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North Carolina’s Largest Voucher School Embroiled in Financial Scandal, Files Incomplete Returns

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2017 //
7

Veteran journalist Lindsay Wagner writes that Fayetteville’s Trinity Christian School–the state’s largest recipient of taxpayer-funded vouchers–is involved in a major financial scandal. North Carolina places no accountability for how taxpayer money is used or whether students make academic progress. The voucher schools get taxpayer money with neither accountability nor transparency.

North Carolina’s largest recipient of private school vouchers has filed a financial review that lacked basic information consistent with “generally accepted accounting principles,” according to the agency overseeing the taxpayer-funded program.

Because Fayetteville’s Trinity Christian School—also currently embroiled in a separate embezzlement scandal—received more than $300,000 in voucher funds during the 2015-16 academic year, it is required to submit a financial review of their organization.

According to records provided by the State Education Assistance Authority (SEAA), the agency tasked with overseeing the voucher program, the financial review submitted last December lacked crucial elements typically found in such statement including a statement of cash flows and a balance sheet. What was included instead was a brief “statement of activities” that only listed top line revenues and expenses as well as a supplemental schedule of functional expenses.

***
It is remarkable to omit a more detailed balance sheet from a set of basic financial statements, said Mig Murphy Sistrom, a Durham-based accountant whose firm specializes in preparing financial reports for nonprofit organizations.

Because the accounting firm that prepared the financial review for Trinity Christian—Edwards Pechmann & Packer, Inc.—did not include a balance sheet, “it raises a concern that the organization may not have accounting records adequate to produce a balance sheet,” said Murphy Sistrum.

Since 2014, Trinity Christian has received more than $1.2 million in taxpayer funds through the Opportunity Scholarships Program, which provides low-income families money to attend private schools. For the academic year 2016-17, school voucher recipients comprised 60 percent of Trinity Christian’s enrollment, according to state records. The voucher school’s overall school enrollment grew by 25 percent between 2015-16 and 2016-17.

The state places few requirements on private voucher schools to account for how the taxpayer dollars are used to educate students, demonstrate achievement of the students who receive the aid or any transparency to assure the funds are used as intended.

What would Betsy DeVos say? Let the free market figure it out?

Categories Accountability, North Carolina, Scandal, Vouchers

Texas: The Resistance Movement Against Vouchers is Growing and Looking Good

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2017 //
9

On Tuesday evening, I flew to Texas to keep a promise to myself. Three years ago, I was chosen for the annual award of the Friends of Texas Public Schools. The day I was supposed to fly to Austin, there was a huge blizzard in New York City and my flight was canceled. All flights were canceled the next day as well. I Skyped in to the event the next evening, and a few weeks later received a beautiful large wooden plaque with my name on it. But I never felt I earned it because I wasn’t physically there. So, I arranged to meet with them again this week. The gods of the air decided not to make it easy, so there was a huge rainstorm, delaying my flight for four hours, and I arrived at 2:30 am the day before I spoke.

This is the talk I gave, no notes, just an informal conversation. I am sorry to say it is posted on Facebook so if you are not on FB, you can’t hear it. I can’t hear it myself as I am not on FB.

After I spoke, I participated in a panel where I learned very encouraging news. I sat with three members of the Texas House of Representatives, two of whom are Republicans. All of them understand the importance of public schools, and all are opposed to vouchers.

To my right was Representative Dan Huberty, the chair of the House Public Education Committee. He is a Republican from Humble, Texas, near Houston. He recently told the news media that voucher legislation would be “dead on arrival” if it passed the Senate. The Tea Party has put a target on his back, and when he runs again, I will do everything in my power to support him because he is a principled supporter of public education. He announced during the panel discussion that his committee had approved a new appropriation of $1.6 billion for public schools (in 2011, the legislature cut more than $5 billion from public schools and never restored the cuts when the economy revived).

Next was Representative Diego Bernal, a Democrat from San Antonio. He is charming, smart, and a strong supporter of public schools.

Last to speak was Representative Gary VanDeaver from New Boston, who was a career educator and a superintendent in his community. He has said that he supports school choice in principle, but does not support public money being taken away from public schools to fund private schools, faith-based schools, or homeschooling.

