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Title: Children as Cookies?
Author: Louis Godfrey
Date: Nov. 1, 2007
When Utah House Speaker Greg Curtis, R-Sandy, recognized Rep. Brad Last during one tense moment in the 2007 Legislature, the typically bustling chamber fell dead silent. All eyes were fixed squarely on the St. George Republican. “I have great affection for public schools,” Last began, “and I have been struggling with this issue for years … but I have come to the conclusion that this is the right way to implement school choice.”
The final vote on House Bill 148—education vouchers—came just before noon on Feb. 2. The measure squeaked by, 38 to 37.
In the days leading up to the vote, Last had several meetings with Curtis and Rep. Stephen Urquhart, R-St. George. As the bill’s chief sponsor, Urquhart was leaning hard on Last for support. Last was also in the crosshairs of Parents for Choice in Education (PCE), a local pro-voucher group. Both sides in the voucher debate had targeted him as the crucial vote. With passage upstairs in the Senate assured, there was no question he would decide this issue.
“I knew that my vote would offend those in public education,” says Last, himself a former Washington School District board member. “I was still struggling with this issue right up until the vote, but I believe in my soul that I made the right choice.”
Last had been a longtime holdout on vouchers. He had voted against a tuition tax-credit bill in 2005, and he even had voted against vouchers in the House Education Committee two days before the full vote.
Nine months later, Last says he backed the voucher bill simply because he felt comfortable with the specific legislation.
“I saw a bill that was designed not to hurt public schools but to help them. I’m particularly interested in the means testing and the hold-harmless elements of the program,” he says. “If you look at all the restrictions and funding issues with public education, they really do an excellent job, but this is just another limited tool in the toolbox to help with that mission.”
Essentially, Last was convinced by the argument that pro-voucher forces have spread with the “Oreo cookie” ad, which has blanketed prime-time TV for the last several weeks. If you’ve somehow missed the PCE-funded commercial, it features self-described “parenting experts” Richard and Linda Eyre stacking Oreos, which symbolize Utah schoolchildren. While subtracting cookies and redistributing them among stacks, the Eyres show how vouchers will purportedly augment the public school system by decreasing class size without sapping school resources. It’s just one of the ads, pro and con, running nonstop in advance of the Nov. 6 election.
And it’s all because you, the voters, signed enough petitions circulated primarily by the Utah Education Association last spring to place Referendum 1 on the ballot.
Vouchers have consumed Utah politics this year—from the halls of the Legislature to the docket of the state Supreme Court, with a public spat between the Utah State Board of Education and Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. But 2007 is just the culmination of Utah’s decadelong battle over school choice, itself just another front in a national war between groups like the National Education Association and the Michigan-based All Children Matter (both of which have poured millions into the state through their proxies).
In spite of the overworked talking points being parroted at neighborhood meetings, televised debates and on countless blogs, precious little time has gone toward dissecting philosophical motivations or political history behind vouchers. As Utah Senate majority caucus manager Ric Cantrell puts it, “The only thing new that we are hearing is the level of emotion.”
The theory behind this report is that by knowing the back story of the pro- and antivoucher fights, voters might actually cast a more intelligent referendum vote.
Children as Widgets
All voucher programs are essentially government-entitlement programs, or “conservative welfare,” says Paul Mero, director of the ultraconservative Sutherland Institute. But the difference between the practice and the original theory of school vouchers is large, and the real difference between Utah’s proposal and others is that the motivations of its strongest advocates lie in that original theory.
The nation’s first voucher program was created in 1990, in Milwaukee, as a response to a socio-economic crisis. “Milwaukee was a classic example of a declining industrial city in the 1980s,” says Daniel Levin, a professor of political science at the University of Utah., and a Wisconsin native. “When the American Motor Company was bought out, and Allis-Chalmers (the tractor manufacturer) moved its operations out of state, the city went into a free-fall.
“Milwaukee began to lose a large portion of its white, middle-class population and became much poorer and more African-American very quickly. This had a radical impact on the school system, in ways that it was not equipped to deal with, and schools began to fail.” Levin remembers that, of the approximately 900 students enrolled in his high school class, only half graduated.
