Every year, Mississippi lawmakers propose taxpayer funding for private schools, and every year, those bills are defeated, following a deluge of phone calls from taxpayers urging legislators to vote them down. Nevertheless, the proposals return every year, fomented by a torrent of lobbying dollars from outside Mississippi promoting the notion of school choice.
Mississippi voters aren’t the only ones opposed to pouring public money into the dark hole of school choice, with no public vetting or reporting, no audits—no accountability whatsoever. Voters have recently voted against funding private schools with public money in Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska. Nebraska voters took the unusual step of rescinding a voucher law that the state’s legislators had previously passed.
Do Vouchers Improve Education Outcomes?
Research has shown that these “choice” programs produce significant declines in students’ academic proficiency, with the largest deficits in Math. Public schools outperform private voucher schools. If better academic outcomes are our goal, our best bet is to continue investing in our public schools, which recently have earned Mississippi glowing national press due to gains in reading and math proficiency, hailed as the Mississippi Miracle.
Public schools are held to rigorous academic standards, and each year they are assessed and schools are rated publicly based on how well they are moving students toward academic milestones. There are no such standards for private voucher schools.
Unlike other state-funded programs, private voucher schools are free from fiscal oversight. Taxpayers have no idea how their tax dollars are spent and no way of knowing with certainty what sort of education is being provided with these funds. Instead, the public pays the bills with no proof of any service delivered.
Record requests in choice states have revealed that public dollars have been used to purchase home theater systems, trips to Disney World and fancy BBQ grills—all under the guise of parental educational choice.
Despite what “choice” proponents want you to believe, school choice presents a severe financial burden to the state. Arizona has experienced a budget meltdown since passing its voucher program, the majority of which has gone to pay private-school tuition for more affluent families whose children already were enrolled in private schools. School choice has caused cuts to public services and underfunding of the state’s public schools.
Recently, private schools have expressed their preference for tax credits to benefit their coffers, hoping to avoid any scrutiny voucher programs might attract. Dollar-for-dollar credits for donations to private schools are a back-channel way to get taxpayer funding to private schools. The cost to the state is the same. It is lost revenue that cannot be used to fund public schools, to improve our roads or to provide any of the state services on which we rely.
Why Shouldn’t Parents Have a Choice?
Mississippi parents do have choices, lots of them. They can choose public, private, charter or home schools. The issue isn’t one of choice, but rather one of spending: What should taxpayers be asked to fund? Should the public be asked to fund two separate school systems, one public with high standards, robust accountability and annual fiscal audits, and the other, private, without a strict adherence to those same expectations? Shouldn’t all taxpayer-funded schools be held to the same rules?
Taxpayer dollars should not be used as a free-for-all for parents to choose whatever they like at taxpayer expense. We don’t choose our own publicly funded roads, law enforcement, parks or fire trucks. Education should be no exception.
Mississippi’s public schools are doing well. Our national fourth-grade reading ranking has climbed to 21st. Fourth-graders in low-income families have ranked a remarkable second in reading and third in math in 2022. A whopping 94% of public school districts are rated C or better on a rigorous accountability model that private schools seem determined to avoid.
Our state has plenty of serious issues our legislature needs to address. School choice won’t solve a single one of them. Maybe it’s time to focus our attention on things that will.
Voters are right. School choice is a bad idea. Public dollars are for public schools.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
