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School Vouchers Part Two

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In the previous essay, I considered some of the arguments in favor of school vouchers. I now continue the discussion. Another set of arguments focus on the choice aspect, that vouchers allow parents to select education that best fits their children and education that will cultivate values. For example, choice proponents claim that vouchers (and similar programs) will enable parents of children with special needs to pick a tailored program not available in public schools. An obvious reply to these arguments is that the main reason public schools lack tailored programs is that they are woefully underfunded. Schools could offer tailored programs if they had the funding—so diverting public money to vouchers makes less sense than funding such programs. To use an analogy, this would be like arguing that public money should be diverted from community rec centers to private gyms because the rec centers lack the variety of equipment possessed by private gyms. If the equipment is critical for the community, then the funding should be used to get that equipment for the rec centers.

A third set of arguments focus on economic efficiency and accountability—the gist of the arguments is that private schools will be more economically efficient and more accountable than public schools and hence they are better. While I will not deny that public schools can be inefficient and lack accountability, I will also not deny that the same is true of private schools. Look at the nightmare of for-profit colleges to see what can go wrong in the private education sector. There is obviously no public sector curse and private sector magic—one can have bad or good in either domain. If a school district is inefficient and not accountable, going private is not an automatic fix—it also leaves all the problems in place in what remains of the public sector. Rather, the solution is to increase efficiency and accountability in the public sector—as has been done with many very good public schools. In the case of for-profit schools, there is always the obvious question about how they can do all that a public school would do for less, yet still make a profit. At the college level, the answer was that they did not.

A final set of arguments focus on how voucher and similar programs improve schools by offering competition. While, as a runner and gamer, I do recognize that the right sorts of competition can result in improvements, this does not seem to apply in education. First, consider the disastrous for-profit colleges. If the competition hypothesis held true, they should have been better than public schools and helped improve them. However, they ended up being vacuums for public money and disasters for their students. Public schools mainly responded by doing what they could to help their victims—I attended various meetings about what to do with classes for students who attended for-profit schools that were not accredited. Second, public schools operate at an incredible disadvantage in the alleged competition. They are more accountable than private schools, they must meet far more requirements than private schools, they are subject to state assessment and grading, they must accept everyone, and their funding is limited. To use an analogy, this would be analogous to arguing that giving places like Disney and Six Flags public money from the state park system would improve the state parks because of the competition. This would obviously not improve the state parks—they are far more limited than the private operations and already have far less funding. If we want better state parks, taking away money would hardly be the way to make that happen. Likewise, taking money from public education is not going to make it better.

In sum, while vouchers are good for some people, they do not benefit public education. The arguments in their favor are problematic, while those against them are strong. As such, vouchers (and similar programs) are a bad idea.

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School Vouchers Part One

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My adopted state of Florida recently passed a school voucher program that would pay $130 million to private schools to pay the tuition for 18,000 students. If the voucher plan is not ruled unconstitutional (as it was in 2006), the state plans to expand it to include families with ever higher incomes. This plan has been praised by conservatives who support it by appealing to the benefits of school choice.


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While strong support for public education has been bi-partisan at times, it is currently split along ideological grounds. As such most opposition to vouchers comes from the left and they advance a variety of stock arguments. First, it is argued that the voucher system is intended to transfer public money to private businesses, thus making it a form of “wealthfare” in which public money benefits businesses that are already well-off. Second, it is argued that vouchers take money from underfunded public schools that desperately need funding. Florida, while not the worst, is near the bottom for spending per student and teacher pay. There are many unfilled teaching positions, schools with broken air-conditioning, and teachers routinely must buy their own classroom supplies. Third, it is argued that vouchers are often a tool to channel public money into religious institutions through their schools. Fourth, it is argued that the voucher system is intended to undermine public education to maintain the existing class system and to undermine the bedrock of democracy. While I do agree with these arguments, it is worth considering the proposed merits of vouchers. After all, to simply embrace or shun something solely on ideological grounds would be to reject critical thought. As such, I will consider some of the reasons advanced in favor of voucher programs.

