Arizona’s voucher advocates have a persuasive, but false, narrative about the value of taxpayer-funded private school tuition. It falls apart when you look at our voucher history since the programs began 20 years ago.
The pro-voucher narrative is lovely and seductive. Lots of parents who want private school for their children just can’t afford it, advocates say. Vouchers allow those parents the opportunity to choose, so of course lots of children will switch from public to private schools. Vouch it, and they will come. As the student population expands, the advocates continue, it diversifies. Minority students who otherwise couldn’t afford tuition will take advantage of the vouchers and flock to private schools. And really, they conclude, vouchers are a break-even proposition, since all those new students using vouchers mean fewer students attending public schools. Vouchers pay for themselves.
That’s their story. Now here’s the truth. In the 20 years since Arizona began its first voucher program, private schools have gained less than 900 students. During the same 20 years, public schools added over 350,000 students. And while Arizona’s Hispanic student population has increased dramatically, the ethnic mix of private school students hasn’t kept up.
Before I start into a numbers dive, let me give you my sources, which are as legit and unbiased as I could find. The public school numbers are from the National Center for Educational Statistics, a vast U.S. government data archive where even an amateur like me can sort through the data to find the information I’m looking for. The private school numbers are from a 2016 study, Exploring Arizona’s Private Education Sector, created by the pro-voucher organization, EDCHOICE. I begin in 1995, two years before Arizona passed its tuition tax credit law, and follow the numbers through 2014, which is the most recent year with complete data. Empowerment Scholarship Accounts began in 2011, so they’re only a small part of the 20 year history.
In 1995, 44,134 Arizona students attended private school. In 2014, enrollment was 45,019. That’s a gain of about 900 students over 20 years—not much of an increase, considering we’re bringing in over $150 million a year in voucher funding. For that kind of money, you’d expect to see a major increase in the number of private school students. How many more students should $150 million buy? Let’s figure it out. Arizona spends $7,500 per public school student. If voucher money moved public school students to private schools on a dollar-for-dollar basis, you’d expect to see a 20,000 student increase over pre-voucher days. The actual 900 student gain comes to more than $150,000 for each new student.
Arizona vouchers are hardly the break even, pays-for-itself proposition the advocates claim. It looks like there aren’t tens of thousands of parents who can’t wait to take advantage of vouchers and move their kids to private schools. Even if you vouch it, they still won’t come.
But actually, the numbers are worse than that. While private schools were adding 900 students, public schools added over 350,000 students, from 743,566 in 1995 to 1,097,422 in 2014. That means private school enrollment declined relative to the total student population. In 1995, 5.6 percent of Arizona students went to private schools. In 2014, it dropped to 3.9 percent. Private schools are educating a smaller slice of Arizona’s school-aged population, even with hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars moving from public to private schools.
Here’s a private school change that sounds positive. The proportion of Hispanic students in Arizona private schools increased over that 20 year span while the Anglo population decreased. Hispanic students rose from 18.1 percent to 24.1 percent of the private school population, a gain of 6 percent, while Anglo students fell from 70.9 percent to 58.1 percent, a loss of 13 percent. That’s proof positive, the ethnic balance has improved. The problem is, the change doesn’t match the larger change in the overall ethnic balance of the state’s student population since 1995. Over the same period, the proportion of Hispanics in public schools rose by 13 percent—7 percent more than the rise in private schools. The public school Anglo population lost 15 percent—2 percent more than the loss in private schools. As a result, private schools are less reflective of Arizona’s student ethnic balance than they were 20 years ago.
Any Arizonan who believes the hype about vouchers, that they increase the number and diversity of students while having little impact on public school funding, has fallen victim to a public relations con job. The impact of Arizona’s vouchers has no connection to the narrative that’s used to sell them. But anyone who likes the idea of subsidizing private school tuition, or even paying it outright, with public dollars because they think that’s a better way to spend state funds than using them to improve our underfunded public schools—those people should be delighted with the way our voucher programs have turned out.
This article appears in May 25-31, 2017.
“In the 20 years since Arizona began its first voucher program, private schools have gained less than 900 students.”
Can you better define the voucher program you reference? Are you referring to the tax credit program? It started as a $500 credit to be used towards tuition. But tuition was 10 times that amount. And you could not give it to your own child.
So enrollment numbers based on that are basically irrelevant. Let’s run full voucher value for 10 years and see what happens. It will make public schools better. Trust me. It couldn’t hurt.
Arizona “Vouchers”: Safier-Style Propaganda vs. Facts
The commenter who posted under “No hurt” is correct that you are lumping non-comparable funding initiatives together under the term “voucher.”
