Georgia’s new voucher law puts us in league with such states as Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma. That’s not such great company to keep.
Those states consistently show up on the bottom rungs of state rankings in education. Georgia never seems to end up with Massachusetts, New Jersey or Connecticut, which lead the nation in K-12 performance.
There are several reasons for that. Those states spend a lot more on education. They invest in teachers, hire visionary leaders and follow rigorous curricula. They’ve prioritized schools for decades so they also have a more highly educated workforce than Georgia.
I have a son halfway through a doctorate in organic chemistry focused on new cancer-blocking drugs. Hoping he might return to the South for work, I looked at a U.S. map of major hubs for pharma and medical research. The hubs were largely clustered in the Northeast with a single dot on the map in this region of the country at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.
Georgia is competing to attract high-tech and high-wage jobs, which require a well-educated and well-paid workforce. We won’t get there by undermining efforts and funding for public education. And that’s what Senate Bill 233 — a voucher bill with a bunch of add-ons — will do.
Signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp in April, the law gives parents $6,500 a year starting in fall 2025 if they pull their child out of a low-performing public school and switch to a private school or homeschooling. The predicted annual cost of $140 million will be balanced by a reduction in funding for the public schools that lose such students.
No state has enhanced its education outcomes through vouchers, although proponents have struggled to make that argument on ever-shifting criteria.
Vouchers were first sold as an antidote to low test scores in public schools. However, large-scale voucher programs failed to boost test scores, which remain the coin of the realm in how we judge public schools.
In fact, statewide voucher programs drove down academic performance, especially in math. So the marketing campaign shifted to fuzzier rubrics such as parental satisfaction and later life outcomes rather than how students perform on tests. For example, the pro-vouchers group EdChoice now cautions on its website, ”Test scores can only tell us so much about a child’s schooling experience.”
Government-funded vouchers have another outcome that garners little attention — they spur the creation of new schools in church basements and former grocery stores that happen to charge the exact amount as the available voucher and often eventually shut down. In a study of Milwaukee’s long-running voucher program, researchers found that 41% of all private voucher schools operating in the city between 1991 and 2015 failed.
We saw that recently in the shuttering of a Christian school in North Georgia that took taxpayer dollars to educate students with learning disabilities. (Georgia approved a school voucher program for children with disabilities in 2007.)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported War Hill Christian Academy in Dawsonville closed after parents assailed the quality of education of the church-operated school. The saga began after a group of mothers became upset after the pastor allegedly brushed off their concerns about missing money from a holiday fundraiser. And it escalated from there.
As the AJC’s Ty Tagami reported, “This started a chain of events that led to an accreditation downgrade, an ongoing review by the Georgia Department of Education of the school’s use of taxpayer-funded vouchers and an investigation by the sheriff in Dawson County.”
The director of the accrediting agency that oversaw War Hill told the AJC the school lacked enough teachers with proper educational backgrounds and credentials to operate as a traditional, full-time K-12 school.
In the 2022-23 school year, the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement reported that 5,864 students received one of those special needs vouchers — the average amount was $6,821 — and used them at 281 participating private schools.
Most voucher legislation presumes the real oversight of the private schools receiving millions of dollars of taxpayer money will come from recipients. If the school isn’t providing the education promised or is squandering the state funds, parents will sound the alarm.
That has led to few controls and little accountability in many voucher programs, which often skimp on providing money for any real monitoring or investigations by state agencies. So, even if parents voice concerns, the state often lacks sufficient staff and resources to respond. Georgia’s law creates an appointed review committee made up of eight parents of students eligible for the voucher. Their chief purpose, according to the law, is, “To assist in the determination of whether certain expenses meet the requirements to be considered a qualified education expense.”
In Florida, vouchers have underwritten Disney World passes, big-screen TVs and paddleboards, but the Legislature there rebuffed an attempt this year to impose tighter controls after homeschooling parents objected they should be able to use state dollars for enrichment. In Arizona, vouchers have been paid out to “ghost” children and programs that didn’t exist.
When the expanded Georgia voucher program commences, brace for revelations of fraud and classrooms without credentialed teachers and remember the abuses are not a design flaw of the plan. They are a feature of it.
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