Voucher hypocrisy alert

by David Safier

Arizona Republicans are trying to get more private school vouchers into law through the front door, the side door and the back door. I'll write more about the various bills which would use taxpayer dollars to pay for private school tuition another time. Right now, I want to point out one unbelievable business-as-usual piece of hypocrisy in one of the bills.

Question: What do conservatives think is the best way to measure student achievement and the quality of schools and teachers?
Answer: Standardized test scores.

Question: What does a Republican-sponsored bill want to remove from the responsibilities of private schools which accept students who receive tuition tax credit scholarships?
Answer: Having those students take standardized tests.

SB1048 is an amendment to statutes relating to tax credits. It has a whole slew of provisions that need to be unpacked and explored. But one thing it does is eliminate this line from a previous law which requires a "qualified" private school to administer standardized tests to its students:

For the purposes of this section, "qualified school":
1. Means a nongovernmental primary school or secondary school: . . .
(b)  That annually administers and makes available to the public the aggregate test scores of its students on a nationally standardized norm‑referenced achievement test, preferably the Arizona instrument to measure standards test administered pursuant to section 15‑741.

Why? Why eliminate the very tests conservatives put so much stake in for students who go to private schools on the taxpayers' dime?

My answer is simple. They know it's likely the tests won't show the tax credit students are doing better than similar students in public schools. And it's likely to reveal that students attending fundamentalist Christian schools do worse.

Every credible study has indicated that similar students in district schools, charter schools and private schools achieve at more-or-less the same level. The only exception, according to a study done by the Bush administration not once, but twice, is fundamentalist Christian schools, where students' test scores were lower than similar students at other schools.

Washington, D.C., had a years long voucher program which was studied reasonably thoroughly. The results indicated that students who used the vouchers to attend private schools achieved at more-or-less the same level as similar students who applied but were turned away in a random lottery because there wasn't enough room. The only difference found was, parents liked the private schools more. That's it.

An extensive study was done on the decades-long Milwaukee voucher program. Among the participating scholars was Jay Greene, a senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute. The study found no significant difference between the achievement of voucher students and similar students at public schools.

No wonder these hypocrites don't want to test their tax credit babies. They want to preserve the fantasy that district schools are failures, charter schools are better and private schools are the absolute best.