It’s the ESAs that have only just been authorized that allow any student currently in the public system to leave the public system and take all of their per-pupil funding with them to apply in a private institution. Only once that initiative has been operational for a few years will we be able to tell whether it 100% portable funding has the benefits “voucher supporters” attribute to it, diversifying the population using private schools and giving families who could not previously afford private schools new opportunities and a broader range of choices. There is no “history” of this program (contra your misleading article title) that can be referred to: it did not exist prior to this year.
Private school tax credit programs, which you misleadingly refer to as “vouchers” and seem to want to assume had essentially the same provisions as the newly created ESA policy, did not provide 100% portable funding to all constituents. Individual tax credits provided piecemeal chunks, $1,000 per couple at one point, different sums at other points, but all of these sums far less than the total cost of one student’s tuition. As “No hurt” points out, you could not donate a tax credit to partially cover your own student’s tuition: taxpayers other than the parents of the child in question could donate to an STO (School Tuition Organization) that pooled the money and applied it in scholarships based on families’ demonstrated financial need, or to one of the STOs which accepted “recommendations” that the funding be applied towards a particular child’s tuition, regardless of need. A particularly industrious family could potentially patch together enough individual tax credits donated by people other than themselves (relatives, friends, neighbors) to cover most of their tuition in a private school — and then complete the forms necessary to “apply” for the funds that had been donated in their child’s name (a separate step) — but the vast majority of people in the system were only getting small discounts on their tuition, discounts that amounted to far less than the state would have had to pay for their child’s per pupil funding, if the child were enrolled in a public district school or charter. Tax credit policy was differentially enabling to wealthier families that had networks of acquaintances and relatives that were all affluent enough to owe more than $1,000 in AZ taxes per annum and differentially enabling to people who were relatively well informed about policy initiatives and the details of the taxation system. The state was saving millions of dollars as the families with children in privates partially or completely relieved the state of the burden of funding their children’s K-12 education. Moreover, there was huge variation from one school and one STO to the next about how responsibly the available funds were being matched with children who actually had demonstrated financial “need.” Corporate tax credits (as opposed to individual tax credits) were supposed to be used exclusively to fund scholarships for the benefit of students with demonstrated need. Perhaps they were, but they were only one component of a poorly regulated and overseen system. The bottom line is that no policy analyst in their right mind who understood the details of how this system worked would have expected it to uniformly enable families of lower-SES status to access forms of education that had previously been out of their reach. There were isolated examples of that taking place in more responsible individual schools and STOs, but it was by no means a system-wide effect.
The ESAs just enacted are a different matter. They allow the full transfer, in one lump, of the entire amount of per-pupil funding (over $5K per annum) from a public school to a private school. Will they have the effect of increasing the SES range in private schools? As was stated above, the jury’s still out on that. No evidence, no history: no conclusions can be drawn.
If you cared to examine the details and produce some accurate reporting, David, you could compare and contrast the practices of all the various STOs receiving individual tax credits and highlight what kind of chaos Arizona’s characteristic failures of oversight and regulation created in its tax credit “system.” Here’s a link to a list of STOs receiving individual tax credits:
https://www.azdor.gov/Portals/0/RefundCredits/sto_i_list.pdf
Or you could highlight the inequities as obvious as the broad side of a barn in the way an initiative your own political party promoted is playing out, Public School Tax Credits. The example of distribution over the course of a 4-year period within TUSD is available on pages 14, 15, and 16 of this Site Council Manual:
http://www.tusd.k12.az.us/sdm/documents/handbook.pdf
But I’m guessing you won’t do either of those things. You seem to be mainly interested in repeating your party’s misleading talking points. See above, in the blog piece on “vouchers” and their so-called “history.”
Your analysis is much too simplistic. Not only the percentage of students in private schools has dropped dramatically since 1995 nationwide. going from 10.7% to 6.9% but so much so that the total has dropped also.
Private schools face even more pressure in Arizona because, thanks to the charter system, parents can get the equivalent of a private school education for free. The fact that private schools have held their own in Arizona is remarkable, and that’s only because of the tuition tax credit.
Its not generally known, but there is tremendous animosity towards charter schools by private school operators. They feel the competitive pressure and it is very real.
By your own calculations, private schools have opened up towards minorities much more so that the rest of the nation. While private schools became whiter in the rest of the nation, they became more open to the public, i.e. minorities, in Arizona.
Arizona is the only state in the nation that can claim to have a truly public education system, where every single school with no exceptions is open to every single child with no exceptions.
Well, maybe there are a few exceptions, a few district schools in Scottsdale and Cave Creek might be open to only the white kids in their district.
It’s true that “private” schools are having a hard time breaking even in the wake of:
1) 2008 and the massive “craters” it created in our financial system and in all institutions and lines of employment connected with it.
2) the introduction in Arizona of charter schools.
The largest network of Arizona “private” schools benefiting from tax credits is, as David Safier has previously pointed out, Catholic schools.
