In South Carolina, Paul Bowers, the communications director for the ACLU, gives six reasons why South Carolina “can’t afford to throw away money on private schools.”
Top South Carolina lawmakers intend to pass a private school voucher law in 2025. This is a terrible idea.
A voucher is a tool for taking public school funding and sending it to private schools. A family that chooses to use a voucher will often have some, but not all, of the cost of tuition covered by the state. After years of abysmal academic results in other states, some politicians have tried rebranding vouchers with new names like “Education Savings Accounts.” In South Carolina’s case, they chose the name Education Scholarship Trust Fund Program (Senate Bill 62).
I’m a South Carolina public school parent who worked for years as an award-winning education reporter. Let me share what the research says about vouchers — because you aren’t going to hear it from pro-voucher politicians this year.
Vouchers cause learning loss.
You probably heard about the problem of learning loss during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Students fell behind grade-level expectations in reading and math, and teachers are still working to catch them up to speed.
In terms of learning loss in mathematics, the effect of vouchers has been worse in some states than the effect of COVID-19, according to the National Coalition for Public Education. Studies of long-running voucher programs in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington D.C. show that students who used vouchers to leave public schools for private schools performed worse than their peers who stayed in public schools.
There are a few theories about why this happens. Many voucher-recipient schools are what education researcher Josh Cowen has called “sub-prime providers,” which are propped up by voucher funding and often close within a few years after opening. One analysis of D.C. voucher-recipient religious schools suggested that they produced worsening results in part because students “received less instruction in reading and math.”
Vouchers are risky for kids with disabilities.
In a 2011 report, the ACLU of Wisconsin found that voucher-recipient schools in Milwaukee were “failing to provide children with disabilities their right to equal access to an education.” Milwaukee Public Schools remained the only option for students with disabilities, as the state had exempted private schools from anti-discrimination laws. A local journalist found that similar problems persisted well into 2023.
The ACLU of Wisconsin found that the result of Milwaukee’s voucher experiment was the creation of a “dual system of education in the city” — where students without disabilities had the choice of using a private school voucher, while students with disabilities could really only attend Milwaukee Public Schools.
There are four more reasons, including “vouchers fund discrimination” and “vouchers are a budgetary disaster.” Read the full post here.
