Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
Whether you call it “school choice” or vouchers, privatization of education socializes all the costs of education, but privatizes all the benefits.
So under “school choice,” all Mississippi taxpayers will pay for wealthy kids to go to private schools, even though those private schools won’t accept all Mississippi taxpayers’ children as students.
If “school choice” keeps being pushed on Mississippi taxpayers, we will continue to be saddled with an even greater financial burden that doesn’t benefit the majority of Mississippi families nor Mississippi communities. In fact, it actively harms most families, businesses and communities because it starves the public schools, which are the only schools responsible for educating every child who walks through their doors.
We will all end up paying even more for education and getting far less in return because private schools are private for a reason – because they don’t want the responsibility nor the accountability of educating all children. Most private schools are set up to educate a select few and the select few does not include poor children, children with special needs and children who don’t speak English.
Educating all children well and equitably comes with a cost. With public schools, taxpayers not only share the costs, they also reap all the benefits that come with a well-educated citizenry.
I don’t know of any private school that wants to accept the responsibility and accountability of educating all children in their community, but they would gladly accept the generous gift of Mississippi taxpayer money to continue educating a select handful of already-enrolled private school students.
Becky Glover Credit: Courtesy photoFolks already using private schools would benefit above all others in Mississippi. Where “school choice”/vouchers have passed in other states, we’ve seen private schools increase their tuition once vouchers are available because they know which families can still afford it and it keeps out students that most private schools would rather not serve.
Mississippi legislators have rarely kept their promise to Mississippi taxpayers, families and communities to be responsible stewards of our public schools. Every time the state Legislature breaks its promise to the people who elected them, they increase the financial burden of their own local communities. The Mississippi Legislature ties the hands of the local community by telling them how much they can tax at the local level and what that money can and can’t be used for.
Plus, many of our communities are at or near the maximum percentage they can tax at the local level. And whether they are at or near that maximum local tax percentage allowed by the Legislature, the vast majority of Mississippi communities don’t have the economic capacity to make up for – at the local level – the amount of financial support they’re supposed to be getting from the State.
“School choice” is a lie built on a false promise. Mississippi has tried vouchers or “school choice” before, and the only people who could receive them were people who had the same skin color as me. Mississippi, like some other Southern states, used vouchers to prop up segregation. Vouchers weren’t intended to be available for all children then, and they won’t be this time either.
“School choice” doesn’t just hurt individual children or families or communities. “School choice” will hurt our cost of living, our overall quality of life, our state’s economic capacity to succeed and, ultimately, the cornerstone of our representative democracy.
Public education is an American value. Investing in public schools is not only investing in Mississippi’s people, it’s also the most common sense approach to strengthening our economy not only at the state level, but also at the levels of our local communities, families and individuals.
Mississippi would be wise to elect legislators and congressional representatives who are committed to strengthening the single most important factor to improving every community’s capacity to succeed economically – America’s public schools.
Bio: Becky Glover is a retired policy analyst and community organizer for Parents for Public Schools Inc. She is a proud product of the Tupelo Public School District and lives in Meridian. She can be reached at: [email protected]
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