The Nuts and Bolts of Voucher Funding -- Parts 1 1/2, 2, 3, 4, and a response to BYU professor, Clayne L. Pope

I attended the propaganda meeting, errr, I mean "voucher discussion" advertised on the Herald's front page in the Orem city council chambers on Thursday, Nov. 1, 7:00 p.m. I almost went to the more exciting sounding debate at Provo High, but felt I should go and see what my legislators had to say. I'm GLAD I did. Before the meeting started, a man passed out VoteFor1 newletters. Various people asked why there weren't representatives from both sides. I soon realized I was in one of the "cottage meetings" being held around the state to "educate" us 60% of voters against vouchers (http://www.sltrib.com/ci_7348362) why the politicians are right. I passed out the copies I had brought of my flyer (see my first blog on Oct. 30th) and received over a dozen happy thank you's afterwards.

I got to meet my senator and my representative. Senators Valentine and Dayton and Reps. Daw and Fowlke were there. I will say that they were very respectful of teachers and of everyone attending, even though 90% of the questions were doubting their assertions.

I was concerned by a lot of the positions they were taking, I was answering some questions from other audience members afterwards, and I had my previous plan to explain all of the funding. Then I saw this: http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/242211/
Guest opinion: BYU professor urges: Educate, don't brainwash

I read those smug, condescending words to all those who actually read the studies and bill language and have philosophical objections to the superiority of private schools while regarding public schools as one of the principal causes of America's greatness...and I just had to respond... completely, thoroughly, rationally, truthfully, to defend the good people I met at the discussion last night and teachers everywhere. So I will be giving some more blow-by-blow of what was said at the forum later. Here is the truth...

Which also happens to address Major Voucher Untruths:

2. Ignoring, or deliberately diverting attention from the true amount of money the state actually sends districts per student in WPU and MSP.

3. Misrepresenting the mitigation money as a full refund for the money lost from the voucher and allowing the misconception that the mitigation money goes directly back to the affected school.

4. Claiming that the schools won’t lose any money because the voucher check itself is written from the General Fund rather than the Uniform School Fund.


The entire cookie rationale and increase in per-student spending is dishonest, unethical, and a bunch of other words.

Public education is about pooling tax resources to educate the children of the whole society, even those who can't pay for that service on their own, because that's consistent with our public standards of social justice and morality and our capitalist principle of teaching them how to fish rather than giving them a fish (welfare). Education is the true social ladder.

So public education dollars predominantly go to services that benefit hundreds or thousands of students at once, i.e. schools, teachers, computers, buses, etc. The myth of "my taxes" going where "I want them"—rather than some sacrifice for society's good—changes the paradigm to school as a paid service where we purchase what we want. Whatever the exact stat is—20% percent of tax payers pay 80% percent of taxes...or something in that range—that philosophy inevitably leads to increased privatization and exclusion of a large portion of society because they can't afford their share. Most Americans and most Utahns reject that, as does the official state policy for education funding.

The voucher amount and mitigation monies are based on MSP:
http://le.utah.gov/%7E2007/bills/hbillenr/hb0148.pdf

The largest part of MSP is WPU:
http://le.utah.gov/interim/2007/pdf/00000364.pdf
Notice where it says "The WPU is NOT a plan of expenditure, or budget...but a mechanism to derive total program cost and distribute revenues." (Caps mine)

A teacher doesn't teach a class of five students because of a cookie commercial claiming each student has a right to $7500 of unique funding, and a student benefiting from at least $245,000 dollars worth of teacher throughout his/her seven classes doesn't take away those funds from others. The entire cost/savings argument of the voucher movement is based upon these false claims.

Average Timmy's true average financing in Utah in 2005 (year I have definite stat's from) without vouchers:
District receives $2220 from local funds that are almost entirely devoted to buildings and maintenance.
District receives $597 in federal money inflexibly dedicated to special programs.
District receives $3508 in MSP from the state to the district. The vast majority of this MSP is spent on salaries and benefits of faculty and staff who benefit many students, rather than just one--less than $40 dollars of that money is sent to his actual school because of head count. (Money sent to an Alpine District Jr. High in 2007-08 is 37.99 per student.)
The school spends $2-3 uniquely on Timmy rather than on resources that benefit many students from that about $35 dollars sent to the school. (Considering the cost of reams of paper and utilities vs. the unique paper and electricity usage of Johnny)
First 3 numbers from:
http://www.choiceineducation.org/documents/FiscalImpactofVouchersonUtah.pdf

