Arizona created Education Savings Accounts, aka Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka vouchers on steroids. We were the first. Then came Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee. Nevada, where Republicans gained control of the legislature and the governorship in January, just passed a similar program. The major difference is, all the other programs are limited to kids who fall into a few categories. Every year the Arizona legislature tries to add more categories to the mix with the ultimate goal of making the voucher program universal, but it has a long way to go. The new Nevada law includes all children, no exceptions.
Other than the universal coverage, the Nevada ESA is pretty much a carbon copy of the Arizona program. The other major difference is, students receiving voucher money have to take yearly standardized tests in English and math and report the results to the state, while in Arizona, no tests are required.
Here’s how it will work in Nevada. If a student has been enrolled in public school for 100 consecutive days, that student will be eligible for a voucher. Like the Arizona version, the money from the state goes into a savings account which the parents can spend on approved educational activities, including tuition, books, tests and tutors. The children don’t have to be in school. As in Arizona, home schooled children qualify. Any money that’s not spent one year rolls over to the next. If it’s not all spent by high school graduation, the remainder of the money can be used for college expenses.
How much money does that come to in Nevada? If you’re a low income family, your child gets 100 percent of the state funding the public school received. Higher income families get 90 percent of the public school allotment. That comes to about $5,000 per child, though, if it’s like Arizona, special needs children who get extra funding in public schools will also get the extra funding in private schools, which can add $10,000 or more to the yearly total.
The major groups behind this law are our own Goldwater Institute — natch, they were behind our ESA law — and the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which was begun by Jeb Bush, though he left FEE recently to pretend he’s not running run for president. (Fun fact #1: Matthew Ladner, who used to be the education guy at the Goldwater Institute, now is the Senior Advisor of Policy and Research for the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Fun Fact #2: Jeb’s most recent book was coauthored by Clint Bolick of the Goldwater Institute.)
It’ll take awhile to see how the Nevada voucher situation works out. There won’t be a mass exodus of students from public to private schools. There simply aren’t enough schools. And $5,000 a year won’t go very far in the private school prep world where tuitions can be three times that high, or more, so it’s unlikely Nevada will be seeing a major influx of low income students into the social-register private schools. But for families that have enough money to cover the high private school tuition, if they can just grit their teeth and put their children in one of those awful public schools for 100 days—a little over half a school year—they can get the state to pay $5,000 a year of their private school tuition from then on.
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2015.
I spent some time recently talking with the principal of an extremely high functioning private school that is humane, developmentally appropriate, safe, staffed with highly qualified (and certified) teachers. She reports that enrollment is down because of the competition from all the free charter schools that have opened up in her neighborhood.
Personally, I would much rather see state tax dollars applied in this school than in any number of inadequately overseen charters I could name.
How do you think families who can afford a private school like the one mentioned above with a voucher program — but not without a voucher program — feel about the piece of legislation you describe?
With the income inequality we’re currently experiencing in this country, David, how would you feel about telling a family whose kid is locked into a public school that is not meeting his needs that they only deserve to send their child to a school they can feel good about if their family income is at a certain level?
Now supporters of charter schools are pointing to them and saying how bad they are and so we need private schools funded with taxpayer money which was probably the goal of of the creators of charter schools in the first place. Koch brothers and the Walton family have been creating schools for the elite for a long time. They have slowly and insidiously penetrated public education to segregate children with charter schools and this is the next step. Both families do not deny that they believe in segregation but they are very careful with their words. This is a way to pay for religious instruction veiled as,’There are no other good choices’. In the 60s I believe the Supreme Court deemed this unconstitutional.
Regular public schools have open enrollment across each district and between districts. I do not believe there would not be in that scope of school choices, a school that could help the hypothetical child who isn’t having his or her needs met at the school he or she presently attends. We have so many choices. Religious education can and should be done after school if a child attends a public school.
This is another opportunity to abuse taxpayer funds and many taxpayers do not want to support religious education of others anyway . We need to clean up charter schools big time. This much needed oversight will be costly and to spread the oversight even further with vouchers for private schools would create a more complicated and expensive program. We need to get back to public education and have funds available to these schools to create better programs for all. Charters have been around in Arizona for a long time and misuse of funds is being found here and across the nation. We need to stop this insanity and take back our education funds to be used as they were always intended.
