Utah heats up long-simmering school-voucher debate
Governor has signed into law the first 'universal' voucher program in the US.
from the March 22, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Milwaukee led the way in 1990 and now has nearly 15,000 students using vouchers. A program started in Cleveland in 1995 was challenged all the way up to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 2002 that it did not violate the establishment of religion clause in the Constitution.
But state courts have struck down voucher systems in Colorado and Florida. Those cases related, respectively, to local control and the state constitutional provision for a uniform system of public education. Many states also have so-called Blaine amendments, which prohibit public funding of private institutions. "We're still waiting to see what will happen if a state court takes on the Blaine amendments head on," Mr. d'Entremont says.
The calls for vouchers can make for surprising allies. Some grass-roots activists, many of them racial minorities, place an emphasis on the need for a sort of escape route from schools with a long history of low performance. Often they receive funding from conservative voucher supporters whose agenda otherwise wouldn't match their own. Some conservatives, on the other hand, oppose vouchers at the local level if they're satisfied in a suburban school system and want to maintain the status quo, d'Entremont says.
Charter schools are a more popular form of school choice, sometimes as a compromise to stave off a push for vouchers. These schools stay in the realm of public accountability, but they free principals and teachers from some of the traditional bureaucracy.
One key difference for people concerned about educational equity is that if charter schools are in high demand, they're supposed to select students by lottery, whereas under a voucher system, private schools can choose which students to serve, says Helen Ladd, professor of public policy studies at Duke University.
Professor Ladd co-wrote a book about education in New Zealand, where money follows a student to whatever school he or she attends. The hope was the system would revitalize the most challenged schools. But instead, Ladd says, those schools "were even worse off than they were before, because motivated parents took advantage of the opportunity to move their children ... and left behind in the traditional public schools even greater concentrations of disadvantaged students."
So far, there's no scholarly consensus that voucher programs in the US make a significant difference in student achievement. Two studies of the Milwaukee program, for instance, came up with different results, one showing improvement in reading and math scores for participants and the other showing no gains.
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