Newsplaining

By: 
Ethan Stoetzer

School choice for whom?
     Two weeks ago, President-elect Donald Trump’s Administration simultaneously announced his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, along with a $20 billion overhaul of the US public educational system.
     K-12 public education wasn’t a widely discussed issue in the general election, with more attention being focused on higher education and the amount of debt that comes with it. With federal laws guaranteeing a child free education (paid for by property taxes), it can be understood why such a topic would be a back burner issue. Following several consecutive years of challenging Common Core implementation, a new administration was sure to face public school education at some point.
     While Trump’s pick for education secretary is a possible column in itself, that’s not what this column will focus on. The education department is pretty consistent. The government merely grants aid to select schools, but most funding come from property taxes, The Department of Education can’t do much to change that. But what can be changed is the structure of public schools as we know it.
     The $20 billion plan would finally bring in what conservatives have been pushing for several years, since before the George Bush years, in creating a voucher system that would establish “school choice.”
     The argument for the school choice movement is that students who live within current poverty levels are “stuck” with underperforming schools because the public school system doesn’t allow them to pick a neighboring district that might have better schooling. If students had school choice, a lot of America’s educational shortfalls would be upgraded because students could simply go somewhere else.
     The way that Trump wants to do this is offer $20 million in subsidies to every child who is “disadvantaged,” which would mean close to 25 million (some states already use voucher systems so that number would boost federally), according to 2013 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which tallies based on number of students who qualify for free or reduced meals.
 Almost $14 million of that would be merely diverted from the government’s current Title I program, which gives financial grants to schools that have large populations of impoverished children (within 185 percent of the poverty line, $45,000 a year for a family of four), according to the Title I document.
     Under the current system, money follows schools. Under a voucher system, money follows the impoverished student. With Trump’s plan, that would equate to around $580 per year, as it disqualifies almost 14 million students by requiring specific poverty limits, according to Vox.com. A possible booster of the plan would ask states to contribute to the voucher program, totaling the amount of money per impoverished child to approximately $12,000 per year.
     These are a lot of numbers, and the results are multifaceted. According to the Kids Count Data Center, the top demographics of students living in poverty are American Indian, Hispanic or Latino and Black or African American, at 34 percent, 31 percent and 36 percent respectively. Non-Hispanic Whites make up 12 percent (all results are as of 2015). Much of those to be impacted by this plan would be those top three demographics — an interesting result as it pertains to Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail.
     But the core point of this plan assumes that America’s 27 ranked math program and 17 rank in literacy (according to Trump) is the fault of a system that doesn’t allow students to pick their own school. The plan completely directs attention away from the curriculum itself, which has been challenging and negatively standardized. To postulate, that’s saying that the reason a child from Hampton-Dumont that lives at the poverty level is not scoring well is because they don’t go to Mason City.
     The plan also doesn’t take into account that there is an open enrollment period for students in the public school system. There are children within the CAL and H-D district that open enroll into other schools without vouchers, and the money is paid through taxes.
     It also doesn’t take into account that this system works for children in inner cities, where districts are closely compacted together, allowing for a child to change districts with little to no obstacles. For those in the Midwest or rural areas, where districts are few and far between, how can a child go from, for example, H-D to Waterloo or Des Moines. Transportation costs alone would burden the family and basically negate that subsidy.
     The voucher program also doesn’t really negate costs in the education system. When money follows the student, economies of scale are not shrunk. If 30 students open enrolled out of a school, they’re most likely to be spread throughout the grades. In this case, a teacher can’t necessarily be cut, the school still must pay its utility costs and operations would function like normal, except for the fact that Title I funds no longer are available for schools to use. This essentially means that schools most impacted will have funding cut while trying to maintain a level of consistent service.
     The benefactor in all of this are private and religious schools, who would be eligible to take these vouchers. According to Vox.com however, tuition at a private school is over $10,000 a year. $580 as a subsidy doesn’t really count as a good discount. Assuming that the state kicks in to offer more money, to say that each student will get $10,000 is a long shot.
     The education system in America is flawed. There is agreement on that. But privatizing the educational system doesn’t fix the problem.
     For instance, parents would most likely be happy that they can send their child to Harvard and pay for it with money left over to maintain a happy lifestyle, but most can’t afford that caliber school or private schools for that matter, and then rely on state schools for their childrens’ success. Most parents can’t afford private schools and rely on the public school system. The plan really hurts them: the middle class family who has yearly property tax hikes to pay for their school, and can’t afford to send their child elsewhere, and are left holding the bag when the children with vouchers leave.
     A system of choice could make successful competition, but it’s a right in the US that children get a free education. We should focus on making that education better by investigating how schools spend their Title I dollars, and making curricula that raise our global rankings, not find ways to make money off of them. 

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