Imagine parents of your students receiving thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to send their children to private schools...
Next, watch your students react as the private schools take only the high achievers, leaving behind low performers, special ed students and those whose families are too poor to pay matching costs for tuition...
Now, experience what it feels like when your school, already struggling to make ends meet, loses precious ADA funding due to declining enrollment, and is forced to cut programs, curriculum and staff...
Members of CTA's Board of Directors serving on the Voucher Monitoring Committee include Michael R. Green, Dianne K. Jones, Paul Markowitz (chair), Lynette P. Henley, Joyce E. Lewke and Tom Conry.
This nightmare is not the result of an overactive imagination. It's called vouchers - and it's all too real. The voucher initiative that has qualified for the November ballot - The National Average School Funding Guarantee and Parental Right to Choose Quality Education Amendment (Proposition 38) - could have all of the above results.
"Vouchers would destroy public education as we know it," says Jan Hopkins, a Garden Grove Education Association member serving on CTA's Voucher Monitoring Workgroup. "The notion that you can increase competition and improve school quality by taking money out of public education and giving it to private schools is a fallacy. There's only so much money. If you take money from public schools and give it to private schools, public schools won't have enough money to get better. They don't have enough money as it is."
Timothy Draper, a 41-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist known for the concept of "viral marketing," or instantaneously circulating advertisements via e-mail, has promised to spend millions of his own dollars to pass Prop. 38, which threatens to infect the entire public education system. According to the New York Times, Draper "advocates free-market solutions at every turn" and considers public education "socialistic."
Under Draper's proposal, parents would be eligible for an annual taxpayer-paid "scholarship" in the amount of $4,000 (or half of the state's education expenditure per child or half of the national average expenditure, if either results in a larger amount) to remove their children from public schools and enroll them in private or parochial schools. Draper claims his initiative would free up money for public schools through declining enrollment, but analysts say it wouldn't work that way - operational and maintenance costs at school facilities would not necessarily go down in sync with enrollment declines.
According to the state's legislative analyst, the long-term financial impact of providing vouchers for children already enrolled in private school could far outweigh any savings from moving public school students into private schools. "There are currently 620,000 pupils enrolled in private schools and, over the course of the four-year phase-in, each of these students would be eligible for a $4,000 scholarship. The costs are at least $2.48 billion to cover the tuition of private schools' students if all private schools participate."
Within less than a decade, the initiative would also do away with the Proposition 98 minimum funding guarantee, thus threatening community colleges and charter schools. If the initiative passes, it could end guaranteed funding for community colleges, child care and state schools for the seriously disabled.
New taxes would be necessary to cover scholarships for students as well as a bureaucracy to oversee distribution of funds. If taxes are not increased, the cost of vouchers would likely mean cuts in transportation, local government, health care, childcare and law enforcement.
The most deceptive part of the initiative is that it purports to raise California's per-pupil spending to the national average. Since the initiative contains no legal requirement for this to happen, analysts see it as a deliberate attempt to convince voters that the initiative will help public schools, when in actuality it will only siphon funding away.
"The part of the initiative that describes raising per-pupil funding to the national average does not require the Legislature to improve school funding, it simply allows it," explains CTA President Wayne Johnson.
"To say this will help bring school funding to the national average is false advertising," says Paul Markowitz, a member of CTA's Board of Directors and chair of the Voucher Monitoring Committee. "Draper discusses bringing school funding to the national average as a pretext to get people to vote for something that's actually quite different. And if too many people don't read the fine print, they won't realize that the Draper initiative is a whole different ballgame from bringing California school funding up to the national average."
Even Draper's own people have admitted the national average tactic was a ruse to get people to vote for the initiative.
While the reduction in funds for public schools would undermine recently enacted reforms intended to improve them, Prop. 38 would make it essentially impossible to extend such requirements to private and parochial schools. Such schools are already exempt from laws dealing with minimum performance standards, high school graduation tests, and even teacher credentialing requirements. Under language included in the initiative, such requirements could not be applied to private schools without a three-fourths vote of the Legislature, a threshold that's virtually impossible to reach.
