SCHOOL VOUCHER DEFEAT IN UTAH
As the dust settles on the massive 62-to-38 percent defeat of a statewide school voucher referendum last Tuesday in Utah, a few conclusions and observations:
This was a fight over a small $5.5-million school voucher initiative that would provide small scholarships ranging from $500 to $3,000 per child –- I call them school-stamps –- to mostly families whose total yearly income is $30,000 or less.
The intent of the state legislature and Governor Jon Huntsman in a closely-fought legislative battle was to allow mostly poor families that could not afford private-school tuitions a chance and choice to walk-with their-feet away from public schools providing inadequate academic education, or where discipline problems and bullies in the public schools threatened the well-being of their children.
The program approved by the legislature set the scholarship opportunity pool to grow with private contributions to $71-million by the year 2020.
Let’s be clear about one thing: This is not money being taken away from public schools. In fact, for every unhappy parent who gets a privately funded voucher and takes their kid out of public school to choose a charter or private school, the public school is less crowded and gets to keep per-pupil funding for kids who leave.
What could be better? Public school teachers have smaller, less crowded classes and a growing budget each year for kids who remain.
The initiative passed the Utah State Senate on a 19-to-10 vote and the state House of Representatives on a 38-to-37 vote, with just one vote to spare, and after the governor’s approval proceeded to Utah’s 1.1-million registered voters on a statewide ballot.
But on November 6, 2007, just 46.5-percent of Utah voters showed up to vote on the school voucher referendum. In Salt Lake City, with 975 voting precincts, the vote was two-to-one against -- 57,440 voters for vouchers, 117,287 against.
The down-and-dirty battle waged for eight months throughout Utah between mostly Mormon, Catholic and evangelical Christian families upset about their children’s deteriorating public schools and the national and state public school teacher unions. It was ugly and expensive. But it was a necessary battle in the war to improve schooling for all children no matter what the economics of their families, or whether they choose public or private schools. Alternatives and competition are good. That's what choice is all about in every aspect of our lives.
According to latest public records, as of October 30, the 2.2-million-member National Education Association teachers union based in Washington, D.C. and NEA affiliates in no less than 19 states dropped more than $3.9-million into this dog-fight and bused loads of union activists into Utah to wage a campaign to defeat the school choice measure.
It was Goliath versus David as the chief voucher proponent, young business entrepreneur Patrick Byrne, dynamic founder-CEO of Overstock.com –- an internet company in Salt Lake City that sells everything from computers and wearing apparel to furniture and cars –- donated a few million dollars of his own private money to support the voucher initiative.
But Byrne's side was ground into the foxholes by grim and bitter battle by the NEA union, Utah’s union affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers also based in Washington, D.C., and a panoply of national and state union organizers who poured into Utah and spent national teacher union dues assessment funds to galvanize union activists from as far away as California and Michigan to defeat the Utah voucher referendum.
One of the best and most intrepid education reporters in the country is Michael Antonucci of Long Beach, California whose Education Intelligence Agency (EIA) researched and added up the nationwide NEA and AFT spending, mostly organized by NEA general counsel Bob Chanin of the Washington law firm of Bredhoff & Kaiser to defeat the Utah voucher initiative:
• The NEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., approved a $3-million grant from the union's national ballot initiative fund and about $200,000 as payments to Chanin and his law firm.
• The NEA-owned so-called Communities for Quality Education group dropped $336,012.
• The NEA-affiliated Utah Education Association reported spending $239,901.95 of its own funds on the campaign, while an additional $16,228.40 came from the NEA-affiliated Utah School Employees Association and $1,260 from the NEA Member Benefits Corporation.
• No less than 19 NEA state affiliates ponied-up more than $120,500 for the anti-voucher campaign: $50,000 from the California Teacher Association; $25,000 from the Montana Education Association-Montana Federation of Teachers; $7,500 from the Washington Education Association; $5,000 each from the Colorado Education Association, Illinois Education Association, Kentucky Education Association, New Jersey Education Association, Pennsylvania State Education Association, and Ohio Education Association; $2,000 from the Connecticut Education Association; $1,000 each from the Maine Education Association, Maryland State Teachers Association, NEA Alaska, Oregon Education Association, and South Dakota Education Association, and $1,003.50 from the Wyoming Education Association.
