Comparing Florida and Kentucky for voucher propaganda is misleading, wrong | Opinion

School voucher schemes defund public schools, devastate student learning, and discriminate against vulnerable children.

Who do they help? Mostly kids who were already in private school to start.

Those are the facts from the last two decades of research and reporting on vouchers, just like those that Amendment 2 would most likely usher in if it succeeds in Kentucky this November.

But you wouldn’t know it from all the pro-voucher messaging coming from national, billionaire-backed groups like the Americans for Prosperity—a national organization created by the Koch network—and a variety of allied think tanks like Kentucky’s own Bluegrass Institute.

I’ve spent nearly two decades studying voucher systems and, more recently, warning about the role these right-wing, billionaire backed groups have played in creating pro-voucher messaging.

One typical strategy is what I call “flooding the zone” with studies and policy briefs that purport to show vouchers work for kids and families, based on another state’s supposed success.

These days that model state is Florida, which has to-date the largest voucher system—now over $1 billion in price tag — threatening school district budgets. The Bluegrass Institute has gotten in on the act over the last few years, publishing what amounts to a love poem, written in the language of public policy, about how great things are going in the Sunshine State.

Their basic argument, though, needs to be addressed, because even I — a vocal voucher critic — have acknowledged that in Florida there’s been suggestive evidence of so-called “competitive effects” of voucher schemes: the idea that vouchers put pressure on local districts to improve performance.

It’s true that a handful of credible studies using Florida data have shown such a pattern. But the catch is this: those gains come only in historically under-resourced districts threatened with severe funding loss from vouchers.

And the results are tiny: something like moving the average child from the 50th to the 50.2th percentile for a 10% increase in state voucher spending within those district’s borders. That’s roughly 10 times less than the impact of just directly investing in those local public schools in the first place.

Another way to put it: those tiny competitive effects are found only in districts that stood to lose the most funding due to vouchers. So pro-voucher think tanks are selling a false promise when they sell Florida-style competitive effects and claim vouchers won’t defund local public schools.

Only one of those two promises can be factually true at once.

There’s also reason to believe even those tiny Florida effects wouldn’t happen in Kentucky. Florida is a large, densely populated state with major urban centers, and many private schools within those urban centers for parents to spend that voucher cash.

When I was a faculty member in public policy at the University of Kentucky, my colleagues and I wrote about how education policy schemes based on market competition held less promise for states like Kentucky. That’s because apart from places like Louisville, Lexington and handful of other large districts, rural communities depend on locally-based school improvement strategies.

There aren’t hidden teacher labor markets to tap in these rural districts once they’ve fired a bunch of district teachers. And there aren’t hidden private schools coming to save the day through competition. My colleagues and I called this reality “working with what they have.”

Researchers aligned with the Bluegrass Institute have also tried to make more sweeping claims about the benefits of “education freedom” (vouchers and other school choice) by comparing results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the nation’s “report card”—across states with different voucher schemes.

This is an exercise in what actual specialists in education policy call “MisNAEPery:” super-imposing one’s own ideological policy priors onto differences in states’ NAEP results to try to make a political point that those policies are the best.

The point is this: studies claiming to show Florida or another state has better schools because they have school vouchers either leave out important information or are just flat out wrong.

That’s to be expected. Like its other sister think tanks in the national right-wing State Policy Network, the Bluegrass Institute is acting as something of a political campaign-style war room to beat back data that undermines their voucher cause. The goal, as I’ve written elsewhere, isn’t so much to get the story right, it’s to ram vouchers through hesitant states.

To wit: more than 75% of all voucher studies cited by pro-voucher groups come directly from such voucher advocacy groups. These include 59% percent of all studies showing positive “competitive effects.”

With its rich heritage and its proud traditions, Kentucky is many wonderful things. What it isn’t, though, is a place for national, billionaire-backed voucher schemes to come devastate local schools and districts.

And there’s no evidence nor data that have ever shown otherwise.

Josh Cowen is Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, and Senior Fellow at the Education Law Center. His book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers” is Available at Harvard Education Press.