Federal versus State Education Vouchers

Andrew Coulson has a nice piece at Cato on state versus federal education vouchers.   He begins:

President Bush wants to help kids in failing public schools. That's good. He wants to do it by giving them federal vouchers to attend private schools. That's bad.

And the key paragraph is:

But if you study the subsequent 25 centuries of education history, you are driven to an inescapable conclusion: government funding of private schools brings with it government control – and the higher the level of government involved, the more serious the problem.

I am not sure I agree with Coulson that state-level tax credits are better than state-level vouchers; both require the government to define "education"  and thus create the potential for excessive control.  But that is a detail; Coulson's overall message is dead on.

Comments

[Mike Huben]

Coulson is a crank pseudoacademic at CATO. I'm amazed at how credulous libertarians are about such people.

His revisionist history is useful for propaganda purposes, but I don't see that he's published anything peer-reviewed in any credible journal.

As a matter of fact, that's a true mark of cranks and pseudoscientists: publication of a book aimed at a market of ideologues, as opposed to academic peers. Just like creationists. If his ideas are so wonderful, why don't they pass this basic sniff test?

It's easy to find charitable yet critical reviews of his work:

"... Coulson's disappointing tendency to present oversimplified and partially misleading accounts of complex chapters in the history of education in order to support his overall argument..."
http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/0267.shtml

"The monolithic nature of his argument leaves little room for Coulson to expand his analysis beyond a simple "public equals bad and private equals good.""
http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev70.htm

Just reading his article, it's easy to find bogus arguments. A tax credit is just as much government money as a voucher: there is the same opportunity cost to government. And it gives no more protection from government regulation than a voucher: government will insist tax credits are available only for regulated schools the same way it will insist schools that accept vouchers are regulated.

It strikes me that his policy recommendations would be quite regressive: the rich could be credited much more (for expensive schools) than the middle class or the poor. Unlike vouchers or current funding, where the benefits would be more even.

[Chris]

"Coulson is a crank pseudoacademic at CATO. I'm amazed at how credulous libertarians are about such people."

Typical Huben, ad hominem in place of substantive arguments.

[Mike Huben]

Typical Chris, unable to spot the real argument. And of course, if Chris was being scammed by somebody, he'd defend that scammer to the death against ad-hominem assauts until he was broke.