From Vouchers to Credits

Kevin Carey watches libertarian thinking on education policy descend from vouchers to a preference for tax credits, which will work like vouchers except be much more regressive. And of course that's the problem with relying on an ideological movement that doesn't believe there should be public services for advice on how to organize your public services. Once public schools have been replaced by vouchers and vouchers have been replaced by tax credits, the next logic step is to reduce the size of the credits and just have lower taxes overall.

People with the means and inclination to send their kids to a good school can do so, and families lacking such means or inclination can send them to a bad one or have them go out and get a job. That, after all, is the essence of freedom and who could be against that? Besides which, everyone knows that the lower tax rates resulting from the end of public education will produce more economic growth and benefit the poor in the long run.

Comments

that's the problem with relying on an ideological movement that doesn't believe there should be public services for advice on how to organize your public services

Exactly right. Although I would extend this attitude beyond libertarians to members of the modern GOP as well. Ronald Reagan said that "government is not the solution to your problems, government is the problem." Then he set about to prove it. (apologies if this is a direct unattributed quote.)

I've asked conservatives before if they were interviewing a teacher and they said "educating children is not the solution to our problems, education is the problem" if they would hire that teacher. The follow up question is then, if you DID hire that teacher, how could you possibly be surprised/outraged when the kids in the class can't read?

Posted by drjimcooper | May 18, 2008 11:34 AM

I'm almost tempted to let people who advocate the elimination of unions and the implementation of vouchers and other policies like them have what they what, no questions asked. That way, if it does work, we'll have better schools, but if it doesn't work, we will have shut the right-wing up for some time.

It's gotten to the point where it seems like one side, the conservatives, keep insisting that we are merely too tied to special interests to recognize what a wonderful opportunity for change we are passing up. Maybe I've missed something, but it seems like the evidence is ambiguous, at best. Yet we still see people like Alex Tabbarok over at Marginal Revolution point to events in New Orleans as irrefutable proof that unions are awful. I guess I just don't get it.

Posted by Brian | May 18, 2008 11:50 AM

You missed two steps-- tax credits are made nonrefundable and then, credits are converted to plain tax deductions.

Posted by beowulf | May 18, 2008 12:07 PM

But wait, there's more!

A well functioning market will reward good decision makers with more money, and bad decision makers with less. For maximum economic growth, we should have as much money as possible in the hands of good decision makers, and the best approach to this is a regressive tax system with overall net wealth transfer to the rich, who will invest it and the resulting growth will benefit all.

Posted by Chuck | May 18, 2008 12:28 PM

Making parents more responsible for their decisions is not an attack on the equality of opportunities for children. All we are proposing is shifting the costs of raising a child away from the collective and onto the decision making adults. Remember libertarians treat children and adults differently. And contrary to liberals we feel parents owe a duty to their child. If unfit parents abuse this responsibility, as Yglesias mentioned, then the principles of tort law should apply.

Anyways vouchers are a completely separate and innocuous issue. To somehow say we will move from vouchers (which is basically a question of efficiency not of spending or cost allocation) to privatizing the cost of education is a little unrealistic.

Posted by Gordon Gekko | May 18, 2008 12:41 PM

The argument for vouchers needs to be placed in context. Doing public policy always involves comparing flawed alternatives. Certainly public education has its problems.

For one, because of a lack of competition we have little reason to expect its quality to improve over time, and little reason to expect there to be improved education.

Second, with government control of education, we won't see as much specialization of educational goods as we would under a market because there is no price mechanism for distinguishing individual's preferences from one another.

Third, government controlled education can be politically dangerous because it is easier to co-opt for ideological purposes than competitive market institutions.

Fourth, by using so much coercion, government schools create irresolvable social conflicts, particularly between religious and secular parents. The right of religious students to pray and the right of secular students to be free from prayer have to be traded off against one another. With school choice, these conflicts can be reduced significantly.

Fifth, it seems to be an obvious fact that all else equal, less coercive institutions are morally superior institutions. If vouchers are fairly equivalent with respect to consequences with public education over the proper time interval, then the reduction in coercion should break the tie between the two on the level of moral justification.

