You don’t hear the privatization crowd using the word “voucher” much. That’s because the “V” word doesn’t poll well. “Tuition tax credits” gets a pretty good response. “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts” and “Education Savings Accounts” — basically the same thing — are too new to be polled accurately. But vouchers themselves remain unpopular.
So, use the term “vouchers” whenever you talk about the programs, not the wrapped-in-a-pretty-package-with-a-bow-on-top euphemisms the corporate privatizers dream up. If people aren’t familiar with vouchers, tell them it’s paying for private school tuition at public expense.
Fitz gets it. In his satirical op ed in the Star, The case of the missing tax dollars or how Public Ed refused to die, he used “voucher” four times, twice pairing it with “vultures.” And his Sunday cartoon, Vouchers, shows elephants in hard hats, called the “Voucher Crew,” taking the bricks out of public education and using them to construct private schools. Perfect.
The economist Milton Friedman started pushing vouchers in the 1950s, and his Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice has been trumpeting them ever since. This January, the foundation published the results of a survey evaluating people’s feelings about vouchers. When it came to the best ways to reform education, people chose smaller class sizes, technology and accountability over vouchers. (Teachers’ unions scored just slightly lower than vouchers, even after years of demonization by the right.) In 2013, when people were asked what they think of the idea of “allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense,” only 29% gave a positive response, the lowest number since 1993.
Voters have never given their support to vouchers. Even in Utah, 62% of voters said No to vouchers in 2006. So far as I know, every voucher program in existence around the country has been put there by legislators. They don’t dare put the question to the voters. They know what will happen.
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2014.
This is too funny. I don’t remember you complaining about the term “Internal Revenue” and then calling it a service. Are you kidding?
Milton Friedman -Mr. privatize everything – did advocate for education vouchers in the 1950s. In fact, he kicked off his thinking on school vouchers in 1955 in an article, “The Role of Government in Education.
I can’t help but notice that this article came one year after the historic Brown vs. Board of Education: the ruling that ended segregated public schools. Ever since Brown vs. Board of Education, public schools have been under attack from those too frightened of the concept that we are ALL in this together and that “Liberty and Justice for All” applies to all of us.
Milton Friedman’s ideas failed in Chile and they are failing are children in the United States. Thomas Jefferson knew the importance of public education and he linked it to the survival of democracy. We should not allow the likes of Milton Friedman to trump our Founding Fathers.
Dave, good call on the connection of Brown v. Board and Friedman’s call for vouchers. Friedman’s voucher idea was used by segregationists to create government funded “tuition grants” to white families so they could attend segregated academies rather than attending integrated schools. Friedman said he was against the tuition grant schools, but, whether an unintended consequence or not, he helped create them.
And, like lots of conservatives who lean libertarian (see Ron and Rand Paul), he wasn’t too sure he liked the 1964 Civil Rights act, since it took away the “liberty” of businesses to discriminate.
I wrote a post about this last December on Blog for Arizona: “The origins of the phrase, ‘Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.’” http://blogforarizona.net/?p=21136
Uh…seems like we’re missing the point. We educate the next generation to help make them ready to run society when we are geezers. In a globally competitive world ( you folks driving Japanese, Korean, Italian, Indian , and German cars know what I’m talking about), we seem to come up short. Last time I looked, we ranked 32nd in math and 20 something in verbal globally. We edged out Cyprus, but they are in a financial crisis and civil war…yeah.
So the real question is what is the best way to get us at least into the top 10 ? Hard to believe that doing more of the same ( union driven education budgets that over reward teacher tax free comp/benefits versus education quality) seems to be the definition of madness. Maybe it isn’t vouchers or charter schools or pure private schools. But I’m sure that it isn’t going to come from the folks who financially benefit from the current system. Look at the Chosen One and his cabinet… their kids don’t go to public schools. Maybe that is a hint.
Also it is interesting that the focus of the Democrat immigration bill is to get foreign born STEM students to stay in the US. Seems like even they don’t have much confidence in the US education system.