On Thursday, the state senate passed the voucher bill, which will take money from public schools that educate all children and give it to parents for private or religious schooling or homeschooling, with no accountability. The bill passed 18-13. Here is the statement on the bill by our steadfast ally, Pastors for Texas Children.

The usual opposition to vouchers comes from a bipartisan coalition of rural Republicans, who understand the importance of their community public schools, and urban Democrats, who don’t want their schools to be privatized or defunded. The day I arrived, the Senate sponsors of vouchers added an amendment to exclude any district from the voucher legislation with fewer than 50,000 students, to win votes from rural legislators. Experience in other states shows that once a voucher bill is passed, the exemptions drop away and eventually every school district will be starving its public schools, even rural districts.

The bill that passed exempted counties with fewer than 285,000 people, to fool the rural legislators. It excludes homeschoolers. It has no accountability for students with vouchers, so public money will fly out the window with no one knowing how it is spent.

I learned that there is big money promoting vouchers, namely a group called Empower Texans, an organization created by billionaire Tim Dunn to push for lower taxes, less governments, school choice, and the usual Tea Party platform of less for all. Empower Texans has a PAC that endorses local and state candidates, including school board candidates. Anyone who opposes their agenda has to worry about a well-funded primary fight from their right. Empower Texans, to say the least, does not support public education.

Texas has two great forces working on behalf of public schools: one is parent-led organizations like Friends, TAMSA (Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment), Texas Kids Can’t Wait, and many more. The other force is the Pastors for Texas Children, a group of more than 1,000 pastors across the state who support separation of church and state and who actively help their local public schools.

The Facebook page of FOTPS has a photo of Blake Cooper, a recently retired superintendent who now works as a volunteer for Friend of Texas Public Schools, and FOTPS founders Leslie and Scott Milder. Leslie taught high school for 10 years; their children attend public schools.

I had a great time. I even had great barbecue for lunch.

I have great hopes for Texas public schools because it has many organizations of parents and teachers who will fight for what is right, and it has strong bipartisan support in the House. Ninety percent of the children in the state attend public schools. In the 2018 elections, if parents and educators turn out to vote, the face of Texas could change, and it could do right by its 5.4 million students in public schools.

PS: I heard that two pro-voucher Republican legislators held a meeting today in Dallas, and the audience beat them up (rhetorically)

Categories Resistance, Texas, Vouchers

Bruce Baker: Why #PublicGoodsMatter

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2017 //
45

Bruce Baker employs a series of tweets to demonstrate the fallacy of “the money follows the child.” Public money is collected for the public good. Public money supports services and institutions for future generations, not just for those now using them. The oft-heard demand that “the money follows the child” is fallacious. It is used to privatize institutions created for all.

https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/public-goods-the-money-belongs-to-the-child-fallacy-in-tweets/

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

DeVos Thinks She is Promoting the “Common Good” by Attacking Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2017 //
87

I am writing this post for the journalists who cover education. Please fact-check every word that DeVos says. She literally doesn’t know what she is talking about.

This is the New York Times’ report on Betsy DeVos‘ press conference at Brookings.

She claims that the Bush-Obama policies of test-and-punish failed because throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Any teacher could have told you that NCLB and Race to the Top were failures, not because they threw money at the problems, but because they spent money on failed strategies of high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, closing schools, and opening charters.

She is so ill-informed that she would be well advised never to speak in public.

Her comparison of selecting a public school to hailing a taxi is offensive: schooling is a right guaranteed in state constitutions, taking a cab or car service is a consumer choice. She was echoing her mentor Jeb Bush, who compared choosing a school to buying a carton of milk, when he addressed the GOP convention in 2012.

As you will see if you read the account in the story, she has the unmitigated gall to say that her crusade for consumer choice in education–whether charters, vouchers, homeschooling, cyberschooling, whatever–serves the “common good.” What an outrage! Providing a high-quality public school,in every zip code serves the common good. Tossing kids to the vagaries of the free market subverts the common good. Anyone who has been reading this blog for any period of time has learned about the entrepreneurs who open charter schools to make money, about the sham real estate deals, about the voucher schools that teach science from the Bible, about the heightened segregation that always accompanies school choice. Wherever George Wallace and his fellow defenders of racial segregation are, they are rooting for DeVos.