Average Timmy's true average financing in Utah in 2005 in a bizarro back-in-time world with vouchers:
$2220 from local funds that are almost entirely devoted to buildings and maintenance.
$597 in federal money inflexibly dedicated to special programs.
(Both of these are not based on head count, and both flow in and are automatically spent on fixed costs regardless of Johnny leaving the district for Private School 101.)
The district gets mitigation money, the difference of Johnny's average voucher, $2000, and MSP, $3508, for 5 yrs, thus receiving $1508 this year.
The state general fund disperses a $2000 check to Private School 101.
The State allocates the remaining $2000 dollars equivalent to the voucher from the Uniform School Fund to the district, but then removes it and deposits it...back in the Uniform School Fund...where it sits until next year. http://le.utah.gov/%7E2007/bills/hbillenr/hb0148.pdf Lines 309-315.
Timmy's departure was not enough to let go of a teacher, so the district has to absorb that $2000 loss to its budget offset by the $35ish dollars not sent to the individual school. (And if the district would have lost enough students in a single school, 25-28ish students, to hire one fewer teacher, it also would lose an average of $50000-56000 in voucher funding and classroom size would remain the same. NOT because of district spite, but because of the lesser amount of WPU's allocated per head by the same state legislators who passed vouchers! And in a much more realistic scenario, if 25 students leave from 15 different schools, the class size is minimally reduced for one year and the district just eats the average $2000 loss for each student while releasing no teachers. AND after 5 years, the district doesn't even get the $1500 in mitigation money.)

Final results of student voucher: Total taxpayer money allocated is $2000 more. Total funds per student in education money appears higher [(District student population - 1) divided by same amount of money originally allocated] even though both the district and school actually LOST money. The $2000 that was sent to the district so it could be called school funding, but was shell-gamed back into the Uniform School Fund, just rolls into the allocations for the next year. Or it accumulates because of many vouchers and the legislators cut taxes because of the "surplus" while the actual schools and districts slowly bleed to death, leading eventually to the ultimate goal of complete privatization.

The typical classroom is almost entirely fixed costs until you remove enough students to get rid of a teacher.

The Susan Aud study I quoted above admirably sums up MSP and exactly what amount of funding comes from the state, completely contradicting all of PCE's and the pro-voucher legislators' $7500 statistics that count state MSP spent on teachers and local and federal funding as "leftover" that can be redistributed.
http://www.choiceineducation.org/documents/FiscalImpactofVouchersonUtah.pdf
But being the biased person she is--her words, not mine...read the opening disclaimer of her study--she then proceeds to label leftover local funds which she acknowledged are fixed construction costs as a windfall."

This USU study of a previous Tax Credit for Private School bill from 2004 has two very relevant points to this discussion:
http://www.choiceineducation.org/documents/USUTuitionTaxCreditStudy.pdf
First, it explains very well on page 34 that the average school district in Utah budgets on average of 75% of its funds to salaries, benefits, and capital projects (construction). You can't redistribute those things in any "reasonable projection" that doesn't involve large groups of students leaving the same schools rather than small amounts from many schools.
But the study also goes CRAZY, like seriously bonkers/nuts/weird-professor-proving-that-one-plus-one-equals-three-with-arcane-statistics-that have-no-bearing-in-the-real-world crazy. In the Executive Summary, the authors state that the marginal cost “per WPU” (huh?) in 2002-2003 is $8675...when the actual WPU for that year was $2116 and the “total per student” was just under $6000. I am not misreading this. Here is a direct quote from page 6:
“But, this is then also the value that state and local districts can be expected to save from public school appropriations if a single student leaves a publicly funded school...This figure significantly exceeds per student spending...This is to be expected and is a natural result of school district managers doing their job well.”
So they admit that public schools are extremely well run, and then...what?!
I actually read most of what I could understand in this 149 pg. monster until pg. 45 which contains the table with the crazy "marginal costs." I will be the first to admit I did not understand much of what I read about all of the stats. But any reasonable person can conclude that claiming marginal savings higher than the broadest possible total cost statistic is a fraudulent way to claim over a billion dollars in savings.

