The problem with vouchers and sending public money to private schools
Published July 9, 2014
by Rev. Vernon Tyson, retired Methodist pastor, published in News and Observer, July 8, 2014.
I’ve been a United Methodist preacher since 1952. All that time I have been married to the love of my life, who spent all of her working years teaching in the public schools of North Carolina. My daddy was a preacher and my granddaddy and my great-granddaddy and his daddy and my five brothers were all preachers. My forebears planted tobacco and have preached the Gospel in Eastern North Carolina since well before the Civil War.
I believe that America is a God-centered nation – we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, after all. But to give tax dollars to private religious academies is wrong.
The 2013 decision by the General Assembly to provide public tax dollars in the form of vouchers to private, selective academies violates the N.C. Constitution as well as the U.S. Constitution; the former says plainly enough that public school money is exclusively for public schools.
Virtually all of the schools cited on voucher applications thus far are private religious academies. Two of the top three applicants are in Raleigh, including the Al Iman School and the Raleigh Christian School. Most of the rest are private Christian schools. They want public money but have no intention of admitting the public to their schools. Will the Islamic academies take Christian students? Will the Christian academies accept Islamic or Jewish pupils? Will any of these small religious academies have the resources to accommodate mentally or physically challenged students – the same ones who are welcomed with open arms at our public schools every morning? If Christian identity schools pop up that preach white supremacy, will they get public tax dollars, too?
Don’t get me wrong. I fully support the right of every religious institution to instruct children however it sees fit, even if I disagree with some of its tenets. That is part of our core identity as Americans. None of them, however, has any right to taxpayer dollars.
Most of our Founding Fathers believed in God. But they all believed in religious freedom. There would be no Church of the United States. There would be no official state religion. This was enshrined in the Constitution and based in part on the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, authored by Thomas Jefferson. The state cannot get in the religion business.
Nor can the church afford to be ruled by the state. We believe in the one Golden Rule, but we also know about the other – that he who has the gold makes the rules. Churches should take neither money nor dictation from the principalities of this world. This school voucher law is a threat to religion as much as endorsing one religion or another is a threat to the Constitution.
But the best reason to oppose school vouchers is because they drain millions of tax dollars from our cash-strapped public schools. We have not yet financed our public schools as fully as they deserve. Apparently we cannot afford even inadequate funding for our public schools. This is no time to be supporting yet another school system, especially one that so clearly violates our state and federal constitutions. It is unethical and immoral to take tax dollars from public schools and hand them over to unaccountable private corporations that don’t have to accept everybody, obey public school standards, provide a lunch room or a library, or care for special needs students.
Why should your son lose his best teacher because North Carolina can’t afford to pay her a salary she can live on? Why should your daughter’s favorite teacher leave because our schools can’t match Georgia after we’ve written so many no-strings attached checks to private schools? Why should your second-grader lose a teaching assistant so that we can buy books for the local Islamic school or provide creationist science texts for your town’s “Christ-centered” academy?
I am grateful that we have been endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. In North Carolina, those rights include a sound basic education in a system of free, equal, tax-supported public schools. And our Constitution stipulates that public money for education must be spent exclusively for that high public purpose.
The Rev. Vernon C. Tyson lives in Raleigh.
July 9, 2014 at 9:17 am
Tom Hauck says:
Good column but not one word about how the current public schools are not teaching all the children.
Many people think that Chapel Hill schools and their teachers are the best, yet in the 2012 - 13 school year (the latest statistics available) only 15.2% of the Black elementary school children passed their reading and math end-of-grade tests while 74.6% of the Whites passed.
How can anyone want to keep those Black children locked up in schools that do not teach them?
By the way, at the high school level only 28.4% of the Chapel Hill Blacks passed their tests while 83.4% of the Whites passed those same tests.
I do not see a problem with sending a child to a school that will teach the child, even if a bit of religion is included.
July 9, 2014 at 3:57 pm
Johnny Hiott says:
We should never forget education in America was the best in the world until government took it over.
