Loome: School Choice Backers Keep Changing Their Story
Note: The following is an opinion-editorial item written by Nancy Loome, executive director of the Parents’ Campaign and president of The Parents’ Campaign Research & Education Fund. Opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily that of this publication.
By Nancy Loome
The “school choice” crowd can’t seem to get their story straight.
The first iteration of their campaign to use state tax dollars to subsidize private schools came in 1954 in response to Brown vs. the Board of Education. Segregationists made no bones about the fact that “tuition grants” (private school vouchers) would provide a way for white parents to evade the public school integration newly mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since then, elite billionaires still pushing to fund private schools with public dollars have attempted to bury that ugly history, promoting an ever-changing narrative as they’ve struggled to find a storyline less offensive to the broader public.
Early voucher proponents theorized that, if parents lost faith in public schools, they would support vouchers as an alternative. They adopted the mantra: “Public schools are a failure, private schools are superior” and urged lawmakers to slash funding for public education. So confident were they that public schools were inferior to private that they agreed to test voucher students, but that accountability was short-lived, as voucher students fared poorly. School choice adherents were shocked by the data, which show that public schools outperform private schools.
So the “failing schools” message gave way to “Competition makes public schools better” – their claim that public schools produced good outcomes because of the competition that vouchers introduced.
When that, too, was proven erroneous, new messaging emerged: “Vouchers are a civil rights issue.” Suddenly anti-public education billionaires and their lobbyists claimed that their primary mission was ensuring that children living in poverty would have the same private school choices that more privileged children have. Only their legislation stated clearly that private voucher schools had no obligation to admit children they didn’t want to serve – or to provide transportation, school meals, and other services on which children in low-income households rely.
The data are clear: most vouchers have gone to wealthier families whose children already were enrolled in private schools. The structure of voucher programs ensures that children in low-income households are the least likely to use them. This is particularly true for tuition tax credits (private schools’ preferred means of receiving state-sponsored funds), which benefit those who already are enrolled in private schools and already are paying tuition.
The latest iteration from voucher spin doctors is “education freedom” – parents should be free to choose their children’s schools. Of course, parents can choose (to the degree that private schools are willing to admit their children), but taxpayers shouldn’t be obligated to bankroll every choice that a parent makes. And it’s important to note that”options” do not translate to rights.While all children have a right to a free and appropriate public education, they have no rights where private schools are concerned.
The public isn’t buying the “school choice” propaganda, as is evidenced by a long string of failures when put before voters. Every time it has appeared on a ballot for a public vote, the diversion of public funds to private schools has lost. That includes the most recent election, when Kentucky, Nebraska, and Colorado defeated voucher-related ballot measures.
As voters have rebuffed efforts to subsidize private schools with public dollars, the national “choice” lobby has shifted its strategy, spending lavishly on legislative races in targeted states, hoping to tip the scales by electing legislators who would do their bidding despite the lack of public support.
That strategy has proven more successful, and legislatures in a number of states have saddled taxpayers with the bill for hundreds of millions of dollars in private school subsidies benefiting affluent families, devastating state budgets and driving funding cuts to important state services.
What have taxpayers gotten in return? Inferior academic outcomes and no accountability for how their hard-earned dollars were spent. After 20+ years and billions of taxpayer dollars expended, not one penny of private school voucher funding has ever been audited.
That’s a bad deal for children and a bad deal for taxpayers.
Nancy Loome is executive director of The Parents’ Campaign (msparentscampaign.org) and president of The Parents’ Campaign Research & Education Fund (tpcref.org). She and her husband Jim have three grown children, all of whom graduated from Clinton Public Schools.
