Nevada has a new Education Savings Account law. It’s pretty much the same as Arizona’s law, with one difference. Every student can use it, so long as the student has been in a public school at least 100 days. In Arizona only a limited number of students qualify. The Arizona folks who pushed our ESA want the same universal access as Nevada, but they decided to start small, then expand the law to include more students each year until everyone qualifies.
The ACLU is taking the Nevada law to court, saying it violates the separation of church and state because ESAs are basically vouchers which use government funds to pay for private school tuition. There’s nothing illegal about using government funds to pay for private school so long as the schools don’t have religious affiliations. The problem is, across the country 70 to 80 percent of private schools are connected to a church, and the constitutions in Arizona, Nevada and many other states forbid the use of government funds for religious education.
It sounds like the ACLU should have a strong case against the Nevada law, but Arizona’s ESA law was challenged on the same grounds, and the court ruled that the program is constitutional. But you never know. Different state, different court, different people making the argument against the law. Anything can happen.
Congratulate the Goldwater Institute for how cleverly it designed the ESA’s work-around to the church-state problem. True, the tuition money comes from state funds, and true, it often goes to pay for tuition at religious schools. But using a green-eyeshade sleight of hand, the funds are moved from the general funds column of the state ledger into a special “savings account” box with a student’s name on it. That somehow makes everything OK because the state isn’t actually paying for the religious school tuition, it’s just giving the money to the parents who then use it to pay for their children’s educations. That one degree of separation launders the money, somehow washing it clean of any government connection and making it all legit. ESAs clearly violate the spirit of the state constitution, but the courts have decided they manage to stay within the letter of the law.
My bet is, the ACLU will lose its Nevada battle against the ESA, especially since some of the big pro-voucher guns are in town to defend the law. But if the ACLU prevails, we may see the ESA fight revived in Arizona.
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2015.
“Doing all they can to indoctrinate students in Common Core through the public school system.”
http://www.nevada.edu/ir/Page.php?p=CCSS
In most every case governors had nothing to do with authoring Common Core but they keep repeating the lie anyway. Rockefeller Foundation paid lobbyists wrote CC, and parents are fleeing the public schools because of it.
Parents have begun complaining that the math homework does not even resemble math. What next?
“…if the ACLU prevails, we may see the ESA fight revived in Arizona.”
Good, because our so-called “defenders of public education” in Arizona are losing the battle to keep conditions humane and administrations high functioning in our public schools. The public schools suffer from under-funding, rampant over-testing and score- and rankings-driven policies, as well as (in some districts) a lack of transparency in supposedly “public” institutions that, the way they’re governed and administered, can’t really properly be termed “public.”
Of course, increasing access to alternatives is one of the strategies being used by privatizers to undermine the public system, but David, if your political camp has failed to keep conditions in the public school classrooms and central administrations decent, you no longer have a right to argue that there shouldn’t be publicly funded alternatives. I have no respect for commenters like you who “look the other way” and remain silent when it comes to lies and mismanagement in the public system, at the same time that you relentlessly argue against policies that increase access to alternatives. If you’re going to argue against alternatives, you need to do a better job of holding those managing the public systems accountable.
Parents need options. It’s obvious the public schools can not address their own problems, let alone educate my kids. Everybody whines about choice in reproduction, but when it comes to education they choose total control.
Keep alternative education choices available and safe.
REPEATING A NOTE TO COMMENTERS: In a comment on the last post, I said that from this point forward, if I think a comment moves too far off topic, I’ll delete it. This isn’t a matter of getting rid of comments that disagree with what I’ve written. That’s absolutely fine. But I want the discussions to stay close to the topic I wrote about, and sometimes a commenter will hijack the comment thread and take it in a different direction. I think I’ve deleted two or three comments since I began writing on The Range, so it’s not something I plan to do a whole lot.
The first comment on this thread talks about Common Core, which isn’t directly related to the topic. It’s the kind of comment I might remove, but I have a feeling the commenter hadn’t seen what I put on the last post, so it stays.
