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

Primary and secondary education 165
secondary level are represented by large and powerful unions. Since the vast majority of
teachers at private schools are not unionized, and their wages are often significantly
lower than those of public school teachers, there is a strong incentive for public school
teachers to resist changes that would threaten their job security and levels of
compensation. In addition, there is a large educational bureaucracy that has grown up
around the government-run educational system for whom a change from a governmentrun
educational system to a decentralized form of service provision is likely to be
perceived as threatening to their employment interests. Another source of potential
opposition to school vouchers are parents living in high-quality public school districts,
the value of which are imputed into the value of their homes and which could be eroded
with a voucher system.
However, there are significant interests lobbying for change in the school system as
well. Religious and cultural groups have long argued for increased funding for schools
that foster the particular beliefs and customs of their communities. Pluralism in curricula
afforded by a voucher program that would leave school choice up to individual parents
rather than a single government bureaucracy, if it included sectarian schools, would be
appealing to such groups. In addition, educational entrepreneurs would find attractive the
opportunities afforded by a private market in educational services with a guaranteed base
of consumers armed with government vouchers, and could be expected to argue for an
increased role for themselves in the provision of educational services. More importantly,
parents—both as individuals and through parent associations—are vitally interested in the
quality of their children’s education and if widely persuaded that a superior alternative
exists to prevailing forms of public provision, are likely to be prepared to invest
significant resources, individually and collectively, in promoting such changes. The
intensity of most parents’ interest in the quality of their children’s education stands in
marked contrast to the relatively limited interests that they are likely to have, as
consumers, in the price and quality of many conventional consumer goods or services
that they purchase where their limited stakes are likely to inhibit significant investments
in individual or collective action to correct imperfections in these markets. Thus, we are
skeptical that collective action problems explain why parents are ineffective in
overcoming the political resistance of teachers’ unions and the educational bureaucracy
to the adoption of a voucher system, if it were widely perceived by parents to be a good
idea. However, we doubt that parents as a group are widely persuaded of the virtues of an
educational voucher system, but rather are often at odds with one another in their
interests (e.g. over funding to particular religious groups, communities, or academic
programs). Thus, the contentious features of the design of an educational voucher
system—admittedly exploited in political discourse by teachers’ unions and the
educational bureaucracy—are likely at least as much to explain the lack of widespread
adoption of educational voucher schemes as the disproportionate political influence of
vested supply-side interests.
Conclusions
The primary and secondary education system is a massive and complex system which we,
as a society, expect to fulfil a great variety of ends. As we have seen, the primary and