8 Most of the debates about vouchers have been conducted around one issue, whether or not they raise scores on standardized tests. There are other crucial issues that must not be ignored, however. Voucher plans, like all market-driven and privatized models, are part of a larger and quite aggressive ideological movement to change how we think about our society and our participation in it. They assume without question that public is by definition bad and private is by definition good. Instead of collectively building and rebuilding our institutions, voucher plans are part of the larger effort by conservatives to change the very meaning of citizenship.
Citizenship is now to be defined as simply consumer choice.
The unattached individual makes choices about her or his life, without caring what its effects are on the rest of society. The reduction of democracy to selfish individualism may in fact be Un-American. I doubt that this is what we as a society want. Widely discredited in the scientific literature, the volume claimed that African Americans were on the whole less intelligent than European Americans. While this does not discredit all of the arguments in favor of vouchers, it should make us extremely cautious about how voucher plans fit into the larger sets of social commitments that guide many of their proponents.