Findings of importance to policy-makers:
Why are teacher unions around the world bitterly opposed
to opportunity scholarship plans, school vouchers, parental choice,
and other market-based reforms? The answer, according to an unscientific
but broad survey of nearly 50 teachers unions in more than a dozen developed
countries, is this: They aren't.
In fact, out of 48 unions expressing a stand, only eleven (23 percent)
strongly oppose voucher-choice systems. Seventeen (35 percent) are strongly
in favor, while twenty (42 percent) are not strongly opposed or in favor,
or are politically inactive.
Among countries that have significant experience with them, fourteen
unions (52 percent) back choice-voucher plans, and twelve (41 percent)
are neutral.
Even in the U.S. teachers commonly dissent from the NEA/AFT monolith.
A survey of members of the Association of American Educators, an independent
teachers association, found that 14 percent agree with the NEA's position
on school choice, while 76 percent disagree.
Teacher union officials from Sweden, Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands,
Australia, and Denmark say choice including, in most cases, government
support for private schools works.
LAURIE CAILLE is an officer of the Syndicat National des Enseignements de Second Degree, a French teachers union for junior high school teachers. She is trying to explain to an American why school choice works well for France.
"In France," she says, "we have an old tradition of absolute separation between the church and the state." The French approach of providing significant aid to private and religious schools might, in another environment, seem to involve government in the business of religion.
The state's subsidy to private schools goes "only through 'contract'
or agreements between the states and the schools." Still, for a choice
or voucher system to work, it would have to be built around such a wall
of separation, since in France, "schools, both public and private, are
subsidized by the state."
ONE CAN just imagine the reaction union officials at the National Education Association or American Federation of Teachers would have if a similar procedure were proposed for the United States. No matter what provisions were made to insure separation even precautions sufficient to satisfy one of the largest teachers unions in France they would not be enough.
And that in a way, is what makes Ms. Caille an unusual teacher union official. Or, to be more precise, it makes her a typical one provided only that one steps outside the United States.
Like many, Ms. Caille is not a fervent supporter of vouchers or "school choice." But neither is she angry about the prospect as most teacher union officials in the United States appear to be when the subject comes up. In fact, Caille argues the French system, elements of which have been in place since Napoleon's compromise with the Catholic Church in the First Empire, has helped to provide a sound education. If anything, she says, the social impact has been small or positive.
It tends to "defuse" any church-state tensions, as another French teacher union official put it, by letting families go their own way within a broad frame-work of access and universal education.
Recently, AdTI staff interviewed officials from more than 40 teachers unions in a dozen foreign countries with significant school choice. In most cases such as Sweden, Denmark, Australia, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and others the choice plans now attract significant support for movement between both public and private schools.
The predominant mood is by no means one of enthusiastic support, particularly outside of those countries, such as Denmark and France, where school choice and government support for private schools is well-entrenched, an ingrained habit.
But there is a broad acceptance to public and private school choice among the solid majority of teacher unions outside the United States. In the Netherlands, 75 percent of all primary and secondary students attend a state-supported private school. "Most teachers in the Netherlands," says Walter Dresscher, President of the NGL, one of the largest Dutch teachers unions, "think that this system works very well."
Table 1 shows the results of a non-scientific survey of 48 teachers
unions.
Table 1.
Q: What position does your union take on "parental choice" or vouchers
systems which allow parents to select between public schools and in some
cases private or "free" schools?
STRONGLY
SUPPORT 35 %
STRONGLY
OPPOSE 23 %
NEUTRAL OR NO
STRONG POSITION 42 %
Of 92 unions surveyed, 48 responded: 17 strongly support choice/voucher
schemes, 11 strongly oppose. Twenty unions were either neutral or took
no strong position. Of these, 10 said their union takes no position on
choice systems as such (which are in place in most of the countries); another
three said their unions avoid politics altogether. Seven liked or disliked
the system but with serious caveats four like choice-voucher plans, but
only if changes are made in funding formulas or other mechanics; three
don't like them but do not advocate overturning existing systems.
The most fervent supporters of these market-based plans for education,
perhaps not surprisingly, are in countries such as the former Soviet Union.
