Argument favoring vouchers fails our kids

Evidence points to ‘more choices’ meaning little.

In the upcoming legislative session, Georgia’s Republican leadership has signaled it may revive the voucher bill that met with defeat this year and last.

Mike Dudgeon, policy director for Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, said at a recent political forum that his boss wants to continue to fight for Education Savings Accounts, which are essentially vouchers. Vouchers enable students to attend private school using public dollars. While Education Savings Accounts also allow Georgia parents to use tax dollars to pay for homeschooling materials, tutoring and education therapies, most of the money goes to private school tuition in the five states that already offer ESAs.

Dudgeon lamented the characterization of legislators in favor of educational savings accounts as the “enemy of public education.”

Pro-voucher lawmakers may not be enemies, but they’re not friends — at least not the kind you can count on when the oven breaks, the basement floods or the cat gets stuck in a tree.

And that pretty much describes the status of many school districts in Georgia, especially rural ones. With nearly a half-million rural students, Georgia is only surpassed in rural enrollment by two states, Texas and North Carolina. A recent report by the Rural School and Community Trust concludes Georgia is not doing well by those rural kids.

Describing Georgia’s rural districts as racially diverse and poor, the report says: “Schools and districts are large across the state, and instructional spending for each rural student is well below the U.S. average. Student achievement in rural areas is low, well below the performance in non-rural areas, and the state’s achievement gap for rural students in poverty ranks Georgia among the 10 highest-priority states on that measure. More than any other gauge, it’s the dire college-readiness results that make Georgia the seventh most serious situation for rural education in the U.S.”

The Rural School and Community Trust study compared instructional expenditures per pupil in rural public school districts and found Georgia spent $5,681 per student, which is below the national average of $6,367.

Does it make sense for Georgia to fund an auxiliary education system when it already shortchanges so many kids in its existing public schools?

The state has been promising to revise its funding formula for 20 years, but seven blue-ribbon commissions have tried and failed to figure out the right price tag to put on a quality education. Or, they came up with a cost, but it was more than Georgia was willing to spend.

Lawmakers often contend that money is the barrier that prevents kids from leaving their local public schools; it’s also availability of options in rural areas where there are too few students to sustain a private school or even a public charter school. National Center for Education Statistics data show private schools are far more common in suburbs and cities than rural areas.

Another attempt at vouchers in the General Assembly could meet resistance from Democrats and from some rural Republicans skeptical of the benefits of a costly voucher program in communities without private school options. That skepticism is justified, as there is not persuasive evidence yet that vouchers lead to increased achievement. Recent research has been discouraging on that front.

A much-anticipated study this year of the Louisiana statewide voucher program found math scores tumbled and never rebounded, undermining the common argument of voucher advocates that declines in performance diminish with time. Math scores were significantly lower for the Louisiana students placed in private schools through a lottery than a control group of kids who wanted to participate but lost the lottery. The control group students remaining in public schools ended up with substantially higher math performance even after four years, according to the University of Arkansas study.

In the General Assembly debates over vouchers this year and last, legislators brushed off contrary research and said their priority was more choices for families. But no one is served by bad choices, not the taxpayers of Georgia who collectively pool their resources to pay for public education or the students who may end up with worse academic outcomes.

DENVER POST One study of Louisiana schools showed kids who might have used vouchers wound up performing better in math while at public schools — through four years.