School vouchers undermine the public good
Support the public good: Contact your legislators today and tell them to keep public money in public schools.
For years, we have been constantly subject to the politics of fear. Fear that bad people will come into your home, so you need guns to protect yourself. Fear that desperate refugees are actually criminals coming to hurt you. Fear that public school teachers are pursuing a “sinister agenda” to indoctrinate your children into being gay or trans or, even worse, liberal.
That politics of fear forms the basis of the governor’s bad penny of a “Students First” voucher program. The program, like all other voucher programs, directs public funding to private — and often religious — schools under the guise of “school choice.” When combined with Iowa’s lax oversight of private and home schools, the program could be disastrous for the children it claims to help and all of the rest of us, too.
Private schools do not perform better than public schools; if they did, we’d be hearing about it, not hollow repetitions of the “school choice” slogan. Instead, private schools admit only certain kinds of children: children without special needs, children who share the same religion, children who are the right kind of children. In short, they allow fearful parents to hide their children from outside influences.
School voucher programs, even those branded “educational savings accounts,” are funded at the expense of public schools. Currently, if I enroll my child at a private school, the payment mostly comes out of my own pocket. Under a voucher program, the state would take $7,598 from our public schools so that I could give it to the private school of my choice. That lets me choose how to spend your tax dollars, on a service with little to no public oversight or accountability.
But Iowans know that we have standards for our public schools because our children need to be prepared to live in the world. We know that our public schools are centers of community. And we know that vouchers won’t benefit most of us: nearly 75% of Iowa’s public schools are located in rural areas without private schools. The only “choice” in those areas is whether to send children to online schools like ICCSD’s or put them on ever-longer bus rides as rural Iowa continues to lose population. This is why rural House Republicans torpedoed last year’s voucher plan.
What’s more, a high-quality, egalitarian school system is vital to our common good. A well-educated workforce has obvious economic benefits, but we also rely on our schools to communicate the lessons of our history and provide the skills needed to participate in self-government. As Thomas Jefferson said, “an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic.”
Today, being able to come to a common understanding with people outside of our cultural bubbles is a vital civic skill. Public schools represent a cross-section of their environments and cannot turn children away, making them better bubble busters than private schools. In the current hyper-partisan environment, we should celebrate that instead of threatening public school funding.
And our schools do not have resources to spare; our public school rankings have been declining along with our public school funding for years, and there’s plenty of ink being spilled about our current and growing teacher shortage. Iowa already provides up to $90 million each year to private schools. It’s wrong to lavish more money on them while starving our public schools with stealthy inflation-induced funding cuts.
We should not allow a small minority to segregate their kids at the expense of everyone’s public education. Support the public good: Contact your legislators today and tell them to keep public money in public schools.
Author’s note: The voucher bill passed and was signed into law shortly after this column ran.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on January 14, 2023.