There, a thirst for freedom has led to a bouquet of educational entrepreneurship
and institution-building. In Moscow alone there are more than a dozen teacher
unions and associations.
THE ONLY countries, in fact, with more than one negative response towards choice or vouchers were the United States, England, Canada, and New Zealand from which nine of the 11 "strongly opposed" answers came.
There are several possible reasons, especially considering the similarities between them. All are English-speaking, largely white countries. Vouchers and choice plans enjoy some support across the board, but in recent years they've been especially popular among the less affluent and minority groups.
Historically, voucher plans were often a response to Catholic, and in some cases Protestant or Jewish demands, for religious schooling. (The largest Israeli teachers union, the Irgun Morim, predates the founding of the state of Israel, was an active proponent of Hebrew language instruction in Palestine from the 1920s.) The four countries with the strongest anti-voucher sentiment either have small Catholic populations, or a political tradition that has unabashedly restricted access to religious education.
Even in these four, the fundamental attitude is no longer one of active hostility, but grudging acquiescence. "Even if some members do not like the system," says A. Craig Duncan, MA, Acting General Secretary of the Scottish Secondary Teachers' Association, "it is now generally accepted." Indeed, since Scottish and other unions in the United Kingdom have much greater participation by private school teachers, "our members in independent schools are worried about possible financial problems for their schools if the assisted places scheme" supporting poor students in private schools "is phased out." (For an excellent summary of the history and functioning of choice systems, see Charles Glenn, School Choice in Six Countries, Department of Education, 1989.)
For these and other reasons, teacher unions outside of the four great English-speaking republics (including Canada outside of Quebec) have grown accustomed to parental choice even favorable. Each of these has either only limited parental choice in education (U.S., Canada), or very recent experience (Britain, Sweden), or is still fighting a relatively bitter battle over choice and choice-related issues such as school funding formulas (New Zealand, Australia, Sweden). Even so, a majority of unions in Australia and Sweden back their country's choice-voucher plan.
Indeed, if we look at the results among unions in countries with significant
exposure to public or public-private choice, the result is: 14 unions (52
percent) in favor of voucher-choice plans, 11 (41 percent) with no strong
opinion, and two (7 percent) opposed. (Table 2.)
Table 2.
Among unions in countries with long-standing choice or voucher plans...
Q: What position does your union take on "parental choice" or vouchers
systems which allow parents to select between public schools and in some
cases private or "free" schools?
STRONGLY
SUPPORT 52 %
STRONGLY
OPPOSE 7 %
NEUTRAL OR NO
STRONG POSITION 41 %
We asked union officials to comment about the concrete workings of their
system, and the experience teachers have actually working in it. Surely
this experience will have some relevance to a U.S. debate in which opposition
to choice is largely theoretical that is, carried on by persons who have
little or no experience functioning in an education market. One good way
to organize these responses is in terms of the complaints about choice-voucher
systems voiced by theoretical critics.
1. "Vouchers, or systems which have the effect of vouchers,... will
destroy public education."
The above is a resolution adopted by the National Education Association and published in its annual handbook. On its face, the assertion would seem to be absurd. Table 3 is a list of some of the countries with the highest degree of parental choice in education, usually including private-school subsidies. On the right is the percentage of public funds that go to public schools, generally a figure above 80 percent. A similar survey of pupil enrollment rates suggests vouchers and choice plans have hardly proven fatal to public schooling.
Table 3.
Public schools, RIP?
Percentage total education expenditures made by public schools (primary
and secondary) in countries with choice or voucher plans (1992):
Ireland 99 %
Hungary (1994) 97 %
Canada 96 %
Denmark 95 %
New Zealand 94 %
Sweden (1994) 94 %
Australia 93 %
Russia (1995) 89 %
France 83 %
Spain 77 %
Germany 70 %
Netherlands 25 %
Mean of voucher-
choice countries 84.3 %
OECD country mean 86.0 %
If vouchers "destroy" public schools, it will come as news to teacher union officials from to Russia to Australia. Some union officials who were asked if choice or voucher plans had or would "destroy" public education in their country appeared to think the interviewer did not understand their system, and, like Ms. Caille above, repeated slowly how their system works, to make clear that public schools were not singled out by the plan.