Furthermore, she is utterly ignorant of the large body of research showing that charters do not get better results than public schools, voucher schools get worse results, and cybercharters get abysmal results.

Then she makes a crack about how America’s scores on international couldn’t get worse. She is wrong, and Grover Whitehurst should have told her so. Our scores on the international tests have never been high. Over the past Hal century, we have usually scored in the middle of the pack. Yes, our scores could get much worse. We could follow the Swedish free-market model and see our scores tumble.

Grrr. It is frustrating to see this kind of ignorance expressed by the Secretary of Education, although Arne Duncan should have lowered our expectations.

Please read “Reign of Error” and learn that test scores are the highest ever for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (although they went flat from 2013-2015, probably in response to the disruptions caused by Common Core); graduation rates are the highest ever; dropout rates are the lowest ever. When our students took the first international test in 1964, we came in last in one grade, and next to last in the other. But in the years since, our economy has surpassed all the other nations with higher scores. The test scores of 15-year-olds do not predict the future of the nation.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Teacher Evaluations, Vouchers

Betsy DeVos Suck-Up Watch

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2017 //
18

The website Chalkbeat posted an article about the sunny side of Secretary DeVos.

http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/03/28/rave-reviews-here-are-the-states-schools-and-programs-that-have-gotten-betsy-devoss-seal-of-approval/

She likes really good programs!

Like Florida’s tax credit programs for vouchers! (Which sucks tax dollars away from public schools)

Like Milwaukee’s school choice programs! (Which have produced no positive results for students in 26 years)

Like Nevada’s Achievement School District (which does not yet exist and is modeled on Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District; unmentioned: most of Nevada’s charters are failing schools by the state’s metrics–Nevada needs an Achievement School District for failing charters)

She is cheerleader-in-chief for school choice. Given her deep-seated antagonism for the democratically-controlled community public schools that 90% of our nation’s children attend, we should expect a change of heart.

By we should expect unsentimental, critical reporting.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Media, School Choice, Vouchers

Brookings Sullies Its Reputation By Aligning with DeVos Agenda for Privatization

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
35

The Brookings Institution used to be referred to as a liberal think tank. In reality, it was a nonpartisan think tank that hired former high-level officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations and produced valuable studies and reports. As I was ending my time in the first Bush administration in late 1992, the president of Brookings came to my office at the US Department of Education and invited me to accept the Brown Chair in Education Policy. Since I did not want to live permanently in DC, I declined his offer but agreed to be a Senior Fellow. I was in residence at Brookings until 1995, wrote a book on national standards, then returned to Brooklyn. I continued to be a Non-Resident Senior Fellow until 2012, when I was summarily fired from my unpaid position by Grover Whitehurst, who joined Brookings as chair of the Brown Policy program after serving as director of education research in the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps it was happenstance, but the email from Whitehurst came a few hours after the online release of my blistering critique of Mitt Romney, whom Whitehurst was advising. Whitehurst fired me because, he said, I was “inactive.”

Whitehurst served for a few years as head of the Brown Center but was quietly removed as the Chair. Now, he uses Brookings and its prestige to promote the Republican agenda of privatization.

Here is the latest, in which Whitehurst plugs charters because “We do not know how to create or sustain uniformly great neighborhood schools.” He should have added that “We also don’t know how to create or sustain uniformly great charter schools.” There is no existence proof, even though charters choose their students and exclude students with serious disabilities and ELLs and push out behavior problems. Residents of Clark County, Nevada, may be surprised to see that he raised their grade, since most charters in Nevada are failing schools, concentrated in Clark County, and the funding for the voucher program (which he hails) has been halted by state courts. Columbus, Ohio, got good marks even though the scandal-ridden charters in Ohio have become a bad joke.

To make sure that everyone noticed that Brookings was linking its reputation to the most controversial, least qualified member of the Trump cabinet, DeVos was invited to speak at the press conference on the only subject she knows: the glories of school choice.

The press release reads:

School Choice Increasing Nationally; Secretary DeVos to Speak at Release of Brookings’ Annual School Choice Rankings
Proportion of large school districts allowing choice has nearly doubled since 2000; Denver wins top spot for large districts for second year in a row

Rankings from Brookings’ 2016 Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI)—an annual ranking of school choice in the nation’s 100 largest school districts—will be unveiled today at a Brookings event featuring keynote remarks by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. You can watch a livestream of the Secretary’s remarks at 9:30 AM EDT.

