Editor's note: After redefinED posted Howard Fuller's comments about universal school choice, we asked the Cato Institute's Andrew J. Coulson for a response, which we published last week. To keep the debate going, we asked Matthew Ladner, senior advisor of policy and research at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, for his take. He generously offered the following.
My friends Howard Fuller and Andrew Coulson started a needed discussion regarding the direction of the parental choice movement. Dr. Fuller has been quite outspoken in his opposition to universal choice programs in recent years, and Coulson raised a number of interesting and valid points in his redefinED piece. The parental choice movement has suffered from a nagging need to address third-party payer issues squarely. It’s a discussion that we should no longer put off. The example of American colleges and universities continues to scream a warning into our deaf ear regarding the danger of run-away cost inflation associated with education and third-party payers.
Howard Fuller and Andrew Coulson also indirectly raise a more fundamental question: where are we ultimately going with this whole private school choice movement? Dr. Fuller supports private choice for the poor and opposes it for others. He has concerns that the interests of the poor will be lost in a universal system. I’m sympathetic to Howard’s point of view. I view the public school system as profoundly tilted towards the interests of the wealthy and extraordinarily indifferent to those of the poor. We should have no desire to recreate such inequities in a choice system.
Andrew makes the case that third-party payer problems are of such severity that we should attempt to provide public assistance to the poor through a system of tax credits, and have other families handle the education of their children privately. Andrew’s proposed solution to the very real third-party payment issues is in effect to minimize third-party payment as much as possible, and to do it as indirectly as possible through a system of tax credits.
Despite the fact that Howard comes from the social justice wing of the parental choice movement and Andrew from the libertarian right, they agree that private choice should be more or less limited to the poor.
My own view is different from both Howard and Andrew’s. I believe the collective funding of education will be a permanent feature of American society and that it should remain universally accessible to all. I believe Howard’s real concerns over equity and Andrew’s real concerns over third-party payment can be mitigated through techniques other than means-testing. (more…)
Editor's note: After posting Howard Fuller's concerns about universal vouchers last week, we asked Andrew J. Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom, to offer his perspective.
It’s not hard to see why Howard Fuller might be skeptical of universal government education programs. Public schooling is one such program and it has done an atrocious job of serving the poor. But is its universality the cause of its failure? Fuller believes that the poor are forgotten and given short shrift under universal programs and that the wealthy are favored by them. If that were the case in public schooling, we would expect schools serving the poor to receive less funding than those serving the wealthy. In responding to Fuller, Matthew Ladner contends that this is indeed the case: that public schooling “systematically distributes more money per pupil” to wealthier kids.
Actually, though, that doesn’t appear to be true. According to the federal Department of Education’s Condition of Education 2010, Indicator 36-1, districts with the poorest students are the highest spending. Public schools serving these students are not atrocious because they are underfunded, they are atrocious despite the fact that they are the best funded districts in the nation.
Having voted to raise public school spending relentlessly for generations, and having chosen to direct the highest level of per-pupil spending to the poorest children, it is hard to believe that Americans are indifferent to the education of the poor.
A more plausible explanation of the facts is that Americans would love to see their poorest countrymen thrive educationally but don’t know how to make that happen. For generations they have been told by the media, academics, and political leaders that the solution is higher spending. They have gone along with that recommendation and it has failed utterly. A few are finally beginning to realize that, but they still don’t know how to improve matters.
But the school choice movement believes it does know the cause of the problem: the lack of alternatives. Middle and upper income families find it easier to pay for private schooling or to relocate away from the worst public schools. They have alternatives that the poor do not. As a result, they get better service. The movement’s solution is thus to ensure that everyone has alternatives.
And this brings us back to Fuller’s claim: that the poor will be better served by a school choice program targeted exclusively at them. Is he right? In answering that question, it helps to consider a few facts and distinctions that are usually overlooked:
• First, there is a difference between universal access to the education marketplace and universal participation in a government program;
• Second, tiny markets are dramatically inferior to vast ones;
• And third, it actually matters who is footing the bill for a child’s education.
Saying that everyone should have educational choice is not the same thing as saying that everyone should participate in a particular government program. (more…)
When Indiana's celebrated state superintendent of instruction, Tony Bennett, spoke in support of universal vouchers at last week's American Federation For Children summit, the panel's moderator did not sit quietly. After all, just last year, Howard Fuller (pictured here) fought legislative attempts to include high-income families in a Milwaukee voucher program he helped create for poor children. Of the prospect of universal vouchers in Wisconsin, Fuller proclaimed, "That's when I get off the train."
So Fuller, a legend in the school choice movement, politely invoked "the moderator's privilege" after Bennett spoke. And he was characteristically blunt.
