Vouchers, School Privatization, and the Threat to Public Education

Such calls for privatizing the nation's education system aren't new. In 1955, economist Milton Friedman argued that taxpayer-funded vouchers should support parents in their choice of schools. Yet, over the next four decades, 26 states and the District of Columbia brought the voucher issue to voters, via referenda, to change their constitutions on the separation clause. (See the map, "School Vouchers: Public Opposition, Legislator Support.") All failed (Doerr, 2012).

Still, the voucher movement was gaining a foothold. The city of Milwaukee pioneered the current voucher movement in 1990, with a program restricted to 300 students whose families had incomes less than 175% of the poverty level, and a 2002 Supreme Court decision paved the way for statewide voucher programs. (See the sidebar, "Vouchers in the Courts.") Most recently, the Supreme Court delivered a decision regarding state-level prohibitions against the use of public funds for religious institutions—a decision that could, potentially, lift restrictions on school vouchers.

This legal battle is being fought in a political climate—at both the federal and state levels—that appears especially receptive to vouchers. As support for public dollars for private schools grows, proponents have intentionally shifted their language from controversial "tax-funded vouchers" to the more positive "school choice" (Wolfgang, 2011).

But "choice" is not synonymous with "voucher." The umbrella term "choice" covers a wide range of education options that include publicly funded charter schools, homeschooling, magnet schools, and individual tax deductions (for approved educational expenses). Generally, if a taxpayer-funded program subsidizes a student's attendance at a private school, that program provides the same service as vouchers. But what do these programs look like?

Decoding School Choice Programs

Voucher-like programs include five different tax-funded approaches to offering school choice:

Vouchers: A voucher usually provides a set dollar amount, established at the state level and often based on the school district's per-pupil expenditure (PPE), though some vouchers cover the full cost of tuition. The state usually delivers the money—sometimes referred to as "scholarships"—to the private school of choice. The typical voucher amount ranges from $2,000 to $5,000 per year (Vevea, 2016), with a national average private school tuition of approximately $10,000 per year (Private School Review, n.d.).

Education savings accounts (ESAs): Sometimes referred to as "next-generation vouchers," ESAs cover more than just school tuition (Cunningham, 2016). States that offer ESAs place a set amount of taxpayer dollars into a government-authorized savings account; families can use these dedicated monies to pay for a whole host of approved educational expenses, such as tuition, transportation, online courses, or tutoring. The amount provided in each ESA varies from state to state, but tends to be based on a state's PPE.

Such ESAs differ from Coverdell ESAs (otherwise known as education IRAs). Coverdell ESAs, created via federal legislation, offer parents tax advantages to set aside a specific amount of money to pay for qualifying education expenses (from kindergarten through college) for their children (EdChoice, 2017). In contrast, state-created and -run ESAs give the taxpayer-funded education allocation directly to parents.

Tuition tax credits: Participating states award tuition tax credits to businesses and individuals for donating money to approved nonprofit organizations that, in turn, offer private school scholarships to qualifying students. Eligibility requirements vary, but may consider federal poverty guidelines or the academic performance of a student's previous school. Each state legislature sets the number and financial scope of these tax credits.

A joint report by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy blasts tuition tax credits for allowing nearly 20 states to "divert more than $1 billion per year toward private schools via school voucher credits" (2017). According to the report, donors can benefit financially from claiming both a state tax credit and a federal deduction on the same donation. Under these tax loopholes, wealthy taxpayers can claim tuition tax credits for donations (up to $4,500 a year for individuals and $100,000 for corporations).

McKay scholarships: Geared toward students with disabilities, the Florida-based McKay scholarship program has been described as a public/private "hybrid" because families can use the state-funded vouchers at participating public or private schools.

The state bases the scholarship amount on the allocation of public funds (according to the student's individual education plan or 504 plan, as well as district services provided) a student would have received at her assigned public school or the amount of the private school's tuition, whichever is less. Parents must pay any fees or tuition costs beyond that set scholarship dollar amount. The average McKay voucher is slightly more than $7,000 (Florida Department of Education, n.d.).

Created in 1999 during Jeb Bush's governorship, the McKay program is one of the oldest and largest voucher programs for students with disabilities (Kamenetz, 2017). Approximately 20 similar programs now exist nationally for children with special needs (Samuels, 2017).

Title I portability: In recent years, the Republican-led Congress has attempted to allow states to turn their federal Title I allotment (of the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA) into individual vouchers for low-income students to apply toward their public or private school—this is referred to as Title I portability. Current Title I spending regulations allow school districts to direct the federal funds to their highest poverty schools, which can use their allocations to cover whole-school expenditures, such as classroom instruction and curriculum, intervention services, extended day learning, teacher professional development, arts, and music education.

If a portability option were allowed, the PPE would significantly affect a Title I school's ability to cover these whole school expenditures and further dilute targeted federal dollars to schools who need the funding most.

