Letter to the Editor: Say No to School Vouchers

To the Editor:

The New Jersey legislature is considering adoption of a voucher scheme that would divert our tax dollars from public schools to fund private and religious ones.  

Each public school child who receives a voucher to go to a private or religious school would drain up to $16,000 from his or her school district. Yet the cost of educating the remaining children would not be reduced because these are overwhelmingly fixed costs -- such as buildings and teachers -- that are not lowered when a few children leave a classroom.

Nor will this destruction be contained to a few districts. Voucher promoters have been clear that the goal is to expand vouchers state-wide, similar to Indiana and Wisconsin, whose large voucher schemes also began as limited experiments.  

Imagine the devastation to our public schools that would result from having to increase class sizes and cut programs in order to pay for the private and religious education of thousands. This kind of public school destruction is why U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said emphatically that he “will never support school vouchers.”

Voucher proponents claim vouchers would help low-income children.  But the people of New Jersey are not fooled by the false marketing. Quinnipiac University found that they reject the use of their tax dollars to pay for private and religious schools by 56% to 39%.  

And New Jersey residents are not alone. Taxpayer-funded vouchers have been rejected repeatedly by voters across the country.  In Utah, a voucher law passed by the legislature was even repealed by that State’s voters.  

Voters reject vouchers because they understand that they are a consistently failed experiment that hurts the children who receive vouchers as well as those who stay in the public schools.    

A perfect example of the failure of vouchers is the Milwaukee program, which is very similar to the one being proposed in New Jersey.  Last spring, for the first time, the Milwaukee voucher students were given the same standardized tests as the students attending the Milwaukee public schools.  The voucher students did much worse.  Only 34.4% of voucher students were proficient in math and 55.2% in reading.  Of the demographically comparable public school students, 47.8% were proficient in math and 55.3% in reading, and Milwaukee public school students as a whole did even better.

This failure of vouchers is particularly striking as the voucher students are a very select group, hand-picked by the private and religious schools to ensure their success.  They also include very few children with special needs -- only 1.5% versus almost 20% of Milwaukee’s public school students.

And Milwaukee’s failed voucher experiment has not come cheaply.  Last year alone, it cost the taxpayers of Wisconsin $131 million.    
   
Vouchers not only fail students academically, they also place them in danger by sending them to unregulated voucher mills that spring up to profit from our tax dollars. In Ohio, for example, the Cleveland Plain Dealer discovered that the Islamic Academy of Arts and Sciences operated in a building with dangerous levels of lead-based paint and no fire alarm or sprinkler system.  Eight of the 12 instructors did not have teaching licenses, and one had been convicted of first-degree murder.  In 1999, more than half of the students for whom the school received voucher payments did not even attend the school, or did so for only part of the year.  

Such scandals are rampant among the handful of states with vouchers.

New Jersey already has a program that enables children to attend public schools in districts outside of their own.  This program could easily be modified to enable more children living in high-poverty districts to attend a quality public school elsewhere in the State.  In contrast to radical, failed voucher experiments, such inter-district programs have been very effective across the country in helping low-income children excel academically.  

If voucher promoters want to experiment with this failed idea here in our state, they must do so with their own money.  We need to do everything possible to keep them away from our children and our tax dollars.  

Julia Sass Rubin

Princeton Township resident and member of Save Our Schools NJ