Paul Hill is founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education and a professor at the University of Washington. When I was on the other side of education debates, I served with Paul on the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. He is one of the nicest people I know but we now disagree about the value of choice as a means of “reinventing” public schools. Paul is the creator of the idea of portfolio school districts, where the school board is supposed to treat schools like a portfolio of stocks, closing “bad” ones and opening new ones to replace them.
In this article, Paul Hill maintains that DeVos will not have the money to achieve her voucher agenda.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/58c83826e4b0816ed87b5e43
He says that if she turns the $15 billion in federal money for poor kids, that comes out to only $600 per student, and that is not enough to fund vouchers or to induce people to open new schools to accept voucher students.
He does not deal with the recent spate of reports showing that vouchers don’t have a positive effect on academic outcomes for kids who get them, and in some major studies, have actually been shown to lower the test scores of low-performing students. So he deals not with whether vouchers will help kids but whether the federal funds are sufficient to make them happen.
He writes:
“Betsy DeVos’ most fervent supporters and opponents agree on one thing: that she would like to divert federal funds from existing public schools and cause a mass migration into private schools. But simple arithmetic tells us that these expectations about what she can accomplish—or destroy, depending on your point of view—are wildly inflated.
“The federal government doesn’t spend nearly enough money in education to have such a big effect. Federal Title I funding to local education agencies, the main tool at the Department of Education’s disposal, totals $15 billion. If DeVos were able to turn all that money into private school vouchers for students currently receiving Title I services, each eligible family would get about $600. If the same money were spread among all public school students, a voucher would be worth less than $300.
“That kind of money doesn’t cover private school tuition, which starts at about $10,000 a year. With a $600 voucher, a few families who were on the cusp of affording private education could decide that the little bit of extra money was enough to allow them either to stay in or transfer to private school. Those families might stabilize or even slightly increase enrollment in private schools. It’s unlikely that many families now attending free public schools would decide that a small discount—$600 represents about 6% of average tuition—justifies ponying up the remaining $9,600.
“The Trump administration has floated a fallback proposal, tuition tax credits for anyone who contributes to a voucher program. Donors could reduce their taxes by a dollar for every dollar they give. This approach—correctly called a tax expenditure—would have exactly the same effect on the federal government’s bottom line as a government-operated voucher program would. Readers can judge whether a deficit-conscious Republican Congress is likely to approve a tax credit that adds more than $15 or $20 billion annually to the national debt.
“Vouchers (whether funded directly or via tuition tax credits) could benefit communities that have struggling but high-quality private schools that might be preserved rather than being lost entirely. But whether a modest-sized program can do anything more than help fill up existing private schools depends on the answers to a few questions. Once existing private schools reached their current capacity, would they expand to take more students, or would new private schools emerge? Would entrepreneurs be willing to start schools knowing that even with their vouchers, families would have to pay almost full tuition? Would those schools be good enough to keep the families they attract and to grow to an economically sustainable size?”
I question whether there are a significant number of struggling but high quality private schools to accept voucher students. The good private schools have few, if any, empty seats. Not many want to accept kids with low test-scores, no matter how much voucher money they bring.
I am not as sanguine as he about the poor prospects for vouchers. I agree that the federal money is symbolic but it may be a stimulus to state’s to add their supplement, bringing the voucher up to $5,000 or $7,000. This still is not enough for voucher students to gain entry to good private schools but it might be enough for mediocre religious schools with u certified teachers.
Even if the vouchers don’t make much of a dent, DeVos’s advocacy for charters will stimulate stages to open more of them, despite the dismal record of charters in DeVos’s home state of Michigan. And of course we can count on her to bad-mouthnpublic schools in every public appearance. She will be sly. She will say she favors great schools of every kind, because she is all for the kids. She even likes “great public schools,” but she has never seen one. She will ignore the large body of research about the failure of voucher schools as well as the research showing that charter schools get results no different from public schools, and some are far worse than public schools. She certainly doesn’t care about charters’ high teacher attrition or about their unfortunate practice of excluding children with disabilities.
So while she is unlikely to achieve her lifelong dream of getting rid of public schools, she will have a bully pulpit to bash public schools. This is unjhealthy for our society and our democracy. Friends of public education should not forget that DeVos is a dedicated enemy of public schools. Ignore her honked words. Don’t be deceived. She will not change her views.
