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Is school choice really about school choice?

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educationDonald Trump is going to build more private schools, and get public schools to pay for it. That’s the essence of his so-called school choice plan, which as we all know isn’t about actual school choice.

School choice is about taking money away from public education and using it to pay for people who have already decided to enroll their children in private schools.

Which is a great move for a lot of folks, as I know personally. Augusta Free Press has a longstanding relationship with a local private school that can accurately boast of a 100 percent college acceptance rate.

That being the case, why not close down all the public schools, who can’t come anywhere close to 100 percent?

The barest of details in the Trump plan, if it can be called a plan, tell us why. Trump seems to think that all it takes to get more kids in private schools is a $12,000 tuition voucher.

I say seems to think that, because Trump knows that $12,000 is nowhere near what it costs to educate a kid in private school, where tuitions are, charitably, at least two to three times that amount.

Now, sure, private schools can and often do provide tuition grants and waivers to students to get them in the doors. As a colleague at a local private school told me recently, nobody actually pays the sticker price.

Even so, vouchers paying anywhere from a quarter to a third of a private school tuition aren’t going to get kids from low-income families into private schools.

I can speak from the experience of having grown up in a low-income family, where the books and supplies fees that the school system passed on, back in the 1970s and 1980s in the range of $30 to $40 a year, from memory, were sometimes too much for my parents.

If families can’t afford $30 or $40, how are they going to turn $12,000 into $30,000 or $40,000? Are we expecting the alums who support private school foundations to pick up the slack? And even if they could, how much excess capacity is there currently in private schools to accommodate an influx of new students?

The biggest advantage offered by private schools is the smaller class sizes, remember. Public schools have to cram 25 to 30 or more kids into a classroom to provide economies of scale. Private schools improve upon the delivery by shrinking class sizes to six, eight, maybe 10, but the more kids in a classroom, the less individual attention the students get, and the less valuable the education provided.

So the answer is: build more private schools.

Aha, right? Just build more private schools. Seems too easy.

But think about it for a second. Build more schools. You have construction costs, or at the least expenses related to leasing and retrofitting existing space. That’s just off the top, capital expenses.

The crucial part of the infrastructure is the acquisition of human capital – teachers, administrators. On top of simply hiring people to fill positions, you need time to turn those people that you’ve just hired into a team capable of implementing a curriculum.

No doubt an influx of voucher money could attract investors to private education. Money has the skill of being able to find people with unbelievable ease. You have to be skeptical at the outset that the new folks attracted to private education are there because they’re interested in providing education services.

So, OK, in the end, no, we don’t just build more private schools. Just not feasible, that idea, and anyway, if that was the solution, wouldn’t the market, which a supposed businessman like Trump holds sacrosanct, already be moving in that direction without needing the government to prod things?

News flash: the number of children in K-12 has actually decreased over the past 15 years, from 12 percent to 10 percent, and the U.S. Department of Education projects further decline in the next decade.

Trump’s vouchers aren’t going to reverse that trend, but he knows that, even as he expects you not to know that.

The evangelicals who eat school choice talk for breakfast, lunch and dinner don’t want poor kids like me in their private schools.

They just want their money back, the rationale being, we don’t use public schools, so why should we pay for them?

Well, I haven’t used the police, fire and EMT departments in years; I’d like that money back. And I don’t have any personal beefs with people in Afghanistan, Iraq, South Korea, really anywhere else in the world, so give me my money back for the cost of the military, thanks.

I don’t even have kids, and my wife and I have decided that we’re OK with that, so I’ll never personally benefit from the tax dollars that go from my bank account into the national treasury and are then disbursed to schools.

I have to account for that in my life ledger by taking as payment that I get to live in a country with kids who get a grounding in the fundamentals of learning and eventually either learn a trade or prepare themselves for professional work, and that the more people who are able to become productive members of society, the better off I am, and we all are.

Bottom line: efforts to undermine public education – and that’s what happens if this political effort to claw back tax dollars dating back decades ever sees the light of day – are a threat to our long-term national wealth.

Column by Chris Graham

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