"The private schools get 75 to 85 percent of the cost of educating a child in the public schools not 100 percent," says Carolyn Allport of the National Tertiary Education Union in Australia. Thus, public schools get between 118 percent and 133 percent of the per-pupil support that private schools do. "We have our criticisms of this system but the formula is not weighted against public education."
"Our choice system has been in operation for a period of over thirty years," notes Mrs. Roth of the Danish Union of Teachers. "And we have a strong public education system. We view the public schools and the private schools as working together.... or at least, co-existence."
Bernard Hosie, a teacher and headmaster in Australian schools for 18 years, is even more pointed. "Great Britain instituted a dual system of education in the late 1940s," he wrote recently in The Los Angeles Times. "It has not destroyed the public system as the prophets of doom foretold." (October 11.)
(Only in the Netherlands, as Table 3 indicates, do private schools
predominate. But in the Netherlands, other than during the Nazi occupation,
the private schools simply never ceased to be popular. Public education
took the form of public funds going to private institutions a la food stamps,
Medicaid in a way that provided high consumer satisfaction).
THIS DOES not mean that teacher union officials abroad completely dismiss the kinds of concerns about public education so debated in the U.S. On the contrary, most of them have felt, and some still feel, such concerns. But they do find that some of their earlier fears were excessive. And perhaps most important they note that public schools have enjoyed a certain re-invigoration, and teachers a liberation, since choice or voucher plans were adopted. Parents select a school, actively or by default; the very act, the very possibility, causes them to take a different attitude towards the schools, to feel empowered. Teachers deal in a market of broader alternatives, with greater freedom to experiment, and greater emphasis on results.
In Sweden, just four years of public support for private schooling have led to a renaissance of education diversity. "We now have German schools, Finnish schools, Estonian schools," comments Sven Kinnander, international officer of Lärarnas Riksförbund (National Union of Teachers in Sweden.) "We now have different pedagogical orientations and teaching methods." There are "religious schools, like Catholics, Methodists, even Muslims." There are also "schools with alternative education methods... such as Montessori or Waldorf pedagogics," receiving support, as Kerstin Weyler, Information Officer at the National Agency for Education, notes.
The spirit of renewal has even helped invigorate the (still dominant) public sector schools. "Many municipalities," Weyler notes, "are introducing school vouchers for their own schools" that is, offering public school choice so as to be able to match more closely the market options provided by private-sector schools. "Competition is growing."
In countries where voucher or choice systems are long-standing, an
ethos of cooperation between private and public schools has to some extent
replaced the doctrine of all-out warfare. Belgium's school voucher plan
"dates back to the years 1830-1831 when Belgium became independent," explains
J.M. Ansciaux, the General Secretary of Centrale Generale des Services
Publics-Enseignement. "Private schools are considered institutions of public
interest."
AS THESE comments suggest, union officials abroad are reluctant to concede the superiority of the religious and private sector schools. In a sense, the numbers back them up choice and voucher systems have not led to the collapse of public school systems.
When we asked open-ended questions about the workings of choice and voucher systems in their countries, union officials from Great Britain, Ireland, France, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia all emphasized the fact that the vast majority of parents choose to remain in the public school system. It seemed clear that for many of them, this is a matter of pride a talking point, as it were, on behalf of public school teachers.
"Only five percent of the students of compulsory school age attend private schools," comments Frau Waltraud Fuchs of Deutscher Lehrerverband. "It is not predominant."
"Despite the government subsidies," comments Sharan Burrow of the Australian Education Union, "less than one student in four in Australia attends private schools, "and the figure is smaller for primary schools."
"Ninety percent of the schools are public ones," agrees Carole Hicks, executive director of the NZEI. "This, for us, is a measure of how well our public schools are working," says Bill Gibbons, Deputy Secretary General of New Zealand's Post Primary Teachers Association.
"The proportion of private schools in Sweden is very low," says Ann-Christian Larsson and Kristina Ullstrand of Lärarförbundet (Swedish Teachers Union.) "Only 1.8 percent of the pupils attend private education [even though] these schools are financed by public means."
