Guest Column By Stephen Herzenberg“Are we getting our money’s worth?” In these tough economic times, that’s a question that families across Pennsylvania are asking themselves with every purchase at the grocery store or when they buy clothes for their kids. And with billions of dollars of cuts to schools and other critical services on the table at the state Capitol, it’s a question that taxpayers and lawmakers need to ask as well.
After all, balancing the state budget is a tricky business: to sustain the state’s economic recovery, we need to invest in programs that work. And to be fiscally responsible stewards of tax dollars, we should target cuts to programs that are least effective. But we aren’t targeting dollars to programs with strong and transparent track records in this year’s education budget.
Our public schools face some of the deepest cuts in Gov. Corbett’s budget. This despite the hard numbers showing that our investment in public schools works: hundreds of thousands more students are on grade level in reading and math compared with a decade ago. Pennsylvania has become a national leader based on student achievement data. Locally, parents can compare reading scores, college admissions or even attendance rates in one school against another. Because we know what we’re paying for, taxpayers can see whether their hard-earned dollars are being invested wisely.
Meanwhile, the Senate is considering a plan to provide taxpayer-funded vouchers to students who attend private and religious schools. Because this new voucher program would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, you would expect it to be backed by strong evidence — from Pennsylvania’s existing voucher program, for example.
Yet this existing program, funded through the Educational Improvement Tax Credit or EITC, stands out starkly for its lack of even basic accountability measures. Since 2001, taxpayers have spent a third of a billion dollars sending children to private schools through the EITC. If you added up all the students who are getting our tax dollars to attend private school this year, they’d constitute the second-largest school district in the state.
So what do we know about how well these students are learning? Nothing. How about whether the children with the greatest need are even benefiting? Not that either. At least we must track whether money’s being used for scholarships, not diverted (as in Arizona) for executive perks at organizations that collect tax credits? We don’t even know that.
Unlike with other taxpayer-funded programs, the state isn’t even allowed to ask groups that receive tax credits for vouchers to provide information that would let us judge if they are a good investment. That’s right — a 2005 law forbids it. This law might stem from religious schools’ opposition to public reporting or a desire to limit scrutiny of vouchers’ educational outcomes. Whatever the rationale, it is unacceptable.
Lack of accountability undermines the basic way vouchers are supposed to work — through parental choice. It makes it impossible for parents to make an informed decision about where to send their child. The lack of accountability in our current EITC voucher program should give us pause before we go down the road of a much larger voucher program.
There is no meaningful accountability in the Senate voucher plan. While schools would be required to test students’ progress, private schools could choose the assessment tool. This would make apples-to-apples comparisons of student progress at different schools impossible.
A new voucher program should be a non-starter without a solid financial and educational accountability plan. There also are other reasons to question the wisdom of a new voucher program. For example, in other states where rigorous evaluations have been done, vouchers haven’t improved educational achievement. In addition, the top-ranked countries in international achievement comparisons aren’t distinguished by having taxpayer-funded vouchers.
A new voucher program also would have little impact in much of rural Pennsylvania, where there are few private schools. Under the EITC program, 22 counties have no EITC scholarship organizations and 16 have only one.
An expensive new voucher program also will deepen the cuts faced by Pennsylvania’s public schools. We know that these cuts are a bad idea because we have solid information on the progress Pennsylvania has made as a result of educational investments during the last decade. With our existing EITC voucher program, on the other hand, taxpayers have no idea if they’re getting their money’s worth.
Stephen Herzenberg is an economist and executive director of the Keystone Research Center (www.keystoneresearch.org), which recently released “No Accountability,” a review of Pennsylvania’s existing school voucher program.
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