David, apparently I am not making myself clear. My comment was based on your assessment of the Nevada ESA and why I feel the popularity is growing. I don’t know how much more related I can get. If you start your “book burning” tactics there will be nobody to share your ideas with.
You need to read Trumps book, “The Art of the Deal.” It would really open your eyes.
The public school system is a modernist institution. The population’s ability to believe in its legitimacy as the sole dispenser of publicly funded education depended on the now outmoded and discredited belief that there is one unified, valid epistemology. ESA’s, vouchers, charters, etc. are a reflection of the reality that at the highest levels of discourse in our society, no one believes in modernism anymore. Our epistemology is post-modern. We know we are a pluralist society. Moreover, the best parts of our American political tradition defend our population’s right to be “plural” and to be free of state interference in certain aspects of their values and beliefs.
So get over it. It’s a lost battle. We won’t be going back to the former district school monopoly on the use of public funds. If we had sane public policy in this state (which we do not) we would be developing a valid set of standards and a regulatory system to make sure that schools authorized to use state funds (including district schools) are transparent, well-run, humane, and are meeting their students’ educational needs. We don’t have that in place and there are many, many irresponsible actors (including some public districts) on the current chaotic educational scene in Arizona. It’s the Wild West — and in terms of educational outcomes, it’s creating about as many casualties and perversions of justice in our school system as your old-style gunslinger / vigilante network did in our justice system in days gone by.
That’s right, David — we need to get rid of ESA’s, vouchers, etc. entirely. Because the only people who deserve to have “options” in education are the wealthy, those who can afford to pay tuition out of their inflated incomes or inherited wealth. The poor must be locked into low functioning public systems like TUSD and if we want to see justice served we must ensure that they have NO EXIT.
Sarcasm, if you follow the redistribution method of progressives they have to eliminate the ESA because their plan of destroying wealth will only go so far. If states like Nevada and AZ allow them they can’t effectively eliminate all non public school competition. Thus the courts are loaded with libs like the 9th Circuit for their appeals.
Let’s hope Nevada upholds the law. How many court challenges must these poor parents endure?
David W, I thought you were probably making a connection to my post in your first comment, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. No problem with a comment like that if you make it clearer how it follows the topic. As I said, my purpose isn’t to get rid of a bunch of comments, it’s to keep people from running away with the comment thread and moving it away from what I was writing about in the post.
Rat T — one of the commenters suggested to you a while back that you read the encyclical Rerum Novarum — did you do so? There are some progressives who support ESA’s… the sort of progressives who acknowledge the reality of pluralism and are concerned about counter-cultural concepts like “human dignity” and the “common good.”
I did read it and found it rooted in traditional Catholicism. It attempted to run down the middle between socialism and uncontrolled capitalism. You can only split this thing so many ways until dilution erodes any value achieved.
That’s exactly right. Rerum Novarum rejects the extremes of total state ownership of property on the one hand and unregulated capitalism producing unjust and inhumane extremes of wealth and poverty on the other hand. In that we live in a system that tends towards the latter rather than the former, ESA’s are one way of ensuring that those on the lower end of the income spectrum have access to one of the goods the capitalist system usually reserves only for those at the high end of the income spectrum — access to a range of good educational opportunities.
I notice that people who advocate for charters and vouchers have trouble with plurals and possessives. The plural of ESA is ESAs not ESA’s. The dollars siphoned from public education to ESAs are now ESA’s. The STO money filtered through Steve Yarbrough is over a million dollars, not dollar’s.
I find it ironic that those that defend education and evolution would oppose evolutionary changes in education.
A savings account of any type – education, health or personal – is out of the question for at least the bottom 25% of the population who don’t even have enough money to live on. We have been creating policies, like savings accounts, and taking actions that basically say that the bottom 25% do not matter: starve them, incarcerate them and let them get sick and die.
