What a moment New York is in over charter schools. Mayor de Blasio has managed to illuminate the heroism of Eva Moskowitz and the families of her Success Academy. It could be a springboard for Moskowitz to run for mayor. Gov. Cuomo is now in the fight in a big and encouraging way.
This strikes me as a moment to take the education debate to the next step — school vouchers. I’ve been banging this drum for years; it’s a decidedly minority position. Mayor Bloomberg viewed it as chimerical, and chose to go with charters and put them on the map.
Strategically, though, wouldn’t the Success families be in a better position if they didn’t have to lobby continually for government support?
Thousands of parents in this town are desperate — clamoring — to get their children into better schools than those run by the government. Under the charter system, they have to bow and scrape for every square foot.
A true voucher system would give parents, who are the customers of the school system, far greater choice. It would direct, or permit, money to follow the parents’ choice, to whatever school they chose, public or private.
This is a proven idea. In Vermont and Maine, towns that don’t have public schools have been operating voucher systems for generations. Tuition payments from taxes follow the parents’ decisions on where to send their children to school.
This strategy was backed in the 1950s by the future Nobel laureate Milton Friedman.
Friedman, a free-market economist, reckoned a voucher system would make education more efficient. He also estimated that the competition would help the public-school system. It would also be more democratic, opening to families of modest means private education that under our current system is reserved for the wealthier families.
As Jim Crow was dying in the south, there were efforts to use vouchers to maintain segregated schools. That evil, though, isn’t the purpose of vouchers. Indeed, the most astonishing development was that vouchers emerged as a movement to rescue minority children from failing public-school systems.
All sorts of experiments with vouchers have been launched in the past decade or so, ranging from Wisconsin to Florida to Ohio to the Columbia District. The voucher program in Milwaukee now involves so many pupils that if it were a school system it would be the fifth-largest in the state.
New York City, though, has been stuck. Bloomberg seemed at times to recognize the potential virtues of a voucher system. But he shrank from the political fight, saying in one radio broadcast, “Even if you think it is a great idea it would not get through the Legislature.”
No one underestimates the difficulty of a fight over vouchers, which would give parents a choice as a matter of right. The movement to include religious schools — Catholic, Jewish and Muslim day schools — would, all by itself, precipitate a major test of constitutional issues of church and state, though the Supreme Court has allowed religious schools to participate in Ohio.
New York’s Constitution has an extra-high barrier — a so-called Blaine amendment — against any state money going to religious education. This formalized anti-Catholic sentiments exploited by 19th century demagogue James Blaine.
There is a constant effort to work around Blaine’s curse. What is being called a quasi-voucher system is moving through the Legislature; it could result in scholarship tax credits. It is backed by, among others, the Catholic schools and the Orthodox Union.
Yet the lack of true vouchers has left Eva Moskowitz and the charter movement in a box. Charters represent a modest, much-needed approach to reforming public education — in other words, a compromise effort to save the public schools. A campaign for vouchers would put that point into sharp relief.
It would also help lift this story up to a national level, where it deserves to be every day. The fact that Cuomo and de Blasio have now locked horns on charters has electrified the issue, making it a fork-in-the-road for major politicians here. And if the story goes national, that could force Hillary Clinton to get into the fray.
She has always opposed vouchers. She has supported charters, but she and Cuomo are eyeing the same presidency. She — and her husband — fetched up at the de Blasio inauguration. Will they turn against him in what could be the biggest fight of his mayoralty? Strategically, only a true voucher system would take all this out of the government’s hands.