News
September 28, 2006
Briefing by David Bohn before the United States Commission on Civil Rights On the subject of School Choice as a Civil Rights issue.
Hartford, Connecticut.
Those of us speaking today may have very different views, but one thing we can all agree upon is the need to give every child, especially the poor and minority children, a better education, but as we know today we do not. This is the great civil rights issue of our time.
Many would attempt to do this by spending more money on public education, especially in poorer school districts. These are well-intentioned suggestions, which deserve to be respected for their compassion. But upon closer examination there is little to support the idea of a direct connection between higher public spending and the quality of educational outcomes. And let us all keep in mind throughout the discussions today that the original and on going constitutional intent of publicly funded education is that the money for each child to be educated belongs to that child. Tax payers don’t generously fund schools for the benefit of teachers union, nor for the benefit of school staffs or administrations, but rather for each child to be educated. Therefore each child has a claim and a right to those tax payer dollars not the entities serving that child.
In March of 2005 Dowd Muska published a study entitled The Value Gap which compared the money invested by local Connecticut school districts with their Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) scores. What this study found was a negligible connection between per pupil spending and academic achievement. The conclusions of the Executive summery of this report state the following:
- Efficient school districts are not necessarily wealthy school districts.
- Inefficient school districts are not necessarily poor school districts.
- The state’s poorest school districts not only fail to serve their students,
- but also generate an abysmally low return for taxpayers’ dollars.
- Many affluent towns spend much more than middle-class towns for the same educational outcomes.
- Many middle-class school districts achieve remarkably high student performance with relatively low spending.
- Efficient school districts should be closely examined by education reformers and taxpayers alike, in order to determine the best ways to spend tax revenue more wisely.
From my own experience I have observed that Connecticut urban private schools can deliver an excellent and desirable product for $3,000 per year, while dysfunctional public schools, in the same district, in Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven cost four times that amount. I have learned this information first hand through my involvement in the Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation of Connecticut. CEO, Connecticut is an organization that gives Connecticut kids, currently in failing public schools, a real opportunity for an excellent education. The more I work with CEO, the more enthusiastic I become as I see the results.
Children are the future of Connecticut and our Nation both morally and economically. Without excellent education the children of today and the citizens and workers of tomorrow will not meet the demands of maintaining our free society and the form of government that secures our freedoms. Neither will they have the skills to enter the workforce and keep American industry, productivity and innovation the envy of the world. Those who make decisions about where our kids go to school play a critical role in changing the lives of children forever and shaping the course of our State and Nation.
With $1,500 CEO Connecticut provides a needy child the realizable opportunity to attend the school of their choice. You might be thinking $1,500 can’t be enough to do all that; private school tuitions are much more expensive than that! Yes, you are correct, the parents must raise the remainder of the tuition themselves and many of the private schools they choose offer financial support also. Please note how very motivated these parents are, to get the best education possible for their children. The parents of the children CEO serves are qualified at two times the government defined poverty level. Most parents struggle to raise their portion of the tuition, but right now over 450 children in Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven are going to the schools of their choice with CEO scholarships.
All CEO Connecticut scholarships are funded by donations from individuals, corporations and foundations. There is a dramatic need to expand this program to other Connecticut cities and children. Currently the Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven plans have waiting lists. The demand for these well deserved scholarships far exceeds our current funding ability. This demonstrates that most parents of children in the failing public schools of Connecticut realize their children are being cheated and their basic civil right to a good education is being ignored.