These unions take choice or voucher plans as a kind of gentle insult,
or at least, something of a challenge. (This is particularly true in countries
where the adoption of choice is very recent or was especially bitter).
There is a healthy, competitive spirit in this. And, on the evidence, public
sector schools have proven capable of adapting.
ALL OF THIS, however, tends to undercut the end-of-public-education-as-we-know-it drama. The spirited, bullish comments about their public schools we heard from union members may suggest that private schools do not have the decisive edge many in the United States and other non-choice systems think they do. Also, though, it implies that choice-voucher advocates may have an insight into the dynamics of choice plans. If public schools in Sweden, Germany, and Denmark are that healthy, perhaps there is something to be said for voucher plans after all.
"It is not about people being pitted against each other," says Jean-Michel Boullier, the head of the Federation des Syndicats Generaux de l'Education National et la Recherche. (His union represents only public school teachers.) "We want the same conditions in private and public schools. But we think the education system has to move and avoid being static. So it is important to have more than one system. The public system in France is too big, and the government has to reactivate it." The choice system, he says, "is one way of doing that."
School voucher programs, as one U.S. teacher from Topeka, Kansas
said recently, "can only help the public schools through competition. That
NEA canard about how choice will rob public schools of needed funding is
so old. Do all those people take night school rhetoric programs together?
You hear the same lame lines all the time, like, 'taking food out of the
mouths of children.' " (The American Educator, February, 1996.)
2. Voucher-choice plans favor the rich, and often hurt or ignore
the poor.
The New Zealand Education Institute, one of the most anti-voucher unions we spoke to, put the argument this way in a recent press release:
"RICH SCHOOLS' VOUCHER SCHEME DOES STATE SCHOOLS OUT OF TEACHERS."
The plan, the release quotes national secretary Rosslyn Noonan as saying, "is going to cost almost $240,000." The money will go to private schools, who will pay their teachers more. This will hurt public schools on the margin, and thus tend to hurt the poor. The money "would be better used for incentives to get teachers into classrooms in state schools experiencing staff shortages," such as in inner city ethnic schools.
One notable thing about the release itself is that it was issued in reaction to a government-proposed pilot program to provide extra private-school assistance to 200 poor children.
We asked: Is the New Zealand Educational Institute supporting this particular experiment, since it at least appears aimed at helping low-income families? No, said executive director Carole Hicks.
"We are fighting this experiment very hard." Why? Because the "real
aim is to take money away from the public schools," and the public schools
"are needed to help the poor."
FEW OF the teachers unions abroad took this extreme a view of the equities of voucher plans generally let alone those focused specifically on the lower income. In countries with a longer voucher experience, of course, many poor families now have experience with empowerment through vouchers. In U.S. cities, choice and voucher schemes have always been more popular in polls of city dwellers than in affluent suburbs. Now, in places like Milwaukee and Harlem, programs have been a reality and the support is at extreme levels of 80 percent and higher.
Foreign teachers unions tend to be less concentrated and more diverse. (See our recent paper, "Teacher Union 'Concentration' in 21 Countries," October 17, 1996.) Thus, more often than in the U.S., they represent inner-city private school, religious school, or choice-school teachers who either favor, or have adapted to, or have an interest in, the choice or voucher system. In the case of New Zealand, this de-concentration of interests became clear when we talked to other public education professionals, who differ from the NZEI on the equities both of vouchers generally and the new plan focused on the poor.
"Children from low socio-economic backgrounds can apply to be government-funded under the recently-introduced TIE scheme (Targeted Individual Entitlement) to attend private schools," notes Louise May of the Schools Staffing Section of the New Zealand Ministry of Education. "This scheme is proving to be very popular." Well: Not universally. The scheme is not popular with the NZEI, nor would it likely find favor in the U.S. with either the NEA or AFT. This merely throws into relief, however, that the equity arguments against voucher-choice systems do not constitute the heart of the objections these groups have. Remove the inequity, even focus programs specifically on the most needy, and the objections remain. (Even the equity objections!)
Besides as one U.S. teacher from South Dakota, who supports school
vouchers, put it "The NEA is saying that a parent can send their child
to any school of their choice but that if its a private school they should
pay for it over and above the taxes they're already paying. Isn't that
unfair to middle and lower income parents?" (The American Educator, February,
1996.)
