Vouchers and path dependence

Posted by Marc Hodak on November 5, 2007 under Invisible trade-offs | Comments are off for this article

The big voucher vote in Utah is coming tomorrow. It doesn’t look good for the forces of choice–the betting is that the vote will be about 60% to 40% against vouchers.

I see this outcome as a consequence of path dependence. Public schooling still holds sway for the majority of Americans who went to perfectly good public schools. The only people who know how bad public schools can get are the inner city poor, who tend to support vouchers in large numbers. What does this have to do with path dependence? Consider this counter-factual: if we had all gone to private schools of varying quality, i.e., say schools in wealthier parts of town being much better than schools in poorer sections, as they are today, and the choice was vouchers as proposed (i.e., higher amounts for poorer people) or the creation of government-run schools, how much of the vote do you think would go for the voucher option? I think vouchers would win, and I don’t think it would be anywhere as close as 60-40.

The fact that we’re starting from a reality of public schools give unions huge financial power, of course, since the public sector is the only place a union can thrive. It also gives them the ability to say things like this:

Union members understand the idea of privatization. When you start to privatize anything, you lose the control of quality, such as highly qualified educators and how the money is spent.

For poor kids stuck in crappy public schools, the first part of that–“quality”–may seem like a sick joke. But most suburbanites got theirs, and they don’t want to risk losing it just so some poor (often read: minority) kids can get some, too. The second part–“how the money is spent”–is, of course, what the unions really understand.