The CEO Foundation has been actively engaged in changing lives through educational choice for low income families in Connecticut. Families, who are currently being denied their basic Civil Rights to the type of education that opens doors and sets a child on the never ending road of learning, are finding significant help through CEO’s modest scholarship program. Yet, because all CEO funding is limited to privately raised money we currently are only able to offer the basic civil right of school choice to a little more than 450 children. There are tens of thousands of more children in our State who do not have access to the quality education that is their basic civil right. Not because they don’t have the desire, or skills, or potential to succeed, but because their families can’t financially leave the failing public schools in their municipality for a school of their choice. Because powerful political forces (namely teachers unions and the politicians beholden to them) have blocked all efforts to publicly fund a scholarship program for Connecticut’s children, these kids are denied their basic civil right to educational choices that will shape the rest of their lives. We must all step forward now and put an end to the injustice and inequitey of the current government monopoly education system. We currently have a system which says you are free to go to the school of your choice, provided you have the financial means to escape, which in reality is available only to the wealthy. The enormous amounts of tax payer money now being spent on public school education are currently being squandered by ineffective school administrations, self interested unions and a system of education that is betraying parental trust and cheating children of their one shot at education. If there is one thing that the CEO Scholarship Program proves is that very little money can set a child free from educational doom. There is currently plenty of money in public school budgets to give every child in Connecticut the quality education of their choice, but those who hold the purse strings are denying these children and their parents the ability to achieve that education dream. The Civil Rights of our children in Connecticut must be defended now because today’s children will never have a second chance at their education.
More money is not what is needed, in fact some of the worst public schools in our nation have some of the highest per student expenditures with New York and Washington, DC topping the list. Taxpayers are constantly being told by the public school power establishment that they are being stingy with the children. Yet in most Connecticut municipalities more than 70% of all tax revenues go to public schools. Every national municipality cited in the Cato Institute study entitled “Saving Money and improving Education” by David Salisbury indicates there is plenty of money available to properly educate children. The problem lies with those who have reserved to themselves the sole power to control and direct that money. It is shown time and time again that when parents can direct financial resources for their children’s education costs are lowered and controlled, and educational excellence is achieved. When a governmental bureaucracy, on the other hand, dictates to parents what education it will dole out to their child, costs dramatically increase and the quality of education is greatly diminished.
It is for this reason that I would like to spend the balance of my presentation talking about the documented economic advantages of school choice, a method that has proven popular and academically superior wherever it has been tried: both here in the United States and in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Sweden. It is interesting to note that the Danish school system, which has featured school choice for a century and a half, is consistently one of the best in the world, both for mainstream students and for special education.
The results are in and the hard hitting evidence is conclusive that School Choice makes tremendous financial sense wherever it has been implemented. David Salisbury, formerly of the Cato Institute, put together one of the most comprehensive and best policy analysis pieces on School Choice. Much of the information in my brief to you today comes from his report called “Saving Money and Improving Education, How School Choice Can Help States Reduce Education Costs.” The statements made in my brief can easily be referenced in Mr. Salisbury’s piece and verified by his extensive Notes and Bibliography. Whether you look at the Arizona School Choice Plan or the Milwaukee Plan or the Cleveland Plan, or The Florida Plan or the Pennsylvania Plan or the Maine Plan or even the Vermont Plan, school choice reduces costs and improves education.
Some significant national facts have to be first considered:
- In constant dollars per pupil average expenditures have risen from $3,300 in 1965 to $8,992 in 2001.
- In 1950 the money spent on K-12 education represented approximately 2.3% of national personal income but dramatically rose to 4.5% of personal income in 1999.
- Between 1988 and 1998 public education expanded the number of its employees by 23.7% which out paced the 20.7% employment growth rate for the overall private economy during that same time period. This made public school employment growth third largest nationally after Health Services and Business Services.
- Since 1986 the rate of employment growth in public education has been more than double the growth in the number of students.
- Between 1979 and 2000 national average student enrollment grew by 13% , but during the same period the total number of school employees grew by 61%, while the number of teachers grew by 35%.
- Nationally, public schools now have approximately 1 employee for every 8.1 students, and teachers only make up 40% of the total public school employees.
- Back in 1970 when all national norm reference tests (like the Stamford Achievement Tests and the SAT’s) showed all U.S. public school children performing at much higher academic levels the pupil / teacher ratio was 22.3. In 2001 the pupil / teacher ratio dropped significantly to 16.3 students per teacher yet all national norm reference tests indicate that academic performance in the public schools is falling, even with those same tests being significantly “dumbed down” since the early 1970’s.
