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EMERGENCY CAMPAIGN AGAINST VOUCHERS

A DOZEN REASONS WHY VOUCHERS WILL HURT CHILDREN IN NYC, NOT HELP THEM

By Noreen Connell, Executive Director, Educational Priorities Panel
January 29, 2001

1. Vouchers will not level the playing field among the children of upper-income parents and lower-income parents.

In his most recent "State of the City" speech, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that he wanted children attending public schools to have the same opportunity that his children have to attend a good school. The last time EPP inquired, the tuition at his son’s school averaged $14,000. We have no written statement as to the exact amount the mayor proposes for each taxpayer-funded voucher, but, from what he has told reporters at different times, it would be in the range of $5,500 to $8,500. Most private schools with good reputations charge anywhere from $12,000 a year to $23,000 a year, so these vouchers would not provide access to these good schools.

In the private market, for the most part, the highest-quality goods and services are more expensive than lower quality. Why doesn’t the mayor send his children to a neighborhood parochial school that only charges $6,000? The answer is that the additional $8,000 charge gives him some assurance of a better quality education. Of some interest is that the mayor’s tuition bill is equivalent to the per-pupil level of resources of some suburban public schools. Could it be that money does matter when it comes to education?

2. Parental "choice" sounds good, but in a consumer-driven education system (the private market) low-quality education becomes the fault of the consumer.

Since the majority of voucher supporters are very conservative politically and are opposed to civil rights, women’s reproductive rights, and fair funding for schools, their repeated use of the slogan "choice" needs clarification. Pro-voucher literature and web sites often characterize the public school system as a "government monopoly." Their goal is not to have high-quality public schools that serve most children, but to have a system very much like our nation’s health system, in which individuals or employers purchase services from both private and public providers. Our health system also generates profits for insurance companies, health maintenance organizations (HMOs), and hospitals. In the private market, the first rule is to be a smart consumer. Sometimes, even the most knowledgeable consumers do not find out that their HMO will not provide certain cancer treatments until it is too late.

Will parents know if the private school they choose will diagnose their child’s learning difficulty and then provide services to help their child overcome this difficulty? Will they be given information on the school’s average test scores? They may or may not. When it comes to the private marketplace, parents do not have rights, they have choices. Within the public schools system, parents have rights to special education services and to information, though it may be difficult and take a long time to secure them. Under the New York State Constitution, parents have a right to a sound, basic education for their children, even though the Campaign for Fiscal Equity has had to go to court to get this right enforced and the state Legislature and the governor have yet to act on Judge DeGrasse’s January 2001 NYS Supreme Court decision.

As imperfect as our public school system is, city and state government and education officials can be held accountable for low-quality instruction. In the private school system, it’s "buyer beware." In the private marketplace for education, children will have to depend on their parents’ ability to make the right "purchase." Shouldn’t every child be guaranteed access to a good public school?

3. When it comes to the private market, it is the schools that "chose" students.

The mayor argues that he wants to give low-income parents a "choice." All voucher experiments, whether publicly or privately funded, have shown that much of that "choice" belongs to private schools. They freely exercise their rights to reject students because of disability, low-academic performance, and behavior problems or because their parents will not agree to religious requirements or to participate in fundraising.

Every spring, education groups that are members of EPP receive calls from private-school parents who have been notified that their children will not be allowed to register for the next school year. One year, in preparation for a report, EPP called several private high schools to inquire why all their students graduated within four years. We were told that when students begin to show signs of falling behind, they are asked to leave.

Data on the expulsion rate of students from private schools is deceptive. Most private schools give parents a "choice" of leaving or having their children expelled. One of the research problems in trying to ascertain whether students in Milwaukee and Cleveland have improved their academic performance once they transfer to a private school is that these students drop out at very high rates (25 percent to 33 percent a year). The cohort of students that remain in private schools is very small after only two years. Comparisons between these private school "survivors" and public school students are highly questionable and do not in the least represent a "random" experiment.

4. Very few students would be able to benefit from a voucher program because there is, hypothetically, only room for 16,000 students in private and religious schools in New York City.

State Education Department data show that there are 267,000 private school students in New York City. If there were a seat vacancy rate of 6 percent (the national average for private schools), about 16 percent of the 95,000 students attending low-performing public schools could avail themselves of a seat in a private school. What sort of private school has vacancies? Overwhelmingly, these are under-performing private and religious schools. Some voucher advocates state that only low-income children should get vouchers, but over 700,000 public school students in New York City fit this profile. There would be room be 2 percent of these students in private schools. The numbers don’t add up. The voucher proposal is really a "lottery" plan where only a handful of students really have any possibility of access to private schools.

