A national expert on school vouchers said rural regions like the Upper Cumberland are most vulnerable when voucher systems are established.
Michigan State University Education Policy Professor Josh Cowen said there are too few private schools in rural areas for vouchers to benefit those communities. Cowen said some suggest that online programs and micro-schools could fill that void but he said those programs tend to do poorly in terms of academic performance.
“In the long run, states have to make tough choices because they can’t afford two systems of education,” Cowen said. “They can’t afford to pay for every district in the state and a bunch of private schools that a few years earlier folks were paying on the private side themselves. So the financial problems start right away and get bigger over time.”
Cowen said the system serves as a cash subsidy for existing private choices because the vast majority of those that would use the system are already in private school. Cowen said voucher programs often cause new private schools to pop up in rural areas but research shows most of those schools shut down within three years.
“I’m not sure we necessarily want to encourage the fact that all these kind of on the make pop-up schools jump into rural communities to make a little bit of money, either with good faith or bad faith, and then close down two, three years later,” Cowen said. “I don’t root for schools to close whether they’re private or public and I don’t think folks in rural communities should look forward to that either.”
Cowen said voucher systems usually see positive test scores early on but the numbers decline over time. Cowen said the recent voucher program expansions seen across the country have been gotten worse and worse as they get bigger.
“I know you guys have had some test score results reported recently for the Tennessee voucher system and I got to tell you, that’s about as good as it’s going to get if past experience holds here,” Cowen said.
Cowen said voucher systems pull key state funding away specifically from rural communities since most private schools are located in urban and suburban areas. Cowen said this means the most vulnerable kids are the ones who end up left out when these programs come into effect.
“Just north of you guys in Kentucky, sixty-five percent of voters in Kentucky on election day voted for Donald Trump,” Cowen said. “Sixty-five percent of voters rejected a voucher scheme pushed in that state, just the same folks pushing them in your state right now. It’s not a red state or a blue state issue. I think what that tells you is that people understand that, regardless of what their party politics are, they understand these things don’t really help their families.”
Cowen said he has been studying vouchers across the country for nearly twenty years. Cowen said he has worked with teams of researchers who were more optimistic and those who have been more critical of the system.
“In early days, vouchers seemed to show some reasonably positive results for small pilot phases,” Cowen said. “But over the last decade or so as vouchers have expanded, the bigger, the more recent the voucher system, the worse the results for kids.”
