CESifo Conference Centre, Munich
Workshop 2015
Workshop on
Public Opinion and UIFPolitical Economy
ofEducation
9 May
School Vouchers and Racial Politics in the U.S.:
Explaining the Strange Bedfellows Supporting
and Opposing Private School Choice
James V. Shuls and Patrick J. Wolf
School Vouchers and Racial Politics in the U.S.:
Explaining the Strange Bedfellows Supporting and Opposing Private School Choice
James V. Shuls*
Assistant Professor
University of Missouri – St. Louis
266 Marillac Hall
1 University Blvd
St. Louis, MO 63121
[email protected]
(314) 516-6528 office
(314) 516-5942 fax
&
Patrick J. Wolf
21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice
University of Arkansas
219 Graduate Education Building
Fayetteville, AR 72701
[email protected]
* This paper was prepared for the Workshop on Public Opinion and the Political Economy
of Education, jointly hosted on May 9, 2015 by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research at
the University of Munich and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at
Harvard University. Do not cite without permission.
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School Vouchers and Racial Politics in the U.S.: Explaining the Strange Bedfellows
Supporting and Opposing Private School Choice
Abstract
The politics of school vouchers in the United States are often simplistically and
inaccurately portrayed as pitting Republicans against Democrats and whites against minorities.
In reality, the political coalitions that have succeeded in passing private school choice laws in 22
states and the District of Columbia consistently involve a blend of African American or Latino
Democrats, who support vouchers due to a concern for social justice and an expectation that
minority students will benefit, along with (mainly) white Republicans, who support vouchers due
to confidence in the effectiveness of market-based reforms and the fact that vouchers are a
wedge issue for Democrats. Opposition to vouchers typically comes from both white and
minority representatives of the educational and Democratic political establishment, along with
moderate white Republicans representing rural and suburban districts. Thus, the political divide
surrounding school vouchers is more new versus old, grassroots versus established, and both
ideological extremes versus the ideological middle than it is a simple case of right versus left or
white versus black. This paper will: (1) define private school choice and discuss its prevalence
and history in the U.S., (2) describe the empirical reality regarding the racial and political divide
over vouchers, (3) explain the logic behind why certain groups have taken their official position
on private school choice, and (4) offer some general conclusions about the logic and future of
political support of and opposition to private school choice.
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1.
Definition and Background Regarding Private School Choice
From social issues to taxation, there tends to be a defined political left and right. That is,
there is often clear demarcation between Democrats and Republicans stances. When it comes to
education policy, however, this is increasingly not the case. This is especially true in regards to
private school choice. The Washington Times noted, “The school choice movement, long seen as
synonymous with the GOP, is taking on a new looks as inner-city Democrats increasingly
embrace the issue – and some rural Republicans balk, holding up the movement’s momentum in
some states” (Sherfinski 2014).
In this paper, we (1) define private school choice and discuss its prevalence and history in
the U.S., (2) describe the empirical reality regarding the racial and political divide over vouchers,
(3) explain the logic behind why certain groups have taken their official position on private
school choice, and (4) offer some general conclusions about the logic and future of political
support of and opposition to private school choice.
Private school choice is an umbrella term for any government program that provides
resources to qualified families that allow them to attend the private school of their choosing. It
includes “town tuitioning” initiatives, government-financed school voucher programs, tax-creditfinanced scholarship programs, and special types of education (a.k.a. “empowerment”) savings
accounts. It does not include personal tax deductions that parents in some states receive as a
partial reimbursement for paying their own child’s private school tuition.
The first private school choice programs were established in Maine and Vermont in 1869
and 1870, respectively. Called “town tuitioning”, these initiatives are limited to areas that lack
public high schools, providing tuition vouchers that can be used to attend any non-religious
private school in the country, though most participating students attend Vermont private schools.
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The two town tuitioning private school choice programs have operated continuously for over 140
years and currently serve about 7,500 students.
School voucher programs permit parents to enroll their child in a participating private
school of their choosing with the support of government funds that often are accepted as the full
cost of educating the child. The first school voucher program was established in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, in 1990. Currently, 21 school voucher programs operate in 11 states and DC, serving
124,835 students.
