According to a story in today’s Alexandria (La.) “Daily Town Talk,” large parts of Louisiana have no private schools taking part in the voucher program. They prefer to wait and see or just keep their distance. Some say they have no seats available; in one case, a school principal said her board members were “philosophically opposed” to using government money to pay for private school tuition.
With so few seats available for voucher applicants in Louisiana, I am beginning to wonder whether the voucher proposal was a diversion.
Maybe the point all along was to create hundreds of new charter schools across the state, which could siphon away public school students and cut the funding for public schools.
The unfolding of the voucher story is pretty intriguing, because this one is the big demonstration of vouchers, the one that voucher advocates have been longing for many decades.
And since Romney is out on the campaign trail flogging vouchers, this story has national significance.
Here are the problems:
1. Not that many seats available.
2. Some of the schools most eager to accept voucher students do not have a strong academic program, so the children might be leaving their struggling public school to enroll in a low-quality private or religious school.
3. The sorting of students into voucher and charter schools seems likely to intensify racial segregation, as students choose to go where they feel welcome.
4. The program may create demand by families who already pay for religious school to pay for their children too.
5. It’s hard to figure out how a program that allows 1% of eligible students (about 5,000 of 400,000 eligibles) to enter a private or religious school of unknown quality will end up transforming American education for the better or even helping sizable numbers of children.
Stay tuned for Gannett series that promises to “follow the money” in the Louisiana plan and to see how closely the Louisiana plan matches the language in ALEC model voucher legislation.
Governor Bobby Jindal may have discovered a way to revive racial segregation while calling it “reform.”
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree completely. Here in NJ, advocates of our Opportunity Scholarship Act (which they keep saying are not vouchers since they are paid for by tax credits! I guess it is a good idea to call a spade a diamond these days….) keep telling us it is not a bad idea because the program is so limited in scope. In fact, when I look at the bills, we are talking about under 5% of students from the selected schools moving to voucher schools and less if you consider that vouchers can be used for students already in private schools. This is not a significant way to help students even if we believed that voucher schools offered better academic hope. But then we hear the story that if we can save only one, we have the moral obligation……all the while advocates of this bill are perfectly willing to let the rest of the students suffer even though there are solutions within the public schools system that could be done now to help all students now. It is an absurd cover and shell game be promoted by people with personal gain at the top of their agenda.
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You are right. It is a shell game. If you can save an entire school full of students by reducing class size, funding the arts, offering intensive tutoring for those you need it, why wouldn’t you do that? Why would you drain resources from your community’s public school so that a handful of students can leave for private or religious schools with tax funding? The bottom line is that this is a decisive lose for the majority and a dubious win for the small minority who take leave of public schools.
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Right on all 5 problems. And, yes, I think there will be quite a money trail found. “Reform” that’s a laugh. It’s more like robbery from the taxpayers and education from the children and punishment to the teachers.
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Well here we go again. Why are we allowing this to happen? Education, as an industry, takes itself less seriously than any other industry I have ever been involved with. We wring our hands, we write letters to each other but there are no national, informational ads or grass roots movements to spurn the corporate raiders and we just sit here and preach to the choir. We have the NEA and AFT that collect dues then what? This is our fault! We are allowing this to happen. We had a saying in one of our faculty rooms. “I am a public school teacher, I take crap from everybody.” This attitude has spilled over the where I know public school teachers who vote for charter schools and want to start their own. Other industries post public infomation ads telling their version and these industries are all less important than ours and yet we do nothing. Why as one of the largest organized groups in the country do we not stand up and tell the truth? I would like to see an ad on TV telling the true story but if it hasn’t happened by now it never will and we can only blame ourselves.
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I read that several years ago, Colorado offered vouchers to students from low-performing public schools. But several private schools didn’t want the vouchers when they learned that they would have to accommodate students with learning or physical disabilities, students who weren’t members of their religion, or students who were more racially or linguistically diverse than they were used to. Perhaps many private schools are private precisely because they don’t want to open their doors to all members of the public?
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