A little more than seven percent of Arizona’s students attend private schools or are home-schooled—eight percent, tops. That’s who the vouchers-for-all Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are all about, the eight percent, making sure they get the maximum access to taxpayer dollars our Republican legislators and the governor can manage. Meanwhile, the ninety-two percent attending district and charter schools have to fight to get a few dollars added to the state’s dwindling financial commitment to its education budget.
But, the argument goes, vouchers will mean more children in private schools, so the ESA voucher dollars aren’t really new money. It’s just a case of funds following students. Except that’s not what’s happened in Arizona. Back in 1997, long before ESAs, we began another voucher program, private school tax credits. It takes money that otherwise would go into the state budget and funnels it to School Tuition Organizations which dole the money out to pay for private school tuition (and make a handy little profit for the STOs in the process). It’s grown from a program that transferred a reasonably small amount of taxpayer money to private schools, about $4.5 million a year, to more than $140 million a year. If more vouchers meant more parents choosing private school for their children, we should have seen a boom in their enrollment over the past twenty years. Instead, something like 2,000 fewer students attend private school now than in 1997. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands more students are enrolled in district and charter schools.
$140 million a year in vouchers—and for the past few years we’ve thrown the ESA vouchers into the mix as well—and the result has been 2,000 fewer private school students in a state with a growing school-aged population. While the privatizers say vouchers are all about the growth of “school choice,” a shrinking percentage of parents are choosing private schools for their children.
Since the expansion of ESAs was signed by the governor, many people have said it signals the dismantling of public schooling in Arizona. I agree, but only to an extent. It’s misleading to imply more money for vouchers signals the beginning of the end for public schools. Maybe the trend line will change and the private school and the home-schooled population will grow a bit, but those options aren’t going to replace public schools. What we’re doing is dismantling our commitment to free public education which began with our country’s founders and has grown steadily for more than 200 years. Only in the past twenty years have we begun to renege on our commitment. Instead of viewing education as a public good which deserves our continued, growing support, we’ve balkanized “public schooling” into districts schools and charter schools, which are a public/private hybrid, and we’re diverting a growing percentage of our education money to private schools and home-schooling. The result will be an increased education inequality to match our growing income inequality. If this trend continues, money going into our district schools will diminish along with the quality of education, while charter schools and private schools receive an increasing amount of money and attention.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2017.
How disingenuous. What’s happening here is the 8% are finally being offered what the 92% have always gotten: tax funded support for their educations, and you twist that around to make it sound as though the 8% are stealing something from the 92%.
Enrollment in privates is down because fewer people can afford them. Been inside any privates in Southern Arizona since 2008, David? Most are struggling financially and many would go out of business if not for the need-based scholarships they are able to offer because of tax credit programs, which enable a broader band of SES to attend than would otherwise be able to. If a diverse range of high functioning independent schools are strengthened because of ESAs, why is that necessarily a bad thing? The policy change won’t decrease the per pupil funding in public district schools, and no one who doesn’t want to transfer to the alternative sector will be forced to do so. Some who wouldn’t have been able to afford it will now have the opportunity to access forms of education they would not have been able to access. Why is that bad?
Another question is: Can we really afford to let these alternative institutions go out of business, which is absolutely what would happen to many of them if tax-based subsidies disappeared? Many of them are what might be called “reservoirs of educational best practice” in a context where skill-and-drill / teach-to-the-test / boil-it-all-down-to-what-can-be-expressed-in-a-multiple-choice-corporate-produced-machine-graded format is increasingly taking over our public schools. What will we point to in the future as evidence that reading and writing and researching are the best ways to learn to read and write and research, not doing worksheets and taking multiple choice tests on how to read, how to write, and how to research? Sadly, worksheets and machine graded tests are what you find in too many public district school classrooms, even supposedly “college prep” programs where the AP monster is increasingly destroying students’ ability to do anything but cram and regurgitate facts a corporation has selected for them to memorize. (Talked to any college professors about AP curricula, David? In my experience, they are not fans. I have yet to find one who believes they are anything resembling a college course, or even suitably prepare students for a college course, much less serve as a suitable “credit earned” replacement for a college course.)