Fairness for teachers
OF COURSE, equity can refer to more than pupil expenditures. Teacher pay and working conditions are an issue of equity as well. In the view of many teacher union officials abroad, the fairness of choice and voucher plans is considerably superior in those terms than the U.S. system of closest-public-school monopoly with no choice and no aid to private schools.
"Here... the working conditions and salaries for our teachers are the same in private as in public schools," notes Ann-Christian Larsson of Lärarförbundet (Swedish Teachers Union.)
"There are no salary differences between teachers in the public schools versus the private schools," says Marianne Kristoffersson of Lärarnas Riksförbund. "Those who are members of a union get help and support from the union," but private school teachers account for about 3-4 percent of the members of the Swedish teacher unions. And, "when a collective agreement had been made in the public sector," as Larsson notes, "the private employers enter into similar agreements with their employees."
"Our teachers haven't been opposed to this choice by the parents," observes Hans Laugesen of Sweden's Gymnasiesko-lernes Laererforening, "because teaching itself has the same regulations in public and private school. While a teacher or a school official accepts the special ideology that governs a private school he is at the same payment level as in public schools."
All this is in marked contrast to the wide U.S. gap between public and private teacher school pay. A public school teacher from Sacramento who supports school choice says: "It would give us more opportunities! One reason I don't teach in private schools is because the pay is lower than in public schools." (The American Educator, February, 1996.)
U.S. unions are not keen to talk about pay differentials, though, given that public school primary and secondary teachers earn significantly more than their private school counterparts here. In fact, it's somewhat revealing unions that despite the way that terms like "equity" and "fairness" dominate discussions of education, U.S. teacher union officials almost never apply them to teachers certainly not in terms of making public-private comparisons. Table 4 shows why "fairness" and teacher pay is not high on the agenda of the NEA or AFT.
Table 4.
AFT: Any Fairnessfor Teachers?
NEA: Not Exactly,in America
Average income for full-time teachers, by selected characteristics,
1993-94:
Elementary schools
private $20,962
public $34,611
Secondary schools
private $26,970
public $37,291
All levels
private $23,395
public $35,924
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for
Education Statistics, "Schools and Staffing Survey, 1993-94," prepared
in August, 1995.
WHAT is most interesting, then, is the whole different context in which teachers unions outside the U.S. view the fairness question regarding vouchers and choice. For these unions, it includes teacher pay and public-private sector fairness; the possibility that poor children will benefit from choice; and various non-economic considerations.
"Many times" in the Netherlands, comments Dresscher, the president of the NGL, "the question has been raised whether it [the voucher-choice system] is outdated or not. The fact is, the Dutch system does prevent the problem of big differences between public and private education, often related to social class."
In this view, vouchers, by mixing poor students into schools now
limited to the middle and upper class, make a contribution to dynamic fairness.
They can break down social barriers. This is a mission traditionally envisioned
for public schools, but which they have seldom achieved because of school
assignment by zone and other practices common to nearly all public school
systems.
3. Voucher programs violate church-state separation, or promote
religious divisions.
The teacher union officials who spoke to us about vouchers and church-state issues tend to share the concern for keeping religion and the government at arms' length. In general, though, they take a different view of what this means.
"For us, a neutral policy is one in which religious and secular concerns are treated equally," says Mrs. Fuchs of Deutscher Leherverband. "How is it that favoring non-religion would be equal?"
As we recounted at the beginning of this paper, Ms. Caille of the Syndicat National des Enseignements de Second Degree had a similar, let-me-explain-it-again kind of reaction. "If the experience of teachers unions in countries that have vouchers is any guide, then economic impacts between public and private schools have some importance to teachers and the electorate. The idea that vouchers of favor or disfavor religion seems not to."
"We have achieved a settlement of sorts," says Sharan Burrow, federal president of the Australian Education Union, a group that opposes voucher-choice formulas. Under this peace treaty or, to be more precise, limited cease-fire battles continue to rage regarding "fees, the philosophy of education," and a "range of initiatives." The AEU and some others continue to oppose the voucher-choice idea as a policy. But there is relative peace on religious issues.
