Megan McArdle writes about vouchers. Specifically, she writes about individuals who have enough money to pull their kids out of public schools and then oppose the idea of helping poorer families do the same:

I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers “destroying” the public schools by “cherry picking” the best students, when they’ve made damn sure that their own precious little cherries have been plucked out of the failing school systems, I seethe with barely controllable inward rage. It is the vilest hypocrisy on display in American politics today. Now, I don’t accuse David Nicholson of this particular sin . . . yet. Right now he’s only guilty of the lesser sin of viewing real estate purchases as the natural vehicle through which one should excercise educational choice. Perhaps he favors vouchers to help the kids he’s left behind. But if he does, I sure wish he’d mentioned it.

Is the problem with vouchers the cherry-picking of the best students? I wouldn’t have thought so. Cherry-picking the best students seems like a lesser problem to me. It is true that the best students tend to be those with the most involved parents, and the most involved parents would be the most likely to make use of a voucher system. That would leave the worse students (and some good students who happen to have less involved parents) in the public school system. If that cherry-picking of students was all that happened, the voucher system wouldn’t hurt anyone. It wouldn’t help everyone, but it would help enough individuals that it would be an overall positive for our society.

It seems to me that the more valid argument against vouchers is not that it allows for the cherry-picking of the best students, but that it allows for the cherry-picking of the best teachers. A school that offers better teachers would get more students (and, thus, more money). As a result, schools would not only be competing for students, but also for teachers. The better teachers would be able to demand better salaries at these schools, leaving only the worst teachers for the worst schools. Arguably, this, not the cherry-picking of students, is what hurts the most, because the students who are left behind are left behind in a lower-quality school than they would otherwise have attended.

Despite this, I believe that the overall effect of a voucher system^[a] would be positive. I readily admit that I could be wrong about that, but our current public school system is very broken and fixing it is a very difficult problem. Vouchers seem to me to be the best option to fix the system at this point, but I am more than willing to examine other alternatives.

1. I’d even take a pseudo-voucher system, where parents and students were given the right to choose from a selection of public school options. [↩]