No more 'one and done' for voucher program

Preschool is great. Vouchers are complicated.

There is a bill before the Indiana senate that would provide money for a pilot program in which 1,000 Indiana children would head to preschool. The bill has broad bipartisan support.

The bill also provides an alternative to spending one year in public school before becoming eligible for a voucher.

With the program, those students who completed preschool in the pilot would have access to vouchers to attend private schools without stepping foot in a public school.

Sending students to preschool is something Indiana needs to embrace. Playing with blocks and having outside time may not seem like an opportunity for expansive education.

But learning how to ask someone to share the blocks without biting them or how to walk outside and back inside without dissolving into complete anarchy are important skills for educational success.

Preschool isn’t where you learn algebra or biology. It’s where you learn how to learn algebra and biology and how to function with your peers while you do it.

These skills should not be overlooked. They’re the foundation for a strong, successful education.

That foundation is the biggest problem with this accompanying voucher expansion.

The implication of the expansion is that these students, by virtue of having attended preschool, are already set up to succeed in education.

And if they’re already set up to succeed, why send them to public school at all?

“Public schools aren’t for successful kids,” the program seems to be saying, “those kids should be going to private schools.”

This kind of rhetoric should have no place in state politics.

Voucher programs may or may not be a good thing. They may or may not expand the advantage of the strongest schools by enabling them to compete with private schools while simultaneously removing the last resources from schools that are already struggling. They may or may not unconstitutionally provide tax dollars to schools of a religious nature.

None of that matters here.

This bill is an attempt to improve the education of Indiana students by offering them preschool, but it includes a subtle statement on the viability of public education.

It assumes public education in Indiana is not only broken, but beyond repair, that students who have the skills to succeed deserve to be educated outside of it at the expense of those who remain.

It’s an expansion of privilege. Those who have deserve more at the expense of those without.

Preschoolers can teach us a good lesson here.

The kid who had all the blocks and kept demanding more of them isn’t the kid who did well in preschool.

He’s the one who got bit.