Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Andrew Thomason

IdahoStatesman.com

SPRINGFIELD — Riding the wave of a victory in school reform last year, education activists are gearing up for another push this spring, this time for school vouchers.

Through vouchers, tax dollars are used to help pay for tuition at private schools. Although attempts at instituting a voucher program have been made, the idea has yet to achieve enough support to make it out of the General Assembly.

Past plans in Illinois have targeted vouchers at children enrolled in underperforming schools and those who live in economically depressed areas of the state.

“All of the most serious school choice proposals we have seen over the past couple of years have at least one thing in common; they in their own way try and deliver school choice to students in the worst schools,” said Collin Hitt, a senior policy analyst with IllinoisPolicy Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

Hitt said his organization plans to ask lawmakers to revisit the issue again this year.

Vouchers have made unusual allies out of conservative advocates and Democratic lawmakers. The conservative advocates say they would save taxpayers money and create healthy competition between the public and private sectors.

In the General Assembly, Democrats representing urban areas generally have been the voice for vouchers. State Sen. James Meeks, D-Chicago, has for the past two years sponsored legislation that would help the parents of about 30,000 children in the Chicago Public School system send their children to private schools.

Meeks’ legislation passed the state Senate but failed in the state House in 2010 after staunch opposition by teachers unions. Similar legislation never made it beyond the Senate in 2011.

“We think diverting money from public schools is a misuse of taxpayers’ dollars,” said Charles McBarron, a spokesman for the teacher’s union, the Illinois Education Association. “The Legislature has spoken on vouchers the past several years.”

Meeks did not respond to requests for an interview with Illinois Statehouse News, and his office failed to respond to questions about whether the senator will push the legislation again this year.

State Rep. LaShawn Ford, D-Chicago, sponsored a voucher program last year that would target children attending schools in the 20 zip codes reporting the highest lottery tickets sales. Ford said those areas, in general, are economically depressed. Children attending schools in those areas would be given vouchers, funded in part by state lottery sales, to attend private schools. 

Ford said he plans to push for school vouchers again this spring.

“I’m a strong supporter of public education where public education is a supporter of its taxpayers. When I see that there is a struggle in meeting the needs of communities, then we have to look at other options,” Ford said.

Meeks’ district office is fewer than three miles from Indiana, which recently passed the most sweeping school voucher program in the nation. In that state, about 60 percent of the children are eligible for school vouchers, according to Hitt.

“There are families with people on both sides of the border that are suddenly going to have very different opposition when it comes to educating their kids. I think that’s going to rub off in Illinois,” Hitt said.

Education reformers in Illinois last spring passed legislation that weakens teacher tenure by tying student performance to a school's decision to fire a teacher. Republicans and Democrats championed the legislation.

McBarron said the state needs to see how the massive changes affect the school system before tweaking anything else.

“Let’s implement it, let’s see what happens, what kind of victories we’re going to score as a result (of the reforms) and then we’re going to build on those,” McBarron said.

Ford said the state can’t wait around to see if last year’s changes are enough to fix a state school system in which more than half of the students are underperforming when compared to national standards set byNo Child Left Behind.

“We cannot allow for our students to stay in failing schools to wait until we find a cure; we have to give them some alternatives,” Ford said.

Studies on the effectiveness of voucher programs in better educating students are mixed.

Chris Lubienski, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies school choices, and he said academic gains are minimal.

“Once you control for the fact that there’s more special education students, more English deficient students, more disabled students, in public schools, when you control for those differences, public schools actually might outperform private schools on standardized tests,” Lubienski said. “It’s kind of a surprise.”

But Hitt points to studies such as one by the Friedman Foundation, a group that advocates for school vouchers, to demonstrate the merits for school vouchers. The Friedman Foundation study says “the empirical evidence consistently shows that vouchers improve outcomes for both participants and public schools.”

National School Choice Week features a series of events spotlight ing the need for educational options for children. Events run from Jan. 22-28. Click here to find events in your area.