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Given last week’s Supreme Court decision favoring vouchers, perhaps legislators should consider the following as a prompt for the new SAT writing section:
“You will have a decade to plan and execute real educational policy reform with little accountability to average parents. Before you begin accomplishing anything, bicker and make allegations, and plan on how you can stonewall real reform. Your solution should be as nonsensical, as partisan and as useless as you can make it.”
Last week, educators touted newly announced SAT I changes as vital to making college more equitable, while conservative reformers called the voucher decision the most important since Brown v. Board of Education. But in the midst of political and media hype, parents and students shouldn’t be fooled into thinking these superficial reforms will help their children get a better education.
Changes to the SAT I announced last week will replace analogies with a writing section and make the math section tougher, but they fail to fix the racial disparities in scoring that are the SAT I’s most chronic problem. Rather, UC President Richard Atkinson – who spearheaded these changes by essentially threatening The College Board with the prospect of this university dropping the test as it stood – seems to hope the so-called improvements will lead to changes in K-12 schools throughout the country by forcing them to emphasize writing and harder math.
What Atkinson seems to be missing is the group of tests that college-bound students already have to take that include these changes: the SAT II. That test has been required for years for entrance into most universities, yet many schools continue to inadequately prepare their students for college.
Though Atkinson and others say SATs indicate how well students will do in their first year of college, at a UC campus under the quarter system, diligence has as much to do with performance as intelligence, let alone mere performance on a test.
The voucher decision, on the other hand, paves the way for changes in K-12 education that advocates say will strike at the heart of performance differences on tests like the SAT. If federal proposals supported by President Bush pass, vouchers will give parents tax credits toward private schools, drastically changing the way students are educated.
Democrats fear such measures will spell the end for public education and adversely affect poorer and middle-income families, while simply giving a subsidy to more wealthy families who can already afford costly private education.
But in many ways vouchers merely mirror the success of higher education funding systems. In this state, for example, taxpayers support the University of California and California State University, while also funding scholarships for students who choose to attend private schools like Stanford or Loyola Marymount.
The argument should not center around the benefits or detriments of socialized education, the separation of church and state or the evils of private industry – it should be over how best to educate American children. The best way to do this is to invest in American education, whether it’s private or public.
Highly funded private schools may better serve students, but that doesn’t mean public schools can’t do the same with adequate funding. Once again, higher education shows this: public schools with sufficient funding, like the University of California, are able in large part to compete with top-notch private schools.
The problem with K-12 education, particularly in California, is that it is grossly underfunded. This state ranks 48th in the union in funding to K-12 education at $5,603 per student despite nearly 10 years of increased spending.
Conservatives argue that blindly throwing money into education doesn’t solve the problem. They’re right, but California schools, at least, already have sufficient accountability standards and policies in place. What they don’t have is money.
Unless total funding increases, simply moving money to private schools will do little to increase the overall quality of education. Rather, it will only allow parents on the margin to put their children and money into private schools they couldn’t otherwise afford. This may help those students, but it will also hurt the students left behind.
At this point there are two options: either cut funding from other state programs, or raise taxes. Given the financial situation of the state, there is little fat to trim that hasn’t already been cut, so it’s time to look elsewhere.
If President Bush chooses to tout a voucher program that could lead to the largest federally implemented education reform in decades, he must also increase federal aid to education.
If the poor could finance education in their districts, we wouldn’t have these problems. The only place left to look is the rich. Currently the maximum federal income tax charged to the richest Americans is roughly 40 percent on incomes over $288,350, just over half of what it was before Ronald Reagan was president.
Legislators complain that raising this ceiling would constitute punitive taxation, but even after a tax of 60 percent, the rich would still be rich. Leaving millionaires with millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) isn’t punitive – taxing a single parent of two who makes $20,000 is.
If the poor could pay for better schools, they would, but they can’t. As long as our tax laws favor the rich, so will our education system. The answer should be clear to our policy makers, even if they went to public schools.