The Two-Income Trap (7 page)

But the public-versus-private competition misses the central point. The problem is not vouchers; the problem is parental choice. Under current voucher schemes, children who do not use the vouchers are still assigned to public schools based on their zip codes. This means that in the overwhelming majority of cases, a bureaucrat picks the child’s school, not a parent. The only way for parents to exercise any choice is to buy a different home—which is exactly how the bidding wars started.

Short of buying a new home, parents currently have only one way to escape a failing public school: Send the kids to private school. But there is another alternative, one that would keep much-needed tax dollars inside the public school system while still reaping the advantages offered by a voucher program. Local governments could enact meaningful reform by enabling parents to choose from among
all
the public schools in a locale, with no presumptive assignment based on neighborhood. Under a public school voucher program, parents, not bureaucrats, would have the power to pick schools for their children—and to choose which schools would get their children’s vouchers. Students would be admitted to a particular public school on the basis of their talents, their interests, or even their lottery numbers; their zip codes would be irrelevant. Tax dollars would follow the children, not the parents’ home addresses, and children who live in a $50,000 house would have the same educational opportunities as those who live in a $250,000 house.

Children who required extra resources, such as those with physical or learning disabilities, could be assigned proportionately larger vouchers, which would make it more attractive for schools to take on the more challenging (and expensive) task of educating these children. It might take some re-jiggering to settle on the right amount for a public school voucher, but eventually every child would have a valuable funding ticket to be used in any school in the area. To collect those tickets, schools would have to provide the education parents want. And parents would have a meaningful set of choices,
without
the need to buy a new home or pay private school tuition. Ultimately, an all-voucher system would diminish the distinction between public and private schools, as parents were able to exert more direct control over their children’s schools.
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Of course, public school vouchers would not entirely eliminate the pressure parents feel to move into better family neighborhoods. Some areas would continue to have higher crime rates or better parks, and many parents might still prefer to live close to their children’s schools. But a fundamental revision of school assignment policies
would broaden the range of housing choices families would consider. Instead of limiting themselves to homes within one or two miles of a school, parents could choose a home five or even ten miles away—enough distance to give them several neighborhoods to choose from, with a broad range of price alternatives.

School change, like any other change, would entail some costs. More children might need to take a bus to school, pushing up school transportation expenses. On the other hand, many parents might actually shorten their own commutes, since they would no longer be forced to live in far-flung suburbs for the sake of their children. The net costs could be positive or negative.

An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs. In the short run, a large number of parents would likely chase a limited number of spots in a few excellent schools. But over time, the whole concept of “the Beverly Hills schools” or “Newton schools” would die out, replaced in the hierarchy by schools that offer a variety of programs that parents want for their children, regardless of the geographic boundaries. By selecting where to send their children (and where to spend their vouchers), parents would take control over schools’ tax dollars, making them the de facto owners of those schools. Parents, not administrators, would decide on programs, student-teacher ratios, and whether to spend money on art or sports. Parents’ competitive energies could be channeled toward signing up early or improving their children’s qualifications for a certain school, not bankrupting themselves to buy homes they cannot afford.

If a meaningful public school voucher system were instituted, the U.S. housing market would change forever. These changes might dampen, and perhaps even depress, housing prices in some of today’s most competitive neighborhoods. But these losses would be offset by other gains. Owners of older homes in urban centers might find more willing buyers, and the urge to flee the cities might abate. Urban sprawl might slow down as families recalculate the costs of living so far from work. At any rate, the change would cause a one-time
readjustment. The housing market would normalize, with supply and demand more balanced and families freed from ruinous mortgages.

Even with that perfect house in a swanky school district, parents still are not covered when it comes to educating their kids—not by a long shot. The notion that taxpayers foot the bill for educating middle-class children has become a myth in yet another way. The two ends of the spectrum—everything that happens before a child shows up for his first day of kindergarten and after he is handed his high-school diploma—fall directly on the parents. Preschool and college, which now account for one-third (or more) of the years a typical middle-class kid spends in school, are paid for almost exclusively by the child’s family.

Preschool has always been a privately funded affair, at least for most middle-class families. What has changed is its role for middle-class children. Over the past generation, the image of preschool has transformed from an optional stopover for little kids to a “prerequisite” for elementary school. Parents have been barraged with articles telling them that early education is important for everything from “pre-reading” skills to social development. As one expert in early childhood education observes, “In many communities around the country, kindergarten is no longer aimed at the entry level. And the only way Mom and Dad feel they can get their child prepared is through a pre-kindergarten program.”
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Middle-class parents have stepped into line with the experts’ recommendations. Today, nearly two-thirds of America’s three- and four-year-olds attend preschool, compared with just 4 percent in the mid- 1960s.
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This isn’t just the by-product of more mothers entering the workforce; nearly half of all stay-at-home moms now send their kids to a prekindergarten program.
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As
Newsweek
put it, “The science says it all: preschool programs are neither a luxury nor a fad, but a real necessity.”
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As demand has heated up, many families have found it increasingly difficult to
find
a prekindergarten program with an empty slot. Author Vicki Iovine describes the struggle she experienced trying to get her children into preschool in southern California:

