A voucher bill, a ghost of Georgia Legislatures past, is expected to reappear when the General Assembly resumes next month. It will arrive in altered form, cloaked in something generic and benign like education savings accounts or opportunity scholarships.
Don’t be fooled: This is the same old phantom rattling the same old chains. No matter its name, the legislation seeks to redirect tax dollars to private schools at the expense of public education.
State Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, and his GOP colleagues, with the backing of Gov. Brian Kemp, plan to push the issue again in 2024 after this year’s narrow defeat of Dolezal’s “Georgia Promise Scholarship Act.”
That bill would have given $6,500 to the family of each public school student who switched to a private school or chose home schooling. It lost in an 89-85 House vote, a defeat enabled by some courageous rural Republicans who voted “no’' because the bill would not help their constituents.
Those Republicans are now facing a lot of pressure and arm twisting to toe the party line.
The Georgia legislation is part of a surge of voucher-plus proposals that offer a range of options for the voucher including tutoring, books and computers. Under Florida’s voucher law, the list of permitted educational expenditures includes televisions up to 55 inches, trampolines, paddleboards and student admission to theme parks. But the prime intent of vouchers remains underwriting private school.
There are a lot of reasons to reject vouchers but the most relevant is they don’t work. Research on existing voucher programs shows they do not deliver on their promise of academic acceleration.
Studies in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., found students who used vouchers to leave public schools for private schools experienced sizable learning declines. Voucher scholar Joshua Cowen, professor of education policy in the College of Education at Michigan State University, said early findings, including some of his own, found vouchers improved academics, but the studies examined boutique and select programs that involved a thousand students or less. In statewide programs, the number of eligible students is much higher. He and his team have evaluated programs nationwide including New Orleans and Milwaukee, the country’s first modern school voucher program.
“So far, measured by test scores, the coin of the realm, the impacts on the 25% of students who do leave public school for private school see some of the worst test score drops in the history of education research,” said Cowen. “Literally we have never seen anything like this.”
Why is there such an academic freefall? Cowen said research on standard voucher programs suggests the larger the program, the worse the results. A key reason is a shortage of quality private schools.
Many voucher families end up at struggling religious schools for whom voucher checks become a lifeline or at pop-up schools that open overnight when tax dollars start to flow and often quickly close.
Nor can Georgians trust the assertion by GOP leaders that public schools won’t suffer any funding repercussions from vouchers.
“What’s done with these voucher-plus programs is the state obligates itself to new expenses that are currently being borne by the private sector,” said Cowen. “It usually takes three budget cycles before the check comes due.”
That’s about when legislatures find there is no additional funding available for public education to offer new initiatives or keep pace with needed investments in public schools.
In expanded school choice programs like those being touted by the GOP leadership, the real beneficiaries seemingly are more affluent families. In Florida, for example, of the 122,895 students newly enrolled this year in expanded school choice programs, 69% were already in private school. Provisions to limit voucher programs by income or by requiring students be enrolled in public schools are often eventually dropped from the law, said Cowen, in a telephone interview.
The Georgia Legislature has a history of backing bad education policies. Remember the state takeover plan modeled after Tennessee’s Achievement School District? Fortunately, Georgia voters were wiser than state leadership and soundly rejected the Opportunity School District when it was on the ballot in 2016. Voter skepticism was vindicated when an ongoing evaluation of the Tennessee model deemed it a failure.
In 2013, Georgia lawmakers fell prey to another half-baked idea, basing 50% of a teacher’s evaluation on student growth as gauged by state tests. Numerous studies showed value-added scores were influenced by the economic status of students. Not surprisingly, Georgia began backing away from the law almost immediately, as have most states.
And, of course, there is my favorite, a mandate that schools spend 65% of their revenues in the classroom. The GOP pushed the 65% solution through the Legislature in 2006 despite obvious signs it was fraught with problems and confusion. The law produced nothing but more paperwork, and the state now exempts virtually all districts from complying through waivers or charter district status.
With the evidence against them, voucher proponents in the Georgia Legislature are careful now to pitch vouchers not as an academic boon, but as a means of giving parents more choices. But must those choices — proven by research to be bad ones all around — be funded by Georgia taxpayers?
About the Author
