State Senator Daylin Leach Crushes The Voucher Argument In PA

With the election of a Republican Governor and Legislature, talk of a School Voucher Program has ignited in Pennsylvania. "School choice" as they call it, sounds wonderful in theory, but usually becomes little more than an assault on public education in detail. State Senator Daylin Leach, a Philadelphia area legislator elected in 2008, takes on the "school choice" crowd quite effectively. Here's a bit of it.

Recently, there has been a lot of attention paid to Senate Bill 1, which would for the first time create a system of taxpayer-funded vouchers which parents could allegedly use to “choose” what school their child can go to if their current school is inadequate. This is certainly a bold idea. It creates a very expensive, new entitlement program in the midst of an unprecedented budget crisis. Given that, as a member of the Senate Education Committee, I feel it is important to subject this legislation to the scrutiny that any proposal this far-reaching deserves.

SB 1 proposes to give each eligible student an average of $9,000 to use at any other public or private school that is willing to take them. Over the course of the first 3 years of the program, this will cost the state several hundred million dollars. The first obvious question is where all of that money is going to come from. “School-choice” advocates say it will follow the child from the old school to the new.

The problem with that is that the old school will not save $9,000 when the student leaves. Most of the costs of running a public school are fixed. If a child leaves, you still need the same teachers, you still need to heat the building, pay the nurse, hire a security guard, etc. So if more money is taken from the school than is saved by the child leaving, the old school is left worse off than before: poorer, and with fewer resources per child for those left behind. This is particularly important because the bill creates a structure where the overwhelming majority of children won’t actually get to “choose” anything and will instead remain at their current school.

The bill says a student can use the voucher at either another public school or a private one. But no school is required to accept any child. Both public and private schools are not only free to set their own criteria for admission; they are free to not accept vouchers at all.

In the case of private schools, most charge far more than $9,000 per year. Supporters of SB 1 do not explain how the “low-income” people eligible for vouchers would come up with the additional thousands of dollars they would need to “choose” to go to their favorite private school. Further, it is highly unlikely that those private schools with strict academic or performance standards will alter those in order to participate in a voucher program. So even if such schools do participate, only the top students of any given school are likely to be accepted, leaving the rest of the students exactly where they were.

Similarly, public schools are also likely to accept few, if any, children with vouchers. We are facing dramatic cuts in state aid to public education. In this climate, “better” public schools are unlikely to subsidize the education of many students from outside of their districts. Who will pay the difference between the $9,000 voucher and the $20,000 or more that most of the better public schools spend per child now? Absent a source of those additional funds, most public schools will, quite reasonably, use their resources to educate the children of their own taxpayers.

And so ladies and gentlemen, we now can see why this makes no sense. It doesn't give true choice to the neediest kids, but it does deplete our public schools finances. This is why the best way to lift kids in failing schools is to fix the school they're in, not give them a little money to go looking around. Yet, the GOP has launched a full court press against public schools, from New Jersey Governor Christie cutting the schools funding to saw-dust on the heels of the top test scores in the country, to federal Republicans claiming that teachers are bankrupting America and killing schools with their union. Here in Pennsylvania, the old voucher program is back out, but at least we have articulate advocates for public education like State Senator Daylin Leach.