Vouchers: The Latest Right-Wing Attack on Public Schools by Noah Lansner We are facing an education crisis in the United States. A report recently released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris indicated that American high school graduation rates are now 28th out of the 29 industrialized countries included in the study. This comes on the heels of a study done earlier this year, in which the results of a mathematics and science test of 12th graders showed the United States to be among the least knowledgeable of the industrialized nations. Average reading and math proficiency has failed to increase significantly since 1971, whereas writing and science proficiency has actually decreased in those years. These problems are worst in the cities, where under-funded, ill-equipped schools have extremely high dropout rates. The response from many politicians has been so-called "school choice" programs-many of which include school voucher programs that allow parents to use public education dollars towards private school tuition. In the Milwaukee school system, which has one of the largest voucher programs in the country, the courts recently ruled that the program could be expanded from nonsectarian private schools to include private religious schools. This program has been supported mainly by those on the political right, but it also has support among many inner-city parents who hope to gain access to the vouchers and send their children to better schools. Newt Gingrich described his hopes for the program as "I want these children to have a chance to have a decent life. I want them to have a chance to go to college and not to prison." The obvious problem with this viewpoint is that a voucher system is unable to help most children. According to a California study, the private schools in the state are currently operating at about 85% of their capacity. This means that less than one percent of public school students in that state could expect to find spaces in existing private schools. Since vouchers cannot go to a vast majority of students, most of these students will remain in public schools and will not be helped by voucher programs. Unfortunately, voucher programs, while potentially helping that fraction of students, will have an extremely negative impact upon those students who remain in the public schools. First, those schools will lose money that has gone to private schools in the form of vouchers. According to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, Milwaukee Public Schools will lose more than $25 million in state funds this year alone because state money will be redirected to voucher schools. While this amount is relatively small compared to the school's overall budget, it is not insignificant. Furthermore, the expansion of the program to private religious schools will remove more money from the public school system in Milwaukee. Not surprisingly, expenditures for public schools vary greatly with median income; wealthy districts (median household income over $35,000) spend almost $1500 more per student than poor districts (median household income under $20,000). It is those poorer districts that will be affected by the loss of students, and therefore the loss of funding. The public schools in these districts will also lose their best and brightest students to private schools. Since private schools are selective institutions, they can afford to take only the top students who qualify for vouchers. The majority of the students will remain in the public schools. Rather than helping these students, the voucher system will hurt them by creating a two-tiered system where the top students go to private schools while the majority of the students stay behind in deteriorating public schools. Moreover, removing these top students will remove the motivated, determined, pro-active students (and their parents) from these schools. These students and parents are likely to be the ones who push to improve the schools that they are in. If they are removed from the public schools, a strong driving force for improvement will be removed. In addition, voucher students are more likely to come from less disadvantaged backgrounds. A study of the voucher programs in San Antonio found that mothers of low-income voucher students were three times more likely to have had some college education than mothers of comparable public school students (55 percent vs. 19 percent). And, of course, if those students who remain in the public schools fail to graduate or go to college, the chances that their children will do so is drastically reduced. Voucher programs are doing very little to help the students who truly need it. The voucher system is an attempt to avoid fixing, in a meaningful large-scale way, the problems with the American education system. Rather than helping all those who need a decent education most, the voucher system selects a handful of students from poor neighborhoods and provides them with a hand up, while leaving the rest of the children in these areas worse off than they were before. Education is a public right, which we have a responsibility to provide to every child in America. It is not something that can be subject to the marketplace, where the bottom line rules. American democracy is based on the idea that everyone has equal opportunity. Rather than attempt to make this a reality by helping inner-city children get the education they need, the voucher system selects a small handful of those students, who are likely to be better off to begin with, and helps them at the expense of the rest of those children.