What happened to the 'truth test'?

I recently asked here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#3482656904449016704) whether KSL reporter Richard Piatt's blatant errors in his "true-or-false" voucher report were intentional, since Parents for Choice in Education had taken the report to use in its mail to voters. PCE's flyer used Mr. Piatt's comments and his graphics, which are pretty dramatic. Unfortunately, several bloggers have shown that they're pretty wrong, too.

Last night, someone calling himself "Rich's buddy" left a comment on my blog that read,

Piatt isn't a voucher hack. He simply made a mistake.

I bet even he would admit it to friends, in fact, he did.

I wrote a response to that note:

To Rich's buddy,

I appreciate very much that Mr. Piatt told his friend that he made a mistake. I don't doubt what you say, and I appreciate that you said it to me.

But Mr. Piatt, whom I don't know, is a public figure and, moreover, a journalist, which means his job is to inform the public on matters in their interest. At the moment, there are only three items in the public record reflecting Mr. Piatt's journalism on the voucher issue. One is the KSL report, whose errors I described in some detail; the second is his published comment to Bill Keshlear, stating clearly and unequivocally that Mr. Piatt stands by his original report; and the third is the mail from Parents for Choice in Education, repeating in black-and-white what Mr. Piatt said on KSL, and using the graphics that Mr. Piatt used in his report.

We now have fewer than six days before we will go to the polls to make a decision, based on the best information provided to us, on the voucher matter. If Mr. Piatt made a mistake and was willing to express that to his friends, I hope in the interest of public awareness and professionalism that he would make that known, and specifically to correct the public record on this question.

Now, it isn't just bloggers bringing attention to the problem of this report's credibility, and KSL itself is acknowledging its discomfort about the mess -- although I notice that no one yet has taken a step to say that there were fundamental errors in the report. Rather, they're adopting a slippery path, just disavowing any part in the production of PCE's flyer here (http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=2068612) and here (http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=2064177), and hoping that the next few days go by quickly.

Of course, it's still true that KSL editorialized against Referendum 1. But Mr. Piatt's contribution to the public record, on behalf of his television station, is what's in the public record, and that's what sits on paper in black-and-white on kitchen tables across the Wasatch Front.

Which is more important, letting errors be sold as truth, or standing up and correcting the public record?

It looks like allowing errors to be sold as truth -- or pretending that correcting the public record isn't really an option -- is more important to KSL News Director Con Psarras, quoted in Paul Rolly's column today here (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7327640):

Now, it is KSL's turn to take umbrage at the voucher advocates' attempts to turn the media giant into a pro-voucher toady.

The television station put a statement on its Web site taking issue with the voucher advocates' flier that implies "Eyewitness News" produced, or helped to produce, the voucher ad.

The flier points to a KSL story that analyzed ads being aired by both sides of the voucher debate. Reporter Richard Piatt questioned some points in the anti-voucher ads, and that's what the pro-voucher folks highlighted in their own fliers and ads "thanking" KSL for its truth in advertising test.

KSL News Director Con Psarras said the three-minute story was a complex analysis and to simply boil it down to a "true" versus "false" scenario is misleading.

"It's ironic that we do a 'truth test,' the intent being to distinguish between spin and actual fact, and the people who like what we did in that story take our material and spin it out of context," Psarras said on KSL's Web site.

KSL's news department takes no stand for or against vouchers, Psarras said.

No, it just aired an erroneous report that's now the public record and that misleads voters, and it apparently doesn't intend to correct that record. You can't really count that as taking a stand, can you?

Or can you? Let me check that PCE flyer again; it's on the kitchen table with KSL's work all over it.

Are vouchers "welfare for the rich"?

They're words that I've used myself, responding to the University of Utah's Center for Public Policy and Administration review of House Bill 148 here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#7106415494168653762). To me, it's an obvious conclusion, since the maximum voucher award under House Bill 148 is $3,000, meaning that only well-to-do would be able take advantage of the offer and not suffer under additional expense, and since rural parents in particular would have no benefit from it at all, there being no private schools within a reasonable distance of them.

In the last few days, more have come to this conclusion. Educator and blogger Kalyn Denny, responding to a post by Leslie Madsen Brooks here (http://www.blogher.org/school-vouchers-back-ballot), wrote,

I've been arguing against vouchers for so many years that frankly I'm getting a little bored with the topic, but one argument that a lot of people seem to miss is the lack of logic in viewing vouchers as a tax rebate because your kids aren't going to public school. In our society, everyone pays for the public schools (to have an educated society) in the same way that everyone pays for roads even if they don't drive or pays for parks even if they never jog. I pay my share of taxes which support public schools even though I have no children. So how does it make sense that people who do have kids in school get a "rebate" on their taxes (the voucher) because they aren't using that service.

I remember when the big voucher push was on in California and the California Teacher's Union had bumper stickers that called vouchers "Welfare for the Rich." That's about the reality of it. The cheapest private schools here are much more than the $3,000 voucher.

And I do agree completely with these thoughts from Elizabeth:
"That said, I think most voucher supporters are also hypocrites -- while there are some who are truly concerned about poor kids, most of them are primarily interested in promoting the free market as the solution to all of the problems in the world and beating up on the teacher's unions."

I'll end by saying that as a 29 year teaching veteran who has really gone the extra mile to try to make a difference for kids (in the state funded lowest in the nation for public schools) I'm very insulted by some of the tactics the pro-voucher people are using here.

For more about Ms. Denny, you should review her (appetizing) work in the kitchen here (http://kalynskitchen.blogspot.com/).

At the same time, thanks to Ms. Brooks, who commended the research at this blog as well as a few others, including Mata Hari and Gary Weiss, who here (http://garyweiss.blogspot.com/2007/10/patrick-byrne-wows-em-in-utah.html) weighed on Patrick Byrne's inconsiderate suggestion that high school dropouts be burned. Mr. Weiss writes,

Being a childless bachelor. a product of privilege and private schools who has never had to work a day in his life, he has really wowed the good working people of Utah, as you can imagine.

Byrne being Byrne, he immediately has begun his reverse-Dale Carnegie act, making enemies and alienating people. His latest gaffe is smearing opponents of the initiative -- 60% of Utahans, according to recent polls -- as "bigots."

I've still heard no word that Mr. Byrne has expressed regret for the statement. In fact, blogger Falze at Albany Media Bias, apparently defending him, included the full text of a letter from Mr. Byrne to his customers, which read, in part,

Dear Customer,

The NAACP is demanding an apology from me. I refuse.
...
...I purposefully chose such a horrific image in order to cut through the polite euphemisms by which some assuage their guilt over the current situation.

Honestly, that's a strange admission, since Mr. Byrne's first response to media was that he had been taken out of context, and his second response is that it was a lie (http://www.sltrib.com/ci_7295679). Even his third try wasn't the charm, as he spent a good deal more time talking about himself than making a substantive case for vouchers:

I also built 19 schools and orphanages in Afghanistan, Nepal, and in Africa and South America, schools that now educate 6,000 kids, mostly female: all these schools are named after my Mom.

In a great new video posted this week at YouTube here (http://youtube.com/watch?v=hNS3Tb2CxCQ), a Utah grandpapa called IceThePuc. "A vote for Referendum 1 will simply put $3,000 into some rich guy's pocket," he says. "The rich get richer, the poor get poorer."

What makes his video so compelling is that the granddad sits behind stacks of chocolate cookies. They only "represent a well-known cookies," he explains, "but I can tell you they're cheap, generic knock-offs because, like most of you, I have to save money where I can."

Later in explaining his opposition to vouchers, the granddad says, "Most of us support the public school system because we lead normal lives and live on a budget."

Detailing the eventual loss of public school funding, he asks, "Hey, rich guy, can we have some of our money back?"

He answers himself, "Once we give it away, it's pretty hard to get it back."

"The people out there encouraging you to vote 'Yes' do not represent the typical, Utah, public-education family. My kids went to public school, and now five of my grandkids are attending public school. Help protect our public education funds by voting 'No' on Referendum 1."

His end credits are a special touch. "This non-advertisement has been paid for by one grandparent against Referendum 1," he says, as the words "A 'These Are Good Cookies' Production" scroll up the screen. If any awards are given after this voucher debate is finished, I hope this grandpapa gets one.

In the meantime, I've added his "A 'These Are Good Cookies' Production" to my blogroll on the left, and I hope you'll click there and watch for yourself.

A blogger named Darlene is another writer who has worked out her thought process in writing, at a blog called "A Person Named Eunice," here (http://apersonnamedeunice.blogspot.com/2007/10/school-vouchers-wince.html). She writes,

First, I am basically a democrat at heart, at least economically. Which means that I believe that it is the moral duty of a citizen to contribute to society—yes, in the form of taxes—for the good of others in the society who are not as able to take care of themselves. (I think, for example, that to cheat on your taxes, or to bend the rules on your taxes, or even to cleverly hide assets in “legal” ways in order to avoid paying your share is unethical and, frankly, dishonest.) I feel that it is my job as a Christian to look out for my neighbors—even the ones who seem to be lazy (because, maybe, their parents didn’t teach them to work?).

I feel it is our duty to make sure that not just our own kids but the kids of our neighbors should be taken care of. This includes all those kids on the west side that are such a drain on the property taxes of “us east-siders.” That includes the kids whose parents don’t care enough to research public and private schools and use vouchers to make sure their kids get what’s best for them.

If the voucher proposition passes, every child whose parents care about him will be put into the school, public or private or home-based, that his parents think will be best for him. But what about the kids whose parents don’t care, or who are overworked or undereducated enough not to be able to research what’s best? They will be left in the public schools. These kids are often the ones who use the most resources from the education system, in the form of teacher energy and other, more measurable resources.
...
My other big reason for being against vouchers is that I don’t believe that it is moral to whine that a system isn’t working and then jump ship. I think the right thing to do is to fix public education, not abandon it. People who are unhappy should join school boards, volunteer in their schools, lobby for more and better asset allocation within districts, etc. If all of the caring parents start jumping ship, it will sink. And, once again, what happens to the kids left on the ship?

I don’t know a single public schoolteacher who is in favor of vouchers. And why is that? You’d think that they would recognize that more private school students means more job opportunities for them, right? Well, it probably does. But the reason is that the kind of people who are choosing to become schoolteachers these days are doing it for only one reason: they care about education. There is NO other reason a person would become a teacher in this world. And the people who really care about education in society (not just about their own kids’ educations) know that the voucher system is not good for society.

I didn't include her entire rationale, so I encourage you to click through and read the rest, too.

Finally, I need to thank Tyler Slack at Desultory Thoughts, who posted a catalog of voucher-related posts more than a week ago, and who found a few of mine helpful in his deliberations. You can read his notes here (http://www.utahadventurevideos.com/blog/archives/2007/10/23/pta-parents-know-best/). He writes, in conclusion,

I haven’t written anything tonight that 100 other bloggers haven’t already written. Nothing original about this, more of a summary if anything. But the last reason I choose not to support vouchers is not only because of the plain information and facts that are laid out before me, helping me see that it is indeed flawed, but all the other individuals and organizations that are advocating on behalf of our children and hoping Referendum 1 is voted down on November 6.

Thanks, Tyler.

Is KSL's reporter a voucher accomplice?

One of the reasons I thought the Utahns for Public Schools representative, Lisa Johnson, did a better job of presenting her case than Richard Eyre in last week's "debate" on KSL was because she was quick and effective at rebutting his arguments with clear, concise facts and data. His "gee-whiz" folksiness and his crumbling cookies didn't overcome ready facts, ably delivered. A good example of this involved KSL itself. When given the chance by the moderator, Mr. Eyre leaped onto the "true-false" report done by KSL's Richard Piatt and reminded viewers that Mr. Piatt judged two UTPS commercials to be false but said two Parents for Choice in Education ads were true.

But Ms. Johnson took issue with that report and, as I recall, knocked down Mr. Piatt's findings one by one. If I had a transcript of that conversation, I'd post it to illustrate my point, but I don't. I only recall that Ms. Johnson took the stuffing, piece by piece, out of that "true-false" story. In the end, she was convincing and Mr. Eyre was not.

Now there's a new chapter to the "true-false" story. Mata Hari reported here (http://againstutahvouchers.blogspot.com/2007/10/ksls-inaccuracies-repeated.html) on Friday that PCE is sending out mail that quotes Mr. Piatt's report and uses his graphics ("FALSE" stamped across the faces of classroom teachers). Mata Hari says she "went in search of setting the record straight and came across a letter from State Board of Education Chair Kim Burningham to the News Editor at KSL."

"I hope that KSL will do something about this, and that after further review, Piatt will issue a retraction. I sure dislike seeing a TV station being purposely used to distort the facts," she writes.

Sure enough, the letter from Mr. Burningham took apart, piece by piece, Mr. Piatt's report just as Ms. Johnson did in the "debate" with Mr. Eyre.

For example, Mr. Piatt reported, “During this five-year trial period, the program is an 'experiment.'”

But even I know, just from reading House Bill 148, that there's no "trial period." If voters approve Referendum 1, it's enacted for good, unless or until the legislature chooses to repeal the law and the governor signs the repeal.

Now, for sure it's an experiment -- "most definitely a risky and costly experiment," as Mr. Burningham puts it -- but Mr. Piatt's report leaves the viewer thinking that there's a trial phase and if the plan doesn't work for Utah families, it will naturally fade away. The fact is, it'll be law -- it won't just "fade away." Mr. Burningham writes,

...there is no sunset date and no termination or reaction to the study is required. No language exists requiring the legislature to reauthorize the program at any time in the future. It just continues.

In the UTPS commercial, the 2006 Teacher of the Year says, "Private school vouchers take resources away from public schools." But Mr. Piatt reported that she wasn't telling the truth. "In a financial sense, that's false," he said.

But in a fact-based reality, it's certainly true. Everyone seems to agree that because House Bill 148 sets aside "mitigation money" so that public schools wouldn't (in theory, although this hasn't been really explained) lose the per-pupil funding it gets as children are taken out of public schools and enrolled in private schools, that mitigation money goes away after five years. Then, schools go right back to being funded -- poorly, let's remember -- on a per-pupil basis. Yet schools' overhead costs are the same: the cost of buildings, maintenance, utilities, staffing, etc. The bottom line is that the voucher plan, then, would result in a loss of funding to public schools.

As Mr. Burningham writes,

The Legislative Fiscal Analyst has estimated that the voucher program will cost the state $429 million over the next 13 years. The fact is that every dollar spent on voucher schools is a dollar that is not going in to the public classroom. [http://ftp2.census.gov/govs/school/elsec05_sttables.xls, Table 8; Salt Lake Tribune, March 8, 2007.]

The “mitigation monies” outlined in HB 148 are only for the first five years after a student leaves the school. So, while the cost of running a school – paying the teachers, the rent, the support staff, the electricity bill – remains much the same, the budget the school has to do those things will diminish. http://le.utah.gov/~2007/bills/hbillenr/hb0148.htm

Furthermore, while there may be some savings to schools during the first few years of the program, as private school students are added on down the line public school districts will experience a significant drop in funding as the cost of the voucher program balloons from $9 million to over $70 million by 2020. This is because all private school students by year 13 of the program will be receiving state money – whether or not it makes a difference to their family in being able to afford private school tuition. The $429 million estimated by the Legislative Fiscal Analyst as the cost to the state over the next thirteen years far outweighs any estimates of savings it could provide.[Salt Lake Tribune, March 8, 2007]

One of Mr. Piatt's most blinding misstatements is this one: “In anti-voucher ads those questions are cast as troubling questions: ‘Setting few if any standards for private voucher schools. Like no accreditation…’ That’s false. In fact, school accreditation…[is]spelled out in both voucher bills.”

Boy, is that patently false. I've read House Bill 148 word-for-word more than a dozen times and I've broken it down segment-by-segment in a four-part series online, and I'd challenge Mr. Piatt to demonstrate how House Bill 148 requires private schools to be accredited. It's not there.

Mr. Burningham puts it much more politely:

HB 148 states that schools taking voucher students must “provide, upon request to any person, a statement indicating which, if any, organizations have accredited the private school.” This does not constitute a mandate for accreditation from any organization – merely that the schools disclose whether or not they have achieved accreditation. HB 174 makes no further mandates for accreditation on private schools.

According to the Utah Administrative Code Rule R277-410, the Utah State Board of Education is “not responsible for the accreditation of nonpublic schools, including private, parochial, or other independent schools.” The same rule mandates the accreditation of all public secondary schools, including charter schools, while public or charter middle, junior high, and elementary schools may seek accreditation if they wish.

Further, according to the Utah State Office of Education School Accreditation website: “In the State of Utah, by law all public schools, granting high school credit, are required to be accredited.” The State Board of Education says that “Private and parochial schools that issue high school credit and/or diplomas should be accredited” – again, not constituting a mandate.

Then Mr. Piatt gets to the question of standards and accountability in private schools, and he gets it blatantly wrong again. When the UTPS commercial says House Bill 148 includes no accountability for tax dollars, Mr. Piatt declares, "That’s false. In fact…accountability… [is]spelled out in both voucher bills. That includes requirements for annual student testing.”

House Bill 148 only requires that private schools give a "norm-referenced test" that compares their students' performance against students nationally. Nothing in the bill requires private schools to administer the same tests given in public schools, or to show how their students perform against students in Utah's public schools. That would be giving accountability to the public for public funding, and the voucher plan doesn't say that.

Or, as Mr. Burningham writes,

The test chosen by a private school may be any norm-referenced test in any curriculum. It may have absolutely no reference to the achievement required from public school students on, for instance, the Utah Performance Assessment System for Students (U-PASS). U-PASS, enacted in 2000 by the Utah State Legislature to ensure the effectiveness of the tax dollars being used in public schools, is just one of many testing requirements of the 96 percent of Utah students who attend public schools. The results of U-PASS testing are widely available and reported to allow parents to see how their child’s school is doing with the core curriculum approved by the State Board and required of all public schools. On the other hand, schools accepting vouchers have no such requirement for a comprehensive core curriculum, let alone a test that definitively covers such a curriculum. There can be no basis for comparison between public and private schools to determine success if students are not held to the same standards.

Additionally, accountability goes beyond testing - while public school budgets are reported annually and in great detail, private schools accepting vouchers must only account for the voucher payments separately and contract with a certified public accountant to make a report to the State Board every four years.

Finally, Mr. Piatt flatly misleads his viewers about teacher credentials in private schools. The UTPS ad says there's no requirement for private school teachers to have a credential to teach, and Mr. Piatt says, "That’s false. In fact…teacher credentials are spelled out in both voucher bills.”

How could someone entrusted to report facts to viewers get this so wrong? Last week, the University of Utah's Center for Public Policy and Administration got it completely right, as I wrote on Saturday. They wrote,

Teachers must either hold a baccalaureate or higher degree OR have special skills, knowledge, or expertise that qualifies them to provide instruction in the subject(s) taught.

And I wrote,

That means there's no requirement in this law that teachers in private schools have a college degree. If I'm a private school administrator and I want to hire my cousin to teach math, even though he's a high-school dropout, I can say he has "special skills, knowledge or expertise" because he managed the inventory at a local construction company for a year. That took math skills, didn't it?

Again, Mr. Burningham said it less abrasively than me:

What subject matters those degrees are held in or what “special skills” constitute making a teacher qualified is left up to each individual school. No license or teaching credential is required – merely that the school makes the qualifications of the teachers it has chosen available for review by parents.

All of this begs some simple questions for me. Did Mr. Piatt know what he was reporting? I mean, did he read the bill himself, or did he have an intern read it for him? Or did he just accept the PCE told him as fact? Did he do his own fact-checking, calling any state agencies -- maybe even the State Board of Education -- to get their input before airing his story?

And, not knowing Mr. Piatt myself, it makes me wonder whether he has some personal stake in the outcome of the voucher referendum. An educated person really can't make all of these blunders by accident, can he? Is that possible?

Taken by itself, Mr. Piatt's report is one great mess, and it's clear than PCE is taking advantage of it to confuse voters. But then I recall that Governor Jon Huntsman appeared before television cameras last week, said hopeful things about the voucher plan, said he would vote for it, then advised Utah voters to do their own research into the issue, come to their own conclusions and vote their conscience. Within a couple of days, it seemed, PCE had produced a new commercial that included only the governor's remarks that were favorable to the voucher plan.

Taken together then, Mr. Piatt's report and the PCE ad featuring Governor Huntsman, it looks like there's a pattern in PCE's strategy: Get something into the public record, even if it's false, or even if it's only part of what we want, and then use the parts we like to create a better, stronger impression that favors the voucher plan.

Is Mr. Piatt a willing accomplice in this strategy? It's a possibility, since we know that the editorial board of his television station has taken a clear and public stand against vouchers. They published it here (http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=238&sid=1997679), saying,

The KSL Editorial Board has thoughtfully considered the views presented by opponents and proponents of school vouchers, and has come to the conclusion that a broad taxpayer supported voucher system should not be implemented in Utah. Our opposition to vouchers boils down to a fundamental question: Is Utah's public school system broken and in such disarray that doing something as radical and unproven as directing precious tax dollars toward private schools, many of them parochial, the answer? We think not!

It is not a question of school choice since parents already have a variety of options in Utah. Any parent who so chooses can send a child to a private school, or a charter school, or a different public school! School choice is not the issue!
...
In KSL's view, that's where the focus of Utahns ought to be. Let's reject vouchers and work toward making changes that will benefit all Utah children for generations to come.

So Mr. Piatt's employers weren't behind his report.

Come to think of it, that leads to one more question: If the editors at KSL are plainly opposed to the plan, yet they have allowed Mr. Piatt's erroneous report to stand (and now to be used by PCE as pro-voucher campaign material), then are they, too, willing accomplices in the pro-voucher campaign? How difficult is it to say, "Our reporter produced a report that drew certain conclusions, and in retrospect, we understand that those conclusions weren't accurate. In the interest of public service, we want to amend that report and offer a better account"?

As it is, the editors at KSL have let their reporter's errors stand. In an email exchange with Bill Keshlear here (http://utdems.blogspot.com/2007/10/did-ksl-tvs-truth-test-tell-truth-about.html), when confronted with the various facts refuting his report, Mr. Piatt wrote simply,

Bill,

I stand by my story.

Rich

And so far, KSL stands by its errors.

What does the CPPA report tell us?

First, I had nothing to do with the report that's just been released by the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Utah (http://www.imakenews.com/cppa/e_article000937843.cfm?x=b11,0,w), so any similarities you may find between their report and my personal analyses of House Bill 148 here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#1285319116098397573), here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#7656358297803053091), here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#2927554735439584254) and here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#4426877382633871027) are purely coincidental, as they say in the movies. Unless its authors took the time to read my posts on it, for which I'd be happy.

Now that that's out of the way, Hooray! that someone has finally made an objective, piece-by-piece report of what House Bill 148 says. This is what I've been waiting for. Why has no newspaper done this? Or television station? My only complaint about the CPPA report is that it's so brief. It reads and feels as if the authors have really gone out of their way to be noncommittal about the bill. I respect and applaud that goal, but in the pursuit of offending no side, the result is that the report feels thinner and paler than it could have been.

Nonetheless, it's the best we've got, and it's good. Writers Jennifer Robinson, Janice Houston and Sarah Wilhelm promise only "The Basics" in their title, and that's what they deliver. What did the Utah legislature do?

In 2007, the Utah Legislature passed the Parent Choice in Education Program, which, if implemented, will provide scholarships (vouchers) to children to attend private schools.

