Tag Archives: vouchers

Calling Out The Lie

It appears that the World’s Worst Legislature is succeeding in its goal of destroying–or at least fatally wounding– public education in the Hoosier state. An inconvenient side-effect of that success is the now-clear evidence that initial arguments for the state’s voucher program were always bogus.

Participation in Indiana’s taxpayer-funded private school voucher program jumped to the highest level since its start over a decade ago – even as the number of low-income and families of color using vouchers decreased. 

According to a new state report, the Choice Scholarship Program totaled $311.8 million in grants for 53,262 students in the 2022-23 academic year. That’s 9,000 students and $70.4 million more than the previous school year. 

But those increases will be dwarfed over the next two years, as nearly all Indiana students will become eligible for vouchers in the coming weeks. Those changes, enacted by new state law, are estimated to qualify 41,800 additional students for the program and cost $1.136 billion in total.

Those of us who have followed the General Assembly’s persistent efforts to privatize education will recall the original, pious justifications for “school choice.” Vouchers, they assured us, were a mechanism that would allow poor minority students to leave those underperforming “urban” (read “ghetto”) schools. The educational voucher program was sold as an effort to “level the playing field” for the underprivileged.

Right–and I have a bridge to sell you…

What also proved to be untrue was the claim that vouches would improve educational outcomes. Years of academic research–previously shared on this blog and elsewhere–have demolished the claim that the “private” (basically, religious) schools benefitting from those vouchers would do a better job of imparting academic skills. 

In the face of incontrovertible evidence that vouchers are actually used by middle and upper-middle class families–a significant number of whom had been paying to send their kids to private schools before our legislative overlords kindly eased their financial burden–and similarly overwhelming evidence that educational outcomes were not improving, the justification changed.

Now it’s enabling “parental rights.”

(I will restrain myself from pointing out how hypocritical Republicans are when they talk about “choice” and parental rights….parents who might want to take their kids to Drag Queen story hour, or who want them to learn accurate American history sure don’t get rights or respect for their choices…but I digress.)

As with other policies flying in the face of evidence, the GOP’s fondness for vouchers can best be understood if we follow the money.

In Indiana,

In the program’s 12th year, the average student is described as White, elementary school-age, and from a household of around four people with an income of $81,818, according to the Indiana Department of Education. Indiana’s median household income is around $62,000.

The report found the high-income eligibility likely led to the 9.3 percent decrease in the number of participating families with an income of $50,000 or less. Families earning $100,001 to $150,000 saw the largest increase in voucher use at about 8.4 percent.

As the Indianapolis Star reported,

The increase in participation will likely only continue in the coming years now that the state legislature expanded the income limit threshold to 400% of the free-and-reduced-lunch threshold, enabling a family of four making $220,000 a year to get a voucher, whereas the program currently cuts off families of that size at an income of $166,500.

It’s interesting that the Hoosier lawmakers who are so generous to upper-income constituents when it comes to siphoning students from the public schools suddenly become “fiscally conservative” when it comes to helping poor Hoosiers. Look, for example, at the income limits for pre-school vouchers. Those are limited to families with household income below 127% of the federal poverty limit, or about $32,700 for a family of four — and in order to be  eligible, parents must be working, attending school or participating in some sort of job training.

In Indiana, government works best for the well-off. It’s a lot more punitive when dealing with the working poor.

The worst part of this travesty , however, isn’t fiscal. It isn’t even the substandard educational results provided by those private “academies.” It’s the deepening of social polarization, the deliberate encouragement of tribalism.

Public education–as political scientist Benjamin Barber emphasized–is constitutive of a public.In an interview before he died, Barber cited Jefferson:

Jefferson saw a profound connection between the Bill of Rights — the document embodying the rights of citizens — and education as the foundation which made democracy work and made the Bill of Rights work. The founding of the common school, the public school, in America was for Jefferson the foundation for an effective and successful democracy. I think we have lost sight of the connection between the schooling, citizenship and democracy.

In an increasingly fragmented and hostile America, that connection is more important than ever. Indiana’s GOP supermajority doesn’t understand that. Or care.

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Choices

When I read the June 2d issue of the Indiana Business Journal, I fumed.

An editorial by current Lt. Governor and  2024 gubernatorial candidate Suzanne Crouch was titled “Why I support Universal School Choice for Hoosier Families.” Of course, “school choice” sounds way nicer than “Why I support destroying Indiana’s public schools,” or “Why I support school vouchers despite overwhelming evidence that they don’t deliver educational benefits, are socially divisive, and are a huge taxpayer subsidy to religious institutions.”