One set of reasons can be grouped under what I will call the “better student argument.” The gist of this argument is that vouchers are good, because it results in better students. To be specific, choice advocates point out that private schools have better safety, better academic performance and better graduation rates than public schools. From this, they contend, it follows that vouchers are beneficial.

It certainly makes sense that the private schools have better students than public schools—this is because they can select their students and public schools must take everyone (with some limits). There is also the fact that parents who would use the voucher program would tend to be more engaged.  To use an analogy, comparing the two is like comparing intramural teams which must take everyone and varsity teams that have strict tryouts and cuts. The varsity teams will almost always be better teams. But it is not being varsity that makes the varsity team better—it is the selection process. The fast runner is not fast because she is on the varsity team, she is on the varsity team because she is fast.  The same holds for the private schools—they get better students because they are free to reject the ones they do not want.

One could also use an analogy to public health: the private schools are like hospitals that can select their patients and exclude those they do not want. Public schools are like hospitals that must take everyone. Such exclusionary hospitals would have far better outcomes than the public hospitals—because they would select the better patients and would be getting more money. However, this would hardly be a good solution to public health.  

On the one hand, if your child is a good student and can get accepted by a private school, then the voucher program would be appealing. You can get your child into a school with a better class of students. On the other hand, if your child is the problem child or bad student that other children are trying to escape, then the voucher program will not help you—your child will be stuck in an ever-declining public-school system. While this might be seen as just a problem for the children who cannot escape and their parents, these children are part of society and are thus everyone’s concern even if the concerns are purely pragmatically about crime and employability. Using a public health analogy, abandoning people into a declining public health care system puts everyone at greater risk.

If it is replied that the problem students will also get vouchers, then the obvious problem is that private schools will no longer be better or safer. Going back to the sports analogy, this would be like varsity teams trying to still claim to be better while responding to criticism about leaving people out by opening the teams up to everyone. They would soon cease to be better. Likewise for the voucher program: if it is open to all children, then the public schools would simply be replicated in private form. If the schools are exclusionary, then people will be left behind in what are acknowledged to be more dangerous and inferior schools. As such, the better student argument is problematic. Excluding the “problem” students so that the private schools are better means abandoning these citizens to declining public education—which will hurt everyone. Opening the schools up to everyone would mean they would be the same as public schools, so they would not be better. The discussion continues in the next essay.

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Opportunity Hoarding IV: Rules of the Game

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As noted in previous essays, competition over opportunities is almost certainly unavoidable and can even be desirable. However, this competition can do more harm than good. One example of this is opportunity hoarding.  Opportunity hoarding occurs when parents try to seek advantages for their children in ways that are harmful to others. As would be suspected, opportunity hoarding typically occurs when parents use morally problematic methods to secure advantages for their children at the expense of other children. An excellent example of this is the 2019 college admissions scandal and I will use this to set the stage for the discussion.

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As many writing about the scandal pointed out, the rich have many legal means of tipping the admission scales in favor of their children. These include methods that have nothing to do with the merit of the applicant, such as the use of legacy admissions and making financial contributions to the institutions. Other methods aim at improving the quality of the applicant (or at least the application). These methods include paid test preparation courses, paid counselors, paid tutors, and paid essay coaches. Because the rich have so many advantages already, the admission scandal seemed especially egregious and somewhat perplexing. From a philosophical perspective, the scandal raises an interesting general moral question about what methods are acceptable in the competition over opportunities and which are not.

While some might consider a state of nature approach to this competition (a war against all with no limit on the means), this would be clear violation of our moral intuitions. After all, while we might disagree on specific limits, we almost certainly agree that there are limits. To illustrate, the murder of competing children would seem to be obviously unacceptable as would other horrible things like blinding or maiming to weaken the competition. But once the obviously horrific is out of the way, there remains a very large area of possible dispute.

One approach favored by manner is to use the law as the guide. On this view, parents may use any legal means to restrict opportunities in favor of their children. While this might have some appeal, it suffers from an obvious defect: the law is whatever those in power make it, so evil (or at least unfair) things can become a matter of law. The usual extreme, but legitimate, example is the legality of slavery. As such, while it is often right to obey the law, it does not follow that what is legal is ethical.  So, if a parent justifies their actions by pointing to their legality, they merely prove they acted legally—they have not shown they have acted rightly. So, something is needed beyond mere legality to determine what the limits of the competition should be.

