New Volume From The Century Foundation Offers Fresh Insights on the Debate over School Vouchers

Sep 23, 2003

Authors: admin

Publisher(s): The Century Foundation

The impending Senate vote on a voucher plan for Washington, D.C. public school students has renewed the volatile debate over programs that provide public money for students to attend private schools. Coalitions for and against these proposals cross-ideological and political lines.

Public School Choice vs. Private School Vouchers, a new volume from The Century Foundation, puts the debate in perspective – defining the issues, dispelling myths, and offering an alternative plan for improving education for all children through public school choice.

Over the past four years, The Century Foundation has supported papers, articles, books, events, and a task force to examine many of these issues. The projects include Gordon MacInnes’s white paper “Kids Who Pick the Wrong Parents and Other Victims of Voucher Schemes”; a forum on “Progressive Alternatives to School Vouchers,” featuring Brent Staples, Adam Urbanski, Christopher Edley, and Elliot Mincberg; A Notion at Risk:Preserving Public Education as an Engine for Social Mobility, which included a chapter on charter schools by Amy Stuart Wells and colleagues; Richard D. Kahlenberg’s All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice; and Divided We Fail: The Report of the Century Foundation Task Force on theCommon School, chaired by Lowell Weicker.
Public School Choice vs. Private School Vouchers is edited by Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, who has assembled relevant excerpts from these projects in a singe place. In addition, the volume includes new selections written by Century Foundation staff and fellows Thad Hall, Ruy Teixeira, and Bernard Wasow, as well as insightful articles by educational policy experts and journalists, including Helen Ladd, Edward Fiske, Sean Reardon, John Yun and Richard Just.

These research efforts find, on the whole, that private school vouchers are not a panacea for what ails education in the United States. Taken together, the studies indicate that there are significant issues of accountability, capacity, segregation, and stratification in privatized initiatives. The volume shows that the advantages private schools appear to offer are most likely a function of the student and parental mix that comes from institutions selecting their populations, and that public school choice can harness these positive characteristics to benefit all students, not just a few.