VOUCHERS, CHILDREN OF COLOR, AND THE BIG LIE

By Bill Colon

At a New Jersey legislative hearing last spring on a proposed taxpayer funded school voucher bill, Georgia State Legislator Alisha Thomas Morgan testified on the results of a voucher scheme that had been implemented in her state a few years earlier. Ms. Thomas Morgan, a very articulate African-American woman, claimed vouchers were successful in opening educational opportunities for minority children in Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia.  She praised the virtues of the program and how it was offering real choice for low-income children of color.

In June, in a dramatic rebuttal to Ms. Thomas Morgan’s testimony, the Southern Education Foundation released their analysis of the Georgia voucher scheme.  In a report titled “A Failed Experiment: Georgia’s Tax Credit Scholarships for Private Schools,” the Foundation concluded that, “Instead of providing the state’s neediest children attending troubled public schools with new affordable opportunities for a good education, the law has been carried out, in large part, as a means to publicly finance the attendance of relatively well-to-do students, many of whom were already in private schools. (p. 2)“

In other words, children of color and their parents were sold an espejismo — a mirage.  Instead of providing educational opportunities for low-income minority children, the Georgia voucher scheme served as a mechanism to move taxpayer dollars from public schools to the hands of private operators while diverting $72.1 million from the Georgia state treasury.

A similar mirage may come to New Jersey in the form of the proposed voucher scheme that, like the one in Georgia, is being sold as a way to rescue low-income children of color who are stuck in underperforming school districts.

But taxpayer funded school vouchers do not rescue children.  As even voucher proponents are increasingly admitting, children that receive vouchers to attend private schools perform no better than demographically comparable students in public schools.  And, as the recent experience with Milwaukee’s voucher scheme can attest, they sometimes do worse.

Vouchers proponents also would like us to believe that African-American and Latino parents support vouchers.  Quinnipiac found, however, that African-Americans New Jersey residents opposed taxpayer funded vouchers at higher levels than the population as a whole.

Nobody bothered to poll Latinos, but my anecdotal experience is that Latino parents do not support vouchers, especially when they understand what vouchers would mean for children who do not speak English or who have special needs.

Vouchers are not a panacea for children of color, nor for anyone else.

It is unfortunate that we are wasting so much energy, time, and money on what is at best a band-aid and more likely is damaging to our public school system.

Let’s put these voucher schemes to rest. Let’s talk about the real issues plaguing underperforming school districts, such as levels of poverty that mirror the third world.  Let’s focus our energies on proven ideas that can make our public schools better for all of our children.

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Bill Colón is the CEO of The Latino Institute, Inc., a private nonprofit, educational organization, which provides leadership training and empowerment programs for parents and students.