Folksy Eyres and Yummy Oreos Can't Sweeten the Flawed Voucher Bill

First, there were the Book of Mormon radio ads from a mysterious lawbreaking campaigner.

Next, there were the PCE desperation spots linking unions, liberals, moveon.org, Ted Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton to the Utah voucher fight. Who's next, Osama Bin Laden?

And now, just in time for Conference weekend, get ready for a play to the Wealthy White Mormon vote with...yep...Eyres and Oreos!

In their practiced, folksy Family Home Evening style, Linda and Richard Eyre pull out their oversimplified Oreo cookie analogy for all to see. Some of us have seen it before. It goes like this - compare the money spent in a public school to cookies. If you take some of the cookies away and give them to private schools, you can redistribute the remaining cookies to the others in the class; and with one fewer student, the class size is reduced.

Sounds great? And with the Eyres making the pitch, what's to stop fans from rushing out of Deseret Book checkout lines and falling over themselves in a mad dash to the polls?

(For those of you who don't know who the Eyres are, they write parenting books and their many children had a fabulous experience in our Utah public schools).

This much can be said - the ad will probably be effective with some Mormon voters. The LDS culture I belong to values trust. Sadly, this trust is often abused. That's why we're the scam capital of the United States. And that's not hyperbole; we really ARE the scam capital of the United States.

As you might imagine, there are more to these cookies than meets the eye. Half-truths, whether presented in a PCE-commissioned study, a misleading flyer, a sound bite, a think-tank essay, or even by kitschy Mormon star power, remain just that.

To get to the real story, you must look at both the truths and the lies. Anything else is, well, Eyres and Oreos!

Truth - Switchers save money.
The difference between the voucher cost and the amount we would have spent remains in the Uniform School Fund.

Lie - The voucher bill saves money.
The Eyres and Oreos ad leads the viewer to assume that the bill will save money. This is untrue. The Legislative Fiscal Analyst, who helped write the impartial analysis of the bill, determined that HB148 would cost Utah taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

PCE is not telling you this simple truth - the cost of paying vouchers to those who would have gone to private school anyway far exceeds the savings from the switchers.

Voters don't need silly cookie analogies to understand the graph below (the data is directly from the Legislative Fiscal Analyst):


If you watch the Eyres and Oreos ad (and you'll get LOTS of chances), the Oreo stacking suggests that the only line that means anything is the "green line" of the graph, which represents the best possible savings of the voucher bill. This line assumes that any and all public education costs are variable (no fixed costs) and completely follow the student. (In case you were curious the "black line" represents the amount of WPU spending per student and is the lowest possible savings amount).

But as you can see, the green or black line - the actual savings are probably somewhere in between - is only a small part of the equation. Here's the truth - as more private school students become eligible, the costs of the program skyrocket. The "red line" shows this escalation as the program is phased in. Why aren't the Eyres showing us those Oreos? Perhaps they ran out.

Truth - We don't spend enough on our students.
Mrs. Eyre is correct. We are dead last in per-student investment and in the past decade our funding effort (amount invested in education per $1,000 in revenue) has been poor. Even with the much-overdue investment this year (which now appears to be a bribe to pass vouchers if you listen to Sen. Bramble) we're still woefully mediocre. But at least we're not dead last in teacher pay (we're 48th. Even with our red-hot economy our legislature refuses to pay our public school teachers what they're worth. Not even close. But they did find enough to spend hundreds of millions on a caveat emptor voucher experiment. No wonder we're losing fantastic teachers to neighboring states.)

Lie - The switcher savings are guaranteed funding for public schools
The bill does not guarantee that any savings, after accounting for fixed costs, are hands-off. The political forces pushing the voucher bill are the same ones who have cut public education revenue through regressive trickle-down state income tax policy. Any measurable increases to the uniform school fund would simply become the subject of election-year tax cuts.

And, as mentioned before, when higher education budgets - paid by the general fund - come up short the legislature raids the uniform school fund for the difference. As the "red line" of the graph above shows, vouchers would add a huge new burden to the general fund. So when there isn't enough in the general fund to cover the costs of higher ed, guess where they'll go to make up the difference?

Ironic, isn't it, that the same political forces who want to fund the $429 million "red line" couldn't cough up $2 million from the same general fund to help elderly, blind, and disabled Utahns get preventive healthcare because it was just too expensive.

Strange how none of those Oreos are on the table.

Truth - If a student switches to a private school, the class size is temporarily reduced.
The logic in the Eyres and Oreos ad is simple - if a student in a class of 30 leaves, you then have 29 students. Fair enough, but...

Lie - Students switching out guarantee a reduction in class size.
Fewer students mean fewer teachers. To achieve the savings necessary to actually reduce the student:teacher ratio, the number of switchers would have to be multiple times the amount estimated by the Legislative Fiscal Analyst. PCE engages in wild, grossly overblown speculations to achieve the switch rates - and hence the savings - necessary to reduce class size beyond isolated switchers.

A scenario that can and does happen is when the number of students in a grade at a school dips below the student:teacher ratio, a teacher may have to be reassigned to cover needs elsewhere. This scenario creates increased class size. In one case you may have read about, a parent cited a personal example in which her daughter's school had 60 students split amongst 3 teachers. When 3 of the students left for a nearby charter school, the 3rd teacher was then reassigned to cover new student enrollments in a nearby school. This caused the 57 remaining students to be split between two teachers.

Another scenario that PCE doesn't like talking about are the reverse switchers. In the DC voucher experiment, a full 20% of students who took a voucher went back to their public schools before the end of the second year. These students often returned to their public schools in mid-year. Such a scenario can be troublesome. In Utah, for instance, a school who receives a student after October 1 receives no funding for that student for the balance of the school year. In this scenario, the school wouldn't receive any Oreos for that student until the next school year. In the meantime, they have to spread the remaining Oreos around to accommodate the unfunded addition.

Staffing teachers and managing class sizes is an important activity for any public or private school system. The Eyres and Oreos ad would have you believe that vouchers would help us achieve a systematic reduction in our class sizes, which remain the largest in the nation. The truth is it is an empty promise. Although some class sizes might be temporarily and slightly reduced, this represents little more than a "remainder after division" and those same remainders can cause some class sizes to increase.

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One thing is for certain - by November 6th, even though this bad bill will be "returned to sender," we may never quite look at Oreos, or the Eyres, the same way again.

But at least it's light-hearted. Give PCE another couple of weeks for their really nasty stuff to hit the airwaves.