Pennsylvania Vouchers - A Correction and Response

There was a serious mistake in yesterday’s DR News. We wrote: “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.”

In fact, all of the children to be served are low-income children, not middle-class children, in the years described in the Senate’s fiscal note. A special thanks to Pete DeCoursey at Capitolwire.com for setting us straight.

We apologize for this error. However, it does allow us to respond to questions and concerns raised by readers, all in the context of whether taxpayers are getting value for their money.
Vouchers are being sold as a way for children to leave low-performing public schools. 

However, the overwhelming majority of students who will get vouchers already have left public schools (or never were in them), whether they were low-performing or not.

Also, they are attending schools of unknown quality. In the absence of a universal system of academic and financial accountability, it is hard to justify requiring taxpayers to support private and religious schools that may, in fact, be worse than the public schools. It also begs the question of whether students in nonpublic schools really need a state subsidy if their parents already can afford to send their children to nonpublic schools. Shouldn’t voucher money be reserved for poor students whose parents cannot afford to make that choice?

In the beginning, the voucher program is limited to students in low-performing public schools. In the second year, the program expands to students in the attendance area of low-performing schools, regardless of whether the student actually attends the school, including students already in nonpublic schools. By the third year, the program expands statewide, providing tax-funded vouchers for nonpublic schools, regardless of how well the public schools perform or how poorly the nonpublic schools perform. The question of whether taxpayers are getting value for their money is conspicuous.

Several readers wrote to ask what the difference is to taxpayers whether money goes to a public or nonpublic school as long as the child is being educated. Even assuming that the schools are of the same academic quality, there still are important differences.

Attending public schools is not just requirement (unless the student attends some other school or is home-schooled); it is a legally enforceable right. It also is a constitutional duty of the General Assembly to ensure that public schools are “thorough and efficient.” There is no such legally enforceable right to attend a private or religious school and no mandate for the General Assembly to support non-public schools or ensure their quality.

Further, when public money (acquired by force of law in the form of taxes) supports public schools, there is a continuing public benefit. The money isn’t used just to pay salaries. It pays for books in the library and the classroom, computers and white boards, science labs, building maintenance, machinery for vocational programs, and a host of other things that continue to be public assets. The same is not true of money that goes to non-public schools because the public loses the lasting benefit of those dollars. Instead, a private or religious school gets that benefit at the expense of the public.

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Click here  or send a donation to Democracy Rising PA, P.O. Box 618, Carlisle, PA 17013.

This is a correction to the previous article:  Pennsylvania's Voucher Math
 

(Editor's response: Ahh, but we all know that the teacher's union really runs the show and they aren't governed by the Parents or any Government oversight. They are more interested in the school teachers and their dues than they are in educating our children! Look at the  past and present record of the crap they are piling on our children under the guise of education!!! And NO ONE, NOT the Parents and NOT the Government is able to change this abysmal curriculum!


No, Public (Government) Schools are the WORST option. Home Schooling has consistently proven to be the best with Private and Religious Schools in 2nd place as a whole.  ---Al)

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