ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 5 (May 2002) pp. 253-256.

VOUCHERS WITHIN REASON: A CHILD-CENTERED APPROACH TO EDUCATION REFORM by James G. Dwyer. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. 248 pp. Cloth $32.50. ISBN: 0-8014-3948-5.

Reviewed by Terri B. Davis, Department of Political Science, Lamar University. Email.

School choice has been a matter of legal concern since at least 1925 when the Supreme Court held in PIERCE v. SOCIETY OF SISTERS (1925) that parents have a constitutional right to decide what form of education their children should pursue (public or private). The issue took on added academic and political significance after the publication of Milton Friedman's CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM (1962), which argued that the injection of free market principles into the realm of education would serve to improve public education. School choice proposals gained particular momentum after the National Commission on Excellence in Education released its 1983 report, A NATION AT RISK, which argued that the poor quality of American public schools was responsible for the slow growth in the nation's economy. Today, almost every state legislature and many local communities have considered some form of public choice legislation, and vouchers have been at the forefront of legislative initiatives. Regardless of the Supreme Court's impending decision on the constitutionality of Ohio's tax funded "scholarship" program, Dwyer's VOUCHERS WITHIN REASON highlights a number of education issues that are rarely discussed in the literature about education reform, namely the lack of state and federal regulation of private schools, the distinction between the educational interests of children and those of their parents and
other adults, and the role of the state in providing a "good" education to all children including those in private schools.

Dwyer attempts to redirect the focus of the debate over vouchers away from its current emphasis on parental rights and the plight of children left behind in failing public schools. He argues two central points: it is morally and constitutionally mandatory that states enact voucher programs, and, children enrolled in private religious schools without vouchers are the only children who have a moral right to vouchers. In his Equal Protection Clause analysis (Chapter 6) of a hypothetical, "ideal" voucher program (outlined in Chapter 3), Dwyer contends that children in private religious schools are entitled to share in state spending on education. However, the dominant theme of the book is that private school students are entitled to an education that complies with "robust regulations regarding academic quality and treatment of students" (p. 211). Regulation, he argues, "can be a good whose distribution is a matter of justice." State-imposed requirements for
instruction, treatment of students, and standards of achievement "are a benefit to children, insofar as they induce schools to provide a better education" (p. 64). Specifically, Dwyer focuses on the benefits state regulation could bring to children in private religious schools that seek to instill religious values at the expense

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of a good liberal, secular education. Attaching regulatory requirements to the voucher money given to participating private schools would result in substantial changes in private school teaching and curriculum and induce non-complying private schools to revamp their teaching and curriculum in order to qualify for public funds available through vouchers. Since existing voucher programs (outlined in Chapters 1 and 8) contain no restrictions on how religious schools spend state money, Dwyer contends they are "morally and constitutionally impermissible" (p. 16).

Dwyer seeks to argue these points through a "child-centered approach" to education reform. The child-center approach he proposes is one in which children are persons distinct from their parents and other groups of adults. Children are "entitled to have their interests control the outcome of policy deliberations" (p. 5). The interests of any group, including parents, must be excluded from policy consideration or subject to a showing that the adult's interests are more important than the children's interests. A child-centered assessment of vouchers differs from adult-centered assessments in that it does not presume any set of adult rights or claims and seeks to construct a voucher program without direct reference to parental choices, preferences, or beliefs (pp. 64-65).

Dwyer's child-centered analysis depends not only on a wholesale separation of children's interest from those of their parents and other adults but also on a separation of children's interest from societal interests. Dwyer contends that existing political theory and its relation to vouchers is inapplicable because it has been dult-centered in its treatment of "children's schooling as an instrument for serving ends of society as a whole and ends of parents and adult members of religious groups" (p. 49).
Specifically, Dwyer describes the "liberal statist position" exemplified in Amy Gutmann's DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION, and the "pluralist position" demonstrated
in William Galston's LIBERAL PURPOSES. The liberal statist position asks how education can serve the interests of liberal society as a whole, and the child's welfare "has no special place, is not the focus of moral attention, and is satisfied ONLY to the extent that children share with all other citizens in the good of a stable liberal society" (p. 51, emphasis in the original). Dwyer further argues that if Gutmann's conclusions are in fact consistent with children's welfare on the whole, "it is coincidental rather than compelled by her approach" (p. 51). Galston's view is "even more troubling from a child welfare perspective" because it "posits that parents
have a right to presumptive authority over their children's education," a right that is predicated on "parents' desire to pass on their way of life to their children" (p. 54).

Having attempted a theoretical separation of children's interests from those of parents and society, Dwyer then proposes a child-centered approach to child-rearing policy that gives "priority to the welfare of children"-a priority that again requires one to view children's interests as separate from those of their parents. Dwyer's effort here has substantial implications for a wide variety of education reform. However, he moves much too quickly from a description of the specifics of a child-centered approach to education reform to a discussion of a child-centered assessment of school vouchers. Specifically, Dwyer contends that curricular issues (defined as "the content of good secular education" p. 63) are best represented in the works of Meira Levinson, Harry Brighouse, and Michael Pritchard. However,
the author neither articulates the


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common features of their respective theories nor the unique child-centered contributions they bring to the academic and political discussion of education reform. He almost immediately shifts his attention to a pronouncement that, "the state must ultimately decide what the interests of children, individually or collectively, are" p. 65).

