One Utah

Now that it looks like Utah has decided to find ways to funnel tax money into religious institutions, I feel obliged to talk about vouchers.

I’m a graduate of Judge Memorial. IOW, I attended a private, religious school. I’m opposed to vouchers because of that experience.

Public tax dollars should not be used for sectarian education. At Judge, even non-Catholic students received Catholic education in our religion classes. Now, I have no objection to Judge Memorial teaching religion. I object to tax dollars being used to support sectarian religious education. Say what you will, even the most careful teachers in religious schools will tend to have a bias in favor of their particular flavor of faith. In a private institution, they should not have to present a truly objective view. They should be able to advocate for their view - but they shouldn’t use tax dollars to do so.

Voucher proponents argue in favor of parental choice. Of course they’re ignoring several important realities. It’s not as if there are thousands of empty seats in Utah’s private schools. To the contrary, Utah’s private schools have every student they squeeze into their buildings.

Voucher proponents like to argue that “competition” will be good for public schools. They’ll have to compete and get better or students will take their vouchers and run to private schools. The painful hole in that argument remains obvious. Private educations may be better than public ones, but not because private schools are inherently superior but because private schools have the freedom to remove any and all behavioral problems - and they do so aggressively. While I was at Judge, a student in my year was expelled for behavioral issues, another student was expelled in my hear for low grades. They simply went away. As a result, private school students are more motivated to study, more likely to like school and hence do better, and also more likely to come from families in which education is more highly valued and hence receive full parental support. I don’t remember disruptions in classrooms or even in the hallways at judge. I remember one fight on school grounds. The cafeteria far from being a wild and woolly jungle of adolescent was a place where people ate, socialzed and studied. The institution was, I’m told, far more lenient when I was there than it is now. But those circumstances did not arise because of the magic of private school - they arose because the school could choose its students. Judge could kick students out if they misbehaved or caused trouble; if they failed to achieve academically. Other private schools are in the same boat. Imagine an entire school populated by honor roll students and you have a vision of a private school. Public schools, however, cannot simply expel students. The time spent in public schools on behavioral problems, disruptions and so forth detract from the core mission of education. Competition would only work if we didn’t require students to be in school and if we were willing to let public schools behave like private schools. But we’re not and so competition is designed to fail.

Proponents of vouchers are not what they seem to be. Many of them are using vouchers as a well-funded attack on the principal of public education, as an attempt to defund public schools. The right-wing war on public education started long ago with anti-desegregation fights, continues today with fights over teaching actual science, sexuality education and tolerance, and includes getting public tax money to fund private institutions. The end goal is not better public education, but no public education. Where they’ve been used, vouchers have not made systemic differences in public education. Instead, they’ve served to weaken it.

I’d sum up, but it’s been done for me:

“Children will not benefit from this program. Vouchers have always been about ideology and not education. We’ve never seen a shred of credible evidence that shows school vouchers actually help students learn. While all public schools must demonstrate success under No Child Left Behind, private schools are not held to the same level of accountability for their performance. The House of Representatives has chosen to blindly dole out taxpayer money, and it’s the students who will pay the price.

This entry was posted Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 2:35 pm and is filed under SLC Politics, Utah Legislature, Utah Politics, Vouchers. Both comments and pings are currently closed.