Choice Proponents Play a Solid Game

Del. Chris Saxman has been championing school choice for years, so he answers the standard criticisms of choice proposals with the celerity of a chess grandmaster going through the motions of the Ruy Lopez.

Don't vouchers and tuition tax credits drain money from the public schools? No -- carefully constructed, they would actually increase per-pupil funding for public K-12, he explains.

But with roughly 125,000 students already in private or home schooling in Virginia, establishing a voucher or tax credit would vacuum up a lot of dough, wouldn't it? That's why, he says, the state should structure eligibility around income limits for families, and provide only partial tax credits for corporation-sponsored scholarships in order to leverage money at a 2-1 or even a 4-1 ratio.

Yet if private schools are going to enjoy state support directly (through vouchers) or indirectly (through tax credits for families and corporate-sponsored scholarships), then shouldn't they meet the same accountability standards that public schools have to meet through the SOLs? Sure -- if they were getting 100 percent of their funding from public sources. But since they're not, Saxman says, they shouldn't have to.

On that point, the soon-to-retire delegate from Staunton and current chairman of School Choice Virginia has received some unintentional support from an unlikely source: Kitty Boitnott, president of the Virginia Education Association.

IN A COLUMN last month in The Washington Post, Boitnott objected to the Obama administration's enthusiasm for charter schools (which are semi-autonomous public schools). She said Virginia doesn't need them, there's no proof they work -- and besides, "he who pays the piper calls the tune. When the state, for example, pays only 13 percent of the cost of supporting the schools in Falls Church . . . should the state Board of Education be able to dictate to Falls Church what schools it must create?" Her answer: no.

By that same reasoning, if the state offers a tax credit to a corporation that pays the tuition so a few undeprivileged kids can go to a private school, should the state be able to dictate the school's lesson plans? Following Boitnott's argument, the answer is again no.

Saxman adds another point: With greater school choice, "ultimate accountability rests with the consumer." Rich parents already can choose which private school to attend. Middle-class families already buy houses in neighborhoods where the public schools are better. Poor families are stuck with the school they're assigned to -- unless they have a mechanism such as the popular D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, or Milwaukee's well-known voucher program, to vote with their feet as well.

Still, the idea of giving families vouchers or tax credits for education makes some Virginians uneasy. Choice advocates have had to swim through the lingering turbulence from the long-ago era of Massive Resistance -- when private, whites-only academies sprang up in reaction to school integration under Brown v. Board of Education. It's taken a while to convince those with good memories that today's choice advocates are nothing like the racists of yesteryear.

FORTUNATELY, the commonwealth has some analagous proposals and programs that make it easier to do so. For instance, there's Gov. Tim Kaine's now-dormant plan to expand pre-kindergarten through -- you guessed it -- vouchers.

As a news story about what was then a signature initiative began three years ago, "Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday his plan to provide all 4-year-olds with access to preschool would funnel public dollars to private child-care providers as well as to public programs . . . . 'One option,' Kaine said, 'would be, do you do this purely through the public school system? But if you were to do that, much of the money that you would spend would be bricks and mortar -- to add classrooms -- and I want to spend the dollars on teachers and kids more than on buildings. I think that we definitely need to take advantage of the network of existing providers.'"

The same argument has long been made in support of Virgnia's other education voucher program: the Tuition Assistance Grant. Currently pegged at $3,000, it's given to any state resident who attends a private college in the commonwealth. Republicans and Democrats alike consider it a bargain compared with the cost of subsidizing a student at a public university. Each TAG saves the state thousands of dollars it otherwise would have to pay.

LIKEWISE, A $2,000 tax credit (for example) given to a corporation that provided a scholarship so a student in an underperforming public school could go to a private one would take one pupil out of the public-school system, while leaving most of the per-pupil expenditure -- now averaging more than $10,000 -- behind. That's a net gain for the school district, not a net loss. (Of course it gets more complex than that. For a more detailed examination, see the Thomas Jefferson Institute's fiscal-impact study at http://thomasjeffersoninst.org/pdf/articles/2009_TTC_Paper.pdf.)

A couple of weeks ago the VEA's Boitnott said school choice shouldn't be on the table "until and unless the Commonwealth of Virginia is able to fully fund public schools." OK, so would the VEA support choice if the state met that test? Don't bet on it. She also said, regarding the school-choice movement, "I really believe there is an underlying bigotry at the bottom of it all." Please. That's like calling health care reform proponents closet socialists -- or just knocking the chessboard off the table. It's dramatic, but it reveals weakness. Surely defenders of the status quo can play a stronger game than that.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .