Does Idaho’s school voucher scheme save the state money? Hardly | Opinion

The Mountain States Policy Center, a self-described free market advocacy group that supports diverting state tax dollars to private schools, is making a specious argument regarding Idaho’s new private school tax credit.

They argue that a student using the $5,000 tax credit actually saves the state money. The state spends $9,000 per pupil in the public school system, the argument goes, and since the state doesn’t have to spend that money on that student and instead gives the family $5,000, that saves the state $4,000 for every student who takes the tax credit and leaves the public school system.

Only, it’s not that simple. This argument completely ignores the fixed costs of a school.

Take, for example, your local elementary school that has 50 third-graders enrolled for the upcoming school year. The school district will hire two third-grade teachers, so there are two third-grade classes of 25 students each.

Let’s say five of those students’ parents decide to take the state tax credit and leave the school district to go to a private school. The local public elementary school still needs to hire two third-grade teachers. If the school were to hire just one teacher, the class size would be 40 students.

Further, the school still has to pay for the building, the upkeep, the janitors, the heat and electricity, and all of the other fixed costs of running a school.

But now the school has $45,000 less to do it with, since the school will no longer receive the per-pupil funding from those five students. But the school district’s expenses didn’t go down by $45,000.

And with this tax credit scheme, the state has $50 million less to fund public schools.

Yes, there might be some nominal variable costs that go down with five fewer students, but the school district doesn’t get to turn off the heat by 10% or run the AC 10% less. If a school bus is 10% less full, the driver doesn’t get paid 10% less, and you don’t put 10% less fuel in the tank.

The district’s finance director or school principal don’t get paid 10% less.

Private school voucher and tax credit proponents like to talk about how this will force public schools to be competitive. But this is not a level playing field.

The other thing that the Mountain States Policy Center doesn’t mention is that the tax credit simply distributes the money on a per-child basis. That’s not how we fund public schools. Public schools rely on average daily attendance, not straight-up enrollment.

But costs to the public school don’t go down depending on whether the student is present or not.

These tax credit-funded students might receive more money than it would cost the public school to educate them.

Meanwhile, a special-needs student or English-language learner will require more funding, and private schools can decline to educate those special-needs students.

Yes, we fund a public education system — all of us do, whether we have students in the school system or not.

The word “system” is written into the Idaho Constitution: “The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools.”

We all pay for a public school system because it benefits us all.

We appreciate and respect some of the arguments for school vouchers.

But the argument that they save the state money and therefore those taking advantage of the program deserve some sort of thanks is certainly not one of them.

Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, assistant editor Jim Keyser and community members John Hess, Debbie McCormick and Julie Yamamoto.