Why school voucher programs mostly work ...

Teachers’ unions hate them.

Democrats hate them (mainly because the teachers’ unions hate them).

Big city mayors – mostly Democrats – typically hate them. (See above.)

Yet parents who use school vouchers generally praise them. Vouchers allow parents to take their kids out of failing and/or dangerous public schools and move them into better performing and safer schools.  Many parents report their kids seem to do better in those schools.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems.

Critics claim vouchers rob the worst and poorest public schools of funding. That’s true.  Then again, maybe those schools should be closed anyway.

Teachers’ unions are especially opposed because they claim it’s an attack on public education; what they are really afraid of is that teachers currently protected by union rules in those bad schools could lose their jobs. Again, maybe they should. Maybe they are part of the problem. 

If an ordinary business – even unionized – fails to adequately serve its customers, it will lose those customers to businesses who will. And that failing business may close. Just pumping more money into this failing business can’t alone change things unless the root causes are addressed. If it fails, employees will lose their jobs, but the good ones will likely find work elsewhere.     

There’s no demonstrable proof that giving really bad public schools more money improves anything. There’s a point when no amount of increased funding for facilities, for special programs, for larger staffs, or for better teachers’ and aides’ salaries, accomplishes anything.

Some of the worst inner city public schools, academically and in terms of violence, routinely get roughly double the funding per student of public schools outside the cities. But these are still awful, with poorer test scores and more daily violence against students and teachers than their suburban or rural counterparts who accomplish better results with far less money.

Another problem is fraud.

When school voucher programs started, so did a variety of charter schools; some were naked for-profit hoaxes designed to enrich the politically connected.

The original idea of charter schools was good – schools without all the burdensome regulations and union rules that stifled innovation and accountability for results. Charter schools could become a hands-on laboratory to find new and more efficient ways to teach kids, maybe saving taxpayer money, too.

However, with the lure of easy money, hucksters arrived.  They often clothed their money grabs in pseudo religious or ethnic garb. There was a surge in proposed new charter schools of dubious merit that never opened, or closed quickly, which, nonetheless got billions in grant money. Some that stayed open produced laughable results, worse than the public schools they challenged. 

Parents got sucked in with the promise of better education for their kids. And a lot of charter schools simply failed to deliver.  Meanwhile the operators got rich. 

The problem was not school vouchers, but bad charters. It’s important to separate the two, because on the whole school vouchers work for many parents and their kids. 

So why do school vouchers work? And I have to add “mostly” because of bad charters. 

There are three reasons, I believe.

First, there’s the Hawthorne effect – which in simplest terms means that performance often improves when there’s a change coupled with consistently applied measurement. People tend to perform better when they know something has changed and that someone is measuring the effect of that change. When a student is transferred to a “better” school and knows someone is actively keeping track of how well they will do, such as their parents, they’ll often do better.

It’s also why public schools that now require their students to wear uniforms see a boost in performance.  It’s not about eliminating competition over designer fashions, or helping poorer families; it’s about a change in the environment and measurement. 

Next, teachers who believe they work in a “better” school – affirmed by parents using vouchers to enroll their kids – are more likely to do their jobs more enthusiastically. Teachers may feel they have students who want to learn, who want to be there, instead of students who see school as a purgatory they must endure until they are old enough to drop out.   

Finally, and most importantly, parents who use vouchers to move their kids to what they think is a better school are taking a proactive role in their kids’ education. They don’t want their kids to fail.  They want them to get an education, graduate, and move up. This desire alone is often powerful enough to push their kids to perform better in schools. Unfortunately, it’s too rare in some places. 

Dedicated teachers in bad public schools often lament that the real problem in their school is not poor facilities or insufficient funding as much as parents who don’t seem to care whether or not their kids learn anything. Or even go to school.  Too many parents simply don’t take any responsibility for their kids – they expect teachers to do the parents’ job of raising their child. These parents don’t know, or much care, how or what their kid is doing in school. 

In the end, vouchers only really help parents who give a damn about their kids.

If parents aren’t interested enough in seeing their kid get a good education in a safe environment, there’s nothing anyone, or any government program, can do to make them care and take a more active role. It’s a lost cause.

Vouchers alone can’t save and repair bad public schools. But these can draw attention to the cause of the real problems that foster bad public schools.

Parents who don’t care. Administrators more interested in promotions and higher pay than running successful schools that produce properly educated kids.  And too many teachers who have simply given up and are just marking time until retirement.