Ms. Iovine’s remarks are tongue-in-cheek, and pundits love to mock the parent who subscribes to the theory that “if little Susie doesn’t get into the right preschool she’ll never make it into the right medical school.” But the shortage of quality preschool programs is very real. Child development experts have rated day-care centers, and the news is not good. The majority are lumped in the “poor to mediocre” range.
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Not surprisingly, preschools with strong reputations often have long waiting lists.
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Once again, today’s parents find themselves caught in a trap. A generation ago, when nursery school was regarded as little more than a chance for Mom to take a break, parents could consider the economics in a fairly detached way, committing to pay no more than what they could afford. And when only a modest number of parents were shopping for those preschool slots, the prices had to remain low to attract a full class. Today, when scores of experts routinely proclaim that preschool is decisive in a child’s development, but a slot in a preschool—any preschool—can be hard to come by, parents are in a poor position to shop around for lower prices.

The laws of supply and demand take hold in the opposite direction, eliminating the pressure for preschool programs to keep prices low as they discover that they can increase fees without losing pupils. A full-day program in a prekindergarten offered by the Chicago
public
school district costs $6,500 a year—more than the cost of a year’s
tuition at the University of Illinois.
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High? Yes, but that hasn’t deterred parents: At just one Chicago public school, there are ninety-five kids on a waiting list for twenty slots. That situation is fairly typical. According to one study, the annual cost for a four-year-old to attend a child care center in an urban area is more than
double
the price of college tuition in fifteen states.
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And so today’s middle-class families simply spend and spend, stretching their budgets to give their child the fundamentals of a modern education.

The solution here is pretty obvious: Extend the scope of public education. If Americans generally believe that educational programs should begin at age three, why should public education wait to kick in at age five or six? The decision about how old children should be when they start school was made more than a century ago, when views about the learning capacity of young children were very different. The absence of publicly funded preschool is an anachronism, one that could easily be remedied. A host of politicians, including 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore and Congressman Richard Gephardt, have proposed publicly funded, universal preschool.
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We agree—it is high time.

At this point, the reader might expect us to join the chorus calling for taxpayer-funded day care as well. Unlike preschool, the primary mission of most day-care programs is not to educate children but to provide surrogate child care when parents are at work. For more than two decades, women’s groups, labor unions, and liberal politicians have been pressing the government to foot the bill for day care. Blocked by conservatives, advocates of free day care have had little success, but that hasn’t stopped the clamor.

It is time for a hard look at this sacred cow. How much help would subsidized day care really offer to middle-class families? It would certainly be a big help for poorer families whose paychecks can barely cover even low-quality child care. But what about the average two-parent middle-class family? Government-sponsored day care would
ease the immediate cost pressures on some families, but the long-term financial implications are more complex. Unlike the money that the government spends on public safety or education, which benefit every child, subsidized day care benefits only some kids—those whose parents both work outside the home. Day-care subsidies offer no help for families with a stay-at-home mother. In fact, such subsidies would make financial life more difficult for these families, because they would create yet another comparative disadvantage for single-income families trying to compete in the marketplace. Every dollar spent to subsidize the price of day care frees up a dollar for the two-income family to spend in the bidding wars for housing, tuition, and everything else that families are competing for—widening the gap between single- and dual-income families. Any subsidy that benefits working parents without providing a similar benefit to single-income families pushes the stay-at-home mother and her family further down the economic ladder. In effect, government-subsidized day care would add one more indirect pressure on mothers to join the workforce.

Does that mean that publicly supported day care is a bad idea? Not necessarily. If it were part of a package that also improved public education from kindergarten through high school, the bidding-war implications of a day-care subsidy would be muted. Moreover, day-care subsidies could be accompanied by offsetting support for single-income families, such as tax credits for stay-at-home parents, which would help level the playing field between single- and dual-income families. Besides, publicly supported day care would have very real benefits for society at large, not the least of which would be to raise the standard of care for millions of children who currently receive inadequate attention while their parents are at work.

Finally, we come to the other end of the education spectrum, for which American parents are advised to start stashing away money before their little ones can even fingerpaint, let alone choose a major: college.

Americans are a contentious lot. They express an astonishing variety of opinions about politics and religion, sports teams and movies, vitamin supplements and workplace dress codes. They even disagree on the basic facts of history. According to one recent poll, 6 percent of our fellow citizens believe that the Apollo moon landings were faked.
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But there is one topic on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: the importance of a college education. According to a recent survey, 97 percent of Americans agree that a college degree is “absolutely necessary” or “helpful,” compared with a scant 3 percent claiming that a degree is “not that important.”
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In other words, Americans are
twice
as likely to believe that man never walked on the moon as they are to believe that a college degree doesn’t matter! In a diverse culture full of contrarians who relish their differences with one another, faith in the power of higher education is the new secular religion. Americans now see a college degree as the
single most important
determinant of a young person’s chances of success—even more significant than getting along well with others or having a good work ethic.
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