The PBS Network aired an interview last month with journalist Jennifer Berkshire, co-author of an analysis of what she calls the “dismantling” of America’s public schools.
Ms Berkshire does a great job of pointing out how parents who complain about moving targets at school board meetings—ranging from gender identity to critical race theory, from masking policies to return-to-school protocols, from posting lesson plans at the beginning of the year to gun safety, etc., etc.—are being used as pawns by well-funded interests who seek to destroy the public schools.
She’s right. By vilifying teachers, with moves such as placing cameras in every classroom to monitor what is being taught and passing laws to ban the teaching of certain subjects, the political divide in the US has created a situation that will make public school teachers run away and high school students entering college choose majors that will lead them away from teaching.
Ms Berkshire also relates this vilification movement, vast and scattered as it is, to the teacher shortages we see, especially in some areas of the country. We know teacher shortages have always existed in certain subjects, such as special education and some STEM subjects. Still, we are now seeing a depletion of teachers in certain regions, from rural Kansas to large urban areas.
Although some leaders and school administrators are taking ownership of teacher recruitment by instituting programs that encourage new teachers (Educators Rising, South Carolina, Colorado) or increase the likelihood districts will be able to retain good teachers, others are opening up the floodgates to just about any warm body that will stand in front of a classroom, even if they have no special training or qualification as a teacher.
If teaching doesn’t require any particular skill, which is what letting anybody teach who has the time implies, highly qualified teachers are even less like to stick around.
But Ms Berkshire, who is a co-author of the book A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, delivered a much more cautionary tale in her interview. She is concerned that voucher programs, such as the universal voucher program now in place in Arizona, destroy equity.
“You pay for [public schools] because we’re investing in the idea of schools as growing future civic leaders and participants in our democracy,” she said. “What does it say that we’re going to walk away from that and start to define education as an individual responsibility that you shoulder the burden for yourself?”
In my exponential function (forgive me, but I think better in mathematical terms), the poor people are at the left, and the rich people are at the right. Voucher programs usually come with a great tagline about making private schools more affordable, but they hardly ever cover the total cost of tuition.
One problem with my hypothetical, theoretical function, however, is that data, in some cases, don’t support it fully, especially for smaller programs in which the government selects recipients based on income. In the Maryland BOOST program, for example, which provides scholarships to a little more than 3,000 students every year, more than 50 percent of the recipients in 2021-22 were students of color, and 100 percent were eligible for free- or reduced-price meals through their school, a measure that is often considered a proxy for poverty.
The program in Maryland selects students based on financial need, while some programs in other states do not, relying on parents to put away money from their incomes to be used for private school tuition, which qualifies them for tax breaks from the state. Although BOOST doesn’t provide the total cost of tuition, it does take away the opportunity for affluent families to use the money.
But not providing the total amount of tuition still means parents have to come up with part of the tuition. For parents who make a lot of money, that will be good, and vouchers will help them to a certain extent. But parents who don’t make a lot of money are much less likely to take advantage of any voucher program because they won’t be able to come up with the rest of the tuition money. They’ll simply opt for the free public education states are required to provide, despite the fact that the state may have reduced funding for those schools to pay for the vouchers.
So while these voucher programs shift the cost of education from taxpayers and onto parents’ shoulders, they also shift the responsibility of providing education away from the public and onto parents.
Editorial
Dillon Rosenblatt, writing on the Fourth Estate 48 substack in an article entitled “Wealthy Arizonans love [Education Savings Accounts]” also backs the hypothesis: “Put simply, wealthy families can foot the bill and those in lower income areas struggle, as do the public schools they attend, he wrote. “The 75% figure from ADE in August shows that families who can already afford to attend these private schools were the first ones to hop on the opportunity to cash in on the taxpayer money to help them pay for the tuition (most private schools cost more than the $7,000).”
@azedschools estimates that approximately 75% of the universal category applicants do not have a prior record of AZ public school enrollment.
Additional information on the ESA program is available at https://t.co/S5K5pE8stO.
— Arizona Department of Education (@azedschools) August 30, 2022
So while Maryland’s BOOST program may not be one of the biggest offenders, in Arizona, where universal vouchers are the law and child and school advocacy groups are trying to repeal that law, the data reveal that poorer families don’t get much benefit from any sort of diversion of taxpayer dollars toward private schools.
Next time you hear about parents’ rights, remember that the responsibility to foot the bill comes with those rights. And that will widen the equity gap in just about every way. What the outcome creates is a situation where poor kids, disproportionately brown and black students, are stuck in public schools that have had much of their money taken away to fund voucher programs that only wealthy kids have an opportunity to use; poor kids are wholly deprived of that opportunity and then fall further behind their affluent peers.