Vouchers

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Jackson: The Realities of School Vouchers

Published on Wednesday, July 10, 2002 in the Boston Globe
The Realities of School Vouchers

by Derrick Z. Jackson

VOUCHING FOR vouchers is easy if you do not intend to use them. After the Supreme Court upheld Cleveland's school voucher program, President Bush called it a ''great victory to parents and students.'' He said vouchers give ''freedom to parents.'' He said ''it was an important statement'' to ''make sure no child is left behind.''

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If vouchers are this good, why should the disproportionately blond burbs have all the fun? Besides, the right wing for years has been saying we are wasting, through busing and union contracts, the $5,934 that we spend per student per year in school districts where the poverty rate is more than 35 percent. Let us see what happens for that $6,144 per student per year in districts where the poverty rate is less than 5 percent.

Based on Bush's personal path to education, at Phillips Academy in Andover and at Yale, we obviously should not stop there. Only 6 million of America's 47 million schoolchildren attend private schools. The horrible divide in resources is only getting wider. While the national ratio of one private school student to every eight public school students is about the same today as it was in 1970, the ratio of private school teachers to public school teachers has risen from 1 for every 9 to 1 for every 7.

How sincere the nation is about addressing inequities is revealed fairly rapidly by looking at Cleveland's voucher program. Currently, only one Cleveland student out of every 20 uses vouchers. They cannot use them to go to the suburbs because no suburban school system will take them. Vouchers are useless for elite private schools since they are good for only up to $2,250 per student. Nationally, nonsectarian private school tuit ion averages $4,693 a year at the elementary level and $9,525 in high school. In the Northeast, elite private schools easily go for $15,000 a year for day students and $25,000 a year for boarding students.

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