9th Circuit Imitates Marcel Marceau
Last month, I warned that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals would soon be handing the school choice movement a legal setback. Well, it’s here.
As expected, the 9th Circuit has reinstated a lower court challenge to Arizona’s scholarship donation tax credit program. The program allows taxpayers to contribute to non-profit Scholarship Tuition Organizations (STOs) that provide financial assistance to families choosing private schools. The taxpayers can then claim a dollar for dollar credit for their donation.
While this ruling leaves the program intact for the time being, it would almost surely require the tax credit program to be amended if it is allowed to stand. Fortunately, as I noted in my earlier post, the 9th Circuit is overturned as often as a caber at the Highland Games. Its ruling is unlikely to stand if appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
At issue is the fact that taxpayers are free to choose the STOs to which they donate their money, and private STOs are free to set criteria for the schools at which their scholarships can be redeemed. There are thus some STOs that offer scholarships only to religious schools. This is essentially the same situation that obtains when taxpayers claim deductions for contributions to non-profit charities. The charities can legally be religious or secular, and they can infuse the services they offer with religion, or not, as they choose. The whole thing is constitutional because it is the taxpayers, not the government, that decides which charity gets their funds. This is all settled law.
To get around the fact that the legal precedents were against it, the 9th Circuit decided to do a compelling impression of Marcel Marceau, pretending to hem itself into an invisible legal box. Specifically, the 9th Circuit decided to pretend that the constitutional restrictions limiting government expenditures (as in school voucher programs) also apply to the private funds at issue under tax credit programs.
That box, of course, does not exist. No government money is spent under the tax credit program, and the tax credits are themselves available on an entirely religiously neutral basis, in scrupulous conformance with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
So here’s my next legal prediction: the constitutionality of the Arizona education tax credit program will ultimately be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and opponents of educational freedom will have to resort to some new ploy in their efforts to herd American families back onto the public school plantation.
Why President Obama Won’t Save Urban Catholic Schools
In today’s Washington Post, Checker Finn and Andy Smarick ask President Obama to save the nation’s vanishing urban Catholic schools. Their commentary does a good job of explaining why he might want to do that: Catholic schools are typically bastions of excellence in otherwise educationally blighted inner-city areas. Economist Derek Neal has shown that black children attending these schools are 26 percentage points more likely to finish high school, and twice as likely to graduate from college, than similar students attending urban public schools.
Finn and Smarick also suggest ways that president Obama could bring the option of private schooling, including Catholic schools, within reach of all families — supporting the spread of state tax credit and scholarship programs around the country, for instance.
What Finn and Smarick don’t do is explain why the president will continue to ignore the evidence and their plea, instead letting the educational prospects of inner-city children erode even further. Three possible explanations occur to me:
- The president is unfamiliar with the evidence on the superiority of private and especially urban Catholic schools
- He thinks that his administration will succeed in dramatically improving public schools all over the country, despite the failure of all his predecessors’ efforts
- He thinks that making it easier for poor parents to choose private schools would hurt him politically
Personally, I don’t believe the first explanation. I can believe the second, but wish I couldn’t (wouldn’t it be nice to have a realist in the Oval Office)? And I can certainly believe the third, but if so, the president simply hasn’t done the political math.
Coming out strongly in favor of public and private school choice at the state level would win Barack Obama substantial new support from independent and moderate swing voters who seem to have been drifting away from him, while costing him very little from his base. The NEA might reduce its level of support, but they’re not going to flip and back Republicans. And few if any Democratic voters would switch party allegiance over a Democratic president’s desire to help poor kids with the most effective policies.
In English Learning Case, Families Will Lose Either Way
The Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments today in a case that will affect how and at what cost English is taught to non-native speakers in U.S. public schools. On one side are Hispanic parents from southern Arizona who sued their school district for failing to properly teach their children English, and on the other are district and state officials who want the courts to butt out and let them teach students in whatever way, and at whatever cost, they choose. I understand what these parents are going through — I grew up in an English-speaking family in the French-speaking province of Quebec — but it really doesn’t matter who “wins” this case: the families will lose either way.
Even if the parents “win,” and the Court orders their public school district to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on English instruction, it won’t do any good. A 1985 federal court order compelled the state of Missouri to spend an additional $2 billion over 12 years to desegregate Kansas City schools and improve the achievement of African American students. Neither goal was achieved, and even the presiding judge eventually admitted his order was a failure. Extra spending and court pressure do not improve public school performance, because public schools don’t have to show improvement to get the money and because courts can’t dismiss ineffective administrators or teachers.
The real solution is to empower families to _leave_ the schools that are failing them and move their children to more effective ones. Fortunately, Arizona has an education tax credit program that makes scholarships available to defray private school tuition. Whatever the court’s verdict, these parents should be banding together to create a local scholarship fund that can accept tax-credited donations so their children can attend the private schools of their choice. They can then pick whichever schools demonstrate the most success at teaching English instead of spending their time in court.
Duncan the Mercenary, Obama the Coward
The Obama administration’s stance on the voucher program is transparently political and insulting. President Obama claims he wants to help the poor and improve education, and yet he has aided and abetted Congress in the murder of the only federal education program with evidence of sustained and increasing achievement gains for participants (and at a quarter of the cost).
