Danger in a school voucher program
Have you ever heard of The Alliance for the Separation of School
and State, where you sign a proclamation that says, “I proclaim
publicly that I favor ending government involvement in
education?”
The Alliance, along with the Cato Institute and a panoply of
think tanks with cooked data, have brought us the proposed school
voucher program over which our very own Legislature is laboring as
we speak.
We hear school vouchers sold as school choice for poor kids, but
the goal of the national movement that has landed in New Hampshire
is to dismantle American public education.
The quote from the movement’s godfather — Milton Friedman in
“Public Schools: Make Them Private” — says it best: “Vouchers are
not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition
from a government to a free-market system.”
This is essentially the mission statement of the Cato Institute
education folks who have been helping our legislators write and
lobby for a school voucher program in New Hampshire.
The proposed New Hampshire program would start large and, over
time, could shift as much as $200 million in public school funding
to private, religious and home schools. Here’s how.
Our local property taxes fund our local public schools. That’s
the way it works. If we have no children, our older and kids are
gone, or we send our children to a private school, we pay the
school portion of our property taxes anyway.
And they’re accountable to us. Even people without children in
the school serve on the school board because it’s a community asset
to be nurtured. If it’s a school whose students do well on tests
and go off to college, we take pride in it. People want to live in
our town. If not, we work on making it better. That’s how we built
our country, our democracy, our economy.
But the new program would fund school vouchers with business tax
credits and, as the students left the schools, the state would take
the adequacy aid back from the school districts. Our local schools
would either shrink or our local property taxes would increase to
replace the lost state money.
Our schools are already laboring under the burden of decreasing
enrollments. Over the past 10 years, our public schools have shrunk
by 1,400 students each year as a result of demographic shifts. In
its very first year, the proposed voucher program could more than
double that loss — to 3,400.
And the sponsors have provided for relentless annual expansion.
The program could fund as many as 20,000 students in its 10th year.
And all this time, public schools are shrinking and local property
taxes are going up, in effect to fund the private, religious and
home schools.
The schools themselves could be a local religious school or
Phillips Exeter. But they would not be accountable for the results
they got with our tax money. No testing. No reporting of any kind
on academic results. No financial reporting. Remember, the goal
here is to take the government money, but not the government
control.
And the vouchers would go to many of the students who leave each
year anyway to go to private and home schools. Many voucher
recipients will never have been in public schools.
This is clearly not a case of poor people in need. The big
winners are the small Christian schools, who have had much greater
enrollment losses over that past 10 years than the public schools
have. A student coming with a voucher needs that much less
scholarship money.
It’s hard to see any legitimate public purpose in promoting this
kind of outcome in New Hampshire.
Who’s asking for this program anyway? The recent UNH Granite
State Poll found that, by a margin of 2-1, New Hampshire voters —
left, right and center — reject spending public money to send
children to private schools. And public school parents are
satisfied with the schools by a margin of 68 percent to 30
percent.
So our Legislature is not responding to some grass roots
movement coming from within New Hampshire. It’s the Alliance for
the Separation of School and State, in California, and the Cato
Institute in Washington DC that want this for us.
We shouldn’t be fooled by the gauzy “school choice for poor
people” sales pitch. We need to defend our public schools.
Bill Duncan of New Castle is with Defending New Hampshire Public
Schools, www.dnhpe.org.