I'm glad the authors don't adopt the misleading term used in the bill, "scholarship." (Yet. But unfortunately it slips in later.) And who will get these vouchers?

Unlike voucher programs in other states that limit scholarships to only low-income students or students with disabilities, the Parent Choice program will provide scholarships to all Utah students who meet basic criteria.

So what did the CPPA choose to do?

The Center for Public Policy and Administration has completed an analysis of the Parent Choice in Education Program. This analysis provides a thorough examination of the Parent Choice program by addressing who is eligible, the standards for private schools, and the fiscal impact on the state and school districts.

Great start.

Then the authors deliver a brief history of the legislative, judicial and citizen-led actions that found House Bill 148 on the November 6 ballot, including the confusion about the second voucher bill, which is not a part of the voucher referendum but which will be affected by the referendum outcome.

The scholarship program was set to begin in the 2007-2008 school year; however, “The Utah Supreme Court ruled that if a majority of voters vote in favor of implementation of HB 148, then the Parents Choice in Education Program under HB 148 and HB 174 will be established. If a majority of voters vote against implementation of HB 148, then the Program will not be established” (Utah Legislative Research and General Council 2007).

If House Bill 148 were enacted, what would it do?

The Parent Choice in Education Program, if implemented, will provide annual scholarships to qualifying children to attend private schools in Utah. The scholarships range between $500 and $3,000 per student, depending upon family size and income.

And who is considered "qualifying"?

In order to qualify for the program, a student’s custodial parent or legal guardian must reside in Utah. The student must be between 5 and 19 years of age (except that a student who has not graduated from high school may qualify up to age 21).

Students must also meet at least one of the following criteria:
=Be born after September 1, 2001;
=Be enrolled as a full-time student in a Utah public school on January 1, 2007;
=Not be a Utah resident on January 1, 2007; or
=Be in a lower income family (student qualifies for reduced lunch)

These four criteria prohibit students currently enrolled in private schools from receiving the voucher scholarship, unless the student’s family is low income. Therefore, the students who will qualify for the scholarship are those just entering kindergarten, those who were enrolled in a Utah public school on January 1, 2007, students who lived outside of Utah on January 1, 2007, or students from low-income families who are now enrolled in private schools.

But it is also true, and I wish the authors had pointed out plainly, that because the program is being phased in over 13 years, by the end of that period it will cover children who aren't transferring from public schools to private schools, but also children who are enrolling in school for the first time, using public-funded vouchers in private schools.

The authors then include a chart showing the dollar amount of the voucher that would be given to a private school, even for the wealthiest families in Utah. Their chart demonstrates that this isn't a program designed to subsidize private school education for poor families, but rather to subsidize private school education for the wealthy. Its welfare for the wealthy, paid for from the state treasury!

Back to their narrative, they explain what House Bill 148 requires a parent to do if he or she wanted to collect a voucher:

To receive a scholarship a parent must apply for the scholarship from the Utah Board of Education by June 1 preceding the school year. By signing the application, parents acknowledge that:

=A private school may not provide the same level of services that are provided in a public school.

Which is a tacit admission, isn't it, that the program isn't really about "competition," because the standards to be met by public schools are -- as the bill acknowledges -- higher than any standards expected of private schools.

=The private school in which they have chosen to enroll their child has disclosed to them the teaching credentials of the school's teachers and the school's accreditation status.

It doesn't require that a school hire any teachers with professional credentials, or that the school earn any accreditation from any authority. It only requires the school to tell parents what, if any, credentials its teachers have, and what, if any, accreditation it may have collected.

=They will assume full financial responsibility for the education of their scholarship student if they accept this scholarship.

Which again acknowledges that the dollar amount of the voucher is likely not going to cover the cost of private school expenses, leaving the parent to make up any and all of the difference -- plus the cost of transportation.

=Acceptance of this scholarship has the same effect as a parental refusal to consent to services pursuant to Section 614(a)(1) of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

And with this, the state washes its hands of any responsibility it has to guarantee equal protection to students, including students with special needs, or students with handicaps, under federal law. This part makes it clear that once a mother endorses the voucher check to the private school, that mother waives all federal rights guaranteed to her and her children, and the state won't offer any protections of its own.

This is a pretty powerful section, if you ask me. But the next section is just as powerful; it outlines the pale requirements for a private school to be eligible to receive the public-funded vouchers.

So what are these pale requirements?

First, the private schools must have a physical location within Utah where students attend classes and have direct contact with teachers.

So, anyone who opens a storefront "school" can qualify.

Second, private schools must comply with the antidiscrimination provisions laid out in the U.S. Code under which students may not be discriminated against because of race, sex, color, national origin, disability, religion, age or status as a parent.

So voucher-receiving schools cannot discriminate on the basis of race, religion or other factors, but there's never a guarantee that space will be available for a child who... (you fill in the blank on the basis of race, religion or other factors).

Third, private schools must annually assess each student using a norm-referenced test that compares students’ performance to national results.

Why not use a test that compares students' performance to state results -- the performance of all Utah students in every school, public and private? Is there a reason we can't do that? Or is there a fear of what those comparisons might reveal?

Fourth, schools must contract with an independent certified public accountant (CPA) who must submit a financial report at the time the school applies to accept scholarship students and once every four years after.

While public schools are subject to review every year, a private school that accepts public funds will only have to deliver an audit every four years. That means a private school can misuse public funds the first year it accepts them, if it chooses to, but the public won't know about it for another three years.

Fifth, there are also requirements for teachers at private schools. Teachers must pass a criminal background check. Teachers must either hold a baccalaureate or higher degree or have special skills, knowledge, or expertise that qualifies them to provide instruction in the subject(s) taught.

Did you notice that second "or"? I'll highlight it for readers:

Teachers must either hold a baccalaureate or higher degree OR have special skills, knowledge, or expertise that qualifies them to provide instruction in the subject(s) taught.

That means there's no requirement in this law that teachers in private schools have a college degree. If I'm a private school administrator and I want to hire my cousin to teach math, even though he's a high-school dropout, I can say he has "special skills, knowledge or expertise" because he managed the inventory at a local construction company for a year. That took math skills, didn't it?

Sixth, schools must have an enrollment of 40 students or more. They cannot operate in a private residence nor can residential treatment facilities participate in the program.

So if I want to open a private school in a storefront and begin collecting public funds through vouchers, I only have to enroll 40 children. If I have a large family -- lots of brothers and sisters and cousins, and they all have children -- then I can open a school serving only the children in my own extended family, and make a profit from public funding. That's precisely what the law will allow.

Lastly, schools that “encourage illegal conduct” are not eligible to participate in the voucher program.

That's a relief. Although nothing in House Bill 148 requires teachers in private schools to undergo criminal background checks, it's nice to know that the school itself can't encourage any illegal conduct.

And yet, as the authors point out:

Given the criteria above, not all private schools will be eligible to participate in the voucher program.

Because the criteria are so stringent? These criteria?

It is equally important to note that not all private schools will choose to participate in the voucher program.

CPPA points out that the state Board of Education will be responsible administering the voucher program, with a little funding to cover administrative costs.

Then CPPA addresses the fiscal impact of the program. Even after you move your stacks of Oreo cookies around, playing with "costs" versus "savings," the CPPA reaches a conclusion that a lot of other folks have reached, too:

By the 13th year of the program, when it is fully implemented, the costs to the state will exceed savings to the school districts by $43-59 million.

That's not $59 million of savings to the state, that's $59 million in COST to the state. And I thought vouchers were supposed to save taxpayers money?

The authors point out that there are voucher programs in other places, but that there's a big difference between them and House Bill 148:

The voucher programs in these states are aimed at specific populations of students, such as low-income students or students with disabilities.

...Utah’s voucher law... is the only state-wide voucher law that will provide scholarships to all students who meet the basic criteria outlined above.

So while other cities or states may have experimented with giving vouchers only to poor parents, the sponsors of House Bill 148 went whole-hog, drafting a plan that includes even the wealthiest of the wealthy, and making it statewide and universal -- an experiment that has never been attempted before on this scale, with these costs.

CPPA outlines the arguments for and against the voucher plan without indicating whether any argument has greater merit in shaping public policy, and I wish they had included that sort of evaluation. It would have been helpful in decision-making. But they do raise a point that I raised in one of the earliest notes I posted on this issue: What does the Constitution say, here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html#594952384401936106). They write,

Finally, there may be constitutional concerns with Utah’s voucher law.

According to the Utah Voter Information Pamphlet, available through the Lieutenant Governor’s Office, under the Parent Choice in Education Program, public funds will be used to provide scholarships for students who attend private schools, including private religious schools.

The use of public money for students attending private religious schools may conflict with federal or state constitutional provisions that prohibit the use of public money for religious purposes. In addition, other aspects of the program may conflict with equal protection provisions of the federal or state constitution or with state constitutional provisions relating to the State Board of Education’s authority or the scope of the public education program.

Because of the program’s unique characteristics and the lack of a directly applicable court ruling, it is unclear how a court would rule on any of these issues.

All in all, this was a good, fact-based, objective look at House Bill 148, and I'm grateful to the University's CPPA for doing what our regular media hasn't had the courage to do.

Do you think the regular media will report much about this study? Or have the Oreos had their desired effect...

What will we see in finance reports?

If I remember correctly, another wave of campaign finance reports will be due next week, on or near Halloween. Should we expect more tricks or more treats in them?

One thing we can predict with certainty because the regular media has written about it many times: That Utahns for Public Schools will likely have collected some more money from NEA and probably some of its state chapters. I saw an item in the Trib (I think) last week saying that Arizona teachers were contributing to them, too. So that's a given.

What we can't predict with certainty is how much more funding Parents for Choice in Education has collected, and from where.

Will they have collected more cash from a secret source in Missouri, as we learned would happen here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#8774387773635419070)? Will they report any contributions from Rex Sinquefield himself, or from his Show Me Institute, as I suggested here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#7871848005276981626)?

Or will PCE report a substantial contribution from hidden sources, like the $358,000 it showed in its last report from its "PCE Foundation" and its corporation, "PCE Incorporated," as we learned here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#3432994937239750239)? That way, the real donors are kept secret. Isn't it strange that if I donate $100,000 to PCE's political action committee, my name is reported and becomes public information. But if I donate $100,000 -- or even a million dollars -- to PCE's "foundation" or its "corporation" and let those entities funnel my donation to PCE's PAC, then I remain anonymous, as I learned here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#8277881091086636499)?

Does it matter that someone could pour a million dollars or more into PCE to influence Utah public policy and never be held accountable for that influence?

Someone has to be paying for its tv ads, and it's safe to say that $358,000 didn't cover all of them, PLUS the cost of running their campaign, PLUS the people they brought from other states and paid $6,000 for six weeks' work (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#9178866463962043502), PLUS their attorneys' fees (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#941576069269867772), PLUS the pay-for-votes plan they started but scrapped (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#6365446034137726617).

If I had to guess, I'd predict that someone, somewhere has tried hard to match what they thought UTPS would likely collect. If that's so, I wouldn't be surprised if PCE has collected and spent a million dollars or more -- all from unidentified donors.

Is it a safe prediction that the regular media will ask these questions, and spend the time to track down the answers? If history is any guide, we may be disappointed again (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#857283314006361911). Paul Rolly will likely do his part, but there are a lot more reporters than just Mr. Rolly covering this issue.

Based on what we read in their articles, I can't tell whether or not regular media reporters read weblogs. But I do read those weblogs, and I wonder if we as webloggers ought to make sure that the reporters have the benefit of our work. So last night I went back through the 14-day archives of major papers and found the names of reporters who wrote articles about them, and collected their email addresses if those addresses were attached to their articles. Here's the list I made:

From the DesNews:
Jennifer Toomer-Cook, jtcook@desnews.com
Tiffany Erickson, terickson@desnews.com
Lee Davidson, lee@desnews.com
Amy Choate-Nielsen, achoate@desnews.com
Amelia Nielson-Stowell, astowell@desnews.com
Lee Benson, lbenson@desnews.com
Joe Dougherty, jdougherty@desnews.com
Jared Page, jpage@desnews.com

From the Herald-Journal (Logan and Cache County):
Charles Geraci, cgeraci@hjnews.com
Devin Felix, dfelix@hjnews.com

From the St. George Spectrum:
Katie Oliveri, koliveri@thespectrum.com
Ryan Dionne, rdionne@thespectrum.com

From the Trib:
Lisa Schencker, lschencker@sltrib.com
Glen Warchol, gwarchol@sltrib.com

From the Davis County Clipper:
Doug Radunich, dradunich@davisclipper.com
Becky Ginos, bginos@davisclipper.com

From the Park City Record:
Frank Fisher, education@parkrecord.com

From the Ogden Standard-Examiner:
David Troester, dtroester@standard.net
Amy K. Stewart, astewart@standard.net
Sam Cooper, scooper@standard.net

And from the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin:
Sarah Miley, swest@tooeletranscript.com

I hope they will look through the finance reports for themselves and see if my predictions are close. Even so, I hope to send to them whatever interesting facts I find there. At least they'll know that the issue has been researched by the blog community if nowhere else.

Speaking of the blog community, I was pleased to see this week that Tyler Slack at Desultory Thoughts is back with a new post on the voucher referendum, here (http://www.utahadventurevideos.com/blog/). Of course, I appreciate the links, but I think Tyler did a good job cataloging what else has been published on the details of House Bill 148. Check out his work.

What did we learn from the KSL debate?

Debates over the voucher referendum are coming fast and furious now. I hope to write more about the KSL debate between Richard Eyre and Lisa Johnson, and I will, but I thought I'd put up the links to the KSL video now and add more to this note later.

If you want my opinion, I think Ms. Johnson took this one home with her clarity, consistency and believability. I know that Mr. Eyre is a salesman by trade, but in a matter of important and expensive public policy like this, it might have been better not to appear and sound like a salesman. The most ridiculous moment was when he pulled crumbling Oreo cookies from his pants pocket.

I have to say that the Oreo cookie theme was cute when the Eyres first rolled it out, and it made a good (though misleading) prop for a tv commercial. But after two months of Oreo cookies, I think most people are tired of them (at least I am). Even the moderator seemed to think it was ridiculous to have him drag out crumbling cookies.

Debates are as much about performance as about the information, so I'll make one more point about Mr. Eyre's performance, since he's had a long career in public speaking and should know how to present himself well. For thirty years, Mr. Eyre has presented himself as a "nice guy." But he really didn't come across as "nice" in the debate, he came across as, well, overbearing, leaning over toward Ms. Johnson for part of the time -- when he wasn't trying to make friends with the moderator. (Maybe this is going too far back, but does he remind anyone else of Eddie Haskell, from "Leave It to Beaver"? Really phony and artificially earnest?)

And interrupting a speaker may win you points for being aggressive in big-league debates or especially on the cable news shows, but interrupting Ms. Johnson's responses just reinforced my feeling that Mr. Eyre isn't the "nice guy" that he portrays in his books and appearances on national tv. It makes me wonder, Does he do that at home? Is "bullying" one of the character values taught in his Joy Schools?

For now, the link to the KSL video is here (http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=2033837).

Who is intimidating & who is informing?

Yesterday I mentioned the Trib article saying that the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce is still struggling to come to a decision whether or not to support the voucher referendum. It reported that pro-voucher special interests have taken matters into their own hands and begun circulating letters to businessmen across the region.

While it's never safe to predict what representatives of special interests will do when ethics clash with a potential profit motive, if I were a gambler I'd bet money that the Salt Lake Chamber will find that common ground pretty soon and come out for the voucher referendum. For one thing, time is running out. And what motivates businessmen is the POTENTIAL for profit. There's plenty of potential for profit when public funds are funneled into the private sector. And compromising one's ethics often stings less than a flu shot, because doing it can garner as many new friends in the business community as it costs you. So I'll stay tuned for that announcement.

By lunchtime yesterday, the Trib had found a copy of this letter and published it here (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7258384). Several things about it caught my attention. One is that these business leaders finally admitted that the goal of the voucher program isn't to improve public education, isn't to reduce class size, isn't to give public schools more funding -- the various lies that have been promoted for the past six months -- but instead, the goal is to give parents an incentive to move their children from public schools to private schools. The businessmen say it in black-and-white:

The new voucher law would create an incentive to move as many of these new students as possible into the private sector...

But that's not all. Mata Hari picked up on this yesterday, too, here (http://againstutahvouchers.blogspot.com/) but I'd like to repeat it: There's a real strong element of Big-Brother intimidation, or old-fashioned bullying, in the letter when it comes to special interests telling businessmen to inform their employees about this referendum, and what to say to their employees, and how to say it. When I scraped out the fluff from the letter, here is that element laid bare:

Dear Fellow Business Leader,

It would take a significant tax increases just to accommodate this [public school enrollment] growth, and that could hurt our citizens and our economy.
...
The new voucher law would create an incentive to move as many of these new students as possible into the private sector and relieve pressure on taxpayers and our public schools.
...
Because of misguided opposition, the new voucher law has been placed on the November 6 ballot and now voters must decide its fate. Unfortunately, no one is talking about the enrollment crisis we face and the important role vouchers will play in avoiding overcrowded classes and massive
tax increases.
...
We are asking you to tell your employees about this aspect of the debate and encourage them to carefully consider the economic
impact of their decision. We have drafted a letter you can use as a template to explain the issue to your employees.
...
Please take the time to go over the information and to add your own thoughts as you discuss this issue with your employees.
...
We also strongly encourage that you remind your employees to vote.

Did you get the message? It says, roughly, We want voters to adopt the voucher referendum. Here's a way to scare them into adopting it: Tell them taxes will increase if they don't. Tell your employees that they can stop their taxes from rising by voting for the referendum. In fact, we're sending you a letter to read to them, or to give to them, and you should add to it if you know of something more than will convince them to vote for the voucher plan. Whatever you do, make sure that you tell them that voting for the voucher plan is a good idea, then tell them to vote.

To me, that's not information, that's intimidation. What comes next, a signed note from the poll supervisor saying you voted, that you can turn in to your manager at work? Punishment for not voting? You lose a shift? Or you get moved to third shift?

Two things make this absurd to me. One is that, as I pointed out yesterday, Parents for Choice in Education did backflips to stop all sorts of public employees -- mainly ones that work for school districts -- from even talking about the referendum on public property; remember the nasty letter to administrators from their attorneys? The other is the panicky argument that if workers don't vote for vouchers, their taxes will go up.

That second argument is what led me to look at what happened in Milwaukee, the grandfather of voucher programs in the country. Voucher supporters used to use Milwaukee as the example all the time. The big newspaper in Milwaukee is the Journal-Sentinel, and it has some online archives you can access for free.

Guess what I found out: Taxes in Milwaukee DID go up. But they went up AFTER Milwaukee enacted a voucher program. And, in fact, they went up partly BECAUSE Milwaukee enacted a voucher program. Might they have gone up anyway? Sure, because as public services expand, and the costs of those services grow, public revenues have to be levied to pay for them.

But the businessmen of Salt Lake City -- at least these ones:

Fred Lampropoulous, CEO, Merit Medical
Keith Rattie, Chairman and CEO Questar Corporation
Patrick Byrne, CEO, Overstock.com Thomas E. Bingham, President, Utah Manufacturers Association
Howard M. Headlee, President, Utah Bankers Association
James V. Olsen, President, Utah Food Industry Association
L. Tasman Biesinger, Executive Vice President, Utah Home Builders Association
M. Royce VanTassell, Vice President, Utah Taxpayers Association
Chris Kyler, Utah Association of Realtors
Candace Daly, National Federation of Independent Business
Lee J. Peacock, Executive Director, Utah Petroleum Association
David A. Litvin, President, Utah Mining Association

are selling a very different equation: Enact a voucher plan, they say, and your taxes will not go up.

Last November, while the Wisconsin legislature was debating its annual budget, reporter Alan Borsuk of the Journal-Sentinel wrote an article here (http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=533306) saying that public schools were closing and their enrollments were dropping, while the costs of public-funded private-voucher schools were growing. A total of 18,000 students received vouchers totaling more than $100 million, he wrote.

This is the part that stuck out like a sore thumb, given what the pro-voucher business group in Salt Lake City is telling employees:

Under the state formula for paying for school vouchers, Milwaukee residents pay more in property taxes for each student who uses a voucher than for each student who attends MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools]. Mayor Tom Barrett and others have argued strongly that what they call the "funding flaw" for the voucher program is unfairly burdening taxpayers.
...
In a letter last week to state Rep. Sheldon Wasserman (D-Milwaukee), Milwaukee School Board President Joe Dannecker said that $7.6 million of the $16.5 million increase in the amount of property tax to be collected for schools for this school year is due to the voucher program and that each voucher student increased property tax collections by $447, while each MPS student increased collections by $91. The total property tax bill being levied by MPS increased this fall by 7.7%.

So 18 years after enacting a city-wide voucher plan in Milwaukee, taxpayers pay almost 500 percent more ($447 per student) from their property tax bill to pay for a private school voucher than they pay to send a student to public schools ($91 per student).

That article was important enough, but Mr. Borsuk published a new one, just today, that is even more important. It says that an organization that pushed to enact the Milwaukee voucher plan 20 years ago, and one of the well-known leaders in that effort, have now changed their minds, saying that "choice may not improve schools."

A study being released today suggests that school choice isn't a powerful tool for driving educational improvement in Milwaukee Public Schools. But more surprising than the conclusion is the organization issuing the study: the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank that has supported school choice for almost two decades, when Milwaukee became the nation's premier center for trying the idea. The institute is funded in large part by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an advocate of school choice.

Mr. Borsuk's article is found here (http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=678202). The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute sounds like the Sutherland Institute, if it's a conservative "think tank". I wonder if the Sutherland Institute also gets funding from the Bradley Foundation? Mr. Borsuk's article goes on:

Even some of the most ardent supporters of school choice in Milwaukee have seen that the purest version of the idea - in which there is little government oversight of schools, and parental decisions in a free market dictate which schools thrive - does not square with the reality of what happened in Milwaukee when something close to such a system existed. That reality can be summed up in two phrases: "bad schools" and "little change."

Bad schools: A Journal Sentinel investigative report in 2005 of the then-115 schools in the voucher program found that about 10% showed startling signs of weak operations. In short, many parents were choosing bad schools and sticking with them. Escalated government oversight of schools' business practices and a new requirement that all voucher schools be accredited by an outside organization have played roles in putting most of those schools out of business.

Little change: Milwaukee has been a national laboratory for school reform such as the voucher program, yet there is little evidence that it has yielded substantially improved academic results - at least so far. Test scores in MPS, especially for 10th-graders, have been generally flat for years. The record of the voucher schools is unclear, though results from a major study of the program are supposed to begin coming soon.

So here's what I understand: Voucher supporters in Milwaukee wanted a public-funded voucher program with little or no government oversight of voucher schools, leaving only "choice" to decide which schools are good and which aren't, and that's what they got. When that didn't work, the program was changed to allow city or state agencies to oversee the business practices in schools that were failing, and some of them closed because they couldn't meet good business standards. When there were still no improvements, the city required voucher schools to become accredited, and some more of them closed because of they couldn't meet accreditation standards. Still there was no improvement in student test scores.

Haven't we heard from the sponsors of House Bill 148 that vouchers in Utah would improve the quality of public education? That it would cause class sizes to go down? That it would leave more money in public schools? That choice would bring competition, and competition would force public schools to get better? That it wasn't necessary to ask private schools to be accountable or to be accredited, because parents would get to decide what was best for their children?

