Huckabee And Education

I’m pretty sure Milton Friedman first came up with the vouchers idea way back in the ’50s. That’s what I recall from Peter Brimelow’s book, The Worm in the Apple.

As for how they became the end-all, be-all: pretty much any other conservative strategy on education would have to involve at least one of the following: a) an all-out trust-busting attack on the unions (Brimelow calls them the “Teacher Trust”) and collective bargaining; b) a complete rethinking of the subject that takes into account the differences in intellectual ability across the population, i.e. abandoning what Sailer calls the “Yale or Jail” myth and engaging the sort of issues Charles Murray kicked around in his WSJ articles a year ago; and of course, c) restricting low-skilled immigration due to its impact on public schools and academic averages.

(a) is a political battle the Right doesn’t have the strength or stomach for. (b) is a concept the mainstream Right can’t handle intellectually or fortitudinous (even without bringing race into it). And (c)…well, you know…both the above reasons plus all the other things motivating mass immigration. So with these real strategies out of the way that leaves movement conservatives with stuff like vouchers, merit pay, and punishing schools that’s don’t pass more students…meager stuff at best, if not counterproductive. But vouchers are probably the best of these, and they appeal viscerally to the political class (I mean, they’re just scholarships–who could be against scholarships?), so they got elevated to be-all end-all status.

About Huckabee though: The only reason I’ve heard from his team for his concern about vouchers sounded pretty sensible (if it was true), something about them not covering the private school’s whole tuition and thus putting a new burden on the school. I think they also trotted out the valid conservative concern that anything tying the private institutions to the fed govt is trouble. I don’t know how accurate all this is, he misrepresented the whole illegal-alien-college-tuition thing after all, but I’ve never heard a “bad” reason for his objection to vouchers, like that it steals precious public funds or whatever. His general position on them (as of now) is pro.

That said, he did get the New Hampshire NEA endorsement. That’s bad! Even if he snowed them on vouchers, no conservative should be able to give a successful speech to them, as Huckabee did. And his regular spiel on education is a lot of gobbeldygook about stimulating the right brain along with the left brain. His thinking seems to be that kids arent learning what they should at math and reading because they’re bored, so they must be entertained with music so that they will get down to work and master…math and reading. It sounds expensive and pointless.

Milton Friedman’s great and all, but he really was a libertarian. He just wasn’t thinking in terms of a school’s quality having much to do with its students, and therefore of the uncomfortable question of whether voters who have already taken the trouble and cost of choosing their homes with good schools in mind really want to, well, socially engineer those schools. That’s not a comfortable idea for anybody, certainly pygmy Friedmans like Kemp aren’t going to go there.

That said, the unions spare no expense trying to defeat any voucher push. That gives the GOP litmus-testers the impression that referendums on them aren’t accurate snapshots of public opinion, but rather distorted by all that nefarious union advertising. That could be right…but I’d want to see how it compares to similar battles, like the anti-race-preference initiatives that always run into massive establishment resistance and yet manage to pass smoothly.

Look at the bright side, Dan. At least Ms. Elwell isn’t endorsing Giuliani.

Foreign policy aside, this love affair with school vouchers is one of the big reasons my respect for “movement conservatives” has plummeted in recent years. As a commenter above enumerated, much of the conservative support for vouchers is driven by cynicism and intellectual laziness.

What, exactly, is a voucher? It’s a government handout, pure and simple. Far from “privatizing” public education, the far more likely consequence is the socialization of private education. The government’s power to subsidize is part of the government’s power to control. If you seek to water-down private religious education in the US, a federal voucher program is the perfect first step. Any conservative with an ounce of intellectual honesty can see that.

This is yet another example of something you have commented on elsewhere, Dan: the widening disconnect between conservative (or rather neoconservative) elites and traditional Republican voters.

Remember Proposition 38, which was on the ballot in California in 2000? If it had been approved by the voters, it would have provided a $4,000 “scholarship” (don’t use the word “voucher”!!!) per year for any K through 12 student to use at a private school.

I wrote a paper about this a few years ago, and I still have the polling data. The proposition’s landslide defeat cannot be laid solely at the doorstep of liberals in San Francisco and Berkley. Some of the more lopsided opposition came from traditional Republican counties. Examples: Ventura County voted 69-31 percent against it. Inyo County, one of the most rural counties in the state, voted 68-32% against it. Orange County was 64 to 36% opposed. (Bush won all these counties in 2004.) Apparently, Republican voters know something about vouchers that the neocon elites do not.

A big part of the problem is that too many “conservative” activists have have literally stopped thinking. All they do is react. “Look at this! Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barbra Streisand and the NEA don’t like vouchers. So vouchers must be a great idea!” That is pretty much the sum and substance of the “conservative” pro-voucher position. One of the reasons Rudy Giuliani makes me gag is the way he panders to this impulse with abandon and without even a hint of shame.

Have conservatives “stopped thinking” because of their support of vouchers? Perhaps so, though that simplistic interpretation fails to account for the desperation pervading the lives of so many of us who are scrambling to homeschool or educate privately while still paying an enormous tax bill to support a failing, corrupt, dysfunctional public education system.

I’d prefer some other form of relief, because I realize that vouchers aren’t a magic bullet. In fact, I’m well aware of all the issues cited above. But when we’re flat on our backs with a monopoly’s foot on our necks, we look for whatever help we can get.

Ron Paul for President!