Vouchers offer equal opportunity

State should give poorer families chances for choice

Despite many historic improvements, K-12 education in Massachusetts is still too much like a game of musical chairs. Families who can afford it move to wealthy communities or send their children to private schools, children from a few less-affluent families win lotteries that allow their children to go to charter schools, and too many of the rest are left standing when the music stops.

That would change if Massachusetts passed a voucher program that would give poorer families the access to private schools that their more affluent counterparts already enjoy — something that could be done at little or no cost to taxpayers.

Vouchers — which provide public funds to help parents pay private school tuition — worth $6,000 per year for grades K-8 and $8,000 for high school could be offered to 10,000 students from lowincome families. Since the amount of the voucher is less than the commonwealth’s average per-pupil spending of about $12,000 per year, there is no net cost to taxpayers even if spending per pupil on the remaining students rises.

By this fall, 400,000 students, mostly from low-income families or those with special needs, will be educated under private schoolchoice programs in 23 states and the District of Columbia. The programs include scholarship tax credits, which work indirectly by providing a tax credit to a third party who donates money to fund a scholarship that is provided to parents; vouchers; and educational savings accounts, which operate like vouchers but also allow the money to be used for other educational expenses.

One sign of the success of private school-choice programs is that once established, states have almost always chosen to expand them. Nine out of 10 highquality studies of voucher programs in seven cities have found improved test scores for at least some students; none of those studies found any negative impacts.

There is strong unmet demand for choice in Massachusetts. The combined waitlists for charter and vocational-technical schools and the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity — the Metco program, under which Boston and Springfield students attend schools in surrounding districts — include 56,000 students. In Boston, the Metco waitlist is about five years long.

A North Carolina court just ruled that vouchers are constitutional. But for such a program to become available to low-income Massachusetts families, the commonwealth must repeal the socalled “Know-Nothing”-style amendments to the state Constitution. The amendments, named after the political party that was behind them, block state money from going to private and parochial schools and are an outgrowth of mid-19th century anti-Catholic bigotry.

What about the students left behind? Research indicates that a voucher program would improve educational outcomes for both those who do and don’t choose to access the voucher, because competition from vouchers stimulates improvement in public school performance. It would also reduce segregation, increase parent satisfaction with schools and make Massachusetts more economically competitive.

But most importantly, it would make the equal rights on which our republic was founded a reality for many more Massachusetts residents. And making the right to educational opportunity a reality should never depend on whether a student happens to be seated or standing when the music stops.