Utah Vouchers: A Classic Case Of Bait And Switch
Utah Taxpayer Association has done a lot of work on their blog arguing that school vouchers will save taxpayer money. What they don’t tell you (until recently) is that their numbers are basically meaningless because if the current voucher plan is adopted its legislative supporters will likely have to increase voucher amounts before most Utahns can use the program. If they do this much of UTA’s pro-voucher propaganda is invalidated.
Under the current plan even the most generous vouchers aren’t enough to cover anything near full tuition at 90% of Utah’s private schools. When extra fees and the costs of uniforms are considered (these aren’t covered by vouchers) few Utah families will likely decide they can afford to use school vouchers to pay for their kids’ education.
I pointed this fact out to Utah Taxpayer Association in the comments on this blog post last week. Here’s how they responded:
Coupled with financial assistance from private schools themselves and private organizations, vouchers will be sufficient to cover tuition. If not, then the Legislature will simply increase the voucher amount. Easy fix.
Republicans, Parents for Choice in Education, and the Utah Taxpayer Association are trying to sell us on a voucher plan which they understand won’t work. If we end up buying the plan we will be stuck with this broken plan or we’ll have to pay for all of the improvements the legislature decides are necessary before we’ll have something typical Utahns can actually use.
Raising voucher amounts isn’t an “easy fix” because it makes a lie out of all of the economic arguments voucher supporters (especially the Utah Taxpayers Association) have been using to try to sell this plan. We don’t need another government entitlement program that ends up costing millions more than voters were promised when the plan was originally proposed. You’d think the folks at UTA who are normally more skeptical of government expenditures would agree.
Shame on UTA. If they really wanted what was best for taxpayers they’d abandon this ideological crusade for education vouchers.
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On Wednesday last week I left a comment on UTA’s blog asking them to explain how increasing voucher amounts doesn’t invalidate their pro-voucher economic arguments but my comment hasn’t made it through their moderation process yet.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 13, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
I think you’ve misrepresented their position. The first sentence clearly states that the voucher amount is sufficient. If that ends up not being the case, they can raise it.
Comment by Voucher dude — August 13, 2007 @ 2:05 pm
Is public education a “bait and switch”? The Minimum School Program looks at lot different now that it did five, ten, twenty years ago.
It’s also a lot more expensive now than it was in the past. Were the original proponents of public education baiting and switching when they implemented the first public education program that was much less expensive than it is now?
Looks like a double standard here.
Comment by Voucher dude — August 13, 2007 @ 2:07 pm
There’s also the possibility that inexpensive options will be created as a direct result of the voucher program (should it survive the polls, of course). Regardless of the outcome in November, it would be very nice if someone would find a way to build and operate quality low-cost private schools.
Comment by Jesse Harris — August 13, 2007 @ 2:43 pm
Voucher Dude (and UTA),
Why are private schools going to pay voucher students to attend their schools when they are currently working near capacity with kids that don’t cost them anything extra to educate? You voucher fans have been cheering the market aspects of this plan from the beginning…now you think businesses are going to bail out a bad government voucher plan by footing some of the bill? That idea seems pretty naive tome.
The vouchers won’t be enough for average Utahns to use and the amounts will have to be risen. All the propaganda we’ve heard from voucher supporters on the economic benefits of the current plan is based on a false set of data.
I agree with much of your second comment. Our public school system is at times more expensive than it needs to be. The good thing is that as a state we’re doing as good a job as anyone else in the country at educating our kids and we’re doing it for a lot less money. Lets keep it that way…vote against the wasteful voucher plan!
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 13, 2007 @ 3:01 pm
If anything, increasing the voucher amount at the low end would make the voucher even more attractive fiscally because even more students would switch. I think that makes the Utah Taxpayers’ Association’s assumptions conservative.
Even at a higher voucher amount, say $4,000, this is still a smaller entitlement than what we are spending right now.
Comment by Voucher dude — August 13, 2007 @ 3:02 pm
Who told you that private schools were near capacity?
Comment by Voucher dude — August 13, 2007 @ 3:03 pm
Voucher Dude,
Why don’t you take a break from being a sock puppet for UTA and go approve the comment I left on your blog. It has been in moderation for five days now.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 13, 2007 @ 3:06 pm
I’m basing my contention that Utah’s private schools are operating near capacity on a conversation I had with the administrator of one Salt Lake City private school last week. I was shopping for a private school for my pre-schooler. The administrator told me they were nearly full when I asked if they had room for my first grader as well. I was mostly asking because of my interest in the ill considered voucher plan.