This is not because the teachers or their unions necessarily have any strong pro-religious leanings. In fact, teacher union officials from Sweden, Germany, France, and other countries complained about the way in which Moslems and other non-Western religious and-or ethnic groups have been able to obtain school licenses and thus, funding for their activities. American voucher opponents (such as Al Shanker) have given more graphic expression to this fear by noting the possibility that under a voucher scheme, a Ku Klux Klan or Nazi leader could open their own school with government funding.
"That could not happen here," comments Mrs. Fuchs. "You must obtain a license first." (This is true of all voucher-choice plans we are aware of.)
A related, but separate objection is the idea that voucher or choice plans will have a divisive impact, tending to segregate children into religious or social sects. This differs, of course, from the idea that vouchers will improperly subsidize particular religions or religion generally. But it is often bound up in the same cluster of arguments.
"Our system," says Gene Roth of Danmarks Lærerforening, "is an expression of entente." There was "great division... in the Dutch Community in the nineteenth century between protestants, catholics, and liberals." Choice allowing families to go their own way on religious matters, under a broader umbrella of shared national ideals common to all the schools, public and private was an effort to defuse this conflict, and secure social peace and unity. "It has worked."
"There is no significant level of antagonism between the different types of private schools, nor is there between public and private schools," comments Louise May of the Schools Staffing Section of the Education Ministry of New Zealand. "Mostly they seem to be fairly supportive of each other."
In New Zealand, May notes, the government funding formula has the affect of encouraging different groups to come together. "Integrated, private schools have to comply with some governmental requirements. For example, a Catholic integrated school must accept 30 percent non-Catholic students to receive government funding."
For France, as Boullier, head of the Federation des Syndicats Generaux de l'Education National et la Recherche, put it, "the private schools pre-date the public schools, and their history goes all the way back to pre-Revolution France." Advocates of public education, he notes, at first were confined merely to arguing for public funds to help the poor be able to reach these private, mostly religious, schools. "In most of the 19th Century, public schools were just private schools, receiving assistance." What would now be public schools "started in the year 1885. Our trade union was founded in 1937."
Thus, to French teachers unions, the idea of rights to public education, which they certainly uphold, are somehow bound up almost inextricably with the idea of rights to conscience and to parental choice, including the choice of private, religious schooling. Even that, in a sense, understates the concept: "It is more that the French idea of 'public education' includes private and religious as part of it," as a young French college student put it to us during an interview.
"The public system is more comprehensive in France," as Ms. Caille of the put it. "Schools, both public and private, are subsidized by the state. But the state's subsidy to schools... goes only through 'contract' or 'agreements' between the state and the schools."
The sensibility of French unions on the matter of religion is of
special interest, for reasons that may justify a slight digression, particularly
for those with an interest in Alexis de Tocqueville himself. Others may
skip to the next sub-head on page 14, at no loss.
An aside
Tocqueville, choice, and
the French religious agony
FRANCE HAS had voucherized education going back to the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1789. At various points, the system was questioned, but never overturned other than by war or a brief revolutionary episode.
In 1844, for instance, the Republicans (in French terms, the center-left and far left) attempted to bring all schools under the direct regulation of the federal government ("the University") and cut off funds to schools that did not meet its regulations. Since one of the regulations was to be no state support for religion, this would have had the effect of terminating the support for private schools that had been in place since it was grudgingly conceded by Napoleon in order to win the support of the Catholic Church for his rule. The Villemain bill, containing these provisions, came before the Assembly in January, 1844.
It was then that a young (but already famous) French parliamentarian went to the center of the oval-shaped chamber to question what contribution, if any, would be made to religious harmony, or for that matter education itself, if religious schools were either regulated into atheism or, just as bad, financially strangled into bankruptcy. Having heard the zero-sum arguments about different groups, experts, and side-effects, he took up what seemed to be the deeper issues of social harmony, morality, and freedom.
"If we are not careful, gentlemen," Alexis de Tocqueville began, "we will soon arrive at a point at which we will represent here, neither ideas nor men, but interests, canals, railroads. You say that a peace" that is, a social peace "exists, and I will tell you again that the war has only changed the theater of politics, it has become philosophical and religious...."
