Despite a resounding defeat in the 88th Legislature, private school vouchers will return as a major issue in the 89th Legislature, which begins Jan. 14. After pouring money into Republican primary races to defeat anti-voucher incumbents, Gov. Greg Abbott claims he has the votes he needs to pass a voucher program; meanwhile, both he and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick continue to claim they will do so alongside increased public school funding and educator pay raises, despite evidence mounting from other states that vouchers inevitably drain state budgets and hurt public school funding.
But don’t take our word for it. We asked the experts: Dr. David S. Knight, associate professor at the University of Washington and co-director of Education Policy Analytics Lab and the Center for Early Childhood Policy and Equity at the University of Washington College of Education, and Dr. David DeMatthews, founder of the Texas Education Leadership Lab and professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. In November, Knight and DeMatthews published a new paper with the National Education Policy Center titled, The Fiscal Impacts of Expanded Voucher Programs and Charter-School Growth on Public Schools: Recommendations for Sustaining Adequate and Equitable School Finance Systems.
Below is a Q&A with the pair of professors that hits some of the key points of their research on the topics of public school finance and school privatization efforts, via vouchers and privately run charter schools.
Let’s start by setting the scene because the real foundation of your collaborative work is a grim reality: The U.S. Department of Education has projected pronounced enrollment declines over the next decade for public school districts nationwide. Because of that, we expect the financial constraints on these school districts to get far worse.
Before we discuss anything else, what’s driving that enrollment decline? A certain sect of public school critics claim that it’s parent dissatisfaction with “woke” or “radical” curriculum. But, in your opinion, having studied that issue, is that true?
From our review of research and publicly available data, we believe the decline in enrollment has many causes, is contextually driven, and is often unrelated to people’s perceptions of public education.
People move to different communities, cities, or states for many reasons, often tied to the economic opportunities. The U.S. has experienced a slowdown in immigration beginning in the first Trump Administration and through the COVID-19 pandemic that is only recently starting to bounce back. U.S. birth rates have also declined since the 1990s.
However, in states and regions with robust charter school enrollment, public schools are clearly losing students. Charter management organizations often spend significant amounts of money to entice families into their schools. Such marketing campaigns are aimed at persuading parents to leave public schools and are not necessarily rooted in any evidence or data to suggest charters outperform public schools.
While some right-wing politicians and critics claim parent dissatisfaction with so-called “woke” curriculum is an issue, the overwhelming majority of families strongly support their public schools and do not feel this is an issue. But yes, that idea is out there. In fact, we regularly see media reports of right-wing groups investing millions in campaigns to push this false narrative in an effort to erode longstanding support for public education.
In the published paper, you discuss the ways in which charter school expansion and private school vouchers have exacerbated enrollment declines and, subsequently, funding declines for public schools since our schools are funded on a per-student basis. In Texas, to Gov. Abbott’s great chagrin, we do not have a private school voucher program. But we have seen an explosion of privately run charter schools over the past 20 years. Can you speak to the effect those charter schools have had on Texas public schools?
Yes, cities like Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and Austin have been saturated with charter schools due to a very lax approach by the commissioner of education to follow the education code and ensure that new charters do not negatively impact public schools. Within the inner core of many Texas cities, the school-aged population is also in decline due to rapid gentrification, rising housing costs, and a new upper-middle class moving into the urban core of cities that are less likely to have children. Together, these factors are causing declining enrollment in some urban contexts, which has a significant negative impact on those public school districts.
As you well know, we’ve got another legislative session coming up in January. What could Texas lawmakers do next year to mitigate the financial harm charter schools have on traditional public schools? What bills do you think would be crucial to pass for the financial stability of public schools, many of which have announced layoffs, shuttered schools, or are working with deficit budgets?
First, lawmakers can take additional efforts to make sure the commissioner follows the education code as written and does not simply waive those rules to allow new charters to arise or to allow charter management organizations with unrated or failing campuses to continue to expand. That practice flies in the face of common sense and undermines the basic market principles many charter advocates preach.