Originally, Milwaukee’s program found champions in black Democratic politicians, because the program targeted only the most impoverished school districts and limited voucher expenditures to secular private schools. But, by 1996, conservative Catholic organizations such as the Bradley Foundation successfully pushed to expand the program into parochial schools.
Three years later, Florida established its voucher program, the first to be implemented statewide, where religion was also a factor. “There were Florida school districts, like Miami-Dade, that were failing or near failing,” says Palm Beach Post reporter S.V. Date, who has covered Florida’s voucher program extensively.
“But the reason Florida got vouchers is because Jeb Bush was elected [governor]. For decades, there had been a small but politically powerful group of evangelical Christians who wanted public funding for their schools. And they had a lot of influence over Bush.”
You would be hard-pressed to find such conditions in Utah’s private schools. Yes, most parochial and private schools in Utah favor vouchers. But even the harshest critics of Utah’s system don’t consider it to be failing. Utah’s high-school-dropout rates are well below the national average (the highest in the state, in the Ogden district, is 14 percent), state standardized-test scores are above average and Utah has one of the highest advanced-placement pass rates of any state. And Utah’s dominant religion—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—has a long history of supporting public schools. There are notably more full-day Catholic and Episcopalian schools in Utah than LDS schools—not counting the LDS release-time seminary program.
So, where is the push for vouchers in Utah coming from?
For one answer, you can tune the radio to KTKK 630 AM, weekdays at 5 p.m. The first thing you’ll hear is the throbbing bass line of the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” followed by, “Welcome to Free Capitalist Radio. This is Rick Koerber, and I am the Free Capitalist. Time to wake up and turn your brain on …” For the next two hours, Koerber and guests discuss current events through the lens of modern libertarian ideologists such as Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell and, most especially, Milton Friedman, who first proposed the idea of school vouchers in a 1955 article titled “The Role of Government in Education.”
Koerber, a business consultant and motivational speaker by day, says, “Friedman talks about how the government has not only mandated education and funded education, both of which are good, but that the government has also taken over the administration of it. This has created a state-subsidized monopoly that has really stifled innovation and limited productivity in education.”
School vouchers have become the cause du jour of Free Capitalist Radio and for its parent organization the Free Capitalist Project (FCP), which boast thousands of members around the state. Recently, FCP has formed a loose collaboration with Parents for Choice in Education to promote vouchers.
“For me, vouchers are one way to combat the single biggest threat today, which is this continuing government-union alliance,” Koerber says. “They are about approaching public education reform with a market-style solution.”
“Vouchers are the market approach to education,” says John Witte, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a recognized authority on vouchers. “Now, that has its advantages and disadvantages, but the idea is that schools become businesses and parents and students become clients.”
The U.’s Levin is skeptical of this “market approach” to education. “If you really listen to the rhetoric around the voucher issue, it is an attack on government services. Education is the public service that is most directed at the middle class in this country, and teachers are the single largest group of government employees,” Levin says. “If you want to attack the modern welfare state, there is no bigger target than public education.”
Most Utah lawmakers who voted for vouchers quickly distance themselves from the fringe views of the Free Capitalist, but there is a small minority in the state Legislature whose thinking is not all that different from Koerber and his compatriots. These are the Republicans, who time and again, have kept the voucher issue alive—from the push for tuition tax credits during the ‘90s to current efforts.
“The reason the voucher bill we passed is the way it is, is because of compromise,” says Urquhart. “It’s fun to talk about a Friedman-style voucher program, where all funds are distributed to the parents, but it would never get anywhere on the Hill. If I were king for a day, though, I would do things differently.”
And he might still. Urquhart is cagier than most talk-show hosts who blather away about free-market education and commie-inspired teacher’s unions. “Isn’t all legislation just a first step? There is almost always a need to tweak and amend down the line,” he says.
Show a little gratitude, wouldja?
But if libertarian-minded lawmakers are only a minority, then, the question becomes, how did they get a (slim) majority on the House floor?
Bountiful Republican Rep. Sheryl Allen has a storied history of political survival—barely—in squarely conservative Davis County. She has long been a target of pro-voucher forces. Both as a legislator and in her work directing the Davis County School District Foundation, she has consistently—and vocally—opposed most of her fellow Republicans on vouchers.
