SC on cusp of giving parents money for private, non-zoned public schools. Who will benefit?
State lawmakers are on the cusp of passing an education scholarship account bill, which, by 2026, would entitle nearly two-thirds of families to a $6,000 voucher they could use at private schools, public schools outside of their zoned districts and any number of other educational expenses.
Passage of the bill would mark an educational sea change in South Carolina, which unlike many red states, has historically rejected expansive school voucher legislation.
For the past two decades, private school choice advocates in South Carolina have asserted that vouchers would offer a lifeline for the state’s most vulnerable children who are trapped in failing public schools. Critics, meanwhile, have charged that vouchers would wreak havoc on those same schools, peeling away the brightest students and the resources attached to them.
In reality, neither claim is supported by the data.
With the South Carolina House expected to take up the Senate-passed ESA bill this week, The State Media Co. set out to answer some of the most pressing and hotly debated questions about vouchers and their impact on education access and achievement.
S. 39, which cleared the Senate in January, would establish education scholarship accounts, or ESAs, to fund tuition and other educational expenses for parents who pull their children out of local public schools and enroll them in private or non-charter public schools outside of their zoned districts.
The ESA program would start small, initially enrolling only the most economically disadvantaged children, before gradually expanding in both size and scope to cover nearly two-thirds of families in the state within three years.
Because enrollment in the program would be capped at 15,000 students —– roughly 2% of the state’s public school student population —– only a fraction of eligible families could participate.
Participating families would receive $6,000 per child —– the exact voucher amount would be subject to change annually at the discretion of state budget writers —– to use for tuition, tutoring, transportation, technology and any number of education supplies.
If the bill passes, the state could end up sending $30 million to private schools next year and up to $90 million annually by 2026.
What should South Carolinians expect to get for their money? To help answer that question, The State reviewed the academic literature, spoke to education researchers and parsed reports about voucher programs in other states.
Do vouchers serve their intended targets?
While most private school choice programs launch with the intention of helping poor or disabled children, they aren’t always successful in reaching those groups, research shows.
Families facing the most challenging personal circumstances are often precluded from using vouchers, and those that do aren’t guaranteed admission to the schools of their choice, according to Josh Cowen, professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University and a prominent private school choice researcher.
Excess tuition costs, transportation challenges and, for some rural students, a lack of private school options in their area all pose barriers to using vouchers.
And because private schools are free to reject students for any reason besides race and national origin, they can — and often do — deny admission to children with disabilities and checkered academic or disciplinary histories whose needs they are unwilling or unable to accommodate, Cowen said.
Some religious schools in South Carolina also exclude LGBTQ and gender non-conforming students, students who are pregnant or have children, and students with visible tattoos or piercings, according to a review of student policy handbooks and mission statements posted online.
“What we see with voucher programs,” said Cowen, a vocal voucher critic, “is that they avoid the bottom kids.”
That’s not to say, however, that voucher-accepting schools take the top students from struggling public schools.
According to Patrick Wolf, a professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas and a leading voucher researcher, private school choice programs typically don’t attract the best students from under-resourced public schools, either.
“When it comes to education, (parents) follow the maxim that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” Wolf said. “If their child is doing well in a neighborhood public school, there’s really little reason for them to take advantage of these programs.”
So who uses vouchers?
Participants in income-limited statewide voucher programs typically fall into two general categories, according to Cowen: 1) lower income, but not “poor” students who attend public schools; and 2) lower-middle income students who attend private, often religious, schools.
More typical is the child who has never attended public school, whose parents “pinch every penny” to send him to a private religious school, Cowen said. Those students are more often white and more likely to stay the course at the private school.
“That’s really the target group,” he said.
In fact, data from other states show vouchers often subsidize the education of students already enrolled or planning to enroll in private schools.
In several states with voucher programs, the vast majority of participants had not attended public schools the year before, according to news reports.
Some advocates argue such reports overestimate the portion of vouchers doled out to existing private school students, but nonetheless acknowledge that a significant number of some states’ voucher recipients already attended or would have attended private schools.