In a summary of the results (PDF), ECCI’s author and Brookings Senior Fellow Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst highlights the growth of choice across the nation’s school districts according to trends tracked by ECCI, many of which can be observed since 2000. Whitehurst notes that the proportion of large school districts allowing choice has nearly doubled over the past 16 years. That coincides with other measures of the growth of school choice, including that the number of large districts for which charter school enrollment is at least 30 percent of total public enrollment has increased from one to ten.

Whitehurst writes: “There is no question empirically that opportunities for parents to choose among traditional public schools for their children, to choose a charter school, and to receive a financial subsidy to attend a private school have grown leaps and bounds in the last 15-20 years. The traditional school district model is no longer the monopoly it used to be.”

The ECCI is not designed to answer causal questions about what system or education delivery mechanism works best, but to reveal what’s happening on the ground by providing a snapshot of choice and competition in each district and allowing for comparisons of specific policies and practices across districts. The rankings are based on objective scoring of 13 categories of education policy and practice. School choice options considered by the rankings include: the opportunity of choosing any traditional public school in a district (open enrollment), charter schools, magnet schools, virtual schools, and affordable private schools.

Whitehurst notes that critics of school choice often assert that the alternative to choice is to assure that every public school is of high quality, but that “universal access to a great neighborhood school is a pipedream.”

“We do not know how to create or sustain uniformly great neighborhood schools. There is no existing proof that we do, and there is strong empirical evidence that the performance of schools varies substantially everywhere there are large numbers of schools to compare…School choice is one way of addressing the reality of the normal curve of school performance by giving parents the opportunity of moving their children out of schools that are in the lower tail of the distribution.”

Students in the nation’s 100+ largest school districts are overwhelmingly (91 percent) in public schools, with 56 percent of the ECCI districts allowing choice within the traditional public schools. According to Whitehurst, “advocates of school choice should take note of the reality that for the foreseeable future the greatest opportunities for the expansion of choice are in the public school sector through furthering the reach of open enrollment.”

Denver, which received the highest score on this year’s ECCI, and the Recovery District serving New Orleans are the only two districts in the ECCI that receive grades of A on school choice. Both are characterized by: open enrollment and a centralized assignment process requiring a single application from parents for all public schools; a good mix and utilization by parents of alternatives to traditional public schools; rich information to parents to support school choice, including a school assignment website that allows parents to make side-by-side comparisons of schools; funding that follows students to the school in which they enroll; a fair and efficient formula for matching school assignments for students to the expressed preferences of their parents; and provisions for transportation of students to schools of choice outside their neighborhoods.

Notably, Camden City School District in New Jersey and Clark County School District in Nevada saw substantive enough changes to move them from receiving an F in the previous year to a B- and C-, respectively. Clark County’s increase in score was largely due to Nevada’s Educational Choice Scholarship program, which was enacted and launched in 2015. Camden, NJ experienced a dramatic increase in score and grade on the 2016 ECCI by virtue of rolling out a new process for school search, application, and assignment.

New to the top 10 list this year are Columbus, Ohio, and Chicago, while Baltimore and Tucson dropped off. Chicago showed a score increase due to its decision to include data on student growth among the information on school performance provided to parents on its website. The score for Columbus increased, in part, because the district documented a student-based funding formula for schools.

Almost one-quarter, or 26 of the 112 school districts scored on the 2016 ECCI, received a grade of F, meaning that families have very little in the way of school choice other than what they can exercise by choosing to live within the geographical assignment zone of their preferred public school. Or, if they do provide school choice, the process is hidden from parents.

You can learn more about the 2016 ECCI rankings by exploring an interactive breakdown of results or reading a report of topline takeaways (PDF).

CONTACT
Delaney Parrish
Assistant Director of Communications, Economic Studies
202-797-2969 | DRParrish@brookings.edu | @DParrish
BROOKINGS
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Nevada, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Ohio: Study Sponsored by Pro-Voucher Group Shows Negative Effects of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2017 //
16

I was a founding board member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (now, Institute). It is a pro-choice organization. I opposed the decision to sponsor charter schools in Ohio, because I thought it was outside the work of a think tank. My ideal think tank would exercise independence in reviewing government policy and gain respect for avoiding doctrinaire conclusions. On that issues, I was out voted, but was not surprised when most or all of the charters we sponsored were failing schools.