Doesn't this Milwaukee study, after 18 years of having such a program in place, put the lie to those propositions?

And here's a question: Do you know who Howard Fuller is? Gordon Jones does; Mr. Jones was the first Executive Director of the Utah Education Funding Project, whose name was changed to Parents for Choice in Education, and he continues to serve on PCE's board of directors. In explaining why he supports the voucher referendum, Mr. Jones mentioned Mr. Fuller here (http://www.utahpolitics.org/archives/2007/10/supporting_referendum_no_1.shtml), saying,

The appeal of school choice is driving leadership at the national level to the minority community. Leading voucher proponents have included Polly Williams, Floyd Flake and Bernice Gates, leaders in their minority communities, and now the irreplaceable Howard Fuller, with his Black Alliance for Educational Opportunity.

Mr. Fuller is "irreplaceable" as a leader in the voucher movement, Mr. Jones says. That's unfortunate, because the voucher movement will now have to replace him, according to Mr. Borsuk of the Journal-Sentinel:

Howard Fuller, the most prominent supporter of voucher and charter schools in Milwaukee, has changed his position toward agreeing that government oversight of voucher schools is needed. In a recent interview for a workshop of the national Education Writers Association, Fuller said empowering parents to make good choices, improving student performance and creating good schools were proving to be much harder achievements than many once thought.

Asked whether the voucher program was leading to improvements in the achievement of MPS students, as was once expected, Fuller said: "I'm one of those people who believes that we may have oversold that point. . . . I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn't been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS that we would have thought."

Is this one way of saying that citizens who stood up against vouchers so long ago were right? That citizens who argued for smarter investment in Milwaukee's public schools, rather than funneling money into the private sector, were right? That those citizens who asked impertinent questions when the voucher plan was being debated were right? That citizens who questioned the arguments of the voucher proponents were right? That citizens who were skeptical of the nebulous data used by voucher advocates... were right, all along?

In fact, is this another way of saying that someone should have taken a deep breath and spent more time thinking this through before investing potentially billions of dollars -- and experimenting with an entire generation of schoolchildren's lives -- in a voucher plan?

It sounds, to me, that when special interests order businessmen to tell their employees what to think, and how to vote, that's intimidation. And when a "think tank" went looking for one result but found the opposite result, then published a study saying so, that's information. (It's even a surprising admission!)

In the interest of being informative rather than intimidating, here's a bit of happy information: The early voting period has begun today!

Do businessmen and bloggers agree with KSL?

It's interesting to see how decisions are being made as we get closer to Election Day. I'm especially interested in the decisions being made by fellow bloggers, mainly because we take the time to write out our thought processes, and I value being able to read those decision-making processes. Those conclusions -- like the conclusions of the KSL editorial board, in an article published yesterday here (http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=238&sid=1997679) -- are a lot more valuable to me than to look at the statistics we see in polls, although I'd like to mention them today too.

Getting right to their point, KSL's editors write,

The KSL Editorial Board has thoughtfully considered the views presented by opponents and proponents of school vouchers, and has come to the conclusion that a broad taxpayer supported voucher system should not be implemented in Utah.

Our opposition to vouchers boils down to a fundamental question: Is Utah's public school system broken and in such disarray that doing something as radical and unproven as directing precious tax dollars toward private schools, many of them parochial, the answer?

We think not!

It is not a question of school choice since parents already have a variety of options in Utah. Any parent who so chooses can send a child to a private school, or a charter school, or a different public school! School choice is not the issue!

A vote against vouchers must not be interpreted as a vote for the status quo. Make no mistake about it, there's plenty of room for improvement. Still, contemplate what could be accomplished if the energy that has been directed at vouchers could be redirected toward implementing reasoned, effective and adequately funded reforms in the tried and tested public school system.

In KSL's view, that's where the focus of Utahns ought to be. Let's reject vouchers and work toward making changes that will benefit all Utah children for generations to come.

And there's not an Oreo cookie in sight.

But before I go further, though, I want to thank Marshall at Wasatch Watcher, who was researching the Free Capitalist Project before I ever heard of it. He mentioned it last night here (http://www.wasatchwatcher.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=313), "During the summer we noticed an organization by the name of Free Capitalist that seemed a little too suspicious." And if you click through his link here (http://www.wasatchwatcher.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=191), you can read his original notes on FCP from June. In fact, I learned from Marshall a new term that I'm going to adopt: "wingnut welfare." (I'll give appropriate credit when I use it.) His research began when he saw billboards advertising the FCP and wondered who was paying for such a grand advertising campaign, and he deduced that it couldn't be a regular small business.

So I think there are some scenarios playing out here:
-the owner of the billboards are paying for the advertising out of their own pocket.
-a wealthy donor shelling out cash to support the advertising campaign.
-this is another right wing astroturf group.

Either way you slice it I don't see how an operation like this is breaking even without some wingnut welfare.

What is wingnut welfare? For those that haven't heard it here is a quick synopsis. Basically wingnut welfare is support for an organization that could not exist in the real world without the infusion of cash from usually a wealthy donor (that incidentally usually benefits from right wing policies) like the Walton family.

Now this would not normally be so hard to swallow if it wasn't the fact that an organization like this goes around telling people how great the free market is but can't even support its own activities.

I think I agree with Marshall. I think the Icebergs are probably great money-makers for Rick Koerber, but I don't think they're big enough to pay for the FCP ad campaign.

Thanks, Marshall, for your notes and for giving me a new term to use.

Now, whether we look at polls or we read the decisions written by thoughtful people in the blogs, it looks like Parents for Choice in Education, the Free Capitalist Project and the sponsors of House Bill 148 aren't fooling many people. Just this morning, KCPW reported that the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce -- which includes Patrick Byrne, PCE's largest individual (public) donor -- can't agree on whether or not to support the voucher plan. Reporter Julie Rose said here (http://www.kcpw.org/article/4652) that the pro-voucher business leaders are so angry at the delay that they're acting on their own:

Members of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce are so divided on vouchers that Vice President Natalie Gochnour says they're struggling to take a position on the issue. Several prominent CEOs are fed up with the delay and now running their own campaign in support of school choice.
...
The group is distributing form letters to business leaders, asking them to promote vouchers to their employees...

Isn't that strange? Business leaders are going to ask their employees to vote for the voucher referendum. Isn't that what PCE's lawyers said was illegal? Remember, PCE's attorneys sent a letter to school district administrators more than a month ago telling them they couldn't allow any literature about the referendum to be displayed at their work sites, and they couldn't allow school employees to talk about the referendum either.

I wonder if PCE's attorneys will send a letter to Mr. Byrne and the pro-voucher members of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, advising them that urging their employees to take any particular action on Election Day is not legal? Or is it? Maybe it was only illegal to talk about the details of the voucher plan or to hand out literature about it, if doing so might lead people to oppose it. Maybe it's entirely legal for business owners in the private sector to tell their employees to vote for it. Is it legal?

Anyway, Ms. Rose's point is that the business community is split on vouchers. If that's true, they might benefit from reading Pramahaphil's post at Green Jello, which outlines the suggested costs of the plan, and the suggested "savings" of the plan, then reaches a conclusion about the plan here (http://pramahaphil.blogspot.com/2007/10/vouchers-humble-pie.html). Frankly, it's one of the best, most-reasoned posts I've read about the issue. Pramahaphil writes,

I have been reviewing the [Legislative Fiscal Analysis] report again and again, and I have hit a paradigm shifting roadblock in my support of vouchers. I do still believe vouchers would produce a fairly decent net savings for the first few years (savings ranging somewhere near 4-6.2 millon or in a worse case scenario a loss) , but there will come an equilibrium within 5 to 6 years where the savings break even, and when vouchers fully implement in the 13th year and onward vouchers will inevitiably begin to net annual losses. One might argue about the ambiguities of savings from private school student who would have gone to private schools with or without vouchers and the students who may attend private schools because vouchers make the difference, however it is impossible to get around the fact as time goes by (especially after year thirteen) all students in private schools will be receiving voucher money (whether or not they wanted or needed vouchers to incentivize them out of the public school system).

Judging from the Legislative Fiscal Analyst's Report, from year 13 (and I assume from then on) vouchers will net annual losses between $43,088,978 and $59,492,020. There may have been some options that could have alleviated this undesirable effect of subsidizing students who were "no-matter-what-the-cost" private school bound such as requiring a 1 or 2 year period of public school attendance for voucher eligibility. However, with the exception to the eligibility of current Utah-residing, school-aged students no such requirements were included in HB148 or 174.

Pramahaphil is an accountant, so it gives me even more cause for concern when he spends this much time poring over the Legislative Fiscal Analysis and finds more questions than answers. I tend to rely on my own accountant to know how to find workable solutions when we meet at tax-time. If Pramahaphil has hit a stumbling block, maybe it's time to step back and take a deep breath. He continues,

After the 13th year and beyond it would be a drain on the public coffers, and I'm afraid it would be viewed as nothing more than another entitlement program.

If HB148 or 174 would have had a provision forcing voucher recipients to enter public school for at least a year or more before being voucher eligible, the thirteen year savings to loss issue may have been solved. This is not the case, HB148 would have its beneficial savings for a season but in the long-run would become a drain of Utah's tax dollars. I hope that if and when Ref 1 is voted down the Legislature reconsiders the issue, and looks at how to resolve the 13 year crunch.

Regretfully, I think I will be dropping my support of referendum 1 with the forlorned hope that the idea doesn't die permanently in this state. If this damages my credibility -- so be it. The idea is good, but the plan's execution has that 1 major flaw for me. This paradigm shift has not been an easy one for me to embrace.

In comments at the bottom of Pramahaphil's post, a lot of readers praise his courage for taking this position, and I agree with them.

Mike Jones at Utahania is one of them, writing here (http://utahania.blogspot.com/2007/10/other-people-question-spending-tax.html), "Pramahaphil over at Green Jello is even an accountant. I am not very good at accounting, so reading the numbers in the Voter's Guide was all I could handle. Pramahaphil read the Legislative Fiscal Analyst's Report, probably enjoyed it, and reached a similar conclusion to mine."

Darren Draper is another blogger who spelled out his rationale for his "7 readers in Utah," here (http://drapestakes.blogspot.com/2007/10/why-ill-be-voting-against-referendum-1.html). Darren is an education technology specialist from Sandy who works for the Jordan School District. He writes,

This issue of vouchers, currently being referred to as Referendum 1 (here and also here, see page 4), will be decided in three weeks when Utahns will vote on one of the most debated, polarizing issues in state history. As I've been asked by several people "why referendum 1 is so bad", I'll give you my take now.

While never guaranteed to be great, private school can be great... for those that can afford it.

Most Utahns can't afford private school - even with the funding that vouchers would provide.

Hence, Referendum 1 would be a way to reward the people that already utilize private schools and not really a way to recruit new students.

To continue, I honestly believe the opening paragraphs of our nation's Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Furthermore, I believe (like many of the educators that served to shape our nation's educational system):

-Education is one of those unalienable rights to which all men (and women) are entitled.

-Neither liberty nor the pursuit of happiness can truly be obtained without an education.

In closing, I think there are many questions that all people need to answer for themselves:
-How do you feel about public funding for private schools?

-Have you studied the issues yourself?

-Do you think that every child has a right to a quality education?

Another blogger I enjoy reading, Bob Aagard, has spelled out his views on the plan itself but also takes a hard stand against the tactics used to promote it here (http://bobaagard.blogspot.com/2007/10/national-groups-imposing-things-on.html). After leading a small campaign of his own to find young Jeffrey Isbell, the blogger from Illinois hired by PCE to do its work on the internet, Bob writes this note:

My problem with Jeff is not his coming to Utah to work for something he believes in. That would be hypocrisy on my part. Is that any different than my going to Minnesota for two years to share the Gospel with those good people?

My problem lies in the hypocrisy of PCE complaining about NEA money (which Utah educators have paid into for years) coming in, but ignore the large percentage of their funding that comes from out of state. Not to mention their out of state employees.

Vouchers have always been about outside groups spending money to force this on Utah, in the hopes that it will spread across the country. Kinda like forcing democracy on the middle east. Only, instead of doing it with guns, they are doing it with money. Look at all the money the Walton heirs of plugged in to get pro-voucher legislators elected.

Recent polling has showed that 61% of Utahns will vote against vouchers in two weeks. 61%. That's a higher percentage then voted for John Huntsman in 2004.

Utahns don't want this program. Please stop forcing your views on us. You're wasting your money.

Which brings me to that poll, described here in a Trib article (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7236295). This one was done by The Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University, and it shows that 61 of voters say they'll vote against the plan.

That followed a poll done by Dan Jones and Associates earlier in October, described in a DesNews article here (http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695216987,00.html). In that one, "sixty percent of Utah voters say they would likely vote against a voucher program."

And that result followed an even earlier poll: "In July, the Deseret Morning News reported on a similar poll that found that 57 percent of those surveyed would most likely vote against the voucher program..."

From these results, it would appear that a lot of people have, just as Governor Huntsman suggested last week, taken the time to read the plan, considered carefully its details, weighed its impacts, and come to the same conclusions drawn by the KSL editorial board.

How does Mr. Koerber avoid reporting?

Last week, after I got a note from a "Free Capitalist insider," I wondered how the Free Capitalist Project was registered with the Lieutenant Governor's office, since it was allowing its resources to be used by Parents for Choice in Education to support the voucher referendum. I would think that a mailing list, even if it's an email list, would be a thing of value. If it wasn't valuable, why would PCE want to use it? And if it is valuable, then contributing the use of it to a referendum campaign would have to be reported somewhere.

So I looked at the Lieutenant Governor's website again to see if the Free Capitalist Project had a political action committee. It doesn't.

I looked to see if FCP has a political issues committee. It doesn't.

I looked to see if it's registered as a corporation. It isn't.

It has no statement of organization as a PAC or as a PIC.

And when I search the "candidate contributor summary" feature, I find that FCP hasn't reported any contributions to any campaigns.

Yet both the Trib and the DesNews last week reported clearly that the Free Capitalist Project had allowed the use of its email list -- which has to be considered something valuable -- for Parents for Choice in Education employees. And the embarrassing retraction offered by FCP said the PCE employees were also FCP volunteers. So FCP has to be registered somehow, somewhere, right?

FCP isn't registered as a business with the Utah Department of Commerce here (https://secure.utah.gov/bes/action/index), although it does business in Utah. There's a Free Capitalist Enterprises LLC in Provo. Its agent is Forrest Allen, but its address is 85 Eastbay Boulevard, which is the same address shown at the Lieutenant Governor's website for a string of $5,000 contributions made to Parents for Choice in Education on September 12, 2006. Each of these businesses, all located at 85 East Bay Boulevard in Provo, gave $5,000 to PCE on that date: Founders Capital LLC, Hill Erickson LLC, Franklin Squires Investments LLC, McGuire Group LLC, and New Castle Holdings. Some other individuals and businesses are shown in that report giving $5,000 to PCE on that date, and one of them is Rick Koerber of Springville, who is apparently the owner of all of the businesses I just listed.

Also, I googled the FranklinSquires company name again, and sure enough, Rick Koerber is founder and CEO of FranklinSquires Investments.

So Mr. Koerber = FranklinSquires Investments = 85 East Bay Boulevard in Provo = Free Capitalist Enterprises = Free Capitalist Project.

That's not all you'll find if you google FranklinSquires Investments, I learned. There's a website here (http://www.mycollector.com/news_FranklinSquires2.html) that points to actions taken by the Wyoming Securities Division against FranklinSquires Investments, and news about a lawsuit going all the way back to 1997 has been given its own website here (www.FranklinSquiresLawsuit.com). I learned two more things about Mr. Koerber -- that apparently he owns or operates a "university" (called FranklinSquires University) and that he owns the Iceberg Drive Inns!

With 11 Iceberg Drive Inn locations in three states, the rapidly expanding foodservice franchise is famous for its deliciously think, made-to-order shakes standing two inches above an oversized cup. Founded in the summer of 1960 in Salt Lake City, Utah, the original Iceberg Drive Inn quickly turned into the city’s most popular ice cream destination. Today Iceberg Drive Inn, Inc. provides unique, flavorsome products to thousands of Americans and continues to make each of its shakes the old fashioned way: personally by hand.

NOW I know how he makes his money!

Plus, there's this link (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070510100845AAuJ3wT&show=7) but I honestly don't know how to evaluate the information there, whether it comes from people who have direct experience with Mr. Koerber and his companies or whether it comes from his competitors.

And there are questions about "equity milling," something apparently devised by Mr. Koerber, here (http://www.websitetoolbox.com/tool/post/sdcia/vpost?id=1821780).

One of the links took me back to Wikipedia's entry on the Free Capitalist Project, which reiterated what I thought: that FCP does do business in Utah, though it isn't registered anywhere as a business. The entry here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Capitalist_Project) says,

Membership in the Free Capitalist Project is free and open to the public, however individuals are required to make a public declaration called the "Producer Pledge" at a formal Free Capitalist events in order to become a formal member of the organization.
...
Members are not required to pay a membership fee, however following the one hour Thursday night Free Enterprise Forum meetings, the FCP holds "Prosperity Quest Study Group" sessions which are open only to FCP members who have become "Free Capitalist Apprentice Members" which includes the requirement to have paid a $250 fee and a $30 month fee.

Those fees represent a business transaction, right? If so, then where is the FCP registered as a business? At the Better Business Bureau?

No, FCP isn't shown at the Better Business Bureau of Salt Lake City, but FranklinSquires Investments is. And while it isn't a member of the BBB, it does get some attention from the BBB, as explained here (http://www.saltlakecity.bbb.org/commonreport.html?bid=22008292&language=1&bu). Six complaints against FranklinSquires were filed in the past 36 months for contract issues, billing or collection issues, or refund or exchange issues, and at least one is still unresolved.

I started with a simple question and still don't have a simple answer. I learned a lot about Mr. Koerber's business dealings, but I still can't tell how his Free Capitalist Project is able to use its resources to help the voucher referendum without registering as a political issues committee, or as a political action committee, or as a corporation, with the Lieutenant Governor's office. Does anyone else know?

Aren't PCE and Free Capitalists cooperating?

Occasionally, I get pointed notes here that don't contribute to any objective analysis of the voucher referendum or the organizations supporting or opposing it. Usually they repeat someone's talking points, or they argue against a conclusion I've drawn from researching these things. Most are anonymous, although Paul Mero from the Sutherland Institute did use his own name, and a few others have. If these notes rely on rhetoric rather than objective data, I usually delete them because they don't add anything new to the analysis of the issue.

But I received one last night that I'm going to include in today's post because it begs a simple question: What is the connection between Parents for Choice in Education and the "Free Capitalist Project"?

To remind readers, I wrote yesterday about Governor Jon Huntsman's lukewarm remarks about the voucher referendum. Far from cheerleading, the governor repeated his party leaders' message about vouchers, said he would vote for the plan, but then told Utah voters to study the issue and make up their own minds. I thought it was a statesmanly and politically skillful thing to do.

Then I posted the entirety of a full-page ad in the Trib, paid for by Utahns for Public Schools, that cataloged a host of offenses on the parts of Parents for Choice in Education, the Free Capitalist Project and other PCE allies in their campaign to spend money from All Children Matter of Michigan to buy a statewide, universal voucher system for Utah. To be more specific: The only time I mentioned the Free Capitalist Project in my Thursday was when I copied a direct quote from a Trib ad, which itself copied a direct quote from a Paul Rolly column in the Trib. Here's the link to my post (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#700704111565639902), here's the link to the original Trib column (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7155888).

And here's the specific excerpt that mentions the Free Capitalist Project:

With polls showing overwhelming numbers of voters poised to repeal the voucher law that was passed by the Legislature last winter, voucher advocates got so desperate Thursday they sent an e-mail from the Free Capitalist Project offering money for pro-voucher votes in next month's referendum election. But then someone must have let them know it usually is considered illegal to buy votes, so they sent a second e-mail several hours later retracting everything they said in the first e-mail.

Now, here's the note that was posted at my blog last night. If I'm to take it at face value, it comes from a "Free Capitalist insider":

Just to clarify a few things. The email was not "sent out by the Free Capitalist Project." The email was sent out by a volunteer member of the Free Capitalist Project who is currently employeed by PCE. The offer in the email was a PCE offer, and the Free Capitalist Project new nothing about the details of the "get out the vote" campaign, and had simply allowed the email to be sent to Free Capitalist members using the email database and template.

The retraction was also decided upon by PCE.

While we may disagree on politics, and Free Capitalist obviously has to be responsible for what they do, it is worth noting that NOTHING happened.

I can agree with a lot of folks who are suprised even angered by the email - but human beings in a free society make mistakes of all different varieties. Its suprising to me that so many "so called" lovers of freedom are so quick to judge those they disagree with by standards that if applied accross the board would have all of us in jail or fined severely.

Just .02 cents from a Free Capitalist insider.
(Anonymous) 8:21 PM

(This was a cut-and-paste, so the various errors belong to the author.)

In the interest of "clarify[ing] a few things" as my correspondent begs, let me offer some objective facts gleaned from the media and from my own online research.

First, an email message was published on a Free Capitalist Project "template" and was sent to Free Capitalist Project members and others in an Free Capitalist Project email database. We must assume that since no accusations of "hacking" have been lodged, the person(s) sending the message, using the Free Capitalist Project template to email addresses found in a Free Capitalist Project email database, were given access to these resources by the parties responsible for the Free Capitalist Project.

Next, Paul Rolly published the substance of both the original email and the "retraction" in the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the state's major newspapers. Mr. Rolly didn't invent the email, nor the retraction, nor the substance of either, nor did he invent any the $10-per-voucher-vote scheme that was represented in the original email. No amendments have been made to Mr. Rolly's column, nor any retractions of its substance.

At the same time, Tiffany Erickson of the Deseret Morning News -- another major newspaper -- reported very plainly and clearly here (http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695217972,00.html),

A pro-voucher group offered to pay "motivated" individuals to go out and secure votes in favor of the program. However, a retraction and apology were later sent. The Free Capitalist Project sent out e-mails earlier this week looking for "advocates" who could earn $250 for securing 25 names of voters who committed to vote for Referendum 1. They could earn $10 for every additional name after that. The group also claimed they were working on behalf of Parents for Choice in Education, something PCE said Thursday was false.

In fact, in Ms. Erickson's reporting, she quoted Free Capitalist Project CEO Rick Koerber himself saying that he gave "permission" for the person(s) to use his email list.

And, in fact, given the brief history of PCE and its well-documented tactics, a lot of attentive bloggers were more surprised at the attempts by responsible authorities to disentangle themselves from the new tactic than surprised by the new tactic itself.

Democracy for Utah wrote here (http://www.democracyforutah.com/node/1856),

But really, come on... how likely is it that some random volunteer, all on his or her own, would send out a mass e-mail offering to pay people money out of the organization's funds? Money that hadn't been approved? This excuse is right up there with "the dog ate my homework." Take a little personal responsibility, someone.

Justin at Utah Amicus quoted Utah Code here (http://utahamicus.blogspot.com/2007/10/justin-says-it-is-illegal-to-buy-votes.html), saying

Utah Code 20A-1-601. Bribery in elections.
(1) It is unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by himself or through any other person to:
(a) pay, loan, or contribute, or offer or promise to pay, loan, or contribute any money or other valuable consideration to or for any voter or to or for any other person:
(i) to induce the voter to vote or refrain from voting at any election provided by law;
(iv) because a voter voted or refrained from voting for any particular person, or went to the polls or remained away from the polls; or
(2) In addition to the penalties established in Section 20A-1-609, any person convicted of any of the offenses established by this section shall be punished by a fine of not more than $1,000, or by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than five years, or by both a fine and imprisonment.

