Sample Term Paper: Pros & Cons of School Vouchers for Public Education in America

Term Paper 12 pages (3,395 words) Sources: 21 Style: APA Topic: Education

School Vouchers Term Paper Introduction

Today, the nation’s public schools are in trouble, and no one seems to agree what needs to be done. Standardized tests score continue to languish in the midst of curriculum reform efforts and many young people enter the job market without the basic skills and knowledge they will need to succeed. In this environment, it is little wonder that an increasing number of American parents are opting to send their children to private schools, but this alternative is not cheap and many are unable to afford this luxury. Still others, though, make enormous sacrifices to ensure their children receive the best education possible by enrolling them in a private school, all the while paying inordinate amounts of income taxes in order to maintain the nation’s public schools. While the critics argue that school vouchers will adversely affect public schools by drawing off the cream of the academic crop and reducing funding in the process, advocates maintain that it is grossly unfair to require parents to pay for their children’s education twice. To determine the facts and whether American public schools can afford the introduction of school vouchers, this paper provides a review of the relevant peer-reviewed and scholarly literature to identify the potential benefits and drawbacks associated with school vouchers, followed by a summary of the research and salient findings in the conclusion.

Term Paper Review and Discussion of School Vouchers

Background and Overview

The importance of receiving a quality education has long been a value of American society, but it is clear that some families enjoy a distinct advantage over others when it comes to which schools their children will attend (Rouse & Barrow, 2006). Affluent families enjoy the advantage of sending their children to the best possible schools available, while their lower socioeconomic counterparts are mired in a public school system that may or may not be living up to it mandate to deliver high-quality educational services. In this regard, Rouse and Barrow (2006) note that, “Although education pays off handsomely in the United States, children from low-income families attain less education than children from more advantaged families” (p. 99). Public education in the United States aims at producing intelligent, responsible, well-informed citizens who take an active interest in the world around them but the critics say that most schools fall far short of this goal.  Jonathan Kozol points out in his book, Savage Inequalities, that, “It is obvious that urban schools have other problems in addition to their insufficient funding.  Administrative chaos is endemic in some urban systems.  . . .  Greater funding, if is were intelligently applied, could partially correct these problems but it probably is also true that major structural reforms would still be needed” (Kozol, 1991, p. 124). The National Council on Crime Prevention (NCPC) also says that violence in America’s public schools affects everyone in the country because of the special place public schools occupy in the national conscience, as well as the vital role they place in educating and shaping tomorrow’s leaders.  Further complicating the education process in the United States is the increase in violence and shooting rampages that have received widespread media attention.  According to Siegel and Senna, “It has become common to view schools as a highly dangerous place in which intruders or students victimize teachers and other pupils, vandalize property, and disrupt the educational process” (1988, p. 309).  In just one year, there were more than 100 homicides in American public schools, 9,000 rapes, 12,000 armed robberies, and more than $600 million in destroyed property (Siegel & Senna, 1988, p. 311). Moreover, Lorion says that every day, approximately 100,000 children are assaulted at school.  Additionally, 5,000 teachers are threatened with physical assault and 200 are actually attacked and 20% of students have reported that threats involving a weapon and/or threats of assault in school represent a major problem for them.  “However, the most frequently reported forms of violence in school are pushing and shoving” (Lorion, 1998, 2).  There is little wonder, then, that parents have desperately sought better alternatives to traditional public schools by enrolling their children in private schools but not all can afford it.

Recent School Voucher Initiatives

To date, a number of school choice initiatives including open enrollment, magnet schools, charter schools, and school voucher plans have been suggested as ways in which the nation’s schools can be improved (Etscheidt, 2005). School vouchers, which are also called education vouchers, are government educational funds that are provided directly to public school students rather than the school, school district, or larger administrative body so that students can use these vouchers to attend the schools of their choice (which can be either public or private) rather than the public school for which they are zoned (School vouchers, 2009).

