Whether in the form of tax credits, education savings accounts, or vouchers for low-income or disabled children, programs in Louisiana and Wisconsin have so far only funded 7,000-10,000 students per year. But in Nevada, the state's entire 62 percent share of the meager $8,339 in annual per-student spending (compared to the 2013 national average of $10,700) will be turned over to all families, rich or poor:
Under the law that Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval signed Tuesday, children must be enrolled in a public school for at least 100 days before they can receive a voucher. Low-income families or students with disabilities can receive the same amount the state spends per public school student, or an average of about $5,700, while middle- and upper-income families will receive slightly less, about $5,100 a year.
The result won't just be a massive taxpayer subsidy for more affluent families that regardless would have chosen private schools for their children. As the recent record shows, voucher programs don't just strangle funding for public schools, they provide lifesaving cash injections into some dubious academies that would otherwise fail.
In Georgia, the state's $2,500 tax credit for donations to "nonprofit scholarship groups" to help poor and needy children turned into something else altogether. As the New York Times reported in 2012, "Most of the private schools are religious" and "nearly a quarter of the participating schools in Georgia require families to make a profession of religious faith, according to their websites." In the first year of Governor Bobby Jindal's voucher program in Louisiana, almost half of students attended private schools with a D or F rating. As the New Orleans Times Picayune detailed in November 2014, the voucher students performed poorly:
Of 126 private schools accepting the publicly funded tuition subsidies, 23 posted scores low enough to prevent them from accepting new voucher students next fall.
In some voucher states, the decades-long decline of Catholic schools has been arrested—at least temporarily—by the diversion of public dollars into church coffers. In 2012, the
Wall Street Journal in "
Vouchers Breathe New Life into Shrinking Catholic Schools" explained the dynamic in Indiana:
Thanks to vouchers, St. Stanislaus, which was $140,000 in debt to the Catholic Diocese of Gary at the end of 2010, picked up 72 new students, boosting enrollment by 38%.
"God has been good to us," says Ms. [Principal Kathleen] Lowry. "Growth is a good problem to have."
But sometimes, growth isn't enough. Last month, Our Lady of Grace School nevertheless announced it would be the
third Catholic institution to close in Louisiana despite the influx of taxpayer cash into the Archdiocese of New Orleans coffers:
This year, Our Lady of Grace enrolled only 173 students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade - fewer than a single grade at some schools. By the end of the year, that enrollment had dropped to 158. Most of its students attended with financial assistance from publicly subsidized state vouchers.
Regardless, school vouchers promise to be a major issue in the 2016 elections. In 2012,
Republican nominee Mitt Romney pledged tax credits for homeschool parents and a $25 billion program of federal school vouchers. This year,
most of the GOP White House hopefuls have not only endorsed vouchers, but are trying to outbid each other in winning over influential homeschool advocates in evangelical-heavy states like Iowa. And with
friendly rulings from the Roberts Supreme Court, the future of American public education is clearly on the ballot next year.
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