Which prompted commenter Jason The to observe, below the post,

I think things like this should be avoided in general. Obviously paying a canvasser "per head" to go out and encourage voters is not in itself illegal, but paying based on who actually votes would be, and when it comes to the PCE's reputation (so far) in this debate, I'm uncomfortable with them proceeding in this way.

I think common sense should tell an organization to steer clear of anything of this sort. It not only looks desperate and suspicious, but it creates a risk for abuse. If you can't campaign successfully without resorting to these types of incentives and tactics, perhaps it's time you reconsider your own point of view.

Maybe you're losing a particular campaign because you're wrong, and not because you're not paying people enough to vote? Just a thought.

Richard Warnick wrote at One Utah here (http://oneutah.org/2007/10/12/vouchers-10-per-voter/), "Today we learned that voucher proponents are desperate enough to pay people ten dollars each to vote for vouchers. This came from a group called the Free Capitalist Project founded by pro-voucher moneyman Rick Koerber, the second-largest donor to PCE."

And Glendon Brown, writing also at One Utah, added here (http://oneutah.org/2007/10/12/hey-theres-money-to-be-made/),

Richard commented on the PCE/Free Capitalist email offering cold hard cash for voucher voters. I think there’s money to be made. Here’s what we do: We knock on doors and tell people:

“Hi, my name is . . . , I’m being paid by PCE and Free Capitalist knock on doors to get names of voters interested in the voucher issue. If you let me, I’d like to put your name down and get paid $10. You will receive information from these folks and they’ll include you in get out the vote activities. You are under no obligation to vote for the vouchers, but I’d like to get paid. May I put your name down?”

(Yeah, I know they “retracted” the email, but I don’t for a second believe these folks are above paying for votes.)

EDarrell at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub went even further here (http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2007/10/13/utah-voucher-wars-when-very-desperate-bribe/), writing,

Salt Lake Tribune political reporter Paul Rolly shows just how desperate are the voucher supporters in Utah, with polls showing the voucher referendum on the November ballot will crush the pro-voucher legislation: They offered bribes. Yes, bribes are illegal. You know that, I know that. Tell it to the voucher advocates.
...
I’ll wager it wasn’t the illegality that stopped them. Somebody probably sat down with a calculator and suggested how much it might cost them, at $10.00/vote, if people took them up on the offer. And for the $10.00, there’s no guarantee that any of the votes would be switches — no guarantee that it would sway any votes their way.

And AndrewsMiracleDrug, before doing his own research and finding the Free Capitalist Project's principles published at Wikipedia, wrote here (http://andrewsmiracledrug.wordpress.com/2007/10/12/shady-tactics-by-voucher-advocates/),

Unbelievable. An email sent out on behalf on Parent Choice in Education promises that volunteer “advocates” can earn up to $10 a head for every family member or friend they get to commit to vote yes on Referendum 1. The email was sent by the Free Capitalist Project (and quickly rescinded). You may have seen billboards along I-15 in Draper and Utah County touting the Free Capitalist.

So, given the coverage this train wreck has been given in the regular media and in the blogs, why is a "Free Capitalist insider" now trying to distance the FCP from PCE?

Are they not working hand-in-hand in support of the voucher referendum, supported largely by funding from All Children Matter of Michigan?

Is FCP CEO Rick Koerber not one of the largest individual contributors to PCE, giving more than $25,000 in his own name and in the names of his corporations (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html#2589682112043767447)?

Did he not admittedly give permission for PCE employees -- knowing they were PCE employees -- to use FCP resources?

Is it not a well-known tactic to recruit like-minded individuals using the resources of like-minded organizations, like when PCE advertised to hire activities from all across the country (which I described here http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#9178866463962043502)?

In my view, the connections between FCP and PCE are documented sufficiently enough that it's foolish for any "Free Capitalist insider" to disavow the relationship now. And if FCP's goal is to rehabilitate its image, it's going to take more than "clarifying a few things" at a weblog (or a dozen weblogs) to do it. We're known by the company we keep, aren't we?

One last thing: My "Free Capitalist insider" emphasizes that, in the wake of this embarrassment, "it is worth noting that NOTHING happened." I think that's a great point, and it leads me to a final question: If the FCP was so damaged by this debacle that its insiders are seeking to "clarify" facts, might they not insist also that the offending employees/volunteers be removed from their positions with PCE? Would not a Fortune 500 company replace a division leader who made such a blunder? And do so without batting an eye? I ask because at no point in the past week have I heard or read anyone say that disciplinary action was taken by anyone against anyone. I only hear and read variations of "mistakes were made," and we know the real value of such rhetoric as that.

And what did Gov. Bangerter say?

By the way, just as a footnote, Governor Huntsman wasn't the only Utah governor to speak on vouchers yesterday. Former Governor Norman Bangerter told Doug Wright on KSL that he had "more questions than answers" about the plan. He first made it clear he supports public schools and found no superior alternative in his own experience as a parent:

The first thing, I feel like, is we really have to continue to support our public schools and that's the best place for kids to get their educations, stay in their communities, stay with their peers, build that community relationship. I saw, when my children were growing up, and they opened up Skyline and some of those, my children went to Granger, and they transferred over there because they thought it was better.

I don't think there was ever any positive, anything striking, that was better about it for the child that made that choice.

For Governor Bangerter, the problem in the voucher is the change in funding to public schools.

But the thing that I'm concerned about is the money. If you break this down on a school-by-school basis, and if you look at it, say, the maximum waiver or voucher is $3,000 and assume the average would be $2,000, and you take 1,000-member school, they're going to lose 15 students. That's going to cost them about $30,000 in money that goes out, but they'll have $80,000 that they don't have a student. But there won't be any savings in that school. The teachers will still have to be there, the lights and heat have to go on.

When we talk about that this is a guarantee for 5 years, that the money stays there, what happens after the 5 years? And so, I don't have answers. I have more questions than answers.

Mr. Wright himself told the governor that "the more you kind of get out of the emotion of it, and dig down into the facts of it, the more, almost, troubling, it becomes."

And Governor Bangerter agreed, saying there's no way to know "what the impact will be."

We really don't know how many are going to go out, and we don't know how many will stay out, whether they go out for a while. I think there's some clear challenges to turning it over to purely private schools without any checks and balances.

I know educators who will tell you some of these kids will come back in three years and they'll be way behind. Some would say they'd come back and they'd be way ahead. So, it's kind of a roll of the dice in my mind, and I'm not so sure the savings will be there.

That's my major concern, and as you know, and as everybody agrees, we have some special challenges in the funding of education because of the demographics of our society.

That makes two governors of Utah who are for improving public schools and Utah's competitiveness and who aren't exactly "urging" voters to support the voucher referendum.

What did (and didn't) Gov. Huntsman say?

A few important things happened yesterday, as I see it. One is that Governor Jon Huntsman both honored his party's platform and stood up to his party leadership in making careful remarks about Referendum 1. Another is that he preserved the statesmanship that earned him praise from the coalition organized against Referendum 1, who published the full-page ad in yesterday's Trib. (I want to talk about that ad, too.)

I think that the big news from yesterday's press conference isn't what Governor Huntsman said or didn't say, but that his speaking about it at all raises the issue to a new level in the minds of Utah voters. There are still a lot of undecided voters, and the fact that the governor has come to the podium now makes it an issue to consider. And after listening carefully to what he said, I think it's those undecided voters that he was talking to.

Now, let's turn to what he said, and how the major papers and tv have covered it.

We can imagine what the party wanted the governor to say: Repeat the talking points, say you'll vote for the voucher referendum, and urge all Utah voters to do the same. And say it loud.

And we can imagine that he's been under a lot of pressure from pro-voucher party leaders and the pro-voucher contributors who supported his first campaign for governor. Patrick Byrne alone gave his campaign $75,000 in 2004, and that's only what's in the public record. As Parents for Choice in Education and its sponsors have proven this year, here's no telling how much money may have flowed into the governor's campaign treasury from secret donors through all sorts of corporations and non-profit organizations. Campaign checks come with pressure, and we can imagine there was plenty of it. In today's Trib, Glen Warchol wrote here (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7210998) that Governor Huntsman was "surrounded by voucher enthusiasts." I think that may be code for "muscle."

All of these things makes what he did and said really interesting.

Speaking as a Utah Republican, honoring his party and its leadership, and satisfying those who contributed to his campaign in 2004, he repeated the party leadership's message on Referendum 1. Their message says, without offering any common-sense support to prove it, that vouchers will help public schools, that vouchers will be just one "piece of equipment in the arsenal," and that vouchers will help Utah's "long-term competitiveness." So Governor Huntsman said all of those things, and he said he would vote for the referendum.

Speaking as Utah governor and a Utah parent, however, he stepped off the party leadership's message and urged voters to research the issue for themselves before voting. Rather than urging Utahns to support it, he said, "Whatever you think is right, whatever you can justify, is the right answer for you." And far from hammering home his support for the voucher plan, Governor Huntsman made it clear "he loved the public schools his own children attend and they would remain there," according to Mr. Walchol's report in the Trib.

Tiffany Erickson and Lisa Riley Roche saw the same thing in the DesNews here (http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,5143,695219642,00.html), saying Governor Huntsman "urges Utahns to be informed on the issue and vote for what they believe is right." They added,

Huntsman went no further at Wednesday's press conference than he has since the debate over the voucher referendum began.

And they said that he still won't appear in advertising for the referendum -- and won't become a "poster child" for vouchers.

And Brock Vergakis of the Associated Press, in today's Herald here (http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/240725/3/), wrote that Huntsman not only gave the referendum a soft-sell, but he even played down his influence in winning support for vouchers.

While voucher supporters were optimistic Huntsman's appearance at the Capitol news conference could sway the vote, Huntsman wasn't so sure. "I doubt it," he said.
...
...Huntsman was still less than forceful. He didn't implore the public to vote in favor of vouchers, rather telling voters to become informed on the issue.

"That's all I ask. We have a very important vote Nov. 6. Become informed and then vote whatever you think is right. Whatever you can stand up and justify is the right answer for you," Huntsman said.
...
...Huntsman did say why he supports vouchers. He said he considers it part of an overall mix of education options that would gave parents choice.

But he stopped short of saying parents should vote in favor of the program.

Strangely, the party leaders surrounding Governor Huntsman at the press conference heard a completely different message. Senate President John Valentine told the DesNews that the governor was "very clear in his support and his encouragement of people to vote for Referendum 1. ... That to me is more than lukewarm. That's red hot."

Red hot? "Become informed and then vote whatever you think is right" is red-hot support for vouchers? Really? And did the governor really "encourage" people to vote for the referendum? After all, according to the Associated Press account, Rep. Carol Spackman Moss"said she wasn't even sure if Huntsman said he supported vouchers during the news conference, although she was there. Much of Huntsman's speech focused on how the Legislature gave the biggest funding increase in state history to public schools earlier this year."

Nevertheless, it was enough for Rep. Carl Wimmer, who has been openly critical of the governor, to tell Mr. Vergakis, "I could not be prouder to have the governor as the head of the state right now."

So, in one press conference, Governor Huntsman honored his party by repeating its platform on vouchers, but stood up to his party leaders by not delivering the "red-hot" endorsement they clearly wanted, and preserved the statesmanship that earned him praise in a full-page ad in yesterday's Trib.

As for that ad, I hope everyone saw it. It's a catalog of media coverage of what the voucher bill sponsors, and Parents for Choice in Education, and their formal or informal partners have done with their money from All Children Matter of Michigan -- and the donors that they won't identify -- to get voters to support their voucher plan.

You know, when there's such a steady stream of these offenses, with some new terrible tactic being uncovered every week or so, you tend to forget some of them. So this catalog did a good job, I thought, of reminding people of what has happened. As it is, the list is long and awful enough, but it doesn't include everything -- like advertising through Phoenix and Washington, D.C. to bring activists into Utah when no Utahns would take pro-voucher campaign jobs (including blogging, as Bob Aagard reminds us here http://bobaagard.blogspot.com/2007/10/im-not-stalker.html), and like sending email spam to voucher opponents and lying about it (as Mata Hari reminds us here http://againstutahvouchers.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-on-voucher-spam.html). When this is all finished, I suspect these things are going to make a fine textbook for do's and don't's in a political science class.

I couldn't find a link to the ad online, so I copied over the text so those who didn't see it could read it here. Please forgive the length of the quote:

AN OPEN LETTER TO GOVERNOR JON HUNTSMAN JR:
On behalf of the state’s leading voices for children and public education we commend you for your statesmanship in staying out of the debate on Referendum 1, the private school voucher law. Your steadfast pledge to let the voters decide the issue on November 6th reminds Utahns why we elected a public servant with an unwavering sense of duty. We write to you to ask for your help in ensuring an election that is run with the integrity, honor and transparency that Utah voters deserve. In particular, we call on you to put an end to the secrecy, deception and trickery that has been chronicled by the media.

OPERATING IN SECRECY:
"Voucher cash spigot still secret"
The Salt Lake Tribune, September 19, 2007
“The Utah Lieutenant Governor’s Office is requesting the attorney general investigate who is behind the series of ads urging Utahns to uphold the state’s voucher law, with one of the ads reciting parts of the Book of Mormon to make its point. But the actions of the anonymous group qualify it as a Political Issues Committee subject to finance reporting laws…”

"Pro voucher group may be breaking the law
AG will be asked to investigate why unnamed entity failed to file report"
Deseret Morning News, September 20, 2007
“The Utah Lieutenant Governor’s Office says it will ask the Attorney General’s Office to investigate an anonymous pro-voucher group that could be skirting election laws.”

"Outsiders fund ‘school choice’ PAC"
The Salt Lake Tribune, June 25, 2006
“Parents for Choice in Education has a grass-roots image and a name ready-made for focus groups. But it turns out most of the cash the advocacy group for privateschool vouchers and tuition tax credits spreads around Utah in elections comes from big-business donors outside the state…”

STRONG-ARMING BUSINESS LEADERS WITH THREAT TO BLOCK HEALTH CARE PROPOSALS
"Voucher 'threat” sparks debate"
The Deseret Morning News, September 25, 2007
“A high-powered group of Utah businessmen and health experts put forward Monday a plan providing affordable health insurance to an estimated 360,000 Utahns, while GOP legislative leaders are accused of saying that the plan may fail in the 2008 Legislature if leading businessmen don’t support vouchers on November’s ballot.”

USING DIRTY TRICKS TO MISLEAD UTAH VOTERS
"A Sting Operation?"
The Salt Lake Tribune, Wednesday, October 10, 2007
“The mystery has been solved surrounding a phony Web site that lured in people thinking they were getting anti-voucher information only to find pro-voucher propaganda instead.”

TRYING TO BUY UTAHNS' VOTES
"Oops! Vote purchase didn’t pay"
Salt Lake Tribune, October 12, 2007
“…[V]oucher advocates got so desperate Thursday they sent an e-mail from the Free Capitalist Project offering money for pro-voucher votes in next month’s referendum election…But then someone must have let them know it usually is considered illegal to buy votes, so they sent a second e-mail several hours later retracting everything they said in the first e-mail.”

"PCE Worker says cash-for-votes program was the brainchild of PCE, to be funded by PCE"
610 KVNU.com, October 13, 2007

DISCREDITING UTAH'S PUBLIC EDUCATION SUPPORTERS
"Voucher camp gets desperate"
Salt Lake Tribune, October 11, 2007
“With Election Day looming and most Utah voters still opposed to writing go-to-private-school-free checks, voucher supporters are getting desperate. So in the final weeks of the campaign, they’ve resorted to a three-pronged diversion: bogeymen, dubious research and, when the opportunity presents itself, moral outrage at a fabricated slip from the other side.”

"Pro-voucher poll called ‘despicable’ "
Deseret Morning News, August 18, 2007
“…[S]ome Utahns say the pro-voucher Parents for Choice in Education has gone too far and have digressed from the issue in a push poll conducted this week.”

"Derailing debate: Pro-voucher tactics underhanded, revealing"
Editorial, Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 2007
“[I]nsinuating in a poll question that your opponents are somehow evil often elicits the desired response. It is an old technique called ‘push polling.’ It influences how the subject answers the question and, at the same time, besmirches the opponent.”

"Voucher war brings in big guns"
Salt Lake Tribune, September 14, 2007
“Now, the pro-voucher cabal has employed veteran legal hit-woman Mary Anne Wood to intimidate the other side…”

We are asking you to help put an end to these reprehensible practices and to call for a clean and fair election on November 6th.

Does remembering these things make you feel like going back home for another shower?

And you know what's worse? Thinking that these same tactics will be used again next year, and the next year, and the next year...

Does profit motivate support for vouchers?

Lisa Schencker wrote in today's Trib (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7197820) about Richard Eyre and his Oreo cookie show at the Rotary Club in Salt Lake City. I like Ms. Schencker's reporting, but I think she might have turned in a more indepth story if she'd had the benefit of Jeff Harmon's letter to the DesNews from last week (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695218115,00.html). In it, he wrote:

The most important question is "Who actually benefits from a voucher system?" And the answer is: Anyone who has a financial interest in private schools.

I have no evidence that Mr. Eyre wants to run a private school. He and his wife are successful authors and they've been on national television to promote their books. But media reports say that they do have an interest in a company they founded in the 1970s that provides pre-packaged education curriculum programs to pre-schools. And the family members who now run that company have expressed a desire to expand their sales into "a much larger market." Could the Eyres or their adult children benefit financially from the adoption of a voucher program? If private elementary schools plan to expand their services to offer pre-school, and the Eyres plan to expand their programs into "a much larger market," could a business partnership take advantage of the public funds flowing into private elementary schools through vouchers?

Here's what I found on the internet: A 32-year-old Arizona mother named Shawni Pothier has organized several parents in Gilbert, Arizona, to form a co-op pre-school called the Joy School. In an article here (http://www.azcentral.com/families/articles/0911mombeat11Z12.html), it says that Pothier "is the daughter of a prominent Utah couple, Richard and Linda Eyre, who started the Joy School program about 20 years ago."

The program provides, for a fee, "lesson plans and CDs with songs, games and other activities..."

When I googled "Joy School," I found a webpage for the Logan Joy School here (http://loganjoyschool.com/), which says it has a "teacher with degree in early-childhood education from USU," which is surprising, because the voucher plan that Mr. Eyre is supporting with his Oreo cookie commercials doesn't require private schools to hire teachers with degrees. Nonetheless, this is the right webpage, because it clearly states it is "the wonderful Joy School curriculum created by Richard and Linda Eyre and honed in the original Joy School right here in Logan." The cost per student ranges depending on how many days per week the student attends.

"Joy Schools" are now marketed by the Joy School Company, I learned from another webpage (www.joyschoolco.com). The Joy School Company, though founded by Mr. Eyre, is now run by his daughter and son-in-law, Saren Eyre and Jared Loosli. Mrs. Eyre Loosli's own education career began when "she ran a company in Boston providing educational character-based after school programs for the lower elementary school grades," so she has experience selling curriculum programs to schools. And "Her husband, Jared, is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has worked in marketing for the last 6 years. With his expertise, Saren and Jared hope to offer Joy School to a much larger market."

The Joy School Company is clear about its three-part mission, the first part of which is its profit motive:

To offer the benefits of Joy School to more children and families through promoting and supporting “commercial” or “for-profit” Joy Schools

Expansion of their program is another goal, using "former elementary school teachers" to help the enterprise grow:

If you want to send your child to Joy School rather than doing it yourself, find someone who’d like to make a little extra money by teaching children a couple mornings a week in her home and have her contact The Joy School Company for help in setting up her own Joy School . Usually the best “commercial” Joy School teachers are former preschool or elementary teachers or have some other sort of experience working with young children...

"Franchisees" who want to buy into the company "for profit" get a menu of products from the Joy School Company:

A CD-ROM containing a full set of registration forms, a parent handbook, and recruitment materials that you can personalize and use for your group
Suggested supply lists and templates for making the items you’ll use again and again in your Joy School
Overall instructions and tips for running an effective program
Ideas for setting up your home
Agendas for parent meetings as well as ideas and newsletters to encourage parent participation and understanding of the Joy School curriculum
Lesson plans offering simple instructions for crafts, activities, stories, snack ideas, and everything else involved in the lessons
Ongoing support to help you with problems that arise
New ideas via email bulletins
Opportunities to network with other Joy School operators and advertise your program on our website.

The website's fact sheet explains how they profit. They collect:

$150.00 for your one-time start-up fee (covers your $50 lifetime membership to valuesparenting.com plus instructions, timelines and checklists for effectively starting up your program, fliers and information sheets for advertising your program, all the forms you need to register children, supply lists and ideas for setting up effective spaces for teaching, parent-orientation materials, templates for making weather charts and other posters and materials you use throughout the year, and more). If you’ve previously paid a $50 for your lifetime membership fee to valuesparenting.com, you just pay $100 for your start-up kit.

$85.00 per semester for your school’s franchise fee (you pay this every semester that you teach Joy School – it gives you the right to use Joy School materials and the Joy School name, to get all the lesson plans and all updates to lesson plans, to receive newsletters and materials to give out to the families of the children you teach, and to get support and help from the Joy School company via phone calls and email. It also includes music CDs of all the children’s songs involved in the curriculum – one CD for each unit.)

$8.00 per child per unit for their Joy School “dues” plus their own CD of the songs for that unit (this includes shipping and handling of CD’s). As there are 5 units in each semester, families pay $40/child for dues per semester. Most Joy School operators charge this at the beginning of the semester as part of the registration fee for that semester. If a child does Joy School for the second year, the parents won’t need the CDs again so that child pays just $20/semester for dues.

And apparently, the profits are unending, and handy tax write-offs only add to the bottom line!

If you charge children $65/month (a pretty good deal for parents in many areas) to come to Joy School two mornings a week and have 6 children enrolled in your program, you’ll receive $390.00/month or $3510 for a 9-month school year. After you subtract out your $150 one-time start-up fee and your $170 for franchise fees ($85x2 for two semesters), you’d gross about $3200 for your first year. And this is for working just 6 hours a week (Joy School typically runs 2.5 hours, two mornings a week and it typically takes an experienced teacher about ½ hour to prepare each lesson).* Unlike many new businesses, you’d make a good profit after expenses in your first year. Then your next year, since you don’t have to pay your startup fee again and since you’d likely increase your group size, you’d make more money. If you had a group of 8 children in year two, you’d make $4510 after expenses ($65 x 8 children x 9 months = $4680; subtract $170 for franchise fees). You’d charge children separately for their dues/CDs so the per-child cost of Joy School is not included in these figures.

As time goes on, most Joy School operators add more children to their groups, teach more than one Joy School group, and/or increase their tuition as the good reputation of their preschool spreads. For example, with one group of 10 children paying $85/month, you’d make about $7480 for the year (after taking out your franchise expenses). Of course, if you chose to teach more than one Joy School group (i.e. one morning class and one afternoon class), you could make more money. You can double, triple or even quadruple the money you make as you offer more groups and/or make your groups a little larger. **

If you figure out how much you’d be making per hour in your first year, it would be almost $20/hour. If you increase your class size to 10 children and your tuition to $85/month (as in the scenario above), you’d be making almost $40/hour.*** If you’re teaching your own child as part of your group, it works out very nicely to be making money rather than spending money on your own child’s preschool experience. And this would be money you can make without having to leave your home or find childcare for your children. Plus you basically get paid vacations since you are paid the same amount every month by parents, regardless of holiday breaks when you don’t hold Joy School.