Debunking School Choice

"People like the idea of choice," says Reverend Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "There is this notion that making more choices will create more competition and in the end, a better product."

Despite this allure, public school advocates such as Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty, point out that Americans hold firm against allowing public tax dollars to fund private schools. When asked to decide, via referenda, to amend their state constitutions, "voters have said, 'no.' We've won 27 out of 28 times."

And yet, state legislatures have signed pro-voucher policies into law. State lawmakers, Lynn points out, "share some of the same public misperceptions" about school choice and can be swayed by the flurry of information and agendas on the issue—especially when "they receive pressure from pro-voucher organizations with clever titles such as the 'American Federation for Children.'"

Yet, as Lynn points out, "There is absolutely no evidence that vouchers do much of anything except, in general, subsidize parents who are already paying something for private schools." In addition, public polling indicates that most Americans do not support vouchers:

• In an October 2017 ABCNews/Washington Post poll of all registered voters, 55 percent opposed any type of government financial support to subsidize attendance at private schools. The opposition rose to 70 percent when respondents were asked if they would support vouchers "if it meant less money for the public schools."
• In a 2014 PDK/Gallup poll, 67 percent of Americans surveyed said that they opposed "allowing students and parents to choose a private school at public expense."

"Time and time again, the public expresses its unwavering preference for neighborhood public schools and strong support for reforms that help improve the public school system rather than abandoning it, closing it, or giving parents money to send their child to a private school under the guise of 'choice,'" notes David Griffith, ASCD's senior director of government relations.

Protecting Public Education for the Public Good

Public education has long been considered an essential pillar to a democratic society. Operating under an open-door policy, public schools accept any child regardless of disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or language barrier. More than 90 percent of U.S. students attend public schools, which continue to be underfunded by both federal and state coffers despite the ever-increasing demands placed upon them. Shifting much-needed resources toward private schools seems counterintuitive.

Mary Kusler, former senior director of advocacy for the National Education Association, acknowledges that support for public schools must focus on more than simply saying "no" to vouchers. "Our answer has to be 'no and ….' We've got to reinvest in our public schools so that they are the best. We know that's not always happening."

Signed into law December 2015, ESSA aimed to grow that proactive reinvestment. The law specifically prioritizes strategies proven to build academic success in public schools, such as better support for new educators, higher-level coursework, more well-rounded education, and school counselors. Simply, these supports have not had sufficient time to show dividends. Diverting public school dollars toward vouchers, especially now, would undo the work of evidence-based policy, based on a pro-voucher public relations plan.

Unbalanced Accountability

The No Child Left Behind Act, the George W. Bush administration's signature rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, demanded increasingly stiffer accountability for student achievement from public schools and teachers. Yet, the same public accountability strings do not attach to tax-funded vouchers going to private or religious affiliated schools. This irony is not lost on most public school supporters.

"Vouchers are not required to uphold even minimal accountability requirements, such as reporting on their number of highly qualified teachers or what their student assessment scores are in the aggregate," explains Griffith. "Where is the outcry over the lack of accountability and/or transparency for tracking how effectively these public tax dollars are being spent?"

If choice is the new accountability, this runs counter to nearly every legislative requirement put in place to measure or track public school "success" over multiple decades, he adds.

"I reject the assumption that private schools are 'just better' than public schools, and that parental satisfaction is the only measure of whether a voucher is working."

Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director of policy and advocacy for AASA, notes that in a balanced scale of accountability, public schools would compete: "if the playing field is leveled between public, private, and parochial school options, then public schools will play that game all day long."

Voucher Results: Where's the Beef?

If we consider academic success as "school kids performing better on any assessment once they leave a neighborhood public school and attend another one with a voucher, then there is no study to prove that theory," Lynn says.

He urges everyone to "look at data. If 'success' means [the kids] are doing better academically, the kids don't do better. No study supports this claim, unless it's using dubious scientific means to demonstrate that."

Lynn cites the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, the only voucher program funded by Congress, which "has been studied four times … and each study demonstrates that school voucher students actually don't do any better than their public school peers. In fact, some do marginally worse."

Within three days of the April 2017 release of the U.S. Department of Education's one-year evaluation of the program, Congress reauthorized it, despite the following data:

• Math results, for students who participated in the voucher program, were worse than those of other students.
• Math and reading results for K–5 students in the voucher program showed they performed worse than their D.C. public school peers.
• Student participants who had previously attended public schools not deemed "failing," performed worse in both math and reading (Dynarski, Rui, Webber, & Gutmann, 2017).

Congress's decision to reauthorize the program, despite these results, represents an "appalling example," of ideology, not scientific data, driving policymaking, Lynn argues.