“The thing that I most worry about is that people will forget the importance of protecting poor people in this,” Fuller said, before adding a few sentences later, “I just want people to know … when folks move towards universal (vouchers), just know that some of us are going to fight it.”
The world of school choice is more textured and dynamic than it’s portrayed. It’s not a monolith. It’s many camps, with overlapping but not always consistent visions. For the most part, those differences were glossed over at the AFC summit, and for good reason. The summit was a fitting celebration of recent victories. It was rightly punctuated by moving speeches from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
But the differences are there. And beneath the surface, some tensions too. Fuller has drawn a line in the sand before, including in this podcast interview last year with former redefinED editor Adam Emerson. Here are his latest remarks in full, as best as I could hear and transcribe them: (more…)
Civil rights and school choice champion Howard Fuller today released a statement through the American Federation for Children supporting a proposal to expand the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to other cities in Wisconsin.
In recent weeks, Fuller has reacted strongly against a plan from Gov. Scott Walker to eliminate the income threshold that regulates entry to the voucher program, but he called Walker's plan to expand the program to other cities one that gives poor and working-class families the education options they deserve.
His full statement reads as follows:
I believe that poor and working class families deserve to have options that allow them to seek better educational opportunities for their children. Programs like the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program are one of those options. I would strongly support any efforts by parents, elected representatives and concerned citizens from other cities in Wisconsin such as Green Bay and Racine to establish such a program in their communities. I recognize that both Racine and Green Bay have some good public schools but not every child has access to them. I want every child in these two communities to be able to go to a high quality school that will transform their lives whether that school is public or private.
In today's Wall Street Journal, John O. Norquist, a former Democratic mayor of Milwaukee, defends an effort from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to eliminate the income threshold regulating entry to the Milwaukee voucher program, which currently is open only to low-income students. The threshold has had the effect, Norquist writes, "of isolating low-income students from other more affluent students." By contrast, most Western nations have a much greater enhanced form of parental school choice, and their urban centers are economically and racially diverse as a result.
People with children and money don't cluster outside European or Canadian cities to avoid sending their kids to school with the poor. And the poor who live in cities have the opportunity to attend public, private and parochial schools that are appreciated by a large cross section of parents.
American liberals have been reluctant to embrace school choice, fearing it will drain resources from government-operated schools. Yet isn't it even worse to support a system that rewards concentration of the rich in exclusive suburbs segregated from the poor? Of course there are affluent people (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama come to mind) who enroll their children in urban private schools like D.C.'s Sidwell Friends, which still has some children enrolled from the choice program. Many more, including middle-class parents, would live in economically and racially diverse cities once school choice was universally available.
If expanded, Milwaukee's choice program will demonstrate this to the whole country.
Opposition to Walker's plan to expand the program has come in recent weeks from a stalwart defender of the school choice movement, Howard Fuller. While Fuller has supported raising the income limit of the Milwaukee voucher to include more moderate-income people, he said making the program universally accessible to students in all income levels "essentially provides a subsidy for rich people."
Much of our podcast this week with Howard Fuller explored statements Fuller made recently admonishing Wisconsin's governor and legislature for plans to eliminate the income requirements for entry into the Milwaukee voucher program, but another point in our talk highlighted his thoughts on the acacemic achievement of students in the program, and what it means.
Results from a comparative assessment between students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and those in the school district showed that students receiving vouchers performed no better than their peers in traditional public schools. That has led to the responses one might expect among voucher critics, such as Diane Ravitch, but Fuller, the founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, explains why it's unfair to dismiss the entire enterprise:
There are two elements to choice. One is choice. There is a power to having choice. So when people say students don’t do any better, the issue is do you now therefore want to deny parents the option of being able to go to schools that do do better. Because not all of the schools did not do better. Some of them did much better. And the real purpose of choice is to give people who have not previously had options the ability to choose.
Now the second thing we have to work on is to improve the schools that they will have the choice to attend. Because a voucher is not a school. It’s a mechanism. It’s a funding mechanism to get people to a school. And because we have not yet turned a corner where all of the schools that peple are attending are better. That is not a reason to deny parents the power to choose. Because, if that’s the case, then you should shut down the whole traditional public school system, because vast numbers of those schools are not serving people well at all.
… The second point I would make is, it’s incumbent upon all of us, then, to support freedom to choose, to fight for quality. Because freedom is illusionary if you don’t have the ability to choose from something other than mediocrity.
... The third point is, we’re doing almost as well with half the money. One of the things people got to understand is, if I'm trying to make a school work, and I’ve only got $6,500 per kid, and you got a school making $13,000, with all due respect, money does matter. Because there’s never been equity in funding, it’s very difficult to make an argument that someone getting half the money should do as well as someone getting double what you’re getting.
