Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld is puzzled, as am I. School choice has not fulfilled any of its bold promises. The charter industry is rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, and large numbers of them close every year. Vouchers were supposed to “save poor kids from failing schools,” but mostly they subsidize well-off kids who never attended public schools. Why do red states keep pumping more resources into failed programs that are neither innovative nor successful?
He writes:
Pundits have been wringing their hands over the “learning loss” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed the largest decline in decades.
But if people care about what kids are and aren’t learning, they should be every bit as alarmed by the private school voucher programs that are spreading across the country.
That’s according to Joshua Cowen, a Michigan State University education policy professor. He’s been studying vouchers and following the research for two decades, and he says the evidence is crystal clear that voucher programs don’t work when it comes to helping students learn.
In a recent episode of “Have You Heard,”an education podcast, he said thorough evaluations of large-scale voucher programs – in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C. – found overwhelmingly negative effects on learning as measured by test scores.
“We’ve seen some of the biggest drops in test scores that we’ve ever seen in the research community for people who take vouchers and go to private schools,” he said.
The impact on math scores, in some cases, was twice as large as the test-score decline associated with the pandemic, he said. It was on the scale of what New Orleans students lost when Hurricane Katrina shut down schools and forced families from their homes.
“They suffered that badly, in terms of their test scores,” he said. “We’re talking about nine or 10 months loss of learning. It’s massive….”
Cowen said he naively thought the conclusive research findings would put a nail in the coffin for state voucher programs. In fact, the opposite has happened. There are now 29 voucher programs in 16 states enrolling over 300,000 students, according to the pro-voucher group EdChoice. Arizona recently adopted a “universal voucher” program. Some states have adopted Education Savings Accounts, private-school tax credits and other neo-voucher programs.
Indiana expanded its already large voucher program in 2021. The program grew last year to over 44,000 students at a cost to the public of nearly a quarter billion dollars. Nearly all participating private schools are religious, and some discriminate by religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. A 2018 evaluation of the effects of Indiana’s program – cited by Cowen and conducted by professors at Notre Dame and the University of Kentucky – found significant test-score declines in math.
Why haven’t voucher programs disappeared if they don’t work? The title of the “Have You Heard” episode sums it up: “Moving the Goalposts.”
Parents have the right to send their children to low-performing religious schools or to homeschool them. But why should taxpayers subsidize their personal choices?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The answer is because they can. Achieving educational outcomes is not the goal.
The original goal was higher test scores.
When that didn’t happen, the goal
became simply “choice,” because everyone likes choice, even bad choices.
Test scores may have been the original goal of some in the education community. I doubt that raising test scores of mostly poor or minority students was ever the goal of Republicans in red States. That Democrats bought into the trap is pathetic. Since the 1984 election Teachers Unions and thus public schools have been a Republican target. Not to mention the appeal to the Religious Right and White Nationalists objecting to integration.
“Reagan’s and Walter Mondale’s positions on education are very clear. The President’s legislative program is straightforward – a constitutional amendment allowing prayer in the schools, tuition tax credits, stricter discipline, merit pay, greater state and local control, an end to forced busing. If he were given full rein (Congress did not give it to him in his first term), he would significantly reduce and restructure federal education programs.
Walter Mondale directly challenges tuition tax credits, vouchers, and merit pay as ideas that would seriously weaken the public schools. He has been and remains a vigorous proponent of a larger and more diverse federal role in education. He is for forced busing to correct racial imbalance. He calls for a substantial increase in federal funds in support of minorities and the disadvantaged and for increased innovation and research and development. ”
(From a CS Monitor article in Oct 1984 ).
Why? In Florida, our benighted rulers have a vested interest.
key words for the entire subject: VESTED interest
Charters & Vouchers are Educational Oxycontin.
Cherchez La Moolah → Politicians = Pushers → Corporations = Sacklers.
Perfect description, Jon.
Why indeed? Because our country (with the help of Rufu, 45, ALEC, and Carlson) has now embraced a white supremacist, nationalist agenda which has no space for the support of anyone, anywhere, except for straight, white Christian folk. Time to tax the churches and let them pay for their own brand of “woke”.
Rufo…
Oakland Mom- you left out the anti-woman bigotry that goes with conservative religion- “straight, white, Christian” men.
