G.I.’s Ladner: Public schools work. Vouchers are unnecessary.

by David Safier

The Goldwater Institute's Matthew Ladner has written lately about the gains students in traditional public schools made on their NAEP scores. (The NAEP is considered the gold standard of national standardized tests.) He acknowledges, when traditional public schools are run well, they get results.

Of course, he's not talking about Arizona schools. No one would be foolish enough to say Arizona's last-in-the-nation-in-per-student-spending schools are getting the job done in stellar fashion. He's talking about Florida.

Ladner has been talking up the success of Florida's public schools for years. Clearly, it's his and G.I.'s position that public schools, even with all the bureaucracy and union interference he complains about, can work, and work well.

That's even true in a state like Florida where there is, to use Ladner's terminology, an "almost 1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio" (if you consider bus drivers bureaucrats). Florida's school districts have the same teacher-to-non-teacher ratio as Arizona's.

And Ladner is the first to admit, private schools are no better at educating children than public schools. When Florida had vouchers, the students' achievement at the private schools was no better than public schools. The same thing is true in Washington, D.C., where the voucher system has not resulted in higher achievement for students at private schools. And Ladner's friend, Jay Greene, has just published a study indicating that Milwaukee's two decade old voucher system has not resulted in any measurable improvement in students' educations.

All this must mean Ladner is planning to invest his time and energies in making genuine improvements in Arizona's traditional public schools so they work as well as Florida's and abandon his quest for more tuition tax credits and other forms of private school vouchers.

Since he has the ear of Republican legislators, I hope Ladner will recommend we boost our per student spending by about $1200 so it matches Florida's, and put the money into solid educational reform.