Tax-credit scholarship programs are similar to voucher programs except that they are
funded indirectly by providing individuals and corporations with a reduction in their tax liability
in exchange for charitable contributions to nonprofit organizations that subsequently issue
voucher-type scholarships to qualified children. The state tax credit that individuals and/or
corporations receive varies in value from 50 to 100 percent, depending on the state. Moreover,
the size of any specific contribution and the total pool of contributions in a given program is
typically capped. The key feature of tax credit scholarship programs that distinguishes them from
a simple personal tax credit or deduction for private school tuition is that the party that
contributes the donation is not the party that exercises school choice. The first tax-credit
scholarship program was launched in Florida in 1999. Currently, 18 such programs exist in 14
states, serving 190,932 students.
Education savings accounts are the newest form of private school choice. They are the
educational version of flexible spending accounts commonly found in the medical field or to
cover college costs. The government assigns to a spending account a portion of the amount of
money they would otherwise expend on a given child’s K-12 education in a year. Parents can
then use those funds for a variety of qualified educational expenses for the child, including but
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not limited to private school tuition. The first ESA program was established in Arizona in 2011.
It currently serves 731 students. The only other ESA is the newly enacted program in Florida.
Throughout this paper we will use the term “private school choice” to refer to this entire
collection of essentially similar programs, totaling 43 programs in 20 states plus DC that
collectively enroll 316,498 students.
With the relatively low number of students, readers may wonder why we would bother to
study private school choice programs. A few years ago, several prominent pundits famously
declared the death of school vouchers as an education reform in the U.S. In 2008, Sol Stern of
the conservative Manhattan Institute observed that the voucher movement had “hit a wall” and
predicted it would soon be consigned to the scrapheap of history (Stern 2008). That same year,
Greg Anrig of the liberal Century Foundation published an op-ed in which he asked the
rhetorical question “How did one of the conservative policy world’s most cherished causes
crumble so quickly?” (Anrig 2008) Subsequent years produced similar declarations of the death
of school vouchers from conservative-turned-liberal Diane Ravitch (e.g. Richards 2011; Ravitch
2011). These prominent social commentators from both the left and right seemed only to agree
about one thing: school vouchers were a thing of the past.
Not only was the movement to enact private school choice programs not dead in 2008-09,
it wasn’t even sick. In 2008 and 2009, four new voucher and tax-credit programs were enacted in
Georgia, Louisiana, Arizona, and Indiana. The five years from 2005 to 2009, when the private
school choice movement was supposedly on the wane, saw a doubling in the number of such
programs in the U.S., a rate-of-gain fairly typical since the third private school choice program
was established in Milwaukee in 1990 (Figure 1). Just four years into our current 5-year
policymaking period, we see a typically high rate-of-gain of 115 percent in the number of private
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school choice programs, with most of them specifically in the form of school vouchers. Rumors
of the death of school vouchers and private school choice have been greatly exaggerated.
Moreover, private school choice programs are concentrated in states with large minority
populations, such as those in the South and the industrial Midwest (Figure 2). The Northwest and
West Coast are the only areas of the country without private school choice programs. Most of
the states with multiple programs, such as Florida and Ohio each with 4 and Louisiana and
Oklahoma each with 3, have at least one initiative targeted to low-income students and at least
one focused on students with disabilities.
Figure 1. Private School Choice Programs in the U.S., 1869-2014
Sources: Compiled from Alliance for School Choice 2014; supplemented by Friedman Foundation for Educational
Choice 2014
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Figure 2. U.S. States with Private School Choice Programs, 2014
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2.
Political Support for School Choice
Image also does not comport with reality regarding political support for private school
choice. A common view is that private school choice is an effort by Republicans to “privatize”
public education (e.g. Lubienski & Lubienski 2014; Smith & Meier 1995). First, properly
understood, private school choice is an exercise in government outsourcing not privatization
(Mills, Wolf & Greene 2014; Cassell 2003; Moore 2002). Second, many of the most outspoken
and influential supporters of private school choice have been Democrats, including former
Democrat candidate for Vice-President Joe Lieberman, Democrat Senators Corey Booker, Diane
Feinstein, Mark Warner, and Bill Nelson, and a large number of Democrat state and local
officials (most of whom are African American or Latino).
Support for vouchers does tend to be higher among Republicans (Gokcekus, Phillips, and
Tower 2004; Kenny 2005). However, where efforts to enact private school choice have failed at
the last minute, as they did in Illinois in 2009 and Tennessee in 2014, it has often been due to a
surprising number of “no” votes by moderate Republican legislators. At the policymaking level,
the factions surrounding private school choice generally pit ideological Republicans who support
free markets (e.g. Senator Rand Paul) and ideological Democrats who advocate social justice
(e.g. Senator Corey Booker) against establishment Democrats (e.g. Senator Dick Durbin) and
moderate and mostly rural Republicans.
