Vouchers: a superficially attractive, very bad idea.

“Private school voucher programs that give tax dollars directly to families can be expanded with the stroke of a pen to strip out accountability and include universal eligibility, exploding costs for taxpayers, gutting funding for public schools, and creating endless opportunities for waste, fraud, and abuse. We only need to look at what is happening in  Ohio, Arizona, Florida,  Iowa, and other states to understand what we will eventually face in Pennsylvania if a new voucher program is enacted.”

Susan Spicka, Education Voters of PA.

There has been some talk about vouchers and our governor has signaled some willingness to consider offering them to PA families.

Vouchers are amounts of money that taxpayers front for children’s education returned to families so they can put that money toward tuition at a private school or charter school.

Proponents say this will increase competition and make every school better. They say vouchers offer parents more choices that might best suit their child. They say vouchers would level the playing field and allow kids to get out of “failing” local schools. 

Proponents of vouchers are wrong on every count.

Vouchers do not cover the full tuition at private or charter schools. This is because our community schools already do a great job of educating our children on a tight budget. They have the economy of scale on their side. Salaries of all public school employees are tightly regulated and scrutinized. Nobody is getting a yacht out of public school, but private and charter schools cannot say the same.

Furthermore, when schools “fail” it’s because the children they’re trying to teach are so traumatized by poverty and despair that their education comes after their fears for their own safety, their parents’ multiple jobs, the devastation of their communities, and many other factors far beyond teachers’ ability to help. Blaming teachers for those students’ lack of progress is like blaming doctors when kids fail to thrive during a famine.

Competition only helps raise performance when it doesn’t matter if nobody succeeds. Think of any competitive enterprise. Suppose pizza restaurant #1 makes a better pizza than pizza restaurant #2. Great! Let them take all the business. But suppose it’s not profitable in your community for there to be any pizza restaurant? Then there won’t be one. And you’ll be okay because you don’t have to eat pizza. But send your child to school? If competition kills your public school and then your charter folds, your kids have no school at all. And that’s a problem.

The competition thing is a red herring. Teaching is more like parenting than managing a hedge fund. Teachers do the best they can all the time, the way parents do. You don’t need to threaten or incentivize them. Just like parents, they want to do good work.

But what about the different needs of different kids? Shouldn’t parents have choices about where to send their child to school?

Parents already do have choices, they just have to pay for them with their own money. But isn’t it better, wiser, and fairer to ask our community schools to provide for ALL children? Ask our families of special needs kids. How are their schools responding to their child’s needs? On the whole, our community schools are doing a good job for kids with all kinds of disabilities, developmental delays, and other issues. (They also try to accelerate the kids with GIEP’s).

The fact is that our community schools are open to the input of parents in a way that no charter and no private school needs to be. They also are accountable to anti-discrimination laws. Our public schools also have the resources to offer our most needful students the services that will help them—but only if we have robust, vibrant public community schools.

Some additional facts:

In states where parents receive vouchers to offset tuition at private schools, the whopping majority of that money goes to families who have never sent their kids to public schools. In other words, vouchers are a break for families who can already afford private school and they come straight out of the budgets of schools that educate ALL the kids. It’s a massive transfer of money to those who need it the least.

While we have seen open (and often contentious) debate at our school board meetings about what ought to be taught in our students’ classes or included in the school libraries, there will never be similar debate about private schools or “charter” schools. They do what they want to do and they do it behind closed doors, including (if they choose) religious indoctrination, teaching stuff that’s simply untrue, or otherwise undermining a shared vision of our nation and our future.

They are financially unaccountable. They can rent to themselves at exorbitant rates, pay their CEO’s exorbitant salaries, and generally drain the educational experience of their students dry, without recourse for families other than quitting the school.

They only operate where they can make a profit. Rural communities? Forget it. They can close when it becomes unprofitable, leaving kids literally locked out. They can discriminate against kids who are more expensive to educate, or when they don’t fit their . They are there to make a profit and that means if your kid has special needs, they don’t have to admit them.

But it’s even simpler than that. Let’s look at any other public good and ask: what about vouchers? 

What about people who aren’t happy with our police force? Shall we give them their tax money back and allow them to hire private security with the returned money?

Or privatize fire departments? So we can all hire our own firefighters and hope they’re free when the burning starts? 

Or sell off all our public parks and give that money back to taxpayers so they can buy a few square feet of land on which to walk their dogs? Or jog in place?

No. There are things, like roads and a standing military, that we share the expense of building and maintaining so that we are ALL covered.

Vouchers are one of the many ideas that sound great until you think about them for an extra 30 seconds. Like Urban Renewal, New Coke, or Academic Standards (yeah, we’ll tackle that one sometime soon).

Vouchers are a pleasant-sounding Trojan Horse, intended to weaken or destroy community schools, eradicate a vital institution foundational to our shared democracy, and put profits into private hands.

We oppose them. Strongly. And we ask you to join us in advocating for vibrant community schools that get the job done.