School Choice for Low Income Families

Stephen D. Sugarman

Remarks given at University of Pennsylvania Law School October 22, 1999

To Appear in the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion (2000)

The President of the United States sent his daughter to a private school. I read recently that a majority of the members of the Senate and the Congress have sent their children to private schools. A startling proportion of public schoolteachers sends their children to private school.

What is the message here? The message is that the poor cannot be trusted to make choices for their children. And it is really bad when you hear the message from the people who view themselves as self-styled defenders of the civil rights and civil liberties of the poor.

Another source of dismay of mine is that liberal opponents of school vouchers attack Milton Friedman's plan,⁽¹⁾ an unregulated voucher scheme, in which half the money that we now spend on public school kids would go to every kid in the country. That is not what the public wants. That is not what school choice is becoming. It is not what the publicly funded private school choice programs in states like Florida and cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland are about. It is not what privately funded school voucher programs in Indianapolis, San Antonio, and seventy-five other cities around the country are about. Those plans are all about giving choice to working class and poor families. It is choice for those families that we liberals ought to be concerned about, and it is choice that the children in those families desperately need.

People who have means can already move to the fancy suburbs and send their kids to what are purported to be public schools, or they can send their kids to private schools. Of course, those schools do not generally admit poor kids from the cities. Poor families do not usually have a choice.

What happens when you do give poor families a choice for their kids? They jump at the opportunity. John Walton and Ted Forstman recently offered 40,000 school vouchers to poor families, and one million families around the country signed up in a very short time.⁽²⁾

How do the poor feel about the choices they make once they are given the opportunity to choose? They think their choices are great. They think the schools they have selected for their kids are better. Their kids like it better. The kids go more often. The teachers are more demanding. The curriculum is more central to the kids' lives. Plus, if the kids stick with it, the kids do much better. The literature also demonstrates that poor children who attend private schools graduate from high school and go on to college at a far higher rate than their counterparts who stay in the public schools.

Elizabeth Coleman charged that voucher plans skim off the cream. It is a charge often made by liberals. These programs I am talking about do not skim off the cream. First of all, to start with, we are talking about poor people. Second, among poor families whose kids are doing very well in public schools, do they leave when they are given these choices? No, they stay where their kids are succeeding. Who leaves in these typical programs that are now in place around the country? It is the single mother whose kid is being treated very badly and failing miserably in the school. She is the one who moves her child to a place where the child has a chance to do better.

Now, will some private schools go bankrupt or rip off their families through fraud under a school voucher plan? Yes, a few will. That is also true for some car dealers and some department stores, but no one is suggesting that we have Soviet-style government ownership of the distribution of clothes and automobiles in this country.

In any event, the real bankruptcy and fraud are in many of our urban public schools, where the push-out/drop-out rate, in public schools like those in New York City for example, is more than 50%,⁽³⁾ and many of those who so-called graduate end up functionally illiterate. That is where the real bankruptcy and fraud are.

Will some parents make poor choices for their children? Yes, some will. But, of course, under a choice plan, if your first choice does not work out very well, you can change your choice and go somewhere else. That is not what our public schools are about. They are very, very reluctant to let you transfer out of the local school if your child is not doing well. Often your only real choice is to try to move. But if you are poor and living even in quasi-decent, low-income housing, the last thing you want to do is to move. And if you are living in government-subsidized housing, you probably cannot move at all.

Will we get more racial isolation by having school choice? Well, the reality is that we have a tremendous and growing amount of racial isolation in our public schools today. Although private schools and charter schools have considerable racial isolation, it is less than the public schools have. We will get some more appealing sorts of racial isolation, I suspect, with choice. Some African-American families will choose Afro-centric schools. Some Hispanic families will choose bilingual schools. I think that is great. They should be able to get what they want for their kids. In fact, they will probably be moving their kids from one racially isolated school to another racially isolated school.

Will the public schools get better? Elizabeth Coleman makes the usual complaint that we are siphoning money from the public schools with these plans, neglecting to note, of course, that children are leaving, so there are fewer children over whom to spread the money. In fact, in the last two decades we have more than doubled spending in public schools - that is, real, inflation-adjusted spending. Alas, our public schools are not doing significantly better. Most people think they are doing worse.

If we have widespread school choice, public schools will get better. They will get better because they will want to hold on to their enrollment. In order to hold on to their pupils, they will be more responsive to the needs of kids - needs that are neglected now. We see this already with charter schools. When charter schools begin to spring up in substantial numbers in the community, the public schools respond and the public schools do more.

Now, let me just say a few words about the constitutionality of school choice. The purpose of these plans is to give some measure of choice to the poor that other families, like those of most of us in this room, have long had for our children. Is this worthy and legal purpose somehow made illegal because some of those children will be sent to religious schools? I do not think so.

Is the Food Stamp program⁽⁴⁾ illegal because some poor people use their food stamps to buy matzo for use in their Passover Seder?⁽⁵⁾ I do not think so. No one would say that.

Some people say, "Well, that is different, because only a little bit of the food stamp program's money is used for religious ritual purposes." And they say, "Look at all the school choice that will be used for religious schools." Elizabeth Coleman said 80%. But that is the wrong way to understand school choice plans.

Most people who are given choice in a sensible school choice plan will choose to stay in their local public schools. That is where most of the choice will be made. Some will choose charter schools. Some will choose magnet schools. Some will choose an inter-district transfer, in the states that allow it, to out-of-district schools in the suburbs. Some will choose private, nonreligious schools. And, yes, some will choose private religious schools. In the bigger picture, relatively few of the people who have the choice will make that choice.

Let me emphasize that the people who choose to keep their kids in public schools will also be making a choice, and their choice will change the milieu of the public schools. This is because their children will now be there by choice, and not by force. In turn, those public schools will get a benefit that private schools now have. They will get the loyalty of their families, because the families will be there because they want to be there. And if you choose to be there, the schools can make more demands on you as a family and more demands on your child. That, I think, is part of the secret as to why private schools do so well.

Now, you could say, "Well, we could create vouchers that could only be used in nonreligious private schools. What would be wrong with that?" I would certainly be in favor of such a plan, as compared to what we have now. But why, I say, should we limit it to that? If there are some families who want religious schools for their children, why should they be singled out and treated worse because that is the kind of choice they want to make? That is what the free exercise of religion⁽⁶⁾ is about. That is the sort of position that I would have thought that the Anti-Defamation League, our cosponsor today, would have been supporting - that is, endorsing the free exercise rights of all of American families. Thank you.

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¹ Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman advocates educational choice. See The Friedman Foundation (visited Mar. 26, 2000) <http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/>.

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