School voucher arguments fall flat because they don’t use facts

States that implement vouchers have decreased performance.

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Columnists

February 14, 2023 - 3:00 PM

Opponents of public education hired economist Ben Scafidi of Georgia to address the House K-12 Education Budget Committee on Feb. 8, 2023. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

On Wednesday, the House K-12 Education Budget Committee passed a massive voucher bill that will gut the state’s public education system if made into law.

In advance of the vote the legislators entertained a Georgia economist, Ben Scafidi, a big name in the national “school choice” crusade, who regaled the committee with a long story about why he thinks Kansas schools are failing. Aside from the obvious issues inherent in paying a guy from out-of-state to tell us about our own numbers, the presentation was riddled with problems.

Specifically, it wasn’t true.

The case for keeping vouchers out of Kansas is historically compelling. States that implement vouchers have decreased student performance, the current push for vouchers is part of a persistent historical effort to keep schools segregated, and the vast majority of K-12 parents are satisfied with their children’s education.

But let’s act as if we’re coming at this argument with fresh eyes. What did Scafidi fly all the way here to tell us, and was any of it valid?

He had two main points: Kansas irresponsibly spends more and more money on public schools, and our test scores are bad. Let’s tackle each one.

Scafidi’s first slides were about total spending per student. He claimed that Kansas has increased its spending per student, from 2003 to 2020, by 25%. This is a total misrepresentation of district budgets.

What he did was take a bunch of different kinds of money (local, state, federal and extra Covid-19 funds) that is spent for a whole bunch of different things (such as food, transportation and insurance) and put it all in a big pile, and then compare that pile to 2003’s spending.

It’s such a messy equation as to be useless, but in a classic conservative move he made it seem to be all about administrator salaries.

This talking point is exhausting. School systems are subject to massive state and federal oversight and require an enormous amount of administration. Nobody is thrilled about it, trust me. Nobody in any school district delights in hiring somebody to full-time process Medicaid payments for students who need services instead of hiring somebody to actually provide those services, but we have to. It’s required by law.

More importantly, though, is the irony of Scafidi’s testimony. He spent a significant amount of time chastising Kansas public schools for administrative bloat that he “discovered” using the Kansas Department of Education’s own website.

Not only is this a total misrepresentation of expenditures (see the Kansas Association of School Boards report), but in the future, if we want to see how our public tax dollars are being spent in schools and what the breakdown is per spending type, we will have no way of doing that because private schools don’t have to tell us. He hammered a false point leveraging a system of transparency he would have us do away with in the wake of this bill’s implementation.

Let’s look at real numbers. Let’s do actual base state aid per pupil. 

I’ll start in 2003 because he did, but I’m going to go all the way up to the current year because … truth. 

The base state aid for each student in 2003? $3,863. The base state aid for each student in 2022? $4,846. 

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