A column on the education page of today's New York Times offers the newspaper's preferred alternative to school vouchers. "What is needed is a different kind of voucher, a housing voucher that helps poor families move to the suburbs, as middle class families do, in search of better school environments," the column says. Vouchers are an inadequate solution to the problem of failing urban public schools, according to the columnist, because "poor children do not generally get better educations at parochial or other neighborhood private schools." The Times column comes out in favor of "equalizing neighborhoods" and favoring a move to "relocate large numbers of poor families to the suburbs."
Some questions. If "poor children do not generally get better educations at parochial or other neighborhood private schools," then why are so many parents of poor children entering lotteries for privately funded scholarships that would allow their children to attend just those schools? Are they not acting in the best interest of their own children?
And does the Times columnist really believe that it is impossible to run a successful school for poor children in a city, that there is something about the air in the suburbs that makes it easier for students to learn? What does the Times have against cities? If the Times likes the suburbs so much, why doesn't it stop lobbying for a tax break on its new headquarters tower near Times Square and pick up and move to the suburbs itself, the way it wants poor parents to do? And why stop at the suburbs? Why not set the poor students up in apartments on New York's Fifth Avenue and send them to the Dalton School?
There are plenty of crummy suburban public schools out there, even in wealthy suburbs, a fact that the Times column conveniently ignores. It's almost enough to make a reader think that the Times' drive in favor of "equalizing neighborhoods" has little to do with the substance of educational policy but is of a piece with its support for higher taxes on the rich. The Times preference is consistently for "equalizing" rather than for liberty. It just genuinely seems to bother the newspaper that some people end up richer than others, that some schools end up better than others. But that is an unavoidable side effect of a system that encourages individual initiative; the alternative is to enforce mediocrity. A school voucher system -- and, by the way, most voucher plans would allow the voucher to be spent at another public school -- would create competition and choice that would encourage excellence. (Though frankly, Smartertimes.com has doubts about the corrosive effect of government money and regulations on the private and parochial schools that would receive the voucher money.) Deporting poor students from cities to monopoly public schools in the suburbs -- a suggestion that the Times columnist is making in all apparent seriousness -- would create no competition and would be a recipe for mediocrity.
Correction Correction: The Times runs a correction today of an error that Smartertimes.com pointed out on Sunday about the name of a Washington think-tank. In the correction, the Times gets the name of the think-tank wrong a second time, this time in a slightly different way. The name of the institution is the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, not, as the Times refers to it in today's correction, the "Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy."