Vouching for our public schools
School vouchers pay the tuition cost of public schools, but they can also pay for religious & private education.
January 18, 2023
Author’s Bio: Carolyn Klaus has lived in Ames over 50 years, has been a member of the League of Women Voters of Ames & Story County for 13 years and served on the board since 2012. She currently serves as board president.
Iowans have long been proud of our public education system—and with good reason. In 2020, Iowa’s graduation rate was 92%, placing us with just 2 other states at the highest national ranking. In the 1980s, Iowa led the nation in per pupil spending, demonstrating our commitment to quality education. Iowa’s state quarter says it all, with the words “Foundation in Education” printed on every coin.
Unfortunately, our commitment to public education appears to be faltering. This is demonstrated by the recent trend of underfunding our schools. For several years, our per pupil funding has fallen to less than inflation, and now we are not even in the top 20 nationally for per pupil spending.
This trend is very concerning, as ongoing underfunding will eventually impact the quality of education. More than 82% of school funding in our districts goes to salaries and benefits for teachers, administrators, paraeducators, etc.
This means when there isn’t sufficient funding, there isn’t much room for cuts other than for the people who care for and educate our children. In this upcoming legislative session, there is a plan to take even more dollars from our public schools with the proposed “Student First Scholarships,” which is just another term for vouchers.
The League of Women Voters have long been supporters of our public education system, and we oppose the use of tax dollars for vouchers to private & religious schools, as this will be detrimental to our public schools. This money should be invested to support more than 90% of our children who attend public schools.
Public schools educate ALL our children, whereas private schools can be selective in who they admit. Public schools are accountable to the public through elections for school boards and requirements to report academic results and have an annual public financial audit. Private and religious schools do not have the same accountability to the public, leading to the potential for fraud and waste.
Parents already have a right to a choice of private, religious or homeschooling for their children, and these choices are already being supported with public dollars. According to the Legislative Services Agency, the state’s annual spending on non-public education was at least $37.1 million dollars in 2018, a 53% increase since 2008. This support comes in the form of busing assistance, textbook purchase, scholarship support and a tax credit for those paying private school tuition.
It is not a “choice” if your child can be denied admission to a non-public school because of race, religion, disability or gender. There is no option for “choice” for those who live in the 239 school districts without an accredited private school. Taxpayers don’t have the “choice” to see how our tax dollars are being spent by non-public schools. The public does not have a “choice” in the selection of those governing non-public schools and making decisions on how our tax dollars are spent.
We cannot afford to continue to funnel more money away from our public schools. Our schools’ teachers and administrators have done an exceptional job with the limited resources they have been given. They are responsible for our most precious resource, our children, and we should be doing all we can to support their commitment and hard work. Our communities and towns depend on strong public schools. Communities that lose their schools through consolidation resulting from poor funding will lose a potent draw to keeping and/or bringing young families to their communities.
For our children and communities, we must start once again to prioritize our support for the public school system. This issue came up early in the legislative session which began January 9th, so contact your state legislators as soon as you can to encourage them to vote against vouchers and to vote for our children and communities.
David Jackson | Jan 20, 2023 at 7:29 pm
Where did you get the information that per-pupal spending? And is there a reason you used the ambiguous language of “fallen to less than inflation?”
Almost all available data shows that overall in the US we are spending more per-pupal now, adjusted for inflation, than any time in history.
“More than 82% of school funding in our districts goes to salaries and benefits for teachers, administrators, paraeducators, etc.”
That’s right, and how many administrative positions who are not teachers, or the principal and vice principal, or nurse do we have in our schools now compared to 1980? We’re paying for abysmal academic outcomes and pseudointellectual political-ideological programing that leads kids to ignorance and behaviors resulting in lives with even more broken homes which increases the behavioral issues in children seen in schools today, and disrupting education even more generation by generation.
Public schools are contributing to their own problems, and why? Because the ideologues run the administrations, propped up by the teacher’s unions who care more about the constant growth of dues paying members than they do the quality of education our children are receiving.
How many high school kids can tell you gender is a social construct, and Christopher Columbus was a terrible person, but can’t tell you the genetic difference between males and females, or what tribes murdered other tribes and sold them into slavery in pre-colonial North America, or Africa for that matter? How many can’t conduct the basic arithmetic needed to balance simple finances, let along the more complex arithmetic to go on to a STEM field of they wished, or tell you how many amendments there are to the Constitution, or tell you the basic structure of a cell, or the physics formula for force, or chemistry’s basic unit of matter, or how to properly structure a sentence? The public schools have turned into indoctrination centers producing ignorant, angry, poorly educated kids and parents are voting for politicians who at least promise to give them more choices in where to send them to school.
Nuke | Jan 24, 2023 at 11:23 am
DJ conveniently skips the part where the author writes, “Public schools are accountable to the public through elections for school boards and requirements to report academic results and have an annual public financial audit. Private and religious schools do not have the same accountability to the public, leading to the potential for fraud and waste.” How can you expect improvements in education without robust oversight?
And DJ fails to address the author’s concerns, “It is not a ‘choice’ if your child can be denied admission to a non-public school because of race, religion, disability or gender. There is no option for “choice” for those who live in the 239 school districts without an accredited private school.”
Instead, DJ goes on and on about tired old Right-wing tropes regarding “indoctrination” of our youth. But what does he think the Pledge of Allegiance is? What does he think the white-washed version of history is? The fact of the matter is that fearful defenders of white male patriarchy call it “indoctrination” when trying to oppress a more holistic view of the world.
David Jackson | Jan 25, 2023 at 6:39 pm
Nuke, nowhere in your reply did you attempt to show how my logic was flawed for facts were incorrect. Telling, but not surprising.
If public schools were as accountable to the public through elections for school boards as they need to be, school choice wouldn’t be a winning issue for the politicians who champion it would it? This isn’t difficult for independent thinking readers to understand without me addressing it. Private and religious schools do have accountability because the outcomes of the children will determine whether or not they can keep their enrollment, although admittedly all they have to do is be better than the public schools the parents are trying to escape their children from.
I also didn’t find it necessary to address the shameless race/sex/gender identity fear mongering of children being denied admission to private schools, from the author who doesn’t want anyone to have that choice in the first place. She needs to provide some evidence, something people who think beyond the emotional fear mongering our public school education conditioned us to function from demand before making policy and voting decisions.
And finally, the Pledge of Allegiance is just that, a pledge of allegiance to the United States. Not a pledge to any one political party, or ideology, but to the country for which we live and the principles it stands for. Yet not only are you apparently so radical you think this qualifies as some form of indoctrination, but in and of itself so egregious a whataboutism argument can be made comparing it to the anti-scientific ideologies, and pseudointellectual demographic division propaganda, being pushed on students in many of our public schools which critical thinking parents have had enough of.
Sorry but you don’t get to call political disinformation “real history” and claim everything else is “white-washed” without providing evidence. Yet this notion, and claims of an oppressive “white male patriarchy” are the exact product of the indoctrination you dismiss as a “right-wing trope.”
Your response is the product of the very issues our public schools have with providing a quality first world education. Holistic view? Yeah, I’d love to see an in-depth history of all the parties I mentioned in my first response along with European explorers, colonists, and settlers. If you bother to read on your own you’ll find there are no innocent parties, from any background, anywhere in history, contrary to the claims of divisive ideologues pushing power and oppression narratives to deconstruct the idea of the US under the guise of a “holistic view.”