Vouchers: Will the legislature say yes to the kids?

Vouchers: Will the legislature say yes to the kids?
by Bud Schauerte / LSR

When, in 1955, the future Nobel laureate-economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose conceived the idea of tax-funded school vouchers and wrote a now famous treatise on the subject (“The Role of Government in Education”), virtually no one believed that such vouchers someday would play a significant role in funding primary and secondary schooling through private and religious schools.
Correct, they haven’t.
The number of U.S. tax-funded students attending private and religious schools today is so low that totals are pure speculation. Add up the limited number of voucher-eligible K-12 students in the seven states (Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Utah, Iowa), plus the District of Columbia, where legislation authorizes limited tax funded vouchers, and the number barely exceeds 130,000 students.
Home schooling growth is helpful as a comparison with tax-funded voucher education. Brian D. Ray, founder of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) estimates that U.S. home schoolers now total more than 2 million, with the number increasing by seven percent annually.
About 400,000 Texas students are home-schooled, according to a group known as Texas Home Educators.
Among the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) is that parents have the option of transferring their children from failing schools to better-performing public schools. Regrettably for supporters of vouchers, the NCLB law does not provide for private school transfer options, a shortcoming which supporters intend to correct before the NCLB law comes up for renewal next year. There is a huge political fight being waged about it.
“What led to increased interest in vouchers was the deterioration of schooling dating from 1965 when the National Educational Association (NEA) converted itself from a professional association to a trade union,” Friedman states from his website.
The NEA, now the largest labor union in the nation, is confident that the nation again will reject vouchers on both Federal and state levels. “U.S. voters, for the last 30 years, have rejected vouchers every time they’ve been proposed;” the NEA claims on its website.
If that was the case at one time, it isn’t any more. Arizona in June passed new and expanded school-choice programs for the state, while the state of Wisconsin expanded Milwaukee’s long-standing school choice program by 50 percent.
What the NEA fails to take into account is that the fast pace of school failures has trapped large numbers of children in failing schools with little or no hope of getting out.
In Texas, a huge concern is the high school dropout rate. According to the San Antonio-based Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA), Texas high school students drop out at the rate of 36 percent annually. The percentages are greater for Hispanic (48 percent) and African American (43 percent) students.
The U.S. Department of Education in June noted that 3 million children currently are attending chronically failing schools. Such schools are defined by the NCLB Act as those which have failed to satisfy minimal state standards for at least six consecutive years.
On the left/right political spectrum, Republicans and conservatives have been more likely to support school vouchers than Democrats.
But Michael Q. Sullivan, vice president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), claims that school choice is not a partisan issue. “Some 80% to 90% of both African American and Hispanic parents, most of which support Democrat candidates for public offices, are demanding school choice,” he says.
The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature is further evidence that those who favor or oppose tax-funded school voucher cannot be stereotyped by political party.
During last year’s regular legislative session, a pilot school-voucher program for certain Texas school districts might have become law had it not been for a lethal Republican amendment to a bill reauthorizing the Texas Education Agency (TEA).
Rep. Carter Casteel (R-New Braunfels), authored the amendment to SB 422 which stripped the pilot voucher program from the reauthorizing bill. The vote total that erased hopes of a school voucher program in Texas was a slim 74-70.
A switch of two or three votes—Democrat or Republican—in the House of Representatives would have given Texas its first tax-funded school voucher program.
But the setback in the Texas House last year has not discouraged newly organized school voucher supporters. The most recent (June 7, 2006) lobbying group to organize is one called “Texans for School Choice,” headed by Jason Johnson as executive director.
“Our goal is to support legislation which will set up pilot tax-funded voucher programs in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio,” Johnson says. “We intend to organize parents and keep them informed on school choice issue.”
So what will happen if the Texas Legislature again rejects tax-funded school vouchers? That’s exactly what happened last month in Newark, N. J., when the Legislature rejected vouchers for New Jersey students.
A caboodle of parents, acting on behalf of 60,000 students, got together and filed a class action law suit against the whole state. Could this occur in Texas? Not likely because members of the Texas Legislature (especially Republicans) would need to have a political death wish. Come to think of it, a class action lawsuit against the state of Texas is entirely possible.
Distributed by www.lonestarreport.org