Another thing to bear in mind is that when you run a business in your home, you can write off part of your mortgage or rent payments when you do your taxes. You can also write off your supplies and all expenses related to running your Joy School. Many Joy School operators find that their tax savings are substantial.

But they add a disclaimer at the bottom:

* As your actual income is dependant on the amount you charge for tuition, how successful you are in recruiting students, and the overall quality of your preschool, the Joy School Company cannot guarantee any particular amount of income.

Just as in the case of House Bill 148, the Eyres' Joy School enterprise believes that no particular college preparation or credentials are necessary to work with children, although they say former elementary school teachers (who presumably come with college educations and state licensure) make the best teachers:

The best Joy School teachers are those who’ve had considerable experience teaching and caring for young children. Many in-home commercial Joy School teachers are former elementary or preschool teachers. Some have taught Joy School as a co-op with other mothers and got their teaching experience that way. The most important qualifications of a Joy School operator are

an understanding and appreciation of the Joy School curriculum
experience working with children and a good natural rapport with children
an ability to work well with parents
good organizational skills and basic computer skills
a sincere desire to provide a wonderful preschool experience to children and to involve their parents in their preschool education

Speaking of licensure, however, the fact sheet does caution franchisees that pesky laws in some states may actually require them to fill out some forms and sit through a couple of hours of meetings to get a "family day care provider" license. And as for being insured against liability if harm comes to a child in a Joy School, they have a quick fix for that, too:

License: In some states, you need to obtain a “family day care provider” license in order to run a preschool in your home. There is no separate category for preschools, so you have to meet the requirements (which are generally very minimal) for holding a daycare in your home. Some states only require that you get a license if you have more than a certain number of children or if they will be with you for more than a certain number of hours a day. You may not need a license if you state that you’re providing an educational program, not day care. If your state does require you to have a license, don’t worry, the fee per year is usually less than $100 and the requirements typically involve attending a 2 hour meeting, filling out some forms, and having someone visit your home to be sure it meets basic safety standards.

Insurance: You generally don’t need special insurance to run a preschool in your home but we recommend that you have all parents sign a waiver stating that they won’t hold you liable for any common injuries that may occur while their child is with you.

Apparently, the Eyre family enterprise has been lucrative for them and for some who continue to pay the franchise fees. One satisfied franchisee is quoted saying,

I’ve transformed my garage into my own little preschool classroom (and wrote off all the expenses on my taxes!) and we’ve got a great system going here.

Another wrote,

Once parents come see the fun room I have set up in my basement, observe a lesson, and look at the flier I give them about the Joy School philosophy, they’re hooked.”

Is it possible that Mr. Eyre is promoting universal vouchers in Utah in anticipation of a massive business expansion into private elementary schools? Could there be a "much larger market" than that?

I don't know. I never see Mr. Eyre on his television commercials talking about his investment in this private education curriculum enterprise. I only hear him talking about Oreo cookies and encouraging voters to support Referendum 1.

While I'm here, I should mention that another google search brought me right back here (http://againstutahvouchers.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-questions-than-answers.html), where Mata Hari had already caught the Eyre family's profit motive, and where she found something ironic about their "value of the month": self-reliance.

(As an aside, I noted that the Eyre's "value of the month" is self-reliance. Can someone please tell me what is self-reliant about parents accepting public taxpayer funds to pay for private school? Wouldn't a truly "self-reliant" parent eschew tax dollars and dig deeply into his or her pocket, in a self-reliant way, and pay for their own children?)

Which brings me back to Ms. Schencker's item in today's Trib. While Mr. Eyre continues using his Oreo cookie show to suggest -- erroneously, as is apparent to common sense -- that vouchers will raise per-pupil spending in public schools while reducing class size, State Board of Education chairman Kim Burningham gave their audience the common-sense response, which yielded at least one viewer's common-sense verdict on "fuzzy math":

"I wish education financing were simple," Burningham said, "but it's very complex." Just because a child leaves a school, he said, doesn't mean all the school's costs go down. He said public schools that lose students also lose the federal money that comes with them. Schools would also still have to pay for capital outlay costs, costs such as salaries for janitors and teachers and special education students, who can cost several times more to educate than typical students.

Burningham said ultimately vouchers would cost $429 million over 13 years, which would exceed any savings.

Rotary Club member Linda Bonar said she thought both sides did well, but the Oreo argument did nothing to sweeten her view on vouchers. She's still against them.

"I'm still concerned about the fuzzy math involved," Bonar said.

How do rural parents benefit from vouchers?

When the sponsors of House Bill 148 met with Parents for Choice in Education and/or their major funders -- maybe to collect a campaign check or two -- did anyone talk about the parents and students who live great distances from urban areas where the majority of these 138 private schools in Utah is found? If they did, did they make a conscious decision to exclude these rural parents from consideration, or was it accidental?

Last week, I said I might need to rename my blog "Accessibility First" because I was interested in where parents would have to live to use public-funded vouchers. I found a link to a Trib article showing a map of the 138 private schools in Utah, most clustered along I-15 from Ogden through Salt Lake City to Provo. (You can see the map again here http://www.sltrib.com//ci_5060104.)

The map said that St. George and Park City had four each; Brigham City, Escalante, Hurricane, Koosharem and Logan had two each, and these cities, towns and communities had one each: Castle Valley, Cedar City, Erda, Helper, Kanab, La Verkin, Moa, Manti, Monroe, Montezuma Creek, Monument Valley, Mount Pleasant, Oakley, Roosevelt, Tooele and Toquerville.

In looking at that list, I thought about people I know across the state, wondered where might be the nearest private school to them, wondered how far they would have to drive to get to a school where they could use a voucher. For example, I know there's not a single private school in Eureka or in all of Tintic School District. There's not one in Kamas or the South Summit School District. And there's not one in Randolph or the Rich School District.

Do you realize how far of a drive it is from Randolph to Ogden, the northern end of the clusters of private schools in the Trib map? It's roughly 100 miles, depending on where you live. That's just one way, and that assumes that the roads are always open. From Eureka to the private school in Spanish Fork, the one furthest south on I-15 on the Trib map, is almost 50 miles, each way.

So how are parents supposed to feel if they live in the remote rural communities of the state, are asked to support public-funded vouchers for private schools, but they live an hour or more from the nearest one themselves?

Yes or No: Is the voucher plan affordable?

Yes or no, Is the voucher plan affordable to Utah? A lot of people are asking about the affordability of Referendum 1, the universal, statewide, public-funded voucher plan. The data that tells how much the program will cost and how much it's supposed to "save" is as clear as mud. It reminds me of something Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography: "There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics." Like a lot of voters, I don't care for any of them. I prefer the 'yes' or the 'no.'

Emily at Utah Amicus writes here (http://utahamicus.blogspot.com/2007/10/429-million-over-next-thirteen-years.html) that the voucher plan, "if passed, is expected to cost Utah Taxpayers $429 million over the next thirteen years." At news like this, I would expect to see the members of the Utah Taxpayers Association taking up their cudgels against the plan and its sponsors, yet I've seen no such uprising.

The editors of the Daily Herald take issue with Emily's arithmetic. They declare here (http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/240238/) in the Sunday edition, "The true cost of vouchers over 13 years is $327 million, not $429 million as opponents claim." But the editors also say the costs are so little that "it's hardly worth quibbling over." Maybe a hundred million is "chump change" to the wheelers and dealers funding Parents for Choice in Education, but to regular citizens who will wind up paying for it through their taxes, I'd say it's definitely worth quibbling over -- maybe even worth studying hard.

But back at Utah Amicus, in the comments below Emily's post, Paul Mero of the Sutherland Institute goes several steps further to announce the plan will realize "savings" of more than a billion dollars. If Mark Twain were reading Mr. Mero, I think the assertion of a "billion" dollars in savings is where he would stop.

By the way, if cost-saving is the primary goal of lawmakers, then Craig Perry of Salt Lake City has a proposal worth considering just as seriously at House Bill 148. He writes in Saturday's Trib here (http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_7170265), "I have something I'd like to propose to be on the ballot also this November: pay and benefit cuts for those who are supposed to be representing the people. I think it's only fair that there are budget cuts for the people we've entrusted to make sure that our children are getting the highest quality public education possible. We can give the money we save on their exorbitant salaries and socialized medicine benefits packages to the schools. They could certainly use it for the art and music programs that are currently being cut from their curricula."

Even if we apply the foolish "Oreo cookie" logic to Mr. Mero's "savings" of a billion dollars, we'd have to be feeding Oreo cookies to every child in Utah, including every child now enrolled in 138 private schools, to get close to that figure. To my knowledge, there's no reference point online to the documentation of Mr. Mero's arithmetic, so we're left to speculate that these savings fall into the category of "damned lies" or, worse, "statistics."

Or is THAT the secret analysis done by the Legislative Fiscal Office, that Sen. Curt Bramble didn't want Utah voters to see?

Apparently, one report from the legislature's Fiscal Analyst's Office was requested by Sen. Pat Jones and Rep. Kay McIff, who both oppose Referendum 1. They asked specific questions about voucher costs, they got the analysis of Referendum 1 showing the voucher plan would cost $327 million, and they released that information to the public.

But then Sen. Curt Bramble asked for a fiscal analysis, and suddenly the voucher plan would "save" $1.4 billion. How? Legislative Fiscal Analyst Jonathan Ball told Glen Warchol at the Trib here (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7166738) that

Bramble asked for the "cost of educating in public schools all who would qualify for a [voucher] over the next 13 years." In other words, the cost to educate all the potential voucher students, even ones moving in from out of state, if they chose not to leave the public system.

Since Referendum 1 ultimately gives vouchers even to parents whose children already attend private schools -- and who have never attended public schools at all -- are they included in Sen. Bramble's analysis? If so, is that a fair analysis? After all, students enrolled in private schools right now don't cost taxpayers a penny. But they'll cost plenty if the voucher plan is enacted and public dollars begin flowing to those schools.

But we don't know the answer, because Sen. Bramble first refused to give his taxpayer-funded fiscal analysis to the public. (Do you think the Utah Taxpayers Association will weigh in on behalf of Utah taxpayers to make sure everyone gets that taxpayer-funded information?)

The importance of giving the public an easily digestible bottom line was evident last week when opponents were denied access to the research supporting what has become known as the "Bramble Memo." The Fiscal Analyst Office denied the request, citing the state's Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA)

GRAMA, the office said, does not allow the public to see research provided to lawmakers - unless the legislator involved permits it. Jones and McIff gave the analyst's office permission to make the research public. Bramble initially would not give permission to release research behind his memo. But late Friday, after several interviews with The Salt Lake Tribune, Bramble directed the Fiscal Analyst's office to release the information.

Voucher opponent Alan Smith, an attorney who is a member of Utahns for Public Schools, accused Bramble of "political gamesmanship" with the Fiscal Analyst's Office, undermining the agency. "The office is supposed to have credibility - he's abused it for his own partisan ends," Smith said.

The timing of the Bramble memo, July 27, less than a month after the majority leader and other House and Senate voucher advocates formed a pro-voucher PIC, shows Bramble was using a state agency for political purposes, Smith said.
...

Bramble said he withheld permission to release the research because he felt the GRAMA process should be followed. "I don't know what the unintended consequences would be of waiving the standard for what is a public record."

If it's taxpayer-funded, doesn't that make it a public record? Or is it just funded by public dollars but intended for select individuals' personal or private use, like a school voucher?

Getting back to Oreo cookie logic, Gwendolyn Wilson of Sandy questions it in a letter to the Trib on Saturday here (http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_7170276), writing, "I want to relate a story about my daughter's elementary school. Several years ago, her school eliminated one of five kindergarten teachers due to lower enrollment. As a result, this school had four classes of 25 kids each instead of five classes of 20 kids each. When I asked the principal why this happened he said that he was forced to reduce the number of teachers because the enrollment had dropped. He said that he had no choice according to the district funding rules."

Veteran classroom teacher (33 years!) Anne Stringham of Holladay had a similar reaction to the Oreo cookie commercial. She writes in her own letter to the Trib here (http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_7170273), "I am a visual learner, and as such, I tend to zero in on material that uses that learning channel. So, naturally, when the very incorrect data of the pro-voucher commercial I saw with Richard and Linda Eyre was placed before my eyes, those eyes did see red."

No doubt this is a hotbed of discussion with pending weeks to be filled with diatribes from both sides of the debate. However, to purposely televise faulty information in hopes of making your case is unethical. One would think that prominent individuals, especially those in the public spotlight, would choose to place their names (faces in this case) behind accurate data.

A student does not represent $7,000 on the weighted pupil unit calculation. That amount is much lower. Nor does removing one child from a classroom lower that room's class size. The district looks at the number of students enrolled and then determines how many full-time equivalent staff to allocate depending on the current designated ratio of teacher to student."

So much for the argument that vouchers will lower public school class sizes. Maybe this is what happens when we reduce education to a stack of Oreo cookies.

I think Jeff Harmon of Layton has identified the right questions AND the right answers in his letter to the DesNews here (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695218115,00.html):

I think the voucher issue comes down to three questions:
What is the problem that vouchers are supposed to address?
Will the Utah voucher legislations fix the problem?
Who will actually benefit from a Utah voucher system?

In my opinion, some well-meaning people have fallen for the statistical issues of per-pupil expenditure and class size without looking at the real determinant for school performance. Yes, Utah ranks very low in per-pupil expenditure and class size, but the state is ranked fourth or fifth in the nation for students who graduate and students who go on to college. Clearly, the Utah voucher legislation will not fix a problem that isn't there.

The most important question is "Who actually benefits from a voucher system?" And the answer is: Anyone who has a financial interest in private schools.

And that doesn't sit well with Dixie Allen of Vernal, who represents District 14 on the State Board of Education. She writes in the Trib last Friday here (http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_7163301), "If we truly wish to provide a quality education system for all students, can we trust that private industry and individual parents can and will provide the necessary funding to educate all students? Do parents trust that the private educational programs will accept their child, regardless of status, ability or special needs? There are many questions regarding funding, accountability and equality surrounding the voucher proposal. Do we trust it will be worth the tax dollars you provide?"

And which tax dollars are we talking about? Kenneth Bruner of Layton, writing to the Standard here (http://www.standard.net/live/opinion/letterstotheeditor/116129/), has caught onto Referendum 1's secret(s):

Referendum 1 isn't about choice, it's about who pays. During a time when we are seeing staggering increases in property taxes and shortfalls in health department and other critical service funding that needs to come from scarce tax dollars, we can't afford to pay for a family's personal choice. If you've read House Bills 148 and 174, you may be surprised to learn that vouchers will be paid out of general state tax revenues in the General Fund. They will not be paid from monies already allocated to educate these children in public schools as suggested by voucher proponents.
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This referendum is wrong on more levels than I could possibly describe in a mere 250 words. Would it bother you to know that nonresidents (legal and illegal) will be eligible for vouchers the day they move into Utah? How about providing vouchers to families who already have their children in private school (HB174 would provide immediate vouchers to a family of four with an income of $38,000)? A minimum $500 would be given to even the most affluent of families.

Emily, who wrote about the inaffordability of vouchers at the Amicus, caught it, too: "And yes, pro-voucher people, you are correct when you say that this money is not coming from the Education fund... it is coming from the General fund.. the very fund which pays for things like my husband's salary and our family's health insurance and other important things like road maintenance and prisons."

Col. John Smith, U.S. Army-Retired now living in Bountiful, gets it. "I'm just a blue-collar guy — a bricklayer and a contractor. I didn't even complete college," he writes here (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695217832,00.html). "But I know what a shell game is, and I can sniff out a con artist. Some people are telling me we'll fund our private-schools voucher plan out of the sales tax. They say that doesn't count because we're not going to touch the public schools' income tax. How dense do they think we are? That's a shell game. Common-sense voters know it's all taxpayer money. It all comes out of the same pocket. Maybe it also helps explain why we do the poorest job in the United States of funding our public schools."

Adam Bushman, a senior business major at Brigham Young University, and his wife Rachel, both lifelong Utahns and living in Provo, understand how vouchers would affect their lives and the lives of their children. They write at the BYU website here (http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/65726),

Referendum 1 claims to be the answer to the problem of “failing” public schools. The funny thing is, our schools won’t fail unless vouchers succeed. Referendum 1 gives scholarship money to parents who choose to save their children from those nasty “failing” public schools by putting them into private schools. Private schools and their teachers are not held to the same standards as public schools, and statistics show no significant difference in performance between publicly and privately educated children. Private schools are not proven to be of any better quality than the “failing” public schools.

But the real problem with Referendum 1 is that for every student that goes to private school, a public school loses funding. And every dollar that public schools lose is one dollar less they have to spend on insignificant extras such as teachers, computers, books, arts programs, and resources for ESL and disabled student populations. And then you’ve got a serious problem. After loss of funding to private schools, public schools really will become failing schools, and then we will face terrifying consequences.
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Most of us, despite our grand dreams of wealth and glory, will make moderate incomes and have billions of kids, and private schools will be a luxury we can’t afford, vouchers or no vouchers. The average private school in Utah costs $8,000/year/kid, and the average family (two kids and the median income) only qualifies for a $2000 voucher per kid. You can kiss Disneyland goodbye, because if vouchers pass, you’re going to need every extra cent to pay for your kids to learn how to read.

But future millionaires need not fear, because even making $150,000+ you’ll get $500 per kid to pay for their schooling. So the people who can already afford private school get free money anyway, and the people who can’t afford it don’t get enough to put it within reach. Ridiculous.

I agree. It's ridiculous.

I began with a simple 'yes' or 'no' question: Is the voucher plan affordable to Utah?

A wise lady once taught me that 'yes' or 'no' questions are deceptively easy, not deceptively hard. The question is simple, and the answer can be simple too. If facts don't immediately let you say 'yes,' then it's likely that the answer is 'no.' I tried to reason my way to a clever middle ground, as if it matters more who's asking the question, or who's offering the facts that lead to the answer. But as I've aged, I've returned many times to her wise counsel and found things to be just as she explained.

This question is no different. Is this voucher plan affordable to Utah? If the answer isn't instantly 'yes,' then it must be 'no.'

Isn't it illegal to buy votes in Utah?

It is hard to write about this topic today. It seems like good people have been bombarded with the worst kind of political dirty tricks imaginable now for the past four or five months. This isn't the way Utah really is. And I hope that the real Utah can still be salvaged when this campaign by Parents for Choice in Education is over, when their money from All Children Matter in Michigan is all spent, when their money from the secret donors from Missouri and elsewhere in the county is run out, and when their political operatives and opportunitists have gone back to wherever they came from. They have dragged good people through a nasty political mess unnecessarily and I'll be glad to see them close up shop on November 7.

Here's why I write this. Either Parents for Choice in Education and the people they've hired with their out-of-state money are incredibly, incredibly stupid -- and I use these words carefully, and purposefully -- or they are incredibly, incredibly ignorant of how to persuade Utahns that their voucher referendum is a good idea. Not once have they told Utah voters what their referendum says, spelled it out line by line and explained why they propose the details that they propose. Tiffany Erickson of the DesNews wrote this morning here (http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695217976,00.html), "Compounding the problem is that voters don't have a lot of facts."

When she asked the director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics about it, he said "voucher supporters, at this point, are going to have difficulty securing the votes needed to implement the law."

Which is probably why they've bombarded people in their homes with nasty push-polling on the telephone, bombarded them on television with commercials about Ted Kennedy, bombarded them on the Internet with emails from fake websites. Now, worst of all, PCE is advertising to pay people to vote.

The evidence is posted at Utah Amicus here (http://utahamicus.blogspot.com/2007/10/30-pieces-of-pce-silver.html). So is a "retraction" that sounds like they regret being caught more than they regret adopting a truly stupid -- and probably illegal -- election strategy. Like I said, this is not the way good people behave, and I'll be glad when they go back home and take their bad ideas with them.

Here's the post:

The following letter was sent out by The Free Capitalist Project:

Help the School Voucher Campaign!

Parents for Choice in Education is conducting a “Friends and Family” campaign during these last few weeks before the Nov. 6 special election. We need you to help us to get as many people as possible out to vote for Referendum 1!

We are looking for the following information/qualifications of each person who signs up:

Must provide Name, Address, Phone Number(s), and e-mail address

Must be a registered voter (deadline for mail-in registration is Oct. 9)

Must be willing to put up a yard sign (or equivalent)

Must commit to voting for Referendum 1 on Nov. 6 (or prior via absentee ballot)

If you are motivated and have a desire to help this campaign succeed, as well as earn a little money in the process, you can sign up with Parents for Choice in Education to become an “advocate”. As an advocate, you agree to seek out your friends and family and solicit their commitment for this important cause. In addition, if you provide your field manager with a minimum of 25 names of persons who have committed to voting for Referendum 1, and those persons actually vote, you can earn $10 per person. That’s $250 [30 pieces of silver] for the 25 names, plus an additional $10 for every name after that. (Side note: All yard signs will be provided by Parents for Choice in Education through their Field Managers.)

Brandon Dupuis
Field Manager, Northern Utah
Parents for Choice in Education
E-mail: bkdupuis@gmail.com

Jim Speth
Field Manager, Southern Utah
Parents for Choice in Education
E-mail: lovedagny@passport.com

So any enterprising family who wants to earn spending money can sign up one of its members as PCE "advocate," vote on Election Day and go have dinner on PCE's tab, thanks to Brandon Dupuis, Jim Speth and the Free Capitalist Project.

And here's who's behind the "Free Capitalist Project" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Capitalist_Project):

Founded by Claud R. Koerber in 2004[6] the Free Capitalist Project held its first public event in Las Vegas, NV in November 2005...

The foundation of the FCP grows out of Koerber's personal search for prosperity. He filed for bankruptcy in 2001 amid financial failure in connection with his business globalcentral.com.

The first Free Capitalist Forum was organized in St. George, UT in early 2006...

The organization's official headquarters address is Washington D.C., while the main office staff is located in Provo, UT.

The highest concentration of members currently exists in the Rocky Mountain region of the USA. Effective August 2007, members meet in local "Free Enterprise Forums" that typically meet on Thursday nights. Members are not required to pay a membership fee, however following the one hour Thursday night Free Enterprise Forum meetings, the FCP holds "Prosperity Quest Study Group" sessions which are open only to FCP members who have become "Free Capitalist Apprentice Members" which includes the requirement to have paid a $250 fee and a $30 month fee.

The free Capitalist Project has established both national and local agendas for civic service. A few notable examples of the national Free Capitalist Project's civic service record include:
--Voter Awareness and Support Event for Mayor Rudy Giuliani August 08, 2007.
--Key Support for Milton Friedman's vision of School Choice, via the Utah Universal Voucher Law.

This is the same Rick Koerber who has given more PAC contributions to PCE than any other individual except Patrick Byrne, as I showed here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html#7547982243280633563) and here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html#2589682112043767447).

At the same page where Utah Amicus has posted this letter offering payment for voting, Amicus has posted a "retraction" it received in email.

