Bacon's Rebellion

A Voucher by Any Other Name

—

by

Dick Hall-Sizemore
in , ,

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Governor Glenn Youngkin

Governor Youngkin has included in his proposed budget $50 million to provide $5,000 “Opportunity Grants” to 10,000 students from low-income families to apply against the cost of attending private schools.

While this limited voucher program avoids the primary objection of being a subsidy to rich families who send their kids to private school, there are a couple of characteristics of this proposal that need to be noted:

  1. Income level. According to media reports, the grants could be available for a family of four making up to $81,120 annually. This is hardly “low-income.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2023, the median household income in Virginia was $89,931.

2. Usefulness. Even with a $5,000 grant from the state, a truly low-income family is not likely to be able to afford to enroll its child in a private school. A quick internet search of private schools in the Richmond area revealed one with a tuition of $6,000. The tuition for others varied on the age of the child, but ranged from the mid-teens to over $30,000 at the high school level.

There is no doubt that children from low-income families are being slighted in schools throughout the Commonwealth. The governor is to be commended for his efforts to make that fact clear and to strengthen the accountability measures. Improving the educational opportunities for low-income children is going to require a lot of effort and innovative thinking. This “Opportunity Grant” program seems designed more for PR and political purposes than for making a true difference in educational progress for low-income children.

Share this article

ADVERTISEMENT

(comments below)

Comments

Comments

7 responses to “A Voucher by Any Other Name”

  1. LesGabriel Avatar
    LesGabriel

    Using the same source that you did, I found that family income was $110,000 and married-couple families was $130,000, both well above the $81,120 eligability level.

  2. Stephen Haner Avatar
    Stephen Haner

    So, Dick, are you arguing for a larger subsidy amount? Fine! The people who follow this closer than I do seem very happy with this. It will supplement, not replace the existing scholarship tax credit program. The public school monopolists hate it and will try hard to kill it, but I think this is a good thing.

  3. Todd T Avatar
    Todd T

    I was thinking of doing an article on this one too. The Maryland BOOST program is similar and around $10M, enacted during Republican Governor Larry Hogan with a Democratic legislature (initial amount was $5M in 2016). Maryland's D governor and legislature tried to reduce it in 2023 with language to eventually phase it out, but got major pushback from parochial school families (Catholic, Jewish), and the phase out language was eliminated.

    Pennsylvania had a different type of program (much broader) that helped do in Josh Shapiro for the Democratic vice presidential spot.

    I'm not a private school choice person, but I welcome a policy debate about what to do with kids in failing systems. For instance, ardent private school choice critic Professor Josh Cowen supports open enrollment (i.e., not having to live in the district to attend the school).

  4. Derrick Max Avatar
    Derrick Max

    First, using advertised tuition amounts is like assuming every college kid pays the price on the colleges website. THEY DONT. Private schools offer tuition on a sliding scale — in economics, we call this pricing down the demand curve. I ran a school that had a reported tuition of $12k per student, but the average amount actually paid was less than half of that, and for the truly poor, we usually did what we could to get a tuition amount that they could afford. If we had open seats, every dollar a poor person paid, helped cover our costs. Our lowest tuition was $100 per month, or $1,000 per school year. I am guessing schools in Richmond do the same. Of course, the truly wealthy…and we had a one or two, paid the sticker price. Last I saw, only 14 percent of college kids in private colleges paid the full tuition.

    Second, people will develop schools to help struggling students and a tuition much lower than what current private schools charge. When we opened our private school in DC, my guess is the average private school tuition was closer to $30k, as there really were only elite private schools and only a handful of private schools (mostly Catholic) serving low income kids. Today, there are close to 40 schools serving low income children east of the river thanks to the DC Opportunity Scholarship (or grant as you say). Through foundations, churches, rich people with big hearts, tuition can be driven down by charitable donations…our first few years were significantly funded by some folks on wall street that cared.

    Third, our low income students in Virginia, especially in our urban centers, are being lost. Their test scores are actually lower than they were in DC when we pushed for scholarships almost 20 years ago! It is unacceptable. We can all bicker over scholarship amounts, designs, impact on large public schools, etc…all the while another generation of students are being left behind. They will grow up to think the system was rigged against them…and sadly, in the case of education, they will be 100 percent right. We will then debate why more African Americans arent in board rooms, or the executive suits…and no one will mention that some great minds were lost in schools that didn't serve high potential students well. Our urban schools are failing low performing students, and they fail to push high performing students hard enough. Kudos to the Governor for stepping up. Lucas and Scott should jump on this and say, "we want to expand this to $10k per student, and set aside funds for the next 10 years…and we want to fund lab schools, and charter schools, and add more money to our public schools in failing urban centers…this is the civil rights issue of our day, and Democrats are putting teacher's unions and status quo ahead of student needs!

  5. Nancy Naive Avatar
    Nancy Naive

    1) just about the same as ACA advanced premium eligibility.
    2) any exemption for church-based? It’s just more money to The Church.

  6. Nancy Naive Avatar
    Nancy Naive

    Men are divided in opinion as to the facts. And even granting the facts, they explain them in different ways. -Edwin Abbott Abbott, schoolmaster and theologian (20 Dec 1838-1926)

  7. f/k/a_tmtfairfax Avatar
    f/k/a_tmtfairfax

    Dick,

    Keep in mind that the public school funding monopoly was created from ethnic and religious bigotry in the 19th century. The failed national Blaine Amendment and the successful Little Blaine Amendments in many states did the trick. This includes Virginia. If a constitutional provision or state law had its roots in black slavery or Jim Crow laws, would its continuation be acceptable today? If so, why the difference? Are some forms of bigotry still acceptable because the teachers unions are big political funders?

Leave a Reply

ADVERTISEMENT