“ESAs” doesn’t look right to me, but I looked up plurals of abbreviations in the Chicago Manual of Style (15th Edition) and sure enough, in section 7.15 under “Possessives of Letters, Abbreviations, and Numerals,” they say that abbreviations that contain no interior periods form the plural by adding -s, and they give “IRAs” and “URLs” as examples. With abbreviations using internal periods (discussed in section 7.16), however, they note that you do form the plural by adding -‘s, thus M.A.’s, Ph.D.’s.
Note to David, who is a former English teacher and made the same mistake (ESA’s as a plural) in the blog: the plural is “ESAs” or “E.S.A.’s,” not “ESA’s,” apparently. We can thank Pima Mujer for pointing that out, and she can thank both of us for making errors that enabled her to write a clever, insulting comment — though it was inaccurate, of course, to imply that “people who advocate for charters and vouchers have trouble with plurals and possessives.” David is not a person who “advocates for charters and vouchers” and he made the same mistake: “Congratulate the Goldwater Institute for how cleverly it designed the ESA’s work-around to the church-state problem.”
I do congratulate them. Well done on this one, Goldwater Institute.
Oops… I see that in David’s usage it is a possessive. I had initially read it as a plural, reading “designed the ESA’s [to] work around the church-state problem.” As written, it is a possessive, though an awkward one: “the ESA’s work-around to the church-state problem.”
I don’t strive to be clever and insulting. Like David, I strive to be an advocate for public schools and expose the poor, policy decisions that siphon money away from them.
Glad the all-important punctuation issues have been cleared up. RE a couple of the ideas in Pima Mujer’s post:
How exactly are ESAs “siphoning” dollars from public education? Dollars that go to support the education of a child do not belong to the public system after that child is withdrawn from the system. Whether or not those dollars go into an account to support some other educational expenses for that family, the “per pupil” funding will leave the public school which that child attended when the child leaves. Is it better or worse for the child’s good and the common good for those dollars to be made available for the family to spend on an alternative school? It depends. Currently, we don’t have enough regulation and oversight, so it may well be that the child will be enrolled in a school of dubious quality that doesn’t serve their best interests. Some alternative schools do meet children’s needs better than publicly funded alternatives, though. In some cases allowing the family to use the per-pupil funding in another setting accomplishes a great deal of good. I’m not going to get into the “church and state” issues here, but in terms of the overall quality of the educational services provided, in my opinion, transferring a child from Basis or UHS to Salpointe would be a good move in most cases. Many non-Catholics choose to attend Salpointe because they like the school’s humane and flexible policies and the quality of college preparatory education it provides. Should the cost of tuition be an obstacle, if a family of limited means wants to have the option of transferring to Salpointe?
As for Yarbrough — to bring him up every time “choice” policies are mentioned is a dodge. Some who support ESAs do not support Yarbrough’s chicanery. Let’s discuss the merit of the policies and in what ways greater regulation and oversight are needed if they are to accomplish any good for students. We should not assume that because Yarbrough has been caught mis-using funds, all policies of the type he has abused should be thrown out. That’s just sloppy thinking and bad public policy decision making.
I notice that people who argue against charters and vouchers have trouble with commas:
“I strive to be an advocate for public schools and expose the poor, policy decisions…”
“poor, policy decisions”?
I’m guessing she meant “poor policy decisions.”
But perhaps we should get off the punctuation issues, acknowledge that everyone makes mistakes, and discuss the merit of the policies.
What’s in the best interests of children is to get a good education. When you have districts as poorly administered as TUSD on the local educational scene, some families do need the means to get out, and in some cases, it may make more sense for them to attend a school that charges tuition than another publicly funded school. None of the commenters here have explained why it’s bad policy to allow children to apply their per-pupil funding in a good alternative school charging tuition. Clearly we need to eliminate some of the abuses of the system, but why do we need to throw the choice policies out entirely? Locking children and their per-pupil funding into low functioning public schools won’t ensure that they receive a good education there, nor will it force districts like TUSD that refuse to put students’ needs first to become accountable, transparent, and student-centered in their decision making.
