Answering Education Questions

I recently received email from a neighbor who said that he felt that since he didn't have children, he shouldn't be taxed for public education. He also favored the voucher program, which the legislature passed and subsequently was overturned by referendum.

The two statements were related but not necessarily complementary. If we only taxed families with children, we would certainly not be able to afford the current level of funding for public education, let alone the additional costs of vouchers. My response to him was long but perhaps this forum is a good place to record my perspective.

I believe that quality public schools are a priority because they ensure an educated citizenry for the future of democracy. The taxes we pay are not tuition for our children any more than the taxes are user fees for the library or the parks or the freeways. Not everyone will use them but everyone benefits from the fact that the services are provided in our communities.

I don’t know what your occupation is but say you manage a fast food restaurant, or run a print shop, or an insurance company. You might discover that you “use” the public education system because it is supposed to prepare your employees to be able to do basic mathematics, to communicate, or to think logically. Whether or not I am an employer, I want my police officers, my cable guy, or my store clerk to be trained – and trainable. So I benefit if the public school system is working. No, I don’t like to pay taxes any more than you do but I think that the alternative would be worse.

There are many areas of government that support other segments of the population. We hope we don't ever need the service of a school for the blind but we support it because we are charitable. Loyalty to the community often trumps freedom to support only those areas of government that serve us individually. And we take on the projects that protect or care for our neighbors.

The voucher issues seem to linger and unfortunately are very divisive.

The problems I had with the education voucher legislation of last year were these:

1. The appropriation for vouchers would be another budget category-- one that goes to support private schools, when public schools are already underfunded relative to education funding in every other state. This appropriation would be called additional education funding though, and legally could be pulled from the education Trustlands revenue.

2. Voucher proponents claimed that the parents would have greater choice. However, the tuition voucher would lower the expense of private school tuition only if the school chose to accept the child. The children who would be accepted would not be the “at risk” students, the learning disabled, the ESL, or behavior problems. And it is unlikely that the low-income parents could provide the transportation or the parent involvement that private schools require, let alone the remainder of the tuition. I visited with a college student who described the urban public schools in Baltimore. She said she wished they had vouchers available so she could have escaped them. Our schools are not currently as bad as that. I believe that vouchers would have hastened the descent of our public schools to that situation and widened the gap of social classes.

2-B. I call it 2-B because it might be an alternative scenario to #2 above. The private schools set the price of their tuition based on a free market system. They will charge what the market will bear. If they are not particularly interested in growth in the number of students they serve, they may find that they can raise their tuition by the amount of the voucher, and the families who were willing to pay at that level before will still be able to pay. This gives them more revenue with the same affluent population. But the increased revenue is tax dollars.

3. In areas of the state where there are no private schools within hundreds of miles, the families would have the tax burden of benefits to the urban and suburban private schools.

4. Lastly, not all private schools would be willing to accept tuition vouchers because they don’t want to bow to government requirements. And the legislature would be anxious to show that the schools accepting tuition vouchers were held accountable. Their way of doing this is to subject the schools to the same testing requirements or teacher certification. Many private schools don’t want the expense of this intervention.

I know that there are private schools that fill a need. I wouldn’t stand in the way of those who want to provide them or patronize them. I also don’t object to appropriations such as the Carson-Smith scholarships for autistic children who are not served in public schools. But I have this attitude that tax-funded public education is the basic education that is provided to prepare the next generation for responsible citizenship. Public schools must take everyone that comes to the door. Private schools don’t have that responsibility. Private schools should not be given the public funding.

On a more personal level, I choose to have my children experience public education because it puts them in an environment where they learn to work with those people who make up their community. Their education is enriched at home and we as a family try to contribute time and talent to enrich the education experience for others at the school as well.

Well, now you have the long version of my voucher opinion. Admittedly, some of it consists of speculation, but then, so did the opinions of those who favored vouchers. A system as widely applied as the Utah proposal that was over-turned, has never been tried. No other developed country in the world has a system of education vouchers for private schools. It would be an experiment. For the reasons I gave at the beginning of this message, I am not anxious to be the state to see whether I am wrong.

Effective Legislators

There is an organization whose purpose it is to judge the effectiveness of legislators. While there might be many aspects that go into defining a “good” legislator, the single criteria for being “effective”, according to this group, is the number of bills an individual sponsors that pass. So, the more laws that make it into the Utah Code, more effective our legislature is. Of course, no elected official wants to be seen as a “slouch”. Is there any wonder that citizens are increasingly dependent upon lawyers to keep them on the right side of the law?

I wonder if there might be an organization out there which would take on the task of identifying the legislators who are most effective at stopping the passage of needless or downright bad legislation.

What's for dinner?

Every once in a while it's time to clean out the refrigerator. There are Ziplock bags of this and Tupperware containers of that – some of the contents of which are beginning to show their age. So we sort out these containers. This one is definitely a “keeper”-- just what we want and need for dinner tonight. That one (Piu!) goes into the trash.

The legislature has the responsibility to do a similar exercise. Bills pile up going into a session in January and the sorting begins. Committees evaluate them first. If they merit approval there, they are sent to the House or Senate for debate. Both chambers must declare them worthy of adoption, after which, the Governor has an opportunity to validate the choices, and (Bingo!) we have the latest set of laws and regulation. In other words, “Dinner is served.”

What happened this year was interesting. Education is a hot topic in the state as well as the legislature. Lawmakers are being hounded by their constituents to adequately fund public education and the institutions of higher education, for which they have responsibility. The number of bills dealing with education was daunting but the committees began their work of sorting back in January. Some bills were debated in one legislative house or the other; some passing, some tossed out.

But the days were passing faster than the bills. By March third, votes on many bills that were essential had been postponed and still more, which were deemed of lower priority, were a long ways from being debated.

So some legislators came up with a brilliant, if unappetizing, idea. Take a big pile of education bills; pour them all into one stew pot, called an omnibus bill; and vote on them all at once. A time saving concept in the kitchen as well as the legislature! So in went the essential funding, along with the questionable programs, along with (What's this?) proposals which had already been rejected in committee or defeated by an earlier vote. What does it matter that some parts of the concoction were fished out of the trash? Would any legislator dare to reject the essential funding of education in an election year?

Law makers went home smiling. Everyone who sponsored an education bill got a gold star on the forehead for being an “effective legislator.”

What the public is served up now is a stew that brings in the increased money that educators need, but it sure smells funny.