Since this is a question of ethics on a national scale, an appeal to utilitarianism seems sensible: the limits should be set in terms of what will be most likely to create the greatest benefit and least harm. This leads to the stock problem of sorting out what it means to create the greatest positive value and least negative value. It also requires sorting out the measure of worth.  For example, a set of limits might result in the children of the wealthy becoming even wealthier while the less wealthy were worse off than their parents might create more total wealth than a more equitable system in which everyone was reasonably well off. If what matters, as it does to some, is the overall wealth then these would be the right limits. However, if maximizing value is more about the impact on each person, then the more equitable division would be the moral choice: it would create more positive value for more people but would fail to create the most total positive value.

Since a utilitarian approach recognizes only the utilitarian calculation of value, some might find this approach problematic. Instead, they might favor a rights-based approach, or one based on a principle of fair competition. To illustrate, Americans profess to value competition, merit and fairness: the best competitors are supposed to win in a fair competition. This, obviously enough, just returns to the problem of fairness: what means are fair to use in the competition for opportunity?

One possible approach is to use a principle of relevance: a fair competition is one in which victory depends on the skills and abilities that are relevant to the nature of the competition. For example, if the competition is based on academic ability, then that should be the deciding factor—donating money should not influence the outcome of competition. This will, of course, lead to a debate about what should be considered relevant. For example, if it is argued that donating money is not relevant to determining college admissions because it is not relevant to academic ability, one might then argue that race or sex are also not relevant and thus should not be used. So, if relevance is used, it must be properly and consistently defined and applied.

While relevance, in general, seems like a reasonable consideration, there are also concerns about the preparation for the competitions. To illustrate, the children of the wealthy get a competitive edge because their parents can get them into good K-12 schools, pay for tutoring, pay for test preparation, pay for counseling, pay for help on essays and so on. That is, they can buy advantages that are relevant to the competition for college admissions and careers. On the one hand, these do seem to be unfair advantages because they are not available to the children of the poor simply because they are poor. On the other hand, they are relevant to the competition because they do improve the skills and abilities of the children. One possible solution, for those who value fair competition, would be balancing things out by providing the same support to all children—thus making the competition fair. This leads into the question of how far the quest for fairness should go.

At this point, some might be wondering if I will advocate forcing parents to only parent as well as the worst parents, so as to even things out. After all, a parent who can spend time engaging in activities with their kids, such as reading to them and helping with homework, confers an advantage. Since making parents do a worse job would obviously make things worse, this would be wrong to do. As such, I do not oppose (rather I fully support) parents being good parents. However, in many cases parents face the challenges of lacking time, resources and education to be better parents and these could be addressed. As such, I would advocate lifting parents up and utterly reject any notion to bring them down (something only those deranged by ideology would suggest).

The above is only a faint sketch of the matter—much more needs to be said about what the rules of competition for opportunity should be in our society. This is, obviously enough, a matter of values: are we just mouthing words like “fairness” , “opportunity for all”  and “merit-based competition” while embracing the practice of unfairly buying success? Or do we really believe these things?

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Political Survey of the Academy

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If all goes as planned by the Republicans who control the government, my adopted state of Florida will require an annual survey of the political beliefs of students at faculty at public universities. This survey is not occurring in isolation. Trump recently signed an executive order aimed at enforcing “free inquiry” on campus and complaints about the liberal domination of the academy are now stock conservative talking points.

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One challenge with assessing this plan is that the details are unclear—questions remain about whether the survey will be compelled (which would seem to violate the 1st amendment), whether the data will be anonymous, who will use the data and to what end.

One concern is the question of whether the survey will be compulsory. If it is, it would seem to force students and faculty to engage in compelled expression of their political beliefs. This seems likely to provoke legal challenges based on the 1st amendment. There is also the moral concern about compelling people to identify their political beliefs to the state, something that seems to smell a bit of tyranny.