I asked the administrator at the school what she thought of your voucher plan and she laughed. They won’t be taking vouchers. They don’t expect that the new potential income would be worth the invasiveness of government regulators.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 13, 2007 @ 3:16 pm
For the record…the state’s public school managers don’t relish the idea of having to play the role of invasive government regulator either. Everyone should check out Greg Haw’s commentary from yesterday’s Standard Examiner.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 13, 2007 @ 3:27 pm
You hit the nail on the head again Jeremy!! It’s a bunch of GARBAGE! Look at the people pushing for the vouchers, they are either wealthy people who already have their kids in private schools and are hoping to get a state issued coupon to save money on the private tuition or they are the blind, average (or below average) income citizen who cannot see the fact that vouchers will not cover the full amount of tuition needed to send their kids to a private school!
How can this create “equality” for our students? If the wealthy would receive a coupon and the poor would still not be able to send their kids to private schools how does this magically fix or make our system better?
Comment by Dignin — August 13, 2007 @ 3:52 pm
Jeremy,
I thought I had brought up this study in a previous post about vouchers, but I have searched through the old posts and I can’t find it. This study http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/friedman/downloadFile.do?id=105 argues that if 2% of students use vouchers then the voucher program would save Utah taxpayers $700,000 a year. I was curious what comments you had on the study.
Comment by Daniel — August 13, 2007 @ 6:17 pm
And one problem with the argument that private schools are near capacity is that you are only looking at the short run. If private school providers believe there is going to be a larger market for private schooling, then they will see this profit opportunity and expand capacity or there will be new entrants into the field. This won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.
Comment by Daniel — August 13, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
The UTA’s analysis is not invalidated if the voucher amount is increased to $4,000 or even higher because it is still less than the amount that is being spent per public school student right now and just a couple thousand switchers will be needed to compensate for the cost of providing vouchers to current private school enrollment.
Comment by Voucher dude — August 13, 2007 @ 8:13 pm
Daniel/VoucherDude/UTA,
You are both ignoring the mitigation funds included in this program. This voucher plan isn’t that great a deal for taxpayers to begin with. Increasing the voucher amount even by only 25% further extends the amount of time a voucher student must stay out of public school in order for there to be any cost savings.
I read the Friedman study and it is based on a different program than this one. It also doesn’t take into account the mitigation moneys included in this plan.
UTA/VoucherDude’s argument that increasing the voucher amount to $4000 plus doesn’t change anything is bogus because increasing the voucher amount increases the estimated costs of the program correspondingly. The numbers may still be “good” assuming enough students use vouchers (a bold assumption) but they aren’t the same rosy numbers you’re using to sell the original plan to Utah’s voters. You’re still hitting us with a huge bait and switch…especially since your paltry 25% estimated increase still falls far short of most of Utah’s private school tuition amounts.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 14, 2007 @ 7:33 am
My mistake…mitigation moneys don’t include the amount of money given to the student as a voucher so we aren’t double paying for the voucher student’s first 5 years. We still aren’t saving anything though and an increase in the amount of vouchers still increases the costs of the voucher plan to Utah’s taxpayers.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 14, 2007 @ 8:28 am
Changing the voucher amount does change things (I never said otherwise). However, I said it does not invalidate the UTA’s claim that taxpayers still come out ahead. As long as the voucher amount is less than the amount we are spending as taxpayers, taxpayers benefit.
However, I must give you props on your ability to create a strawman and knock it down.
Comment by Voucher dude — August 14, 2007 @ 10:37 am
Voucherdude/UTA,
Thanks for the props. I’ve been crafting and knocking down strawman arguments on this site for nearly 4 years now! I’m still not as skilled at it as you guys over at UTA
You should also give me some props for publishing all your comments…even those I disagree with. I’m still waiting for you guys to publish my comment on your blog from last week.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 14, 2007 @ 10:57 am
So long as the voucher is less than the cost of educating a child within the public schools, the public schools will reduce their costs MORE than the cost of the vouchers. A means-tested voucher weights the benefit toward people with lower incomes. Until vouchers become a legal reality, it would be foolish for a private school to invest in more capacity. However, once they are established as a reliable source of revenue, the market will respond. Utah’s public schools are generally good enough that I doubt that more than 10 or 20% of students will use vouchers. However, for students who are poorly served in the current public schools, it can be a godsend. For example, private schools could open that specialize in teaching methods for kids with dyslexia. That could be more efficient than having every public school try to mount a program of its own.
Let’s remember: The tax money comes from ALL families and taxpayers. The benefit that public education is supposed to serve is educating the next generations of citizens and taxpayers. The mission of public schools is NOT to serve as a make-work program for teachers, administrators, bus drivers, and school construction workers. Yet public school advocates seem to think the institutional schools are more important than the people they serve–students and parents. They insist “Get your service through us, or not at all.” even though we serve school lunches, and subsidize ones for the poor, we do not insist that children of poor families eat ALL their meals in an institutional setting. We also provide food aid and financial aid to the poor directly, and they can use food stamps at a regular supermarket. While there are occasional public medical clinics, most medical services to the poor are provided through payments to private health care providers. We could create public hospitals and clinics and tell the poor to go only to them, but that is not necessary.