Given that the state actually decides what the interests of children are, it is na‹ve to assume children's interests can be sufficiently separated from the state's interests in the way Dwyer's child-centered approach to education reform requires. In a constitutive form of government, the "state" is the people. Public policy in representative government is the result of rational discourse among interested adults and even uninterested adults who entrust public officials to produce and implement fair and just policies. Thus, Dwyer's approach to education reform asks the reader not only to separate children from adults but also to separate the state from the people-
a request that democratic readers will find offensive if not frightening. Furthermore, the fact that certain interests held by children may overlap certain interests held by the state does not mean that philosophical considerations of the interests held by children and simultaneously by the state necessarily and primarily serve the instrumental ends of society as a whole rather than the interests of children. The reader would be well served by a more in-depth elaboration of what child-centered curricula would entail and greater clarification of how a child-centered approach to educational reform substantially differs from those offered in liberal education theory. As it stands, Dwyer's child-centered perspective appears to separate children from all relevant adults-parents, teachers, administrators, taxpayers, and
even society at-large-leaving only the state to define and protect children's interests. This perspective runs directly counter to basic liberal principles of limited government and individual freedom.

In Chapter 3, Dwyer constructs an ideal voucher program in which all eligible schools "strive to advance the educational interests of their students AS THE STATE SEES IT" (p. 67, emphasis in the original). A utilitarian assessment of vouchers is then performed to determine whether his ideal program "would on the whole do more good than harm, taking into account all the human interests at stake" (p. 68). The conclusion drawn from his analysis is that children are the only persons with fundamental interests at stake in voucher programs. In Chapter 4, he identifies interests that, from the state's perspective, are so important to individual well-being that they ought to trump subordinate or non-fundamental interests. Here, Dwyer contends that the separate interests in vouchers of all groups except for children are other-determining and therefore non-fundamental and of less moral purchase than those of children. For example, he argues that the interests public school teachers and administrators have in vouchers are those that are selfish, financially driven, and derived from a desire to retain their livelihood. Any altruistic interests (such as a teacher's or parent's sincere interest in the eventual fate of children and future generations) are summarily dismissed as non-fundamental.

The interest of children in vouchers is nonetheless dependent in Dwyer's analysis on a foundational assumption that all children have a right to a good liberal, secular education. The leap Dwyer makes from the assumption that all children have a right to a good education to the conclusion that the only children who have a moral

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right to vouchers are those in religious schools not now participating in voucher programs is an extraordinary one indeed. He makes little attempt to demonstrate that children have a right to equal educational opportunities except through very occasional reference to the proper goals of education (particularly those set forth by the Court in BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION), in a passing statement that "many states recognize the moral right of children to receive a good education in their own constitutions" (p. 102), and in a brief discussion concerning the "priority of place" of children's interests and the proper goals of child rearing. Significantly, Dwyer mentions the Court's decision in SAN ANTONIO IND. SCHOOL DIST. v. RODRIGUEZ (1973) only to point out that the decision was based on an issue of federalism ("which is not relevant to the question here" p. 161), and to cursorily mention that education has been deemed by the Court to not be a fundamental interest or right that triggers strict scrutiny (p. 164). His examination of education reform completely ignores the Court's ruling that children have no national constitutional right to an education. The omission is most likely intentional given Dwyer's legal training at Yale Law School and his professional experience as an attorney specializing in family law and youth law. His objective is clearly one of defending vouchers solely as a matter of right for children in private schools. Chapters 5 and 6 more fully demonstrate this objective in his outline of specific legal strategies through which to pursue Establishment Clause and Equal Protection Clause claims that lend greater support to the constitutionality of vouchers. In these chapters, Dwyer suggests that the inconsistency and lack of clarity in Supreme Court Establishment Clause doctrine opens the door for voucher advocates to sufficiently "secularize" voucher programs in ways that might increase their chances of the Court upholding the constitutionality of vouchers. His proposed Equal Protection strategy involves a redirection of attention away from the right of parents to school choice toward the equal right of private school children to receive a "fair share of the state's expenditures on education" (p. 167).

One need not endorse vouchers to find some value in the issues Dwyer raises even if his intended audience is one that, ipso facto, accepts vouchers as a viable or "just" education reform measure. The book very explicitly states many of the implicit assumptions held by school choice and voucher advocates. Dwyer's unapologetic support of vouchers and articulation of the legal and philosophical foundations of voucher arguments, as well as his examination of the moral and constitutional shortcomings of existing voucher proposals, paves the way for more direct and energetic discussions of current school reform initiatives. His examination of how adults perceive the interests of children challenges educators, scholars, and policy makers to reflect critically on the interests they hold in children's education and the meaning they assign to adult representation of children's interests in education policy deliberations. Finally, voucher opponents can consider Dwyer's book to be a guide to understanding the legal strategies voucher proponents will likely pursue in the not-so-distant future.

CASE REFERENCES:

PIERCE v. SOCIETY OF SISTERS, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).

SAN ANTONIO INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT v. RODRIGUEZ, 411 U.S. 1 (1973).

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Copyright 2002 by the author, Terri B. Davis.