The laymen version of this is that the study claims, for the year 2002-2003, that when the state put a kid in school and sent the local district the WPU of $2116 (plus some more if he was special ed.), the state somehow then gained $8675 if the kid moved out. I repeat, it is fraudulent to publicly claim that taxpayers save $1 billion dollars from this "magic money."

And that's just what the voucher supporters do:
http://www.choiceineducation.org/research.php
The entire "vouchers help public schools" case is dead. Aud's study counts local money specifically devoted to fixed costs and "savings" sitting unallocated in the Uniform School Fund to reach her conclusions, and the USU professors, the ones whose claims are the basis of all of those doorhangers and PCE's front page claiming "over $1 billion in savings, defy belief. Did no one ever read this?! Is the incomprehensibility of voucher funding their greatest defense?

Flyer distributed late Oct. and early Nov. in Orem neighborhoods

This is the flyer distributed through one neighborhood initially. It represents my personal research and opinions and was made completely with my own time and money. A few other teachers have made copies and plan on distributing them also. So the first sentence naming the specific neighborhood has been deleted.

A PUBLIC SCHOOL OPINION FROM A NEIGHBOR

AND WHERE YOU CAN LOOK FOR ANSWERS

I am a public school teacher who wants the best for all children. I believe that vouchers are not a solution to any of the problems facing schools in Utah or the Alpine School District. In fact, the voucher campaign has been misleading about their philosophy and funding, and vouchers will hurt the majority of students in public schools while subsidizing a select few who choose to leave. This flyer outlines my reasoning and includes a lot of web links so that you can research the issue yourself.

This is a link to the official Utah Voter Information Guide on Referendum 1 with arguments from both sides, an impartial fiscal analysis, and the actual text of the bill, HB 148. http://elections.utah.gov/Citizen.htm

Public schools lift society up

Public schools are designed to teach all children and are open to all children. Public education available to all students is one of the main reasons that the United States has been able to create the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world. And Utah’s public schools are great! Our students have some of the highest test scores, graduation rates, and percentages of students going on to college in the country while spending the least amount of money per student.

The inevitable and frustrating problems we sometimes face in public education are worth it when considering the alternative—a system where private schools are the only choice and only for those who can afford them. We have the entire history of the world before U.S. public education in the 20^th century as empirical evidence that a completely private system will not educate all students.

Vouchers are specifically designed to hurt public schools

Vouchers are not new. They have been rejected by many states for over 30 years. Influential thinkers promote vouchers as a tool to “defund” public schools until they are eliminated, leaving a “free market” of only private schools. After failing in Utah repeatedly, voucher advocates added “mitigation money” to the bill in order to “mitigate” their negative effect on public schools, allowing them to pass vouchers by one vote. (See below for more on the real effect of the mitigation dollars.) Senator Curtis Bramble, the sponsor of HB 148, is a “Legislative Advisor” to a large think tank, The Heartland Institute, that advocates vouchers on a national basis. You can check their website for many pro-voucher arguments and see what you think. I am including a link to an essay by the president of The Heartland Institute where he specifically explains to libertarians how vouchers are the first step in the plan to “wean” the public from public schools and completely privatize education.

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10644

This explains why organized, out-of-state groups poured $750,000 into the 2006 Utah legislative campaign to elect those who promised to vote for vouchers, why they ran ads this spring trying to stop the public from petitioning for a referendum on the law, and why they initiated the current multi-million dollar ad campaign trying to convince voters that this subsidy will help public schools. They are convinced that Utah is the start of a tidal wave of voucher experiments across the country designed to redistribute public funds to individuals attending private schools.

Vouchers and Money—The Oreo commercial isn’t true

Some voucher supporters sincerely believe public schools are not worth the millions of dollars spent and should be eliminated. We have an honest disagreement. But the voucher campaign in Utah claims that vouchers will actually help public schools through increased funding. This is an effort to confuse people who may want improvements in our schools, but would never dream of hurting them.

There is a commercial currently running that features a prominent Utah couple using Oreos to claim that each publicly educated child in Utah costs $7500, so that when we spend $3000 on a voucher it leaves $4000 extra dollars to be spent on the remaining students. Here is a link to a true cookie video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Kt-i4pmV0

To explain briefly, public schools are designed so that each tax dollar benefits many students at once, not just one individual. The voucher supporters totaled every expense possible: teachers, administrators, counselors, custodians, heat and electricity, extra-curricular programs, school lunch, computers, buses, buildings, the interest on the loans used to construct the buildings, etc., and included funds that come from the federal government, school bonds in individual districts (The $229 million dollar bond Alpine District Voters approved last year is counted as “state funding!”), and school trust land money, to claim that the state spends a unique $7500 on each student. http://utahtaxpayer.blogspot.com/2007/08/7500-per-utah-k-12-student-in-fy2008.html This statistic is useful to compare education funding between states, but has no basis in reality when it comes to how money is actually spent in a classroom.