5. Private and religious schools are not necessarily performing at higher academic levels than public schools.

Many private schools do not participate in the state-testing program. However, to its credit, the Roman Catholic parochial school system does participate. On the one day that 1999 private school test results were posted on the State Education web site, EPP was able to identify several private schools in which average student test results would have placed these schools on the SURR list. In twelve community school districts, parochial school students’ average performance on the fourth grade English Language Arts exam was lower than the average performance of public school students. Obviously, just because a school is private does not mean that it is providing a high-quality educational program. Indeed, we have received complaints about one private school where the "computer room" is filled with broken down equipment and the teachers have no books for themselves or their students. In both Milwaukee and Cleveland, scores of "fly-by-night" schools have emerged. Ironically, their very low-academic performance has exposed many more children to unsound learning environments than before the voucher programs existed.

6. Even the most biased, pro-voucher research cannot show a learning benefit for most students.

Every year, Paul Petersen, director of the Program on Education Policy at Harvard University, issues a new study on how some students in publicly or privately funded voucher programs have improved academically. In a highly unusual move within research circles, the company that supplied data for his 2000 study came out publicly to challenge his conclusions. There have been other research controversies surrounding his studies, but let us dispense with them.

The fact remains that no matter what methodological contortions Petersen uses to arrive at his positive findings, the findings themselves are pretty silly. In study after study, he finds: advances in one grade, but not in other grades; among African-American boys, but not Latinos or Latinas; in Cleveland, but not Milwaukee; in math, but not in reading. In each study, the small group of students showing gains changes among cities, racial groups, grades, and subject areas.

As Dr. Charles Achilles and Dr. Alex Molnar have pointed out, these highly questionable findings stand in stark contrast to research on the positive benefits of smaller class sizes in the early grades. Not only has this research been subjected to peer review and duplicated by several researchers, but the test gains are not restricted to just one city or grade or ethnic group or subject area. Across the board, children’s learning improves when class sizes are reduced from kindergarten to third grade.

7. Private schools are not held accountable for taxpayer funds.

A 1998 U.S. Department of Education report conducted at the request of Congress, Barriers, Benefits, and Costs of Using Private Schools to Alleviate Overcrowding in Public Schools, found that both religious and private schools were unlikely to participate in a voucher program that would require them to meet accountability standards in key policy areas, such as admissions, student testing, curriculum, and religious training. Private and religious schools have not had to be accountable to the public because the public has not funded them.

In both Milwaukee and Cleveland, there are continuing struggles for the most basic level of accountability in these four areas. After only one year of operation of the Cleveland experiment, an independent financial audit found that one-third, or $1.9 million, of the $6 million voucher program had been misspent, largely for the transportation of students by taxi companies. Similarly, when the Wisconsin Legislature allowed private schools to operate with 100 percent voucher students in 1996, four of the twelve schools, or one-third, that were created to benefit from this change had to be ultimately closed because of inflated student enrollment figures and fraudulent financial records. While the New York City Board of Education’s spending practices could be improved, not even its harshest critics can allege that one-third of its $10 billion budget is being misspent.

As the federal government’s very costly experiment with providing taxpayer funding for post-high school career training by private companies clearly shows, the provision of public dollars to private entities requires considerable and costly oversight. The mayor’s voucher proposals have never outlined even minimal accountability measures for private schools, despite his own criticisms of private garbage collectors, the Fulton Fish Market, and school bus companies.

8. Taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools result in government funding for religion.

In both Milwaukee and Cleveland, taxpayer-funded vouchers have provided access to mostly religious schools in low-income neighborhoods. Milwaukee religious schools often ask for children’s baptismal certificates with applications for admission and, in May 1999, twenty-five schools that accepted vouchers refused to submit proper random selection plans for student admission. In Cleveland, though the majority of the students of the Islamic School of Oasis are non-Muslims whose tuition is funded by taxpayers, all children must participate in a short religious service on four days and a longer service on Fridays. Similarly, in the Metro Catholic Parish school, the parents of all religions are required to sign a contract with the school allowing organized prayer and a formal religion class every day. Parents who do not sign this contract do not gain admittance for their children.

The taxpayers of Wisconsin and Ohio are, in fact, now funding religious proselytizing along with educational programs. Do we want to take this step in New York City?