If you doubt the accuracy of that last statement, the IBJ helpfully included lists of Indiana’s largest private primary and secondary schools. Only four of the 25 primary schools listed were not religious–Park Tudor, Orchard, Sycamore and the International School.  Park Tudor–a very expensive private school ($25,930 a year!)– doesn’t accept vouchers. Sycamore limits enrollment to gifted and talented children, and the International School also appeals to a specialized constituency.

All of the other schools on a list headed by the Oaks Academy and Heritage Christian School are either Catholic, or conservative or fundamentalist Christian.

When it comes to the 19 secondary schools, only three–Park Tudor, University High School and the International School–are secular.

I have posted numerous times about the myriad ways in which advocates of “privatization” and “choice” in education have contributed to the hollowing out of America’s civic structure. (If you type “vouchers” into the search bar at the top right of this blog,  you”ll get more data than you probably want to absorb…)

I’ve linked to studies showing that fundamentalist Christian schools are teaching creationism rather than science, and whitewashing history. Science denial and bogus history are unlikely to prepare students for life in contemporary American society.

I’ve linked to various lawsuits challenging religious discrimination practiced by religious “academies.” Significant numbers of those schools refuse to enroll gay children, or children of gay parents.

I have pointed out that vouchers shortchange rural residents and those in small towns, where there aren’t enough students to support alternative, private schools, and Indiana’s voucher program deprives their public schools of desperately needed funds.

I have echoed knowledgable others, like Doug Masson, who points out that pious rhetoric about giving options to poor minority children “trapped” in those terrible public schools is nothing more than a scam.

Back in 2019, Indiana’s voucher program cost taxpayers $161.4 million; by 2025 it will cost  $600 million. And forget “poor children.” Indiana’s voucher program disproportionately serves upper-middle-class white children, a majority of whom are clearly not “escaping failing schools” because–despite lawmakers’ original promises– they never attended public school.

As Doug Masson wrote about that 2019 report:

This reinforces my view that the real intention of voucher supporters was and is: 1) hurt teacher’s unions; 2) subsidize religious education; and 3) redirect public education money to friends and well-wishers of voucher supporters. Also, a reminder: vouchers do not improve educational outcomes. I get so worked up about this because the traditional public school is an important part of what ties a community together — part of what turns a collection of individuals into a community. And community feels a little tough to come by these days. We shouldn’t be actively eroding it.

No kidding!

“Choice” sounds great. Providing citizens with a wide freedom of choice–of religion, politics, lifestyle– is a quintessentially American goal. But voucher programs are evidence that institutionalized choices can also promote division and undermine civic cohesion.

In far too many communities today, the “educational choice” being offered is the opportunity to shield one’s children from intellectual and cultural diversity. Vouchers provide parents with tax dollars that allow them to insulate their children from  one of the very few remaining “street corners” left in contemporary American society. Whatever their original intent, vouchers today are mechanisms allowing parents to remove their children from public school classrooms and classmates that may be conveying information incompatible with those parents’ beliefs and prejudices.

That an otherwise credible candidate for Indiana Governor wants to make support for increased tribalism “universal” is appalling. At best, it tells me that Crouch is totally unfamiliar with the educational and social science research; at worst, it’s a sign that she is competing for the Christian Nationalist vote that is so large a component of today’s GOP.

It goes without saying that if Mike Braun emerges as the Republican nominee for Governor, he will double down on Crouch’s position.

Speaking of “choice”– Hoosiers have one next year.

One of the many reasons I have been so impressed with Jennifer McCormick, the Democrat running for Governor, is that–after trying to protect Indiana’s public schools as a Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction– she left a political party intent upon destroying public education.

Every schoolteacher in Indiana–and every citizen who understands the importance of America’s public schools–should choose to vote McCormick.

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Indiana’s Senate Should Hang Tight..

Indiana’s legislature will end its current session this Saturday. (Your sigh of relief is appropriate.) Thus far–at least to the best of my knowledge–the House and Senate continue to disagree over whether to expand Indiana’s already far-too-generous school voucher program. The House wants to expand it; the Senate–mercifully–does not.

Vouchers were initially touted as a way to allow poor children to escape those “failing” public schools in order to improve educational outcomes. Enthusiasm for them waned as study after study rebutted virtually every argument for “school choice,” but lately–as the Right has trumpeted “parental rights” and attacked public schools as “woke”– proponents are once again having successes; South Carolina, for example, is expanding vouchers, and that state’s lawmakers are using the same dishonest rhetoric that Hoosier legislators employ.

SC senators that supported the bill for school choice vouchers spoke repeatedly about how they were motivated to help poor kids who were trapped in failing public schools and couldn’t afford other options. But on the last day of debate an amendment was filed to double the income threshold to help families making more than $100,000.

