by James A. Bacon
Governor Glenn Youngkin wants to provide an educational escape hatch for lower-income Virginians. He has proposed a private school voucher program that would give $5,000 grants to 10,000 students whose families earn less than 200% of the federal poverty limit ($62,400 for a family of four).
Virginia Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, says Youngkin’s voucher idea is “not going to happen,” reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“I just want to make sure that we’re clear that the governor is not going to take any money from public schools for vouchers for private schools,” Lucas told reporters after Youngkin’s State of the Commonwealth address yesterday.
“I’ve heard that tone for many years in a row now. It didn’t happen year one, year two, and this year it’s not going to happen either,” she said. “I’m not going to take money from public schools for private school vouchers, it’s just not going to happen.”
Why does Lucas want to keep poor Black kids trapped in dysfunctional public schools? Why does she want to perpetuate a system that all but guarantees that poor Black kids will graduate (assuming they do graduate) semi-literate, semi-numerate and incapable of competing for middle-class jobs in the burgeoning knowledge economy?
Thirty-nine percent of students in Lucas’ hometown of Portsmouth failed their English Standards of Learning (SOL) tests in the 2023-24 school year. The rate is even higher for Blacks — 43.4%. And even higher for disadvantaged Blacks — 48.7%. (The math SOL failure rate was even higher.)
Lucas’ argument that the vouchers would be funded with public school money is just plain wrong. Youngkin says the “opportunity scholarships” would “not take a single penny from existing education funding.” The $50 million proposal would come from the state’s general fund, over and above record state aid to education.
Portsmouth Public School (PPS) problems are chronic, deeply embedded, and not easily fixed regardless of how much money is spent. The Virginia Education Association (VEA) notes that the teacher vacancy rate in Portsmouth was 13.4% as of October 2023, 9.5 percentage points higher than the state average. The overall staffing vacancy rate was 17.6%, 12.7 percentage points above the state average.
One obvious inference from those numbers is that the working conditions in Portsmouth are atrocious. The VEA, for whom every problem is solvable with more money, pins the problem on teacher salaries: $68,397 in the 2023-2024 school year, $2,044 below the state average. Perhaps two things are true: Perhaps Portsmouth teachers are underpaid and their working conditions are intolerable.
But Opportunity Scholarships would help Portsmouth K-12 finances, not hurt them. For each student opting out of the public school system, PPS would lose roughly $12,000 per pupil in state aid and federal aid but would retain $5,000 per pupil in local funds to reallocate to smaller classrooms, higher pay, more bureaucrats, or whatever the School Board chooses.
Anyone with a lick of sense knows this, and Lucas, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, certainly does.
What, then, is her real motive? I’m entering the realm of speculation here, but I think she’s worried that Opportunity Scholarships would siphon off higher-performing students — those whose parents care enough to take the initiative to tap the program and who, by definition, care deeply about their children’s educations. The loss of even a few high performers would make the average SOL scores look even worse, thus magnifying the pedagogical and cultural flaws of the Portsmouth public school system.
It’s better to keep all poor Black kids in sub-par public schools than to allow even a small fraction to escape.
Public school teachers and administrators, and of course the VEA, are one of her core constituencies. Lucas will cover for them heedless of the consequences for the school children.
It’s time Youngkin stop playing nice. He needs to embarrass Lucas with the hard truth: her intransigence will harm poor Black kids across Virginia. She needs to stop blocking the Opportunity Scholarships.
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