Byrne said he was “ashamed” of the referendum vote. "This is parents looking at their kids getting a third-rate education and other kids getting basically a death sentence and saying, 'That's OK by me.'” He was quoted as telling the Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City. “When you run the ball down to the two-yard line, you don't get four points for it — [the loss] is shameful," Byrne said.
Utah House Speaker Greg Curtis, a Republican, said there would be no further voucher bills in the 2008 legislative session following the voucher defeat. “We'll take a time out, he told the Deseret Morning News, saying he had spoken to the governor who agreed.
Antonucci said, “The disconnect is also apparent from the campaign funding. The yes side received almost all of its money from Byrne, his family, and organizations with which he is connected in some way. The no side received almost all of its money from NEA, its affiliates, and organizations and individuals directly connected with them.
“It's pretty simple. Most voters don't have kids in school. The voucher program directly benefits parents with kids in school. You have to make a pretty compelling case to even get the attention of the majority of voters. Then you have to persuade them that the current situation is bad enough to require an out for parents of school-age kids. This is a tough argument to make statewide in Utah.
“The unions, with the benefit of being on the no side are in the same position as defense attorneys. They don't have to prove anything, just raise reasonable doubt. It works against unions when they are on the yes side.”
Adam B. Schaeffer, education policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., a leading libertarian think-tank for school choice, said in a piece in the Wall Street Journal that the result of the Utah vote against the country’s first universal voucher program “says less about the program itself than about the difficulty of winning an off-year referendum in the face of an avalanche of national union cash, mobilized public-school employees and a risk-averse public.
“The voucher program is dead,” Schaeffer wrote, “but school choice doesn't have to be. Tax credits for donations to scholarship organizations can help support school choice for lower-income families, and personal-use credits can help middle-class families. Tax credits reduce the amount a taxpayer owes the government for each dollar he spends on education.
“For instance, if a business owes the state $4,000 and donates $2,000 to a scholarship-granting organization, it would pay just $2,000 in taxes. Similar benefits for donations can be applied to individuals.”
Schaeffer noted that hree states have modest forms of personal-use tax credits: Illinois allows families to claim credits worth 25 percent of their educational expenses up to $2,500; Iowa allows 25 percent up to $1,000; and Minnesota allows 75 percent of non-tuition expenses up to a maximum credit of $1,000 per child.
Also five states — Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island — have more powerful donation credits. “Pennsylvania allows a 90 percent credit for donations and Florida allows a 100 percent credit, helping thousands of children from lower-income families attend good, independent schools.”
So school choice advocates are regrouping following the Utah vote against vouchers, saying education tax credits are less controversial than vouchers, enjoy greater bipartisan support, and provide “a way forward in places where it would otherwise be difficult to pass school-choice programs.
Schaeffer concluded: “Broad-based education tax credits that combine personal-use and donation credits to cover most kids are preferable. But with the setback in Utah, reformers will need a policy that has the best possible chance of surviving another ballot challenge, so they may want to proceed incrementally …
“With the support of a Democratic legislature or the signature of a Democratic governor, Arizona, Rhode Island and Iowa passed tax-credit programs last year, and Pennsylvania expanded its existing program. This year a unified Democratic government in Iowa increased the tax-credit dollar cap by 50 percent to $7.5 million from $5 million.
“A strong center-left coalition, including many prominent African-American Democrats — most notably, Newark Mayor Cory Booker — supports tax credits. New York's Democratic Governor Eliot Spitzer proposed an education-tax deduction in his first state budget and also supports tax credits.”
Out of the foxholes and back to the trenches. The teacher unions won the Utah battle, but it is clear that the war to bring school choice and more competition among community public and private schools is far from over. Bring it on for a better America, because European and Asian primary and secondary schools are certainly beating the socks off us.