One possible reason for opposition to private school choice programs by Democrats is the
teachers unions. Teachers unions contribute the most money of any interest group to candidates
for election in the U.S. As Terry Moe writes, “The [teachers] unions are the biggest of the big
contributors for the nation as a whole, besting interest groups of all types—but they are also the
only group that is intensely focused on education.” (Moe 2011, p. 282) The teachers unions
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have given between 88 and 99 percent of their campaign contributions to Democrats in national
races and 80 to 90 percent of their donations to Democrats in state races (Moe 2011, pp. 282283).
The top policy issue for the National Education Association (NEA) and the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT) is stopping the spread of private school choice. It is the formal
position of the AFT to oppose all forms of private school choice. In her address at the 2014
national convention, AFT president Randi Weingarten (2014) lambasted school choice
supporters as “privatizers.” The AFT has slowly warmed to public charter schools, but only if
they can be unionized. The NEA explicitly opposes both private school choice and public school
choice through charters (National Education Association 2014). Any Democrat politician who
supports private school choice in spite of union opposition is turning her back on the largest
single funder of political campaigns in the country.
Why would any elected politician support private school choice, given teachers union
opposition? One possible reason is growing public support for private school choice over time
and with key constituencies. The most comprehensive recent polling on the subject was
conducted by Braun & Associates for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, a
philanthropy that supports private school choice. Based on a telephone poll of a national sample
of over 1000 adults, 40 percent replied that they would most prefer to send their children to a
private school, compared to 37 percent who said a traditional public school, 11 percent who said
a homeschool, and 10 percent who responded with a public charter school (DiPerna 2014, p. 12).
These statements regarding respondents’ preferred types of school for their children contrast with
actual enrollment patterns, as only 9 percent of K-12 students attend private schools, 4 percent
attend public charter schools, an estimated 4 percent are homeschooled, and 83 percent attend
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traditional public schools (National Center for Education Statistics 2014; National Center for
Education Statistics 2011).
The Friedman Foundation survey found that 63 percent of respondents support private
school vouchers, while 33 percent oppose them (DiPerna 2014, p. 14). As DiPerna reports, “The
demographic groups having the highest positive margins and most likely to favor school
vouchers are school parents (+42 points), Southerners (+36 points), Republicans (+42 points),
young voters (+44 points), low-income earners (+47 points), African Americans (+50 points),
and Latinos (+47 points)” (DiPerna 2014, p. 14). These political constituencies that are
especially supportive of private school choice through vouchers includes some that are central to
the Republican party (Republicans and Southerners) but also many that are core Democrat
constituencies (young voters, low-income earners, African Americans, and Latinos). Thus, the
Friedman Foundation poll suggests that the political dynamics of private school choice pits
teacher union opposition against popular support, especially among political constituencies that
will be more influential in the future such as young people and minorities.
The Friedman survey reported similar levels of support for school vouchers and tax-credit
scholarships but slightly lower, but still a majority, support for education savings accounts as a
specific form of private school choice.
Since the survey cited above was sponsored by an advocacy group, we might reasonably
question the validity and reliability of its findings. Several other organizations have conducted
national surveys of public opinion over the past few decades and the results they support can
vary significantly based on the precise wording of the question. Voucher support/opposition
questions have been framed in three different ways over the years: (1) comprehensive
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definitional, (2) choice-focused, and (3) expense-focused. The results from the Friedman survey
were from a voucher question that used the first frame, comprehensive definitional:
A school voucher system allows parents the option of sending their child to the
school of their choice, whether that school is public or private, including both
religious and non-religious schools. If this policy were adopted, tax dollars
currently allocated to a school district would be allocated to parents in the form of
a school voucher to pay partial or full tuition for their child’s school. In general,
do you favor or oppose a school voucher system? (DiPerna 2014, p. 43)
It describes the nature and purpose of the program as well as, specifically, how it is
funded – with tax dollars that otherwise would be spent on the student in public school.