"To be sure, I do not share the views of many prejudiced people against the University" the French government's Department of Education over the grammar schools. "I myself was part of these schools. Its existence, even its purpose, is among the highest interest of the country.
"But I will still notice what needs to be corrected. Yes, instruction has indeed progressed, but education" interruption from the left "did education, which is the training of the heart and the morals, reach the same level?"
"I hear some 'no's, and these 'no's do not come from critics interested in its ruin, they come from faithful friends of the institution" of public education.... The University" the federal regulation arm for grade schools "left many things to be changed, and therefore gave much pretext for war.... War is here, it is started, it is already active...."
Thus, members of the French clergy issued attacks "some of them unfair" upon the secretary of education. Levellier, and other public officials, responded by trying to push the clergy out of its legitimate interests in education altogether. "What does the secretary of education do?" He, "and other men of some importance.... retaliate against not only a part of the clergy which threatens secular education, and not only the whole clergy, but all of Catholicism and of Christianity."
Given this state of war, what was the solution? The exclusion of religion from schooling was a non-solution. "
The fear of a too-powerful church, meanwhile, of a state-backed religion, was obsolete, Tocqueville thought, especially in an increasingly Democratic age. "Some people think the clergy will take a predominant place in society and the government. But do not take seriously the assumption that a society like ours, proud and impregnated of civil and religious freedom, would subdue to an Orthodoxy. Gentlemen, this is pure imagination."
"I have never seen a free people whose liberty is not enrolled in beliefs. To me, the reason for this is that liberty is more the daughter of morals than the daughter of institutions, and morals are daughters of beliefs."
The effort to lift persons materially, through public education and other means, was important indeed "the essence of democracy as I understand it." But even this, and this purpose, was not the highest purpose not even the highest purpose of education, as implied above.
"Don't you think we need these religious beliefs," while debating a bill "threatening their ruin? Do you truly believe that we can help these problems through cold and vain philanthropy? Don't you think we need to appeal to religious men, to all religions, to alleviate all these miseries.... to teach all this ignorance and enlighten all this darkness?"
For the religious war in France, Tocqueville argued, there needed to be an active, dynamic solution not simply a "separation" of church and state or a smoldering silence of contempt, but a system that allowed belief to flourish. "I myself am convinced that the greatest danger in these fights, sooner or later, is that they come to indifference." The violent rhetoric of the clergy which Tocqueville did not hesitate to criticize would in turn facilitate the removal of religious and moral content from the schools in a real but deadly peace. "The peace you are talking about is a fruitless one," a repressed "war of interests instead of a healthy war of political opinion.... In short, gentlemen, I will not vote for the paragraph..." (Alexis de Tocqueville, speech to the Chamber of Deputies, Le Moniteur Universel, January 17, 1844, pages 92-93.)
Thus in Tocqueville's terms, France's de facto voucher system was not likely to be a cause of religious strife, of which he agreed France has had much. Rather, it is a potential solution to religious division, a way of defusing the tension and disarming the time bomb.
This dynamic was perhaps best expressed powerfully 150 years later by French Socialist Louis Legrand, whose 1981 book catalyzed a great education debate in France and whose ideas were taken up as a rallying torch by Francois Mitterand in his election as president.
"The body of society," wrote Legrand, "already is divided." To say this is not to cause division, but merely to acknowledge that one exists. "The official solution to this dilemma has been sough, as we have seen, in an aseptic concept of secularity. This is the worst and most hypocritical situation... emptying public education having become more and more intellectual and arid of values and thus of explicit ideology, while allowing the development of a 'free' educational system marked by an ideological ethic and context.... The common school cannot be the present public school with its ethical and ideological emptiness." (L'école unique: à quelles conditiones?, Paris, Scarabèe 1981, pages 203-204.)
