This morning, John McCain spoke at the NAACP Convention in Cincinnati about his plans for education and the economy. Most of it was standard Republican boilerplate - lower taxes ("for whom?" is an inconvenient question), smaller government (except the Pentagon) - stuff he probably recites in his sleep. But here's one particular bit of Republican boilerplate that really irked me:

In Washington, D.C., the Opportunity Scholarship program serves more than 1,900 boys and girls from families with an average income of 23,000 dollars a year. And more than 7,000 more families have applied for that program. What they all have in common is the desire to get their kids into a better school.

Democrats in Congress, including my opponent, oppose the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. In remarks to the American Federation of Teachers last weekend, Senator Obama dismissed public support for private school vouchers for low-income Americans as, "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice." All of that went over well with the teachers union, but where does it leave families and their children who are stuck in failing schools?

Wait, wait, wait, hold up, Mac. I understand that election season is, by definition, oversimplification season, and if I complained about every instance of blaming the trial lawyers or the teachers' unions or the homosexuals, I'd probably break this blog. But the issue of school vouchers is particularly near and dear to my heart, because I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hometown of the voucher movement. I received the first fifteen years of my formal education in the Milwaukee Public Schools, and I'm pretty well aware of the system's problems - low test scores, class sizes well beyond capacity, and shrinking budgets. (For one of the best illustrations of our budget problems, use the bathroom in an MPS school. After Tuesday or Wednesday, finding toilet paper is a gamble; in some bathrooms, you will find Boraxo, a powdered soap product so old that Ronald Reagan made an ad for it.) It seems to me that the sensible thing to do about those problems is to fix the public school system, not airlift students out of it. But Milwaukee's voucher program, which started in 1990 - about the same time that I was throwing a fit because Ethan Reik got to sit on the "E" in our kindergarten letter circle - took the latter approach, and like other voucher programs, it has had less than a stunning record of success. Which means that there are plenty of reasons, other than McCain's fictitious union-centered greed, to oppose school vouchers.

There are a number of fundamental issues with the concept of voucher programs - privatizating public goods, violating the separation of church and state, and so forth - but the one I want to deal with is that vouchers impose the classical economic paradigm of rational choice on a situation that doesn't fit that model. Anyone who's taken Ec 10 will be familiar with the model of the rational consumer, who carefully considers the costs and benefits of every available option before choosing the best one, which is good for the consumer and good for the rest of us, too. This may be sensible in a situation like buying a cell phone - at any rate, I presume that's why there are so damn many ads for models I can't afford. But the rational-choice paradigm works quite differently when parents are picking a school for their child. Part of this, to be sure, is the fault of individual parents who enroll their children indifferently in voucher programs, just as they enroll them in public schools. But a more fundamental part of the problem is that there isn't much information available on which parents could base a rational decision. MPS publishes test score and demographic information for every school it operates; there is no equivalent source of information for choice schools, making it impossible to make a rational economic choice. Consequently, the benefit of a free-market approach - that parents, by voting with their voucher dollars, will ensure that only the best schools survive - simply doesn't happen.

Nonetheless, parents keep on enrolling in the voucher program, perhaps on the assumption that private schools are uniformly better. (Evidence from the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, which McCain cited as an example of what he'd like to do, suggests this might be the case: while kids in the program don't test better or feel more positively about their schools than kids in the public schools, parents do think that choice schools are better and safer than public schools.) We tend to picture a private school as a well-funded institution with talented teachers, motivated students, and a strong college-prep curriculum - places like Chapin or Exeter or Horace Mann (although if they aren't getting kids into Harvard, I guess they're just failing completely). But this isn't what parents actually get when they enroll in voucher programs. The maximum subsidy for the 2008-09 school year in Wisconsin is $6,607 - a sizable chunk of money, to be sure, but that's less than half of the tuition for a year of kindergarten at the University School of Milwaukee, one of the best private schools in the state. Eligibility is restricted to families with incomes below 220% of the federal poverty level, which means that vouchers are not enough to help those families make up the gap between their income and tuition at a really good private school.

Instead, students on vouchers find themselves at poorly regulated schools with an astounding range of quality. The horror stories include Mandella School of Science and Math, where the principal claimed voucher payments for students who weren't enrolled and bought himself two Mercedes-Benzes, and Alex's Academics of Excellence (you read that right), which was founded by a convicted rapist and evicted from two different locations. Because the Wisconsin voucher law has very weak accountability provisions, these violations were detected by journalists, not the state, and it took much longer than it should have to shut these schools down. I don't mean to say that all voucher schools are like that, but a couple of good success stories does not make public policy, especially when the state doesn't give parents the tools they need to distinguish between the success stories and the horror stories. And if John McCain really wants to fix educational equality in the United States, instead of leaving kids' education up to Alex's Academics of Excellence, he ought to invest in the public schools that serve everyone.