I left TBF in 2009 when I realized that I no longer shared its commitment to choice, testing, and accountability.

I appreciate the fact that TBF Is more willing to acknowledge its failings than other rightwing advocacy groups.

Last July, TBF released the results of a study of the Ohio voucher program, commissioned by TBF and conducted by Northwestern professor David Figlio. Here is the full study.

The study was not an endorsement of vouchers.

The students who won the vouchers were not the most disadvantaged:

“Student selection: The students participating in EdChoice are overwhelmingly low-income and minority children. But relative to pupils who are eligible for vouchers but choose not to use them, the participants in EdChoice are somewhat higher-achieving and less economically disadvantaged.”

Voucher schools can choose their students and did not accept the neediest

“Competitive effects: EdChoice modestly improved the achievement of the public-school students who were eligible for a voucher but did not use it. The competition associated with the introduction of EdChoice appears to have spurred these public-school improvements.” This strikes me as a gargantuan leap of logic. The students who did not use the vouchers improved their test scores. But nothing in this study ascertains that they improved because of competition with vouchers. It is just as reasonable to conclude that they had better teachers than those in the voucher schools.

“Participant effects: The students who used vouchers to attend private schools fared worse on state exams compared to their closely matched peers remaining in public schools. Only voucher students assigned to relatively high-performing EdChoice eligible public schools could be credibly studied.”

The spokesman for TBF called attention to the modest gains of students who didn’t use the voucher.

So here is the logic of Ohio’s voucher program:

If you use the voucher, your academic performance will go down.

If you don’t use the voucher, you academic performance will modestly improve.

This is a bizarre argument for vouchers. Take the medicine and you will get sicker. Don’t take the medicine and you will feel better.

Why is Ohio wasting millions on a program that doesn’t work? Unless you are not in it?

Categories Education Reform, Failure, Ohio, Vouchers

Poll: Betsy DeVos is the Most Unpopular Member of Trump’s Unpopular Cabinet

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2017 //
23

Usually a new presidency has a honeymoon period, a time of good feeling and high poll numbers. As they battle for their policies and legislation, their poll numbers change, for better or worse.

Newsweek reports that Trump and his cabinet have very low approval ratings.

The cabinet member with the lowest approval rating is Betsy DeVos at 34.5%. She is highly divisive because her agenda is unpopular.

Parents across the nation understand that DeVos is an enemy of public schools. She doesn’t understand the purpose of community schools as the center of a community. Nearly two-thirds of the public reject her agenda.

That’s good news. It means in state after state, we can mobilize, organize, protest, and defeat her.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Opinion Polling, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Jeff Bryant: The Big Lie Behind Trump’s Budget Proposals for Education

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2017 //
13

Jeff Bryant spells out the Big Lie embedded in Trump’s budget proposal for education. He plans to cut programs that directly aid poor kids while bolstering charters and vouchers, pretending they are equivalent. They are not. Yet much of the mainstream media has fallen for the Trump-DeVos bait-and-switch.

“Public school supporters are angry at President Trump’s budget proposal, which plans to cut funding to the Department of Education by 13 percent – taking that department’s outlay down to the level it was ten years ago. But the target for their anger should not be just the extent of the cuts but also how the cuts are being pitched to the public.

“Trump’s education budget cuts are aimed principally at federal programs that serve poor kids, especially their access to afterschool programs and high-quality teachers.

“At the same time, Trump’s spending blueprint calls for pouring $1.4 billion into school choice policies including a $168 million increase for charter schools, $250 million for a new school choice program focused on private schools, and a $1 billion increase for parents to send their kids to private schools at taxpayer expense.

“The way the Trump administration is spinning this combination of funding cuts and increases – and the way nearly every news outlet is reporting them – is that there is some sort of strategically important balance between funding programs for poor kids versus “school choice” schemes, as if the two are equivalents and just different means to the same ends. Nothing could be further from the truth….

