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)
In the Columbia area there are, as most, 3 private schools that offer an education that is even close to what the public schools offer. The vouchers will not pay anything close to the cost for these, one can cost over 10,000 a year.
This is just a scam to use tax payer money to underwrite the tuition cost of the rich and upper middle class, while offering nothing to those who are in weak schools and need help. Their only option would be a private school that is even worse than the public one they are fleeing
It seems to me that this bill is more targeted towards appeasing the religious right, since there does seem to be some tie to needs in the bill (household income of something like 180% of poverty line). From the numbers that have been tossed about on the news, these scholarships wouldn’t be anywhere close to $10K a year – more like less than $4000 per year.
So all these kids would likely to be able to afford would be the fundamentalist church schools (if they’d take these students). These schools, by the way, in the report linked above, when adjusted for student factors, were the poorest performers of all.
Now the stuff that’s being touted by, ah, certain candidates for state education superintendent and Sanford – that’s a blatant attempt to dump taxpayer money into the exclusive schools (who would likely just raise tuition by the cost of the vouchers to keep out the riffraff).