by AFT President Sandra Feldman
February 1998

The free-market system is good
at many things, but ensuring
equity is not one of them.

Many Americans consider the free-market system a cure-all. Well, I grew up in a poor neighborhood, and I know first hand about the limitations of markets. In poor neighborhoods, people get the poorest quality in everything controlled by the market system--food, clothing, housing. That's as true now as it was when I was a kid. Look at our scandalous child-care "system." Or at our former health-care system--which was great for the middle class and rich but lousy for the poor--or the managed-care model we're now struggling with. I'm not suggesting that we get rid of the free-market system; it's good at many things. But ensuring equity is not one of them.

So we'll be making a big mistake if we let voucher advocates sell us on a free-market cure for K-12 education. I'm particularly concerned about the assertion that vouchers would save poor, minority children who are stuck in bad schools. The fact is, vouchers would leave many poor children worse off than they are now. Just look at the for-profit trade school scandals.

Voucher supporters often use the GI bill, Pell grant, and college student loan programs in their sales pitch. After all, they argue, those public dollars go to private as well as public colleges, and they've helped millions of students, many of them poor.

Of course this seductive analogy ignores the obvious differences between a free and compulsory K-12 system and higher education. It also fails to mention for-profit, or proprietary, trade schools--even though they make up one-third of the schools eligible to receive federal grants and loans for higher education. We hear about these schools only when scandals about how they've ripped off students and misused taxpayers' money hit the headlines.

Targeting the Poor

To be fair, many for-profit trade schools are reputable businesses that help students gain marketable skills. But over the years, government reports, newspaper exposés, and congressional hearings have uncovered many other schools with poor programs, high dropout rates, and lousy placement records. In fact, by the early 1990s, the scandals were so bad that Congress had to intervene. These "schools" exist primarily to cash in on money from federal programs. Their targets are poor people, often recruited in unemployment lines or housing projects with promises of good-paying jobs at the end of their "training."

The following examples are typical:

-- Three cosmetology schools, described in a 1995 Senate hearing, enrolled 4,300 students over a four-year period and received $6.7 million in public money to educate them. The programs were so deficient that only 80 students passed the state licensing exam--at a cost to taxpayers of $84,000 per license.

-- A Florida for-profit school purporting to train secretaries and travel agents showed, in its staffing, where its real priorities lay. The school employed 109 sales representatives, 70 people to handle federal grant and loan applications--and just 23 instructors. According to a 1991 Senate report, the school received over $150 million in federal grants and loans between 1985 and 1989.

A Reality Check

We often hear that if we give poor, minority families taxpayer-funded vouchers to pay for private schools, excellent schools will spring up in their neighborhoods to accommodate their kids. The trade school scandals provide a reality check on this kind of talk. Undoubtedly there would be some good private schools created to take advantage of voucher money, but there would also be many run by unscrupulous or incompetent people. And, as with the for-profit trade schools, the worst schools would be overwhelmingly concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods.

It's true there are also many rotten public schools. But ask yourself where the possibility for doing a good job with poor kids is greater. With a free-market system, winning and, especially, losing are built in. So is telling the loser, "Tough luck! You should've been better or smarter." But when schools are a public responsibility, it's not every parent or taxpayer for himself. What happens is a common concern--no, an obligation--to make sure there are no losers. Public education is falling short of its responsibility to poor students now, but we're working hard to turn around failing schools. And we're already seeing results. With vouchers, we'd still have failing schools--and no obligation to do anything about them except to say, "Tough luck!"