Tag Archives: vouchers

Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned

Whatever the merits of, or problems with, charter schools, those schools at least are public.  Schools that benefit from the voucher programs so beloved by our Governor and legislators are not, and the public dollars going to such schools are not necessarily being used to educate children.

I have lots of problems with vouchers, many of which are detailed in this article I wrote several years ago. I won’t bore you with the whole list. Read the article if you’re interested. But a warning from voucher opponents that has consistently fallen on deaf ears is that families who would opt for private or parochial schools in any case–families whose children already attend such schools–would be beneficiaries of a windfall. They would take money intended to enable poor kids to opt out of nonperforming public schools.

Evidently, that’s exactly what is happening in Indiana.

Father Jake of St. Jude parish in Fort Wayne, Indiana, indicates that, thanks to the impending influx of tax dollars, the church will soon be getting a repaired air conditioning system, redecorating the church, new paint, and repairs to the church steeple.

The link above the quote will take you to a fairly lengthy post in Education Week Teacher by a woman who listened to Father Jake’s speech. As she also reported (emphasis in the original):

I was appalled when he said that most of the students who are accepting vouchers are already attending St. Jude’s (minute 40:57).  Wasn’t one of the selling points of “opportunity scholarships” to reach out to economically disadvantaged students so that they could attend the private school of their choice?  Weren’t students to qualify for vouchers based on the Federal Free and Reduced Lunch Guidelines?

Father Jake says with a chuckle that scholarships must be based on need, but the parish is free to determine what this means (minute 39.47). He says that since the Indiana Supreme Court says that vouchers are constitutionally allowable because the money goes to the tax payer, so the Indiana Choice Scholarship comes essentially with no strings (minute 42:00).  Father Jake goes on to say that he doesn’t see the program going away because the state of Indiana is saving millions of dollars a year by taking $4700  off the top of the funding formula to give to voucher kids rather than spending the $7000 per public school child in the state formulation.  So, the state saves over $2000 per student, but at what cost to our community schools?

Somehow, it doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy to know that Indiana is saving tax dollars by shortchanging children and re-roofing Father Jake’s church.

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Vouchers and Education

While the constitutional challenge to Indiana’s much-hyped voucher program is pending in our Supreme Court, it might be instructive to look to Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal’s equally-hyped version has just been declared unconstitutional. The legal issues are very different–both challenges were based upon state constitutional provisions, and Indiana’s constitution doesn’t contain the provision that was fatal to the Louisiana program. So there’s no legal equivalence.

Instead, what we can learn from Louisiana falls under the old adage that “there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.”

Even the most well-meaning privatization efforts tend to founder on the shoals of accountability. When the effort involves education, those problems multiply. Despite lots of rhetoric, most academic studies of school voucher programs find that the only area of improvement is in parent satisfaction. Even in well-run programs, student performance remains where one would expect based upon a variety of sociological factors. Reports about rising test scores tend, upon further inquiry, to be based on the ability of private schools to eject students who aren’t making the grade.

Those results come from well-run programs. Louisiana is a poster child for the programs where ideology trumps accountability and basic common sense.

A report from Louisiana Progress, a good-government business group, is instructive. The group petitioned the Board of Education to set at least minimal standards for schools receiving vouchers–evidence that the schools have adequate physical facilities, that they not dramatically increase either tuition or enrollment in order to benefit financially from the program, etc. Calling the program “poorly thought out and poorly implemented,” the report noted that schools selected to participate were not chosen on the basis of educational quality. Most were religious, and many of those quite fundamentalist: the New Living Word School had been approved to increase its enrollment from 122 to 315 students, despite lacking physical facilities for that number; increased its tuition from 200/month to 8500/year, and has a basketball team but no library. Students “spend most of the day watching TV. ..Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses bible verses with subjects like chemistry or composition.”

Another voucher school, the Upperroom Bible Church Academy, operates in “a bunker-like building with no windows or playground.”

