Vouchers: A Bad Use of Public Dollars
Published June 3, 2013
by Ed Dunlap
Sponsors of House Bill 944, the school voucher legislation, offered some changes before its committee passage last week. The maximum income for eligibility was lowered to 133% of the free or reduced price lunch service level (approximately $56,520 for a family of four) and the total amount of money available to fund the voucher program each year was lowered to $50 million from the original $90 million. Provisions were also proposed to increase public accountability slightly and ensure that the neediest students take priority. Yet, as the bill goes to its second committee, let us not forget that the school voucher concept itself is fatally flawed.
Vouchers will not generate the savings that proponents claim. Instead, vouchers will take funding away from the numerous fixed costs that school districts are subject to each year. These costs are for the basic maintenance and operation of public schools; to keep them open, safe, and supportive of students’ learning. These are costs that must be paid regardless of how many students sit in the classrooms. When funds are diverted through vouchers school districts will have to cover these costs by cutting other services.
Parents are not going to get the choice being promised by advocates; that choice will actually reside with the private schools which can admit and turn away students at their discretion. Public schools, by contrast, educate all students. Because of this dichotomy, a voucher system will create a situation where some of a school system’s best, brightest, and most promising students are chosen by private schools while the most vulnerable and most difficult to educate are turned away, left to remain in a public system that has fewer resources to provide the educational services those students need and deserve.
In addition, House Bill 944 will shift tax dollars to schools that are less accountable than public schools. Under this bill, taxpayers would have no way to measure the performance of the private schools receiving public dollars through vouchers. Students receiving taxpayer funded vouchers would not even have to take State administered assessments.
North Carolina’s public education system is far from perfect but local school boards, teachers, administrators, and other educators are diligently working to move it in the right direction. Our high school graduation rate has improved every year for the past decade and is currently at a historical high of 80.4 percent. Our public schools are among the top 11 participating education systems in the world for fourth and eighth grade math scores in the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Our public school students are 22nd in national ACT scores, 12th in fourth grade math National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores and 24th in fourth grade reading NAEP scores.
We have an opportunity to build on these gains, mutually pledging ourselves to preserving and strengthening the one system of public education our constitution provides in the name of enhancing opportunity for all children. This has been our tradition and we are a better society because of it. Alternatively, we can turn away from this tradition and move ahead with a voucher system that takes us down the road of dismantling public education as we know it by diverting funding, investments, attention, and commitment from our public schools. The choices are clear. Our leaders have a chance in the coming weeks to show which course they want to take.
Sincerely,
Dr. Ed Dunlap
Executive Director
North Carolina School Boards Association
June 3, 2013 at 4:34 pm
Richard Bunce says:
I see the government education industrial complex is out in full force protecting their funding stream and their customers, aka parents, be damned. Based on the performance of the government schools with regard to their primary task of educating students that is a bad use of the publics dollars.
June 3, 2013 at 4:55 pm
Sue Black says:
Thank you for the voice of reason and facts. This is bad legislation and should be stopped.
June 3, 2013 at 6:18 pm
Adam Smith says:
This bill should be DOA and is Un-American in it's very conception. Not penny one of tax funds should be used to subsidize religious schools. Separation of church and state is a foundational principle of our nation and should never be compromised. Vouchers are unconstitutional(acknowledged or not), and steal from the public education system and the common good.
June 3, 2013 at 8:14 pm
Richard Bunce says:
You need to go to your local catholic and baptist hospitals and tell all the Medicare and Medicaid patients they cannot get their healthcare their as they are in violation of the US Constitution...
The five most important words of the First Amendment are "Congress shall make NO law".
June 6, 2013 at 3:57 pm
Edward Abby Hoffman says:
Richard- You've gotten your interpretation of the 1st amendment backwards. Publicly funding religious anything is 'establishing' religion in violation of the 1st amendment. Both modern healthcare and education depend on facts not faith, both should be public secular rights.
June 6, 2013 at 11:54 pm
Richard Bunce says:
Really? So no Medicare or Medicaid paid treatment at Baptist and Catholic hospitals... no GI Bill paid education at Catholic or Baptist Universities? You are suffering from government education industrial complex think...
June 3, 2013 at 6:34 pm
dj anderson says:
I foresee abuse of public money going to private schools, but the president doesn't send his children to public schools (Carter did) and plenty of rich don't use public schools. In doing so, they do pay taxes without benefit, but otherwise they are undermining public school at least psychologically and maybe by divorcing themselves from consequences of public school policy while advocating support of it.
Wouldn't it be great if every student had a voucher and not only schools but teachers and subjects would have to compete to get the students?
Are parents competent to make enlightened choices? It is obvious that the NC government doesn't for they want to get children out of the house and away from parents as soon as possible with the "more at four" and headstart, etc. Parents on food stamps already can't be trusted to feed proper breakfast to their children on school days, hence free breakfast and lunch.
People largely don't trust the much of the government, true, but it is also true that the government doesn't trust many of the people.
The same bunch against homeschooling and charter schools are against vouchers. I was one of them, but now think I was wrong. I'm not for vouchers, but I'm hard pressed to deny even a small choice to the poor. I'm probably wrong again.