The constitutionality of school vouchers has also been addressed in recent years with various opinions being advanced, but with the final analysis suggesting that these approaches are within the law. Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has considered whether it was legal for federal or state governments to assist students who attend private schools, many of which are sponsored by various religions, primarily the Catholic Church. In this regard, Kemerer and King note that, “In 1925 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents have the right to send their children to a private school in lieu of a public school. The Court did not, however, address the issue – which has been a problem ever since – of whether public funding could be used to help parents exercise that right. Without the funding to pay tuition at private schools, which are becoming increasingly expensive, the right to send one’s children to them is really an empty promise for many parents” (p. 308). More recently, Etschedit reports that, “In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the Supreme Court addressed the constitutional question involved in voucher programs. A federal aid program in Cleveland provided vouchers to parents, with no limitation on what the schools could do with the funds” (p. 156). The Zelman case represented the culmination of the so-called “freedom-based” choice movement that originated in the Midwestern United States during the last decade of the 20th century in an effort to address parental dissatisfaction with poor-quality public schools. According to Salisbury and Lartigue (2004), “Unlike programs created during the fear-based choice era, freedom-based choice sought to remedy the disparities between rich and poor students by providing vouchers to children from low-income families of all races to attend better schools. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 upheld this type of ‘freedom of choice’ in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris” (p. 14). Since that time, the focus of the debate over school vouchers has shifted to one of appropriateness and effectiveness (Boston, 2008). Not surprisingly, the American public and policymakers alike remain sharply divided on the appropriateness and effectiveness of school vouchers as a method of improving the quality of education in the United States, and these issues are discussed further below.

Opposing Views of School Vouchers

Besides abortion, few topics engender such strong reactions among many observers as school vouchers. For example, as Kemerer and King (1999) point out, “Growing popular support for the use of school vouchers has polarized views about whether such programs are valid policy options and hardened the lines on both sides of the debate” (p. 307). The debate over school choice, though, is certainly not new. As Anrig (2008) points out, “In 1955, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman proposed what was, for its time, a radical idea: that school-children be given government-funded vouchers to enable them to attend private schools” (p. 29). Proponents of school vouchers suggest that it just makes good business sense to allow parents whose children attend private school to forego paying taxes for everyone else’s children. Those in favor of vouchers also maintain that if parents are free to choose the schools their children attend, then schools will be more competitive, students’ academic capabilities will increase, and parents will be more active in their children’s development (Kemerer & King).

Critics of school vouchers, though, stand at the ready with vile characterizations of the initiative that are intended to persuade the undecided that school vouchers are the wrong path for Americans. For instance, Paul (2004) points out that, “The parents and caregivers of color who rallied behind school vouchers failed to understand that private schools are frequently more successful in their efforts to educate because they have the ability to select in and select out” (p. 648). In other words, private schools are not constrained by the same admissions requirements as their public school counterparts and a number of private schools require significant parental involvement as a term of admission in the form of financial commitment and school activity support; however, public schools do not have these constraints. In this regard, Paul adds that, “Public schools cannot deny certain children access to schooling or coerce parents to support their children’s education. For those reasons and others, public schools in the most poverty-stricken areas of the United States continue to poorly educate their students. In some instances, where school funds have been cut as a consequence of poor standardized test scores, such students have been denied the resources that might have helped them to improve” (p. 649). Likewise, Salisbury and Lartigue (2004) note that many critics of school vouchers resort to emotionally charged rhetoric to mislead the American public concerning the true implications of school voucher programs. In this regard, these authors write that, “‘Segregation academy’ is an emotionally powerful slogan that not only conjures bad feelings in the heart but also invokes vulgar images in the mind. Voucher opponents know this, and they misuse the ‘segregation academy’ cliche to generate feelings of fear and racial mistrust” (p. 35). As an example, the authors cite Reverend Jesse Jackson’s observations that, “The same ideology that supported Plessy, opposed Brown, and inspired the formation of all-White academies, is now behind the school voucher issue” (quoted in Salisbury & Lartigue at p. 35). Similarly, popular author and educational activist Jonathan Kozol is also opposed to school vouchers, and also employs emotionally charged language to make his points. During a research project intended to identify the “savage inequalities” that remain firmly in place in American public schools, Kozol argues that school vouchers are even dangerous, particularly because voucher money, could “be used for a David Duke school or a right-wing militia school or a Louis Farrakhan school” (quoted in Salibury and Latigue at p. 35).