Additionally, the economic growth stuff is not a joke. There's a reason libertarians take it so seriously. But of course, it isn't unusual for social democrats to scoff at the idea of indirect, decentralized approaches to reducing poverty as an alternative to direct, centralized approaches. Its a bit like the lack of creativity creationists display when scoffing at decentralized mechanisms for human development.

Posted by Selfreferencing | May 18, 2008 12:46 PM

Wasn't Gordon Gekko a bad guy? I mean, it's like if I were to start commenting under the name of one of the liberal villains from Atlas Shrugged.

Anyway, the suggestion that principles of tort law should apply to parents who can't afford to send their kids to private schools is libertarianly delicious.

Posted by Matt Weiner | May 18, 2008 1:05 PM

Remember libertarians treat children and adults differently.

Except if they aren't able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Then it's fuck the lot of 'em.

And contrary to liberals we feel parents owe a duty to their child.

Go fuck yourself. Liberals feel that parents owe a duty to their child, but we also believe that it is in the best interests of society to take care of the lowest among us. That's why we believe that we should all pitch in to provide certain things, like healthcare, education, among others. Where on earth would we have come up with that idea? I feel like some guy used to talk about it. Funny mexican name or something He-sus, Jezus, it'll come to me.

Posted by drjimcooper | May 18, 2008 1:20 PM

Okay, if we're going to have some p*ss-ant libertarian start making bullsh*t comments about who's morally superior to whom, then we voluntary libertarian socialists who aim to move toward a democratic and cooperative economy are vastly superior to the limited and cowardly propertarian fetishist "libertarians", so there, the end.

Posted by El Cid | May 18, 2008 1:24 PM

People with the means and inclination to send their kids to a good school can do so, and families lacking such means or inclination can send them to a bad one or have them go out and get a job

What's the point of building a treehouse unless you can pull up the ladder?

Posted by Davis X. Machina | May 18, 2008 1:47 PM

@drjimcooper

Jesus was also against deficit spending. So, we're boned both ways.

Posted by JackUH | May 18, 2008 1:49 PM

Jesus was also against deficit spending. So, we're boned both ways.

Jesus was also a well known dirty fucking hippy, so I'm sure he would support scaling back defense spending to free up budget room for helping the sick and needy.

Posted by drjimcooper | May 18, 2008 2:10 PM

For a free market to actually be at work, firms have to go out of business to make room for more efficient firms. How often does a private school actually go out of business? It's not like Thayer is on the verge of bankruptcy or something. Right now, there are less than about 25 or so private schools in America that do a significantly better job educating their students than public schools and those schools tend to be clustered in the Northeast. Making the entire educational system private wouldn't lead to the average school to be up to Andover's standards. It won't even lead to the average school to be up to Thayer's standards. The fact that certain scarce resources - funding, social access, more extracurricular activities, better after-school help, better teachers and a classroom of students who are all they because they choose to be there and compete with each other - are controlled by a handful of prep schools mean that what makes the elite prep schools work is rather unique to those particular schools and can't really become the norm via the market.

While I support vouchers as a way for the top students in bad school systems to escape to somewhere they can better maximize their potential and get the education they deserve at Groton or wherever, as a solution to our problems with public education it is just silly. Sometimes the private sector can't do the public sector's job (see the US military compared to Blackwater).

Posted by Reality Man | May 18, 2008 3:01 PM

This is not directly related to the points in this thread, but I am always amazed that people assume that school choice is limited to choices made by students/parents. Choices about schooling are made by others within the system, and this profoundly affects the way that schools work.

Teachers also get to choose, and guess what? They generally choose to work in places where they get decent pay and benefits, which almost always means public schools. The handful that choose to work in private schools either have another source of support (spouse, family money) or feel it is some kind of mission for them to do so. [Or, like me, they wanted to see how the other half lives. Teaching in 3 of the top private schools in the country opened my eyes in ways I never would have imagined when I applied for that first job.]

