Why don’t school voucher backers trust Idaho parents to decide what their kids need? | Opinion
Yet again, Idaho lawmakers plan to introduce a bill creating a school voucher program. Sen. Lori Den Hartog, R-Meridian, and Rep. Wendy Horman, R-Idaho Falls, plan to structure this year’s bill as a refundable tax credit. A set of $5,000 vouchers open to all families would be capped at $40 million and issued on a first-come, first-served basis. Another $10 million of $5,000 vouchers would be set aside for low-income families.
This program is no improvement over past years’ proposals, and it creates all the same dangers.
For example, once it moves out of a capped pilot program stage, what’s to prevent it from creating a budget deficit that acts like a snowball rolling downhill, gaining speed and momentum the farther it goes, as has happened in Arizona?
Arizona’s voucher program was initially projected to cost $65 million a year, as the Arizona Mirror reported. That’s just a bit more than is proposed for this voucher pilot project.
Dream, meet reality. The annual cost is now fast approaching $1 billion. But what’s a 1,400% cost overrun between friends?
Some will try to argue that this is just money shifting from an inefficient public sector to a more efficient private sector. But there’s no evidence of better efficiency in Arizona.
If you’re a poor single mother in Arizona, thanks to this new regime of expanded choice you have, you’re forced to pay taxes to buy rich kids ski lift tickets, martial arts lessons and climbing gym memberships, as an ABC15 investigation found. That doesn’t sound like efficiency, it sounds like a wealthy family gaming the business travel deduction to write off a vacation.
The proposal to structure vouchers as a refundable tax credit — money the government pays to families directly — also puts the lie to the idea that vouchers are fundamentally about giving parents choice. Because we already have multiple refundable tax credits, including the earned income tax credit and part of the child tax credit.
(One of the ways a child can wind up getting a smaller tax credit is, absurdly, if their parents don’t make enough money. Patching that hole is some very low-hanging fruit if lawmakers are in a problem-solving mood.)
But those credits are usually just a check, not a payment program that comes with restrictions. So it’s worth asking: Why confine parents to spending this money at private or home schools? Because if you remove that limitation on parental choice, what lawmakers are proposing is basically an expansion of the child tax credit.
And we know that works. The expanded child tax credit, part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan, was one of the most wildly successful programs in recent history.
Allowing the expanded child tax credit to expire in 2022 put about 5 million more kids in poverty, well over doubling the American child poverty rate overnight, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted.
Parents should have choices for their children. For poor families, that could mean a choice between expensive private school on one hand and free public school plus healthier food, better medical treatment, or any of the numerous other things needed for children to thrive on the other.
What makes voucher proponents think they’re better at making these decisions than parents?
If lawmakers want to give parents a refundable tax credit, great; just cut them a check with no strings. Just expand the child tax credit and respect parental choice.
Just don’t add the requirement that those funds be spent at privatized school systems. To steal voucher-backers’ favorite refrain — fund children, not systems.