Indeed, many educators even go so far as to argue that the public schools are in such bad shape that they are in no position to compete with private schools on a level playing field. A sampling of the poll results of K-12 physical education teachers by The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance (“Would School Vouchers Benefit K-12 Physical Education?) includes the following revealing observation: “School vouchers are an outdated attempt to replace the governance system. School vouchers encourage public schools to compete for students and for the money they would bring with them” (emphasis added) (p. 14). Alas, although this characterization may be accurate, it is not a legitimate or rationale reason to prevent the use of school vouchers. Indeed, the United States was built on a free market economy that has been shaped by competition and the accountability that entails, and the nation’s public schools are clearly in need of increased accountability. According to Hess (2003), “There is much evidence that suburban public schools, while not dysfunctional, could be much more effective and could benefit from competition” (p. 34). Likewise, economists Choi and Fisch (2003) emphasize that, “Supporters argue that school vouchers address collective action problems in school financing while maintaining accountability of individual schools” (p. 269). Even here, though, critics charge that proponents are resorting to emotionally charged rhetoric to scare the American public into its way of thinking: For instance, Poynor and Wolfe (2004) report that, “For years, the backers of school vouchers have told the public that our public schools are a bloated failure that could be improved only by competition. It is a message of despair, generated by critics who never much cared for public education anyway” (p. 195).

In reality, though, the relevance of some of the traditional arguments against school vouchers has diminished in recent years. For instance, Devins (2001) reports that, “The claim that vouchers would circumvent school desegregation no longer makes sense. With courts increasingly giving up on mandatory busing, racial isolation in public schools is a far more severe problem today than it was twenty years ago. For this reason, vouchers are often seen (by African Americans and others) as a way to improve the lives of minority students in a world without court-ordered desegregation” (p. 919). From this perspective, school vouchers appear to represent a timely initiative that would both level the playing field for parents of privately schooled children as well as compel the public schools to become more effective and accountable in their delivery of educational services in ways that would improve the educational experience in both public and private schools. As Hess (2003) emphasizes, “School choice has many merits and would, in the long run, make America’s educational system much more competitive and impressive” (p. 35).

Nevertheless, many observers are concerned about what form the educational experience and content will assume if school voucher are used to support private schools with a religious focus. For instance, Garnett (2003) notes that there is a different type of “divisiveness” involved in the debate over school vouchers. “Even when filtered through vouchers distributed by the government and directed by individual choice,” Garnett emphasizes, “state financial aid for religious institutions like schools or charities does not encourage common values; it creates conflict and division” (241).

The fundamental divisiveness over school vouchers, though, extends far into the federal government as well. A recapitulation of opposing views from the U.S. Congress is provided in Table 1 below.

According to Dwyer (2002), there is a groundswell of support for school vouchers today; although there remain few voucher programs in place in the several states, proposals for new voucher programs have appeared on the legislative agenda in every state in the union as well as the federal government in recent years. Not surprisingly, school vouchers scare the bejabbers out of many school administrators because they portend the beginning of what they consider may well be the end of the public school system as it currently exists in the United States. As Dwyer points out, “School vouchers are revolutionary both conceptually and in their potential impact. They represent the first major government education reform that entails looking elsewhere than the public school system to deliver elementary and secondary education” (p. 2). Likewise, Hochschild and Scovronick (2003) report that, “A broad choice program, one that provided public funds to help pay the tuition of students at any parochial or private school in the state, would obviously present the greatest challenge to the current system of public schooling. The system would no longer be public in the same sense and it would no longer be subject to democratic control in the same way” (p. 123).

Indeed, school voucher programs, if they were adopted across the country, have the potential to fundamentally change the structure of the nation’s educational system by allowing private schools to educate as many children as do public schools, with the possibility that the several states will no longer even maintain schools of their own (Dwyer). Some authorities suggest that this is precisely the direction in which the nation needs to be headed in the future. For example, according to Rome and Block (2006), “Public schools should not exist in America. Education is not a legitimate function of government. To make matters even worse, the state is a terribly inefficient manager of anything; the classroom is no exception” (p. 83). Yet other analysts suggest that the impetus behind school vouchers is more concerned with changing the way the American public thinks about education and the role of government in providing it. For example, Hochschild and Scovronick (2003) note that, “The push for vouchers is mainly part of a broader attempt to redefine the relationship between individuals and the state, to make people think more like consumers in a market than citizens in a democracy” (p. 6). Whatever its basis, it is apparent that many children in the United States remain at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to received high-quality educational services from their local schools, and school vouchers would at least in the short term resolve this fundamental disparity in ways that other initiatives such as No Child Left Behind are failing to accomplish.

