Vouchers

I have largely refrained--and will continue to largely refrain--from entering political debates in the blogosphere, especially with the hopeless folks at the Volokh Conspiracy (apart from Eugene's always knowledgeable and often penetrating analysis of First Amendment questions, the quality of "political" comment and analysis there is not, shall we say, "cosmopolitan"). But I can not resist a brief remark on this recent posting by the admirably prolific (and much cited), but I fear morally hopeless, David Bernstein:

"Matthew Yglesias makes an error that I've heard over and over again from otherwise-intelligent liberals--that vouchers can't do much of anything to solve the problems that exist with public schools, because there are so few slots available in private schools. Call me crazy, but I assume if vouchers gradually became available to more students, especially those trapped in bad public schools, existing private schools would expand, and new private schools would arise, to meet the increased demand for their services. People didn't say sixty years ago, when Las Vegas was a small town in the desert, "guess we can't settle Vegas, there aren't enough grocery stores." It's possible that existing voucher plans don't provide a large enough voucher to give entrepreneurs the incentive to expand or create schools. But that's not an inherent problem with vouchers, that a problem of funding vouchers at far lower levels per student than the funding of public schools."

Extensive funding of vouchers would, indeed, result in a proliferation of private schools. These schools would flourish by not taking the "problem" students, which is what all the "good" private schools do now (as anyone with children knows full well). The "problem" students are overwhelmingly the ones from broken homes, socially and economically unstable communities, and so on. The problem students would all end up in the remaining public schools, which, of course, would be even more poorly funded than they already are, given the huge drain on taxpayer dollars subsidizing private schools. These schools would then be even worse which would, of course, lead clever pundits to advocate more vouchers to provide "competition" with the public schools.

These remaining public schools would be even "worse" because, as anyone--i.e., no one in the law blogosphere--who knows anything about schooling knows the two main problems actually afflicting the public schools are inadequate funding [which affects class size, in particular] and the socio-economic pathologies of American cities whose children populate the so-called "bad" urban public schools.

In lieu of talking about any actual causes of the problems in public schools--like the socio-economic pathologies of American society, the underfunding of public schools, the mindless proliferation of standardized testing, and so on--our clever pundits blame "lack of competition" and "teacher's unions." These little pernicious fantasies then circulate among the clever consumers of the clever pundits, and soon everyone is congratulating each other for their "insights."

Which is why I largely stay out of these intellectually pathetic and morally depraved discussions.

UPDATE: David Bernstein, who was a leading participant in the conservative self-pity festival a few weeks back, is stricken with self-pity again: his views, he claims, have been misrepresented. But let's have a little reality check here: Yglesias said vouchers won't help, because there aren't enough public schools; Bernstein responded that Yglesias was wrong that "vouchers can't do much of anything to solve the problems that exist with public schools," because more private schools would come along in response to market demand. I responded to the "thought" [sic] that vouchers would solve "the problems that exist with public schools." Q.E.D. (sort of). Professor Bernstein thinks it's "risible" that public schools are underfunded. I'm glad he's getting a chuckle, though the phrase "morally hopeless" does, once again, come to mind. (By the way, I've had many jolly exchanges with David Bernstein about law school rankings and other matters, and being a Nietzschean of sorts, I don't mean anything particularly harsh by calling him "morally hopeless." After all, Nietzsche is, in certain respects, morally hopeless too, albeit more loveably so.)