The Leaflet – States Choose School Vouchers

Published August 14, 2015

 

States Choose School Vouchers

With a 4–3 vote, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in July the state’s education voucher program, which allows low-income students to use funding that would go to the public school system to attend private schools, is constitutional. This solidified North Carolina’s position as one of the 14 states that offers school vouchers, a school reform option that empowers parents and has been proven to improve educational outcomes.

Currently, Arkansas, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, Vermont, and Wisconsin offer school voucher programs.

“Vouchers give parents all or a portion of the public funding set aside for their children’s education to choose private schools that best fit their learning needs,” said the Freidman Foundation for Education Choice. “State funds typically expended by a school district are allocated to families in the form of a voucher to pay partial or full tuition at a private school, including religious and non-religious options.”

“Vouchers tend to be more transparent and easier for parents to understand than other types of choice options,” said Dr. Terry Stoops of the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina. “Furthermore, voucher programs do not require changes to the tax code, which is ideal for states, including North Carolina, that are considering major tax reforms.”

A. Barton Hinkle of the Reason Foundation argues school vouchers save public schools money. “At worst, voucher programs can leave public schools with slightly less money to spend per remaining pupil,” said Hinkle. “But in fact, they usually leave the schools with more, because most vouchers offer less than the state’s per-pupil expenditure. For example, if 10 students each leave a school with an 80 percent voucher, then the school has 10 fewer students but loses only eight students’ worth of funding. Meanwhile, the state is spending only 80 percent of what it otherwise would have on the voucher students.”

Also, don’t forget The Heartland Institute will be hosting its Emerging Issues Forum–Midwest on September 25, 2015, in Chicago, Illinois, and it will hold its Emerging Issues Forum–South in Nashville, Tennessee on December 9. You can register for those events here!

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The July issue of 
Budget & Tax News reports on the downgrade by Moody’s Investors Service, a credit rating agency headquartered in New York City, of Chicago’s government-issued bonds to one of its lowest ratings, citing the city’s massive underfunded pension liabilities as a significant credit risk for investors. Bill Bergman, director of research for Truth in Accounting, commented, “we’ve got to try to address the reasons why we got into this situation in the first place. Part of the way out is being honest, as soon as possible, about our own knowledge of the finances and how we present those finances to the public.”

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