Arguments against tax credits, “vouchers”, and ESAs are in reality arguments about whether ALL K-12 students, or just those who find the Catholic school system not to their liking, should receive equal public support for their K-12 educations. Keep in mind that Catholics (and non-Catholics who want to enroll their students in the Catholic school system) are tax-paying citizens of this country as much as any non-Catholic or anti-Catholic citizen is.
Dress “anti-voucher” advocacy up in whatever disguise you prefer: in reality, it is directly tied to this country’s long and disgraceful history of anti-Catholic bias. Anti-voucher advocacy promotes a form of economic discrimination against Catholics and their clients in the Catholic school system.
Take another look at the practices of post-Reformation England and Ireland, with their systemic, state-sponsored bias against Catholics in education and employment, or the various debates and struggles in the American colonies (including Maryland, which had been founded by a Catholic nobleman) over how much enfranchisement and political and economic privilege should be withheld from “Papists.” Anti-voucher advocacy is more of same, and in a country that supposedly prides itself on religious diversity and tolerance.
Perhaps we need to re-examine what is meant by the term “liberal.” Some people who’d like to “pass” as that are distinctly NOT that.
The column detractors are voucher fans who doth protest too much. When a rebutted becomes as long as the original article, it’s no longer a rebuttal, it’s clouding the issue. Fund our public schools, our neighborhood schools and let the elitist private school folks pay for their own schools. These programs violate the state constitution….they’re nothing more than a gift of public funds
Giving — in detail — relevant facts which the original blog suppresses does not constitute “protesting too much” or “clouding the issue.” Safier’s strategy of lumping ESAs and tax credits together under the imprecise term “vouchers” and pretending that he is proving something about how ESAs will do in the future by what tax credits’ history has been in the past is a completely invalid policy analysis “move.” It is simply more of Safier’s characteristically flimsy propaganda, and it’s offensive that he frames it in language that purports to “prove” that it’s the other side that has a “persuasive, but false, narrative.”
Brian S, please run this experiment: do some research in the field and take a good, hard look at what some of “our public schools, our neighborhood schools” actually are. Include the ones on the South and West sides of Tucson as well as those in the Foothills or the University neighborhood. The fact is that these schools are not “our” schools meeting “our” needs for a significant minority/majority of the population of Southern Arizona. This is one thing among many which the decades-old, unresolved desegregation case and the largest local school district’s ongoing lame response of “displaying incompetence” in implementing its Unitary Status Plan demonstrates.
If there are taxpaying citizens in this region who prefer to apply their students’ per-pupil funding in one of the high functioning Catholic schools in the region rather than in one of the struggling schools in deeply troubled TUSD, the results are likely to be better for the student and for the state, and it is simply mean spirited, vindictive, and bad public policy to say the student’s family should be forced to pay an economic penalty and forfeit any claim to the funds the state has available to support that student’s education. It is in all of our best interests for the young people in this region to receive the best education possible. And it’s a clear case of reality denial to say that the best education possible will necessarily be delivered by the “neighborhood schools” available in some neighborhoods.
P.S. – It’s sad that it has to be said, but in the current context, it clearly does need to be said: name-calling and misleading slogans (“elitists”! “welfare for the rich”!) won’t (or shouldn’t) win any policy arguments, either…
Everyone should go to good government school. Everyone should stay same, think same. Arizona bad.
Arizona is just one more state that wants to privatize everything so that public money goes into private pockets especially pockets that have declared an oath to support and elect Republicans only. The right-wing conservatives were galvanized with the IMPEACHMENT of Nixon and since that time have done everything in their power to totally eliminate the Democratic Party. Unfortunately many Democrats are too uncommitted or just lazy and have allowed the Republicans to take control of everything political. The current White House occupant shows us exactly what to expect whenever Republicans gain complete control. Democrats if you are too stupid ,lazy, apathetic and disinterested in what’s happening then stop your bitchin’ and bend over because you are going to get the f–king you deserve.
To be fair to Safier, he has produced good analyses on some issues. He was right about attrition rates and selectivity at Basis, he was right about 123 before he sold out on the issue and started holding his nose and propagandizing. He is right about the importance of teacher credentialing. But unfortunately, those who read him regularly know he is capable of lapsing into shoddy arguments and drawing specious conclusions in support of his political network’s policy positions. If the goal is promoting his party’s initiatives, right or wrong, he is always spot-on. But if the goal is making sure the voting public has sound information — not tendentious and misleading pseudo-information — he is “off” sometimes and “on” sometimes. He presents it all in the same rhetorical frame of sober-minded, well-researched policy analysis and, if the “likes” and comments are any indication, successfully misleads some of his readers.
As David likes to say: Caveat emptor. If you apply it to his arguments as well as his opponents’ arguments, it’s good advice.