In South Carolina, private school students won’t be eligible for vouchers, at least not initially.
The ESA bill limits new voucher recipients to students who attended public school during the previous year, unless they’re entering kindergarten.
“(Subsidizing the private education of families that can already afford it was) not the intention of the policy,” Senate Education Chairman Greg Hembree said. “Hopefully that’ll hold because I think that’s a very important part of it.”
Many states with voucher programs start this way, some with even more stringent eligibility requirements. Over time, however, they routinely relax them, welcoming an increasingly larger share of students on the way to universality. Six states have passed universal voucher programs since 2021, including both Arizona and Florida, which lawmakers cite as models for South Carolina.
The “voucher curious”
Black public school students also enroll in voucher programs at high rates, but are less likely to stick around, research shows.
Cowen calls such kids “voucher curious.” They may use vouchers to attend private school for a year or two, but struggle socially and academically, and end up falling even further behind, he said.
An NPR analysis of Indiana’s voucher program found the percentage of Black recipients shrunk dramatically after income restrictions were loosened to include some middle-class families.
In the program’s inaugural year, 90% of voucher recipients reported prior public school attendance and about a quarter were Black. Five years later, the majority of voucher users had never attended public school and only 12% were Black.
Wolf, a voucher proponent, attributes the high attrition rate in such programs to a number of factors, including instability among participating families and a mismatch between what students need and what schools can deliver. He said a surprising number of those that ditch their vouchers still express gratitude for the opportunity.
“It didn’t work out for their kid, but they valued the fact that they had a choice,” Wolf said. “That’s an often overlooked aspect of this whole thing. Parents do like options for their child.”
Cowen ties turnover among voucher recipients to socioeconomics, but also to the ill-prepared private schools they attend.
When people hear “private school,” they often conjure an imposing Gothic cathedral with soaring towers and a sprawling manicured campus.
In reality, Cowen said, many of the private schools that accept vouchers operate out of church basements and drab strip malls. They run on shoestring budgets and lack the academic rigor commonly associated with elite private schools.
“These schools are not designed to work with at-risk children,” he said. “Whether they’ve had rough experiences in public school, are special needs kids or have disciplinary problems, they get thrown back out.”
Do voucher recipients show higher achievement?
Whether vouchers “work” depends on whom you ask and how you define success.
Early voucher studies conducted on small, carefully controlled programs showed modest gains in student achievement. Subsequent studies found no effect on test scores, but a slight boost in graduation rates and college enrollment for voucher students.
In the last decade or so, however, as studies have tracked the ever-expanding voucher programs that many states are now adopting, achievement has cratered.
“We started to see some of the largest ever negative impacts on student outcomes that we’ve ever seen in public policy,” Cowen said. “That’s not an exaggeration.”
The harm to test scores in Ohio and Louisiana exceeded the damage done by COVID-19 school closures and Hurricane Katrina, he said. In Indiana and Washington, D.C., the results were only slightly less devastating.
Wolf, who co-authored a study of Louisiana’s program, acknowledges that research on voucher student test scores is a “mixed bag” and “much less impressive” than other measurements of their impact.
But rather than souring on vouchers, as Cowen has, Wolf and other pro-voucher researchers have doubled down on private school choice.
They argue private schools are at a disadvantage to public schools on standardized tests and downplay their importance, focusing instead on research that finds vouchers boost graduation rates, foster character development and improve parental satisfaction.
“For a long time, we were in the era of No Child Left Behind and the big emphasis in public schools was increasing test scores,” Wolf said. “Private schools have more of a tradition of addressing the needs of the whole child.”
He attributes the large negative results he observed in Louisiana to excessive regulation.
Most voucher programs take a hands-off approach to participating private schools, much to the chagrin of private school choice opponents. Voucher-accepting schools typically aren’t required to adjust their admissions and testing policies in exchange for state money because doing so, advocates argue, would hinder their operations.