As they were always intended? That is laughable. Public schools are spending billions as they were never intended to be spent. The US is the second largest spender on education in the world and the results are shameful.
It is funny that when something progressive comes down the shoot that allows families to get a better education with what we are currently spending on education you oppose it. Then you talk about it being the “states money” when it is coming from the taxpayers. It is our money and if there is a better way to educate our children then don’t just defend the establishment. When we were young we opposed the establishment, now many of us have become the establishment. Pretty weird.
David-
You are far too kind to me, but don’t forget to give credit to the school district industrial lobbying complex of Arizona. Without their legal effort to employ a 19th Century state constitutional provision that had been pushed by anti-Catholic groups such as the Know Nothings and the KKK to kill a small scholarship program for children with disabilities, we would never have developed the account based choice programs. At last count similar bills had been filed in about 22 states, passed in six, enacted in five and our friends and their lawyers deserve much of the credit!
Cheers-
ML
Matthew, a blast from the past! Good to hear from you, and to see you’re still arguing that a constitutional ban on spending state money for religious education is a bad idea because of the person who first promoted it. So let’s see, because some of the most important Founding Fathers were slave owners, we should get rid of all the horrible ideas they proposed in the Constitution, right?
Cheers-
DS
I keep wondering when these vouchers will be ruled unconstitutional. THey are clearly walking on thin ice. I remember this argument many years ago and if religion is taught in a school, they cannot be paid for with taxpayer money. I had this argument with my sister-in-law and she clearly expects that these schools will be all Christian. I asked if she would be okay with paying for any religion having a school. Silence. This is very wrong. Does anyone know if there are any pending cases regarding this?
https://www.au.org/church-state/february-2…
@Doug Martin. Here’s a progressive idea. Cut funding to Catholic Services that run hospitals and provide health care with government funds.
The USC does not mention education or religion in a non existent separation clause.
It is a non establishment clause that appears in the First Amendment of the USC. Why do progressives view education different than health care? It must be their union.
Whenever people argue publicly for or against policies that increase access to private schools, I think it would be helpful if they could relate this to what their own choices have been as parents. I currently have children enrolled in a troubled public district and in a high functioning private school. I do not make use of vouchers; we pay for the private without using public tax dollars. However, the daily contrast between low functioning and irresponsible, inhumane policies in the public school and high functioning and responsible, humane policies in the private setting makes me want to see access broadened to the sort of conditions the private school provides. I support families who need to utilize tax credits to pay for tuition using them to enroll their children in whatever school — religious or secular — best meets their children’s needs.
I agree that our public schools are underfunded and that we need to fund them better. If we are honest, those of us who consider ourselves supporters of the state provision of excellent schooling need to admit that some of our public districts are falling far short of anything that could be described as “excellence.” I cannot respect so-called supporters of of public schooling who soft-pedal the need for increased transparency and repeatedly assert that our public schools — including our most troubled local district — are doing just fine. If we are truly to serve the common good, we need to recognize the very real problems this district continues to present and work to solve them instead of denying that they exist. Moreover, we need to stop opposing public policies that make other types of schooling accessible to more families. Yes, we need to increase regulation and oversight of charters and privates, but no, we do not need to go back to a system where district schools had a monopoly on the use of public funds.
As for the slams against “religious” schools in some of the above commentary — we live in a pluralistic society, where there is no state-sponsored religion. It would definitely be wrong for the state to REQUIRE children to attend a school that provided religious instruction. But is it wrong for parents to choose to educate their children in an institution affiliated with a religious denomination, and to expect that, in relieving the state of the expense of providing their child with education in all the academic subjects, they should be able to reduce their tuition fees in that school by the same amount of money they are saving the state? Many of us think not. Nor do we think that such a use of public funds is in any way unconstitutional.
Well said SJ. I attended both public and private. My children attended both. Hopefully my grandchildren someday will not attend public. They are attempting to do too much with too little to too many.
TUSD should be down to a manageable size in 5-10 years. That would be less than 10,000 students. They just voted to outsource substitutes so they can shift them to Obamacare. Really?
Ms Grijalvas father pushed that through Congress and forced it on employers. (ACA) And now they want to subvert the law?