Other evaluations of voucher programs support similar findings:

• A December 2015 working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, revealed that low-income children participating in Louisiana's Scholarship Program increase their chances of failing math by 50 percent (Abdulkadiroglu, Pathak, & Walters; Winsor, 2016).
• Indiana school students who used vouchers to attend private schools scored lower on reading and math tests when compared to their peers who remained in the public schools, according to a Brookings Institute report (Dynarski, 2016).
• Ohio students who used vouchers "fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools," and the effects appear to "persist over time," according to a study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (Figlio & Karbownik, 2016).

Rights and Protections: Read the Fine Print

Public school students have legal protections afforded for sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, and disabilities under Titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and ESSA's Title I.

Yet, when parents accept a McKay special education voucher for a private school, for example, they forego protections under IDEA to guarantee services for their child.

"Students with special needs, under IDEA, are guaranteed a free appropriate public education. If a public school cannot provide what the child needs, that public school can then pay to send the student to a private school," Kusler notes.

In these instances, the public education process under IDEA approves the move, so federal legal protections do follow the child.

Follow the Money

The pro-voucher assertion that public school money, based on the state's PPE, "follows the child" to another school suggests that the financial impact to schools is minimal. A school's finances are far more complex than state money attached to a child. For instance, if a student uses a PPE-based voucher to attend a private school, the district still needs to pay the public school teacher the same salary—now, without that student's PPE in the budget.

Rural communities are particularly hard hit by vouchers. Here, students likely have few education alternatives to public schools—at least within a reasonable distance from home. So, rural families accepting vouchers must pay for transportation to and from the private school. And the local public school system is now struggling with fewer resources to cover the same facilities, transportation, administrative, and instruction costs.

"Rural [public education] matters, and rural does not win under vouchers," Kusler points out. "The community cannot support more than one school district."

"If I lived in a rural area," she continues, "why would I support subverting public dollars for private schools? How is that going to improve my local public school, which is the only option for me to educate my child?"

Race and Class

Vouchers have a sordid background, according to Lynn: "After the integration of public schools, they became a way in the south to maintain separate schools for whites only." Certain southern states created "tuition grants" that paid for white families to send their students to all-white private schools (Klein, 2017).

DeVos acknowledged that history during her Senate confirmation process, claiming that she does not "support programs that would lead to increased segregation. Empirical evidence finds school choice programs lead to more integrated schools than their public school counterparts" (Bendix, 2017).

But a report from the New Century Foundation, which analyzed voucher programs in Milwaukee and Louisiana, found that "in neither case did vouchers succeed in giving many participating students—the overwhelming majority of whom were black—access to integrated schools." The report also revealed, based on demographic data on voucher usage, "a real risk that vouchers will be used by white families to move to whiter schools, and by religious students to move to religious schools" (Potter, 2017).

Race and socioeconomic status are closely intertwined. With most vouchers covering only a fraction of the average private school tuition, Kusler argues that, "for huge swaths of Americans, private schools aren't even an option on the table."

A Public Responsibility

Supporters of the U.S. public education system believe that the Trump-DeVos vision for our schools undermines this bedrock of American values: that every child, regardless of race, sex, religion, and socioeconomic background, deserves a sound educational experience to succeed in life, career, and citizenship. They argue that voucher programs divert sorely needed funding to private schools that lack the same oversight, accountability, legal protections, and accessibility requirements that guide teaching and learning in public schools.

Public school advocates also reject the notion that vouchers support low-income students "fleeing failing public schools"—a claim that doesn't square with the research. In fact, most beneficiaries of voucher programs are not financially strapped. Approximately 75 percent of students who applied for Wisconsin's voucher program had already enrolled in private schools. And the quality of public schools does not seem to factor into many families' decisions on private education. In Indiana, more than half of the students who received vouchers never attended a state public school. Most applications in Nevada were submitted by families from neighborhoods with public schools boasting high academic achievement state ratings (Network for Public Education, n.d.).

"Policymakers need to understand what's at stake when tax dollars are siphoned away from the nation's public school system and are given to private or faith-based schools with few if any strings attached," Griffith cautions. "How many more studies do we need to convince American taxpayers that vouchers are not the silver bullet for students achieving and succeeding to higher levels? How is it OK to discriminate, to not guarantee students' federal civil and legal protections when vouchers are used? When the overwhelming majority of students attend public schools nationwide, our federal and state governments should be doing all they can to ensure that our public school students have what they need to succeed to their highest levels."

References

AASA, the School Superintendents' Association. (2017). Public loss, private gain: How school voucher tax shelters undermine public education. Retrieved from http://www.aasa.org/uploadedFiles/Policy_and_Advocacy/Resources/AASA_ITEP_Voucher_Tax_Shelter _Executive_Summary.pdf

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Abdulkadiroglu, A., Pathak, P. A., and Walters, C. R. (2015, December). Free to choose: Can school choice reduce student achievement? Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w21839

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