Pennsylvania's Voucher Math

Please Note: There is a correction to this article at: Pennsylvania Vouchers - A Correction and Response

Questions:

• Why should parents who get vouchers receive more in taxpayer subsidies than they pay in taxes?
• How much does a public school really save when a student leaves for a non-public school?
• What are the real costs to a non-public school when a voucher student arrives?

Because accountability is a fundamental concern for DR, the February 15 edition of DR News  presented serious problems with Senate Bill 1, the proposal to send some students to private and religious schools with tax-funded vouchers. The problems dealt with a complete lack of academic and financial accountability among schools that would receive tax dollars.

Since then, Senate Bill 1 has been amended, but none of those amendments has made the proposal any more accountable than it was in February. One new requirement for student testing in non-public schools does not include the same tests that public school students must take and therefore gives parents no real basis of comparison. Non-public schools may choose the norm-referenced, standardized test that will make them look best, not a test that demonstrates mastery of the state's mandated curriculum.

Because giving taxpayers value for their money is another fundamental concern for DR, we now look at the murky math surrounding vouchers. Officially, the average voucher would cost taxpayers $7,041 per student in the first year (2011-12), growing to $7,253 per student in the second year (2012-13).

The bottom line is that a $7,253 voucher for just one student is more than a typical household pays in state sales and income taxes plus local property taxes in a year, which is $5,852 at most. A household that gets vouchers for two students would receive a subsidy of $14,506  more than twice what they pay in taxes. This begs the question:

• Why should parents who get vouchers receive more in taxpayer subsidies than they pay in taxes?

Doing the math.
In 2009, the median household income in PA was $48,172. The annual state income tax, assuming that there was no non-taxable income, was no more than $1,479 (3.07% times $48,172). Click here  for the US Census data.

Using a five-year average (2005-2009), the median local property tax in the median PA county (Washington County) was $1,483. Click here  for the analysis by the Tax Foundation (warning: it takes a while to load).

That's a total of $2,962 in state income and local property taxes. If the median household also paid sales taxes on all of its income  a ridiculous assumption, but one that creates the best case for vouchers  add another $2,890 (6% times $48,172).

That's a total in state and local taxes of $5,852 per year for the median household.

The other voucher math questions are far more difficult to estimate, but they continue to be worth asking. To pass a voucher bill without answering them, we believe, would be irresponsible.

• How much does a public school really save when a student leaves for a non-public school? The public school cannot shut down a classroom or turn down the heat. The actual savings are probably in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands public schools will lose for each voucher student.
• What are the real costs to a non-public school when a voucher student arrives? Even several students spread around several grades could not raise costs by the thousands of dollars per student the non-public school would receive for each student.

Vouchers are not about poor children, and they're not about better schools.
Who really benefits from vouchers? Although the rhetoric portrays vouchers as a way to help poor children escape troubled public schools for better private and religious schools, the voucher plan is not guaranteed to do either. According to the Senate's official fiscal note, only about 8% of vouchers would go to poor children in the lowest performing schools. Nearly 67% of the vouchers would go to children in middle-class families who already send their children to private and religious schools. Click here  for the analysis by the Education Law Center-PA, which includes a link to the fiscal note.

Nor is there proof that non-public schools provide a better education for poor children, according to studies of the nation's longest-running voucher experiment in Milwaukee. This has led some former voucher supporters to become voucher opponents, as noted in a May 23 Philadelphia Inquirer article, Pennsylvania: Voucher Ground Zero.

"African-American students in Milwaukee have scores on National Assessment of Educational Progress that are below those of African-American students in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana," said Diane Ravitch, a former high-ranking education official in the George H.W. Bush administration who once favored vouchers but now opposes them. "Vouchers helped no one."

But Senate Bill 1 is certain to hurt tens of thousands of children who cannot take advantage of vouchers and who will remain in schools that have dramatically less money to sustain the gains of recent years, much less make additional needed improvements.

To be clear, DR does not oppose vouchers per se. We oppose the lack of accountability and the inability of the voucher proposal to make financial sense and therefore provide value for taxpayers.

The final question is whether voucher supporters will fix these conspicuous problems.

Please support our work with a tax-deductible contribution. They hate it when you do that (some of them anyway).
Click here  or send a donation to Democracy Rising PA, P.O. Box 618, Carlisle, PA 17013.

Thank you!

Please Note: There is a correction to this article at: Pennsylvania Vouchers - A Correction and Response