Trump’s plan to finance private schools foolhardy

Remember the good old days, when conservative politicians used to campaign to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education?

It may turn out that no Department of Education would be better than the one the nation may get under its new secretary, Betsy DeVos, who will be following a simplistic blueprint provided by President Donald J. Trump.

The Department of Education was given a wide range of responsibilities when Congress created it in 1979. It was to work toward equal educational opportunity for all, to support state and local educational efforts in public and private institutions from pre-school through college, and it was to improve the efficiency with which the federal government supported education.

Over the years it has been called upon to implement No Child Left Behind, Common Core and Rise to the Top. It did so with varying degrees of success, which goes to show that supporting educational achievement in a nation as large and diverse as the United States is a complicated thing. Who would have thought?

To say that DeVos and President Trump have limited experience with public education would be an understatement. In fact, the last president to send his children to public school was Jimmy Carter, who signed the legislation creating the Department of Education.

What DeVos and Trump have in common, besides a lack of personal experience with public education, is their conviction that the best way to improve public schools is to divert money from them to charter, private and parochial schools. Trump has said he would like to funnel $20 billion into voucher programs, which help pay tuition for students attending private schools.

There are more than a few problems with that plan. The vast majority of private schools in the United States are religious schools. The Supreme Court has ruled in several cases, including one from Ohio, that even though the lion’s share of public voucher money may go to religious schools, voucher programs do not violate the required separation of church and state. Based on that, states – and now the federal government – have become ever more aggressive in funneling money to religious schools.

Religious schools

Most private schools are not only religious, but they are selective. They have the ability to pick and choose whom they accept, as long as they do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity or religion.

Public schools must educate all students, including those with a wide range of disabilities, those who do not have strong familial support, those who may have behavioral issues – even those who don’t want to be there. Shifting money from public school systems while giving those districts a disproportionate percentage of challenging students is unfair to public school students and breaks with one of the traditions that made America great: That all students should have equal access to a quality education.

Finally, there is good reason to question whether voucher money is being well-spent. Ohio is one of 15 states that that allow vouchers for private schools. The state has also found other ways of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to parochial schools, despite prohibitions in the Ohio Constitution against giving public money to churches and religious schools.

And even as the state consistently expanded its charter school spending without evidence that the students were benefiting, we’re sure the state will welcome federal voucher money without evidence that the millions it is already spending on vouchers is effective.

In June, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank and proponent of school choice, released a study of Ohio’s voucher program. It showed that “students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.” Like separate studies of voucher programs in Indiana and Louisiana, the Ohio study showed that results were the worst in math.

There is no doubt that improvements are needed in education in the United States, but there is no silver bullet. Vouchers are an unproven ideological answer to educational problems that can’t be solved with feel-good equations.