July 10, 2014 at 11:29 am
Richard Bunce says:
In a bureaucracy, especially a government bureaucracy where actually earning enough revenue to cover expenses is not usually required, eventually the wrong person(s) will gain enough power to destroy whatever it is the bureaucracy was assigned to accomplish. Then it usually becomes about the continued existence of the bureaucracy and not the bureaucracy achieving its goals.
July 9, 2014 at 11:28 am
Richard Bunce says:
There is no down side to providing relatively low income parents with the resources to have K-12 education choices as relatively high income parents have always had including elected officials, government education bureaucrats and government school system administrators/ teachers. Many of these voucher eligible children are not succeeding in traditional government schools systems where the majority of students are not proficient at basic skills. As the national average spending per student in traditional government schools is $10,000 plus the ~$4000 voucher is actually increasing the per student funding in traditional government schools when a parent/student uses one to attend an alternate school system. How about we fund all students at $10,000 plus and let the parents/students decide which school system gets the full per student amount?
Actually even better would be a pre-refundable tax credit in that per student funding amount to remove the hooks of the government education industrial complex government education bureaucrats into the alternate school systems that vouchers invite.
July 10, 2014 at 2:22 pm
Curt Budd says:
If a parent wants or needs to pay for their child to attend a private school, they have every right to do so. But if you actually read Rev. Tyson's article, the issue is you cannot use public tax dollars to fund, what is in effect, private corporations aka charter schools. I am find with the idea of schools that try innovative, new ideas, with less regualtion on their curriculums. However, you CANNOT use my tax dollars to fund schools that discriminate on religious grounds, have NO requirements to provide for special-needs children, contribute to the hundred thousand dollar salaries of charter school inc.'s salaries, etc. There is no way you can justify that. And then to cap it off, the state trots out test score data of charter vs traditional. What a joke. If a charter school has an enrollment of 100 hand-selected students, with no special-needs clientele, they better score higher. What's sad, is half of them still do not. Speaking of diversity, that leads me to the next response.
The continual use of achievement gap %'s is worn out. If you use the % of black vs white proficiency as an indictment on schools and/or teaching, then I guess public schools are biased towards Asian children. Because they consistently out-perform whites in this same data. Should we use the data to continually strive to serve ALL children to the best of our ability(something that Charter schools do not have to deal with btw), absoutely! But differences in the importance that some demographics place on education is exponentially more of a factor in school performance than the school or the teacher. Again, do not misunderstand, teachers and schools should always strive to reach/motivate ALL children, but the widening of the "achievement gap" has a LOT more to do with changes in society, than it does in changes in education itself.
Finally, @ Richard Bunce, you seem to have a passion for this topic, and if your goal is truly to better educate our students, then I will be glad to debate on the public vs charter issue. But please dont generalize with "everyone" believes public schools are failing. For one, you have used the data on EOG tests, quoting % of students not meeting proficient as proof. You can use that data to compare one school to another, but comparing year-to-year is invalid. A few people at DPI sitting around a table arbitrarily decided what the pass/fail number was going to be, called "re-norming" the test. As a 16 year veteran AP Statistics teacher, I can tell you these numbers have no real meaning. Are there issues with education? Absolutely. Especially, at the admistrative level. The end-of-course tests(in math particularly) in their current form are horrible measures of actual student learning. However, I have former or current students that have attended/do attend every Ivy League school, Northwestern, Stanford, have been Parks scholars at NC State, Morehead scholars at UNC-Chapel Hill, etc. so I see hundreds of highly qualified students pass through my PUBLIC school every year.
July 10, 2014 at 2:26 pm
Curt Budd says:
As follow-up, yes, I can spell, trying to type on a cell phone. And congrats Rev. Tyson on a very well-thought out, well-written article.
July 11, 2014 at 12:11 am
Richard Bunce says:
I am interested in giving the parents the choice in how their children are educated and not leave it up to government education bureaucrats who have failed many students and their parents. Government preschool funding, GI bill, Pell grants, etc, etc, etc all regularly go to private businesses performing education functions at the parents/students direction. The government education industrial complex near monopoly on K-12 education must come to an end. Relatively low income parents must be given options just like relatively high income parents including many elected officials, government education bureaucrats, and government school system administrators/teachers have had for years.