We apologize for the previous email that was sent out this afternoon regarding the voucher election and recruiting advocates. It was simply incorrect and misrepresents the Free Capitalist Projects' grass roots efforts. Neither Parents for Choice in Education nor the Free Capitalist Project will ever provide incentives that appear to pay people to vote. The earlier email was sent by determined and sincere individuals who are working diligently, but the Free Capitalist Project and Parents for Choice in Education did not approve, authorize or see the email in advance. We are sorry for the miscommunication. We treasure our form of government and encourage all of you to inform and educate your friends, family and neighbors about school choice and what it means to improve our public schools and Utah's education system.

In its note following the "retraction," Amicus makes what I think is a good point.

This must have been “world’s shortest vote-buying campaign ever” and it is just another example in a long line of dirty tricks. Both PCE and Free Capitalist obviously had to know about the e-mail. No one at Free Capitalist would put PCE’s name to an e-mail without discussing it with them first. If this were not the case, we would expect to hear from PCE denying any involvement in the e-mail.

The retraction doesn't discuss holding the perpetrators responsible. Quite the opposite…they actually seem to be praising the “determined and sincere” vote-peddlers who are “working diligently.” At least they admit it wasn't a prank – just people passionate to inject “market incentives” into our democracy. It works for fast food, and the Utah Legislature – why shouldn't it work for votes, too?

“We are sorry for the miscommunication?” How about – “We were shocked to see an e-mail from our servers that encourage people to buy votes. We found the individuals responsible and they no longer work for Free Capitalist Radio. We're so sorry for this terrible mistake…” But no, the people still have their jobs, they are “determined and sincere,” and “diligent” workers. And in spite of this self-righteous hubris they couldn't help but include, in the *retraction* mind you, yet another unrestrained “vote for vouchers” pitch.

So far, only Ms. Erickson at the DesNews and Paul Rolly at the Trib have taken notice. In Ms. Erickson's report here (http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,695217972,00.html), PCE denied any involvement with the group founded by their second-largest individual contributor. Mr. Koerber first blamed it on a "volunteer," then acknowledged that the volunteer's bigger mistake was sending the email to a broader email list, not just to his Free Capitalist Project members.

Koerber said it was supposed to go to only Free Capitalist supporters but instead went to a broader list.

Mr. Rolly's report went a little further here (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7155888):

With polls showing overwhelming numbers of voters poised to repeal the voucher law that was passed by the Legislature last winter, voucher advocates got so desperate Thursday they sent an e-mail from the FreeCapitalist Project offering money for pro-voucher votes in next month's referendum election.

But then someone must have let them know it usually is considered illegal to buy votes, so they sent a second e-mail several hours later retracting everything they said in the first e-mail.

The original e-mail said Parents for Choice in Education is conducting a "Friends and Family" campaign in which "advocates" are encouraged to sign up friends and relatives who commit to voting in favor of the voucher law in next month's referendum election. If the advocate provides his or her field manager with 25 names committed to voting for vouchers and they actually vote, the advocate gets $10 per person, or $250 for the 25 names, the e-mail said. Plus, the advocate will get $10 for each voter they get beyond the 25.
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So, as the old saying goes (a bit amended): If you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with a bribe.

Where are taxpayers' true facts?

You know, maybe I shouldn't be amazed to hear and read the pure hogwash that the Utah Taxpayers Association distributes. After all, we all know people who believe what they believe, without regard for true facts, real figures and objective data. Since deciding to write about this topic several weeks ago, I have begged for authorities on school vouchers and House Bill 148 to give me true facts, real figures and objective data. I've still seen none from the sponsors of Referendum 1, and the best that the UTA has to offer is more of the same stale cookie dough. Their October newsletter doesn't pass the smell test.

They write

Whenever vouchers are debated, opponents trot out a litany of misleading, inaccurate and outright false statements designed to scare people away from parental choice. The current debate over Referendum 1 is no different. To make sure you have the facts, here is a candid assessment of common false claims voucher opponents make.

Okay, this sounds like a great start. With an introduction like that, I'm hooked and looking forward to nothing but the facts -- weighed, measured and marked for sale. But what I get is what I've already read from the Parents for Choice in Education's website.

UTA says that publicly-funded vouchers won't "drain funds from Utah schools." A bay mare has more sense than that. If Utah has only so many public dollars to spend, and it chooses to spend some of those dollars on vouchers, then it has to cut the number of dollars it spends on something else. Are lawmakers going to cut the number of dollars they spend on law enforcement? Emergency services? Roads? Bridges? Medicaid? If the answer is no, then they're going to have to take money from public schools, like it or not, sooner or later. And if public school enrollment has dropped, then they'll say they're being better stewards of the public treasury for "trimming the fat" from wasteful public schools.

Then UTA writes that when students leave public schools, the level of funding to those schools remains the same:

When a student (or a lot of students) leaves, state law requires that the same amount of money be spread among fewer students. Vouchers work the same way. Instead of paying $7,500 per student, the state would educate those students who switch to private schools at a maximum cost of $3,000 per student. The savings ($7,500 minus $3,000) is used to educate the remaining students and increases per student spending.

I wish my household budget worked that way: The more I spent on things I've never had to pay for, the more money I'd have left to spend on the things I'm always used my money for. Does that make sense to anyone?

Here are two true facts, back to back: Today, Utah taxpayers invest in Utah's public schools, and the children who attend private schools cost Utah taxpayers nothing. If Referendum 1 is adopted, Utah taxpayers will continue to invest, eventually at a lower level, in Utah's public schools, and the children who attend private schools will cost Utah taxpayers several thousands of dollars per year.

And here's a third true fact to go with the first two: Children who already attend private schools and cost Utah taxpayers nothing today WILL begin to cost Utah taxpayers several thousands of dollars a year, as the voucher program is "phased in."

If any of these three true facts is NOT true, I would like for UTA or anyone else to show me how it isn't true. And I would happily post whatever they send me that demonstrates that point.

As for the question about students leaving the the money staying the same, that claim may persuade some people, but some other people know that schools -- all public school in Utah -- are funded according to their student enrollments. How can we be sure of that? Ask yourself this: Do you know of a single school with 500 students enrolled in it that gets the same amount of funding as a school that has 1,500 students enrolled in it? If you don't, do you understand why they are funded at different levels? It's because their student enrollment is different. Fewer students equals fewer dollars. It's common sense and simple math. All this talk about "Oreo cookies" is just that: sweet feed.

You know what increases per-student spending in Utah? A vote of the legislature, when the legislature votes to increase per-student spending. A voucher can't vote to increase per-student spending. People who believe that using vouchers will increase per-student spending will believe a lot of things, and many of those things will be false.

UTA writes,

Opponents say private school vouchers are a parallel system. Everyone else calls it competition.

People understand what competition is. Put two schools, evenly matched, giving no advantage to either, side by side in a match to test academic prowess, or athletic prowess, or school spirit, or any other thing that can be measured by such a test.

But vouchers don't do that. Vouchers use public funds -- funds that otherwise would be spent on public services -- to give parents an incentive to move their children to private schools. OR, ultimately, vouchers use public funds to pay for the private school tuition of children who are already attending private schools today. Did you know House Bill 148 did that? It says so in the bill.

If we give public dollars to one school and hold it accountable to earn accreditation by a regional or national agency, but we give public dollars to another school without requiring it to have any accreditation at all, are we using public dollars to foster competition?

If we give public dollars to one school and hold it accountable for ensuring that all of its instructors have college degrees and are licensed to teach there, but we give public dollars to another school while allowing it to hire people without any college degrees, and without any licenses or other credentials, are we using public dollars to foster competition?

And if we give public dollars to one school and hold it accountable for meeting state and federal standards for curriculum and testing, but we give public dollars to another school without holding it accountable for any standards whatsoever, at any level, for curriculum or testing, are we using public dollars to foster competition?

The answer to all three of these questions is the same: No. When we take public dollars away from public services and give them to private enterprise through a voucher, we harm all of our people in order to reward a few of our people. And for what does House Bill 148 propose to reward them? For moving their children from public schools to private schools.

Then UTA falls back on some of the oldest anti-education rhetoric ever used. After several Utah Republicans have written in the past couple of weeks that they oppose vouchers because they represent a new "entitlement" or subsidy, UTA writes,

Public education itself is a subsidy. The fundamental premise behind public education is to require wealthy taxpayers to subsidize the education of all other taxpayers. Vouchers are a smaller subsidy than the existing public education subsidy ($3,000 maximum voucher, instead of $7,500 for a public school student). This conservative estimate includes facility construction and interest payments, which voucher opponents do not include.

That's patently false, and any regular history textbook shows it. In fact, the fundamental premise behind public education is to allow ALL taxpayers to invest in the economic health and future well-being of their whole community -- and state, and nation -- by providing an education system that is open and available to all of its citizens' children, not merely the children of those who could afford to hire tutors. That's the engine, begun at the turn of the last century, that drove economic and social and political and educational progress for the entire nation and made America the greatest nation in the world through the twentieth century.

Yet, UTA suggests that vouchers would not be a "subsidy" for private industry. I don't disagree at all that we as taxpayers pay for a host of subsidies that provide for a common good -- they give our poorest and least-capable citizens a kind of safety net. And if we didn't do that, would we really be upholding our mission of faith? But to say that vouchers are NOT a subsidy is silly. Any time we make public dollars available for services provided by the private sector, taxpayers are subsidizing the cost of -- of what? -- of having that service provided by employees in the public sector, who are subject to public accountability.

When asked if voucher schools would be allowed to "teach radical ideologies or extremist religions," UTA's answer is laughable. They write,

Not a single witch, terrorist, racist or polygamist school has opened. As the classic Wendy’s ad said, “Where’s the beef?”

The beef is self-evident: What you don't prevent from happening, you allow to happen. It's why some parents don't let some teenagers to have unsupervised sleepovers with others. Accidents don't happen until they happen. Extremist schools don't open until they get the necessary building permits and open their doors for business. And when they do, all they have to do is demonstrate fiscally sound management, and they can become "voucher-eligible." To ignore those facts is to play the ostrich.

And that's another true fact: The only accountability that a voucher school has to the State Board of Education is to demonstrate fiscal soundness through a simple audit. But to hear UTA explain it, that audit is equal to all of the rigor and examination that public schools are accountable to undergo every day, every year, because the public demands it. UTA writes,

Utah’s voucher law requires that private schools who accept a voucher must pass exacting audit requirements before they can receive a single dollar in voucher funds, and must continue to pass the same audit requirements.

Audits are not equal to standardized tests, which are what hold public schools accountable for their public funds.

And UTA sidesteps the question of which students voucher schools must enroll, and which students they can exclude.

"Nearly all private schools have open enrollment policies," UTA writes. Sure they do. And they are still able to turn away an applicant from their doors. What about special needs children? "Currently, 40 private schools already participate in the Carson Smith program," which pays voucher schools to enroll special needs children. That's 40 schools out of 138 in Utah. Do you know where is the one nearest to you?

Does Washington show us Utah's future?

A report in today's Washington Post says that the small voucher program funded by the federal government in Washington, D.C., is putting schoolchildren at risk there. I'm not unfairly describing the article; the headline reads, "Voucher Program Puts D.C. Kids at Risk, Study Says." And the study was conducted not by a "think tank" but by the federal government itself, the U.S. General Accounting Office.

It is apparently important to the federal government, which funded the small program in the nation's capital, that private school teachers in Washington, D.C., at least have bachelor's degrees and that the schools themselves be accredited by a respectable accrediting agency. Neither of those things is true of the Utah voucher plan, as I've already mentioned here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#2927554735439584254) and here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html#2477270079017466782).

It's important enough to the U.S. General Accounting Office that the office has issued a draft report saying that some voucher students are being sent to "unsuitable learning environments." (I wonder if the GAO would call any of Utah's private schools an "unsuitable learning environment" if the referendum passes in November?) On top of it, the GAO report says the Washington, D.C. program -- which, like House Bill 148, uses the word "scholarship" instead of "voucher" -- "lacks financial controls." I suppose that's Washington jargon that means the private schools aren't being as financially accountable as traditional public schools in managing their public resources.

The article by reporter Theola Labbe is found here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/10/AR2007101002529.html?hpid=topnews). Ms. Labbe writes,

A voucher program designed to send low-income children in the District to better-performing private schools has allowed some students to take classes in unsuitable learning environments and from teachers without bachelor's degrees, according to a government report. The shortcomings are detailed in a draft prepared by the Government Accountability Office about the $12.9 million D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. The GAO said the program lacks financial controls and has failed to check whether the participating schools were accredited.

Ms. Labbe says the four-year-old program includes 1,900 students and 58 participating private schools. Since the Sutherland Institute has identified only 88 private schools in Utah that are "voucher-eligible," Referendum 1's voucher plan is potentially bigger than the Washington, D.C. program.

I noticed that the program in Washington now four years old. But as I mentioned here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#4426877382633871027), House Bill 148 holds off until after the voucher plan is in place in Utah for five years before allowing any review to be done:

"Section 11" promises that the legislative auditor general will review and report on the voucher plan "after the conclusion of the 2013-14 school year." This means that even the least effective private schools -- without any of the same public accountability or oversight that lawmakers enjoy to govern public education -- will continue to receive publicly-funded vouchers for five years, so long as they sign the affadavit pledging to comply with the law's thin "requirements," until and unless the legislative auditor general disqualifies the plan or that specific private school at the end of that five-year period.

Ms. Labbe's report suggests that the private schools themselves and the entity "overseeing" the program didn't tell the whole truth about what they were schools were doing and the "oversight" agency was seeing. The private schools accepted public funds without getting the necessary permits to operate, she says:

...in the District, the report says, instead of giving poor children access to better learning environments, program officials put children at risk by failing to certify whether all of the participating schools had the required operating permits.

In a random sample of 18 schools reviewed by the GAO, two lacked occupancy permits, and four lacked permits needed for buildings used for educational purposes. At least seven of the 18 schools were certified as child development centers but not as private schools. In one case, a school was operating in a space designed for a retail store, the report says.

And it looks like the private schools were only accountable to themselves, not to any public agency, to show they were accredited and "in compliance" with expectations.

The schools were largely allowed to self-report that they were in compliance with city regulations, the report says, increasing the possibility that students were being ill-served without proper oversight. "Self-certification without review to verify that the certifications are factual increases the risk that federal funds intended to allow children from low-income families to attend private schools will result in some students attending schools that are not in compliance with the District law," the report says.

We might say these schools weren't being fully accountable, but we also have to say that someone, somewhere, wasn't telling the whole truth, according to Ms. Labbe's report.

We might start with the name of the program, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, and the entity that oversees it, the Washington Scholarship Fund. As I mentioned here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#1285319116098397573), vouchers aren't scholarships, because scholarships are awards given to students who have reached a level of academic achievement and want to continue their education. Vouchers are public-funded checks to private schools. So when we begin an enterprise with a lie, we invite more lies to follow. And it looks like they did, in the case of the Washington voucher program.

The Washington Scholarship Fund, which operates the program under a contract with the U.S. Department of Education, told GAO investigators that it conducted site visits at 42 schools, but the GAO could confirm a visit to only one school.

Some schools told fund officials that they had certain amenities, such as a gymnasium or an auditorium; the report says they did not. Parents might have been misled when they reviewed the list of participating schools and their programs, the report says.

Now, when faced with the objective data, the administrators of the voucher program say they didn't have the power to enforce compliance.

Gregory M. Cork, president and chief executive of the fund, said it has no capacity to enforce whether private schools comply with D.C. laws.

"We're not a government oversight agency," Cork said. "We report the characteristics of schools as they report them to us. Occasionally, a school might fill in the wrong blank. What we do take seriously is to match our families with the schools they choose and the learning environments that are best for their children."

I would ask whether House Bill 148 gives "enforcement authority" to any entity to govern the Utah plan, but I know there are so few measures in it that require compliance or accountability that it would be a foolish question.

Interestingly, it looks like some people at the U.S. Department of Education who support voucher systems intend to "revise" this GAO report before it's released officially. I don't know for sure, but I suspect "revise" means "take out the worst of the negative news."

Samara Yudof, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said the report could be revised before it becomes final. She also said it "presents an incomplete picture" of the program.

If Ms. Labbe's reporting is accurate, then a lot about the Washington voucher program is incomplete, not just the picture of its accountability. The private schools' compliance with the law seems incomplete, their permits seem incomplete, the educational credentials of their teachers seem incomplete, and their "financial controls" seems incomplete. The only thing that seems complete is the $12.9 million that the federal government has already spent on vouchers there.

Why does $12 million sound familiar to me?

At least the city administrators of Washington, D.C. have recognized a problem and are mobilizing to understand, explain and make changes to correct it.

D.C. State Superintendent Deborah A. Gist said in a statement that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) has designated her office to assume oversight of the program. Gist said she will assign staffers to the task. "We will aggressively move to ensure that our students are adequately served," Gist said in a statement. Victor Reinoso, deputy mayor for education, said yesterday that the administration is preparing a response to the draft report.

If Referendum 1 is adopted, should someone begin to identify the administrators who will recognize problems, understand and explain them, and make changes to correct them?

Then why should taxes pay for vouchers?

Apparently, parent involvement matters more to a "low-income, urban" child's academic achievement than whether she attends a private school or public school, according to a study reported today in USA Today. If this is true, then it means the sponsors of House Bill 148 were fundamentally wrong in drafting and promoting their universal statewide voucher plan for Utah schoolchildren. There really is no evidence that children in poor families would excel in private schools just because they're private schools.

Reporter Greg Toppo says here (http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-10-09-public-private_N.htm) the study by the Center on Education Policy "examine[d] 12 years of data on more than 1,000 young people and [found] that they didn't get much of an advantage by attending private schools."

I suspect that Paul Mero and the Sutherland Institute is already working on a response to say that USA Today is wrong, or that the 12 years of data was misinterpreted, or that the researchers picked the 1,000 kids to get the result they wanted. But unless Mr. Mero is able to prove those charges, I'm happy that someone has finally generated conclusions from clear, objective facts.

Though the SAT scores of students in private schools were higher than the scores of their public-school peers, their overall performance in math, reading, science and history was no better. They were no more likely to go to college or be more satisfied with their job at age 26 - they weren't even more likely to be civic-minded as adults. "This certainly will challenge people in the presumptions that private schools are superior to public schools," says Jack Jennings, the center's president.

The study backs up findings saying that the differences between urban public and private schools are small - and often too small to measure. It also suggests that forcing public and private schools to compete through taxpayer-financed vouchers is merely a "diversion" from a more substantial education debate, Jennings says.

In the end, Jennings says, the biggest factors were how much money parents earned, whether they were involved in day-to-day schoolwork and what their long-term expectations were. "There may be ways to improve schools," he says, "but we have to be very conscious of what parents bring to schools."

I've always believe that was common sense, but it's helpful to have it spelled out in facts and figures, too. I found the whole report and a summary of it, and the press release announcing its finding, here (but it's a PDF file, so I can't cut and paste it): http://www.cep-dc.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=document.showDocumentByID&nodeID=1&DocumentID=226. Enjoy.

Are vouchers "good welfare policy"?

Is Paul Mero of the Sutherland Institute right, that the voucher plan is just "good welfare policy"? This is what he wrote last week at Utah Amicus, responding to Megan Risbon's concerns as a single mother questioning the affordability of private schools, even ones that would accept public-funded vouchers (http://utdems.blogspot.com/2007/10/who-exactly-is-supposed-to-benefit-from.html):

One beautiful aspect of this new law is that it does require some sacrifice (sometimes very significant sacrifices) and that is good welfare policy...and that is what this bill is "supplemental income."

Well, I'd never heard anyone call the voucher plan a "welfare policy," or "supplemental income" for that matter, so I googled "school vouchers" and "welfare" and was surprised to find out that, yes, a lot of traditional conservatives consider public-funded private school vouchers to be a form of welfare -- which is why they oppose public-funded private school vouchers.

How is it that traditional conservatives and Mr. Mero use the same word to describe public-funded private school vouchers, yet traditional conservative oppose them and Mr. Mero supports them?

I only scanned the first several pages of google search results but here's a sample of what I found, going all the way back to 1998, in an article by Michael Chapman in Investors Business Daily, found here (http://www.mises.org/story/6):

"The inability to pick and choose among students...is one of the reasons public schools are in trouble," said Lew Rockwell, director of the free-market Ludwig von Mises Institute. "Apply the same rule to private schools, and you go a long way toward making them carbon copies of the schools so many are anxious to flee."

Also, the voucher money doesn't go to kids of "middle-class people who actually pay the taxes that support the public schools," Rockwell said. Instead, it goes only to "those the government defines as 'poor.'"

That group already gets big subsidies for health care, housing, day care and food. "Vouchers represent not a shrinkage of this welfare state but an expansion, the equivalent of food stamps for private school," Rockwell said.
...
"A voucher is a wealth-transfer scheme that takes money from the haves and gives it to the have-nots...by the force of taxation," said Marshall Fritz, head of the Fresno, Calif.-based Separation of School & State Alliance. "The name for that is welfare."

Sheldon Richman, an author who has written extensively on school choice issues, agrees. He notes support for voucher programs is often couched in terms of "social justice."

"Poor people don't have the same choices in cars or country clubs or restaurants," Richman said. "Should we have vouchers across the board? All of a sudden they're egalitarian."

One person adopted Mr. Mero's position, however, regardless of the traditional conservative opposition to welfare: economist Milton Friedman. Mr. Friedman told the magazine, "I prefer unrestricted, universal vouchers."

Mr. Friedman wrote a commentary in the Wall Street Journal in 2000 about his support for a voucher plan being considered that year by voters in California. He wrote there, “What is needed for a truly competitive educational industry is an unrestricted voucher of substantial size” that would “cover all students in the state.”

But President Jacob Hornberger of The Future of Freedom Foundation disagreed loudly, writing here (http://www.fff.org/comment/ed1000e.asp), "If proponents of school vouchers get their way, Americans might well be permanently saddled with one of the most massive government welfare programs in history. What began many years ago as a modest proposal to help those on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder with their educational needs now threatens to encompass every child in America." Mr. Hornberger called the California voucher idea "another giant welfare scheme."

He went further, writing,

And a truly free market would entail the end of all state involvement in education, including the termination of the educational welfare program known as vouchers.

School vouchers operate the way all welfare programs do, that is, by using the state’s taxing powers to take money from those to whom it belongs and distributing it to people to whom it does not belong. Of course, we have become so accustomed to this process that we rarely ask a fundamentally important question: Where is the morality in all this? Why shouldn’t parents bear the responsibility for the education of their own children?

Voucher proponents, of course, are free to call for any welfare scheme they wish, but don’t truth-in-advertising and intellectual honesty dictate that they not describe vouchers as a free-market solution to education? After all, how in the world can a system that is based on coercive redistribution of wealth, compulsory school-attendance laws, school taxes, state licensure and regulation of schools, and a voucher tax-and-welfare scheme be reconciled with principles of the free market?

The separation of school and state through the repeal of compulsory-attendance laws, school taxes, and educational welfare would be infinitely superior to the multitude of voucher schemes that are being proposed all over the nation. Not only would educational liberty be consistent with fundamental moral principles, it also would help us restore America’s heritage of individual liberty and free markets.

Two years later, President Lew Rockwell of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, complained about a voucher plan for Ohio here (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/voucher2.html), saying,

In other words, the people who do not pay the bulk of the taxes – most Ohio schools are funded largely via property taxes – are getting the bulk of the benefits, while those who do pay the taxes are ineligible for the benefits. If the middle and upper-middle class want to send their children to private schools, they must shell out twice: once for public schools for everyone else and once again for the schools they actually use. Meanwhile, the poor are not only not paying into the public-school system, but now receive a direct cash transfer from those who do pay into the system. In other words, it’s welfare.