In Louisiana, however, lawmakers forced participating private schools to clear their curriculum with the state, take any voucher student who wanted to attend and administer the same standardized tests that public school students take, Wolf said.
As a result, only a fraction of private schools in the state agreed to take part. The ones that did were generally of lower quality.
“You kind of get what you regulate for,” Wolf said. “If you have really strong regulations that are a real turn-off to the independent private schools in your area, then the quality schools won’t participate.”
The greatest predictor of whether a school participated, he said, was declining enrollment.
“They were desperate for students and so they were willing to accept the deal that the higher-quality private schools were not willing to accept,” Wolf said.
Cowen also ties “catastrophic” test scores to low-quality private schools, but doesn’t blame over-regulation. Rather, he sees it as the result of unchecked voucher growth.
“When you expand across the state, you’re no longer talking about carefully controlled lab settings where you’re deliberately offering kids a chance to transfer to certain types of schools that are willing to go along with the trial process,” he said. “You’re talking about providers cropping up all over the place who really don’t have a lot of experience educating children. And if they do, it’s not toward an academic end.”
Could SC be in for a private school boom?
The passage of large-scale voucher programs like the one South Carolina is contemplating often spurs the creation of new private schools that lack academic rigor and are heavily reliant on state money to operate, research shows.
Unlike the elite prep schools with tuition in excess of some universities, these pop-up operators attract low-income voucher students with empty promises and prices that won’t break the bank, Cowen said.
Many can’t deliver on their commitments and don’t last.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that advocates for school choice, found 41% of private schools that participated in Milwaukee’s long-running voucher program ultimately failed. Another 11% merged or converted to charter schools.
Start-ups, which comprised about a third of all private schools in the city’s program, had an average lifespan of just over four years.
“It’s not a mystery why we’ve seen devastating academic harm in the last 10 years,” Cowen said. “It’s because of schools popping up or just hanging on to get vouchers.”
Some of the newer voucher programs, including South Carolina’s ESA proposal, require participating private schools to be accredited or belong to an association. Others insist schools demonstrate their viability by operating independently for a period of time before taking vouchers.
Wolf favors the former option, which he said offers a modest quality check on the front end without making compliance too burdensome. He said he sees no way to prevent bad schools from opening altogether without hamstringing a program with oppressive red tape.
“Some of these schools aren’t very good, word gets out, enrollment goes down and they shut down,” he said. “That’s all part of the idea of using market mechanisms in education. Sometimes that leads to the closing of bad schools, and that can be disruptive at the time. But long term, that’s a good thing.”
For Cowen, the situation is more akin to predatory lending.
“You’re offering false hope of a better education to a kid who, more often than not, suffers catastrophic learning loss,” he said. “These are precisely the kids who shouldn’t be subjected to that.”
It remains to be seen whether a glut of fly-by-night schools open in South Carolina to cash in on a stream of voucher money.
Hembree said he’s counting on the state Department of Education, which would administer the ESA program, to vet prospective school vendors.
“(State Superintendent) Ellen Weaver supports this idea, but she supports a high-quality education for each child even more,” he said. “I think they’ll be very careful. If you’re in favor of the idea, it should motivate you more to want to root out the weak players.”
Oran Smith, senior fellow with the Palmetto Promise Institute, expressed skepticism that significant low-quality private options exist in South Carolina and said he thought the plethora of empty seats in private schools could limit the number of new ones that open.
He supports the creation of new schools in parts of the state that currently lack any formidable private options, but is optimistic the Catholic Church, which has a track record of academic success, can fill gaps.
The Catholic Church, which serves over 8,000 children in 32 S.C. schools, has committed to expanding into underserved communities across the state if school choice legislation passes, a spokeswoman for the Diocese of Charleston said.
New Christian schools could also be on the horizon if a voucher bill becomes law.
Edward Earwood, executive director of the South Carolina Association of Christian Schools, said he expects a handful of new schools to open in the coming years, but hasn’t heard of anyone whose operational plans are contingent on the passage of vouchers.
