June 12, 2012
The NYT reports that Governor Romney will strongly push school vouchers if he gets into the White House. It told readers:
“Now Mr. Romney is taking his party back to its ideological roots by emphasizing a lesser role for Washington, replacing top-down mandates with a belief in market mechanisms.”
Top down mandates are a policy. The policy is not replaced with beliefs, it is replaced with other policies. In this case, the piece tells us the policy is a voucher that can be used for private schools. While the article repeatedly assures readers that the motive is an ideological belief in markets, there is another possibility that goes completely unmentioned in this article.
There are companies that profit from running private schools. Such companies could make large amounts of money if the Federal government were to pressure state and local governments to give students a voucher that could be used in their schools.
It is possible that Romney and his advisers are motivated by the desire to appease people running for profit schools rather than an ideological belief in the idea that market forces will somehow fix education for low income student. This possibility seems especially plausible since there is now considerable evidence that increased use of market mechanisms will not improve the quality of education.
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