For many reasons school vouchers are back in the spotlight as a “solution” to the current educational woes. The basic mechanism of school vouchers is that a family can get a voucher for their per pupil cost that would normally go to their neighborhood school, and can then choose which school, public or private, to take the voucher to. The school of their choice then gets the per pupil cost. Essentially, students choose their school and the money that is allocated for that student within the public education system follows each student.

More personal motivations for vouchers also include thoughts like “Since I already paid for my child’s education through taxes, I should choose how that money gets spent”, “I should get to choose what my child learns and the government shouldn’t”, and “Rich kids get amazing educations, and my kid deserves one too, so I’m taking my voucher and going to a private school.” These are the “selfish entitlement” arguments.

Arguments for vouchers rely mostly on beliefs around free choice and free market. Both of those things are excellent keystones of our society, so surely they will work for education, right? The more theoretical view towards vouchers is that capitalism solves everything through a free market. If every student is free to choose the best school, schools will compete for the money by becoming better. Schools that don’t have enough money will naturally close, and they should because they weren’t good enough to attract enough customers, er, students. These are the “education as a free market good” arguments.

Both of these families of arguments are a logical starting point, but both overlook the basic fact that makes it so vouchers can never serve our nation effectively: an educated populace is a public good.

What does that mean? Public goods include resources like clean air, drinkable water, open spaces, and public roads. Everyone has a benefit from these resources, but no one person can easily exclude others from them, and one person using the air/road/water doesn’t make it less accessible to others. Having an educated populace in a country is also a public good. Having the vast majority of your fellow citizens be literate, understand math and science, and have a basic working knowledge of the world is an incredibly valuable resource.

There are two important facts about public goods that apply to the voucher debate. First, selfishness hurts each person in the long run, by destroying the public good.

This is because it unfortunately turns out that public goods often get mistreated. People take more than their fair share, they abuse the system, and indirectly harm others. This is typically explained with the concept of the tragedy of the commons. The basic idea is that in old villages the lord or king or whatnot would make a large pasture open to the public to graze their herds. This pasture was called the commons. The reigning figurehead knew that the villagers’ own land, in combination with the commons, would be enough grazing area to keep everyone’s herds alive and well.

But the villagers typically decided to use the free land instead of their own, leading to a giant dead patch of commons surrounded by individual pastures that were still green. Unfortunately, without the commons, the small pastures weren’t enough for their herds either, so all the herds died and then all the people went hungry, except of course the local Duke, who took all the remaining cows as taxes and said “What a tragedy for all of you and the commons”.

The problem was that each individual thought their own personal use and access to the commons was more important than keeping the commons alive for everyone. As a result each person benefited in the short term and suffered in the long term.

In the world of education an educated populace is the commons, or public good, and your individual education is the private pasture. Both are essential to success. If each person takes from the public education fund so that their own “pasture” can be the greenest around the commons will become overburdened and die. The individuals who used their voucher to get themselves a great education will find they no longer live in a society where the vast majority of people are also educated. Then, just as with the private pastures, people will realize that their personal education cannot possibly handle the burden that was once shared by the entire population.

Most of the “selfish entitlement” arguments for vouchers can be tied back to the tragedy of the commons example. The remaining arguments I’ve heard are along these lines:

“I don’t use the education system, why do I pay for it through taxes?”
“I already have an education, why should I pay taxes for someone else’s?”
“I don’t have kids, why should my taxes pay for schools?”
“I pay for a private education, why should I pay into public schools through taxes?”
“I pay for my kid’s education through taxes, I should get to decide what they learn.”

These all make sense, if you’re a selfish bastard with no sense of the greater good. Each of those sentences also works with any other public good, though their folly becomes more apparent:

“I’ve never used the fire department, why do I pay for it through taxes?”
“I already have a road near my house, why would I pay for someone else to have a road near theirs?”
“I don’t pollute the air with toxic chemicals, why should I pay taxes to regulate companies that do?”
“I pay for private security guards at my house, why should I pay for the police department through taxes?”
“I pay for the police through my taxes, I should get to decide who they arrest and for what.”

In all of these cases the answer is “X is a public good, so everyone who lives in society pays for it through taxes, because life is better for everyone if we all have X, even if you don’t directly use X”. I’m often tempted to follow up with “If you don’t think we need X, go live in a country without X and stop being a leech on our society!”

The “education as a private good” set of arguments for vouchers also holds no water because education is a public good, and treating public goods like private goods always fails.

Anytime anyone brings up the idea that vouchers let education become part of the supply and demand of capitalism, and thus “solves” education, I bring up India. Dan Kedmey discusses the specific city of Gurgaon in detail in this article, but several cities have fallen victim to the idea that life becomes better if all the typically public goods, like water, electricity, and roads, are turned into private commodities. The result is, unsurprisingly, that only profitable public goods are produced, and the poor suffer.

In terms of city infrastructure this “profit only, poorest suffer” result takes the form of toll roads being built to connect one wealthy place to another, electricity and water being provided only to places that can afford high enough charges to make the infrastructure investment profitable, and sewers becoming a luxury item. The reason? If you can only afford two services out of electricity, water, and sewer, the first thing you can do without is a sewer line because buckets and gutters are free.

A privatized version of education via vouchers is destined to similar results. The poorest families who lack institutional knowledge or don’t understand the value of education simply won’t use the vouchers. The best schools will be able to charge additional fees and self select the richest students. Predatory schools will pop up with the goal of profit instead of societal benefit, and take advantage of the population least able to stop them. Some “harder” students, whether special ed, gifted, behavioral, ELA will be deemed unprofitable to teach and will be turned away. Teacher quality will be lowered to save costs, but only at schools where the families don’t know what good teachers should be like.

These predictions of failures are not pessimistic, and do not assume evil intentions. I don’t claim that capitalism is evil or anything so crazy. I just know that an educated populace is a public good and every time we turn a public good into a private for-profit service, it fails many and the poorest suffer the most.

Many articles have a list of single-school or single-area studies that illustrate success or failure for one voucher experiment. But no experiment exists, or hopefully ever will, that illustrates what happens when an entire developed country turns an incredibly valuable public good into a profit driven industry. Anytime a voucher system is argued for look for the the underlying arguments of short-sighted selfishness and misguided economics.

We teachers are at the heart of providing a necessary public good, and we must never let ignorant arguments undermine the foundation of what we do. Just like clean air, drinkable water, fire and police forces, and public roads, we are part of the infrastructure that makes this a developed country. Everyone in the country benefits from what we do, and so we must keep working for the greater good, one student at a time.