Building a Competitive Education Industry
A Weekly Column by Myron Lieberman

The first article I authored in what might be called the upper tier of educational journals was on "Equality of Educational Opportunity," in a 1956 issue of the Harvard Educational Review. As I recall it, the article was an attempt to answer this question: What factual conditions constitute equality of educational opportunity? I cite this not to point out that I knew the answer back in the 1950s, but simply to illustrate my longstanding interest in the subject. During the 1960s, I worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. as an expert witness and consultant in litigation seeking to require school districts, mainly but not entirely in the South, to implement U.S. Supreme Court decisions that required school districts to act "with all deliberate speed" to cease and desist the imposition of racial segregation in public schools, and so on and so forth.

In observing the contemporary scene, I am struck by the extent to which interests instead of principles dominate positions on issues relating to equality of educational opportunity. Controversies over educational vouchers illustrate this point. The pro-voucher forces appeal for vouchers on equality grounds. They allegedly want minority children in the inner cities to have the same right to attend a good school as affluent children in affluent suburban districts. While Bill Clinton was president and daughter Chelsea was attending Sidwell Friends, an expensive private school, pro-voucher commentary was that the Clintons were the only parents in public housing who could afford such an expensive school. When it is pointed out that children from poor families already have the right, but not the money to enroll their children in private schools, the pro-choice counter is that the legal right doesn't mean anything without the means to implement it. Consequently, it is allegedly essential to provide the poor with the means to implement the right. Unless this is done, the right to attend a good school is just an empty formalism.

An interesting aspect of this argument is that it is the same argument utilized by liberals to promote government funding of abortions. Without the government funding, poor women can't afford abortions, so the right doesn't do anything for women who need it the most. This is the liberal argument for government funding of abortions.

The examples illustrate a basic philosophical division over "rights." The conservatives ordinarily regard "rights" as the absence of government restraint; you have the right to do something unless it is prohibited by government. (We can leave out limitations on rights growing out of contractual agreements because it was the actor's decision to contract away his/her rights.)

In contrast, liberals typically regard rights as the power to do something; thus you have the right to an abortion if you have the power to get one. The liberal point of view obviously leads to government funding to provide the power to implement rights that supposedly would otherwise be merely empty formalisms.

Or so I was taught in graduate school. The stark inconsistency of both liberals and conservatives on school choice and funding for abortions suggests that the appeals to rights are rationalizations, not reasons for the positions adopted. To underscore this point, let me point out that the conservatives who justify vouchers as a "right" have never explained how to distinguish vouchers from entitlements. It is liberal dogma that rights are or should be dependent on government funding. If the poor do not have the right to attend private schools in the absence of government funding, how do we draw the line between what government funds and what it does not fund. And the liberals who denigrate "rights" without funding in the abortion context have yet to explain why, from a rights perspective, they oppose funding in the education context.

These pro-choice and anti-choice inconsistencies go a long way toward explaining the futility of trying to resolve voucher controversies by an appeal to "rights." In fact, some voucher supporters contend that vouchers are "the civil rights issue of the new millenium." I support vouchers, but when I encounter school choice leaders who argue that vouchers are a civil rights issue, I wonder whether confusion or tactical advantage or both explain this way of characterizing voucher issues.