Flawed Utah voucher proposal fails as a market solution

Proponents of the Utah voucher bill are quick to ignore the bill’s faults such as poor accountability for public funds, unnecessary high cost, and its failure to help most low and middle-income families. For most voters, any one of these flaws is sufficient for them to vote AGAINST the bill.

Ironically, however, the bill also fails as a market solution. Let’s review:

As the impartial analysis in the Voter Information Pamphlet indicates, the skyrocketing costs of the Utah bill as it is phased in would come from paying vouchers to those who never intended to go to public schools in the first place. Such choices are pre-determined. And, as any economist will tell you, subsidizing pre-determined choices does not create competitive pressure since it does not alter any outcomes. These parents have already made up their minds to send their children to private schools. There is no point in handing out vouchers to them since it does nothing to influence other schools to improve. We would be racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in new, unnecessary expenditures and receiving no competitive benefits whatsoever in return. This makes no sense.

But what about the switchers, proponents ask? Let’s begin with those switchers who would have switched anyway without a voucher. Again, we would be paying out vouchers for no reason. As it stands now, any competitive pressure induced by their departure is already realized. With vouchers, this market force doesn’t change. The only thing that’s different is that we would be spending money – millions of taxpayer dollars – unnecessarily.

So, that leaves us with the switchers who would leave because of the voucher. By now, we would have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars just getting to the point where we might see some competitive forces at work. Was it worth it? Do public schools actually improve because of vouchers?

Not really. Multiple studies show that vouchers do not make public schools better. Just this week, yet another study – this time from a conservative thinktank – underscored the Milwaukee voucher program’s disappointing real-world results. And in the New Zealand program, poorly performing schools simply became worse as they ended up with larger concentrations of difficult-to-teach students. Lawmakers, committed to seeing their market forces experiment work, ignored these schools for years. But it didn’t work and in the end lawmakers had no choice but to intercede and to invest in these schools.

Returning to our scenario - remember, by now we would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars needlessly paying for predetermined choices just to get to the point where a few switchers might exert some competitive pressure. In the bill’s impartial analysis, given the price elasticity of demand, the Legislative Fiscal Analyst determined that about 3 students per school per year might switch because of the voucher. This small switch rate is completely insufficient to force whatever improvements proponents claim the bill will generate.

So this leaves proponents with only one remaining scenario to talk about – more switchers!

With the flaws in the bill becoming clear and with the cost vs. savings argument debunked, we’re now starting to see the “more switchers” argument surface. Senator Bramble recently said:

“One way to avoid higher income and property taxes is to offer parents the option to have their children move into the private sector and take some pressure off our public schools. That's what the voucher plan is all about.” (Emphasis added)

Proponents, including the bill's sponsor, are now making the case that somehow we must increase the switch rate far in excess of the impartial analysis; they’ve even raised the specter of tax increases if we don’t. Wishful thinkers are now flooding the blogs and debates with their own wild personal speculations of enormously higher switch rates.

But how does this actually happen? How do we convince MORE families to LEAVE the public schools? And if motivating more families to LEAVE is necessary for the bill to become effective, what does this mean for our public schools and the students they serve?

Remember - it took hundreds of millions of dollars just to get to the point where we must now wish for thousands upon thousands of additional public school students beyond the impartial numbers to LEAVE our public schools just to recoup the massive opportunity costs on the chance that the bill might exert market forces so it might create some competitive pressure so our schools might improve in spite of overwhelming research showing that this hasn’t worked when it’s been tried before.

Does this sound like a winning strategy?

But even if all of that does happen, just where does that leave the overwhelming majority of students who remain in our public schools? If the goal is to convince students to LEAVE the public schools, then what possible motivation would these lawmakers have to improve our public schools? If we improve our schools, we reduce the demand to leave. If we reduce the demand to leave, we reduce the switch rate. If we reduce the switch rate, the bill becomes an expensive failure. Why on this green earth would we set up a scenario in which the success of one program hinges on the failure of another? Why would we sacrifice the quality of the public schools where 96% of our children attend just to make them SO BAD that thousands of additional families would WANT to leave, just so we can say this bill was not a failure?

This bill makes no sense. Let’s vote it down and work together to craft real solutions that benefit all Utah schoolchildren.