Our opinion: Voucher plan would help sponsor, not students

Despite his influence in the state Senate, Republican Eric Johnson of Savannah lacks the statewide name recognition to clinch the lieutenant governorship next year. So, rather than resort to billboards or ads to expand his political profile, Johnson is using the controversial issue of vouchers.

This week, the senator introduced a bill that would give parents of each Georgia child about $5,000 in taxpayer money to be used to defray private school tuition. What he hasn’t provided — what no one has provided — is a convincing argument as to why. As a result, in the 11 states where the public has had a chance to vote on vouchers, the idea has been resoundingly rejected in all 11.

In statewide contests in 2000, California and Michigan voters turned down vouchers by a margin of more than two to one. Nine months after the Utah Legislature enacted a universal voucher program in 2007, voters repealed it by a margin of 62 percent to 38 percent. After studying the evidence, voters in state after state concluded that private school voucher programs don’t raise student achievement, nor do they improve the academic performance of students left behind in the public schools.

Just as important, voters also recognized vouchers as a threat to the bedrock American belief that public education is critical to the health of the democracy and should not be sacrificed to political agendas.

Here in Georgia, unfortunately, voters won’t get a direct voice on the issue. Johnson is attempting to accomplish his goal through legislative action, and only strong citizen opposition can stop it.

Opponents can count on the support of Superintendent Kathy Cox, who said Tuesday, “I am opposed to a general private school voucher program because it would allow taxpayer money to be handed over to private entities without any type of accountability or consequences. Additionally, there is little independent evidence that general vouchers make a difference in the achievement level of students, especially those that are in the most difficult financial situations.”

Johnson bases his case on the contention that Georgia’s public schools are mediocre and impervious to improvement. However, the failings of Georgia schools are not inherent in public schools. They are a direct result of the state’s deep poverty, its historic indifference to quality education, especially for poor and minority children, and the repeated refusal of the very body that Johnson leads, the Legislature, to fund education adequately and stick with reforms long enough to register improvement.

None of those problems would be solved if Georgia became the first state in the country to embrace vouchers. In fact, in the handful of states that have conducted experiments with vouchers, the results contradict claims of improvement by Johnson and other voucher advocates:

• Although students in Ohio’s limited Educational Choice Scholarship program take the same tests required of public schools, the state doesn’t release or monitor private school scores. Through a public-records request, the Cincinnati Enquirer discovered higher failure rates among voucher recipients than among Ohio public school students.

• An ongoing five-year examination of the nation’s oldest voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, uncovered little difference in test scores between voucher recipients and their public school counterparts. While voucher proponents often try to dismiss such research as biased, the School Choice Demonstration Project evaluating the Milwaukee program includes pro-voucher researcher Jay Greene.

• The much-ballyhooed voucher program in Washington, D.C., also failed to yield the promised results. Last summer, the U.S. Department of Education — headed at the time by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, a voucher proponent — found for the second year in a row that voucher students fared no better on standardized math and reading tests than public school peers.

• In reviewing the research on vouchers, a team from Princeton University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago concluded last year: “The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero, meaning that those gains may have arisen by chance. Further, the very little evidence about the potential for public schools to respond to increased competitive pressure generated by vouchers also suggests that one should remain wary that large-scale improvements would result from a more comprehensive voucher system.”

Yet, in return for zero impact, Johnson proposes to dismantle public education in Georgia. While he insists that parents have a right to use “their” tax dollars as they see fit, those dollars represent the collective pooling of all the community’s resources — including those of taxpayers without children.

Almost all the countries that outperform the United States in standardized testing do so through a public school model. And states such as Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut and North Carolina, which have seen remarkable gains in student performance, have achieved those gains by concentrating on improving teaching and curriculum, not through vouchers.

If Johnson wants to raise his political profile, vouchers may certainly help him accomplish his goal. But if his aim is really to improve education in Georgia, vouchers are useless and probably counterproductive.

— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board (mdowney@ajc.com)

CHECK OUR SOURCES:

The School Choice Demonstration Project, based at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville: www.uark.edu/ua/der/SCDP.html

Federal review of Washington, D.C., voucher program: ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20084023/exec_summary.asp

School Vouchers: Recent Findings and Unanswered Questions: Lisa Barrow, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Cecilia E. Rouse Princeton University: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1268316#