In his USA Today column DeWayne Wickham outs the stealth school voucher program currently promoted by the U.S. Department of Education as a policy-recommendation that is not support by the Department’s own research.
Four days before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings held a news conference last month to tout a bill that would provide $100 million to help students escape troubled public schools, her department quietly issued a report that calls into question the efficacy of that idea.
If passed, the legislation would make available ìopportunity scholarships for students in poor-performing public schools to transfer to another public school, get tutoring or receive scholarships to attend a private school. Don’t be fooled by these options. Opportunity scholarships is a euphemism for school vouchers. It’s an attempt to mask a bad idea with an appealing label.
“We are one step closer to ensuring that parents can make choices that strengthen their children’s future and give them a great start in life, regardless of their resources or the communities they live in,” Spellings said July 18.
Before going out on that fragile limb, she should have read the study issued by the National Center for Education Statistics, a unit of the Education Department she runs. According to that report, which compared reading and math scores of fourth- and eighth-graders in public and privates schools, economics, social background and race had a negative impact on the test scores of private school students.
In the overall study, students in private schools outperformed public school students by a fairly wide margin on math and reading tests. But when the scores of the students of the same racial identity, economic status and social condition were compared, the researchers said, there was virtually no difference (with the exception of eighth-grade reading) between those who attended private and public schools. In other words, the results don’t support the idea that school vouchers are an educational life raft for students from failing schools.
ìThe results … are nothing more than we expected,î says Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association. ìWe know what it takes to improve public education, and it’s not vouchers.î
He’s right. Vouchers are a bad idea that conservatives have recycled. After the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in public schools, right-wingers in Virginia hatched a scheme to give ìtuition grantsî to parents who didn’t want their children to attend integrated schools.
One of the state’s jurisdictions, Prince Edward County, did just that for five years, offering white students tuition grants to attend private academies. Black students got nothing but an educational shaft. The proposed scholarships are a shaft of another sort for black students. They deflect attention from the failure of states and the federal government to ensure that all children have access to a quality public education.
This latest voucher scheme, if implemented, would likely give a small percentage of students in underperforming schools an escape hatch. The rest would serve as guinea pigs for conservatives’ argument that such a program will pressure public schools into doing a better job of educating those who are left behind. It won’t.
ìWe know what it takes to improve public schools,î Weaver says. ìCertified teachers. Smaller class sizes. Adequate and equitable funding. Safe and orderly schools and qualified staffs. And anything that takes away from that is not good.î
Spending $100 million on these scholarships is a bad idea. Most private schools don’t want students who have discipline problems, who have special needs or whose parents show no interest in their education. Giving these kids a scholarship isn’t going to change that.
Public schools, on the other hand, must try to educate a vast cross section of this nation’s youngsters. So instead of trying to deflect attention from the failure of states and the federal government to give public schools what they need to meet this challenge, voucher proponents offer them empty promises. This latest one is called ìopportunity scholarships.î
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