Just in case a member of Indiana’s Senate super-majority reads this blog and is on the fence about House efforts to sway the Senate, let me share a recent Time Magazine article by a professor of education policy at Michigan State, summarizing the multiple ways vouchers hurt students.The article begins by acknowledging the recent uptick in voucher programs, and notes that several states, including Indiana, have had such programs for several years. He then sets out what is known about the success or failure of these programs, asking “Do they work?” (The honest answer would be that these programs do achieve their actual goals: to funnel tax dollars to religious institutions, weaken or destroy teachers’ unions, and make war on the public schools.)

Of course, the purported goal of such programs is educational improvement. So what does the research have to say about that goal? The author of the article has studied school choice for nearly two decades, and–as he says–he’s in a good position to give an answer.

“Based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.”

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements….In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocates market these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

For children who do transfer from a public school, the academic results are, in his words, “catastrophic.” 

 Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

It turns out that elite private schools with strong academics “often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.”

In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.

The author cites data showing that 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they are disappointed, or because the schools (which-unlike public schools–can choose their students) push them out.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

I applaud the Indiana Senate’s uncommon case of good sense. The last thing Indiana needs is expansion of a failed program that enriches fundamentalist religious schools while weakening Indiana’s struggling  public education system.

Fingers crossed that the Senate’s unusual manifestation of good sense makes it to Saturday…

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That Pesky Thing Called Evidence

The World’s Worst Legislature is barreling toward the session’s finish line, and the Republican super-majority shows no sign of moderating its war on public education, despite recently emerging evidence that several of the most enthusiastic proponents of vouchers have disturbing conflicts of interest, not to mention overwhelming evidence that privatizing schools leads to poorer educational outcomes.

Of course, Indiana’s lawmakers are impervious to evidence of all kinds. (Look at Indiana’s gun laws, disregard of environmental impacts…the list goes on.)

I know my periodic posts on the subject are the equivalent of “whistling in the wind,” but as the research continues to pile up, I find it hard to restrain myself.

So…

In the Public Interest recently shared  “a clear and concise breakdown of the problems of vouchers,” written by a Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, and  titled “There is no Upside.”

Here’s the lede:

What if I told you there is a policy idea in education that, when implemented to its full extent, caused some of the largest academic drops ever measured in the research record?

What if I told you that 40 percent of schools funded under that policy closed their doors afterward, and that kids in those schools fled them at about a rate of 20 percent per year?

What if I told you that some the largest financial backers of that idea also put their money behind election denial and voter suppression—groups still claiming Donald Trump won the 2020 election? Would you believe what those groups told you about their ideas for improving schools?

What if I told you that idea exists, that it’s called school vouchers, and despite all of the evidence against it the idea persists and is even expanding?

The article followed up with a compilation of independent analyses drawn from both the research community and “on the ground” reporting by journalists. You need to click through for the details, but here are the “top level” findings:

  • First, vouchers mostly fund children already in private school. Seventy to -eighty percent of kids using vouchers were already in private school before taxpayers picked up the tab.
  •  Among the relatively few kids who did use vouchers to leave public schools, test scores dropped between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations.
  • The typical private school accepting vouchers “isn’t one of the elite, private schools in popular narrative.” The typical voucher school is “small, often run out of a church property like its basement, often popping up specifically to get the voucher.”
  • Understandably, many  kids leave those sub-prime schools. (In Wisconsin, about 20 percent of kids left their voucher school every year and most transferred to a public school.)

Then there is the issue of transparency and oversight.

All of the above evidence should already tell you why it’s critically important that states passing voucher laws also include strong academic and financial reporting requirements. If we’re going to use taxpayer funds on these private ventures, we need to know what the academic results are and what the return on government investment is.

And of course, we don’t.

Then, of course, there’s discrimination.

We know that in Indiana, where one of the largest and lowest-performing voucher programs exists, more than $16 million in taxpayer dollars went to schools discriminating against LGBTQ children. Similar story in Florida—and that includes kids whose parents are gay, regardless of how the children identify.

Given the fact that Indiana’s legislature is advancing other discriminatory measures aimed at the LGBTQ community–especially several ugly measures  targeting trans children–I’m sure our lawmakers consider that documented bigotry to be a feature, not a bug.

The article also traces connections I’d not previously been aware of between the most active voucher proponents and far-right organizations engaging in efforts to suppress votes and reject the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Interestingly, the article doesn’t highlight one of my main concerns: that vouchers are an end-run around the First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State. Here in Indiana, over 90% of voucher students attend religious schools, a significant percentage of which are fundamentalist. The children who attend overwhelmingly come from the corresponding faith communities. Even the religious schools that don’t actively discriminate do not and cannot provide the diverse classroom environment that prepares children for  citizenship in increasingly diverse  America.(Most don’t teach civics, either.)