If the survey is not mandatory and there is no punishment or retaliation for not participating (which could, in theory, result in entire schools not completing the survey), then the 1st amendment concerns evaporate, but there is still the moral concern about the state seeking such information about the political beliefs of citizens.

There is also the concern about the goal of the survey, its intended consequences and unintended consequences. On the face of it, the planned survey seems innocuous, even benign. It is supposed to have a board that will pick or develop an “objective, nonpartisan and statistically valid survey.” As stated, this survey “considers the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented and members of the university community feel free to express their beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom.” Objecting to this would seem to be to oppose free inquiry and free expression, which is presumably why this wording was selected. While I certainly support free expression and free inquiry, I think that there are reasonable concerns with this proposed survey.

While one should always be careful when speculating about motives and the “real intentions” behind proposed laws, they can serve as a reasonable guide when trying to sort out the intended consequences of the law. A main driving force behind this proposed law is the Republican House Higher Education & Career Readiness Chairman Cord Byrd.

Byrd advances an appeal to anecdotal evidence to support the need for the survey, alleging some students shared with him their worries about expressing their political views in class due to a fear of having their grades suffer. If such claims are true, then this would a be a problem—a student’s grades should depend entirely on their performance on the coursework. Students do, of course, have the right to report such discrimination and there is a grade appeal process in place at Florida’s public institutions.

I do acknowledge the obvious: there are bad professors and teaching assistants who grade in an unprofessional manner, sometimes based on their own political and moral values. While there are anecdotes that allege professors engage in this practice, there is a lack of statistical evidence that would support the claim that the problem is significant.  If this is a broad problem, then more rigorous enforcement of the existing grading policies would be in order—a survey would not seem to address this matter. If the problem is extensive and not adequately handled by the existing system, then another approach would be needed—but evidence would be needed that this is a serious enough problem to warrant such an approach.

Byrd also endeavors to justify the survey by appealing to the claim that students are being indoctrinated at public universities. While this is a common conservative talking point, the evidence for this is lacking.  If professors are trying to indoctrinate students, they seem to be very unsuccessful in this task. While students often change their views in college, these changes do not seem to have any liberal bias. While conservative students have spoken of some challenges they faced on campuses, the overall outcome of the experiences are positive and some students have gone from being liberal to conservative. As such, it is reasonable to doubt the notion that universities are engines of liberal indoctrination and hostile to conservative students. Also, this survey seems needless—it is already well known that professors tend to be more liberal than their students, and it is not clear what meaningful new data the proposed survey would provide.

Given Byrd’s reference to fears of indoctrination and grade retaliation, one wonders about the intended consequences of the proposed law. If it is merely to ensure that students are not unfairly graded for their views, then I am fine with that. However, this would hardly seem to address Byrd’s fear of indoctrination. At this point, I can only speculate what the goals are regarding fighting the alleged indoctrination. Will the survey be used to warrant a conservative affirmative action program in which conservatives are hired to balance out the liberals? Will liberals be fired to balance out conservatives?  Will there be a system of ideological enforcement put in place to watch professors for attempts to indoctrinate?  One suspects that the intent is to weaponize the survey; if it was merely to gather information than there would be no talk of the threat of indoctrination.

If this is the case, then it is worth considering the unintended consequences. While some conservatives might praise this move today because it is a weapon against the liberals, it could provide a tool for examining faculty and students for having the right sort of ideology—something that could be abused by the left in the future.

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Politics & Public Educators

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A New Jersey teacher was accused of bringing politics into the classroom in the form of an anti-Trump t-shirt.  While the legality of the matter is up to the courts, this situation does raise an interesting moral problem about the free speech of public educators. As a professor at a state university, I am both an educator and a public employee, so this matter is relevant to me.

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One aspect of the moral concern is that the educator is a public employee and thus paid by the taxpayers and working in a public institution. While being employed by the state does not strip a person of their right to free expression, there are limits to this right. The most common example of a limit is, of course, about yelling fire in a theater when there is no fire.

Since public employees are paid by the taxpayers to do a job, it makes sense that they do not have the right to express their own political views to the public while on the clock. To use the obvious analogy, it would be absurd to claim that I have the right to try to sell my students my books during class time or office hours. Likewise, it would be absurd to say that I have the right to try to sell my politics to my students during class time or office hours. There is also the matter of professionalism—while I am on the clock, I am representing my institution and not myself. As such, I am obligated to distinguish between my own views and those of the institution.

