Amid concerns over the nomination of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, it’s time to review the predominance of state education departments.
Even though federal allocations for education funding are determined at the national level, most specific policies are state-level issues.
It’s your state government that will make the decision about whether to ditch Common Core or to adopt a school voucher program. And it’s your local school board that will decide whether to implement that new foreign language program or to support that innovative literacy initiative.
Whether or not this comes as good news, we should be equally, if not more, interested in the state of education at the state and local levels.
The issue of privatized education, which has received much national attention lately, is of direct concern to us in Indiana. Indiana’s incoming administration promises to expand the state’s school choice program — a premier method of privatizing education.
School choice programs, from one perspective, seem to universalize the opportunity to attend private schools by providing students from low-income families with the means to afford private school tuition. It seems an egalitarian move, aimed at remedying the effects of income disparities.
But from another perspective, vouchers reappropriate funds designated for public education, undermining the original egalitarian system of free, public education in the U.S.
Part of the underlying problem is that private schools are not required to admit all students. They can have admissions criteria that, in effect, exclude certain groups of students.
Although seemingly objective requirements like test scores or GPA do not signify outright discrimination, they disproportionately admit the most privileged and the easiest to educate. For instance, students with learning disabilities and those learning English as a new language are less likely to be admitted to such schools.
Yet, these groups of students are the ones most in need of school resources for improving programs in special education and English as a new language. Voucher initiatives, in part, redistribute much-needed resources to fund private tuition.
Proponents of voucher programs claim the voucher funding does not drain resources from public education, asserting that the programs draw from separate funding pools. Regardless of how it is subdivided on ledger lines, state funding is going to private schools instead of being used to support the public school system.
What private education does, essentially, is stratify the school system. Such exclusivity already exists in post-secondary education, in which selective admissions criteria and financial barriers determine if and where one attends college.
While voucher programs eliminate part of the financial exclusivity of private schools, they do not address systemic issues in education that perpetuate inequalities.
It’s time to learn that sending the students who are easiest to educate to private schools does nothing to improve the situation for students within failing systems. In contrast, increased funding and resources, if implemented effectively, can catalyze marked improvement.
Those deemed “high-achieving” students will learn regardless of the environment they are in. But they will benefit from being in a more diverse public school system — one designed to provide education to all, rather than a self-selected few.
No one learns in a vacuum, after all, and there is no need to teach exclusivity in our schools by expanding private education.
kmilvert@indiana.edu