You know who else gets to choose? The private schools. They get to choose who they admit and who gets to stay. They can choose to leave out anyone for any reason, including those who need special services, those who don't have the money to pay (vouchers rarely cover the full cost, especially at the more desirable private schools) those who don't have the test scores, those who misbehave, and those who are the wrong religion, race, gender, or really for any reason you can dream up. The idea that "choice" means that anyone can go anywhere, if only they had the money, is ridiculous on its face. Yet the discussions of choice that I've seen never even acknowledge choices made by schools and by teachers. FWIW.

Posted by kajey | May 18, 2008 3:18 PM

If you chimps had a clue as to what constitutes "education", I might pay attention to these posts.

The US public school system is a factory producing consumers and workers and a prison system, nothing more. It's a major factor in why thirty percent of the population still supports Bush.

Get a fucking clue.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 18, 2008 6:10 PM

Last summer I ran into an old work associate and we talked a bit about politics. He's a libertarian and went into this long harangue about school teachers' salaries and inner city schools. I was astounded. He's not an idiot but with all the issues facing our country that was his big libertarian beef.
I told him my 53 year old cousin makes $37k or so after teaching 25 years in a poor Ohio county. His reply? "Well, she only works nine months a year."

Posted by carsick | May 18, 2008 7:50 PM

I told him my 53 year old cousin makes $37k or so after teaching 25 years in a poor Ohio county. His reply? "Well, she only works nine months a year."

Thus adding evidence that a lot of people simply have pre-programmed responses that they give without any forethought.

The handful that choose to work in private schools either have another source of support (spouse, family money) or feel it is some kind of mission for them to do so.

Actually, you allude to the real reason in the next paragraph: it's because they know the crop of students will be ones that want to be there and that the school wants to be there. There are some teachers that find it satisfying to turn disruptive, uninterested students into students who can start to engage the material, and there are some teachers who like having an engaged classroom to begin with so that they can teach at a higher level.

Like Reality Man, I find a compelling case to be made for limited use of vouchers. However, vouchers are never even going to be a politically popular solution: the number of people who would be helped by vouchers and would actually want to use them is small, and those people do not actually have the political clout to get the majority to support them. The people who don't care about education are perfectly happy with their schools, or too apathetic to care one way or the other. Most people for whom education is a serious issue have moved to a school district they're happy with or send their children to private schools. There's a small sliver of those who both have a problem with their public schools, can't/won't move to a new school district, cannot afford a private school, and live in a city which is large enough to support enough private schools to make vouchers a workable option in the first place. But then we find that voucher advocates aren't interested themselves in education in the first place: they just want to reduce the tax rate.

Posted by Tyro | May 19, 2008 1:01 AM

Third, government controlled education can be politically dangerous because it is easier to co-opt for ideological purposes than competitive market institutions.

Ah, but in Matt's mind (and that of most leftists, this is a feature, not a bug.

Fourth, by using so much coercion, government schools create irresolvable social conflicts, particularly between religious and secular parents. The right of religious students to pray and the right of secular students to be free from prayer have to be traded off against one another. With school choice, these conflicts can be reduced significantly.

But the leftists don't want to reduce these conflicts. They just want to make sure that the secular parents and students win. Their rights are to be protected, and those who are religious can go jump in the lake.

Posted by Glaivester | May 19, 2008 2:57 AM

1) I thought the lesson of Atlas Shrugged was that all the self identifying exceptional people pack up and leave. What's stopping modern libertarians from starting their own utopia somewhere else?

2) Why can't people pray at home? Why is prayer only desired in the most public of places? Is the point to make yourself feel that you are different and superior? If so, see #1 above.

Posted by An Outhouse | May 19, 2008 8:55 AM

"1) I thought the lesson of Atlas Shrugged was that all the self identifying exceptional people pack up and leave. What's stopping modern libertarians from starting their own utopia somewhere else?"

Not enough women are libertarians and too many older libertarians are homophobic, so in Libertariania, no one would get laid.

