Voucher advocates used to claim that vouchers would dramatically raise test scores. They don’t. Then they said they raise graduation rates, which they do as long as you overlook high attrition rates.
Now, the new siren song is that they save money! Politico reports “the fiscal case for vouchers:”
“The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice touts vouchers as an ideal way to shake up the “government monopoly” on public education. Now the foundation aims to prove that vouchers make good financial sense, too. A report out today calculates that voucher programs in six states plus D.C. saved taxpayers $1.7 billion between 1990 and 2011. (States typically spend less on a voucher for private school tuition than educating a student in public school.) “Parents are already demanding school choice. Taxpayers should be, too,” said Robert Enlow, the foundation’s president and CEO. The report does not look at the quality of education in voucher schools, under fire in many states. Nor does it look at tax-credit scholarships, which allow individuals and corporations to cut state tax bills by donating to private school scholarship funds. The report: http://politico.pro/1rFrb2e.”
Just think: abolish public education and save hundreds of billions!
I thought the point was better education, not cheaper and worse education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think there is a trade off between resources used and quality of education. That is true of most things. The key is to find the best value for money.
That’s about $15 million per year per state, if my shaky back of the envelope math is right.
Savings that are not so giant! Beware big numbers spread over big time periods.
Do these “savings” studies account for the fact that an awful lot of vouchers go to families who were already sending their kids to private school? In which case we’re not saving the difference between what we’d pay to send that child to public school vs. what we pay for the voucher, but rather we’re paying to subsidize a kid going to private school whom we weren’t paying for at all before. Somebody may be saving money, but it isn’t us taxpayers.
Penny wise, pound foolish. The bean counters look only at the short term monetary effects, put on blinders concerning the effects of the “cuts”, cherry pick the “facts” ad nauseum.
Scholars look for broader concepts of truths. Politicians look to feather their own nests.
The way to perdition exemplified.
Gordon Wilder: what you said.
Here’s the end game: why pay to educate all the “uneducables” [Rahm Emanuel] and “non-strivers” [Michael J Petrilli] at all?
Think of all the money that could be saved if the vast majority of the nation’s youth were given the “freedom” to “choose” a no-expense non-education?
Of course, Lakeside School [Bill Gates] and Sidwell Friends [Barack Obama] and Delbarton School [Chris Christie] and Harpeth Hall [Michelle Rhee-Johnson] and U of Chicago Lab Schools [Rahm Emanuel] and such will still be there for the, er, deserving advantaged few.
Why have a two-tiered education system when you could save so much more money by having a one-tiered one?
I wish I were just joking…
😒
What helps is that the government can cut its contribution to private schools to whatever they’re comfortable giving, and parents can make up the difference. It becomes a back door way of lowering the overall tax rate while increasing the overall tax on families who care about their children and can afford to give them a better education.
Also, if we really aspired to have the low level of education coming out of voucher schools such as those in Louisiana, I bet we could do it even cheaper in Public Schools if people really valued their tax bill over their children.
Strangely, people with more money seem to gravitate towards areas with both higher tax bills and better schools….strange…
Come to think of it, if the government only comes to think of itself as a subsidizer of various levels of private education, you get an even starker income divide in “good” schools than you have now – except it will be completely legal and legitimate.
No more campaigns for Fiscal Equity, no more blathering about disproportionate aide due to property taxes. Just give all children an equal disbursement of inadequate money, let their parents make up the difference and you end up with what we have now where “the-haves” do better than the “have-nots” but the state doesn’t get blamed for funding inadequacies.
Nicely put, M.
Vouchers are designed as a way to introduce Monopoly Money into the education game.
That should tell you all you need to know …
Oh, so, it neatly brings us back to their principle that vouchers are vultures because they only feed on the dead meat…
Actually, its another nail in the public school coffin. Voucher to the private schools, portion off funding and students from the public schools, open more charters, open more privates, and voila….no more public schools left to fight over the funding. It will all go to “private” schools, even tho the charters say they are public. Which quite timely brings this up, in the wake of Eva’s “day off charter rally” – she sued not to have her books audited as private, tho out of the other side of her mouth charters are public? And she WON in court, yes? When the laws were corrected, she sued again. Do I have that right?
Did they bother to calculate the millions of dollars that are unaccounted for in these grand experiments? How about the cases of schools accepting contracts, getting paid, and then disappearing? I don’t think you can put a price tag on the waste of human capital in the lives of poor children whose neighborhood school in gone and opportunity gone awry while they are tossed into hands of unqualified robots reading scripts.
““government monopoly”
I would like to know how one considers around 13,500 public school districts with the accompanying number of elected boards of education to be “a monopoly”.
Help me figure that one out if anyone can.
Frank Lutz-speak
Hey, Duane. “Monopoly” because in most places its the only game in town for most kids. It’s the system by which the Feds want to take over the curriculum via the Ebola of CCSS. Not an absolute monopoly, but heretofore the only option was private. Now the legislation wants to permit publicly funded privates. Better a fragmented system that one into which the Feds can hack.
Privatization does not automatically mean less government involvement. Many private sectors still need politicians in local and national to churn out their interests. They want government for making their own money–not for scrutiny.
This is from Politico? You mean Tiger Beat on the Potomac.