Dan Akst contends that a program of school vouchers is what's needed to solve this country's sprawl problem by encouraging otherwise flight-prone would-be suburbanites to stay in the city, thereby easing the push to city outskirts. Well shucks. It's an interesting argument, for a minute at least. OK, less than a minute. After that, the argument can be seen for what it is: a vaguely environmental rationale to justify defunding public education, while perpetrating the rich-poor, class, and race divides in our society.
School vouchers would neither improve schools, decrease pollution, nor curb sprawl -- the essay's central contentions. Not in the world of "Hobsonia" and its supermarkets, and not in real-life America. What vouchers would do is defund the public schools that need the most help, keep the vast array of suburbanites right where they are, and leave pollution completely untouched.
An obvious first question for Akst is: If bad schools really are the reason most people flock to the suburbs from the city (an argument that selectively ignores factors like race, class, and cultural perceptions as embodied in the phenomenon of "white flight"), and that really is what's been fueling sprawl (not, say, poor growth-management policies, developer shortcuts, Wal-Marts, and the like), wouldn't policies to improve schools be the best prescription on all fronts, starting with the very basic but crucial reform of funding public schools more equally by changing the way they're funded (primarily through property taxes -- virtually assuring greater per-student expenditures in wealthier neighborhoods), and not by abandoning the very schools everyone is fleeing?
Well, no, Akst's essay asserts. Substantive solutions that try to address the real problems with ailing schools won't work, silly. And why not? Well, because Akst's friends who agree that meaningful change is needed have kids that mostly go to schools in the suburbs. (A convoluted argument, at best, but it's there nonetheless: "These views are held by most of the caring people I know, but I notice that hardly any of them send their kids to an inner-city school," which can only mean the arguments themselves are invalid ...) But stay tuned, kids. The essay's almost wholesale disregard of logic doesn't stop there.