If you believe in coercion, forced centralization, top-down administrative chains of command, bureaucratized and corporatized “education,” standardization, one-size-must-be-made-to-fit-all, and children as widgets, and would like to see the few remaining havens from these attitudes and practices diminish or disappear, then by all means get rid of those nasty ESAs. If you’d like to see more than 8% of the population having access to better education — and perhaps better educational methods spreading from an expanded and strengthened private sector back into the public district sector from which they have largely been banished, support the expansion of ESAs.
How about someone who opposes ESAs answers the question, “Why is it bad if a diverse range of Independent Schools are strengthened and if kids coming from a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds have access to them?”
That might bring us around to the real motive for opposing ESAs: though “Democrats” have no objection to the plutocracy buying itself any form of education it desires, they want the middle class locked into public district schools to keep them “functional” and to ensure that all students whose income is under a certain level (not ALL students, regardless of income level) are offered exactly the same kind of educational services. They don’t give a damn whether public schools meet the full range of learning needs within that cohort, or whether, as ARS 15-779 tries to require, students who come into public district schools with above-average academic ability are afforded the opportunity to make “otherwise attainable progress” in their classrooms. It’s all about raising the bottom SES range’s educational attainment somewhat and the middle’s participation is needed to ensure that can be done. Increasingly, unfortunately, what this “noble” social experiment seems to be deteriorating into is locking both the bottom and the middle portion of the SES range in this country into classrooms where massive low quality curricula adoptions that profit corporations force these students to grind away at rote memorization and regurgitation of canned content on multiple choice tests. Meanwhile, the “Democratic” party lets the high SES range entirely off the hook. They can buy themselves any kind of education they want, and no Democrat will take issue with their right to do so. The plutocrat Democratic Party campaign funders are certainly not compelled to participate in the great “EQUITY” (?!) experiment the Party is trying to run in this country’s tax funded “educational” institutions.
Sadly, this is the doublespeak-hypocrisy otherwise known as Democratic “education” policy. Any “Democrat” who peddles this shoddy merchandise, which has little or nothing to do with excellence in education or any legitimate, meaningful form of “equity,” should be forced to disclose whether at any point, their own children have been enrolled in private educational institutions. If so, they have no right to pitch policies to the public that decrease rather than increase the percent of our population that can access educational institutions that offer alternatives to what is served up as “education” in too many public district schools.
(And by the way, reputable private schools are non-profit. And their teachers and administrators have lower salaries than public administrators do. So let’s get rid of the idea that they’re all being run by greedy capitalists trying to make a profit on public funds. That is a mischaracterization of the private sector meant to fuel ill-informed support of a particular political agenda which includes keeping the maximum # of students, with their per-pupil funding, locked into a public system that benefits political machines but in too many cases cannot meet the full range of academic needs of the students it enrolls.)
Follow the dots – A) All parents get vouchers for their kids’ education. B) They spend them at the public school of their choice C) Vouchers don’t increase D) School operating costs increase E) public schools are forced to ask parents to make up the difference F) School vouchers decrease – in real terms if not nominal terms G) Parents are asked to make up more of the difference H) Parents can’t afford to send their kids to public education; so they don’t I) Free public education for all is gone, and kids are not educated unless their parents are well-off.
Vouchers for all looks fair on the surface but is always going to favor those who are economically well-off at the expense of the middle class and the poor as well as our businesses who need educated workers.
