Vouchers harm public schools

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Vouchers harm public schools				July 24, 2002

Suppose that someone from the (fictitious) Educational Values Foundation offered you $3100 to remove your child from Jamestown High School or James Blair Middle School and place him or her in a secular or religious private school. Then suppose that, as an added incentive, you were promised up to $500 in state tax credits if you contributed to the Foundation. Would you take the money and run, or would you keep your child in the public school system?

That’s the deal offered in the last legislative session by L. Scott Lingamfelter (R-31^st) in HB 1119. Circumventing the then problems involved with direct state aid to private schools, this bill would have allowed state tax credits of up to $500 per year for people contributing to private foundations which granted up to $3100 per person to send students to private schools. The bill further stipulated that children who received such benefits could be from low-income or non low-income families.

While this bill was passed by in the House Finance Committee this year, Lingamfelter and his voucher cohorts are sure to be back at it in the next session. Stalled previously by bothersome questions regarding the separation of church and state, those who favor privatizing education are sure to get the wheels on the bandwagon again. And this time there will be no circumventions.

Thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling, which found it constitutional to use public funds for private school vouchers, proposals arguing for direct state or local aid to families wishing to send their children to private schools will, in the next Virginia legislative session, be de rigueur.

The court case involved the City of Cleveland, which proposed to offer parents, without regard to financial status, vouchers in the amount of a little more than $1200 to send their children to private schools. However, since $1200 would hardly make a dent in the tuitions charged by secular private schools in the Cleveland area, poorer parents who accepted the vouchers would be forced to send their children to less costly parochial schools, if they wished to flee the public school system.

And much the same would be true here, with a slight shift in religious emphasis. Here, where parochial schools, such as Walsingham Academy, charge upwards of $6440 for grades 9-12 and secular schools, such as Hampton Roads Academy, charge $9372 for the same grades, $1200 is not much of an incentive. Nor is Lingamfelter’s $3100 going to benefit those in the lower economic classes who want to send their children to such institutions.

Who, then, would benefit from such voucher arrangements? Obviously the smaller, evangelical Christian schools, whose tuitions in this area run anywhere from $4200 to $4900 a year. And these are the schools that are being targeted by legislators following the conservative agenda of a special interest group that calls itself the Virginia Republican Assembly, which advocates the use of vouchers and religion over “relativism” in the schools. It was with this group that Jay Katzen, the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in 2001 and a strong advocate of vouchers, was associated.

Quite beyond the question of the separation of church and state, such proposals are bound to wreak economic havoc, and especially if money that would normally flow to the public school systems is diverted to vouchers. According to Chuck Maranzano, the spokesman for WJC public schools, the state education system has already suffered a billion dollar shortfall, and vouchers would only add to the catastrophic cutbacks.

Furthermore, if parents are granted money by the state to remove their children from our public schools, what effect is this going to have on enrollments? More specifically, how will plans for a third high school be affected if, say, 300 students are lost to vouchers?

Why indeed should areas such as ours, which have high caliber public schools, contribute public money or give tax credits to people whose primary disaffection with the public schools has to do with the curricular omission of religious instruction?

Rather than divert public funds to private institutions, wouldn’t it be far better to move along the path suggested by Governor Warner and his PASS (Partnership for Achieving Successful Schools) program? Under guidelines suggested by the governor, money already in place in the education pot would be used to raise the standards of public schools that are having difficulty meeting minimum state standards.

As the New York Times suggested in its editorial of June 28, the ruling of the Supreme Court has done as much damage to education as it has to the First Amendment. And, if the voucher adherents in the state legislature have their way, the damage to public education in Virginia could be catastrophic.