Great discussion guy’s. Thank’s.
You said it. “Currently, we don’t have enough regulation and oversight, so it may well be that the child will be enrolled in a school of dubious quality that doesn’t serve their best interests.”
Yarbrough sucks a million dollars meant for public schools into his STO. As long as he creates legislation that he benefits from, which takes money from public education, I’ll bring him up.
Lastly, if you want your child to go to Salpointe and receive a religious education. You should pay for it, not the state.
I recognize all you education choice people have David on Google alert, so you can pile on in the comments section, but 85% of children in this state attend public school, and the state is 50th in funding. Parents have always had choices, only now they want the state to pay for it.
We need to increase per-pupil funding but not lock it into the district public school system.
If the public schools were not so starved for funds, perhaps those defending them would not be so desperate to prevent kids from leaving public schools and taking their per-pupil funding with them.
(I’m not entirely certain that this is correct, but someone who is pretty well-informed about school funding issues once explained to me that there isn’t enough allocated to cover the expenses of the special education services public schools provide. Somehow the per-pupil funding of kids not utilizing those services is needed to underwrite the expense of those programs, so when kids who don’t utilize special ed leave the system and the ratio of kids needing special services to kids not needing special services increases, there isn’t enough money to fund the programs properly. If this is in fact the case, the solution is to change the way special education services are funded — not to lock the per-pupil funding for kids not utilizing those services into the public system.)
I don’t have google alert on anything. Strawman assumption. No student no money.
I find the arguments made here by the “keep choice policies but eliminate abuses of choice policies” camp most persuasive.
There are a lot of inconsistencies in the “eliminate choice” positions expressed here, and while those supporting choice admit that the policies do need to be cleaned up and better regulated, those who oppose choice have neither admitted what is undoubtedly true — that there are many circumstances where choice policies do students good — nor have they provided the missing explanation referenced by “Exit Strategies Needed” above:
“None of the commenters here have explained why it’s bad policy to allow children to apply their per-pupil funding in a GOOD alternative school charging tuition.”
Is it “bad policy” because the majority of students leaving public schools are academically high performing, and the public schools would like to retain those students for a variety of reasons about which — strangely enough — opponents of choice policies are not always honest and open? If this is one of the reasons, as “Increase Funding” above implies, then the facts and funding issues surrounding those circumstances need to be discussed openly and honestly, and the problems many public schools have meeting the instructional needs of academically high performing students also need to be addressed.
I consider myself a “supporter of public education,” and if I lived in a state like Vermont where the public system is well funded and higher functioning, I might have kept my kids exclusively in public schools. Living in Arizona, I have found it necessary to use the private system at some points as I was bringing my kids up. I didn’t use public funds to do it, but when it comes to ESAs and vouchers, I feel I have an obligation to support them because I know families in the schools my children attended who wouldn’t have been able to afford to make what they felt was the best educational choice for their children without using them. As a social justice advocate, I would think myself a hypocrite if I argued against broadening access to the private system from which my own children have, at a few different points, benefited.
If people who utilized the troubled and underfunded public system in Arizona exclusively throughout K-12 want to argue against ESAs and vouchers, I’m happy to hear their arguments. As for people who as parents at any point utilized privates, when they argue against ESAs, they are essentially arguing this: “I believe that only the wealthy should be able to enjoy the privileges I myself have enjoyed. People who don’t have my economic resources should be confined to a narrower range of educational choices for their children than I had for my children.”
My opinion: if people who oppose ESAs but utilized privates themselves are honest and consistent, they either have to give up saying they have a commitment to “social justice” or they have to give up their opposition to choice policies.
We should all work to improve the K-12 public system in Arizona — and that includes, David Safier, holding elected officials in governance positions ACCOUNTABLE — but until we can get all our K-12 public systems to a point where they are higher functioning, it’s wrong to block parents’ access to alternatives.