But Rockwell is a Libertarian, he says, which must be different from a traditional conservative, yet his position against vouchers is the same as theirs:

This correct position for a libertarian is clear: 1. Deregulate schooling and permit every kind and variety, without compulsory attendance laws; 2. Reduce or eliminate taxes that fund schools; 3. Remove your children from the public schools, the sooner the better, but do it at your own expense. Vouchers do none of the above.

On January 1, 2003, another Libertarian named J.H. Huebert of the University of Chicago Law School agreed with traditional conservatives in opposing vouchers, too, saying, "If they fully examined the bigger picture, voucher advocates would see that vouchers are not appropriate, and will destroy any 'school choice' we already have."

I don't know enough about the differences between Libertarians and traditional conservatives to understand how so many of them can agree on most issues but still be two separate political groups. It must be that there are extreme groups inside each one that are so far away from the middle ground that they bump into each other. But this much seems clear to me: however they get around to their opposition of vouchers, the majority of both groups have some philosophical reason to oppose them. Huebert, for example, wrote here (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/huebert3.html),

I’ve found that when voucher advocates are confronted with this possibility – that government money will result in a loss of independence for private schools – they tend to agree that this is something we should be concerned about, and then they kind of shrug it off and hope for the best, apparently naively trusting that, just this once, government will restrain itself and not ruin everything.

At this point, libertarians who thought vouchers were about liberty should really be scratching their heads. Why would a libertarian ever want to go to court to convince the government that it should force taxpayers to pay for something they weren’t previously forced to pay for? How can forcing people, against their will, to pay for new things – that have nothing to do with the proper role of a "limited" government – be a step in the right direction? That isn’t libertarian; instead, it’s a goose step in the opposite direction.

In March, 2003, Ari Armstrong of Colorado wrote an article here (http://www.freecolorado.com/2003/03/vouchers.html) called "Vouchers May Entrench the Welfare State." In it, Mr. Armstrong declares, "Government programs almost always expand. Over time, the controls over currently market schools are likely to become more restrictive. Also, as vouchers expand and offer education welfare to the families of students who now finance education independently, the effect will be to further entrench the welfare state."

Pensacola Junior College instructor Laurence Vance agreed in February 2005, writing here (http://www.mises.org/story/1726) in an article called "Vouchers: Another Income Redistribution Scheme," Vance quotes Libertarian Ludwig von Mises: "There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes."

He explains,

To those parents who would use vouchers to send their children to a private school, vouchers do seem like they empower parents and provide educational freedom. But vouchers are not about educational freedom, they are an income transfer program from the "rich" to the poor. [Clint] Bolick even admits that vouchers are "a form of income redistribution."

But considering the state of public education in America, aren't vouchers a step in the right direction? Aren't they better than doing nothing? To the contrary—vouchers will make the present system worse. Rather than increasing educational opportunity, vouchers will increase the government's grip on education, increase the costs of education, increase people's dependency on the state, and increase the overall power of the state.
...
Vouchers are an income transfer program in two respects. Not only will people be forced to pay for the education of other people's children, voucher dollars will be an additional tax burden. Voucher proposals never advocate any reduction in funding for public schools to pay for them. The state may eventually embrace vouchers if it can use them to its own advantage to foster increased dependency on the state. With a voucher system, both parents and children will look to the state for educational services more so than they do now.

Finally, a December 2005 article in Reason magazine, found here (http://www.reason.com/news/show/36332.html), asks several leading conservative thinkers about school vouchers and welfare.

President Marshall Fritz of the Alliance for the Separation of School & State wrote,

Tax-funded school vouchers are the biggest obstacle to improving education. They will again trick parents into believing school improvement is just around the corner. They could delay return to a genuine free market by a generation or more. Vouchers replace today's monopoly with a "monopsony" (single buyer). Schools will have only one customer to serve--and it's not you. Follow the money.

As Douglas Dewey once asked, "How is moving from 88 percent of the school population in dependency to nearly 100 percent a good first step toward zero percent? What possibly could motivate edu-welfare parents to demand a lower and lower voucher?" The cost of vouchers is exorbitant: converting virtually all of today's 27,000 independent schools into "public school look-alikes" whose competition will be merely grubbing for government bucks.

And Mr. Hornberger, quoted again, says that people "lack confidence that the market will work successfully with education."

Unfortunately, as well-meaning as they might be, voucher proponents reinforce that lack of trust. If they truly believe that a free market in education would succeed, why would they feel the need to advocate welfare, which is what vouchers are, as a way to get there?

So, based on these comments, I would conclude that Mr. Mero holds the view that a lot of traditional conservatives and Libertarians hold: that public-funded private school vouchers are "welfare." But I would also conclude that most traditional conservatives and Libertarians oppose welfare AND oppose public-funded school vouchers, which leaves Mr. Mero and the Sutherland Institute, and the sponsors of House Bill 148, somewhere on the extreme fringe of their own political ideology.

Now, I'd like to figure out whether or not Mr. Mero is right in saying that public-funded private school vouchers are "supplemental income." If it is, it's subject to state and federal taxes, so that's important to understand, too.

Is this realistic for Utah families?

For today, I probably should rename my weblog "Accessibility First," because I pulled out an old link to a Trib article that included a map of private schools in Utah. It reminded me that there are only 138 private schools in the whole state, and the vast majority of them are located in clusters along I-15 from Ogden through Salt Lake City to Provo. (You can see the map again here http://www.sltrib.com//ci_5060104.)

The caption in the map explains where the rest of them are. St. George and Park City have four each; Brigham City, Escalante, Hurricane, Koosharem and Logan have only two each. And the rest of these cities, towns and communities have only one each: Castle Valley, Cedar City, Erda, Helper, Kanab, La Verkin, Moa, Manti, Monroe, Montezuma Creek, Monument Valley, Mount Pleasant, Oakley, Roosevelt, Tooele and Toquerville. If 34 private schools are scattered across the rest of Utah, that means 104 are congregated along that stretch of I-15 from Ogden in the north to Provo (well, technically, Spanish Fork) in the south.

That raises a question for me. If I'm one of the many parents who live well outside the developed part of the Wasatch Front, and I pay taxes that are used under House Bill 148 to pay for private school vouchers, how would I get the benefit of my tax dollars? Assume, for just a minute, that I qualified for even the maximum amount under the voucher plan, $3,000, and that I wanted to send my daughter to a private school. But then say I lived 60 or 80 or 100 miles from the nearest one. Would I get the same benefit from my tax dollars under the voucher plan as someone who lives in Salt Lake City?

I think that the simplest answer is, No. In order to get the benefit of my tax dollars, I'd have to sell my home in rural Utah -- in this housing market -- moved to one of the larger cities or towns, and then buy a home that I could afford with the proceeds from my old house. And then, even if I qualified for the maximum voucher amount, I'd still have to pay for transportation to and from the private school every day. How many of our parents in distant communities could afford to -- or would want to -- do all of that? I think that the answer to this question is simple, too: Most of those families that have wanted to leave their rural homes and move to the city have already done it. For the ones that haven't already, I don't understand how House Bill 148 helps them. It takes their tax dollars, gives them nothing in return, but transfers the money to a family in the developed parts of the Wasatch Front.

So, in essence, it really is wealth-redistribution. Except that in this case, it may be the wealthier citizens, living in cities and towns, who get the benefit of taxes paid by less-wealthy citizens living in rural areas. That's the opposite of Robin Hood's kind of wealth-redistribution.

And all of this assumes that every private school will accept vouchers, which isn't a safe assumption because it's already been reported that several won't. (Does anyone have a list of the private schools who have said they will or won't accept vouchers? I thought I'd seen one printed somewhere, or at least some were mentioned in a news article, but I can't find any such list now. If you have one, please let me know where to find it.)

And secondly, it assumes that even a maximum-amount voucher will be sufficient to cover the cost of private school tuition. Several bloggers have already written on this topic. Oldenburg at Third Avenue told us here (http://3rdave.blogspot.com/2007/10/utahns-say-no-to-vouchers.html) that tuition to Rowland Hall-St. Mark's is now $14,710 a year (and more for the senior year), and I suspect it doesn't cover transportation:

I went to a private school (Rowland Hall-St. Mark's) from 5-PreK to grade 12, and it was great for me and my ADD with the small class sizes. But RHSM's current tuition is $14,710 for grades 6-11 ($15,040 for 12th because of graduation expenses) and $12,450 for full day kindergarten to 5th grade. That to me seems unaffordable for those who would get the $3,000 voucher. Now maybe Rowland Hall is at high end, but it is also one of if not the best school in the state. And don't our children deserve the best.

I've asked the same thing, Oldenburg.

Bill Keshlear posted a note last week for single mother Megan Risbon, here (http://utdems.blogspot.com/2007/10/who-exactly-is-supposed-to-benefit-from.html):

According to the pro-voucher people at Sutherland Institute, the average cost of private school tuition in Utah is $4,250. That means my out-of-pocket expense for private school tuition would be $1,750. (Not to mention the other expenses of private schools, but more on that later) I don't know about you, but $1,750 is a lot of money! That would pay for half of my daughter’s health insurance for a year. (Another story for another time). Or even a car of my very own car. Or help me pay off some of my student loans.

None of this matters because after paying each month’s bills, I wouldn’t be able to pay the extra tuition anyway.

Voucher proponents paint these rosy, Never-never Land scenarios. They do not live in the world I live in. They never mention other fees associated with private schools: the registration fee, the activity fees, uniforms, and books. And on and on.

Oh, and let’s not forget about transportation. Most private schools don't have the capability to bus children to and from school. Please Mr. Voucher Man, how can I get my child to a private school across the county when I have to be at work at about the same time in the morning? Should I risk losing my job?

Luckily, there are several private schools in the Salt Lake City downtown area so it would not be much of a burden for my family. But what about those low-income families living miles from a private school or in rural Utah with no car or only one car between working parents? What about their so-called "choice."
...
Also, most low-income families are also working families. Both parents work outside the home. Families must come up with after-school child care regardless of whether their kids go to private or public schools. Unless children are supervised by a relative or close friend, child care costs money.
...
Voucher proponents say it's all about choice. Has anyone told them choices parents already exercise? My daughter attends a public school outside our neighborhood boundaries. It costs me $5.

Now, I cannot tell from his short note responding to Ms. Risbon's situation whether he was intentionally condescending to a single mother or if it just sounded a lot like it, but Paul Mero of the Sutherland Institute himself wrote that sacrifice "is good welfare policy."

So you can read it for yourself, I'll copy here exactly what Mr. Mero wrote on October 4:

I would be pleased to sit down with her and talk this through. Of course, she will know her finances and, more importantly, her priorities better than anyone. One beautiful aspect of this new law is that it does require some sacrifice (sometimes very significant sacrifices) and that is good welfare policy...and that is what this bill is "supplemental income."

Most private schools in Utah also provide their own scholarships and, for very low-income households, Children First Utah offers half tuition scholarships to help out. Hundreds of families already make this sacrifice and make it work for them without a voucher. The extra supplemental income from HB 148 helps even further. There is hope, but the author is correct...it is not easy. And that is a shame.

Best, PTM

I don't think it's a stretch to interpret Mr. Mero's theme to say that if wealthy Utah parents can already afford to send their children to private school, it's unfortunate that they are forced to pay for it themselves. Helping the wealthy preserve a little of their wealth is an admirable outcome of the voucher plan. But if the poorer parents who may want to send their children to a private school have to cut out other family priorities to do so, that's fortunate for them, because sacrifice is good welfare policy. Are we supposed to agree that poor parents don't deserve the same quality of life as the wealthy? And if they don't deserve the same quality of life, why is that?

Also, Mr. Mero makes a point that I'd not ever heard anyone make before: that the vouchers given to poorer parents are "supplemental income." Does this mean that parents taking the vouchers will have to pay taxes on them?

And speaking of Mr. Mero and the Sutherland Institute's report on the average cost of tuition in Utah's private schools, here's an excerpt from the press release (http://www.sutherlandinstitute.org/news/news_details.asp?c=2&id=282) that announced that "research":

Independent research conducted by the non-profit Sutherland Institute shows the average tuition among the majority of voucher-eligible private schools in Utah is $4,520. And nearly 64 percent of these private schools are within the range of affordability for low-income families, having tuition below $4,500.

“Affordability is a subjective term,” said Sutherland Institute President, Paul T. Mero.
...
Of the 88 voucher-eligible schools contacted, 64 responded. The responding schools reported annual tuition charges from $1,600 to $52,200. Only six private schools are clearly unaffordable for low-income families the new voucher law is primarily intended to serve. Those six were omitted from Sutherland’s results.

Several points of Mr. Mero's press release bear a second look. The first is that his Sutherland Institute produced "independent research." As Mata Hari has already noted here (http://againstutahvouchers.blogspot.com/2007/10/going-after-parents.html),

I am sure that with all the flacking that the Sutherland Institute has been doing on the pro voucher side they certainly are registered as a Political Issues Committee (PIC).
...
Hasn't Sutherland made "disbursements" (i.e. spent money) to try and influence the outcome of Referendum 1? Isn't Paul Mero unabashedly pro-voucher? Haven't all of Sutherland's so-called "research" papers and news releases made private school vouchers sound better than sliced bread? Then, surely they must be registered as a PIC! Alas, no. No sign of the Sutherland Institute in the list of PICs.

Another is that Mr. Mero identifies the number of "voucher-eligible" private schools as 88. That's 50 less than the total number of private schools in the state, according to the Trib. Should we assume that all of the "voucher-eligible schools" would accept vouchers? If so, that's only 88 schools to cover the entire state, which reinforces my first point about access to private schools.

But the fact that bears most attention in Mr. Mero's study this one: "The responding schools reported annual tuition charges from $1,600 to $52,200. Only six private schools are clearly unaffordable for low-income families the new voucher law is primarily intended to serve. Those six were omitted from Sutherland’s results."

If the study is independent, and intended to be scientific and objectives in order to give the most accurate information to parents and/or voters, why did Mr. Mero and Sutherland exclude the schools with the highest tuition prices from their math? Or, as Bob Aagard put it here (http://bobaagard.blogspot.com/2007/09/sutherlands-new-lies-on-vouchers.html),

You gather data. then you eliminate the 10% of your data that hurts your desired result?

I couldn't have said it better.

At the end of all of this pondering, here are the conclusions I draw. If I've misinterpreted, I'm happy to be corrected.

Some parents can already afford to send their children to private schools, even ones that cost $52,200 per year per student. Other parents cannot.

If passed, Referendum 1 would make some public-funded private school vouchers available to some parents, in amounts up to $3,000 per year per student. But not all parents would qualify to receive a public-funded private school voucher.

There are only 138 private schools in all of Utah, and only 88 of them are "voucher-eligible," according to the Sutherland Institute. It is possible that not all of the 88 "voucher-eligible" schools would accept vouchers or voucher students.

Even if a "voucher-eligible" school accepts vouchers and some voucher students, it is possible that these school won't accept all voucher students who apply.

Parents who live great distances from the few "voucher-eligible" schools that would accept vouchers and voucher students will pay taxes to support public-funded private school vouchers but will not have the benefit of these vouchers because no school exists within a reasonable distance of their homes.

Parents who live great distances from the few "voucher-eligible" schools that might accept their children, particularly, would have to move to a larger city or town to take advantage of the public-funded private school voucher.

According to the Sutherland Institute and its director, Mr. Mero, the voucher plan is "good welfare policy" because it requires poor parents to make greater sacrifices than wealthy parents make.

And while I haven't seen this reported anywhere else, the Sutherland Institute and its director, Mr. Mero, consider vouchers to be "supplemental income," and if it is truly supplemental income, it may be subject to state and federal taxes.

So much for accessibility.

Why are bloggers left to ask the hard questions?

I want to thank a lot of other bloggers for what they're doing to raise the fundamental issues in the debate about the voucher referendum. It was because of reading some of them that I started this one, and I'm also glad to see that others have made the same decision even more recently.

But before I go into more detail about that, I wish I could have seen the voucher debate in Orem on Wednesday. If I read Glen Warchol's report in the Trib correctly, the majority of Parents for Choice in Education's in-state contributors were there on the stage, and that was just Patrick Byrne. (I'm sorry, but he does seem to be the one major donor from inside Utah.) Can you count the essays, emails and mail from Paul Mero's Sutherland Institute as contributions to PCE?

Based on what Mr. Warchol wrote here (http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_7077292), not much was made any clearer because there's still no agreement on the numbers -- numbers of dollars, numbers of students, numbers of schools. These appear to be the only clear facts from the debate:

(1) Patrick Byrne believes American education "is a disaster" and believes that only unions are opposed to vouchers, though a former state leader of the PTA corrected him. It was concerned citizens who organized to put the question on the ballot, she said.
(2) Paul Mero tried to cast voucher opponents as racist and bigoted, implying that wealthy white people who oppose vouchers don't want to help poor minorities through vouchers, although State Board of Education Chairman Kim Burningham corrected him. Even millionaires can collect these vouchers under House Bill 148, he said. I would presume that includes white millionaires too.

Here is the question I would love to see asked in a debate:
(1) Utah public schools are accountable to parents, to the public, to the legislature which funds them and to the federal government which sends No Child Left Behind mandates from Washington. And they manage to serve more than 90 percent of Utah's school children well with one of the lowest per-pupil appropriations in the country. It is possible that using these proposed voucher dollars to raise per-pupil expenditures in public schools, even a little bit, might improve the quality of public schools a lot?

It's the sort of question that bloggers have been asking for a while but that I haven't seen many regular reporters ask. And time is running out to ask the questions and get real answers, because the November 6 referendum is now 30 days away.

Getting back to the topic of the blog community, I want to thank the ones that I read on a regular basis for continuing to ask the hard questions and for digging to find the answers, starting with a brand-new blogger named Kenneth Cole at Republican Wondering. I know how tough it is to question the judgment of the people you respect, Mr. Cole. I also thank a few writers who have only written about this topic once or twice, like Being is Somethingness, Davis Didjerido and Singing Bravely, who is a parent and PTA leader.

There are three blogs that I try to read daily because they always have something new on their front page, whether or not it's related to the voucher referendum: the Sidetrack, Utah Amicus and Wasatch Watcher.

And then there are the ones that may not post something new every day, but when they post, it's always something worth reading. These folks do the sort of research that I enjoy most.

One is Against Utah Vouchers, who has done double duty in the past several weeks. "Mata Hari" exposed Mark Towner of the Spyglass as the email spammer who dumped pro-voucher literature in the inboxes of UTPS supporters a week or two ago. But before that, she tracked Utah voucher campaign money from coast-to-coast, starting on the West Coast with a man named Tim Draper in California, crossing eastward through the Walton Family Foundation of Arkansas and All Children Matter in Michigan (the same people I've been trying to understand for three months), to a man in New York named Howie Rich, who apparently has pushed ballot initiatives and school vouchers in a lot of states. (One thing I have not been able to understand, Ms. Hari, is why these people in California, Arkansas, Michigan and New York aren't spending their money at home, working to create universal statewide vouchers in their own states. Is it because they don't want to do experiments in their own back yards?)

Another couple of great blogs is Coolest Family Ever (thanks, Jesse) and Brooke Anderson's EduBlahg, where Ms. Andbrooke shows she's an unapologetic educator and union member with definite opinions about what's happening to her profession. Jeremy Manning at Jeremy's Jeremiad and Bob Aagard at The World, According to Me (now Rated R) keep, in my opinion, the best catalog of what's being said and posted in the blogosphere on the voucher debate. Bob made me laugh out loud with his personal search campaign. Oldenburg did the same with his post on Missouri moneyman Chip Hurth at Third Avenue. And Voice of Utah did it with their research here.

Unfortunately, these investigations are taking place in the blogosphere rather than in the "real" media. Why is it that only bloggers are asking these hard questions and publishing the answers? While we see a lot of quote-unquote journalism in the major papers, it's really mostly here's-what-happened, and he-said-then-he-said kind of reporting. I haven't seen any newspaper do a study of how the money from All Children Matter flowed through which lawmakers' campaign accounts, and how those lawmakers voted on the voucher plan. And while Mata Hari exposed Mark Towner's email spamming, I haven't seen a newspaper publish any news of it -- and I thought such spamming was a crime. Paul Rolly is the only columnist I can remember who published news of the voucher sponsors organizing lobbyists to campaign for the voucher plan.

What does it take to have a real public-interest investigation done by, and published in, one of the major newspapers?

What does House Bill 148 say (Part 4)?

So if a private school wants to be eligible for public funding through vouchers, House Bill 148 requires that it hire a real CPA to do what takes a lot of space to define in the law, but what really sounds like basic business accounting.

For example, the CPA has to make sure that the vouchers "are accounted for separately and reconciled to student records," and he or she has to "determine that expenditure of scholarship funds have been made for education expenses." What else could vouchers be used for? And once the check is cashed by the private school, doesn't that money belong to the private school to spend as it chooses? How difficult is it for a private school to shift expenditures from one line to another, in order to satisfy this accounting requirement?

The funny thing is, once this CPA establishes this baseline report and delivers it to the State Board of Education, the private school only has to be audited in this way "every four years thereafter, except" if the board changes the delivery date for subsequent reports. I think that means that if the State Board of Education's composition changes, and a pro-voucher majority takes control, it might have the authority to change its own rules and delay indefinitely any subsequent accounting audits of private schools who receive vouchers.

The next section of House Bill 148 outlines which schools are NOT eligible to collect public dollars through vouchers. Look at how narrow this category is:

183 (3) The following are not eligible to enroll scholarship students:
184 (a) a school with an enrollment of fewer than 40 students;
185 (b) a school that operates in a residence; or
186 (c) a residential treatment facility licensed by the state.

So if the private school enrolls fewer than 40 children, if it's being operated in someone's house, or if it's a state hospital, it cannot collect public dollars through vouchers.

But if it enrolls 41 or more students and operates in a business space, even in a rental unit in a shopping center, it can collect as many publicly-funded vouchers as it can enroll students. And it can determine the "qualifications" of its own employees or "contractors" to teach its students, and it can choose whatever test it wants to administer, and all it has to do is hire a CPA every four years unless the State Board changes that rule. Is this accountability?

The next segment of House Bill 148 tells the State Board of Education that it will receive private schools' applications to receive vouchers by April 1 each year, then tells the board that it must approve those applications if the private school meets the criteria I've outlined. And once all of those applications have been approved, then the board must make a list of those approved private schools available to the public, so we can all see where to send our students. So far as I can tell, the State Board is only given the authority to change its rules to delay the timetable for a CPA to report its accounting reports. The board won't have the authority to turn down a private school unless it falls short of these narrow criteria. It makes me wonder why the bill sponsors even involved the State Board of Education at all.

"Section 6" of House Bill 148 orders the State Board of Education to award vouchers according to the funds appropriated by the Utah Legislature, then it orders the Utah Legislature to set aside funds every year to pay for enough vouchers to cover "all students projected to apply." If the state doesn't have enough money to pay for all of the voucher applications, then House Bill 148 says the vouchers will be awarded "on a random basis except that preference shall be given to students who received scholarships in the previous year." This means that a parent only has to worry about winning their voucher incentive once, because every year thereafter, their voucher incentive is likely to be renewed. It's so likely, that if the state runs short of voucher funds, it will even eliminate "new" vouchers for a year. In the worst case scenario, the state will divide up the available voucher dollars among all of the students who received vouchers the previous year.