Thus, one of the most lucid exponents of the école unique,
or common school which to Legrand means one, truly, common school representing
a solid, tangible, national ethos, as distinct from the "vapid" schools
created by public education required, at least for its evolution, and perhaps
indefinitely to sustain it, the presence of an other system with a spirit
of its own. This independent sector would offer definition to the common
school, and act as a spur to its evolution. This is neatly consistent with
the classic liberalism of French education reformers from Thiers to Maupas
to de Tocqueville. As Legrand continued:
"It is contradictory and inadmissable that a democracy that considers
itself liberal should refuse to citizens who desire it the exercise of
the fundamental right to decide on the nature of the education that their
children will benefit from." (p. 205.)
Nothing rotten in Denmark
France's emergence from a millennium of religious strife to the relative peace of today owes to many social, political, and other factors. The fact that this happened, however, during a 200 years span in which voucher-choice education was used to defuse the conflict in at least one important institution, the school, though, suggests at the least that such mechanisms are not inconsistent with social and religious harmony. They may even help, marginally, to produce it.
"We have some very rough disagreements in our schools," a French teacher we spoke to observed, "and especially between us and the state in negotiations over pay. But as far as the parents and children go, at the end of the day, they can walk away from these conflicts or from a certain school or teacher or method, and go a different way. Teachers have greater flexibility in that regard here too.
"You, on the other hand in America, it is more, everything is fought out and won for the whole school. It is" we interrupted to suggest, "winner-take-all" "yes, winner take all. If your public school is going to have a science textbook, that is the textbook. If you and I are parents, and we disagree, we have an argument at the school board meeting, and someone wins and someone loses. And that is it for the whole school everyone's child at the school lives with that policy. And they can leave and go to another school, but of course some cannot afford this.
"And this happens, over and over. I mean, there is one science textbook; there is one religion or of course, normally, no religion; there is one thing for school lunch; there is one teaching method. It is no wonder that you are having such fights over the schools in America.
"In France, we fight about almost everything else, and we fight about wages in the school when it is time, but there is very little conflict over the running of individual schools. Where someone is unhappy, they go elsewhere."
This teacher, who is not religious and teaches in a public school, seems typical of the teachers and even union officials who spoke to AdTI on the issue of vouchers and religion. There may be a deeper irony, given that Europe is a more secular society, and America, more religious. European teachers seem more respectful of religious liberties the freedom of parents and students than those in America. In America, the cradle of democracy, less weight is given to these liberties than to the specter of state involvement in religion something which, if anyone has reason to fear, it would be Germany, France, Italy, and the rest of Europe.
"Everybody is entitled to public education, but realistically we can't meet everyone's needs," suggests Ms. Roth of the Danish Union of Teachers.
"In a democratic and open-minded society, if parents want their children to receive the type of education they desire, they can do so."
In the Netherlands, 75 percent of all primary and secondary students attend a state-supported private school. "Most teachers in the Netherlands," says Walter Dresscher, President of the NGL, one of the largest Dutch teachers unions, "think that this system works very well."
CONSIDERING the broad acceptance of public choice and even private voucher plans among teacher unions abroad, the real anomaly becomes, why are American teachers unions principally the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association so hostile?
One answer may be the relatively narrow focus of U.S. teacher unions. "There are 17,000 teachers in Northern Ireland," as David Allen, Secretary General of the Ulster Teachers' Union puts it, "and we have five unions. You have only two big ones," covering more than two million teachers. We developed this idea in greater detail in a recent paper on union "concentration," mentioned above.
As well, America has little background with religious conflict certainly
nothing compared to Europe. In America, this has led to an attitude that
the government can ignore religious differences, etc. In Europe, the fear
of centuries of division has led educators to seek out a modus vivendi,
a way to defuse the ticking time bomb of religious division.
MOST important, the United States has little experience with public-school
choice, and almost none with private-school support vouchers. This has
made the debate in the United States largely a theoretical one, in which
hopes and fears, complaints and promises, are bound to be magnified.
Robert W. Kasten represented Wisconsin in the House of Representatives
and the U.S. Senate. He chairs the Center on Regulation and Economic Growth
at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, AdTI. Gregory Fossedal is executive
chairman of AdTI. They are grateful to a number of AdTI researchers who
contributed to this paper, including: Patrick Addey, Bonnie Bray, Bill
Mikhail, Dr. Bernard Lewis, and Alexandra Merle.
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