School vouchers and the Antoines and Jamals of the K-12 public education system

According to the American Federation for Children’s 2020 School Choice Guidebook, 12 states plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. have school voucher programs. These programs are designed to provide access to high-quality private school education for students in failing K-12 public schools. The vouchers are typically awarded to students from low-income families. Parents receive state-funded scholarships to send their children to private schools of their choice.

School vouchers have become one of the most hotly debated political topics in America. Critics of the programs say they drain much-needed funds from already cash-strapped public schools. In my home state of Pennsylvania, a newly proposed voucher program would give families up to $10,000 in scholarships to send their children to private schools. The highly controversial bill was advanced to the state Senate floor out of committee earlier this year, but it is unclear whether it will be passed into law.

On the surface, the national debate about school voucher programs appears to be one of those ideological battles between the right and the left, with Republicans generally in favor of school choice and most Democrats against it. But the picture is a bit more complicated. The overwhelming majority of Blacks vote Democratic in elections, but a Morning Consult survey conducted last year showed that 79 percent of Black parents supported voucher programs.

The popularity of school-choice programs within the Black community is understandable. Most of the poorly performing K-12 public schools are located in urban areas, where student populations are overwhelmingly black. Those also happen to be the places where school dropout rates are quite high, with the inevitable results of high unemployment and crime that send large numbers of young Black people, especially males, to prison. To avoid that fate for their children, many Black parents in such school districts covet vouchers for private and other types of schools that provide better educational outcomes.

I have been quite ambivalent about school voucher programs for a long time. Those feelings derive from some experiences I had when I taught in an inner-city school district three decades ago. In my memoir, The Boy from Boadua, I wrote about two male Black students, Antoine and Jamal (pseudonyms for privacy reasons), who were in my eighth-grade math class. Because a majority of the students in the class came from broken homes, there were all kinds of disciplinary problems that I had to deal with pretty much every day. But no matter how much commotion there was in the classroom, Antoine, a quiet, studious boy, always sat by himself in a corner and did his work. He was every teacher’s dream student.

Jamal was the complete opposite. He happened to be the chief instigator of the chaos. His favorite activity in class was drumming and singing, and he always did his best to get many of the other students to join him. I spent the bulk of my time during every class session trying to bring him under control, often without much success. Jamal harbored a deep resentment toward Antoine. In his mind, by his studiousness, Antoine was disrupting the “social order” in the classroom. He therefore used all kinds of means to keep Antoine from learning. After observing that dynamic for a few weeks, I realized that I needed to step in to stop the damage that Jamal was doing to Antoine.

I had multiple one-on-one conversations with each of them to learn about their backgrounds. Both lived with their mothers and had no fathers in their lives. Jamal’s mother dropped out of school and gave birth to him when she was still a teenager. He had little supervision at home, and clearly didn’t know about the importance of education. In contrast, Antoine’s mother graduated from high school. She kept low-wage jobs and worked long hours but fortunately, her own mother lived with her and so Antoine had another adult at home and was rarely alone. Most crucially, Antoine’s mother and grandmother constantly spoke to him about the need to work hard in school.

I was able to minimize the disruptive impact that Jamal’s behavior was having on Antoine’s effort to learn in my classroom. But the broader issue still remained. There were many other Jamals in other classes who collectively made the entire environment unconducive to learning. Waiting to fix those systemic problems would come too late for students like Antoine, and that is why vouchers make sense to me in those cases.

My problem with voucher programs is that through them, society appears to be giving up on the Jamals in our public schools. Some people, especially on the right, contend that the loss of students to private schools forces the public education system to up its game. I’m not sure I buy that argument. I haven’t come across any studies that conclusively show that to be true. My own view is that by taking students and resources away from the public system, the remaining schools and the students trapped in them are left much worse off. But more importantly, not every sector in society should be subjected to market forces.

As is the case with the K-12 public education system, most Americans are highly frustrated by our increasingly dysfunctional Congress. Currently, there are many “Jamals” in Congress who apparently take delight in sowing chaos. Obviously, as a nation, we cannot say there is nothing we can do about them and the gridlock they generate and so we will outsource some legislative responsibilities to private enterprises. Some would argue that our regular elections, which are competitive processes, give us opportunities to kick those Jamals out of Congress and choose better-behaved legislators. The problem is that in most of the constituencies where the Jamals come from, there is no such competition. The districts lean so heavily Democratic or Republican that, practically, no candidates can win unless they belong to the parties with the dominant support in those areas. It is precisely this feeling of invincibility that encourages the disruptive behaviors of those Congressional Jamals.

Through those private conversations I had with Jamal outside of class, I discovered that he was actually quite an intelligent boy. His main problem was that the people who were directly responsible for preparing him to come to school ready to learn, his immediate family, had failed him. That family was itself a derivative of the historical cycle of poverty, racism, parental absenteeism and other systemic problems that plague America’s minority communities. But the case of Antoine clearly demonstrates that the home environment is the most critical success factor when it comes to a child’s education.

There is a lot of finger-pointing in the search for who is to blame for the mess in the urban K-12 public education system. Inadequate funding is certainly a factor and that is a government responsibility. Nevertheless, simply pouring more money into the system won’t solve the problem either. The communities that the Antoines and Jamals come from should also examine themselves critically. It is quite likely that the fathers of those two boys lived in poverty themselves. But destitution should never be an acceptable excuse for that complete dereliction of parental responsibility that robbed Jamal, and Antoine to some extent, of the crucial guidance they needed at that vital stage of their lives.

The tone and direction of the national debate suggest that school voucher programs will continue to be introduced and expanded across the country in the coming years. My view is that we should be going the opposite way instead. Fixing our ailing public schools will be an arduous task, but it is an issue of such vital national importance that it cannot be outsourced. We should by all means provide better educational choices to the hardworking Antoines of today so they don’t end up on the school-to-prison conveyor belt. But it would be a grave abdication of national responsibility if our actions end up guaranteeing that outcome for the Jamals.

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