It also doesn’t address how vouchers disproportionately hurt rural communities.

The article concludes:

So there you have it: catastrophic academic harm. A revolving door of private school failures. High turnover rates among at-risk children. Avoiding oversight and transparency. Overt, systematic discrimination against vulnerable kids and families. Deep and sustained ties to anti-democratic forces working in the United States today.

That’s school vouchers in 2023.

That’s the “system” Hoosier lawmakers want to greatly expand–with funds stolen from the state’s already under-resourced public schools.

It’s indefensible.

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Once More, With (Angry) Feeling…

In case you doubt my repeated assertions that the Republicans controlling Indiana’s legislature are waging all-out war on the state’s public schools, take a look at the current status of bills heading for passage this legislative session.

The budget bill has a 5% increase for public schools in the first year of the two-year budget. That minor increase, however, has to cover the newly “free” textbooks–a requirement that reduces funds left for  everything else (including teacher salaries) by 1.5 to 2%.    

Contrast that with the planned raise in virtual charter school funding in the first year– 18.3%, despite the state’s past unfortunate experience with “virtual” schooling. Or with  voucher schools funding, which is getting a 70% increase, despite the fact that those schools have failed to improve educational outcomes and increased social divisions.

That enormous increase in funding doesn’t come with any increase in accountability–far from it.

The budget also includes $10 million each year for “Education Savings Accounts” (a/k/a vouchers) plus $1.5 million each year for the State Treasurer, to cover program administration. (Interesting that oversight of a purportedly educational program isn’t handled by the Department of Education…)

Then there are the brand-new “Career Scholarship Accounts” that will pay private companies to employ students who will “learn” while they work: $7 million in year one, $14 million in year two. I’m sure it is just a coincidence that one of the sponsors of that particular boondoggle runs a company that stands to benefit handsomely from it….

A recent article from Talking Points Memo pointed out that vouchers are popular with legislators, but not with the public. The author wanted to understand why voucher programs continue to grow despite evidence they do not improve, and often even impede, students’ educational achievement.

Rather than put the question of whether to use public money for private schools before voters, advocates for choice almost always want state legislatures to make the decision instead. That may be because a careful look at the efforts suggests that if it were up to voters, school choice proposals would rarely succeed.

The article went on to describe past results in states that –unlike Indiana–allow citizens to vote on such issues via initiatives and/or referenda. In Indiana, our excessively gerrymandered legislature is not “hobbled” by a mechanism that might allow citizens to weigh in.

A new report by Public Funds Public Schools—a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Education Law Center (ELC)—has documented a massive increase in public spending on voucher programs in the decade following the Great Recession.

The report, The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, examines the growth in voucher programs and spending in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin from fiscal year 2008 through fiscal year 2019. For comparison, the report provides data for per-pupil expenditures on public education in inflation-adjusted dollars for these seven states, as well as the nation’s 43 other states, over this same period.

But it isn’t just money.

Lawmakers aren’t just defunding public education–they are passing bills that make teaching hazardous. In Indiana, Senate Bill 12 will remove the legal defense currently available to school teachers and librarians (who they evidently believe are handing out porn to kindergarten students) and adds yet another mechanism through which parents can challenge school library materials. 

House Bill 1407 is one of the numerous, misnamed “parental rights” bills targeting trans children; it opens the door for litigation against schools, teachers and other government employees who might exhibit a modicum of compassion for these children.

Then there’s House Bill 1608, providing that “no employee, nor a third-party school vendor may provide any instruction to a student in K-3 on human sexuality.” 

An employee or staff member of a school may only use a name, pronoun, title, or other word to identify a student that is inconsistent with the student’s biological sex as either male or female based on genetics and reproductive biology at birth if the student is emancipated or a parent requests in writing the use of the specific name, pronoun, title or other word to identify the student.

There’s much more, but you get the gist: our state lawmakers–few of whom have any background in education (or medicine, when it comes to issues of gender dysphoria)–are engaged in an all-out war on our  public schools and the people who teach in them.

Hoosier Legislators are pouring our tax dollars into the coffers of religious schools–and now, “connected” businesses–despite years of evidence disproving the original justifications for vouchers. They are weaponizing state laws in order to provide legal tools to the rightwing activists working to overrule the documented preferences of large majorities of parents who have children in those schools. 

These culture warriors don’t care what their constituents think, but you should call them anyway.

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