It might be objected that elected public officials routinely use their offices to engage in political activities that benefit themselves and their party. As such, it is unfair to deny the same opportunity to other public employees. One obvious counter is that elected public officials are politicians, so politics is their job. That said, there are certainly moral concerns about politicians using public resources to campaign for their re-election or the elections of others; but this is more a matter of the use of public funds than a free-speech issue. As such, it seems morally acceptable to insist that public employees who do not hold political office, etc. to refrain from political activities while on the clock. But perhaps being an educator makes a difference.

On the one hand, it could be argued that even in political classes the educator does not have the right to preach their own politics to the students. After all, the function of the educator is to teach rather than preach. If a teacher takes a clear stance on a political issue, then students are pressured to accept (or at least act as if they accept) that view—especially if it somehow makes it into the grading process. There is also the concern that expressing political views will alienate students and thus harm their education. For example, a teacher who expresses anti-Trump views strongly in class, can create a hostile learning environment for students who like Trump (or simply dislike having their class politicized). The teacher has plenty of time outside of the classroom to express their views to people who are free to ignore them or speak back as equals; using class time to engage in politics would thus be wrong.

On the other hand, it can be argued that educators do not surrender their right of free expression and if they use it responsibly in the classroom, they have the right to express their political views. This view does have considerable appeal at the college level—professors are supposed to have positions on intellectual and academic issues, and these include political issues. This does become a matter of teaching/educational philosophy. One classic ideal is the professor as professor—advancing their positions on the academic issues and inviting students to engage them. Of course, this does involve the obvious problem with the power disparity and grades. Another classic ideal is the professor as neutral shoveler of theories and ideas—laying out all the various positions and letting the students decide which they like best. One problem with this is that such an approach does not help the students determine which theories and ideas are better—which would be an obvious problem in the context of engineering, math and science classes in which it is often assumed there must be a right answer that the professor is to convey to the students. This, of course, leads into the jungle of the dispute over which subjects are objective and which are not—a jungle far beyond the itinerary of this brief essay.

My practical solution to the problem in my own classes is to avoid endorsing/condemning any candidate (and not just because this would probably get me fired) and to stick to the general issues of politics. Since I do not want my students to simply repeat what they think I think on papers and tests, I am careful to present the positions fairly. If pressed for my opinion in class, I will refer to any writings I have done on the issues and note that they should not simply accept what I say. I also carefully point out that paper grades are not based on whether I like their position or not but based on how well they argue for their position. When I use examples of politicians (usually for fallacies and rhetoric) I do try to include examples across the spectrum. However, the party in power does tend to be the subject of more examples than the party out of power—which is to be expected.

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Assessment & Improvement

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My adventures in assessment began in 2004 when I was assigned to the General Education Assessment Committee. I have served on that committee since then and have become the co-chair. I have also always done the assessment for the Philosophy & Religion unit (it is part of a larger department formed during the consolidations of the 1970s). As would be expected, assessment for the unit is just an extra smooshed into the infinitely expandable 20% of my Assignment of Responsibility (which also includes advising, research, web mastering, facilitating, publishing, and 4-9 committees).

When I first started in the assessment business, most of it seemed quite arbitrary. For example, we were told by the assessment guru that we needed five outcomes to assess. I still assess five outcomes. As another example, we were told that our goal should be that 80% of Xs do Y; for example, that 80% of students achieve a rating of competent or better in an outcome. When one asked why 80% was picked, the answer was simply that this was what was to be done.  To be fair, almost everyone uses 70% as the cutoff for a C grade because that has what has always been done and what everyone does. Which is to say that we use an appeal to tradition and an appeal to common practice.

As is always the case, the years have seen more and more added into the assessment process—I now attend multiple committee meetings, collect data from all the faculty in the unit, and create stacks of spreadsheets with sweet pie charts. I then do an analysis of each outcome, craft improvement narratives and write an extensive reflection. All of this gets loaded into a LiveText system for review by multiple levels of administrators. Its final fate is to be part of various collective reports. While much could be written about any part of this system, the focus of this essay is on the improvement narrative.

