In our view
Time, place isn't right for vouchers
Forget almost everything you see on TV commercials about vouchers.
The comparison to Oreos is just propaganda by the pro-voucher folks. .
And the "too many loopholes" rebuttal by the anti-voucher crowd is propaganda as well.
Neither are fully accurate. And neither give us a solid reasons for voting either for or against. Let's start with the Oreos.
Each Oreo represents $1,000 of the $7,000 spent per pupil in the public schools each year. When a student moves from a public to a private school, three Oreos, or $3,000, moves with the student, leaving an additional $4,000 in the school system without having to teach the student.
It looks like the schools will have more money left over to help the rest of the kids. But for each student who leaves to go to private school, the public schools now have $3,000 less to spend. There are no real savings for that student not being in school.
The cost of utilities, custodial services, overhead and even teacher salaries won't change much. The only real savings would be for textbooks and incidental materials.
So, vouchers could send schools into a downward funding spiral,
But even that's not fully accurate. The Oreo theory does hold true if one considers that the population growth will cause one or more students to fill the vacancy left by each student who moves out to private school. That way, Oreos replaced by the new incoming student, plus the four Oreos left behind by the private school student.
But this supposes that growth trends will continue forever and for all school districts. For any district where growth slows, financial woes won't be far behind.
likewise commercials for voucher opponents aren't convincing either. Their charge that the voucher law has "flaws, loopholes and unanswered questions" is probably true, but meaningless. The same can be said for any law passed since the U.S. Congress and the Utah Legislature began, and even for the U.S. Constitution itself. This tactic is just propaganda and virtually meaningless.
What voters should really consider are the following:
- The tactics used by the pro-voucher forces have been suspect, if not down-right ugly, from the start.
- Out-of-state money was used to fund the campaigns of candidates for the legislature without candidates making their stance clear to the voters. Even when we asked some directly, they would not admit it. We take campaigns with hidden agendas very seriously.
- Some of the pro-voucher candidates seemed to lack any real substance other than favoring vouchers.
- Even with all the high pressure tactics to get pro-voucher people into office, it took severe arm twisting to get vouchers to squeak by in the legislature.
- Then pro-voucher forces sought to block Novembers vote by insisting that an "amendment" to the voucher bill could stand on it's own even if people voted down the original voucher law.
- When it became evident that a vote couldn't be stopped, pro-voucher forces then tried to count the results on a district-by-district basis. This "electoral college" approach meant vouchers could conceivably pass even if voted down by the majority.
- Sanity was saved by the Utah Supreme Court when it ended the mess by ordering a binding, up-and-down vote for Nov. 6, with no funny vote counting.
- Aside from the highhanded efforts to subvert the public, a real problem with vouchers is that they are simply the old story of the camel getting its nose in the tent. While vouchers proposals are modest, there is a real risk that demands will soon grow to eat up all the Oreos.
- A push to raise the voucher amounts is likely because the present voucher plan doesn't offer enough for poor families to benefit, and it provides only incidental relief for the rest. We suspect the low amounts were planned to ease opposition, but with intent to raise them later.
- The whole Oreos thing also seems like an obvious bribe: "Let our children go, and we'll leave money behind,"They've always been free to go and leave all the money behind.
- Vouchers also seem to be aimed at fixing what isn't broken. With Utah schools doing generally well, vouchers seem a better idea for inner city schools elsewhere.
While we don't want to shut the door forever, all this baggage surrounding this issue leads us to conclude it's time to hold off: Someday maybe -- not here, not now.
3 comments:
See Jesse's FUD post from a while back. It covers this post as well as the previous one about poor families.
The bullet points quickly get to the point showing how the voucher forces use fierce political tactics to support an issue that doesn't hold up on its own merits.
But why would the Davis Clipper so strongly smack down the pro-voucher arguments, but still sort of hang on to the myth at the end.
It's like when poli sci wannabees talk about communism as something that would be good if they would only implement it correctly.
Communism, as well as vouchers, are fundamentally flawed because they conflict with basic foundation principles of our society.
Even after the final doom of vouchers on Tuesday, I'm sure our power elites in this state will continue to find ways to bring it back , tweaking it to finally win over those who still hope it could fulfill its magic promise.
All of those bullet points are ad hominem, about supporters of this law (and very generalized into presumptions of all people who support this are bad thing x - and do not address the actual issue and what this law would do. A newspaper should be cautious of the most elementary identified elements of Bad Logic that the Romans identified centuries ago. Oh wait - is it ad hominem to say a newspaper should be aware of something they aren't? No - it's factual. This post is apparently unaware that it is mostly using arguments which in fact bear no logic on the questions at hand.
Now, relating to this argument, which is at least directly related to the issue:
"It looks like the schools will have more money left over to help the rest of the kids. But for each student who leaves to go to private school, the public schools now have $3,000 less to spend. There are no real savings for that student not being in school."
The schools will have no need to make those savings, because the student they would spend it on isn't there. If you don't have a child and you aren't spending money on that child, are you losing money? No, you're keeping your money to use for whatever you want. That spells savings. Moreover, without having an extra student, so that there is no need to spend money, with the much larger amount of money retained from the student who left, the school has more money per student.
If anyone is reading this and it isn't too late, vote for referendum #1 :)
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