Other parts of the initiative that have education advocates up in arms include:
- Private schools are able to pick and choose which students they want to attend their schools. Voucher-redeeming schools would be allowed to discriminate against students with physical disabilities and learning problems, as well as on the basis of gender, religion, IQ and family income. They would not even have to give a reason for rejecting a child.
- The initiative exempts voucher schools from provisions of the building code, including earthquake, fire and safety standards of school construction. Students could be attending unsafe schools - at taxpayer expense.
- The only testing requirement is that schools administer a test that is "nationally normed." There is no guarantee that such a test would be aligned with state standards or comparable to California state tests.
The Draper initiative would use taxpayer funds to subsidize private and parochial schools that are not accountable for whether kids are learning or not. In addition, they would receive public money and not have to account to anyone for how it is spent. Private schools' governing meetings and minutes would not be open to the public.
With no minimum number of enrolled students required before a school could qualify to receive voucher funds, the system could be easily abused. Any individual or company could start a voucher school, with or without training or experience. Parents could declare their homes to be voucher schools.
Vouchers also violate the separation of church and state. "The clear separation of church and state is probably the main reason why a country such as ours, which is multicultural and multi-religious, hasn't had internal fighting," says Markowitz. "This separation has worked very well, and has been used as a blueprint all over the world. To start messing with it now makes me very, very nervous."
"At a time when world events from Bosnia to the Middle East underscore the importance of church/state separation, it is more important than ever that we abide by the constitutional safeguards that have guided this country for more than 200 years," says Rethinking Schools, a Milwaukee-based organization that studies education issues.
Vouchers are at the very heart of extremist attacks on public institutions. Rethinking Schools describes it as "an attack which seeks to reduce government responsibility for the good of all _ while maximizing government support for private and corporate gain." "Voucher proposals are part of a movement to eliminate public schools altogether," noted Coretta Scott King in 1997. "But those who seek to privatize public education have never offered a shred of credible evidence that it offers a promising alternative."
Some characterize vouchers as an issue of "school choice." In reality, the Draper initiative provides "private school choice," not "parental choice." Private schools would not be required to accept all student applicants. Private schools are not available in all geographic areas, and are currently at more than 95 percent of their capacity, leaving few openings for students and increasing the likelihood of discrimination.
"We need to make every public school a school of choice," asserts Dianne Jones, a member of CTA's Board of Directors and the Voucher Monitoring Workgroup. "The way to do this is to improve funding for public schools, not take it away. We can make it so people want to attend these schools and teach in these schools. Vouchers are not the answer."
The issue of choice does nothing but create a diversion from the real issues, adds Jones. "The real problems with schools are outdated and overcrowded facilities, underfunding of schools, large class size, and a teacher shortage caused by low teacher salaries. Vouchers will not solve any of these problems. They will only create new ones."
PROP. 38 ABANDONS NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS
- The voucher initiative, Prop. 38, will cut funding to local public schools, which means fewer textbooks, fewer teachers and more overcrowded classrooms.
- Implementing the voucher program will cost at least $3 billion and not one dime will be used to improve neighborhood schools.
PROP. 38 PROVIDES NO ACCOUNTABILITY TO TAXPAYERS
- Prop. 38 creates unregulated voucher schools that receive taxpayer money but can make financial decisions in secret and are not required to have their finances audited.
- Voucher school operators are not required to have any training or experience educating children, and voucher school teachers do not need a credential or even a college degree.
- Prop. 38 provides $4,000 vouchers to those who claim to "home school" their kids, but provides no system to monitor them.
PROP. 38 COSTS TAXPAYERS BILLIONS
- Providing $4,000 vouchers for the 700,000 students currently in private schools will cost nearly $3 billion.
- Paying for these vouchers and the new bureaucracies created by Prop. 38 will require either a tax increase or a cut in vital services, such as public safety, child care or transportation.
- The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association opposes Prop. 38.
PROP. 38 HURTS KIDS
- Voucher schools - not parents - will choose which school students can attend.
- Voucher schools get public money, but are allowed to reject children for almost any reason, including gender, religion, language, ability to pay, or academic or physical ability.