Earlier surveys on school voucher support/opposition generally used choicefocused question framing, under the principle that expanding parental choice into the
private school sector is the central purpose of school vouchers. The Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies polled a national sample of African Americans about
education issues, including school vouchers, from 1996 to 2009. The Joint Center
consistently used a choice-framed voucher question that asked if respondents would
support or oppose a government-funded program to allow parents to choose any type of
school for their child, public, private or parochial.1 In the first year of the survey, in
1996, support for vouchers was 48 percent and opposition was 44 percent. In the final
year of the survey, in 2008, support had risen to 63 percent and opposition to 29 percent.
The survey director noted that the apparent upsurge in support for school vouchers in the
final survey masked great variability in the survey responses over the years that were
In the early years of school vouchers, they were broadly designed to allow participants to take their voucher to a
public school of their choice, but so few public schools agreed to participate that the provision has been dropped
from most voucher initiatives.
1
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closely tied to the opinions of African Americans about the quality of their public
schools. In 2008, African Americans evaluated their public schools poorly and
simultaneously registered their highest levels of support for private school choice through
vouchers (Bositis 2009). In a poll recently reported in Education Next, researchers
confirmed the results from the Joint Center polls, as support for a very ambitious
universal school voucher program increased from 43 percent to 56 when respondents
were first informed about the national ranking of their local public school system and to
62 percent for respondents whose local public school was in the lower half of that
performance distribution (Henderson, Howell & Peterson 2014, p. 31).
The Gallup poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, sponsored
by the public school organization Phi Delta Kappan, famously switched the framing of
their main voucher support/opposition question during their long history of polling on
that question. Starting in the 1970s, Gallup surveyed national samples of adults using a
voucher question with choice-focused framing similar to that used by the Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies. Support for school vouchers in the Gallop poll
eventually eclipsed 50 percent in 1991, but the next poll, in 1993, changed the frame of
the voucher question to one that ended with the phrase “at public expense” (Moe 2002).
The last few words of a survey question provide the takeaway impression to respondents,
and subsequent experimental research by Gallup revealed that the switch from the choicefocused frame to the expense-focused frame for the voucher question reduced support for
vouchers by an average of 14 percent among respondents (Moe 2002). Gallup still uses
the expense-focused framed question in its surveys for PDK, and those polls continually
report support levels in the 40s, while polls that use the comprehensive definitional and
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choice-focused frames tend to report support levels in excess of 60 percent and
consistently higher for younger respondents, parents of school-age children, low-income
adults, and minorities.
Public opinion polling indicates that support for private school choice through
mechanisms such as school vouchers is trending above 50 percent except in polls that use
negative-framed questions or rely on uninformed respondents. Regardless of question framing,
support for private school choice consistently registers at higher levels for African Americans
and Latinos than it does for white respondents, and for lower-income than for higher-income
respondents. These polls simply show that disadvantaged Americans tend to support private
school choice at higher levels than those with relative advantages. They don’t reveal why that
might be the case, though the Joint Center and Education Next polls hint that the quality of
public schools plays a role.
3.
The Logic of The School Choice Dilemma
At first blush, private school choice seems to create strange bedfellows, with prominent
Democrats and prominent Republicans to be found on both sides of the issue. When examined
within an appropriate theoretical framework, however, there are compelling reasons for various
political factions to support or oppose school choice. In this section, the game theory Prisoner’s
Dilemma is utilized to develop such a framework. Just as the Prisoner’s Dilemma explains why
rational individuals may make a sub-optimal decision, this new model – The School Choice
Dilemma – illustrates why various Democratic and Republican factions may rationally choose to
support or oppose private school choice programs.
Before articulating the school choice dilemma model, it is important to have an
understanding of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. A Prisoner’s Dilemma game helps to explain
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why rational individuals may choose not to cooperate when there are obvious advantages to
cooperation. The generic outline of this model is presented in Table 1. As the story goes, imagine
that two criminals get caught and are being held separately in isolation. The police do not have
enough evidence to convict the criminals of the crime, but could get a conviction on some lesser
charges. Knowing this, the police offer each of the prisoners a deal. This creates the dilemma. If
the prisoner’s both stay silent, they will both be convicted on the lesser charge. If one testifies
against the other, he gets no punishment, while his partner in crime gets a more severe
punishment than he otherwise would have gotten. If, however, both choose to testify against each
other then they each get a moderate punishment, larger than the one they would have received if
they successfully implemented a conspiracy of silence but smaller than the one they would have
received if they kept quiet while their accomplice turned states evidence. Each prisoner does not
know what choice their counterpart will make.