School Vouchers Term Paper Conclusion

It seems ironic that in the Land of the Free, many parents are not truly free to send their children to the schools of their choice because of the economics involved. Despite the charged emotional rhetoric that characterizes both sides of the debate over school vouchers, there appears to be a virtual consensus concerning the need for educational opportunities for all of America’s children. The fundamental question, then, devolves to how best to achieve these goals. The research showed that while the proponents of school vouchers emphasize that parents, especially low-income families, who make the sacrifices necessary to send their children to private schools are being penalized by having to pay taxes to support the public schools as well. The research also showed that critics of school vouchers argue that such initiatives will drain sorely needed resources from where they are most needed, and will drain off the cream of the academic crop leaving the public schools to deal with the rest. Surrounding these arguments, though, is the basic and overriding issue of “public” schools in the first place. Simply because the government has assumed the responsibility for the provision of public schools in the past does not mean that it is doing a good job, or that these policies are carved in stone. School choice and school vouchers therefore represent a viable alternative to the traditional approach to the delivery of educational services in the United States, and the competition that this approach would engender might well improve all schools across the board in years to come.

Term Paper Bibliography (re: School Vouchers)

Anrig, G. (2008, April). An idea whose time has gone: Conservatives abandon their support for school vouchers. Washington Monthly, 40(4), 29-30.

Boston, R. (2008, May-June). Religious school vouchers: An obstacle to education reform. The Humanist. Volume: 68. Issue: 3. Publication Date: May-June 2008. Page Number: 34+.

Choi, S. J. & Fisch, J. E. (2003). How to fix Wall Street: A voucher financing proposal for securities intermediaries. Yale Law Journal, 113(2), 269-270.

Devins, N. (2001). Social meaning and school vouchers. William and Mary Law Review, 42(3), 919.

Dwyer, J. G. (2002). Vouchers within reason: A child-centered approach to education reform. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Etscheidt, S. (2005). Vouchers and students with disabilities: A multidimensional analysis. Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 16(3), 156-157.

Garnett, R. W. (2006). Modest expectations? Civic unity, religious pluralism and conscience. Constitutional Commentary, 23(2), 241.

Hess, F. (2003, April-May). Sweeten the pot for middle America: To make school vouchers truly popular, make sure there’s something in them for suburbanites. The American Enterprise, 14(3), 34-35.

Kozol, J.  (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools.  New York: Crown Publishers.

Lorion, R. P.  (1998). Exposure to urban violence: Contamination of the school environment.  In D.S. Elliott, B. Hamburg, & K.R. Williams (Editors), Violence in American schools: A new perspective, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press

Paul, D. G. (2004). The train has left: The No Child Left Behind Act leaves Black and Latino literacy learners waiting at the station. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 47(8), 648-649.

Hochschild, J. L. & Scovronick, N. (2003). The American dream and the public schools. New York Oxford University Press.

Poynor, L. & Wolfe, P. M. (2004). Marketing fear in America’s public schools: The real war on literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kemerer, F. R. & King, K. L. (1995). Are school vouchers constitutional? Phi Delta Kappan, 77(4), 307-308.

Rome, G. & Block, W. (2006). Schoolhouse socialism. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 33(1), 83-84.

Rouse, C. E. & Barrow, L. (2006). U.S. elementary and secondary schools: Equalizing opportunity or replicating the status quo? The Future of Children, 16(2), 99-101.

Salisbury, D. & Lartigue, C. Jr. (2004). Educational freedom in urban America: Brown V. Board after half a century. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

School vouchers. (2009). ProCon.org. [Online]. http://2008election.procon.org/viewresource. asp?resourceID=1575.

Should the federal government fund school voucher programs? (2009). ProCon.org. [Online]. Available: 2008election.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=1663

Siegel, L. J. & Senna, J. J.  (1988). Juvenile delinquency, 3rd ed. St. Paul, MN: West

Would school vouchers benefit K-12 physical education? (2002). JOPERD–The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 73(8), 14-15.

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