"That same year, a coalition of school districts, now numbering more than 200, filed suit against the voucher expansion."
In other word, a bunch of government employees used taxpayers' money to find legal action, with the aim of maintaining their local monopolies on the provision of taxpayer-funded education.
Government entities use taxpayer money to fund legal action (and pretty much everything else they do) all the time. I am not a lawyer but I believe it is called “administrative law” and is completely normal. To think so otherwise is completely ahistorical and incorrect.
Individual people - government employees - decided to do this.
They decided to use taxpayer funds (that were specifically allocated for educating students) to finance legal action aimed at preventing parents from choosing which schools would receive taxpayer funding to educate their children.
In other words, government employees spent public education money on litigation designed to keep money flowing into their own pockets, rather than allowing those funds to follow students to whatever educational environment their families determined would best serve them.
Of course it’s individual people. The political entity they work for obviously has no will of its own. It is terribly unsurprising to me that people tasked with a job by the government would do what they can to best carry out that job.
Are you scandalized when a city and the county it is in sue each other and the transportation department over who has responsibilities for what sections of road and how much money who should get rather than letting the citizens who drive on those roads decide? Where do you draw the line for what money the government decides how to spend and what money individuals should decide how to spend?
"It is terribly unsurprising to me that people tasked with a job by the government would do what they can to best carry out that job."
Right, but the government tasked school district employees with educating kids who enroll in government-run schools. The legislature explicitly created a voucher scheme, and it's unclear why school district employees would think it was their job to prevent this from happening.
Declining enrollment and pulled funding can destroy the ability of a district to carry out the mission tasked to it by the government. This is not just hypothetical. The rural, conservative school district I used to work for (and may, many like them as pointed out in the article) and the families that rely on them do not like school vouchers, even if they otherwise support everything else that politician does. If too many students unenroll and utilize school vouchers, the whole district could collapse due to lack of funding and screw over all the remaining students.
This is compounded by the fact that vouchers often pull out more funding that the government otherwise would provide to the district for that student. This is mentioned in the article as well. e.g. the state pays the district $5k a year per student, but pulls $8k a year for a student that uses a voucher.
Also, in a lot of these rural areas there are no other good options anyway besides the school district. It’s either the district, a scammy online charter school, a scammy fly-by-night charter school, or homeschooling.
"This is compounded by the fact that vouchers often pull out more funding that the government otherwise would provide to the district for that student."
Can you please help me understand the "This is compounded" part here?
In other words, a private school gets more money from a student’s voucher than a district gets from having that same student enrolled. The voucher doesn’t just move the same amount of money around. A voucher pulls more money from education funding than then enrolling a student in a public school does.
Parents probably care more about the education of their children, than government employees do. I think those parents can be trusted to know what is "serving the education of the students".
It's supposed to be a monopoly. I don't pay property taxes to make some head of OmniCorp Education LLC a multimillionaire. I do it so that the kids in my neighborhood aren't dumber than rocks.
Your local school district is the default. If you want to do something else, you're free to. You can educate your child yourself, or pay another educational institution to do it for you. Is that too expensive? Maybe you should talk about that with the person who pays your salary.
Private schools do not play by the same rules. Special education and transportation are a significant cost of public schools that private schools can just ignore.
> In my city, school district administrators are multimillionaires.
In many more cities, they aren't.
Furthermore, I don't necessarily see what the problem is. Are public employees necessarily supposed to live as paupers? Government agencies can't just tell the people they want to work for them that they have to do so. They have to offer a competitive salary and benefits package. Many school administrators are operating organizations with hundreds, if not thousands, of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, with heavy regulatory requirements. Many have masters or doctoral degrees.
The same would be demanded by other schooling providers, because that stuff doesn't magically go away when you let people compete for tax dollars.
Is it a bad thing? There are plenty of good public schools in the United States. They typically tend to geographically coincide with places with high average household income and thus lots of funding through property taxes, though that's not the only advantage money gives them.
> Why ought that to be the case?
Because society benefits when all children have at least some education from the age of five to sixteen, if not longer. There were times throughout history (up until relatively recently, actually - think prior to WWII) where there was lots of competition for your educational dollars. The problem was, if you didn't have educational dollars to spend, your kid got no education. And now that there's more urban than rural population in the US, you can't even just tell junior to help you with farm chores. You'll just have youths doing... well, it's hard to tell, but when kids don't have anywhere they have to be or anything they have to do, it usually turns out poorly for them and their communities.
> That's what I do, and the sticker price is less per year than the annual per-student opex of my local school district.
I bet it is. The average child who attends a private school typically comes from a household that has more financial resources, and thus, requires less of the social safety net that is often provided through school districts. These schools are also free to tell more "expensive" students (read: neurodivergent and disabled children) to pound sand when it comes to their needs.
Same deal with other industries with hybrid public/private, like the postal service or insurance. Arithmetic is based on serving some people at a loss but amortizing those losses against the wider public. Private entities come in and eat the winners while leaving the losers. Public option is left with only the clients that were never profitable, and private businesses have no obligation to serve them.
"There are plenty of good public schools in the United States."
I live in one of the wealthiest cities in the US. Government-run schools are funded to the tune of $27k per student per year. I had hoped to send my son to one of those schools, until I discovered that none of them would have provided him an appropriate education.
"Because society benefits when all children have at least some education from the age of five to sixteen, if not longer."
This is an argument for taxpayer-funded education. I have not said anything against taxpayer-funding of K-12 education.
This doesn't mean it has to be government-run.
"These schools are also free to tell more "expensive" students (read: neurodivergent and disabled children) to pound sand when it comes to their needs."
This is a reasonable argument with respect to private schools, but doesn't explain why the nearby charter schools, who admit students purely by lottery, are so much more efficient than the government-run schools.
> I live in one of the wealthiest cities in the US. Government-run schools are funded to the tune of $27k per student per year. I had hoped to send my son to one of those schools, until I discovered that none of them would have provided him an appropriate education.
Sounds like it's time to raise hell at a district meeting.
> This is an argument for taxpayer-funded education. I have not said anything against taxpayer-funding of K-12 education. This doesn't mean it has to be government-run.
Most non-public education options in the US are run by religious institutions. The First Amendment to the US Constitution is supposed to build a wall between church and state.
I also want at least some say in how my tax dollars are spent. There are absolutely people in my county and state where people would take my tax dollars and spend them at the K-12 version of a bible college.
> This is a reasonable argument with respect to private schools, but doesn't explain why the nearby charter schools, who admit students purely by lottery, are so much more efficient than the government-run schools.
If your parents have the time and energy to study out which charter school to send you to and put you into a lottery, there's a pretty good chance you have the resources at home to have a quality education regardless of who operates the school.
That last point brings up an ugly thing about privatization that many proponents of vouchers don't want to talk about: optimizing family structures for shareholder returns over the last 50 years (meaning both parents working outside of the home for stagnant wages) has had a negative impact on the children of this country, and you can't just fix that by telling the local school district to split their funding with another educational system.
In other word, a bunch of government employees used taxpayers' money to find legal action, with the aim of maintaining their local monopolies on the provision of taxpayer-funded education.