By Martin Carnoy
Voucher plans have been in place for many years in other countries.
Contrary to the claims of pro-voucher advocates in the United
States, the experience internationally suggests that
voucher plans promise a lot but may actually be worse for
children from low-income families, for whom the gains are
supposed to be the greatest.
"The primary negative effect of school choice is its natural tendency
to increase the educational gap between the privileged and
the underprivileged," John Ambler, referring to voucher
plans in Britain, France, and the Netherlands, wrote in the
"Journal of Policy Analysis and Management" (1994).
The most interesting comparison is from Chile, which has a
long-standing voucher plan where pupils have been assessed
regularly. The Chilean plan began in 1980 under the Pinochet
military government as part of an overall
"de-governmentalization" free-market package. It meets almost
all the conditions of those in the United States who advocate "choice
with equity," including fully subsidized, deregulated
private schools competing head-on for pupils with
deregulated municipality-run public schools in all
metropolitan neighborhoods, from middle-class suburbs to
low-income barrios.
One key feature of the Chilean plan was privatizing teacher contracts
and eliminating the teachers' union as a bargaining unit.
Teachers were transferred from the public employee system to
the private sector. By 1983, even public schools, meaning
those schools run by municipalities, could hire and fire
teachers without regard to tenure or a union contract, just
like any un-unionized private company. Another feature was to release
all schools from the previously strictly-defined structure of
the national curriculum and from national standards.
What were the results of this reform? The first was that even when
parents' contributions are included, total spending on
education fell quite sharply after increasing in the early
1980s when the central government was paying thousands of
teachers severance pay as part of privatizing their
contracts. In 1985, the federal contribution was 80% of total
educational spending, and total spending was 5.3% of Gross National
Product (GNP). Five years later, the federal portion was 68%
of the total, and the total had fallen to 3.7% of GNP.
Private spending rose, but not quickly enough to offset the
drop in real federal contributions. Most of the decrease in
federal subsidies to education came at the secondary and
university levels, where per student public spending dropped
drastically.
The second result was that in Chile, as in Europe, those who took
advantage of the subsidized private schools were predominantly
middle- and higher-income families.
Who Goes to Private Schools?
Chile offers a voucher to all students. "Fees" often are charged at the
private schools on top of the voucher, and private schools are
allowed to screen students. (There are also elite private
schools which do not take part in the voucher plan, where
students' families pay the complete tuition.) As a result of
the voucher reform, there was a massive shift of students into
private schools, in particular middle-class and upper-middle-class
children. By 1990, of families in the lower 40% of the income
distribution, 72% attended municipal public schools. In the
next highest 40% income bracket, only 51% of the families sent
their children to public schools, with 43% in subsidized
private schools and 6% in elite private schools where parents
paid the full tuition. And in the top 20% income bracket, only
25% had their children in public schools, with 32% in subsidized
private schools and 43% in elite private schools.
The third result was that the increase in pupil achievement predicted
by voucher proponents appears to have never occurred.
Scores in Spanish and mathematics from two nationally
standardized cognitive achievement tests implemented in 1982
and 1988 for fourth graders registered a national decline
of 14% and 6%, respectively. According to World Bank economist
Juan Prawda, the test scores fell most for low-income students in
public schools, but they also fell for low-income students
in subsidized private schools. Middle-income students had
small increases in test scores whether they were in public
or subsidized private schools. Subsequent tests in 1990
showed increases of 9% in Spanish and 11% in math, but this
still left scores about the same as in 1982. Middle-income students
averaged higher scores on these tests in private schools than in
public, but lowest-income students tended to do better in
public schools. University of Georgia political scientist
Taryn Rounds' estimates of pupil achievement as a function
of type of school, location, parents education, and students'
socio-economic class using the 1990 test results confirm that
lower-social-class students did better in public schools on
both the Spanish and math tests, and middle-class students
did better in subsidized private schools.
Because low-income parents were less able to add private
contributions to the voucher amounts, private schools in
Chile were apparently not that interested in doing any
better than public schools with lower-income pupils. If the
declining scores in Chile's municipal public schools mean
anything, it is that increased competition had a negative effect
on student achievement, and that the Chilean voucher plan
contributed to greater inequality in pupil achievement
without improving the overall quality of education.
Some analysts in Chile claim that subsidized private schools cost
less because they have somewhat higher pupil-teacher ratios and
pay their teachers lower salaries. But there is no evidence
that this means that private schools are becoming more
"efficient" while public schools lag behind. Indeed, if
private schools are consistently "creaming off"
easier-to-teach students, municipal schools may have to maintain smaller
classes with more highly paid teachers just to stay even
academically.
The fourth result was the need to recentralize influence over the
educational system once a democratic government was elected in
1990. Under the Pinochet reform, government made no effort
to improve the curriculum, the quality of teaching, or the
management of education, since this was supposed to happen
spontaneously through increased competition among schools
vying for students. It did not. Neither did municipalities
or most private schools come up with incentives for improving pupil
performance. Low-income municipalities were at a special
disadvantage because they, even more than other
municipalities, lacked the fiscal capacity and resources for
school improvement. And as soon as unions were legal again,
teachers reorganized themselves, fought for higher
salaries, and for the right to representation. Not surprisingly, they
focused their demands on the central government, which
oversees minimum salaries for both public and private
schools.
Lessons for the United States
The lessons for us here in the United States are obvious, but they are
not the one that privatization advocates want known. Voucher
plans increase inequality without making schools better. Even
more significantly, privatization reduces the public effort to
improve schooling since it relies on the free market to
increase achievement. But the increase never occurs. Private
schools may end up producing higher achievement than public schools, but
they generally do this by keeping out hard-to-manage pupils,
who get concentrated in "last-resort" public schools.
There is another lesson to learn from the Chilean case. At the end
of the voucher road, the case for public schools becomes more,
not less, difficult. The new democratically elected
government, which by U.S. standards would be considered
center/left, continues to blame public school bureaucracy
and lack of market incentives for the low level of
achievement in municipal schools. Once a voucher plan is implemented,
many middle-class parents find that they like their children
being separated from low-income students. Furthermore,
teachers in public schools find that given the worsening
conditions and lack of support, it is even more difficult to
be innovative. This last lesson should spur public school
advocates to support rapid and radical reforms of schools in
inner cities now, and to emulate, sooner rather than later, those
reforms that seem to be working for at-risk students.
Chile had a military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s that could
impose vouchers from above and suppress opposition by force.
In a democracy, it takes highly dissatisfied constituencies
to produce reforms, even if they are not the ones who
ultimately benefit from them. Conservatives have figured out
that the most dissatisfied educational constituencies are
the poor, and will use them to dismantle public education.
Ironically, the privatization movement in the United States is
gaining ground just when pupils from all groups, especially
those most at risk, are making significant achievement gains
and just when public school reform movements are reaching
into inner cities to produce real change. To cite one
example: between 1975 and 1989, the difference in average
reading proficiency scores between African-American and white
17-year-olds went from 50 points to 21 points, or a gain of
about half a standard deviation.
The best antidote to vouchers is to spread public school reform - fast.
- Martin Carnoy is a professor of education and economics at Stanford University. He is the author of two recent books: Faded Dreams: The Economics and Politics of Race in America (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Fathers of a Certain Age (Faber and Faber, 1995). This article is adapted from an essay that originally appeared in Education Week.
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