“The message being spun out of Trump’s education budget is that it takes money away from those awful “adult interests” – like, you know, teachers to actually teach the students and buildings so students have somewhere to go after school to play sports, get tutored, or engage in music and art projects – in order to steer money to “the kids” who will get a meager sum of money to search for learning opportunities in an education system that is increasingly bereft of teachers and buildings.

“Even competent education reporters are falling for this spin, writing that education policy is experiencing a “sea change in focus from fixing the failing schools to helping the students in the failing schools.”

“However, there’s evidence that federally funded efforts like afterschool programs and class size reduction tend to lead to better academic results for low-income children, while the case for using school choice programs to address the education needs of poor kids is pretty weak.

“The Weak Case For Choice

“School voucher programs, like the ones Trump and DeVos seem intent on funding, are particularly ineffective ways to address the education problems of poor kids. Indeed, these programs seem to not serve the interests of poor kids at all.

“Studies of voucher programs In Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona, and Nevada have found that most of the money from the programs goes to parents wealthy enough to already have their children enrolled in private schools.

“Voucher programs rarely provide enough money to enable poor minority children to get access to the best private schools. And a new comprehensive study of vouchers finds evidence that vouchers don’t significantly improve student achievement. What they do pose is greater likelihood that students who are the most costly and difficult to educate – low-income kids and children with special needs – will be turned away or pushed out by private schools that are not obligated to serve all students.

“Charter schools, another program the Trump budget wants to ramp up funding for, also don’t have a great track record for improving the education attainment of low-income students.

“Perhaps the best case made for using charter schools to target the needs of low-income students comes from a study on the impact of charters in urban school systems conducted by research outfit CREDO in 2015. The study indeed found evidence of some positive impact of charters in these communities. But as my colleague at The Progressive Julian Vasquez Heilig points out, the measures of improvement, in standard deviations, are .008 for Latino students and .05 for African American students in charter schools.

“These numbers are larger than zero,” Heilig writes on his personal blog, “but you need a magnifying glass to see them. Contrast that outcome with policies such as pre-K and class size reduction which are far more unequivocal measures of success than charter schools. They have 400 percent to 1000 percent more statistical impact than charters.”

“Indeed, choice programs in all their forms, at least in how they are being promoted by the Trump administration and its supporters, seem more interested in diverting money away from public schools than they are intent on delivering some sort of education relief to the struggles of poor families.”

School choice will actually harm children by diverting money from public schools that now enroll 90% of America’s students to provide choices for a few children. Most of those choices will be for schools with uncertified teachers and a Bible-based curriculum.

This may satisfy billionaire Betsy DeVos but it won’t be good for children.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Lies, Poverty, School Choice, Vouchers

Wisconsin Community Schools Threatened by Voucher Expansion

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2017 //
38

Governor Scott Walker has been a champion of vouchers and charters. He has pushed hard to expand vouchers for religious schools. Some districts will not even lose students but will have to raise taxes to pay for voucher students.

http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2017/03/21/tensions-rise-vouchers-pick-up-traction-across-wisconsin/98177206/

“When Superintendent Sue Kaphingst moved to Chilton less than a year ago, she marveled at how the northeastern Wisconsin community rallied around its local school district.

“Nestled to the east of Lake Winnebago about 75 miles north of Milwaukee, Chilton and its 3,900 residents felt cohesive. Football stars acted in the high school musical. Parents, students and school board members created a yarn art installation on the Chilton Middle School lawn to demonstrate that they were all connected. The high school theater was built with millions from a local family who owned pet supplies company Kaytee Products.

“But there’s a new development here and in other communities across Wisconsin that will test those ties: school vouchers. Four years after the GOP-led Legislature approved a statewide voucher program, the number of private schools registered to receive taxpayer-funded tuition subsidies has sharply increased. Together with the longstanding Milwaukee voucher program and the more recent Racine voucher program, close to 300 private, predominantly religious schools from Lake Superior to the Illinois border are poised to receive taxpayer funding for an estimated 33,750 students this fall, according to Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget.

“For the first time, the Chilton School District could face either an enrollment drop because children will use a voucher to attend the local Catholic school they couldn’t otherwise afford, or more likely, the district will have to raise taxes to fund vouchers for children who already attend the private school.

“Together, the state’s voucher programs are expected to cost about $263 million in 2017-’18, according to Walker’s budget proposal.”

Categories Vouchers, Wisconsin
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