EMERGENCY CAMPAIGN AGAINST VOUCHERS

Spring/Summer 1999 (v3#3)
Voucher Threat Still Lingers

New York City is ground zero in the battle over public education. Although Mayor Giuliani and the City Council have agreed to delay action on the Mayor’s proposal to offer taxpayer funded private school vouchers to 3,000 NYC public school students, this is, at best, a temporary reprieve. The Mayor and Council Speaker Peter Vallone have agreed to set aside $6 million this year to study various education reform ideas, including vouchers.

The threat of vouchers undermining public education in New York City and elsewhere remains strong, however. Conservative political forces who support vouchers are in a desperate race for time. Slowly, but steadily, more and more "back page" newspaper stories are beginning to crop up about other strategies that have significantly improved student achievement in low-income communities. Among the most effective of these strategies are early grade class size reduction, state school funding reform and better accountability systems.

Anti-Voucher Campaign Launched
Individuals and organizations working to improve public education are also in a race against time. EPP member organizations seized the initiative and joined with the teachers union and others to fight vouchers. Within a month of the Mayor’s proposal, the Emergency Campaign against Vouchers developed a mission statement, a fact sheet, and a packet of background information. So far, the Emergency Campaign has over 100 members, including religious leaders, civic organizations, education reform groups, and unions and has held two big events:

Press Conference on March 11
More than 50 organizational representatives and elected officials including UFT President Randi Weingarten, President of the NYC Central Labor Council Brian McLaughlin, State Comptroller Carl McCall, NYC Comptroller Alan Hevesi, NYC Public Advocate Mark Green, Borough Presidents Fernando Ferrer and C. Virginia Fields, and several City Councilmembers joined the Campaign’s Co-Chairs (Rev. James Forbes of Riverside Church, Rev. Peter Laarman of Judson Memorial Church and Diane Steinman of the American Jewish Committee) and coordinators (Noreen Connell, Norm Fruchter and Dr. Roscoe Brown) in front of City Hall.

Teach-In on May 20
A Teach-In was held at NYU with 200 participants, where Assembly Education Committee Chair Steve Sanders, Co-Chair of the City Council Black and Latino Caucus Helen Marshall, Elliot Mincberg of People for the American Way, Dr. Peter Cookson of Teachers College, and Art Eisenberg of the NYCLU gave fact-filled, powerful presentations on city and national efforts to privatize education, the failure of vouchers to increase student achievement, and national and state legal issues.

Despite the considerable political clout assembled on the steps of City Hall, media coverage of the press conference was close to zero. Though The New York Times covered the Teach-In, the other daily newspapers did not. Members of the coalition are continuing to send their organization’s statements against vouchers to the press and continuing to appear in televised debates on vouchers. The Citizens Committee for Children printed up and distributed thousands of anti-voucher postcards to the Mayor and to the City Council Speaker. The City Council Black and Latino Caucus, along with Speaker Vallone, have come out in opposition to publicly-funded private school vouchers.

Voucher Findings
Rarely mentioned by the press in any of the front-page articles, editorials and op-ed pieces on vouchers are any of the research results on voucher programs such as:

•Even when evaluations are conducted by pro-voucher researchers, findings indicate that academic gains for public school students who switched to private or religious schools, either through privately funded scholarships (such as in New York City) or taxpayer funded vouchers (in Milwaukee and Cleveland) have been slight, at best. Independent researchers, on the other hand, find no or barely measurable improvements.

•A large part of the methodological problem in these studies has been that there is too small a sample of former public school students that have remained in private schools for two or more years. There is a very high dropout rate of public school students in these programs. "Fly by night" schools emerged in both Milwaukee and Cleveland that were forced to close because of financial irregularities. Also, a majority of students in both privately and publicly-funded programs were already attending private school or had siblings who attended private school. Helping low-income children escape low-performing schools has been the claim for vouchers. But the reality is that both publicly and privately-funded voucher programs have primarily assisted families who would have sent their children to religious schools anyway.

Mayor’s Proposal
Mayor Giuliani’s attempt to get public funding for vouchers has gotten much press attention, but with little analysis of the actual proposal. Instead news stories have focused primarily on the Mayor’s relationship with the Chancellor. The general public has no way of knowing that this proposal has so many legal hurdles that its implementation is highly unlikely. Unlike Cleveland and Milwaukee, the New York State legislature has not authorized the program and our state constitution has an amendment specifically prohibiting public funding for religious schools.

There has also been a surprising lack of scrutiny of the logic behind the Mayor’s proposal. The Mayor puts forth the argument that competition with private schools will improve the public schools. Would he claim that a reduction in crime resulted from competition with private security forces or that improvements in the subway system resulted from increased private bus and van service? Increased investment in police and transit turned around these public services, not privatization. Even conservative ideologues cannot claim that vouchers have substantially improved the Milwaukee school system after ten years.

The most serious problem with the Mayor’s voucher proposal, hardly mentioned by the press, is that its funding would represent a significant disinvestment in public schools. On its face, the proposal appears to be modest: an expenditure of $12 million over the next two years for administration and incentive payments for a community school district that agrees to participate in sending 3,000 low-income students to private schools. This cost estimate, however, is deceptive. The proposal involves a redirection of city and state education funding that would create a per-pupil "voucher" of between $5,500 to $8,500. This would come to $16.5 - $25.5 million annually. The total amount withdrawn from the public school system over the two years, including administration and incentives, would be between $45 million and $63 million.

False Solutions
Exposing the dubious arguments and false solutions of voucher proponents is critical, because it is clear from looking at Milwaukee that the worst damage that would occur from implementing vouchers is that it prevents us from adopting strategies that actually work. While one out of every two children in the rest of Wisconsin is in a small class size in the early grades, only one in five children in Milwaukee benefits from smaller classes, in part because the school district has had to fund vouchers.

Ironically, in our state it is Governor Pataki, not the Mayor, who is currently blocking major reforms that would bring about significant improvements in urban public schools. In January, the Governor proposed eliminating state funding earmarked for class size reduction, even though three years of funding beginning in the 1999 school year had been promised since 1997. While there has been extensive press coverage of the delay in adopting this year’s state budget, very few reporters have mentioned one of the main stumbling blocks, the Governor’s attempt to undo this two-year old legislative agreement. The Governor has also directed that the state put up an aggressive legal defense against the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit despite a pattern of inequitable funding that places New York among the five worst states in the nation in terms of funding gaps between wealthy and poor districts.

Smaller classes, better funding and greater accountability are some of the measures used successfully by other states to improve student achievement. Let’s hope New York adopts these winning strategies soon, instead of wasting more time on vouchers and other diversions.