School Vouchers, Part 2

I had been discussing school vouchers with Saucon Valley School Board member Ralph Puerta for half an hour before he hesitantly mentioned that he had a doctorate in education finance. In journalists’ parlance, that’s what is called "burying the lead."

By profession, Puerta is a metallurgical engineer but about a decade ago he decided to take a year off from work and get his doctorate in school finance at Lehigh University. He wasn’t planning to change careers, mind you. Rather, he’d been following the annual budget struggles of school districts and thought applying conservative accounting and business principles could straighten out the whole shooting match.

“I went up to Lehigh convinced that I knew almost all the answers already,” Puerta said. “And I found out that I don’t… I’ve come to respect what teachers and the administration are doing.”

A few years later he ran for and was elected in 2005 to . He might not have all the answers but from everything I’ve seen he is committed to analyzing all the evidence on any issue and then voting his conscience, no matter how popular or unpopular it makes him.

but the subject is so vast I didn’t have space to use much of what Puerta had to say. Some of his concerns about Gov. Tom Corbett’s plan to give low-income children vouchers to use to attend private or parochial schools come from practical considerations. For example, will the home school district be required to provide those students’ transportation to the private or religious schools and, if so, who will pay for it?

“Somebody’s got to bear the cost,” he said. Public schools are already stretched so thin, with many planning teacher layoffs and cuts in anticipation of Corbett’s steep funding reductions. But if the home school district isn’t required to bus these students to private schools, how will low-income parents get their children there?

Puerta questioned whether Corbett’s ultimate goal is to privatize education. There are plenty of voucher advocates who would welcome that, believing that the market is the solution. But Puerta said the crisis on Wall Street that spurred the Great Recession shows that the market can be a destabilizing force.

“Markets sometimes go off in crazy directions because markets aren’t always self-correcting,” Puerta said. The public school system can be overly bureaucratic and sluggish, he said. But schools that open and close every few years, with students being shifted from school to school create other problems for students. “These aren’t widgets, they’re kids,” he said.

“Every five years we roll out another reform for public education--No Child Left Behind, Goals 2000,” Puerta said. But when you hear about successful schools, that success can often be traced to a terrific principal, he said. “That can change the dynamic more than other reforms.”

He might have something there. The New York Times Magazine profiled such a principal in April. Ramon Gonzalez, who leads a high-poverty public middle school in the South Bronx, does everything from working with new teachers to improve their effectiveness to finding an organization that does free vision tests at public schools and fits children with glasses immediately. “You can have the best teachers, the best curriculum and the greatest after school programs in the world, but if your kids can’t see, what does it matter?” Gonzalez was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, he has to deal with new students who turn up at the school with no more than a utility bill to prove they live in the neighborhood. “You know what you have to do to come to school here?” Gonzalez said. “Walk through that door.”

Reformers often complain about the obstacles to getting rid of bad teachers, but keeping good ones is just as important. Half of the people who enter the teaching profession are gone in five years, according to Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former George W. Bush appointee. I have friends who have worked in schools where the principal created a toxic environment and others who think their principal walks on water. Investing in great leadership could make a real difference.  

I’m sympathetic to families whose children are trapped in bad schools by virtue of the neighborhood where they live or the limits of their income. And I know it’s not enough to offer ideas of what might improve schools someday to people whose kids need better schools now.

But surely if all the private foundations that are spending oodles of money trying to legislate school vouchers around the country instead put that money into scholarships for low-income children, it would go a long way in accomplishing their stated purpose. They don’t, I believe, because their real goal is degrading and de-funding the public schools to the point where Americans won’t protest when the system is dismantled.