It’s odd to hear conservatives argue that even though a public giveaway program is inefficient and unaccountable, it ought to be expanded because it is popular. Yet that’s the argument they’re making.
The program in question is Georgia’s private-school scholarship program. It allows corporate and individual taxpayers to pay a dollar less in state taxes for every dollar that they donate to a private-school scholarship organization. If you donate $2,000 to such an outfit, for example, you pay $2,000 less in state taxes.
In 2015, the state capped that program at $58 million, and that cap was reached on January 1. Citing its popularity, supporters of the program are now pushing to almost double that cap to $100 million.
I have some questions:
— Under Georgia law, operators of scholarship organizations can keep 10 percent of donations to cover administrative costs, such as their own salaries. Yet in Alabama, the cap is 5 percent. In Louisiana and South Carolina, it’s also 5 percent. In Florida, it’s 3 percent. Why are Georgia’s scholarship organizations two or three times more inefficient, or to put it another way, two or three times more lucrative for those running them? Are they two or three times better connected politically?
— The tax-credit program has long been sold as a way to help lower-income students escape under-performing public schools. For that reason, most states have set strict income limits for eligibility for such programs. Georgia has not. Even worse, we lack even basic demographic information about who’s getting the subsidy — how many are needy, and how many are middle- and upper-class families who would send their kids to private school anyway? We don’t know because we’re not allowed to know; state law forbids collection of that data.
— Is it working? At the insistence of state legislators, every public school in Georgia gets graded on the performance of its students, with results posted prominently on the website of the state Department of Education. That’s fine. When you take public money, you should be accountable to the public.
But if we’re going to almost double funding of this private-school scholarship program, shouldn’t we have at least a minimal idea of what we are getting? What’s the graduation rate of the students involved? Are educational outcomes improved?
We don’t know, and we choose not to know. Alabama requires standardized testing of private-school students with state-subsidized tuition; it posts results and graduation rates from each private school on a state website. Florida also requires standardized testing in participating private schools, as do South Carolina, Indiana, Arizona and most other states.
Georgia requires nothing. Some schools may be doing a great job; others may be failing their students miserably. We don’t know, yet in our blindness we’re supposed to almost double the amount of state money they’re getting? No.
Clearly, a lot of the enthusiasm for Georgia’s program is ideologically driven, but ideology should not blind you to the fact that Georgia’s law is badly drafted and badly drafted on purpose. It has created a grossly inefficient program with no accountability or transparency, and it’s irresponsible to demand its expansion until those problems are addressed.
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