No thanks. Get your kids out of TUSD. The good teachers will follow them.
In answer to questions about the state funding religious schools, here’s the relevant section of the Arizona constitution: “No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction or to the support of any religious establishment.” (Article II, Section 12). In Arizona as in most other states, between 70 and 80 percent of private schools are religious.
Both the Education Savings Accounts and private school tax credits have been challenged on these grounds. The courts have said both programs are OK because the state doesn’t directly fund religious education. With the ESAs, the state puts taxpayer money in a separate savings account which parents use for their children’s educations, and the tax credit donations are given by individuals, who then have their money refunded by the state at tax time. That one degree of separation is enough to maintain the court-approved illusion of an educational separation of church and state.
The argument can be made that the “separation of church and state” has been misunderstood and misinterpreted. The principle was formulated against a state (England) that had a state-sponsored and state funded church (“The Church of England”) and at various times throughout its history either persecuted or waged war against dissenters and / or required people to belong to that church if they wanted to get an education or have access to the means to earn a living in one of the professions. (Are you familiar with John Donne’s bio, David, or with the interesting tension in his poetry and sermons between ideas originating from the religion in which he was raised and the religion which the state forced him to adopt?)
There IS a very real difference between 1) the state setting up and promoting and / or requiring attendance at religious schools because they feel that a particular religion supports obedience to the state or reinforces the values the state wants people to have and 2) allowing taxpayers to CHOOSE to use money that would otherwise be used to cover the state’s expense to educate a child in a public school to get their children’s educational needs met in another institution. It is the latter practice that we have in the voucher system, and the former practice that the formulation of the separation of church and state was designed to prevent.
David, don’t make us define religion. We see it happening in the public schools. You don’t want to go down that road.
A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence. Many religions have narratives, symbols, and sacred histories that aim to explain the meaning of life, the origin of life, or the Universe.
Many generations of my family, up to this day, have received a parochial education, even during the toughest times of the Depression; it was just that important. We also paid taxes though we didn’t attend public schools. There is a long history of the parochial schools of this country being the only ones with certified teachers and therefore under contract with the state to enroll public school students. No, never here in Az but this was done with a separation of the students to comply with that pesky separation of philosophies.
Other than my example of history I am personally opposed to ANY taxpayer funding of private education. Many private schools have a “scholarship” process for those of lesser means to enroll but then comes the limitation of class size.
From Diane Ravitch’s April 2, 2015 article in The New York Review of Books, “The Lost Purpose of School Reform”:
“Fifty years ago, Congress passed a federal education law to help poor children get a good public education: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. […] ESEA was originally conceived as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It had one overriding purpose: to send federal funding to schools that enrolled large numbers of children living in poverty. […] Advocates of federal aid to public schools had been trying without success to persuade Congress to approve it since the 1870s. Their efforts consistently failed because neither party trusted the other to control the nation’s schools. Over the years, there were other complicating issues: […] [including that] urban members of Congress opposed federal aid unless it also served children in Catholic schools. […] President Johnson was a master persuader, and he assuaged everyone’s concerns. The purpose of the law, he insisted, was to help poor children get a better education, and everyone could agree on that. […] Catholics were mollified because they were included in ESEA’s funding (a Supreme Court decision later removed them).”
Looks like Lyndon Johnson was willing to grant that using public funds to support the cost of educating low-SES kids in Catholic schools was acceptable.
The bottom line is children with limited economic resources need to attend the institutions that best meet their academic needs. This is in the children’s best interests; it is also in society’s best interests. What can we conclude from looking at the current scene in Tucson? The largest public school district here, which serves somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 students, is chronically troubled and has a long history of making policy decisions that do not serve the best interests of low SES and minority populations. The charter schools are under-regulated and in many cases irresponsible. Some of them are run for profit by non-educators. The Catholic system is, in terms of its academic strength, professionalism, and humane policies, one of the best alternatives available to parents whose children’s needs are not being met in the public school system. Most of its schools are not at enrollment capacity because of the easy availability of no-tuition charters. Should we support initiatives like Ladner’s? Would a significant number of our children be enrolled in better schools, getting their needs more fully met, if we had a program like this? It’s an interesting question.