From Bloomberg today:
A spending law signed by Obama last month will end a program that gives low-income parents tuition vouchers of as much as $7,500 a year to send their children to private schools. Among 54 participating schools are Sidwell Friends, where Sasha and Malia Obama are students, and Ambassador Baptist Church Christian School, where Sherrise Greene sends her two daughters and had wanted to enroll Marquis.
“I had high hopes that he would be attending with a scholarship with his sisters,” Greene said in an interview. “I’m just really hurt that it’s being ended, because I think it’s a good program.”
Ms. Greene should feel hurt. And she should be angry as well. Many of the scholarship parents are meeting tonight to force Congress and the administration to recognize that they are real people who will be hurt by this payoff to the teachers unions. I look forward to their protests.
The most loathsome character in this sordid story, perhaps . . . it’s difficult to choose . . . is Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. This self-proclaimed “reformer” had this to say to the parents of this wildly popular and proven program:
Duncan said the Education Department findings don’t warrant a continuation of the voucher program, except for children already enrolled. While some students showed “modest gains” in reading, those who had switched to private schools from “low performing” public schools showed no improvement, he said in an e-mailed statement.
How stupid and insignificant do Duncan and Obama think these parents and children are? The whole affair is disgusting.
Can Arne Duncan Fix All the Schools?
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, responding to a new study showing that District of Columbia students using vouchers to attend private schools outperformed their peers in public schools — a study that he has been accused of keeping under wraps until after Congress voted to end the D.C. voucher program — told the Washington Post of his concerns:
“Big picture, I don’t see vouchers as being the answer,” Duncan said in a recent meeting with Washington Post editors and reporters. “You can pull two kids out, you can pull three kids out, and you’re leaving 97, 98 percent behind. You need to help all those kids. The way you help them is by challenging the status quo where it’s not working and coming back with dramatically better schools and doing it systemically.”
But why would vouchers only serve two or three percent of the kids? Only because Congress limited the size of the voucher program. Thousands more families have applied for public or private vouchers than there were vouchers available. If the District of Columbia took its mammoth school budget and divided it into equal vouchers or scholarships for each child in the city, Arne Duncan could bet his bottom dollar that a lot more than two percent of the families would head for private or parochial schools. His fear is not that vouchers only serve two percent of the kids, it’s that a full-scale choice program would reveal just how much demand for alternatives there is.
But note also: Duncan says that he wants to “help all those kids . . . by . . . coming back with dramatically better schools.” But he ran the Chicago schools for seven years, and he was not able to make a single school good enough for Barack and Michelle Obama to send their own children there.
Wouldn’t the 97 or 98 percent of the kids in Chicago whose parents couldn’t afford the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools have benefited from having a choice?
A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (after High School)
The South Carolina NAACP is among the most strident opponents of a new education tax credit proposal in that state that would make it easier for families — especially poor families — to choose private schools for their kids.
But the NAACP’s national platform states that:
The NAACP is a leading advocate of equal access to quality education. In an effort to promote and ensure education opportunities for minority youth, the NAACP offers the following national scholarships: Earl G. Graves Scholarship, Agnes Jones Scholarship, …. These awards help eliminate financial difficulties that may hinder students’ education goals.
Doesn’t that put the SC NAACP’s position into clear conflict with its parent organization? Actually, no. I deleted the qualifier “higher” before the word “education” in the block quote above. The NAACP strongly supports scholarships for poor kids to attend private schools, so long as the kids are over 18 or so.
A few years ago I debated this bizarre inconsistency with a very candid and pleasant NAACP representative, and his response boiled down to this: ”I lived through the Jim Crow South and I don’t trust a bunch of white Republicans to have our best interests in mind.” Fair enough. We shouldn’t trust politicians of any stripe to have the public’s interests in mind on any issue. We should instead look at what actually works best both here and around the world, and do that.
From the largest shanty town in Africa, to the slums of Hyderabad, India, to the remote rural villages of in-land China, the poor are already choosing private schools in vast numbers. And those schools are significantly outperforming their public sector counterparts at a fraction of the cost. Their stories are told in The Beautiful Tree, a compelling new narrative non-fiction book by scholar and world-traveler James Tooley. Cato is launching the book at noon on April 15th at our DC headquarters. I hope someone from the NAACP will attend.
Oh, and in case it matters to anyone, the lead advocate of SC’s tax credit school choice program is state senator Robert Ford, an African American Democrat. For some reason the NAACP still opposes it.
More on the AZ Supreme Court Ruling
As Andrew Coulson noted earlier, the Arizona Supreme Court struck down two voucher programs today that serve special needs and foster children.
I think some of his points deserve an additional emphasis; this is a tragedy for many of the state’s most needy and vulnerable children but it can be easily fixed. (See who school choice opponents are so determined to send back to an inadequate public school system here).
These children can be quickly and seamlessly supported in their school of choice through an immediate expansion of the state’s two existing education tax credit programs, which have been ruled constitutional.
These children are in desperate need of the education they currently receive at private schools, and lawmakers must ensure that they can continue to attend their school of choice.
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