July 11, 2014 at 12:14 am
Richard Bunce says:
Do not know where you found the "everyone" comment but I do know wherever vouchers are offered to parents there are many more applicants than vouchers.
July 11, 2014 at 10:12 am
Bill Worley says:
Education of our children was long ago decided to be an important goal, as an educated populace betters the entire populace. The State providing for a public education became important because otherwise education went only to those who could afford to pay for it.
For too long now we have placed the blame for students who don't achieve solely at the feet of our schools and teachers. All this while we have seen our society digress in terms of core family units and increased socio-economic disparity. It boggles my mind how we can on one hand have raised academic standards and expectations regularly through the years (what percentage of high school students in the 40's, 50's, and 60's regularly took Algebra 2, PreCalculus, and Calculus while still in high school, for example), seen brighter and brighter people enter education having completed teacher training programs that have benefited from increased research into learning and best pedagogical practices, and yet we see student achievement numbers on standardized tests be flat or fall.
I do find it interesting that while we claim that schools are not meeting the needs of black students because of their low achievement marks, we don't also suggest schools must really be favoring asian students due to their high achievement marks. Could it be that the major factors are outside of school, rather than inside? Having taught for 18 years, I cannot think of a personal experience with a teacher who clearly chose to not meet needs of an ethnic group. While I can accept the notion, particularly historically, it's otherwise unfathomable to me.
Parents have always had the freedom to educate their children as they see fit, and that freedom rightfully remains. But the use of tax monies to provide for the agreed upon public education must and should be used just for that. Otherwise we are changing the paradigm, opening ourselves up to government financed education of any kind.
July 12, 2014 at 11:15 am
Richard Bunce says:
Parents have not had the freedom to education their children as they see fit in too many cases including not having access to direct the resources for their child's education away from failed traditional government school systems to alternative school systems that would better educate their child to outright assaults from the government education industrial complex of alternate education systems available to any outside the relatively wealthy especially homeschooling systems.
Speaking of unfathomable... the traditional government school system is incapable of educating a segment of the student population for a variety of societal reasons say it's advocates but they also say the parents of those students should not be given access to the resources for their child to attend an alternate school system that can educate their child.
July 11, 2014 at 10:32 am
Tom Hauck says:
Good to see that there is lots of interest in the subject of public schools not teaching all the children and looking for a way to teach all the children.
It seems that those (at least some of them) already in the system are satisfied that they are doing the right thing and if all the kids do not learn, they do not care -- or are unwilling to do anything to get them to learn.
They also seem unwilling to let the child go to a school that will teach that child even if costs half of what is spent in the public school (a scholarship is $4,200 while the average cost of a child in the public school for the 2012-13 school year was $8,436).
Even then, while spending all that money, about 20% drop out prior to graduation and of those who do graduate from high school and go to the next grade (in a community college or a four year college) about 60% require extra help before they can do the work.
In other words they insist that the poor child can only go to a public school, but refuse to take the responsibility of teaching that child while at the school. They blame the parents -- for no books in the home, the TV always on, coming to school hungry and on and on.
They seem to want to continue the generations of second class citizens dependent on the government or locked up in prison (Latest available statistics show that in 2011 34% of the prisoners tested for reading at the 0 to 6th grade level).
If you do not want the responsibility of teaching the child, set that child free to go to a school that will teach the child and allow it to earn a decent living. The Republican legislature has started the ball rolling by following the recommendations of Darrell Allison at www.pefnc.org.
July 12, 2014 at 11:05 am
Richard Bunce says:
The two primary if not only goals of the government education industrial complex is increased funding for traditional government school systems and crushing of any viable alternative school system especially for any parents besides their relatively wealthy supporters. The performance of the traditional government school is not important with the possible exception of a desire for poor performance to be used as a lever for increased funding.
