Vouchers: Should States Be Subsidizing Private Education at a Steep Cost to Public Schools?
Wisconsin and Ohio were the pioneers, the states which launched school vouchers—public tax dollars covering private school tuition. Wisconsin launched Milwaukee vouchers in 1990, and Ohio followed suit in 1996 with a Cleveland voucher program.
What are the problems with the idea of vouchers?
Vouchers have always been endorsed by their proponents as providing an escape for promising students from so-called “failing” public schools—as measured by test scores. But research demonstrates (see here and here) that test scores correlate not with school quality but instead with the aggregate income of the neighborhoods where public schools are located and the families who live there. Research demonstrates that ameliorating student poverty would more directly address students’ needs.
The idea that vouchers help students academically hasn’t held up either. A study by the pro-voucher Thomas Fordham Institute demonstrates that in Ohio, voucher students regularly fall behind their public school counterparts. But proponents of school privatization (including the Thomas Fordham Institute itself) regularly ignore the evidence.
In a recent summary published in The Nation, Jennifer Berkshire explains that while there is a lack of empirical evidence justifying vouchers, their proponents support them ideologically: “But the GOP’s true policy aim these days is much more ambitious: private school vouchers for all. In Ohio, students in two-thirds of the state’s school districts are now eligible for vouchers, a ballooning program that is on track to cost taxpayers $350 million by the end of the school year. And in Florida, school vouchers are now being offered to middle-class students, the latest gambit by conservatives in their effort to redefine public education as anything parents want to spend taxpayer money on. ‘For me, if the taxpayer is paying for the education, it’s public education,’ Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed earlier this year.”
In Ohio, based on state report card grades which legislators from both parties seem to agree are deeply flawed, vouchers are now to be awarded to students in so-called ‘under- CONTINUE READING: Vouchers: Should States Be Subsidizing Private Education at a Steep Cost to Public Schools? | janresseger
