Nevada’s New Voucher Plan Is Designed to Bankrupt the Public Schools | janresseger

Nevada’s New Voucher Plan Is Designed to Bankrupt the Public Schools | janresseger:

Nevada’s New Voucher Plan Is Designed to Bankrupt the Public Schools

Nevada is one of our nation’s 24 one-party, all Republican states.  Writing for the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown note that, “In January, Republicans took control of the Nevada legislature and the governor’s mansion for the first time since 1929, generating the political momentum to enact the country’s most expansive voucher plan.” “Starting next school year, any parent in Nevada can pull a child from the state’s public schools and take tax dollars with them, giving families the option to use public money to pay for private or parochial school or even for home schooling…  Nevada’s law is singular because all of the state’s 450,000 K-12 public school children—regardless of income—are eligible to take the money to whatever school they choose.”  A child must be enrolled in a public school for at least 100 days in order to qualify.

Layton and Brown report that the new Nevada voucher bill was developed with the assistance of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the foundation Jeb Bush launched in 2008, but from which he resigned at the end of 2014 to prepare for his Presidential candidacy.  The Foundation’s chief executive Patricia Levesque describes Nevada’s new voucher bill: “This is the wave of the future.  In all aspects of our life, we look for ways to customize and give individuals more control over their path and destiny…. This is a fundamental shift in how we make decisions about education.”

The Education Law Center recently circulated an analysis of Nevada’s new school vouchers from Educate Nevada Now, a statewide organization that promotes public education:  “The ESA (Education Savings Account) law requires the ‘statewide average basic support per pupil’—$5,100 per student and $5,710 for low-income and students with disabilities—be deposited into each ESA (Education Savings Account) from local district budgets, a process that will divert, over time, substantial resources from the public schools.  Studies have shown that Nevada substantially underfunds K-12 public education… ESAs will trigger an outflow of funds from already inadequate school district budgets, beginning in the 2015-16 school year… As children leave public schools with ESA funds, some of the costs to educate those students will leave with them.  But ESAs will cause a deficit for the local district, given the fixed costs of operating the school system for all children… ESAs also create instability in district and school budgets.  Districts will not know how many students will exit and how much money will be taken out of the budget during the school year.  This unpredictability will make it difficult to manage public school budgets, as local administrators won’t know how many teachers and staff to hire… or how to allocate funds to provide sufficient resources to schools throughout the school year.”

Nevada is making the vouchers for over $5,000 available to any family, while most other Nevada’s New Voucher Plan Is Designed to Bankrupt the Public Schools | janresseger: