Lawmakers should not give Oklahoma's private school subsidy program a blank check

Yahoo

13-02-2025

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Oklahoma lawmakers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into creating a private school voucher program. But instead of calling the program what it really is, our legislators have attempted to obfuscate what they're doing when helping subsidize the private school education of wealthy families.
While other states call a spade a spade, our lawmakers have decided to call their voucher-like initiative a Parental Choice 'Tax Credit' program.
In reality, our state is following the path of states like Ohio, which spent almost $1 billion dollars in 2024, implementing subsidies for private, mostly religious, schools under the guise of expanded school choice. The Ohio voucher program has produced declines in student learning that would have once been seen as unthinkable.
Oklahoma is now in danger of expanding the two most destructive parts of school choice through an effort to create the first publicly funded religious charter school in the country, and by attempting to remove the spending cap on our voucher-like program.
The fight to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School now faces the scrutiny of the U.S. Supreme Court. As The New York Times reports, 'The widely watched case out of Oklahoma could transform the line between church and state in education.'
In addition to defending the barriers between church and state, we should also ask what the effect would be on student learning when the state subsidizes instruction of math and other subjects in ways that are intertwined with religious teachings.
But equally alarming is state Sen. Julie Daniels' push through Senate Bill 229 to remove the Parental Choice Tax Credit program's spending caps, further rewarding the wealthy.
When private school tax credits were authorized in 2023, a $150 million cap was established for the first year. The cap was raised to $200 million in the second year and $250 million in the third year. As Oklahoma Watch's Ruby Topalian explained, private schools increased tuition, which reduced the benefits for low-income families.
If we were to remove the spending cap, that would not be good news for the state's already lagging educational outcomes.
Research has shown that vouchers, even those called tax credits, are even more chaotic when they follow national patterns. They encourage the creation of failing private schools. In other states, many more low-income students have been initially admitted and then pushed out of private schools, creating confusion for their families and increasing budget problems for public schools.
Josh Cowen's The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers writes about how this funding has caused extreme disruption for public schools and first-time voucher and tax credit users who are not retained in private schools.
Cowen writes that the think tanks who helped launch the 1950s origins of the pro-voucher movement weren't particularly concerned about school improvement. They used the movement as a weapon against school integration and to attempt to weaken labor unions. And today's voucher sponsors use them to push an anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda.
Cowen acknowledged that 'a few tiny studies from the late 1990s and early 2000's showed small gains in test scores for voucher users, [but] since 2013 the record has been dismal.
Over the last decade, the learning loss for the kids who used vouchers to leave public schools had test score drops in some states that were comparable to the academic losses suffered by New Orleans kids after Hurricane Katrina. In other states, those students' academic declines were about as large as what COVID-19 did to student learning. In Louisiana and Ohio, harmful voucher effects were almost twice as bad as the pandemic's academic impact.
His research showed that vouchers mostly pay for the education of children already enrolled in private schools, and suck money from public schools.
And, as Cowen documents, in Wisconsin, for instance, 40% of private schools have opened and closed since their voucher program grew. And, 'about 20 percent of kids left their voucher school every year and most went into a public school.'
This indicates that new, smaller voucher and tax credit programs may not, at first, cause dramatic harm. But once they are scaled up, students who attend private schools for the first time suffer huge learning losses, and cause disruption in the public schools they left and were then pushed back into.
Given the track record in other states, the last thing our state needs to do is lift the spending cap and give the program a blank check.
We should be prioritizing shifting resources from subsidizing the affluent to funding public schools that serve every student who walks through the door regardless of socio-economic status.
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