Second, lawmakers can create a cap on charter enrollment or charter growth, which might include rules that do not allow a new charter to open in currently under-enrolled districts. For districts experiencing rapidly declining enrollment, the state should consider an enrollment hold-harmless provision, which provides funding based on prior year enrollments so that districts have time to restructure schools and classrooms, and transition to a lower enrollment level.
These policies are used in several states such as California, Missouri, and Oklahoma, and help lessen the negative fiscal impacts of enrollment decline.
Let’s turn to vouchers because we’re going to be forced to do so again next year by Gov. Abbott and the Legislature. We hear a lot of talk by pro-voucher legislators and lobbyists that sending taxpayer dollars to private schools actually won’t hurt public schools. Some have been bold enough to claim the “competition” will help public schools. But there’s a way to test this and it’s to look at the experience of other states who have implemented private school voucher programs, some decades old now. What have we seen in other states in terms of the impact on public schools?
Politicians or voucher advocates who say vouchers won’t hurt public school funding or claim that competition will help public schools are either lying or have not done their homework. Vouchers fail to raise student achievement, especially large-scale voucher programs like what has previously been proposed by some Texas legislators and by Governor Abbott.
Researchers have found that students who use vouchers in other states fall significantly behind their similarly positioned peers who remain in public schools. While it is true some researchers have found voucher programs have a “competitive effect” on public schools, the size of the impact is negligible and such gains could be made more efficiently and without harming students using vouchers by making other common-sense investments into public education.
Researchers have not drawn a direct link between widescale voucher expansion and state divestment in public schools, but — and allow us to cite ourselves here — “a recent analysis of longer-standing voucher programs in seven states found that all seven had doubled public spending on voucher programs over an 11-year period from 2008 to 2019, with most spending hundreds of millions per year by 2019. Over the same period, those states invested less in their traditional public school systems compared to all other states on average.”
In the paper, you outline several actions needed to “level the playing field” between traditional public schools and the charter schools and private schools receiving taxpayer dollars. This includes basic things like ensuring non-public schools receiving public funding be subject to the same regulations and requirements for student services and standardized testing requirements. It seems like pretty common-sense stuff, but we’ve seen state lawmakers in Texas and elsewhere buck at the suggestion. What are some of the arguments you’ve encountered opposing efforts to level the playing field?
We’ve heard arguments that some charter schools are doing a better job of serving students with disabilities, but many charters do not serve the same proportions of students with disabilities seen in the general population, especially for students with more severe needs. We’ve also heard arguments that charters should not have to serve all students with disabilities depending on their mission and vision as well as the severity of a disability. Federal law is very clear that charter schools cannot discriminate based on disability and we believe no argument exists for failing to comply with civil rights laws.
We sometimes hear arguments that charter schools in Texas are underfunded relative to traditional public schools, but prior research including some we have conducted shows many charter schools, especially those associated with larger management organizations, receive greater per-student funding than comparable traditional public schools in the state.
Likewise, you recommend several action steps for the U.S. Department of Education in terms of ensuring full and equitable funding for public schools and leveling the playing field with charter schools specifically. How does the incoming Trump Administration affect or complicate your recommendations, given that former President Donald Trump has said he wants to do away with the Department of Education?
The federal government and the Department of Education give states latitude for setting goals and targets for continuous improvement. Without the Department of Education, states would have more leeway. We expect some states to continue to work to create high-quality schools that serve all students. We expect others to take further advantage of that leeway, consequently undermining efforts to strengthen public education and maintain a deep and honest commitment to civil rights.
The report is full of fascinating insights and important recommendations, and we recommend everyone who cares about Texas public schools take the time read it in depth. But for now, if you could impart one thing – the most important point – that Texas educators, parents, and public school supporters need to know heading into 2025, what would it be?
Our nation’s public schools are critical to our democracy, our communities, and our economy. They are a keystone institution that helps us build a national identity and a commitment to living together in peaceful and productive ways. Many “school choice” efforts and the voucher movement more broadly undermine our commitment to public education, fracture communities, promote the inefficient and unaccountable use of tax dollars, and push us all further apart.
We need Texas state leaders to commit to public education through fair funding, a deep commitment to civil rights, and a recognition that public school teachers are critical to propelling our state forward in the generations to come. Restoring trust in public education is key to moving forward as a state and as a nation.