BY STEVE NUZUM
On September 11, South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver voiced predictable outrage about the logical (if a little surprising) decision by the state Supreme Court to remove direct funding for private schools from a school voucher law she supported, writing, in a formal Department of Education memo, “Families cried tears of joy when the scholarship funds became available for their children, and today’s Supreme Court ruling brings those same families tears of devastation”.
While the ruling was a bit surprising-- although the South Carolina Constitution really couldn’t be any clearer in its prohibition against direct aid to private schools, the legislature has been steadily packing the state Supreme Court with justices who some expected to uphold the law, anyway-- Weaver’s statement, itself, wasn’t surprising. Weaver has long telegraphed that her primary educational priority is school vouchers-- it was and remains one of the primary missions of her think tank Palmetto Promise, and “school choice” (which in this context mainly refers to vouchers) was a centerpiece of her campaign platform.
So while her support for vouchers is nothing new, her statement’s focus on the melodramatic imagery of families crying “tears of devastation” does bring into focus the families that matter in the worldview of the most ardent school voucher supporters: a minority of families who already send their students to private schools, and an even smaller minority of families who could not afford private educations for their children, but now can because of a roughly $6,000 school voucher, which does not include guaranteed admission to any school, or transportation.
Many voucher proponents in South Carolina want to change the state Constitution to allow this kind of funding.
So why isn’t this a good idea?
First and foremost, because most voucher schemes, including South Carolina’s, are designed to move funding from public schools to private schools, and to do so, not through the will of voters, but through the decisions of individual families.
And while these schemes are often marketed as a way to help “underserved” poor children, in effect most families who end up using vouchers were already sending their children to private schools. Either way, the average taxpayer is providing a subsidy to either encourage families to leave the public schools or a free rebate for families who already have. This, in turn, strips money from school budgets, which are based on student enrollment.
If, as many voucher proponents intend, vouchers do encourage some families to leave “failing” public schools (generally, defined as schools with low average state test scores), that generally removes funding from schools which arguably need it most (since funding is one of the best predictors of those same test scores). Intentionally or not (and in many cases it does seem to be intentional) this creates a vicious cycle where poorly-funded schools (usually in high-poverty areas) become even more poorly-funded.
And South Carolina doesn’t really need to speculate on the very serious long-term costs of the kind of “universal school choice” voucher programs favored by Weaver, because the states SC officials have held up most frequently as models-- Florida and Arizona-- have already seen their universal voucher programs cost several times more than predicted, leading to budget shortfalls of billions of dollars. These shortfalls have harmed not only the public schools in these states, but also other government services.
I reached out to Weaver’s spokesman in July for comment on the budget crises in states she cited as models for voucher legislation. Her office never responded.
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