A voucher by any other name

is still a voucher, and the bloom is off

Friends, you may or may not have heard of the Invest in Kids Act, passed in 2017 wrapped in a big education funding reform bill. I’m going to tell you about this piece of legislation and others like it, and if you can get all the way through this post, there’s homework at the end. (Just in the interest of transparency you know.)

The Invest in Kids Act is a pilot tax-credit scholarship program that gives donors a 75% tax credit on any donation of up to $1.3M per year (the lucky donor of this full amount receiving $1M in tax breaks). It was originally set to end in January of 2024 but was extended for a year. Just last year it drew in $76M, diverting roughly $57M in taxes back to the donors, and funded somewhere north of 9000 scholarships.

And even though that’s adding up to quite a lot of scratch over 5 years, you can’t know for sure what this money is doing.

The state with all its meticulous record keeping and requirements doesn’t administer all this largesse. Rather, donations are handled by Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs), non-profits who deal the money out to students at private schools.

This shuffle is why proponents say tax credit scholarships are not the same thing as the state giving money to private schools. This is SGOs giving money to private schools.

But a lot gets lost in this shuffle. Like, who is benefiting from these tax credit scholarships? What types of students? How many students with special needs? How many English language learners? How much money does each school receive in these scholarships? How many of these students previously attended public school? What about learning outcomes—are those measured? How do they compare with students’ previous outcomes?

And what about the hundreds of millions siphoned out of the state’s general funds for the last six years? Is anyone keeping track of what all that lost tax revenue could’ve been spent on?

Like I said. A lot gets lost. There is no one place for all this data because at least seven SGOs manage the money for dozens of schools. Lack of sunlight into the process and its impacts and outcomes is one of the main problems with this policy.

But it’s certainly not the only problem.

Private schools choose their own students and set their own rules. In the case of religious schools, some have rules concerning church attendance or compliance with a particular code of behavior—not just for the students but also the parents. Some private schools receiving tax credit scholarships discriminate against LGBTQ students and families. Private schools gonna private school, but those kinds of rules really don’t fly in the public sphere. Why should these schools be funded by public money?

Private schools also really don’t serve many students with disabilities or special needs. No kids are turned away from public schools, and public schools are required to provide a free and appropriate education for every child, including diverse learners and kids with all manner of special needs. Not so for private schools. They don’t have to, so they don’t.

So we’ve got a severe lack of transparency. And we’ve got major discrimination issues: religious bias, LGBTQ exclusion, and a refusal to serve kids with special needs. Those are the two biggest categories of problems with Illinois’ version of vouchers.

Hey, wait a minute—who said anything about vouchers?

Well, it turns out that tax credit scholarships and vouchers not only perform the same function, but they do it with the same public money. This was was recently well stated by the Kentucky Supreme Court (and well summarized by Peter Greene in Forbes) when a tax credit scholarship case came before them. To those who say, as the Kentucky attorney general did, that tax credit “funds were never in the government’s hands,” the court found that

“The money at issue cannot be characterized as simply private funds…rather it represents the tax liability that the taxpayer would otherwise owe.”

“[T]he funds at issue are sums legally owed to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and subject to collection for public use including allocation to the Department of Education for primary and secondary education” and reallocating them to private school tuition is unconstitutional.

Deputy Chief Justice Lisabeth T. Hughes wrote “Simply stated, it puts the Commonwealth in the business of raising sum(s) . . . for education other than in common schools.”

And as you might expect, all that disappeared tax revenue harms our public schools because they continue to be underfunded. Even though we had that transformative education funding reform that passed with Invest in Kids wrapped up inside of it, Illinois hasn’t managed to fund its schools anywhere near what that law stipulated and we’re billions behind. (If you think I’m being my usual hyberbolic self with that “b,” I’m not; here’s a good clear report that explains.)

So: tax credit scholarships and vouchers are essentially the same deal. And I’ve tried to plainly outline the main problems with them in Illinois as found in our relatively small program Invest in Kids.

But we haven’t gotten to the worst parts yet. When these kinds of programs are scaled up, as they are in neighboring states Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa, where they run to the hundreds of millions of dollars annually, as well as in Arizona and Florida and several other states, we start to see patterns emerge.

First, most kids using vouchers were already attending private schools. So when you hear people saying vouchers provide kids with a “way out of terrible public schools,” this is not the typical scenario. Most vouchers provide families with a little extra help to pay for their private schools.

But for those who do move over from public schools to private schools on vouchers? There’s been a lot of data collected on these kids. And it looks actually terrible.

Large negative impacts corroborated by researchers all over the country are so bad they are considered “virtually unrivaled in education research.” The graph below, on math achievement, shows effects of vouchers over time, with voucher programs starting out small on the left (narrow columns representing a small number of students/schools participating), showing modest results. As programs increased in size (wider bands representing larger numbers of students/schools), this is when the unprecedented underwater results start to show.

These negative results have been seen by researchers at Indiana University, Stanford University, Michigan State University, and others. Put another way, the impact of vouchers on students is worse than that of major crises such as covid or natural disasters. Like so:

Josh Cowen of Michigan State offers a pretty straightforward reason for these rather shocking findings. He notes that as more and more government money is dedicated to voucher programs, lots of pop-up schools appear, ready to benefit from the cashflow.

My old buddy Milton Friedman wrote about the wondrous possibilities afforded by the market in exactly this scenario when he first proposed vouchers in 1955:

“Let the subsidy be made available to parents regardless [of] where they send their children — provided only that it be to schools that satisfy specified minimum standards — and a wide variety of schools will spring up to meet the demand.”

But the odd thing of it is, all due respect to Milton, this wide variety of schools springing up?—these aren’t good schools. They’re financially unstable pop-ups created for the sole purpose of receiving voucher cash. It is not surprising that they are poorly equipped to educate students. And it is not surprising that many of these schools close as quickly as they open—dumping vulnerable kids right out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Add to all of this, a final damning effect of vouchers—they go hand in hand with a chipping away of democratic, civic, and public sphere norms. Dountania Batts outlined this clearly in a recent YouTube presentation, “Indiana Choice Scholarships Bulldozed the Pillars of Indiana Public Education.” Right on the heels of Indiana’s decision to begin funding private schools through vouchers, came an appointed, rather than elected state superintendent of schools and appointed, rather than elected school boards; laws governing public schools no longer apply in major urban areas; and school accountability laws are falling.

We know this last one all too well in Chicago. Any democratic process here is hard won and I hope we don’t take any of them for granted. And we certainly don’t need to see more of the democratic norms we do have, get chipped away.

Do we need more opacity in state spending? Do we need more discrimination? Do we need another bait and switch disappointing ed reform program that in this case brings unprecedented damage to student outcomes? Do we need more lobbyists cutting backroom deals that no one voted on? Here? In Illinois?

I know we’re all pelted with dire information requiring urgent action every day. I don’t want to add to that nerve-rattling racket. But I do want you to consider doing something about Invest in Kids. There are a lot of monied lobbies in Springfield right now working hard to extend and expand Invest in Kids. If you find any of what I’ve shared persuasive, you’ll want to contact your legislators and tell them that Invest in Kids must end as planned, and not come back.

This letter to your legislator is an easy way to do that.

Calling or stopping by your state rep or senator’s office also makes an impact if you’re that type of people.

Do what you can to keep public funds for public schools in Illinois. We can do this, friends. We got ourselves an elected school board in Chicago! We can stop vouchers and protect our public schools.

And just to makeup for that dead rose up at the top of the post, here’s some fresh new flowering quince blossoms from the neighbor’s back yard.

Image of dead roses by Petra from Pixabay, image of flowering quince by me

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