There are 120 private schools authorized to receive vouchers in Louisiana. A significant percentage are “Bible-based” institutions with what have been characterized as “extreme anti-science and anti-history curriculums” that champion creationism. (One is run by a former state legislator who refers to himself as a “prophet or apostle.” Wouldn’t that encourage you to enroll your child??) A number use textbooks produced by Bob Jones University.

Mother Jones has a list of 14 favorite lessons being taught by Louisiana’s voucher schools. Among them: dinosaurs and people hung out together; gays have no more claims to ‘special rights’ than child molesters and rapists.

Your tax dollars at work.

Louisiana Progress pointed out–reasonably–that since the reason for the voucher program was that Louisiana’s public schools were not meeting educational accountability standards, it makes no sense to spend tax dollars on private/parochial schools that aren’t even being asked to meet those same standards.

We Americans have a love affair with easy answers. We also tend to believe that–whatever the task–private enterprises will outperform governmental ones. And we have a well-documented belief that change equals improvement. Unfortunately, solving real-world problems requires analysis. Sometimes, there is an easy answer; sometimes, a private entity is better suited to solve a certain problem. Sometimes, change is warranted–and positive.

Sometimes, not so much.

If we want to improve education, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions. We might start with: what is the content of a good education? How can we determine whether schools are providing that content? What can we do to improve the prospects that children who enter our schools without the necessary background and tools will actually learn?

Louisiana and many other states–including our own–don’t want to grapple with those questions. They want an easy way out.

Even Adam’s pet dinosaur knew better.

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Bumper Sticker Solutions

The Indianapolis Star’s editorial this morning offers its glowing endorsement of the mischief created by our (thankfully concluded) legislative session. While the editorial understandably ignored the culture war aspects of the GOP agenda–the same-sex marriage ban, de-funding of Planned Parenthood, the anti-immigrant effort– it especially praised the slogans-masquerading-as-education-reforms measures.

I don’t pretend to understand why people react so differently to difference–i.e., large numbers of us distrust people from different cultures, different races or religions, but at the same time, eagerly embrace the belief that if we just throw away an old system and replace it with a shiny new one, no matter how dimly conceived, all will be well. So we shy away from the hard work of figuring out what it would take to reform public schools by encouraging all manner of un-vetted and arguably unqualified people to create private ones. With public money, of course.

Several years ago, I took a look at the voucher arguments and found them troubling. Time hasn’t ameliorated those concerns.

But it isn’t just vouchers. I have no problem theoretically with Charter schools, since they are by definition public. But not every for-profit college or politically-ambitious Mayor should be able to sponsor them. I am a big believer in teacher accountability, but I’m also leery of how we determine educational productivity. (Do we let the Principal decide which teachers are doing a good job? That seems calculated to create a lot of brown-nosed teachers. Do we use standardized test scores? Decades of research suggests that test scores correlate more highly with parental income than with teaching talent.) These questions and many others haven’t been addressed by our bumper-sticker sloganeers.

Different isn’t always worse. But it isn’t always better, either.

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File Under: Be Careful What You Wish For…..

Here’s a cautionary tale for those private and parochial schools advocating at the legislature for vouchers: Sweden just passed a new education law stipulating that public schools must teach all their subjects in a “non-confessional” and “objective” (i.e. secular) manner. The law applies to all schools, including independent Christian and Muslim schools, because they, too, receive funding from the state.

Anyone who believes that tax dollars via vouchers wouldn’t come with strings attached is delusional. It’s called accountability, or more colloquially, “dancing with the guy what brung you.”

Think about it: what would some of our not-very-enlightened lawmakers say to families who wanted to use those vouchers to send their children to Muslim religious schools? Schools for Freethinkers? What would our more responsible legislators say about using them at schools that employed unqualified teachers, or taught “alternative” history, or that produced students unable to read? What about schools that didn’t meet minimum health or safety standards?

As a wise inner-city pastor once said about the Bush Administration’s Faith-Based Initiative,  “With the government’s sheckels come the government’s shackles.”

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