Educators are scratching their heads in wonderment over the Jindal administration’s plan to spend $10 million on vouchers for private and religious schools in New Orleans while at the same time proposing $38 million in cuts to public schools across Louisiana.

“This raises profound questions about the administration’s priorities,” said Louisiana Federation of Teachers President Steve Monaghan. “Are they really interested in what is best for all the children in Louisiana, or in following a narrow ideological and political agenda in New Orleans?”

After much reported arm twisting from the fourth-floor offices of the Jindal administration, members of the House and Senate Education Committees gave favorable reports to nearly identical bills by Rep. Austin Badon (D-New Orleans) and Ann Duplessis (D-New Orleans) that create so-called “opportunity scholarships” that would allow about 1,500 children to attend private or religious schools.

“Neither one is a scholarship program,” Monaghan said. “They are voucher schemes, initially limited to New Orleans, at a cost of $10 million to taxpayers statewide. For any number of reasons, these are very bad public policy ideas.”

Monaghan said the LFT has drafted a floor letter to all members of the House and Senate, explaining why members should vote against HB by Rep. Badon 1347 and SB 795 by Sen. Duplessis. The Federation argues that vouchers don’t make economic sense, don’t provide real choice for New Orleans parents, and divert attention from real reforms already underway in the Crescent City.

From a budget standpoint, Monaghan said, the voucher plan defies logic. “They are making budget choices that cause real harm in public schools across the state,” Monaghan said. “The governor chose to eliminate funding for a promising year-old program that provides laptop computers for sixth graders across the state, chose to eliminate funding for national board certified social workers, and chose not to give school support staff badly needed pay raises. At the same time, the governor apparently supports additional cuts for K-12 education of $38 million and $31 million for higher education.”

The decision to support private and religious education as an alternative to public schools is an ideological and political choice without research-based evidence to support it, Monaghan said.

“These schemes bill themselves as opportunities for children to enter excellent schools,” Monaghan said, “but they can’t deliver on that promise.”

In the letter to lawmakers, the LFT cites three reasons why the choices apparently offered by vouchers are illusions:

• While both bills allow the voucher to be used a “academically acceptable” public schools, there is no way to judge the academic performance of private and religious schools. They do not participate in the state accountability program, receive no state ranking, and do not make their test scores public.
• There is virtually no chance that the top-tier private and religious schools will accept voucher students. For one thing, their tuitions are much higher than the voucher provides. For another, those top schools have very long waiting lists for students willing to pay full price, and they have rigid selection standards that would bar many voucher applicants.
• Special needs students need not apply. Both voucher bills allow schools to deny entrance to students who require special education services. In Milwaukee, where vouchers have been in place for some 12 years, the percentage of special education students in public schools has risen to 19% of the population, versus only 9% in the voucher schools. That means the much more expensive burden of educating special needs students is falling more heavily on the remaining public schools.

Finally, Monaghan said, New Orleans is already an education laboratory bubbling over with experimental approaches. Apart from regular public and magnet schools in the city, there about 40 charter schools offering a variety of choices for parents.

“In the state’s Recovery District schools, the per-pupil expenditure is already more than double what is spent in most Louisiana public schools,” Monaghan said. “Recently, the state superintendent of education spoke in Washington, D.C. about the wide variety of choices now available to New Orleans families. There is simply no reason for vouchers except to satisfy an ideological and political agenda. That does absolutely nothing to improve the educational opportunities for the vast majority of children in Louisiana.”