The Georgia Senate recently took an incremental step toward responsible and accountable private school choice by unanimously passing a bill that shines more sunlight upon the Peach State’s embattled tax-credit-scholarship program. If the House concurs, then parents and taxpayers will have more information about the students and the scholarship groups that participate—a good thing, to be sure.
 Picture by Santa Catalina School |
But Senate Bill 243 doesn’t go far enough. Yes, it requires the nonprofit groups that administer the scholarships to disclose the number of students they serve and the amount of tax-credited donations that they receive. Well worth making public—but it reveals nothing about the program’s educational value.
Why not also pull back the curtain on student performance? Most of the school-voucher and tax-credit-scholarship programs that exist in other states are designed to show the public at least how they’re performing overall in terms of student achievement. For example, private schools participating in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship administer a standardized test to their scholarship students and report the results to an independent analyst, who then studies the program’s effectiveness and reports to the legislature.
For a quartet of reasons, Georgia should at least do something similar.
1. Parents, policymakers, educators, and the taxpaying public deserve to compare the gains that students make in different school environments. Ideally, comparisons should be made from school to school, but today Georgians can’t even make comparisons between the public, charter, and voucher-accepting private sectors of K–12 education.
2. Academic accountability would go a long way toward quieting some of the more vocal critics of the Georgia program who assert that lawmakers and advocates for school choice don’t care about the standards or performance of the schools accepting the scholarship. Researchers who have studied the nation’s oldest voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, have found that the mere public release of test results played a role in the gains voucher students made there.
3. Few of the private schools that take part in the program would flee from it, even if they faced a testing-and-public-disclosure requirement. Our recent study surveyed private schools in communities served by four of the country’s most prominent voucher programs and found that only three percent of non-participating schools cited governmental regulations as the most important reason to opt out. Regulations that restrict student admissions and schools’ religious practices are more likely to deter school participation than are requirements pertaining to academic standards, testing, and public disclosure of achievement results.
4. It lays the groundwork for a grand bargain: more transparency in exchange for more (or more generous) scholarships. Georgia students would definitely benefit from a more generous program, but Senate Bill 243 maintains the current cap on the amount of tax credits awarded—about $50 million worth. The legislature could raise that ceiling while insisting on greater transparency in regard to the program’s effectiveness.
Indeed, families have expressed great satisfaction with the program and, undoubtedly, more would opt for the scholarship if given the chance. But are satisfied customers enough? Do these private schools teach their children anything? And does their performance compare favorably with students who remain in public schools? Right now, we don’t know.
And we should. The legislature ought to pass Senate Bill 243 for the transparency it does provide. But it should ask for more while loosening the limits on the program to serve more families.
A version of this article first appeared on the Get Schooled blog and will appear in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 25, 2013.
