Vouchers and Free Market Ideology

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 84(1) of American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (see record 2014-06035-009). An incorrect pull quote was printed on page 445. The pull quote should have read: “Vouchers for education based on free market principles of choice would encourage fragmentation of our school population.” The online version of this article has been corrected.] Advocates of educational reform through privatization start from an ideological position that educational reform will be accomplished only in a free market driven by parental choice. Vouchers and charter schools are variants of the free choice position. This article focus on vouchers and ideology of free market. The hallmark of an ideology is imperviousness to evidence. The ideology that motivated the originators of vouchers and charter schools has since become a pretext for the forces of money and power that now dominate the educational reform movement. Because of the pervasively sectarian nature of the 90% or more of nonpublic schools, voucher plans would fragment our school population along religious, class, and other lines. Voucher programs are being adopted despite the fact that studies have generally failed to show that students using vouchers have any advantage in academic achievement test scores versus students in typical public schools. The premise for arguments for school reform is that public schools are failing to educate poor children with the implication that this is a recent phenomenon resulting from the laziness of teachers who are protected by powerful unions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)