Vouchers should provide high quality options and character education
14th February 2012 · 0 Comments
By Andre M. Perry
Contributing Columnist
As a staunch public school advocate, it pains me to say, vouchers can work. But are Gov. Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent John White prepared to give parents the information and transparency required for high levels of parental choice? Also, will state officials hold all schools accountable for character education? Voucher programs typically fail to adequately address these questions.
Give parents real choices. The state should first poll families to see where they prefer to send their children. The RSD recently developed a centralized enrollment system for public schools. We could easily adapt the technology to get a listing of preferences that includes public and private schools. The amount of the voucher should not simply be a function of the per pupil expenditure; it should also be determined by the options families seek. Typical voucher programs only expand the options of what’s affordable and available; not what families actually desire.
Families also deserve report cards on the performance of eligible private and parochial schools. Academic performance is often shrouded in the parochial and private sector. Still, non-public schools take standardized exams of which the State can rank and grade to provide the requisite information for parents to make educated choices.
In addition, Louisiana must always monitor the academic performance of students who take vouchers. If a student performs at a reasonably lower mark at a voucher-receiving school than the average public school student, then that school should not be allowed to take more vouchers.
These actions contribute to a fuller concept of choice. Still, private and parochial schools don’t have to accept vouchers, for good reason. Families send their children to religiously affiliated schools to receive an explicitly religious education. Families expect students to learn the tenants of a particular faith as well as a religious perspective on the world. Thus, faith-based school parents want their children to be held to a standard set forth by religion. ACT, End of Year Exam, or LEAP tests are tertiary to values and tenets of faith that students must constantly demonstrate in faith based schools. In this regard, Louisiana has no authority to issue accountability standards.
Faith-based schools must continue to serve families who want a religious education. Unfortunately, vouchers encourage the growing trend of parochial schools admitting students whose families simply want out of public schools.
The exception of course is of the growing number of families who want their children to receive explicit training and teaching around love, charity, reciprocity, karma, agape, etc., of which their teaching are perceived to be lacking in public schools. I do believe that the crime epidemic is largely a function of families not having additional formal mechanisms for instilling those aforementioned values and moral decision-making skills.
Nevertheless, we arrived to this new phase of reform mainly because students were not learning how to read, write and compute proficiently enough to enable them to participate and contribute to a functioning democracy. The state must be accountable for taxpayer money, and schools that receive those funds should be held to the same academic standards.
Voucher advocates decry that using accountability structures built for a public system amounts to setting public schools as the high bar. Transparency and accountability are not just a public standard; it’s required for educated decision-making and trust.
Nevertheless, schools’ abilities to instill character are measurable. Attendance is probably the most important and under-appreciated statistic we have in education. It is a proxy for student and family engagement, positive culture, rigor and character. If our accountability system seeks to benefit the student and community, then let’s incentivize and dis-incentivize schools for not be able to build character. No school should receive taxpayer money that has constantly shown they can’t hold onto children. Scholarship and character must be measured.
Bobby Jindal and John White should adjust the accountability system to put more emphasis on keeping students in the building. Particularly in our urban areas, we need schools to keep students in an educational system rather than a juvenile justice system. Cities can’t rely on curfews to keep students away from mischief. The State would help itself in the voucher discussion by issuing them to students in public schools who have high rates of early school departure, i.e. “dropout,” “pushout,” expulsion and suspension.
Lord knows we need schools to help families instill character. Faith based schools can certainly aid in this regard, but let’s not forget that we have to demand that those who receive vouchers must be able to read and understand the First Amendment concerning the separation of church and state.
This article was originally published in the February 13, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