Why would the public district system disappear? Keep in mind that in addition to troubled districts that may see an increase in exits now that ESA policy has been increased, there are many high functioning, well-managed districts where the majority of parents are satisfied with the services they receive. It will still be the easiest, most convenient, least expensive thing to do to use your local public district school if that school is meeting your child’s needs. If that school is NOT meeting your child’s needs, the ESA bill enacted makes it less cost prohibitive to transfer to a private, but the amount of the ESA won’t fully cover tuition in any reputable private, and in addition to a portion of tuition, parents still have to be willing to bear the expense and trouble of transportation. It would seem possible that the distribution between public district schools and privates might change slightly as the result of this bill, but not much. The public system will not disappear. The most likely effect of the legislation on the public system would seem to be that it will further decrease enrollment in low functioning districts.
It falls to the Democratic Party to explain how being locked into low functioning schools that are not meeting their academic needs benefits the students who want to leave — not how it benefits the political machines connected with low functioning districts, and not how it benefits the students who may be left behind in those districts. It’s the district’s role to figure out how to meet the academic needs of the students enrolled in it. It’s not students’ roles to persist in a school that is not meeting their academic needs in order to make the teachers’ and administrators’ jobs easier by reducing the concentrations of students who struggle academically or behaviorally. Parents have to choose a school that enables their child to learn at a reasonable rate and that provides a safe, supportive environment. Those who think that every public district school is capable of doing that for every child within its catchment area are simply not living in the real world, looking at real conditions in the schools. Nor are they being realistic (or just) when they propose to say, “Sure, you can transfer out of this school that is not meeting your needs, but if you do so you lose the right to have the tax dollars the state has available for you applied in support of your education.”
Now, close to 100% of our schools are open to the public. Unlike other states, and the situation you want, where every school is closed to 99% of the public.
We are getting very close to a public school system instead of a district system.
The district system was designed with the specific intent of excluding Catholics and minorities. It is a bigoted and racist institution. It is an abomination of language to call it “public.”
Wow the comments on this thread are amazing for taking on straw dogs of their own creation. It isn’t any political party’s responsibility to show anything about public education: the Dems who mismanage are no better or worse than the Republicans that run the state and so drastically underfund our public schools–80% of the school-going population–and then continually find ways to cut up the ever-shrinking pie so that its funds can be shunted to charters. Yeah, charters and private schools that supposedly will now be able to help the lower SES population–except that they don’t. Charters do not show up as any better than public schools in academic terms, and private schools don’t either–and the famed vouchers have been shown to only help those who can almost pay for the school year themselves–hardly the poorest of the poor that commenters seem to keep advocating for.
To the extent that our public education system has become a political football, our kids have suffered. In fact, let us not forget that the Dems and the Republicans together voted for Prop 123, that will guarantee that there are less public school monies long into the future. And apparently in the meantime, even that small amount that is supposed to go to help the 80% will be diverted. If we looked at this in another country we would be able to see it as effectively offering less and less to more and more students. Instead we make up benefits to “choice” that fit neatly into the pocket of ALEC and the Goldwater Institute and in general do little to benefit who those groups promise will be benefitted. I mean honestly, when was the last time those two organizations championed ANYthing for the poor?
That has nothing to do with their reason for existing. They fight political fraud and waste. Most of which has been brought to the public schools by greedy politicians.
I wrote recently in response to another one of your comments, Betts, that vouchers were “lifeboat” policy. They are not meant to save the sinking ships, i.e. TUSD and other districts like it that serve low SES populations. They are meant to get people off of them. It’s a damage control method-of-last resort policy solution, but is there another viable policy solution to the problems of districts like TUSD in this state? If so, I don’t see it. If the Republicans under-fund, under-regulate, and fail to effectively oversee public institutions of education and the Democrats buy into shoddy funding mechanisms like Prop 123 and promote governance candidates who applaud public education administrators for mismanaging the schools and misapplying the sadly limited funds available (or voluntarily giving them back to taxpayers or wasting them on inflated legal fees), students do need to get out. You yourself have, year after year admirably identified problems, courageously spoken about them publicly, and run for the TUSD Board three times. Nothing has changed. The normal mechanisms of democratic control are not working the way they should in this district. People who know effective public education systems in other states would tell you that so many of the variables that keep these systems functioning well are missing in a situation like TUSD’s, I doubt they would recommend that students whose needs are not being met remain in the district’s classrooms.