Essentially we are talking about money being used to buy a service for a segment of the public. That is inherently something that can be approached by using the money to buy services in the marketplace. Utah is in a good position now to do this, because the growing population will maintain demand for public school services even as vouchers come into play. The transition into a mixed system of “public” and private providers of education services will be eased, as public school employees can gradually retire or move into the private sector.
The only specific losers in the transition are school boards and administrators, who will lose monopoly power over education funds, and the teacher unions, who will lose their monopoly. An enlarged private sector will require the UEA to recruit in every individual school, a much more daunting proposition that organizing and negotiating with an entire school district. The UEA knows that the less power it has, the less attractive membership will be, a “vicious cycle”. But that is putting the union’s interest before that of individual teachers and students.
School boards and district administrators like the power they have. They believe they will use it for good. But they are afraid that parents will disagree with them! They lack confidence in their own leadership and persuasiveness. They would rather have the power to force parents to use the public schools.
Then there are those who believe the public schools are an important means of “socializing” children, of indoctrinating them to believe the same thing. This is far less the case in the age of TV, text-messaging, and the internet, along with many different groups for sports, etc. This goal is precisely why many parents WANT vouchers. Indeed, the increasing efforts of the ACLU and others to force the schools to remove references to God and incorporate references to homosexuality, through lawsuits, make public schools appear repressive to many parents. If the ACLU agenda were ever fully enacted in Utah schools, I believe support for vouchers would skyrocket.
Private schools, as “public accommodations”, are prohibited by law from discriminating by race, just like any private employer, restaurant, or motel. Indeed, it is public schools, with their monopoly power over school funds and student assignments, that have the long history of racial segregation. If parents have the financial ability to not send their children to segregated schools, they will do so, breaking segregation far more effectively than any court-ordered desegregation plan. Public schools in Utah are in fact “segregated” because they are based on neighborhoods, which are “segregated” by income, which roughly correlates with race. Vouchers, by breaking the ties between home location and schools, can help blur the income lines between neighborhoods over time, resulting in more integrated neighborhoods.
Comment by Raymond Takashi Swenson — August 14, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
There is about a $3000 gap between per-student funding and the maximum voucher amount that a student can elect to use. I suspect that if the maximum voucher amount were raised to $5000, that would cover the cost of a great number of existing and future private schools in Utah. But who ever said that the idea was to completely cover the cost of private education with the voucher? Not even UTA’s statement above implies that.
Comment by Frank Staheli — August 14, 2007 @ 3:52 pm
Frank,
You’re assuming enough families with kids currently in public schools will take vouchers and provide savings to balance out the freeloaders (families who never would have put their kids in public schools in the first place) who will likely all be taking vouchers where available. Every time we increase voucher amounts it means we need more voucher adopters who are currently enrolled in public schools in order for the program to break even. Increasing voucher amounts greatly changes the dynamics of this program.
Raymond Takashi Swenson,
You make many good points which have been made time and again by people assuming vouchers are the government program which will solve all our education system’s woes.
If we really do get 10-20% of public school students to accept vouchers than I’m wrong in my skepticism and glad of it. If we get too few adopters than this program costs us more money than it is worth and we’ve created a government entitlement primarily directed toward families who don’t need it. How dumb.
Here’s my question to you: If private schools are such a godsend then why aren’t more Utah families using them now? Utahn’s have fewer students per capita enrolled in private school than nearly any other state. Have we really just been waiting for them to become marginally less expensive because of vouchers before we jump onboard this perfect utopian solution to all our education system’s problems?
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 14, 2007 @ 4:48 pm
I’ve been reading the comments on UTA’s blog, and UTA publishes opposing comments on their blog all the time. It looks like there are more opposing than supporting comments (excluding their own).
I read the following comment by UTA on their blog that seems to be directed to you
“Inflammatory comments will not be published.
Disagreeable, yes. Offensive no. Tone down the rhetoric and we’ll respond.
We have published at least 99% of the comments posted here. The only exceptions are those that are offensive or keep repeating the same comments even after we have refuted them repeatedly.”
Comment by Voucher dude — August 14, 2007 @ 4:54 pm
Voucher Dude,
You’re welcome to pretend not to be UTA here whenever you want but your sockpuppetry becomes more than an annoyance when you carry the act so far as to pretend that you aren’t the one who is refusing to publish the comment in question on your blog. There was no offense intended in that comment and for you to claim offense without specifying what it is that so hurt your feelings is disingenuous.
I disagreed with you in that comment as I have here. I didn’t write anything inflammatory.
Comment by Jeremy Manning — August 14, 2007 @ 8:16 pm
Jeremy,
For fun, I’m going to try to recreate the table in the Friedman report that shows the costs of a hypothetical voucher plan with the plan that actually passed the house. I started it last night, but the necessary income data was a little difficult to find. I’ll send you a copy when I’m done.
Comment by Daniel — August 16, 2007 @ 7:58 am