Louisiana Voucher Baloney Reveals “The Cost of School Choice”

Over the weekend, our local NPR station broadcast an episode of  The Center for Investigative Reporting‘s podcast “Reveal” called “The Cost of School Choice.” The report looks at the track record of Louisiana’s voucher program, which began 10 years ago, in the wake of Katrina, and promised a better education for New Orlean’s low income children. The podcast is worth a listen.

Investigative reporter Jess Clark followed the story of a mom who navigates the private school voucher system for her daughter, moving her from private school to private school, where her seemingly bright daughter falls behind and stays behind. Despite being in the “mecca of school choice,” the mom “feels like she’s out of options.”

For low income families, desperate to find something better for their children, school choice can often feel like school chaos. Where is the proof that the private options are better? Why are families leaving public schools for lower performing private schools? Why are tax payers funding private schools with poor academic outcomes?

Unlike Florida, Louisiana’s voucher students are required to take the same standardized tests as public school students. However, unlike their public school grades, Louisiana’s voucher school grades are not published. The State keeps them hidden. When the Center for Investigative Reporting journalists used the state formula to calculate school grades for the Louisiana voucher schools, they discovered 92% of the voucher schools graded received a D or F during the last school year. No voucher school graded earned an A or B.

From their calculations:

“…data from the state shows public schools are doing a much better job than voucher schools of helping individual students catch up. In fact, our analysis found that if you put all the voucher schools together, their students would come in next to last in making progress out of all the districts in the state.”

They concluded: “That means those schools aren’t bringing their voucher students up to grade level. We also found that many students are leaving public schools for private ones with lower test scores.”

The reporters noted that many of the best private schools in New Orleans did not accept the vouchers, presumably because they wanted a selective student population.

Investigators also met with the head of the New Orleans Catholic Schools, who admitted they have benefited from the voucher program which has allowed them to reverse declining enrollment and to evangelize to groups of students and families that they would have otherwise been unable to reach.

Taxpayers should question why education funds are being spent for proselytizing.

“The whole argument was that parents themselves were the best accountability system. Now, I think there are multiple things wrong with that argument. Firstly, the tax dollars that are paying for this are not just coming from parents. All of us have a right to know and to demand that our tax dollars be spent wisely. Secondly, parents don’t always choose a school based on the academic performance of that school… The promise that was made was that the education was going to be better, the children were going to learn more. And if they are not getting a better education then I’m sorry, I’m not wanting to support a parent’s desire just to have the status of sending their kid to a private education. And we’re not, I’m not, the society is not getting anything out of that.” Jarvis DeBerry

Hmmm… sounds A LOT like Florida.

Recently, during a “Pundits on the Porch” interview with the James Madison Institute, Florida’s Commissioner of Education, Richard Corcoran, celebrated what he called a monumental achievement: the expansion of parent empowerment vouchers. He claimed Florida’s new publicly funded voucher expansion will give “every single child the exact same opportunity that the richest of the richest in our state have for their children.”

Oh really? Because that isn’t happening in Louisiana where the schools “the richest of the richest” attend remain out of reach of  voucher recipients and desperate parents feel “out of options.”

A 2017 report revealed a similar situation in Florida.

In November 2017, Matthew Chingos, vice president for education data and policy at the Urban Institute, published a paper titled “Are low-quality private schools on the rise in Florida?” In it, Chingos warned that, since 2010,  participation in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program has shifted toward private schools with weak track records of improving student outcomes, not towards the high quality established private schools “the richest of the richest” attend.

Democratic Congresswoman Marcia Fudge summarized her concerns to the Center for Investigative Reporting reporters like this:

“I just wish that at some point we would just be honest with what we are doing, and we would just tell the American people that what we are doing with this is creating a shell game to fund private and religious schools and their providers using taxpayers as the middleman. That is what we’re doing.”

And that smells like accountabaloney.