- The Bureau of Labor and Statistics recently reported that the average hourly wage for workers in the teacher’s occupational category of “professional, specialty and technical” was $28.74. Within this category registered nurses earned $25.72 per hour, psychologists earned $29.19 per hour, and urban planners earned $26.12 per hour. By comparison, elementary school teachers earned $31.79 per hour and secondary school teachers earned $31.87 per hour.
- Health insurance and retirement benefits are significantly higher for public school teachers than for their private school counterparts. Benefits for general private sector employees are about 15.8% of salary where as benefits for public school teacher’s average 21.5% of salary. In comparison private school teachers benefits average 18% of salary.
- “John Wenders, an economist at the University of Idaho, compared costs of public and private schools and attempted to account for the differences. He found that on average, public schools cost 42% more than private schools for comparable services (taking into consideration different student demographics and additional costs for providing special education and complying with other mandates that fall on public schools).
All of these 10 points are given to prove the all important simple truth that there is plenty of money available right now in every public school system in the country to provide for an effective school choice program that will lift all boats. Each child that left a public school through one of the state sponsored school choice programs mentioned above left a considerable amount of money in that public school to benefit the remaining students. In addition, each public school that loses students to other schools will be highly motivated to reform and provide higher levels of academic rigor and results so as to attract students rather than give them reasons to leave.
If local and state governments have to financially imprison parents and children in government schools to make them stay I say it’s high time we throw open the doors of those economic prisons and say to all “it is your civil right to have educational choice, you are free to leave if you choose.” Every study has shown that when parents are free to choose educational options for their children, public schools benefit, tax payers get relief and children flourish academically.
I would like to finish by talking about a modest approach to school choice, with which I have some personal experience. Non-partisan Action for a Better Redding (NABR) was founded in 1997 by a small group including myself. We did this in response to the sliding educational performance of the Redding public schools and the seemingly uncontrollable pace of local government spending and tax increases. 72% of local taxes go to fund the Redding Public Schools and we get little help from the state and federal government. After years of dealing with the issue of out of control school budgets and unjustifiable school expansion projects NABR came up with a School Choice Plan and a Calculator that would show in a simple format how a school choice plan would financially benefit Redding and its neighboring town Easton.
With the total construction and financing costs for the local Barlow High School expansion being estimated at $80,000,000 our School Choice Calculator shows over a $100,000,000 savings to Redding and Easton if 120 children used the proposed school choice grants to leave Barlow so that we could avoid the expansion. This savings was achieved in 10 years while each child that left the school would allow for a $500 per year contribution to the school in addition leaving $3,500 per year in the public school budget to cover fixed costs. All this could have been accomplished while giving each student that left a $6,000 per year grant to go to the school of their choice. For more information on this Plan and the Calculator which demonstrates its financial feasibility you can go to www.betterredding.org.
If such a plan could do so much for small communities like Redding and Easton, think of what it could do for cities the size of Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven.
There is currently plenty of money to give every child in Connecticut the quality education of their choice, but those with the purse strings and a vested interest in the status quo are denying these children and their parents the ability to achieve that education. Unfair and unjust financial restraints are denying our children their basic civil right to a quality education of their choice. The Civil Rights of our children in Connecticut must be defended now because today’s children will never have a second chance at their education.
Sources and Suggested Bibliography:
Bast, Joseph and Walberg, Herbert, Ten Principles of School Choice, Chicago, IL; Heartland Institute; 2005
Bast, Joseph and Walberg, Herbert, Lets Put Parents Back In Charge, Chicago, IL; Heartland Institute; 2003
Lips, Carrie and Jacoby, Jennifer, The Arizona Tax Credit: Giving Parents Choices, Saving Taxpayers Money, Harvard University, Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 414, Sept., 2001
Muska, Dowd, The Value Gap: How Effective Is Your Local School District? Hartford, CT; Yankee Institute; 2005.
(NABR) Non-partisan Action for a Better Redding web site: www.betterredding.org
OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
Robinson, Taylor, “Try Private School Grants to Ease Public School Bulge,” Hartford Courant. (May 3, 2005).
Salisbury, David, Saving Money and Improving Education. Washington, DC; Cato Institute; 2005.
Yankee Institute for Public Policy web site: www.yankeeinstitute.org