As noted above, the performance of the unit is assessed in terms of five outcomes. For example, the written communication skills of students are assessed as part of the written communication outcome. Once the data for the academic year is gathered and properly spreadsheeted, I do an analysis and then an improvement narrative for each assessment method within the outcome. For example, I do an analysis of draft performance relative to final paper performance as part of the written communication outcome and then write an improvement narrative that maps out a timetable and budget for the improvement. The budget part is easy: we do not get a budget for any improvement, so that is a simple copy-paste operation.

The idea of writing an improvement narrative can be reasonable. After all, if the unit is falling short on an outcome or otherwise encountering problems, then it makes sense to develop a plan for addressing these shortcomings or problems. For example, the students tend to do poorly in the area of written communication. One obvious reason for this is that students are generally less prepared in K-12 in writing argumentative papers than they were in the past. As such, the faculty must address this shortcoming in student preparation in order to bring our results up to the 80% target. That said improvement narratives can also be problematic.

One practical concern is that there is a practical limit to improvement. To use an obvious analogy to sports, an athlete can only improve so far before the cost of improvement becomes prohibitive and there is a point at which further improvement is no longer possible. The same is also true in education: even if improvement is possible, the cost of doing so will be prohibitive and hence there will be a point at which improvement is not rational. One example of this is when trying to improve in one area must come at the expense at making another area worse. To illustrate, the more a philosophy professor tries to make up for the K-12 educational shortfall in writing skills the less time they will have to address everything else—such as philosophy. Continuing the athlete analogy, it makes sense that professors also have skill caps—they will reach a point at which they cannot get any better and improvement will no longer be possible.  It might be objected that a professor can always improve something and hence there must always be improvement narratives. This leads to the more abstract concern of endless improvement.

As might be imagined, one cannot simply write “we are meeting our goals and need no improvement” as part of the improvement narrative. There must always be an improvement narrative that includes improvement narratives. This assumes the possibility of endless improvement. On the one hand, it could be claimed that there is always room for improvement—unless the professor is a perfect being teaching a perfect class to perfect students. This is obviously true. On the other hand, endless improvement is a practical impossibility. One could even say that there is a seeming paradox here: imperfect beings can always improve, but imperfect beings will always hit their limits. As such, imperfect beings cannot always improve. So, what should be done about improvement narratives?

One approach is to be practical and realistic: focus on actual problems and areas that can be improved while having the freedom to claim that areas where the acceptable levels are being maintained are not going to be improved. That is, to say that the performance is good enough given the available resources and pay. This is what I strive to do and is what good assessment should be like. I take the same approach to my running: I know where I can improve and, more importantly, that time and injuries have put a hard cap on my performance. That is to say that without magic or technology, I’ll never run another 2:45 marathon or a 33 minute 10K.

Another approach is to engage in the narrative for the sake of the narrative: if people must write an improvement narrative for everything, even when they know damn well that there is no way that something is going to be improved, people will craft suitable fictions to appease the administration. On the plus side, this will check all the requisite boxes. On the minus side, it is demoralizing to do this and, to be honest, dishonest. I try to avoid doing this.

One especially interesting thing about improvement narratives is that there is the expectation, as noted above, of endless improvement. However, for most faculty their salary is largely detached from their performance and improvement: they receive no improved compensation or benefits for improving the results of outcomes. The only practical incentive is to stay above the level at which one can be fired for cause and to perform well enough for tenure and promotion; other than that, there is no practical incentive to improve. Most faculty, of course, are motivated by pride and professionalism to do a good job and improve—so it is good that people are not solely motivated by gain. But higher education is being pushed ever deeper into the business model and a key concept in business is that you get what you pay for. So, if constant improvement is expected, then there should also be a corresponding increase in compensation based on this. If such improvement is valued and required, then there should also be adequate support provided to achieve that improvement. Expecting someone to always improve without any improvement in compensation and without any increase in resources is to expect far too much. Now, back to my data analysis and narrative crafting.

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