Point/Counterpoint on School Privatization and Subsidies

Today’s Lafayette Journal & Courier offered some space for a column attempting to defend Indiana’s voucher system in response to West Lafayette School Superintendent Rocky Killion’s earlier column entitled “Myth busting Indiana’s voucher system.”

Since today’s pro-voucher column was offered in rebuttal to Killion’s column, we’ll start with him. He said:

1. Indiana’s system won’t save us money. Rather than being, as advertised, a savings to taxpayers, voucher spending has increased from $16 million to $40 million.

2. Indiana’s “choice” system is not improving Indiana’s public schools. There is simply no evidence for it. Top performing school systems in the rest of the world don’t operate like this. He quotes Marc Tucker, president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy: “I defy you to point to a top-performing country that got that way by introducing choice systems.”

3. Private/charter schools get better results than other schools. Again, no evidence. Available research indicates private/charter schools are generally performing the same or worse.

With respect to the cost, the pro-voucher column insists that “vouchers only cover a portion of the cost to educate a child. Their parents, private donors and other scholarships pay their remaining tuition.” First of all, not all children cost the same to educate. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s a major issue with taking a “dollars-follow-the-child” approach. Some kids are easier to educate than others. My guess is that the tougher cases are more likely to stay in public schools. Secondly, this ignores the subsidy potential for parents who, in the absence of the “choice” legislation would have paid 100% of their decision to put their kid in a non-public school. This is a windfall for those families. No one is forcing you to give your kids a public, secular education, but now we’re subsidizing the decision to send kids to private and/or religious schools.

See generally, this report (pdf) from the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability:

Indiana joined the ranks of states with voucher programs with the enactment in 2011 with the Indiana Choice Legislation and expansion in 2013. As indicated previously, this legislation significantly expands the ways in which public dollars in Indiana may be directed to private schools. Indiana’s school choice initiative contains three distinct components, each of which increases the ability of parents to use what would otherwise be public money to cover the cost of a private education.

First, the Indiana initiative offers parents a traditional school voucher (Choice Scholarship) program. Second, Indiana also created an income tax credit (Scholarship Tax Credit) for individuals and corporations making contributions to private, nonprofit SGOs, which in turn use these donations to fund scholarships for Indiana school children to attend private schools. An individual or corporate contributor to a SGO receives a credit against what she, he or it would otherwise have to pay in state income taxes, in an amount equal to 50 percent of her, his or its SGO contribution. Third, the Legislation allows parents to deduct against their Indiana taxable income, up to $1,000 per child for unreimbursed education expenses.

With respect to improving public schools, the pro-voucher column offers this article of faith: “If Killion perceives non-public schools to be ‘competition,’ I would argue that competition will elevate all schools to be more innovative, to challenge the status quo and to achieve more.” You can argue it all you want, but there is no evidence to support the argument. Competition makes some things better but not everything. There’s a reason we don’t rely on competition to supply tap water, drainage, and sewage. Water is a basic necessity, and we all lose when our neighbors cut corners. Based on the manner in which top performing countries developed their public education systems, there is no reason to believe that this voucher system will do the trick.

With respect to private/charter schools getting better results, the pro-voucher column offers nothing – only second hand anecdotes and platitudes about how parents should be able to choose a quality education for their child, assuming (without support) the contention that private and charter schools perform better than public schools. They don’t.

Again from the CTBA report:

None of the independent studies performed of the most lauded and long standing voucher programs extant in the U.S.—Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio; and Washington, D.C.— found any statistical evidence that children who utilized vouchers performed better than children who did not and remained in public schools. After controlling for school type and student demographics, a comprehensive study commissioned by [the Bush administration] found that students who attend traditional, K-12 public schools outperform students who attend both charter schools and private religious schools, irrespective of denomination.

I expect that that bit about “controlling for demographics” is a key point. Some of those demographics are, no doubt, correlated with those more expensive to educate students I alluded to above. But, ignoring those demographics is, long-term, a losing strategy for the community.

The CBTA study recommends that we take instruction from places like Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canada — countries with school systems that were not always leaders but which found ways to dramatically improve their systems. We don’t have to re-invent the wheel here — educational systems have been improved other places. School choice advocates’ determination to ignore those lessons suggests that improving education is a pretext with the primary motive having more to do with cultural and ideological concerns (leaving aside, for now, the venal types who just see the public school system as a big pot of money, ripe for the taking.)