By Alexandra DeSanctis
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
As part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic
Security (CARES) Act, Congress allocated $30 billion to assist educational
institutions in handling the economic fallout from COVID-19. About half of that
funding was designated for higher education and $13.5 billion for K–12 schools,
with the remainder left to state governments.
The bill gave the Department of Education discretion to
craft guidelines for disbursing the money, and earlier this month, Secretary
Betsy DeVos came under fire after she directed school districts to increase the
amount of the money spent on students who attend private schools. Most of the
funds will be allocated on the basis of need, with more going to areas that
have higher numbers of low-income students. But the new guidance requires
districts to allocate part of their shares to private-school students, on the
basis of what percentage of all students in their jurisdictions attend
private schools, rather than what percentage of low-income students do.
Angering opponents of school choice, DeVos has also used about $180 million of
the CARES Act funding to incentivize states to create microgrants, which would
allow parents of grade-school or high-school children to pay for a variety of
educational options, including private schools.
DeVos’s critics, including several Democratic
congressmen, argue that her guidance violates the intention of the law because
it requires districts to use emergency funding, allocated based on poverty
rates, to support all local students, including supposedly wealthy ones who
attend private schools. According to Chalkbeat, public-school advocates
say the guidance “will funnel precious resources to wealthy private schools
while districts struggle to provide computers and free meals.”
Supporters of the department’s guidance, meanwhile, say
it is consistent with the intention of the CARES Act, which aims to assist all
schools and students in recovering from the economic crisis caused by the
pandemic.
It is worth noting that DeVos’s efforts to assist
private-school children involve a tiny percentage of the overall CARES Act
funding designated for schools. Moreover, there is no reason why governments
should, for instance, privilege a local public school’s efforts to provide
computers over assisting parents who want to keep their children in private
schools. Arguments to the contrary are simply a retread of common
anti-school-choice talking points, which insist that any government help for
parents who opt out of public school — whether in the form of vouchers, education-savings
accounts, or tax-credit-scholarship programs — disadvantages those who remain
in the public-school system.
One might quibble with the specifics of how DeVos sought
to include private schools and their students in the distribution of CARES Act
funds, but her reasons for doing so are sensible. Though the stimulus bill
dispensed funding to educational institutions, Congress failed to acknowledge
that millions of Americans choose not to send their children to public schools
and thus are receiving no assistance to continue making the best educational
choices they can during this crisis.
Private schools typically receive far less direct
financial assistance from the government than public schools. In the case of
religious schools, such assistance has, in most cases, been deemed a violation
of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. While public schools are the
beneficiaries of a steady stream of funding from the local, state, and federal
governments, underwritten by taxpayers, the majority of private schools rely
almost entirely on tuition money and donations. Absent aid, these schools will
be the first to close when families face coronavirus-related financial
hardship, and our country will be worse off for it.
To take just one example, close to 2 million American
children attend Catholic schools in the U.S., and nearly 20 percent of those
students are minorities. According to one study, a Hispanic or African-American
student who attends Catholic school is 42 percent more likely to graduate from
high school and 2.5 times more likely to graduate from college than one who
doesn’t. Meanwhile, the National Catholic Educational Association estimates
that Catholic schools save the U.S. about $24 billion each year. The mean cost
per student at a Catholic school is $5,847, and $12,608 at a public school. Yet
because of the pandemic, more than 600 Catholic schools in the U.S. are at risk
of shutting down.
DeVos’s guidance is merely one small way of attempting to
level the playing field in the absence of efforts to directly help private
schools and the families they serve. It would be even better for Congress to
offset tuition costs by earmarking funding in the next coronavirus-relief
package for parents who send their children to non-public K–12 schools. A
targeted voucher program, created specifically to respond to the economic
devastation of the COVID-19 outbreak, would help parents to continue sending
their children to the schools that are best for them.
In the long term, though, the best solution of all would
be for Congress to finally create a federal program providing vouchers,
tax-credit scholarships, or education-savings accounts to families. The debate
over government relief and DeVos’s guidance illustrates precisely what is
broken about education funding in the U.S. There is no reason why a financial
crisis should spur the federal government to pour billions of dollars into
public schools while ignoring the millions of parents who believe a private education
is best for their children. Yet that is what it has done, because that is what
it is in the habit of doing during more “normal” times.
American families deserve better now, and they’ll deserve
better going forward. Congress must act to give them as many options as
possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment