When Chemists Attack

There’s a new Senate bill generating some buzz on the news: S.3682, sponsored by Alexander Lamar from TN (search for it at thomas.loc.gov or try clicking here). The bill looks like it’ll provide vouchers for “low-income” kids to go to private schools – presumably on the basis that transferring poor kids from public school to private school will help them do better.

This premise appears to be flawed. The National Center for Education Statistics has released a report that says sometihng like this. While private schools appear at first glance to produce students who score better on assessments of reading and math than public school students, this difference disappears (and even reverses in some cases), when differences among ethnicity, family income, etc. are taken into account. In other words, it’s not that private schools are necessarily better at educating, it’s that they can and do select their own students.

I fail to see the great need to funnel students out of public schools (which are accountable on some level to taxpayers) to private schools (which are largely unaccountable to taxpayers), when it does not appear that the private schools will do any better a job at educating these students than the public schools do.

But even if you accept that school vouchers are a good idea, if you are into quality science education this little provision in S.3682 should give you a bit of indigestion. While schools

participating in a project under this Act shall not discriminate against an individual participant in, or an individual applicant to participate in, the project on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin

, all bets seem to be off if the school is a religious school. In particular,

if a school […] receives funds made available under this Act for an eligible student as a result of a choice made by the student’s parent, the receipt of the funds shall not, consistent with the first amendment of the Constitution–

(A) necessitate any change in the school’s teaching mission;

. So, while public schools are required (for good reason) to teach accepted science, the fundamentalist religious schools can slurp up those sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars while teaching kids nonsense like creation science on religious grounds.

(Edited – fixed thomas link and corrected bill number)