A student does not uniquely cost $7500 dollars in a school year. The state WPU, or the amount of tax dollars the state government actually sends each school district per student, is $2417 for the 07-08 school year.

http://le.utah.gov/interim/2007/pdf/00000364.pdf

The state also sends block grants for special ed., ESL, and other programs which leads to an average state expenditure of around $3500-3800 dollars per student. (The inexact number stems from the disagreement on figures from the various sources arguing about this bill.) Those WPU dollars are spread out to pay for the above-listed variety of things to help all students. So when little Johnny leaves a public school, taking a $3000 dollar voucher with him, there are not $4000 dollars left unspent to redistribute among the other children. The $4000 dollars is already allocated to some program or employee of the district, and it wasn’t provided by the state government anyway. The “mitigation monies” only refund the difference in the state’s average portion of funding for five years. So the state gives the district $500-800 dollars for five years…in exchange for removing $3000 dollars from district funding for thirteen years which has to be taken out of some other resource because Johnny only uniquely costs the school a few bucks in supplies each year.

Rich families subsidized with public money

And it gets worse. Look at the impartial fiscal analysis in the official voter information guide and notice how the program gets more and more expensive each year, costing at least $71,000,000 each year after 2020. Why does the cost grow like that? If the voucher bill passes, the kindergarten students of current private school families are eligible for a voucher next year, even though they weren’t planning on attending public schools in the first place and would not have cost us a dime of tax money. Each year, another grade is eligible until ALL private school students are eligible for vouchers after thirteen years. There are currently 16,000 Utah students in private schools. There will be an estimated 20,000 private school students in 2020 and the impartial fiscal analysis, which the state legislators saw before voting on the bill, estimates that the vast majority of voucher users will be from these families that were already planning on attending private school. These predominantly upper-class families will receive publicly-funded vouchers to make a choice they had already made, costing the state between $500 and $3000 dollars per child and saving nothing. Plus, the state’s estimate openly admits that most voucher users will come from rich families already capable of paying the expensive tuition—not regular kids able to switch because of the extra money.

Remember, for every $3,000 tax dollars spent in a public school—a teacher…a computer lab…an extra-curricular program…we help hundreds of kids who use those resources. On the other hand, every $3,000 tax dollars that an individual uses on vouchers would be resources taken away from the public good to pay individual tuition at a for-profit institution.

Teachers are not a “special interest”

The coalition against vouchers is not composed of evil, liberal, union goons “trying to take away parents’ choice” like the commercials tell us. The majority of Utah families oppose vouchers and have in every poll for twenty years. The legislature listened to out-of-state voucher groups that donated large amounts of money, passed a law knowing Utah didn’t want it, and then tried to prevent the referendum through a lawsuit and advertising. Now the voucher groups are smearing teachers to excuse their attack on the schools. Think of the teachers or other school employees you know. They don’t act one way at home or on Sunday, and then covertly turn into liberal monsters at school. They’re your neighbors who want to prevent vouchers from damaging or destroying public education in our state. The union money sent to respond to the frequent TV commercials, radio ads, and slick color flyers of the pro-voucher advocates represents the donations of individual teachers all over the country, as opposed to huge individual donations made by billionaires interested in paying less taxes. (Google vouchers, Waltons, All Children Matter, and their funding to see for yourself.) And the union money has been openly donated, not anonymously using loopholes in state campaign laws. (Google Parents for Choice in Education, PAC, PIC, funding.) Check the Fact and Myth sections at the websites of both Utahns For Public Schools and Parents for Choice in Education. Then Google the sources of their research and see for yourself which information is more credible.

http://www.choiceineducation.org/schoolchoice_myths.php http://www.utahnsforpublicschools.org/facts/myths.php

For more info and clickable links, see: http://www.utahedu.blogspot.com/

Vote no on vouchers, VOTE NO ON REFERENDUM 1 — 10-29-07