Voucher-based education programs do not solve our problems | Guest commentary

In a recent commentary for the Eagle, Dave Trabert advocated for so-called school choice programs, specifically state programs that provide money in the form of vouchers to help defray the cost of private schools, as a fix-all for racial and class gaps in educational achievement. However, Trabert misrepresented the school choice effect and ignored much larger factors in student success. He claimed that Wichita area schools discriminate against students of color and students from economically disadvantaged homes, while proposing a program that exacerbates school segregation.

The data on student achievement in school choice programs nationwide is actually quite mixed and often hides how school choice tends to increase school segregation. Trabert left out this fact when he chose Indiana, Arizona, and Florida for his dataset. In Arizona, Latino students make up 44% of the state student body, but 36% of the state’s “school choice” enrollment. White students are 40% of the state student body, but 48% of enrollment. In Florida, white and Asian children tend to go to a school where a third of the student body is Black or Latino, even though Black and Latino kids make up more than half of the state student body.

Indiana’s choice program has a similar divide, as the data shows that school choice schools tend to have a majority white student body. While some individual families may see success for their own children through voucher use, overall school choice tends to give yet another advantage to already privileged groups. Vouchers help families defray the cost of private schooling, but they do not cover the entire tuition, leaving lots of students out of the game.

Here in Wichita, we have a magnet program that allows families to apply to different schools in the district, which was put in place in an attempt to desegregate our schools. Even with the magnet program, we still have significant racial and class issues in terms of educational opportunity and achievement in the Wichita metropolitan area. But these problems extend beyond the schoolhouse or the classroom, with historically racialized housing zones, property tax and school tax inequities, even state funding problems in the past twenty years. These structural issues deeply impact children’s school performance and would not be addressed with a voucher program. It is telling that groups like the Kansas Policy Institute use some of the language of structural racism or structural classism to endorse voucher programs that segregate students and hamper their educational achievement but ignore the broader societal factors at play.

The term school choice is a ruse — it sounds empowering to us as parents, but it is the equivalent of a snake-oil salesman telling you to buy their potion to cure a chronic illness. Since the 1960s, repeated studies of educational attainment in America have reiterated the same finding: family income is the greatest determinant of a child’s success in school. What we do in our schools matters, good teaching makes a difference, access to resources helps students achieve, but socio-economic realities are staggering and cannot be ignored. On the whole, student performance is not necessarily determined by teachers and schools as much as it is an indicator of larger forces at work in our community. When disadvantaged students underperform in schools, we must address factors outside of the classroom.

Voucher programs do the opposite. School choice asserts that education only happens in a school building and can only be affected there. School choice assumes a family can afford to send their child to the school of their choosing. School choice tells a family to find a school, with no guarantee that school will even agree to enroll their child. School choice makes education a personal shopping trip instead of a communal endeavor. A voucher-based education program does not solve our problems, it makes them worse. We need to act as a community and not as consumers.