A Tentative Hope for Vouchers

The heated debate on school choice scales the walls of the ivory tower.

By Ted Fish

What seems remarkable to me, in all this talk about vouchers, is how inflamed each of us can get inside our opinions, while at the same time there are so few facts to ground our thinking.

This point was brought home for me a year ago, when I took part in a graduate seminar at Teachers College, Columbia University, called "School Choice." The class often seemed to resemble a TV talk show more than a graduate seminar. Conversations escalated quickly, until hands were shooting up all over the room, and faces were turning various colors and contortions in encouragement or opposition to what was being said. Not your standard academic etiquette.

But "Choice" was not your standard academic class. When a group of teachers, administrators, and future policymakers gathers itself in a room to contemplate questions that tug at the very core of what Horace Mann, Thomas Jefferson, and other architects of America's common school tradition created, the words strike deep. For even the most apolitical, viewpoints and beliefs begin to emerge from nowhere and start exerting themselves. Attitudes about money surface, along with feelings about sharing and helping. And, of course, the question of what society should do...