School Choice

School choice sounds like a no-brainer, right? What could possibly be wrong about giving parents the opportunity to choose the best school for their child?

It doesn't take much of a second glance to see how the advocates of choice have been waging war on all public education for over forty years that I know about. 

Consider the state of Arizona. In 2011 the legislature created a $2.5 million program for children with special needs that weren't being served adequately by their public school. The children were given vouchers to pay for private schools that would provide appropriate services.* In New York, special-needs children who can show that they are not receiving appropriate services are given a Nickerson Letter, which guarantees that the state will pay their private school tuition. In New York, affluent parents who can afford attorneys who specialize in this area of the law find it much easier to obtain those letters than other parents. In both states it is very difficult in practice to actually find private schools that will serve more difficult cases. We personally visited several very impressive schools, especially designed for children with special needs, and charging astronomical tuitions, who balked at serving children on the autism spectrum. 

But Arizona's voucher law was never really intended to help the parents of children with special needs. It was transparently intended as a foot in the door to normalize the practice of vouchers in order to give them to other parents, especially richer parents. It is now "universal" meaning available to anybody, or at least anybody who can afford the balance of a private school tuition after the value of the voucher, and who can get their child into one of those private schools.

Just in the first quarter of this 2022-2023 school year Arizona spent $300 million on vouchers, or 120 times the original cost of the program. More important, 80% of that money went to families that were already sending their children to private schools! In other words, Arizona robbed $240 million from public schools and from the children who attend them. This is a give-away to the affluent families that send their children to private school. It is a gift to the private schools themselves, especially the for-profit private schools. It is a giant step toward segregating schools by race and by social class since private schools can exclude anyone they want.

I have said many times that privatizing a public service serves at least three purposes. First, ideological. There are so many people who believe that there is no "we", that none of us is ever responsible for or to anyone but ourselves. This is a fraudulent ideology. It denies facts about our personal lives in which all of us are mutually dependent and it denies facts about human history in which all of our progress has been collective.

Second, it is a way to transfer money from the have-nots to the haves. Rich people get to lower their own taxes by refusing to pay for anyone else's needs, even when they - the rich - actively create those needs, as in cutting corners on environmental and workplace safety (or spilling toxic chemicals into public water supplies) to increase their profit margins. And in the case of school funding, they take it for their own kids. Instead of getting a public education for their children, poor people pay taxes to support the tuition of wealthy kids in private schools.

Third, it is always (always!) an invitation to corruption. The rapid and barely-regulated expansion of charters has given us so many examples of "schools" that didn't exist except on paper or were led by people with no educational experience and - in some cases - no education at all! The idea that the profit motive is a stimulus for excellence and efficiency is a story that we have been sold. Profits can be increased to 100% of revenue by the simple method of reducing costs to zero: providing us with nothing at all in return for what we pay.

Now the Texas legislature is considering a universal voucher program, which would give every parent reimbursement for private school tuition, whether in-person or online. In the Texas Observer article linked below, Josephine Lee calculates a $3 billion loss to Texas public schools if this law is passed. On the face of it, that makes sense. If parents vote with their feet by taking their children out of the public schools, why should they have that money? 

But look again. Despite its wealth, Texas is among the stingiest states in per pupil funding, under $10,000 per pupil per year. That 10K won't go far in allowing a poor family in Dallas, say, to send their children to Good Shepherd Episcopal, with its $24,000 a year tuition. But it is a windfall to the parents who already send their children there. And that $3 billion figure is not for an exodus of children from public to private schools. It is the cost of giving a voucher to all of the roughly 300,000 children in Texas who already attend private schools. It isn't an opportunity for the 5.5 million children in Texas public schools. It is a theft of $545 per kid. It can be thought of as as a $13,000 pay cut for a teacher with 25 students in her class. Or perhaps the loss of an after-school program. Or new books. Or lunch.

Our enemies love the word "choice." They tell us we should be able to choose our doctors, but don't want us to be able to pay for our medical care, or even know what it will cost until we receive the bill. They tell us we should be able to choose our employment, but don't want us to choose what our employers pay us, or even to know what that will be before we apply for the job. They even want us to be able to choose which deodorant we use while selling us hundreds of brands, with different scents and different packaging, that all have the identical active ingredients. So why do our choices always turn out to benefit them?

Beware school choice.

* Note: Much of the data for this essay is from an article in this week's Texas Observer by Josephine Lee, "School Voucher Programs Are Hurting Special Needs Students They Claim to Help"