Vouchers are Expensive and Ineffective

Tennessee policymakers want to expand them

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Jeff Bryant has an interesting piece at the L.A. Progressive about the fiscal challenges posed by school voucher programs.

The bottom line: Vouchers end up costing a LOT of money and creating huge budget problems for policymakers.

According to multiple reports detailed below, states that have been among the earliest to adopt universal voucher programs are finding that their costs are far exceeding estimates primarily due to the high numbers of families taking advantage of the programs. These families mostly never had their children enrolled in public schools.

In state after state, the number of families using vouchers to “escape” so-called failed public schools—an original argument for vouchers—is dwarfed by a larger population of families who already had their children enrolled in private schools and are using voucher money to subsidize their private school tuition costs.

Another large percentage of voucher users are parents who homeschool their children and use voucher funds to cover expenses they would previously have been shouldering themselves.

This means the state (and local taxpayers) end up covering education costs for kids they weren’t previously educating. Rather than moving money around to “follow the child” as advocates of “choice” programs claim, voucher schemes create an entirely new school system that must also be supported by taxpayers.

Bryant notes that in Arizona, the voucher plan may cost taxpayers up to $1 billion and a universal program in Florida could require $4 billion.

In Arizona:

“More than 50 percent of ESA voucher funding represents a newly incurred cost to the [s]tate,” the memo read, “due to new applicants that were previously enrolled in private school, homeschooling, or were attending non-state aid schools prior to transferring.”

That would mean that roughly $500 million in NEW money would be needed to support a universal voucher program.

In Florida, the cost for what would effectively be a new “voucher school system” would be around $2 billion.

States enacting widespread voucher schemes end up paying for what are essentially entirely new school systems - and taxpayers end up paying hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars for schools that are not accountable to them.

Which leads us to Tennessee.

The state has a fairly new voucher program that is limited (so far) to Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga.

However, policy leaders want to expand that program to all 95 counties, something that has long been a goal of Gov. Bill Lee.

Before expanding the program, though, it might be useful to see how the program is going so far.

So, it’s not doing that well. Sure, this is early data from a small program. But it seems premature to advance a program that is not only not showing positive results, but also appears to be causing harm.

If only there had been some warning about what would happen on the academic side of vouchers.

Kevin Carey writes in the New York Times:

The first results came in late 2015. Researchers examined an Indiana voucher program that had quickly grown to serve tens of thousands of students under Mike Pence, then the state’s governor. “In mathematics,” they found, “voucher students who transfer to private schools experienced significant losses in achievement.” They also saw no improvement in reading.

The next results came a few months later, in February, when researchers published a major study of Louisiana’s voucher program. Students in the program were predominantly black and from low-income families, and they came from public schools that had received poor ratings from the state department of education, based on test scores. For private schools receiving more applicants than they could enroll, the law required that they admit students via lottery, which allowed the researchers to compare lottery winners with those who stayed in public school.

They found large negative results in both reading and math. Public elementary school students who started at the 50th percentile in math and then used a voucher to transfer to a private school dropped to the 26th percentile in a single year. Results were somewhat better in the second year, but were still well below the starting point.

In June, a third voucher study was released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank and proponent of school choice. The study, which was financed by the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation, focused on a large voucher program in Ohio. “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools,” the researchers found. Once again, results were worse in math.

Tennessee’s results so far seem to be in line with other voucher programs. That is, the academic results are not positive, and in some cases, are negative.

Why expand a program that has kids losing ground academically?

Expansion of vouchers will be incredibly expensive - transferring hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to private operators with no accountability.

It will also likely be a net negative when it comes to student achievement.

This, though, is the primary education policy position of Tennessee’s top elected officials.