You wrote a good comment recently on TUSD’s tendency to “solve” the problem of malfunctioning principals by giving them central admin jobs with high salaries. You asked if this is how the district ends up with central administrators who don’t have kids’ best interests at heart. The answer is yes, it is ONE of the ways. But there are others, and I’m sure you know a few of them. While advocates like you identify and try to chip away without notable success at the many ways that dysfunction and incompetence perpetuate themselves decade after decade, should kids who could exit using vouchers remain in place in malfunctioning schools because, in theory, public schools are a good idea and in other states with more responsible politicians on both sides of the aisle, public schools are able to meet students’ needs?
There are high functioning Catholic and Independent schools in Southern Arizona where seats go unfilled because people can’t afford to pay for them. You state without citing evidence that charters and privates are no better than publics. Of the studies that I’ve read that purport to show that, none of them have methodologies that could not easily be picked apart. Some are trying to get at the truth, others have been thrown together to support a particular political agenda that is tied to political machines connected with one of our two major parties. Meanwhile, I have seen with my own eyes schools that unquestionably ARE better than the schools I’ve seen in TUSD, schools with excellent methods and highly qualified teachers in every classroom where spaces are available and could be filled if more need-based scholarships were funded. It’s the Democratic Party that is shrieking about how horrible it is that legislation has just been passed that will enable a few more students to fill those seats and exit a public system where the Party has flatly refused to ask for sound management. So yes, it’s the Democratic Party that needs to explain why it would be better to keep students locked into the malfunctioning system they continue to insist is the best system in which to educate all children under a certain income level. (The plutocrats, of course, will continue to do as they wish, and neither major party would dare to suggest otherwise when both D and R campaign funding depends on their largesse.)
Sorry. Some of us don’t see small movements in the right direction for some students as something that should be decried as a disaster. Keep me posted on how you’re doing with solving all the problems both Rs and Ds have created in the public education system in this state. In the absence of significant system-wide improvement, I find I’m not in a place where damage control and lifeboats look like something we should be trying to block.
Don’t kid us, you know as well as I do, it doesn’t have jack anything to do with the students or education or private vs. public – it’s all about our state legislators being on the boards and having wives running the software companies, and the lot of them getting rich on our tax money. Pardon me while I go vomit…
There will never be enough money to steal from our children and give to the illegals. But that’s all about to change.
Republicans work on the principle of ” the camel getting it’s nose into the tent,” first . From that small vantage point they have figured out how to take over an entire system and bend it to their way or the highway. Don’t trust a Republican conservative whenever they say it’s being done for the good of everyone because that is a bold face lie. Republicans only work for certain constituents and that has been proven over and over but many American voters are so mentally inept that they are oblivious to everything political unless there is a single sentence mantra they can yell at Democrats to express their dubious outrage. When you stand for nothing how could you possibly be offended by anything other than the myths made up in your mind.
Nope, it’s not about that. Not in the Catholic and Independent schools in Southern Arizona with which I have direct experience. It’s about trying to provide a sound and humane education to as broad a band of students as possible in a context where not many people can afford to pay the tuition.
If you think that TUSD is free of the kinds of dealings for which you express distaste, you simply have not been paying attention to what’s going on in the district. Try going on the Arizona Daily Star website and typing “TUSD” into the search bar. Read every article published on the district during the last 4 years, keeping in mind that even that atrocious record is selective, and cannot include all the report-worthy things that have taken place.
The Democratic Party in Southern Arizona has not, in my opinion, been an effective defender of what public schools can and should be. They inadvisably excuse way too much mismanagement and they are partly complicit in the overall educational disaster this state has become.