Table 1. Basic Prisoner’s Dilemma Game
Prisoner A stays silent (cooperates)
Prisoner A betrays (defects)
Prisoner B stays silent
Prisoner B betrays
(cooperates)
(defects)
Each serves 1 year
Prisoner A: goes free
Prisoner B: 3 years
Prisoner A: 3 years
Prisoner B: goes free
Each serves 2 years
Although the combined sentence of both prisoners is the shortest if the two prisoners
cooperate and do not testify against each other, choosing to defect is the dominant strategy in the
standard finite Prisoner’s Dilemma game (Andreoni & Miller 1993). If Prisoner A chooses to
defect, he will receive the best outcome regardless of what the other prisoner chooses. If Prisoner
B chooses to cooperate, Prisoner A goes free and if Prisoner B chooses to defect, Prisoner A gets
a 2-year sentence. Prisoner A’s sentence could not be improved by choosing to cooperate in
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either circumstance. This is known as a Nash equilibrium, a stable state where a player cannot
improve their outcome unilaterally.
3.1
Applying the Prisoner’s Dilemma to School Choice
Though it is not a perfect fit, there is much about the Prisoner’s Dilemma that reflects the
context parents face when making schooling decisions. Imagine there are two students. Each of
these students is given the opportunity to cooperate and be assigned to a neighborhood public
school or to defect and choose the school they will attend. Unlike the prisoners, whose choices
resulted in a prison sentence of a given length, the student’s choices will result in them receiving
some level of utility from their decision. Utility is simply a measure of satisfaction. In this case,
utility is a measurement of the overall value of the educational experience that the student will
receive.
It could be rationally argued that the optimal outcome for both students is to cooperate
and be assigned to a neighborhood public school (Table 2). This utopian system would result in a
fair and equitable dispersion of students and resources to schools. Once again, however, the
dominant strategy for an individual student is to defect and express school choice, a Nash
equilibrium. This will result in the best outcome for the student regardless of what the other
student chooses. That is, if you do not know what the other student is going to do, it makes sense
to express choice yourself. If you do not choose your school, and the other student does, then you
will be left behind.
There are, of course, obvious difficulties in applying the Prisoner’s Dilemma directly to
school choice. For starters, educational decisions are not made by just two individuals. In most
urban school districts, they are made by tens of thousands of students and their parents. If one
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student chooses to leave their assigned public school it may not make much difference. If many
do, however, it could have a significant impact on the quality of education a student receives.
Table 2. Basic School Choice Dilemma Game
Student B Stays in Assigned
School
(cooperates)
Student A Stays in Assigned
School
Utility = 10 for each student
Student A Expresses School
Utility = 15 for Student A
Choice (defects)
Utility = 2 for Student B
Student B Expresses School Choice
(defects)
Utility = 2 for Student A
Utility = 15 for Student B
Utility = 5 for each student
Another obstacle to applying the Prisoner’s Dilemma directly to school choice is the
measured outcome. Unlike a prison sentence, utility received is multi-faceted. It may take into
account the quality of education a student receives, the proximity of the school to the student’s
home, and a variety of other factors.
Both of these may make it difficult to conceptually understand the dilemma framework in
school choice. Perhaps a real world example may help. Elizabeth and her family moved to St.
Louis a few years ago from Tennessee. She is an ardent supporter of public education, but was
repeatedly told that she should not enroll her children in St. Louis Public Schools. She could
have attempted to band together with other parents to turn her local school around. If all the
parents did so, this may have yielded an optimal situation for all students – a quality school in
their own neighborhood. If, however, some defected and chose to enroll their children in higherperforming schools elsewhere, they would have benefited to the detriment of the students who
stayed behind. Elizabeth and her husband took the advice they had been given and enrolled their
child in a tony private school.
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This true story highlights another important difference between the Prisoner’s Dilemma
and the School Choice Dilemma – asymmetry. The reason that Elizabeth’s local public school
was low-performing was, in part, because the wealthier families expressed choice while the lowincome students were not able to do so. This left a concentration of low-income students who did
not have the financial resources or the information to express school choice. Returning to the
prisoner’s dilemma mindset, this would be akin to one of the prisoner’s paying for a high profile
lawyer who could get the plea deal, while the other prisoner receives a public defender who is
not able to procure a similar deal. This calls for a departure from the direct application of the
Prisoner’s Dilemma framework.