Posted by Reality Man | May 19, 2008 9:03 AM

2) Why can't people pray at home? Why is prayer only desired in the most public of places? Is the point to make yourself feel that you are different and superior?

Why, because their religious faith is so strong that being exposed to a "secular world" -- i.e., one in which invisible magic beings are not part of the regular teaching environment -- would cause their super strong faith to crumble.

Which is why they keep pushing to have their particular faith enshrined in public policy, to show how strong & unchallenged their incredibly vulnerable faith is.

Obviously those people who can manage to get through a school or work day without being reminded of what is supposed to be the religious faith guiding their life are somehow subversive individualists.

Posted by El Cid | May 19, 2008 9:05 AM

"I told him my 53 year old cousin makes $37k or so after teaching 25 years in a poor Ohio county. His reply? "Well, she only works nine months a year.'"

If there's any proof that this explains the difference, then he might have a point. But my question to that guy is, would you be willing to pay teachers more for a full-year schedule? Before taxes, assuming his pay stayed the same on average for each extra month or so (and I'm assuming two months here), the teacher's pay would rise by $8000.

I don't think any of these issues are clear cut, but my gut tells me that if you are willing to pay people good salaries, you will attract talented individuals. I come from an area of the country where the teachers are usually paid very well, sometimes to the point that it bothers a lot of the taxpayers, but I imagine that's one of the reasons that a few of my teachers in high school who were excellent students became teachers.

Posted by Brian | May 19, 2008 9:44 AM

I like the whole free market argument in regards to education, because I always ask this question to the voucher enthusiast: Where is the profit in education? Doesn't the free market maximize profit? Then of course the answer is something about more students equals more money. Here again I ask "what if a company starts a bunch of private schools, uses grade inflation to look good, and generate a lot of profit while providing little education? Isn't that the free market?" The response is always a bit childish, that the "free market will correct this". But I see no evidence that the free market can correct for market imperfection like imperfect information. Especially if the government stops regulations, like testing and introducing educational metrics. Then it really becomes a battle of who has the best PR, like it is with other industries. After all, people buy poison toothpaste from China because there is imperfect information.

Posted by freddiemac | May 19, 2008 10:01 AM

"I don't think any of these issues are clear cut, but my gut tells me that if you are willing to pay people good salaries, you will attract talented individuals. I come from an area of the country where the teachers are usually paid very well, sometimes to the point that it bothers a lot of the taxpayers, but I imagine that's one of the reasons that a few of my teachers in high school who were excellent students became teachers.

Posted by Brian | May 19, 2008 9:44 AM"

This is what drives me insane with all of the attacks on teacher's unions (especially from California pundits, who don't realize California's experience is rather odd compared to the rest of the country). It's politically popular to attack teacher's unions, yet everyone seems to agree teachers are important and should be paid better, but politicians refuse to rather publicly and forcefully point out the contradiction. You get the quality of teaching you are willing to pay for (which is another way funding schools through local property taxes fuck the poor over). If you aren't willing to pay teachers, your residents are mobile enough to leave and a nearby school district is willing to pay teachers well, people are going to move from your district to the neighboring district over time, new arrivals to the area will move to the neighboring district instead of yours, people sell their homes and drive property values down, a lower population lowers aggregate demand locally and thus contracts the local economy and you just fuck yourself over. However, there doesn't seem to be anywhere in the country people are willing to raise their taxes high enough to take full advantage of this dynamic. After all, it is a lot more expensive for the individual taxpayer to have their taxes raised a little over the entire taxpaying population than to pay for private school tuition completely out of pocket.

"After all, people buy poison toothpaste from China because there is imperfect information.

Posted by freddiemac | May 19, 2008 10:01 AM"

But then you die and people find out you died from Chinese toothpaste, so nobody buys that toothpaste anymore, so the market self-corrects and everyone wins! Except for you of course, but what do you expect, the government to help provide you with information so that your toothpaste doesn't kill you? Your will to live shows you to be a stinkin' pinko commie.

Posted by Reality Man | May 19, 2008 1:26 PM