The New York Times today offers what should be a cautionary tale for supporters of the Opportunity Scholarship Act. The legislation, which has been assigned to the Senate Education Committee, would allow corporations to take a 100 percent credit against their corporate tax bill for donations they make to the state’s scholarship fund for low-income students. The money could then be used by the students to attend a private school.
In Georgia, the Times reports, the money is being funneled to the families of the donors. The Georgia situation “is just one example of how scholarship programs have been twisted to benefit private schools at the expense of the neediest children.”
Spreading at a time of deep cutbacks in public schools, the programs are operating in eight states and represent one of the fastest-growing components of the school choice movement. This school year alone, the programs redirected nearly $350 million that would have gone into public budgets to pay for private school scholarships for 129,000 students, according to the Alliance for School Choice, an advocacy organization. Legislators in at least nine other states are considering the programs.
While the scholarship programs have helped many children whose parents would have to scrimp or work several jobs to send them to private schools, the money has also been used to attract star football players, expand the payrolls of the nonprofit scholarship groups and spread the theology of creationism, interviews and documents show. Even some private school parents and administrators have questioned whether the programs are a charade.
The program is being sold as revenue neutral, but it is built on a fund that allows corporations to pay less in taxes, which in turn means that there will be less money flowing into the state’s tax coffers.
The scholarship program, like most school choices plans, is a gimmick designed not to fix public education — and urban schools, particularly — but to create the illusion that we are doing something. If we were serious about fixing schools, we would ensure they were fully integrated by race and class and funded adequately.
Hank Kalet 