3.2
The School Choice Dilemma
Next, we adapt the basic school choice dilemma framework to better reflect the real
world of disparate resources. This time, imagine there are two groups of students. The first group
of students comes from an advantaged background – middle and upper class families. These
students are raised in homes that have access to educational materials and they undertake
enriching activities like camps and educational trips. Conversely, the second group of
disadvantaged students does not have these resources. They are growing up in poverty, have
parents with little educational experience, and have few opportunities to develop academically
outside of school.
Because of the various factors that make these two groups different, the basic quality of
education varies between the two groups. In the school choice dilemma model, the base quality
of education is denoted as “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” for each respective group (Table
3). Each of these groups of students, advantaged and disadvantaged, has the opportunity to be
assigned to a school or to choose their school. Depending on their choice and the choice of the
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other group of students, the two groups will be impacted in different ways. These impacts will
build upon the base level of education that the group will receive.
Table 3. The School Choice Dilemma for Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students
Disadvantaged Student Stays in
Assigned School (cooperates)
Disadvantaged Student Expresses
School Choice (defects)
Advantaged Student Stays in
Advantaged Student Expresses
Assigned School
School Choice
(cooperates)
(defects)
Disadvantaged + B
Advantaged – H
Disadvantaged
Advantaged + S
(box 1 – Utopia, both cooperate)
(box 2 – Status Quo, advantaged can
defect)
Disadvantaged + S + B
Advantaged – H
Disadvantaged + S + B
Advantaged + S – H
(box 3 – Targeted Vouchers,
disadvantaged can defect)
(box 4 – Universal Vouchers, both can
defect)
If both students are assigned to their neighborhood public school it will result in the
mixing of advantaged and disadvantaged students. Unlike the previous models, the two groups
do not receive the same benefit when they choose to cooperate. In this system, the disadvantaged
students receive some positive peer-effects from mixing with the more advantaged peer group.
This benefit is noted as “B” in the table. Advantaged students, on the other hand, do not benefit
academically from mixing with lower performing peer-group members. Rather, they may be
harmed by having a peer group that is worse off, on average, than they are themselves. This is
represented by “H.”
If the students express choice, they get some form of benefit from school choice, “S.”
This benefit could be the competitive effects of choice and competition or it could be as simple
as choosing a school that more closely aligns to the student’s needs. This assumption seems
reasonable, since a large body of evidence dating back to the 1980s has shown positive benefits
for choice schools. Examining test score data for roughly 50,000 students, Coleman, Kilgore, and
Hoffer (1981) found that students in private schools outperformed their peers in public schools,
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even when demographics were controlled for. More recently, experimental analyses have
continued to suggest that private school choice programs tend to improve educational outcomes
for students (e.g. Howell et al. 2002; Wolf et al. 2013; Cowen et al. 2013), including increased
graduation rates. Parents also tend to be more satisfied when they choose their child’s school
(Howell & Peterson 2002; Kisida & Wolf forthcoming). For these reasons, it seems appropriate
to assign a positive value to “S.”
If only advantaged students express school choice, they get the positive benefit that
choice brings; while disadvantaged students, under those circumstances, receive no benefit from
choice or from mixing with the higher-performing peer-group that has defected.
Conversely, if the disadvantaged students express choice, but the advantaged students do
not, they receive the positive benefit from school choice. If they choose to attend schools with
high concentrations of advantaged students, they may also receive the benefit from an improved
peer-group. On the other hand, the advantaged students would have a lower-performing peergroup.
Finally, if both groups express choice they would each receive the benefit that comes
from expressing choice. We would also expect this system to lead to greater integration among
advantaged and disadvantaged students. Therefore, the groups would also receive any benefits or
harm as a result of changes in peer groups.
In the Prisoner’s Dilemma game and the basic School Choice Dilemma model, it was
easy to determine the optimal outcome. In this applied version, however, the winning strategy
becomes more opaque. The values associated with the harm and benefits of changing peer
groups and expressing choice can have a significant impact in determining which of the four
outcomes is optimal for overall student success. Examining the likely content of S, B, and H
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would be a natural next step for this project. If we assume a positive benefit from choice, as we
do, then choice for both groups would result in the optimal outcome. For the individual,
expressing school choice is also Nash equilibrium. That is, the utility they receive from their
school could not be improved unilaterally.
