Our public school systems are at a crossroads. The problem is that the activists have taken control at pretty much every level and are using their power to indoctrinate legions of schoolkids to believe absolute nonsense.
School choice threatens to upend that because it gives parents the power to seek alternatives. That includes private schools that reflect the parents’ values over those of school administrators.
However, critics have claimed that school choice is costly; that it bankrupts states.
That argument never made sense, in part because families rarely get all the education funds to take elsewhere. They get a large portion, but state school systems continue to get the remainder, all while there are fewer students in those schools throughout the state. If spending is based on enrollment, then guess what happens?
That’s right. Less money is spent than originally planned for.
Yet they’ve persisted.
Only, in a move that should shock no one, they’ve been lying.
For years, opponents of school choice have been predicting that Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts policy would "bankrupt" the state. Instead, as the state’s education budget surplus demonstrates, school choice has reduced costs.
This won’t surprise Arizonans who have become accustomed to the empty scaremongering from Chicken Littles claiming that school choice would make the sky fall. But then again, they aren’t the target audience for this pernicious propaganda. Conservative lawmakers in other states are.
Over the past three years, Republican lawmakers in a dozen states have made all or nearly all K–12 students eligible for school choice. More red states, most notably Texas, appear ready to join them. To halt this progress, opponents of school choice have settled on a message intended to give conservatives pause: that school choice supposedly is a budget buster.
"The universal school voucher program is unsustainable," Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, claimed last summer, arguing that the program needed to be curtailed lest it "bankrupt our state." Her proposed budget would have rolled back ESA eligibility, kicking out nearly 50,000 students.
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Fortunately, Arizona’s Republican-controlled legislature knows better. The typical ESA student receives about $7,500 annually from Arizona taxpayers, compared to the more than $12,000 per pupil that Arizonans give public schools through their state and local taxes alone.
Even looking only at state dollars, the ESA program typically costs taxpayers hundreds — if not thousands — of dollars less per child than the public school system. As students shift from public schools to ESAs, the state saves money.
In the first two years since ESAs went universal under then-Gov. Doug Ducey, Arizona enjoyed a massive overall state budget surplus one year, and a net savings in its state education funding formula (which includes ESAs) compared to what it budgeted the second. After lengthy budget negotiations this year, the ESA program’s universal eligibility emerged unscathed.
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By the end of the 2023-24 school year, 62 percent of new ESA students had switched from a public school in the prior year. When factoring in shifts in student enrollment among the public district, public charter and ESA sectors, the JLBC estimated last month a net savings of more than $350,000 relative to the enacted budget for fiscal year 2024.
In other words, it saves states money.
Nothing about that is surprising. After all, the private sector has a long history of doing things more efficiently than the public sector. Why would education be any different?
So why lie about it?
I get that many of you will say that’s their nature, and you’re probably not wrong, but there’s always a reason, even if they have to rationalize it to themselves.
So why?
The easy answer is that they have to lie about it to justify destroying it.
School choice, as I noted previously, means that parents can decide what their children are subjected to in the classroom. While few would object to math and science and English in the curriculum, that’s not all that’s included in schools these days, now is it?
While school choice opponents often invoke the boogieman of creationism to attack those who would take advantage of such a program due to ideology, that’s really not where most people are going to have an issue with public schools.
Instead, it’ll be things like critical race theory, which is most definitely pushed in public schools despite protestations to the contrary. It’ll be gender ideology. It’ll be the next thing or the thing after that.
Over and over again, we’ve seen the public schools used as vehicles to inflict ideology on us as if it’s absolute truth and you’re somehow morally wrong for disagreeing with them about letting your kids be indoctrinated.
School choice allows parents to have just that, choice. They can pull their child from a school system they don’t like for whatever reason and put them in a school that’s more to their liking.
There’s actually no reason to even have a public school system in many states, which have constitutions calling for the education of young people, but don’t explicitly say the states have to do the educating. School choice does just that.\
But in no world is it more expensive to offer school choice than actually have students in schools.
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When my son was in 7th grade he was on a class trip to DC and the class met with then Senator Corzine. He asked why Democrats were against vouchers as the vouchers would take less money from the public schools than was budgeted for each student. Corzine explained that it was hard math to explain why he was against it. This from a former Goldman executive. I always wondered was the math to hard for him or my son because my son understood the math.
I think it's more about union control than ideology. This fight had been going on for years when my daughter graduated from high school in 2004. She has a high IQ (130) and ADHD. Public school had no idea how to handle her so we switched her to a private school from 3rd grade through 8th grade. Vouchers were just being proposed. I remember thinking that it would help us a lot if the money we paid for schooling in general could be applied to educating our daughter rather than going to a system that failed her.
The private school only went through middle-school so we gave public schools a chance again. Our daughter entered a lottery and was accepted into the top-rated high school in the system.
It was a disaster. The school refused to make any allowances for ADHD students (even though required to by law). One of her teachers questioned if ADHD even exists. She failed three classes in 10th grade and had to take summer school. Two of those classes were taught by the teacher who didn't believe in ADHD. The summer school teachers wondered why she was there since she already knew the material.
By that point Ohio had established Charter Schools. They are state-funded with a more limited budget than the public schools get. My daughter did well at one of these and graduated on time.
When we first talked with the charter school about enrolling her we asked about ADHD. They laughed and said, "We understand that. The computer teacher is ADHD." Later he told us that our daughter was the first student he'd had who actually "got" what he was teaching.
Anyway, the schools were making the same arguments against vouchers and charter schools in the 1990s that they make today. There was some indoctrination going on but nothing like what we see today. And every now and then they'd let it slip that it was all about unions. Charter schools and most private schools that accept vouchers are not unionized and the NEA is a major force in the Democratic Party. They control US education policy. It was the NEA that decided to keep US schools closed for COVID a year after everyone country in the world had opened its schools.