.
The allies and enemies of vouchers aren’t as clear as they might seem. A voucher proposal in Michigan a couple of years ago was overwhelmingly defeated, thanks in large part to skeptical (read: racist — or at least classist) suburbanites — and by no means were all of them liberal — who feared what effects urban undersirables might have on their sacred, safe, and successful suburban sanctuaries (and…um…the corny alliteration there was completely unintended).
You quote Rauch approvingly here: “The strongest argument for school vouchers is moral. It is simply wrong for rich, predominantly white liberals to insist that poor, predominantly minority children attend dysfunctional and often dangerous schools that rich, predominantly white liberals would never allow their own children to set so much as one foot in.”
But that’s not an argument for vouchers–it’s an argument for ending compulsory education. Make it into an argument for vouchers and you’ve accepted redistributionist logic that can be turned against you whenever anyone can show that there’s any good or service–housing, medical care, you name it–that the poor enjoy less of than the middle class.
Actually, I thought Rauch phrased things fairly carefully–he wasn’t talking about equality, but about what I guess you could call “okayity.” The problem is not that some schools are better than others (what else is new?) but that some schools are actively harmful. We _do_ owe our neighbors “okayity” in terms of education, housing, medical care, law enforcement (protection & provision of basic justice) etc.
There’re lots of different ways to achieve that minimal standard. Often, state-controlled or state-mandated strategies aren’t the best idea; sometimes they work just fine. If you think it’s good that the government must provide lawyers for indigent defendants, then you accept the principle of state-mandated “okayity” in at least one realm of life, so it’s necessary to argue about particular problems and solutions rather than rejecting Rauch’s standard out of hand.
Eve
I confess I didn’t read the Rauch piece, and still haven’t. The quote just struck me as of a piece with the flirtation with leftist rhetoric that occasionally characterizes voucher advocates, some of which totally elides the distinction b/t positive and negative rights. I probably read too much of it, given that that sort of thing is not typical of Rauch.
I don’t think we should have a general legal obligation to ensure our neighbors “okayity” in terms of goods and services they can purchase in the marketplace, such as medical care, housing, food, or the education of their children. (Though I’d agree that as long as compulsory ed exists, we have an obligation to ensure adequacy, if not equality). A moral obligation, probably.
The author forgets a central point in liberals’ arguments against vouchers: Vouchers frequently offer aid that sounds good but is not enough to make it possible for an impoverished family to actually send a child to private school. This is true with the plan originally suggested by Bush. So what the voucher becomes is one that doesn’t help families that need it, helps that those don’t, and sticks the needy children with even worse schools. Because of this fact, the redistribution argument holds water, though it’s redistribution upward, not downward.