4.
Application of the School Choice Dilemma to the Political Context
The School Choice Dilemma framework helps explain how different groups of students may
benefit or be harmed by school choice. It also helps explain the strange bedfellows that
sometimes arise in the school choice arena. In this sub-section, the School Choice Dilemma is
used to explain why establishment Democrats, establishment Republicans, social justice
Democrats, and free-market Republicans may rationally choose to support or oppose school
choice programs. We reach these conclusions based on how each group of individuals explains
their support or opposition to school choice programs.
4.1
Establishment Democrats
Establishment Democrats typically oppose school choice. They may oppose choice
simply for political reasons. After all, teachers unions are Democratic stalwarts and are opposed
to school choice programs. It may also be the case that Establishment Democrats honestly
believe, as union officials claim, that school choice harms the educational opportunities of
students.
For example, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
has historically opposed private school vouchers. In 2011, the NAACP vigorously opposed the
expansion of the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a private school voucher
program. In a press release (2011), the group stated:
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The NAACP has consistently supported investments in our public schools that will
benefit all students, not just potentially a few. School vouchers do not offer a collective
benefit. Vouchers take critical resources away from our neighborhood public schools, the
very schools that are attended by the vast majority of African American students. (p. 1)
Despite the fact that vouchers poll well among Hispanics, the National Council of La
Raza, the largest national Hispanic civil rights organization, has similarly expressed concerns
about private school voucher programs (Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development 2001).
With vocal opposition to private school choice programs from the NAACP, La Raza, and
teachers unions, establishment Democrats see no positive gains, educationally or politically,
through school choice. Therefore, they are apt to defend box 1 of the school choice dilemma,
where all students are assigned to their neighborhood public school, in a sense “forced to
cooperate”.
Establishment Democrats might defend box 1 as a policy ideal, but that option is
unattainable in practice. We call this system “utopia” because it assumes that assigning students
to schools will lead to an equitable dispersion of students and resources. The closest our country
ever came to mandating that all students attend assigned public schools was in Oregon, in the
early 20th Century, at the height of the Progressive Movement, when the state banned private
schooling. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down that state law as a violation of the freedoms of
religion and assembly in a unanimous ruling in Pierce versus Society of Sisters (1925). Not only
are establishment Democrats unable, constitutionally, to force society into eschewing all private
school choice, but they also can’t seem to stop doing it themselves. A 2002 study by the Jennifer
Garrett of Heritage Foundation found that 49 of 51 Democrats in the U.S. House of
21
Representatives had children in private school – 96 percent -- voted against legislation that
would make private schooling more accessible to disadvantaged students. For Republicans in the
House with children in private schools, only 20 out of 80 (25 percent) voted against the initiative
(Garrett 2002). Establishment Democrats tend to preach box 1 in the School Choice Dilemma
but actually live their lives in box 2.
4.2
Establishment Republicans
The political base for the Republican party is often seen as more affluent individuals. The
suburbs are their haven. Over the years, middle and upper-class families have moved to the
suburbs, exercising “school choice by mortgage” (Wolf 2005). They have increased property
values and have built relatively good public school systems that are exclusive in that students
outside of their neighborhood assignment or “catchment” area generally are prohibited from
attending such schools. Wealthy Republicans have expressed school choice through the
mortgage in their homes and they have separated themselves from the low-performing urban
school systems, which tend to be heavily enrolled with disadvantaged minority students. Choice
amongst wealthier families, but not among more disadvantaged individuals is the status quo in
the American educational system, represented by box 2 on the School Choice Dilemma Table 3.
Like their counterparts in the Democratic party, establishment Republicans do not wish to
upset the apple cart. They oppose school choice programs because their constituency has already
benefited from expressing choice. Expanded school choice programs may result in greater
numbers of low-income students entering the schools of advantaged families. Establishment
Republicans fear this would lower the quality of schools for their Republican base – they fear the
magnitude of the “H” in the School Choice Dilemma.
22
Rural Republicans also fall into this category, but for different reasons. Rural politicians
have little reason to fear an influx of low-income students from other districts. However, they
have ample reason to fear the power of the local public school superintendent. In many rural
communities, public schools are the largest employer and superintendents are among the most
influential individuals. By and large, superintendents, even rural ones, walk lock-step in
opposition to private school choice. Since rural lawmakers sense that few constituents would
benefit from school choice, there really appears to be no strong incentive to support a private
school choice program.