“Some of those started long before we even started talking about the school choice bill,” said Earwood, whose association has about 75 member schools that serve roughly 12,000 students. “I don’t think it would hurt them, but I don’t think that’s the reason they went after opening the school.”
Earwood said he can’t predict the quality of any new school, but trusts parents to make that assessment for themselves and vote with their wallets (or vouchers), if a school isn’t cutting it.
Sen. Shane Massey, the Senate Majority Leader, agrees. He’s confident low-performing schools won’t survive long if parents are kept informed.
“Schools close because the parents realize they aren’t doing a good job and they take their kid out of there,” he said. “I think that will happen, as long as parents have information to make those decisions. That’s why I think the testing component is important.”
Massey, whose opposition to the accountability component of last year’s ESA bill doomed it to the dustbin, has softened his stance on testing this year.
He’s no longer wedded to a provision that would require voucher-accepting schools to give students the same standardized assessments as public schools. Instead, he’s content to have them administer nationally norm-referenced tests that align with state standards and include a linking study.
“The component that we have in there is going to be sufficient to allow parents to evaluate progress,” Massey said. “Choice is important, but it’s also important for parents to know whether that choice is paying off for the child.”
The compromise on testing won’t enable a direct comparison between voucher students and public school students, but it’s “not nothing” and “better than some states,” Cowen said.
Patrick Kelly, director of governmental affairs for the Palmetto State Teachers Association, was less generous in his assessment of the revised testing requirement.
“That’s not the kind of information that families need and it’s also just not psychometrically sound,” he said. “Some linking studies are psychometric voodoo magic.”
Will vouchers hurt public schools?
During Senate debate on the ESA bill earlier this year, opponents cautioned that poor, rural schools would suffer if they lost the state and federal dollars attached to students who accepted vouchers.
Fixed costs and personnel costs would remain constant even as revenues tied to student headcounts declined, they argued.
While true that low-income districts most likely to lose students are also more dependent on state dollars to operate, research shows that private school choice programs do not typically devastate under-resourced public schools.
In fact, they may actually improve them by lighting a fire under administrators.
“Public schools step up their game when they’re in danger of losing students through school choice and the resources attached to those students,” Wolf said. “They deliver more effective education in those circumstances.”
The positive effects are typically small, but they’ve been consistent across many studies.
So, what are public schools doing to produce test score gains?
For one, Wolf said, they begin communicating more frequently and effectively with parents. This is beneficial, he said, because education is enhanced when parents are engaged and school leaders honor the preferences and needs of families.
Public schools at risk of losing out to private providers also may launch new educational programs to serve the needs of select student subgroups.
“It could be advanced learning programs to hold onto their more successful students; it could be literacy programs to help hold onto their struggling readers,” Wolf said. “But you see new programs pop up in these schools when they face competition.”
Another common response is to target educator quality. Public schools under pressure are more likely to remove their least effective teachers from the classroom, he said.
Cowen concedes that the introduction of voucher programs can have “very small” competitive effects on public schools, particularly in low-income areas with large minority student populations that stand the most to lose financially.
What isn’t small, he said, is the positive impact of simply investing directly in public schools.
“Those competitive effects are dwarfed by direct investment in public schools and blown away by the negative impact of vouchers on kids who use them,” Cowen said.
After two decades spent researching their efficacy, he said he’s shocked that so many states continue “ramming through” vouchers at the expense of their most vulnerable young constituents.
“I’ve said vouchers work like Trump won the 2020 election,” Cowen quipped. “You have to just suspend your belief in systems and processes and ordinary lines of democratic oversight to believe these things are working at this point.”
Wolf’s support for private school choice, on the other hand, remains unflinching. For him, evidence that vouchers may harm academic achievement only raises more questions, including, is that really a problem?
“Are parents concerned about that? Or are parents concerned about other things, other benefits that they get from a private school, like safety and character development and things like that?” he said. “Those are some of the questions we’re exploring now in the wake of these mixed findings on the achievement effects of these large statewide programs.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2023 at 5:30 AM.