July 10, 2011

The Next Step in Privatizing Education: Vouchers

What's Left Will Be Starved

By Stan Shapiro

In the legislative term just ended, Governor Corbett and his right wing clones in the Legislature devastated public education funding. But cutting funding levels was just the first punch thrown in the effort to destroy public education. The next step is to divert as much money as has been left for public education into private hands through vouchers.

The idea that problems with public education can be solved by giving poor parents a voucher to pay for their kids to go to quality private schools is a sham. The legislation that now embodies this idea is Senate Bill 1. If enacted, it would probably cost $1 billion per year, taken directly out of amounts that would otherwise be available to public schools. Yet, according to Education Voters PA, only 6,500 students would use the vouchers provided for in this bill, about 65% of whom already attend private schools. Low income students will not likely be among the new students getting assistance, since many of them would have to come up with additional money for tuition; the vouchers wouldn’t pay enough....

Private Schools: Unaccountable to Anyone

Those students “lucky enough” to be admitted to private schools would lose many legal protections at the door. Private institutions don’t need to provide Individualized Education Programs currently mandated for children with disabilities, nor provide any targeted programs of any kind for such children. These schools are also unaccountable for their performance. They are fully exempt from standardized assessment measures, and if they do administer assessments, the results need not be released to the public.

Vouchers worse than public education and probably unconstitutional

Vouchers attempt to solve problems that were on their way to being solved under the Rendell administration. Recently, CNBC ranked Pennsylvania 4th in the nation in education. PA was the only state in the country to improve test scores in both reading and math at all tested levels from 2002 to 2008. Research has not shown, however, that vouchers are effective at improving student results. In fact, in the most recent study, students in Milwaukee’s voucher program performed no better, and in some cases worse, than students in Milwaukee Public Schools in math and reading on statewide tests. Why would we want to veer away from what has been proven to work, namely increasing public school resources, to an unproven, unaccountable and expensive alternative like vouchers?

Furthermore, vouchers are probably flatly unconstitutional because of the assistance they provide religious institutions. Aid to religious schools is expressly forbidden under the PA Constitution, Article III, Section 29. In addition, Article III, Section 30 bars appropriations to private educational institutions without a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly. Vouchers are an end-run against these prohibitions, which guarantees they will be subject to long, expensive and confusing rounds of litigation before anyone knows what the actual educational funding structure of the school system actually is.

The battle over vouchers is set to resume in the state legislature in the Fall. Stay tuned to this space to see what you can do to fight this clear and present danger to effective and efficient education in Pennsylvania.

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