4.3
Social Justice Democrats
When President Obama embraced charter schools, it was a significant departure from the
establishment politics (Maranto & McShane 2012). He and a growing number of social justice
Democrats have championed the charter model because they believe charter schools may be able
to improve educational options for disadvantaged minorities. While many social justice
Democrats extend their support for parental school choice to private schools (e.g. Brighouse
2000, Viteritti 1999) President Obama has thus far refused to follow their lead, though he did
agree to the reauthorization and expansion of the District of Columbia school voucher program
under pressure from free-market Republicans, other social justice Democrats, and participating
families (Stewart and Wolf 2014).
Social justice Democrats tend to be from urban communities. Their constituents are the
ones most effected by the chronically failing urban school districts and are disproportionately
African American and Latino. Like the Establishment Democrats, who draw support from civil
rights groups such as the NAACP and La Raza, social justice democrats also draw support from
groups that represent the interests of minorities. The Black Alliance for Educational Options
23
(BAEO) and the Citizen’s Commission on Civil Rights see school choice programs as a way to
expand opportunities for disadvantaged black youth. Similarly, the Hispanic Council for Reform
and Educational Options (Hispanic CREO) and Wisconsin’s Hispanics for School Choice, see
choice programs as a method of empowering parents to become advocates for their children.
These groups are increasingly being joined in support of school choice programs by minority
celebrities, such as WNBA star Lisa Leslie and NFL Hall of Famer Dion Sanders.
Social justice Democrats typically champion targeted or means-tested private school
choice programs (box 3). These programs offer support to families that fall below a specified
income level. Examples of this include the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program
and the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. By supporting school choice programs that
distinctively serve their community (box 3), social justice Democrats are appealing to their core
supporters.
4.4
Free-Market Republicans
Free-market Republicans are the most natural supporters of school choice; not necessarily
because they benefit politically, but because they have an ideological view that supports choice
and competition as forces for individual and societal improvement. They believe school choice
will promote a system that is more cost-effective because schools are forced to compete for
students and therefore allocate their resources in ways that are maximally productive. These
individuals also believe that school choice increases individual liberty by allowing individuals to
choose the school that best aligns to their values. For all of these reasons, it is rational for freemarket Republicans to support universal school choice programs (box 4).
There is currently no educational system that perfectly meets the definition of a universal
voucher system, however, Sweden may come closest. Vouchers were introduced in Sweden in
24
1992 and all students are eligible to participate (Sandström and Bergström 2005). Sweden’s
system is not a pure market because schools must pledge to not charge more than the allotted
tuition amount. Additionally, Swedish independent schools must accept low performing students.
Each of these limitations to the Swedish education market may be perfectly acceptable to many
free-market Republicans.
Each of our four original political groups – free-market Republicans, establishment
Republicans, establishment Democrats, and social justice Democrats – find a comfortable home
in one of the four boxes of our School Choice Dilemma decision game. Moreover, the match of
political groups to outcome boxes based on the logical expected payouts for key constituencies
closely aligns with the seemingly inexplicable actual pattern of political support for private
school choice.
5.
Discussion and Conclusions
We build upon the Prisoner’s Dilemma game to develop the School Choice Dilemma, a
framework that helps explain two important phenomena. First, it helps explain why individuals
support the idea of school choice for their own children. Even opponents of school choice
programs move to areas where the schools are good, pay for private schools, or otherwise fight to
get their children a high-quality education. If given the opportunity, most rational individuals
would want to choose rather than have their child forcibly assigned to a school.
Second, the School Choice Dilemma helps explain why rational politicians from different
partisan and ideological camps may choose to support or oppose school choice programs. It
becomes clear that school choice is not an issue that primarily pits right versus left, but the two
more ideological wings of the political parties versus the establishment center. The establishment
in both parties have strong political incentives for protecting the status quo.
25
The ideological left and right, social justice Democrats and free-market Republicans, may
have political reasons for supporting school choice. More importantly, they have philosophical
reasons for supporting school choice. Social justice politicians see school choice as a means to
improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students. Free-market individuals see school
choice as a fundamental way to make education more efficient. The battle over private school
choice is likely to continue as an increasing number of states enact and expand such programs.
We shouldn’t be surprised to continue to see different kinds of Democrats and Republicans on
either side of this highly salient political issue.
26
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