You know what they say about letting the camel’s nose under the tent. Once there, it opens the way to larger, undesirable developments.
That’s how I am starting to feel about school vouchers.
It’s anticipated that there will be a big push in 2024 in the Mississippi Legislature to take the next step in the state’s voucher experimentation.
The state dipped its toes into vouchers less than a decade ago when it began funding education savings accounts for special needs students. It currently provides parents of children with disabilities up to about $7,000 a year to defray the cost of private-school tuition or other specific allowable expenses to educate their child.
Next up, most likely, is a proposal to do something similar for lower-income families, regardless of their children’s abilities, who aren’t happy with their public school options.
Then, if the progression in other voucher states is a guide, this will lead at some point to removing income restrictions as well, awarding vouchers to anyone who applies until the legislative allocation runs out.
That’s precisely the path being followed in Tennessee. It started with special needs vouchers in 2016. Then in 2019, it added vouchers for low-income kids in two of the state’s major metropolitan areas — Nashville and Memphis — although it took a couple of years to get the expansion past court challenges. It later added the area around Chattanooga to the program. Now Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, wants to take vouchers statewide and over a two-year period phase out means testing.
The pattern gives the appearance that the supposed concern of voucher proponents that some public schools are either too limited in scope or too dysfunctional to provide a decent education to the poor and disabled is merely a cover for the long-term goal of subsidizing private-school tuition, even for families that can easily afford it.
Some private-school patrons see nothing wrong with this. They claim it’s unfair that they pay school taxes but receive no direct benefit from them, since they send their children to private schools. They complain about paying double: taxes for the public schools they don’t use and tuition for the private ones they do.
That argument, though, could be turned against voucher proponents as well. Why should childless taxpayers or parents who move to this state after educating their children elsewhere fork out money for vouchers they will never use?
Education — specifically public education — is supposed to be part of the social compact. It recognizes that everyone has a stake in an educated populace, since education fuels economic development, reduces poverty and crime, and increases the odds that our democratic form of government will thrive.
It is enshrined in the Mississippi Constitution that the Legislature is obligated to establish and provide financial support for free public schools. Nowhere does it say in that document that the Legislature is obligated to financially assist those who decide their children will get a better education by attending a private school or by being schooled at home.
Vouchers are presented as one of the three main pathways of school choice, which has the goal of giving parents various taxpayer-supported options for educating their children beyond the public school to which they are zoned.
Another of those pathways, charter schools, has so far been a disappointment in Mississippi.
There is no refuting that the public schools in some parts of this state are deficient and the kids attending them are getting a raw deal. Charter schools — public schools that operate independently of the normal bureaucracy — presented a hopeful alternative. They have yet to live up to their promise, though.
On the state’s latest A-to-F accountability ratings, which are based largely on standardized test scores, seven of the state’s 10 charter schools were graded. Only one achieved as high as a C. Three were D’s, and three were F’s. If that’s the best they can do, they serve little purpose. The choice between one subpar school and another isn’t much of a choice.
The main excuse the charter schools give for their low grades is that most of the students they serve start off years behind, having been failed by the traditional public schools from which they transferred. These students need more time to catch up, the charter schools say.
Maybe Mississippi should wait to see if that’s true before it buys into any of the other remedies that school choice proponents advocate.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
