Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Rethinking the selfare state 156
Designing a new system
Given the generally supportive empirical data gleaned from a number of different
jurisdictions on the performance of education vouchers, we now turn to a discussion of
the various subtle design issues that sponsoring governments will need to address if they
are to render voucher programs congruent with the legitimate public concerns that have
traditionally underpinned government’s role in primary and secondary education.
Qualified consumers
One of the first design issues that sponsoring governments will need to address in relation
to a proposed educational voucher scheme is citizen eligibility. One option, favoured by a
number of commentators, is to make voucher programs in education universally
available, and decline to discriminate between different students on the basis of family
income or other characteristics (race, ethnicity, academic performance). Yet, operating
against widespread adoption of this model is the risk that the introduction of a voucher
program will inadvertently but inexorably divert public resources away from low-income
families and to higher-income families who come “out of the woodwork” to take
advantage of the voucher program (meaning that they will seek to capture the value of the
voucher to support their pre-existing enrollment in elite private schools). Unless
accompanied by a significant infusion of additional new resources, the creation of a
universal voucher system may cause reductions in the quality of the education received
by children of low-income families, thereby violating equality values. This problem is
more than speculative. In the Cleveland program, for instance, there were few restrictions
on student eligibility. Consequently, the majority of students who took advantage of the
voucher program were from middle-class families who were committed to receiving
Catholic parochial education. 129
One obvious response to this problem is to target vouchers on a broad class of
similarly situated families. Evidence from other choice-oriented schemes shows that
without targeting of participants, “choosing families were much more likely to be white,
have higher incomes and more educated parents, and be attracted to private schools for
religious reasons.” 130 The targeting of vouchers also reduces the probability of pervasive
cream-skimming. For instance, in the Milwaukee school voucher experiment where only
poor, inner-city students were eligible for voucher assistance very little cream-skimming
occurred. Children who applied for and received vouchers were largely poor,
disadvantaged and suffering in the public system (although their parents had higher than
average education levels). 131 These results suggest that the targeting of the program itself
plays a large role in the possibility of dramatically reducing both cream-skimming and
self-selection of middle- and upper-income students. Witte highlights the difference
between targeted and universal programs in the following terms, while cautioning that
targeted programs can start an educational system down a slippery political slope toward
universality:
[V]ouchers exemplify a subtle politics that uses a social problem to gain
advantages for people well beyond the parameters of that problem; and
proponents do so by understanding and successfully manipulating the