9. The voucher proposal delays the implementation of real strategies to improve the New York City public school system.

The mayor puts forth the argument that vouchers will create competition between private and public schools and that this will improve the public schools. Would he claim that crime rate reduction resulted from competition from Business Improvement District security forces or that improvements in the subway system resulted from increased private bus and van service? Investments in police and transit turned around these public systems, not privatization. The public school system needs a comparable investment so that "quality of life" becomes a reality for families and employers who want to remain in New York City.

The mayor’s proposal on vouchers deflects attention away from real solutions. An opportunity to change the state’s system of funding schools has historically only come around every thirty to forty years (the Cole-Rice Law of 1925, the Diefendorf Formula of 1962, and the "interim" legislative measures of 1974). Should the CFE lawsuit prevail at the Court of Appeals, 100 percent of the city’s public school children will benefit. They will have the first opportunity since the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s of having resource levels that approach those of schools in the rest of the state. Contrast this possibility with the mayor’s proposal. In a best case scenario, about 2 percent of low-income students with vouchers could find space in private schools, and for the most part in private schools that perform below public schools in the rest of the state. Once again, the false hope of vouchers crowds out a discussion of real solutions.

10. The voucher proposal takes away taxpayer funding needed to support public education.

On its face, the mayor’s last voucher proposal appeared to be modest: an expenditure of $12 million over two years for administration and incentive payments for a community school district that agreed to participate. This cost estimate, however, did not include funding for vouchers. The proposal involved taking city and state tax-levy education funding away from the Board of Education and redirecting these funds to vouchers. Each private and religious school that agreed to accept a voucher as payment for tuition would receive anywhere between $5,500 to $8,500 per pupil. EPP estimated that the total cost over the two years, including administration and incentives, would have been between $43 million to $63 million. One of the most telling examples of how vouchers have hurt children is Milwaukee. While public schools in the rest of Wisconsin were able to reduce average class sizes in the early grades and see their children surge ahead academically, so much money went to vouchers in Milwaukee that far fewer children experienced smaller classes.

Had Mayor Giuliani made a proposal last year to use $43 million to $63 million to lease space to reduce elementary school overcrowding, the city could have redeployed 550 "floating teachers" to create 550 new classes from kindergarten to third grade. 44,000 more students could have been placed in classes with average of just 20 students.

11. In countries where publicly funded vouchers have been implemented, socioeconomic and racial segregation has increased.

New Zealand has had a voucher program for ten years. While many low-income Maori and Pacific Island families took advantage of the opportunity to change schools, even more middle-class, white parents did so. As a result, enrollment patterns became significantly more polarized. Schools that had more applicants than classroom seats opted for the students who were easiest to teach and left the others, those with learning or behavior problems, those from disadvantaged homes, and those with limited English, to be dealt with by less-popular schools. Thus for the parents of many disadvantaged students, the right to choose turned out to be a hollow promise.

Chile had a voucher program for twenty years with the same results. There were fewer private schools in low-income areas because they could not survive economically. Ironically, the cost of private schools in high-income neighborhoods increased because even well-off parents received government-funded vouchers and then paid tuition on top of this government subsidy. Competition between well-off parents resulted in higher tuition. In both countries, the voucher system has reduced the quality of the public schools.

12. Market competition in the private sector many have some benefits, but fairness and equal access are not among these benefits.

    Most pro-voucher literature starts with introductory rhetorical passages about civil rights for poor children and then goes to the heart of all of their arguments, the importance of privatizing education. Since the movement for vouchers is largely funded by very conservative individuals, far more ink is devoted to the wonders of free market competition and deregulation then to civil rights, a concept which few of them support in any other policy area. The problem with the marketplace ideal is that it is made up of winners and losers, that is what competition essentially requires. Losers go bankrupt; winners get rich. In the free market, those with money can purchase expensive furniture, equipment, cars, education, and clothes. Those without money can purchase none of these things. Our free market health system means that some get good treatment in hospitals and others get no health care at all. HMOs want to attract young, healthy clients and try to eliminate older clients whose health problems will be costly.

    What would a free market education system look like? The answer lies in history. Long before the emergence of public school systems in the United States and Europe during the 19th century, children were educated through a private and religious school system, which meant that a majority of children and adults were illiterate. Publicly funded systems of education were established with the objective of creating universal literacy. But we don’t have to look just at history to get an idea of "free market" education. Sadly, there are many countries with excellent private schools and inadequate public schools. The result of this imbalance is that a majority of citizens in these countries cannot read or write.

    There is no country in the world today that enjoys a high rate of literacy that does not have a good public school system. The mayor and the City Council’s first priority should be to strengthen the public schools, rather than returning to a market competition model that will greatly disadvantage poor children and will fail to educate many of them.

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