School choice and the Utah voucher referendum: why it failed

Let's start with a premise. Most people are happy with the school their child attends.

It's kind of like Congressional approval ratings. People who give Congress low marks are usually much more positive about their own congressperson. Same with schools. Regardless of your feelings on the state of education in general, most people say that they are pretty satisfied with their local district. I'm not going to look up the research, so trust me on this one, ok? Let's start from there and move forward in this discussion.

So is it so shocking then, that voters in Utah, when given the chance to adopt statewide vouchers voted it down? Here's a brief reaction from Julia Steiny of Providence:

Recently, advocates for school choice were horrified to see Utah’s statewide voucher referendum go down in flames. Patrick Byrne, the dot-com executive who championed the initiative, called the referendum a “state IQ test” that Utah failed. Utah families will be trapped in the existing public school box for some time to come.

I’m not a fan of vouchers, for reasons I’ll explain momentarily, but even I was horrified by the spectacle of teachers’ unions from across the nation — California, Washington, Colorado, Kentucky, Connecticut and twice as many more — assembling money to vanquish the Utah referendum. The National Education Association and its front organization, Communities for Quality Education, dropped just under $3.5 million into what should have been a local campaign.

It's easy to blame it on the unions, of course, but if you start with my premise, that most people are happy with their local schools, it's not hard to see why an initiative like Utah's would lose.

If you live in the suburbs, you probably have what you think are pretty good schools, right? Isn't that why most people live in the suburbs? People who live there for the most part are happy with their schools, or they'd move.

The schools in poorer rural or urban districts are the places where students are more likely to use the voucher to move their child to a different, usually a more affluent school. After all, as Steiny says, it's those districts where parents are told, "your school is failing, but you can't move your child", and the "move" in question is generally from a poorer to a wealthier community, which explains why people in that situation don't just move to another district in the first place.

But it’s infuriating when, per the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, you get a letter admitting that the school your child attends is so academically lousy that your family is legally eligible to transfer to a better one, but there are no better schools available to you. Versions of this letter went out all over the country, especially in poor urban areas and tiny districts with few schools.

Some background: NCLB requires districts to allow students to move from failing schools to more successful ones (as measured by the standardized tests the law requires). But, if those other schools are full, or if a small district doesn't have another school to send your child, then this aspect of the law becomes pretty much pointless, because there's nowhere to move the child. NCLB doesn't require neighboring districts to take children from failing districts; it only requires intra-district transfers where those are available.

The proposed Utah law would have stepped into that void, giving parents the option of sending their children to any school. Now, one advocate of the proposal said the voters of Utah failed an IQ test. But if you are happy with your school--remember, most people are--why would you want to open it up to outsiders? Kids from those BAD schools? For many voters in Utah, voting yes to the voucher proposal would mean letting students from OTHER districts into the school you think is just fine the way it is.

Why do that? Most voters said, I want to keep the wall up around my school, and keep others out. That's why I moved here, that's why I pay high property taxes, and if I wanted the riff-raff in my district I'd move back to Salt Lake City.

If you think about it, the voucher proposal is a rather radical bit of class warfare. It's a way of saying to wealthy districts, hey! You have to let the poor kids from the other side of the tracks into your district. It's kind of like white flight in reverse. Folks in the suburbs moved there years ago to get away from busing. Now, the voucher proposal would say, essentially, those poor kids from the city are going to follow you into your new neighborhoods. But the wealthy people moved out there to get away from them in the first place! They don't want to be followed!

It's not the voters who failed the IQ test. It's the folks who put this thing on the ballot to begin with. They didn't answer a pretty basic question: why would suburban, middle and upper class voters vote for this measure that lets poor kids from bad schools get in there and mix it up with their own priveleged kids? Did anyone expect voters from conservative Utah to vote for a radical social experiment like this?

One more thing about Ms. Steiny's piece in the Providence Journal. She writes the following:

...school choice gives parents the power to vote with their feet. They are no longer at the mercy of schools that are unresponsive to parents, children and poor academic results. Unions protect teachers no matter what. So school choice pits the interests of the teachers’ unions directly against the interests of families.

There's quite a bit that I object to in this little paragraph. First of all, there are plenty of times when schools are absolutely right to be "unresponsive" to parents. Should schools be responsive whenever a child doesn't get a grade they don't like, or does get a disciplinary action they don't like? Schools really can't be in the business of pleasing all the people all the time, and anyone with a whit of common sense ought to be able to recognize that. And unions don't "protect teachers no matter what." They do defend teachers' due process rights, but that doesn't mean they protect teachers no matter what. But I challenge the author to prove that assertion. What protects teachers, as I've said many times on this blog, are administrators who don't do their jobs as evaluators of teachers. Finally, the interest of unions is not directly against the interest of families. That kind of labor-bashing is unfair, untrue, and unsubstatiated. Not to mention irresponsible. And frankly, not very thoughtful. There are lots of philosophical and practical reasons why unions oppose vouchers--the author here just sweeps those under the rug because they're too thorny to deal with in a thousand word column.

With that insulting and mindless paragraph GONE, however, the rest of the piece is worth reading.