Forty percent of Republican men feel that women’s gains have come at the expense of men.
While everybody who reads my posts knows how I feel about testing as proof of anything, I think the figures Cowan marshalls to support his evaluation of voucher school performance should drive a nail in the coffin containing this idea. The deformers started it. By their own metrics, they have failed.
Meanwhile, there are perfectly good arguments against this scheme, which is really just a political ploy to channel money toward a particular constituency. Back in the day we called that pork–money a representative brought home to help the geographic area. Modern political leaders do not represent geographic areas; they are there for a particular philosophy. Pork is the real reason for these appropriations. Pork for ideologues.
The evidence is crystal clear. Two wrongs
never make a right. When those that style
themselves as the solution, jump into the
test score rabbit hole, because the other
side did, THEY have dragged you down
to their level. Oh, you say, you’re
beating them at their own game. OK, did
you forget EXAMPLE is the best
leader?
While you’re playing tit for tat, what
do you think you’re doing to the kids?
What?
A simpler, albeit cruder, statement:
using standardized test scores for anything is just mental masturbation.
I was really off here. I thought the intent of vouchers was simply to dismantle public education. Still potentially wildly successful.
The people pushing vouchers want to eliminate public schools. Many of those promoting charters have the same goal.
Bottom line: sending public money to schools run by private organizations. Some are religious. Some are not. Outcome is the same: Defunding public schools.
A colleague from North Carolina said today on a zoom that 85% of voucher money in North Carolina goes to religious schools. She then said that 70% of that money goes to Muslim Schools.
Those who want a religious education should pay for it themselves.
The war against OUR public schools has never had anything to do with improving test scores or choice. Those were propaganda slogans designed to fool people.
The Koch brothers and ALEC’s wealthy and powerful members, the Wal-Mart Walton family, Bill Gates, who once belonged to ALEC before he realized he couldn’t be in charge and left that organization of greedy, power hungry corrupt lying narcissists, psychopaths an/or sociopaths to eventually start his own disrupting organization that became the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, started out back in the mid 20th century with a goal to destroy the United States of America, a Constitutional Republic and democracy and turn it into a wild, shoot-em-up, libertarian, theofascist cultish, dystopian state where the wealthy and powerful don’t have to worry about government limiting their ability to do whatever they want with their money and power.
That war isn’t only against OUR public schools, but also OUR justice system, OUR federal government (the one the people elect), OUR public services, labor unions that support workers, et al.
My use of OUR means the working class: those that live in poverty earning poverty wages and the middle class that manages to earn enough to avoid poverty.
What “they” (not the working class – hopefully you know who I am talking about) have been doing for decades is no different than the effective Nazi propaganda that was used to win the support of millions of Germans in a democracy, and later in a dictatorship, to facilitate persecution, war, and ultimately genocide.
Who will “they” persecute and get rid of through genocide if they” win this war against the rest of us, that do not support what “they” want?
Why?
Because public schools are “mainstream” and they don’t like anything mainstream. If it’s for everybody, it must not be good anymore.
Why?
Because the headline and that guy on Fox said so. Does anyone think one person from Houses of Congress to the State Houses to the outhouse (Fugitive reference there) would actually read that entire blog – and care?
Why?
Who cares about (or even reads) data. They don’t believe who won a national election, why should they believe test scores?
Why? GOP and politicians and people who don’t read newspapers? Data? “Where we’re going we don’t use data.” (BTF). Democrats? “Give us the data so we can mansplain it even more.” GOP.
Why? GOP “I read the headline: ‘Public Schools Bad. Vouchers for Private and Parochial Good.'” Dems, “Well, at the book group and NPR they said vouchers do not work and destroy urban neighborhoodl”
Why?
Because they think they can “fix” the cities without setting foot in them or having black and brown children attend school in their gerrymandered suburban districts.
Why?
Because it’s a tax write off.
Why?
Oh yeh, almost forgot, they want to help children living in poverty.
An article that appeared in a digital-promoting magazine in 2020 was titled, “Science of Reading (finally) Becomes Mainstream in Teacher Prep Programs”. The programs were listed by their colleges.
More than half of the 15 listed were in former slaveholding states.