The school choice movement could be heading toward a critical juncture for one of its biggest champions. Last week, Howard Fuller made clear his distaste for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to remove the income restrictions to the Milwaukee voucher program, and he says in this redefinED podcast that he'll offer no support to efforts in other states that fail to means-test their own voucher or tax-credit plans.
"I will continue to fight for vouchers, tax credit scholarships, opportunity scholarship programs, charter schools, home schools, virtual schools -- anything that empowers low-income and working-class people to be able to have some of the capacity to choose what those of us with money have," said Fuller, the former superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools and founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. "I will never fight for giving people who already have means more resources. Because, in the end, that will disadvantage and squeeze out the possibility of poor parents having some of these options."
This is not to say that Fuller won't consider raising the income threshold to serve more of Milwaukee's working poor. In the interview, he talks about aligning the requirements for entry into the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program with those of Wisconsin's BadgerCare program, which provides health care to state residents who earn less than 300 percent of poverty. "That would capture over 80 percent of the households in the city," he said. "So if your real objective is to expand the level of support, you could do that and still retain a focus on low-income and moderate-income families."
But if Wisconsin and other states want to make their vouchers universally accessible to families of any income level, "it may very well be that it's time for people like me to get off the stage," he said. "Maybe it has to be a different movement going forward, but if that's the way the movement has to be going forward, it's not something that I can be a part of."
Howard Fuller will never support a universally accessible voucher, and he will oppose any effort to lift all income restrictions to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. But that doesn't mean he won't consider reviewing the elibility requirements that have been in place since Wisconsin established the voucher program more than 20 years ago.
In an interview today with redefinED, Fuller said there is a way to expand the program to serve more Milwaukee students while remaining faithful to the cause for social justice that inspired the program in the first place. Currently, families new to the program can earn a household income no greater than 175 percent of the federal poverty level, which for a family of four totals $38,937. Yet, as Fuller notes, the median household income in Milwaukee is $34,898. Gov. Scott Walker can capture more low-income and working-class families by following other means-tested models proven in other public services without establishing a universal voucher, which Fuller says would ultimately subisdize the wealthy.
As an example, he pointed to Wisconsin's BadgerCare program, which provides health care to state residents who earn less than 300 percent of poverty, which is about $67,000 for a family of four. "That would capture over 80 percent of the households in the city," Fuller said. "So if your real objective is to expand the level of support, you could do that, and still retain a focus on low-income and moderate-income families."
Earlier this week, Fuller told legislators that if they passed Walker's plan to eliminate the income threshold, "I will become an opponent of a program that I have fought for over 20 years." On Monday, redefinED will feature a podcast of the interview with Fuller, who also shares why choice without regulation or accountability is not enough and why he thinks the school choice movement nationally could be coming to a critical juncture for him.
Yesterday, we highlighted Howard Fuller's alarm over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to eliminate the income threshold for entry into the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. The Black Alliance for Educational Options now has posted Fuller's comments to the Wisconsin legislative Joint Finance Committee, to which Fuller closed by saying:
I am a person who has taken blows for years from people who have said this program for some has never been about poor people. They warned that once the program got established the real agenda would surface, which is to get money for rich people. I have never believed and do not believe now that many people who have fought for the program over the years had this as their purpose. But, this is exactly what this provision does. I want everyone to understand that if this provision becomes law, I will become an opponent of a program that I have fought for over 20 years. I will never support a program that essentially provides a subsidy for rich people.
Those who favor private learning options for poor children can count few champions for their cause more passionate than Howard Fuller, who is almost singularly responsible for the success of Milwaukee's voucher program, the nation's oldest. That's why we should take seriously Fuller's heartburn over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's proposal to remove the income restrictions to the voucher and open the Parental Choice Program to wealthier families.
If Walker is successful, Fuller told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel yesterday, "that's when I get off the train," and further called Walker's proposal "egregious" and "outrageous" during testimony of Wisconsin's legislative Joint Finance Committee.
The point Fuller is making is one that too often gets lost in the debate over education reform generally and vouchers specifically: Programs such as Milwaukee's began with the sense that families of wealthier means already had options beyond the neighborhood public school, and that poor families might benefit from public policies that empowered them to find the best fit for their children. And that sense still pervades current means-tested efforts such as Florida's tax credit scholarship and the pending measures in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Any movement in education reform is larger than one person, but let's not dismiss the jaw-dropping implications of Fuller's alarm. State legislatures may feel momentum toward greater school choice and choice advocates may be emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Court's move to legally insulate an Arizona tax credit scholarship, but Fuller would have us remember who needs our greatest help.
