Kevin Carey ran my post from yesterday through a “negative de-sarcasticizer” and wants to take issue with the suggestion that D.C. vouchers were adopted democratically.
First, I should warn Kevin that a negative de-sarcasticizer actually makes things more sarcastic. I know because I bought one on Ebay and I use it to help make my posts as sarcastic as they are. The negative de-sarcasticizer comes with a large, yellow label warning about the hazards of double negatives.
Second, the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers. All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard. This would include NCLB and other federal education legislation that Kevin praises charter schools for more strictly obeying.
Third, I am glad that Kevin believes that “giving parents educational choices and opening up public education to competition and innovation will improve outcomes for students.” And I agree with him that charters would be one way of expanding choices and competition. But I continue to be puzzled by the argument that vouchers are bad because they are less accountable than charters. Whatever regulation you believe is desirable for schools could be applied to vouchers as well as to charters.
Finally, I continue to be troubled by Kevin’s need to dismiss vouchers by labeling the idea as “unworkable” or “not serious.” This is just argumentation by name-calling rather than addressing the substance of the issue. When I hear this kind of argument it makes me want to turn my negative de-sarcasticizer up to full power.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
What is full on the negative de-sarcasticizer? Does yours go to 11?
The reason vouchers are worse then charters, in the minds of defenders of the status quo, is precisely because they carry a more explicit degree of choice.
A charter, despite the fact that it deviates from the one true faith of the district-based public education system, is still very much a creature of the system and thus vulnerable to manipulations of the system. Any bureaucrat worth their salt could come up with a variety of ways to gradually tighten the screws on charters until they teeter on the edge of collapse and then do the decent thing by putting them out of their misery.
But vouchers carry a very much more worrisome aspect and that’s of ownership.
A voucher belongs to *a* person, specifically a parent, and tampering with the voucher impacts each parent’s ownership and from that parent’s point of view, the future of their child. I find it difficult to think of a worse political enemy then a parent who sees you as the cause of an end to their hopes for their child.
Screw with vouchers and you risk angering all the parents who grip them in their grubby little paws whereas making life more difficult for charters doesn’t have as immediate impact on the parents. The charter operator may see the future direction of things but they have to communicate that concern to parents and that makes arousing a ferocious constituency more difficult. It’ll still happen as evidenced by the reaction of parents to the closing of lousy charters but take 20% off the value of a voucher and you’ve taken away 20% of that parent’s child’s future. Time to price Kevlar underwear.
So the reason vouchers are said to be less accountable then charters is because any other complaint would be met with either indifference by parents or active hostility and proponents of the public education status quo understand that making enemies of parents is a politically bad thing to do. The “accountability” complaint allows defenders of the status quo to appear concerned with the quality of the education voucher kids will get while allowing them to do what they really want to do which is erode support for vouchers in order to maintain the district-based system.
That is very well put.
I would recommend Kevin read Andrew Rotherham’s PPI brief from 2002, Putting Vouchers in Perspective, http://www.ppionline.org/documents/Ed_vouchers_702.pdf.
Rotherham does a good job of showing how a voucher-style system of public funding could be set up so that money would follow kids to the school of their parent’s choice, including “private” religious schools, so long as schools adhere to minimum quality standards. Private institutions provide public goods all the time. Rotherham acknowledges that. Kevin Carey should too.