But she is far from the only one. Unlike that national teachers union, which is almost exclusively Democrat, the Utah Education Association has strong ties to the state GOP, inevitable in a one-party-dominated state. Of 3,500 delegates at the 2006 Utah Republican Convention, more than 300 were UEA members.
Which is why, for more than a decade, the main battleground for school choice has been the Republican primaries—specifically those for state House seats. Some observers, like Allen, say this issue alone has cost more moderate Republicans their seats than any other in recent times.
“You can chart the rise of this issue in relation to PCE’s involvement in primary races [starting back in the mid-1990s]. The more money they have put into races, the more influence they have had on the Hill,” says Allen.
Allen points to a number of current representatives who started off as PCE-backed challengers taking on incumbents, including Rep. Aaron Tilton, R-Springville, and Rep. Greg Hughes, R-Draper. Another race in which school choice was a central issue was that of Rep. David Cox, an American Fork Republican who was unseated by rival Kenneth Sumsion in 2006.
According to Robyn Bagley, a PCE board member who failed in her own attempt to beat Rep. Karen Morgan, D-Cottonwood Heights, in a tight, voucher-centered race last year: “We are a registered 501(c) nonprofit. We have formed a political-issue committee and a political-action committee. It is no secret that we have lobbied legislators on this issue and that we have backed candidates that support our position but we have not done anything that the UEA hasn’t, and they have matched us dollar for dollar.”
When the dust has settled, it would seem that any changes in the composition of the Legislature have probably cancelled each other out on this issue. Which is why vouchers can only be attributed to shifting attitudes among many lawmakers, and, in an odd twist, that may have more to do with the UEA’s lobbying than that of PCE.
Almost every pro-voucher legislator will point to a 2003 Utah Business Coalition study as reason to be concerned about the future of Utah’s public schools. The study estimated that Utah will add more than 150,000 new students to the school system over the next 10 years, which could lead to skyrocketing income-tax rates.
“[Ever since that study came out], both bodies have done everything they can to try and address some real problems, but it never seems to be enough,” says one legislative source. “The UEA is just so dead-set against any proposals except their own, that many legislators have come to resent them, and that had led to a resentment of the UEA’s philosophical opposition to vouchers.”
Simply put, the feeling among many Republican lawmakers is that the teachers’ union lacks gratitude.
“This year is a perfect example,” says one legislator who asked to remain anonymous. “We put over $500 million into public education. But, when it came time to announce it, the UEA declined to stand with us. All because of vouchers.”
According to the latest Dan Jones/Deseret Morning News and KSL-TV poll, 34 percent of Utahns say they plan to vote for vouchers and 61 percent against. Seven percent are undecided. Taking those numbers as an accurate reflection of the electorate’s mood, it’s highly unlikely that vouchers will come out alive.
There may be a brief respite, but don’t expect vouchers to fade entirely from view. The money and high emotions continue to flow on both sides.
“I don’t see any appetite for this issue next year or in the foreseeable future,” says Ric Cantrell, of the Utah Senate majority caucus. “But. if American democracy has taught us anything, it’s that ideas, good or bad, never really die.”
Voucher Ins and Outs
The Utah Parent Choice in Education Program (HB-148) would create a scholarship program under which private schools would receive between $500 and $3,000 in taxpayer funds per student, “means tested” for family size and income. The money would not come from the State Education Fund (composed of the Dedicated State Income Tax) but from the General Revenue Fund. For the first five years of the program, school districts would be “held harmless” by the program. This means that, while the amount of the voucher the child receives would be deducted from the average per-pupil funding that a public school district would have received for that child (around $7,500), the district temporarily would receive the difference (between $4,500 and $7,000).
The estimated fiscal impact of this program is an average of $9 million dollars over the first five years ($5.5 million the first year, and up to $71 million by the 13th year). Although those figures are a small fraction of the state’s $3.5 billion annual education budget, it would be the most expansive, expensive private-school voucher program in the country. That is because, unlike other programs in Milwaukee; Cleveland; Washington, D.C.; and Florida—all of which are targeted to low-income kids, students in failing schools or to children with disabilities—Utah taxpayers under the program would also be expected to fund private schooling for upper-income students.