Should Cities and States Adopt School Voucher Programs?

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Compared to professionals in other fields, public school teachers are surprisingly unfree.  In order to teach in most states they must take courses at teachers colleges that are often condemned as being useless or even counterproductive in the classroom . Public school teachers lost the rights that other professionals take for granted because the market forces that protect and reward professionals do not operate inside the public school system. The logic of bureaucracy rewards centralization of authority, resulting in school districts and high schools that are too large for a single curriculum to be best for most students. With multiple and constantly changing curricula, however, there can be no certainty as to what students should have mastered in earlier grades, making it almost impossible for school boards, superintendents, and principals to accurately assess the performance of individual teachers.

There is a better path for teachers to follow. School choice would allow public school teachers to recover their lost freedoms while boosting the productivity of K-12 schools. If parents were allowed to choose schools for their children and if public funds followed the child, the tactics used by superintendents, school boards, and teacher unions to avoid accountability would no longer be necessary or possible. Superintendents would have no incentive to mislead parents or voters. Accurate consumer reports containing school-level information about student achievement and professional competence would become widely available, similar to those now available on automobiles, hospitals, and other goods and services.

School choice would allow a variety of curricula to be applied consistently based on the needs of students and preferences of parents. This would make possible more accurate evaluation of each teacher’s contribution to a student’s learning. Schools that retain incompetent or dangerous employees would quickly lose students to those with merit-based employment policies.