Tweaking the Voucher System

As a retired educator, I've always had a cynical view of the voucher proposals. I've seen it variously as an avenue to avoid integrated schools, to afford education in a religious setting, or to escape going to schools with children from poorer neighborhoods. Now, with the Bushcovites just past the halfway point of their reign and No Child Left Behind (a perfect example of the Big Lie) implemented, it is time to replace principle with pragmatism.

Vouchers and NCLB are premised on the notion of the school as the accountability unit, not the child, not the teacher, but the school. That is a fallacious premise, but it matters not at this point. That this is a gratuitous insult to dedicated educators in schools that serve impoverished neighborhoods matters not at this point. Let's accept the notion of a school failing students, but let us look at those all important test scores further. There must be a score that would indicate whether or not a school had failed an individual student, perhaps the 50th percentile. Clearly, the school has failed the student scoring at the 10th percentile. If a student has a 99th percentile score, the school must be succeeding admirably with that student.

Thus my proposal: Let's modify NCLB so that any child scoring below the 50th percentile (or 60th, whatever) would have the right to attend another school, but students scoring above that benchmark would be unable to transfer. Now that would be a winning formula. The school might not mind losing its lower-performing students and really shouldn't lose those with whom it is succeeding. Those deserving children left in the school would not have their lives disrupted by moving to a new school and might even experience an improved school climate as a result of the departure of the students who have been failed by the school. The geniuses who came up with the notion of schools as the unit of comparison would have great opportunities to study the performance of currently high-performing schools who experience an influx of students who were failed by their previous schools.

This suggestion will surely find merit if voucher proponents truly believe that schools are legitimately units of accountability.