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Randy Sedlacek, president of the Denison Independent School District board of trustees, makes clear that he opposes school choice (“Vouchers will rob public schools,” Another View, Jan. 18), but he is mistaken about the nature and purpose of school choice.
Sedlacek argues that $5,000 is insufficient to cover the cost of schools that charge $12,000 in tuition, and thus they will not accept “a child with only a $5,000 voucher.”
There are about 1,800 private schools in Texas, each with different tuition. In San Antonio, Little Flower Catholic School charges just over $4,000 in tuition annually for kindergarten through eighth grade; tuition is just over $5,000 at St. Matthew’s Catholic School for elementary school. Sibling discounts and parishioner discounts reduce the cost of the education.
In Nevada, education savings accounts, or ESAs, cover roughly 70 percent of tuition for grades six through eight and 73 percent of tuition for grades nine through 12 ($5,100 for middle- and upper-income students, and $5,700 for low-income and special-needs students).
More significant, education — both public and private — does not exist without generous subsidies. The public system is a transfer from taxpayers to schools, supplemented by fundraising efforts; many private schools make needs-based assistance available to cover tuition and other expenses. Hope for the Future, for example, provides needs-based tuition assistance for students in Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of San Antonio.
Sedlacek parrots the claim that private schools get to “choose whom they let through their doors,” the implication being that they’ll discriminate or skim the best students. Nationally, EdChoice has examined the literature on school choice in “A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice” (updated in May), which identifies 10 empirical studies that have looked directly at racial segregation in school choice programs. Eight of those 10 studies found that choice programs decrease segregation by moving students from more segregated public schools to less segregated private schools.
This makes sense. Private schools have the incentive to value diversity in the student body where public schools, because their populations are based solely on geographic boundaries, cannot. For example, St. Thomas Moore Catholic School “admits any student regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or political belief.”
Sedlacek insists that when a school district loses 100 students, other students will suffer because the district loses that funding. This sets aside the fact that schools now lose funding when students leave (a parent accepts a job transfer; a student drops out). Of course, school choice programs benefit students using those programs, but 31 of 33 studies looking at the impact school choice programs have on public schools found that the competitive effects led to improvement in public schools’ academic performance.
One place where Sedlacek is correct is his recognition of Texas’ constitutional obligation to provide “an efficient system of public free schools.” The Texas Supreme Court recently ruled that the Legislature is meeting its constitutional obligation, and the Legislature has the authority to create additional education programs that complement its constitutional mandates, including school choice.
In the unanimous decision, Justice Don Willett pointed out that “school choice has proven to be smart policy” and, he wrote, “We hope the Legislature will consider these and similar suggestions.”
As EdChoice highlights: “The research consensus in favor of school choice as a general policy is clear and consistent.”
John D. Colyandro is executive director and Russell H. Withers is general counsel at the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute, a public policy organization based in Austin.
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