But then, because the bill sponsors anticipate this sort of budget shortfall, House Bill 148 orders the State Board of Education to "request a supplemental appropriation from the Legislature to make full [voucher] payments..."

I wonder if the bill sponsors have ever considered granting the State Board of Education the authority to request supplemental appropriations for public schools, in order to fully fund the cost of a good public education for all the children in public schools? If not, why not? This bill language clearly suggests they have the power to do so.

"Section 6" also goes into great detail outlining how a voucher will be awarded based on parent(s') income(s), including the incomes of widows, step-parents or guardians, and it orders the State Board of Education to design the rules under which the income(s) will determine the value of the private school vouchers. It some cases, the language is pretty crazy. For example, if there's a question about which parent's income to count, the language specifies:

226 (E) if the parents are divorced and the [voucher] student resided with each parent an
227 equal amount of time, the income of the parent who provided more financial support during the
228 past 12 months;
229 (F) if the divorced parent with whom the [voucher] student resided for the greatest
230 amount of time or who provided the greatest financial support has remarried, the income of the
231 parent and stepparent; and
232 (G) if the [voucher] student resides with a guardian, the income of the guardian,
233 unless the guardian's income is exempt by board rule.

The income of the parent, step-parent or guardian is important enough to take up several paragraphs' worth of space in the law, but requiring a private school to hire licensed, credentialed teachers is completely unnecessary, according to House Bill 148.

There are even more "rules" ordering the State Board of Education to establish a "table" of vouchers, and then House Bill 148 spells out which categories of income/students will collect which level of voucher funding, from $3,000 per year down to $500 per year.

This may be where the "accountability" is built into House Bill 148. The bill sponsors make it clear that they don't want kindergarten students to receive more than 55 percent of the full-year voucher awarded to a student in grades 1 through 12. They don't want the State Board of Education to pay out these vouchers in more than four payments per year, nor any later than the first day of September, November, February and April of each year -- except unless a private school demands partial payment in order to hold a space for a student.

Does anyone else find these rules ludicrous? Is this what passes for accountability in the voucher plan? If this isn't insane enough, the law also says,

283 (9) Before [voucher] payments are made, the board shall cross-check enrollment lists
284 of [voucher] students, school districts, and youth in custody to ensure that [voucher]
285 payments are not erroneously made.

And then there's this: Who receives the voucher check in the mail?

286 (10) (a) [Voucher] payments shall be made by the board by individual warrant made
287 payable to the student's parent and mailed by the board to the private school. The parent shall
288 restrictively endorse the warrant to the private school for deposit into the account of the private
289 school.

The check will be made out to the parent's name, but it will be mailed to the private school, not the parent. The parent will then have to go to the school and sign the check over to the school. This much is absolutely clear: Whoever said the private school would not be the "direct" beneficiary of a public funds through this voucher plan was lying to Utah voters.

Which makes it easier to understand "Section 7" of the bill, which essentially tells school districts to lie to the State Department of Education about their true enrollment figures for the first five years after the voucher plan is enacted, if it is enacted. Basically, House Bill 148 pretends to guarantee that public schools lose no funding when they lose students (because public schools are funded now based on how many students are enrolled in them). Of course, this "mitigation" money is a mirage, because at the end of five years, public school funding will come all the way back to the per-pupil level it receives today -- meaning that it will only receive the same low level of funding it receives today, based on the number of students enrolled in it.

"Section 8" is redundant, as it orders the State Board to make rules "consistent" with the Utah Administrative Rulemaking Act. (Did anyone know that lawmakers had passed an act spelling out how rules would be made?)

And "Section 9" is almost comical. It orders the State Board to "require private schools to submit signed affidavits assuring the private school will comply with the requirements of this part." What requirements? That it should make sure to enroll more than 41 students each year and keep its storefront rent paid?

And if the private school doesn't sign the affadavit, then the State Board can cut off its publicly-funded vouchers. That's the full extent of the accountability I find in House Bill 148.

There's one more bit of "accountability": The State Board will be able to "investigate complaints and convene administrative hearings for an alleged violation" by the private school, and IF a violation is found by the board, then the board can cut off that school's publicly-funded vouchers.

BUT "Section 10" quickly and clearly establishes that "nothing... grants additional authority to any state agency or school district" to hold private schools accountable for the publicly-funded vouchers being delivered to them.

"Section 11" promises that the legislative auditor general will review and report on the voucher plan "after the conclusion of the 2013-14 school year." This means that even the least effective private schools -- without any of the same public accountability or oversight that lawmakers enjoy to govern public education -- will continue to receive publicly-funded vouchers for five years, so long as they sign the affadavit pledging to comply with the law's thin "requirements," until and unless the legislative auditor general disqualifies the plan or that specific private school at the end of that five-year period.

Finally, "Section 12" of House Bill 148 sets aside the first $100,000 installment of public funds to pay for private school vouchers.

This, in its entirety, is my best interpretation of House Bill 148, bit by bit.

And after interpreting it, piece by piece, I'm still left asking the same question: Where is the accountability for public funds? Is it in the affadavit promising compliance with the law's "requirements"? In the quadrennial accounting report by a CPA? Or in the review to be conducted by the legislative auditor general after five years of the plan's implementation and expenses? In the orders given to the State Board of Education to serve as a passkey for voucher applications? In the checks sent directly to private schools that must be endorsed by the parents of the voucher school's students?

Or is it nowhere at all? In which case, we're wasting a lot of time, and a lot of energy, and a lot of money on a plan that is wholly and solely intended to disrupt education in Utah.

If that IS the case -- as it appears more and more all the time -- then how do we hold accountable those lawmakers who purposefully collaborated with All Children Matter and its secret funders across the country, accepted their campaign contributions, filed their voucher plan for them, fought to keep the plan off the referendum ballot, then arm-twisted the lobbyists in Salt Lake City into organizing to pass this disruption on to Utah's schoolchildren?

What does House Bill 148 say (Part 3)?

"Section 5" of House Bill 148 defines the nine criteria that will make a private school "eligible" for vouchers, if the law is enacted. More accurately, the language defines what makes a private school "eligible to enroll a [voucher] student," but it's obvious that any private school in the state is "eligible" to enroll a child whose parents pay for the tuition. So to describe the most accurate meaning of the language, we might say it defines what makes a private school eligible to receive public funding. And to be blunt, the eligibility requirements are pretty thin.

First, the private school would have to have a physical location in Utah where a student will attend classes and "have direct contact" with the school's teachers. At least the bill sponsors want there to be a real "school" with a real desk and chair, and a real live person at the front of the real classroom. I interpret from this that "online" schools couldn't receive the public-funded vouchers.

Second, the private school has to hire a real CPA to conduct "procedures specified in Subsection (2)" and report the results of these "procedures" to the state board of education. Essentially, it's an audit, but I'll save the explanation of Subsection (2) until we get there.

Third, the private school has to comply with "antidiscrimination" provisions of a certain federal law. I haven't read the law, but I wonder if this means that a private school will be expected to enroll every student who comes to be enrolled, the way public schools are. Hard to tell, but I have a feeling about it.

Fourth, the private school has to comply with local health and safety codes. But shouldn't we assume that any facility that serves the public has to comply with local health and safety codes? In fact, I'm surprised if that's not true. So why take the time and effort to write it into House Bill 148? Is it just filler?

Fifth, the private school has to "disclose to the parent of each prospective student, before the student is enrolled, the special education services that will be provided to the student, if any, including the cost of those services." I think this is another case of what ISN'T said being equal to, or greater than, what IS said. The private school ISN'T being required to provide the same special education services to students as public schools are required to provide; they're only required to inform parents of the services they do provide. If the student needs services that the private school doesn't provide, the student has to go somewhere else. To be honest, isn't this is passive way of weeding out certain kinds of students -- ones that don't cost a lot to a private school -- from other kinds of students? If the student is basically blocked from enrolling because this private school doesn't offer the services he or she needs, then how great was the value of the voucher to that student? House Bill 148 doesn't solve that student's concerns; it doesn't even pretend to try to.

The sixth requirement for eligibility concerns testing in the private school. House Bill 148 requires a private school to "assess the achievement of each student" but the means for assessment sound different from the accountability expected of public schools. The private school will have to give students "a norm-referenced test scored by an independent party" that compares its students' scores to the scores of other students nationally, or "an alternative assessment" if the student is disabled or has "limited English proficiency," (or if the student would be exempt from taking a "nationally norm-referenced achievement test" while enrolled in public schools). Are these the same as the expectations of public schools to give tests? Are they the same as this, or are they more stringent because of "No Child Left Behind"? If they're more stringent, does it mean that the private school is held to a lower standard -- or no standard at all -- and is exempt from "No Child Left Behind," even though it's receiving public funds to educate a student?

After "assessing" the student's achievement -- by whatever means the school chooses, but which House Bill 148 doesn't define -- the private school has to report the results to the student's parents, and make them available to others without identifying the student. Since the law doesn't define the methods of assessment, and the private school can choose whatever method it chooses, is it reasonable to say the school could choose a test that isn't as rigorous as ones given in public schools, and that suggests its students perform at a level higher or better than students in public schools? If so, is it fair? Is this a level playing field? Are our tax dollars being used to compare apples to apples?

The seventh requirement has to do with the people who teach in private schools. If I read it correctly, House Bill 148 only requires ONE of two things of the people hired (or contracted with, which is different) by a school to teach. A person EITHER has to have a college degree -- not specifically a degree in education, or a license to teach -- OR have "special skills, knowledge, or expertise that qualifies them to provide instruction in the subjects taught." If there's no education degree from an accredited university to prove a person's qualification, or a license proving that a person has satisfied the state's expectations for a person leading a classroom, then who will get to judge the "special skills, knowledge or expertise" that House Bill 148 says is sufficient to teach in a private school? Will the private school itself be the judge of those "special skills, knowledge or expertise"? Without any defined standards?

Earlier this week, the editors of the Daily Herald suggested that this proposal was a good idea because it would allow people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, George Washington or Jane Austen to teach in Utah's private schools, since, without college degrees, they couldn't teach in Utah's public schools. I thought -- and still think -- the argument is disingenuous, because how often will Bill Gates or people of his specific achievements and acumen ask to teach -- as their regular jobs -- in Utah's schools, public OR private? (I wrote more about that topic here [http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html#4478560150977420726].)

And the eighth and ninth definitions for the "eligibility" of private schools to receive public funding is that they must "provide to parents the teaching credentials of the school's teacher; and provide, upon request to any person, a statement indicating which, if any, organizations have accredited the private school." House Bill 148 doesn't require "teachers" in a private school to have a college degree or a teaching license, but if they do, the school will have to provide that information to parents. And House Bill 148 doesn't require a private school to be accredited by any accrediting authority whatsoever, but if it is, the school has to inform parents of it. It is not just a rhetoric question to ask, Is that accountability?

What does wisdom advise us?

A lot of people know and respect Dr. Lerue Winget of St. George. For those who didn't see his guest commentary in the Spectrum today, you can find it here (http://www.thespectrum.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071001/OPINION01/710010314/1014/OPINION) and I encourage people to read it.

After a long career in education and a long look at House Bill 148, Dr. Winget draws his own conclusion:

After serious consideration of the issues involved and the arguments for and against, it is my opinion, based on the following reasons, that Utah should not adopt a voucher system.

Why? Dr. Winget outlines plainly his reasons: proper funding for public schools, the real cost of private school tuition, what he calls the "flawed reasoning" that supports the voucher plan, and "insufficiency" in the total funding made available for education, period. He writes,

Public tax dollars should not be spent for private school education. All parents have the right to enroll their children in free public schools. It is their choice that they do not. The same situation exists with other public services, i.e. libraries. In the case of private schools sponsored by religions, administration of funds and accountability matters may raise issues related to the First Amendment.
...
While vouchers may help some low-income families enroll their children in private schools, it is unlikely that many will be able to do so, even at great sacrifice, based on the amount currently proposed.
...
Some believe education will be improved from the competition private schools would provide through vouchers. This reasoning is flawed.

Adjustments that have already been embraced provide adequate approaches through which the education needs of students can be met. These include: (1) "Alternative Schools" established within school districts, (2) "Charter Schools" established outside of the regular school system, (3) Cooperation of public schools with parents in "Home Schooling," and (4) "Private Schools" as currently funded by private sources. In addition, public schools have well-established avenues for public involvement. Local boards of education are local citizens elected by other local citizens. Principals and teachers are open to contact as needed. Schools and their teachers hold individual parent-teacher conferences. Parent-Teacher associations are generally active in promoting improvements. Special commissions have been and can be established on a local or state level to study problem areas and make appropriate recommendations for changing the system.

In fact, Dr. Winget, Stanford University professor Martin Carnoy, quoted in a just-released study from the Economic Policy Institute, agrees with you and offers objective data from various sources to support your assertion!

Dr. Winget continues,

Vouchers would likely be divisive, causing contention over funds, students, programs, and claimed achievement. Vouchers do not provide real choice since they cannot guarantee to parents that their children will be admitted to the school of their choice.
...
Some argue that the public education system and citizens at large should not be concerned over the relatively small amount of funds currently proposed for vouchers, especially since they would come out of the General Fund rather than the Uniform School Fund. This reasoning is flawed. The ordinary taxpayer is not greatly concerned from which pocket tax dollars for education come. The taxpayer mainly realizes that it is an additional amount of tax money spent for education. If more tax money can be found for education, why not use it to improve the regular system? For years Utah has been near the bottom among the states in the amount spent per student.

The initial, relatively small amount proposed for vouchers is simply the "camel's nose under the tent." There would be continuing clamor for more funds needed to meet the real costs and for additional schools that may be established.

Thanks to Dr. Winget for looking at the objective facts of the voucher plan to draw his conclusions.

Are we discussing vouchers, or snake oil?

I was pleased to see an article in yesterday's Trib that did what I've advocated we do for a while: It described a study that looked at objective facts and drew logical conclusions from those facts. Thank you, Lisa Schencker of the Trib.

Ms. Schencker reported on a study released by the Economic Policy Institute, which looked at Milwaukee, Wisconsin's voucher program. The study consulted the work of respected sources and relied on clear data. And it quoted a Stanford University professor that, coincidentally, I'd quoted before here (http://accountabilityfirst.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html#593302849902996284).

But this is what I found amazing about Ms. Schencker's report: After spending almost a year making the point that its universal, statewide voucher plan would to improve public schools by giving them competition, Parents for Choice in Education disavowed that point entirely when the EPI study concluded that Milwaukee's voucher program had done no such thing. As if they'd never made such a claim at all, PCE's spokesperson took a completely different position. Before this report was released, voucher supporters said vouchers would do a lot of good. After it was released, PCE's Leah Barker told Ms. Schencker, "Vouchers have never created any harm."

A century and a half ago, snake oil salesmen roamed Western outposts and trails, plying tonics that would cure everything from gout to the grippe. Could you imagine a dissatisfied customer complaining that his shingles weren't cured, and the salesman answering, "Well, it didn't make them any worse"?

Or saying, "Well, before, you didn't know whether or not my tonic would help you, so now we're a hundred percent more knowledgeable on that subject?" It's almost as ridiculous as saying, "Everyone's different, so I'm not surprised that I've finally found someone that wasn't helped by it. All I know is, I had thousands of satisfied customers in Dry Gulch bathing in the stuff and feeling forty years younger."

In the end, snake oil is snake oil. When you can't explain what's in it, what's good about it, what objective studies and consumer reports have concluded about it, I suppose all you're left with is the argument that trying it can't make things any worse. And that's not an argument at all, it's a fallback position.

Here's what Ms. Schencker learned (http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=7069164&siteId=297):

Competition from a long-running voucher program in Milwaukee has not consistently improved that city's public schools, according to an Economic Policy Institute study released today.

"Schools are not like the marketplace: Competition doesn't automatically make things better," study co-author and Stanford University professor Martin Carnoy said in a statement. "The evidence does not support advocates' claims that voucher schools raise academic achievement."
...
Milwaukee's program, which started in 1990, is significantly different from the one Utah voters will consider in a November referendum.

Milwaukee's program gives vouchers only to low-income students to attend private schools, whereas Utah's program would give vouchers to students from families of all income levels. Also, students who receive vouchers to attend Milwaukee private schools don't have to pay any additional tuition, whereas in Utah, families that accept vouchers would likely still have to pay some tuition.

I thought I recognized two names in Ms. Schencker's article, and it turned out that I had seen them before and wrote about them, too. One was Martin Carnoy, the Stanford professor who concluded that vouchers wouldn't raise student achievement. The other was Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas. Here's what Ms. Schencker wrote about Mr. Greene, who has now adopted the fallback position that while it can't be proven that vouchers help student achievement, it can't be proven either than vouchers harm anybody:

Jay Greene, a University of Arkansas professor who has researched Milwaukee's voucher program, said no study he knows of has shown that voucher programs hurt public schools. Some studies, he said, show voucher programs improve public schools and others, such as the one released today, show they have no effect on public schools' performance. Greene is part of a team of researchers starting a five-year study of Milwaukee's voucher system. At least one of the authors of the Economic Policy Institute's study is also on that team.

"You can't make an overall conclusion from a single study of a single program," Greene said. "There is some reason to hope a voucher program in Utah would be helpful to schools in Utah and not hurtful."

Voucher opponents, however, both here and in Milwaukee, argue that voucher programs do cause harm to public schools by stealing money and other resources, if not by lowering test scores.

So, is Mr. Greene saying that our proposed statewide, universal voucher plan is just an experiment? And that conducting an experiment this big and this expensive is worth doing on Utah's students, with Utah's tax dollars?

If that's what he's saying, then I would wonder what's wrong with trying it first in Arkansas, Mr. Greene's own state. I'm not thrilled at the idea of trying an experiment in Utah just for the sake of trying it to see what will happen. I agree with what Lisa Johnson told Ms. Schencker: ""For the amount of money it would cost us to implement this voucher program, we could actually help public schools if we were to invest in lowering class sizes or investing in teacher recruitment. With our resources being as limited as they are, we think we ought to use those resources wisely in a way that will help the most people."

For anyone who's interested in what Mr. Greene and Professor Carnoy, here's part of what I wrote on August 22:

In the current issue of School Reform News, however, there's an article titled, "What Can We Learn from the Universal Voucher Law in Utah?" by three men who work in the Arkansas Department of Education Reform. I wondered if this office was affiliated with the Arkansas Department of Education, since its name is so similar. What I thought would be a simple google search led to a few more steps. Is nothing what it says it is anymore?

At the office's own webpage, http://www.uark.edu/ua/der/, I learned that it is not affiliated with the Arkansas Department of Education, but with the University of Arkansas's College of Education and Health Professions. It sounded perfectly legitimate -- a public university serving a public interest -- until I read further.

The office's webpage reads, "The Department of Education Reform is the newest department in the College of Education and Health Professions, established on July 1, 2005. The creation of the Department of Education Reform was made possible through a $10,000,000 private gift and an additional $10,000,000 from the University’s Matching Gift Program. This gift is one of the largest ever received by a college of education in the country. With these resources the department has six endowed professorships, ten doctoral fellowships, and funds for research and projects."

So an unnamed donor with an interest in "education reform" gave a gift of $10 million to the University of Arkansas, which matched the gift with public funds and opened a brand-new department whose products now include papers to be published by the Heartland Institute. And for that $10 million gift, they got a staff of six professors, 10 graduate students and various research aid to set up their operation. (Who in Arkansas would have $10 million to devote to such a narrow purpose, and would not want to give it publicly?)

Its director is Jay Greene. And Mr. Greene's biography, which is available on the public website, lists a good many articles he's written or co-written, with titles such as "Vouchers in Charlotte," "The Hidden Research Consensus for School Choice, Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education," "Private Schooling and Political Tolerance," "Private Schools and the Public Good," "Effectiveness of School Choice: The Milwaukee Experiment," "Sex, Drugs, and Delinquency in Urban and Suburban Public Schools," "The Education Freedom Index," and "A Survey of Results from Voucher Experiments: Where We Are and What We Know."

Now that we understand the point of view adopted by Mr. Greene and the Arkansas Department of Education Reform, it makes perfect sense that one of his graduate students, his deputy director and a research associate should write a new article called "What Can We Learn from the Universal Voucher Law in Utah?" and that it is published in School Reform News by the Heartland Institute. The article is brief (http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=21853 ); it draws some comparisons between the universal voucher law passed by the Utah legislature and voucher plans enacted in the South American nations of Colombia and Chile.

Here is one of their observations:

"If implemented, Utah's voucher plan will be wholly unique. For one, the plan is universal only in regard to opportunity, since it doesn't force families to make a choice, as Chile's plan does. Families can continue to attend their assigned school as if the voucher program didn't exist. The Utah plan also has graduated voucher amounts, ranging from $500 for the wealthiest individuals to $3,000 for the most disadvantaged. Vouchers are available only for use in private schools, so only children of families interested in private school, dismayed enough with their current public school, and financially secure enough to make up any difference between the voucher and tuition costs, will use it. This scenario by no means describes a market-based K-12 education system."

And here's another.

"Martin Carnoy's 1998 study of Sweden and Chile's national voucher programs analyzed the effects they had on traditional public schools. In Sweden, the research suggests, the voucher program "hardly touched public education," because public schools are generally held in high regard. In Chile, however, private schools were deemed to be better than public schools, and vouchers caused a 'flight from public education.'

"Carnoy found the effects of vouchers depend on the public's perceptions of traditional public schools. Public schools in Utah are generally held in high regard, and it appears likely that few Utahns would flee the public school system. Hence, if Carnoy's findings are credible, it may be difficult for researchers to ascertain vouchers' possible effects on public schools elsewhere."

Again, thanks to Ms. Schencker for looking at objective data and reporting its logical conclusions.

How many Mark Twains have we had?

The editors of the Daily Herald began their series considering the voucher referendum today with an editorial that asks questions about the need for licensure of teachers. They are fair enough questions. Not every job in the world ought to require a license, or a certificate, or even a diploma. For that matter, editors themselves bear no such requirement. One of our favorite American authors, Mark Twain, was a newspaper editor and never earned a college degree.

But, then again, how many Mark Twains have we had in the five centuries since Columbus landed in 1492?

At any rate, the editors take issue with the argument that teachers ought to be college-educated and licensed in order to teach. Public schools -- accountable to the citizens under the Utah Constitution -- expect at least that level of education and licensure of candidates who apply for available classroom jobs. But private schools are not bound to the same level of accountability, and the Herald's editors may find that acceptable.

They ask here (http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/239095/3/),

Is it necessarily bad that a teacher doesn't have a license from Utah?

To which I would answer: No, it isn't necessarily bad that a teacher doesn't have a license from Utah. But thank goodness that we have an expectation that a teacher will have a license from SOMEwhere, one showing that a credible college or university found her worthy of a college degree in her chosen field, and that a state granted her application for a license after applying the same examination to her that it applies to all others seeking a career as an education professional.

We are talking about education professionals, after all. Don't we have a right to expect that professionals will bring a level of measured education and credentials to their work? And is there a better way to measure someone's education than by reviewing their diplomas or degrees, or a better way to check their credentials than by asking where or how they've been licensed? If a person can offer no such evidence of education or credential, then is it wise to leave them before a classroom of 25 or more second-graders? Or call them professionals?

The editors ask next,

Are unlicensed teachers always bad?

Which is very strange question, when you think of other professions that also expect a certain level of education and credentials.

Would I mind being operated on by an unlicensed cardiac surgeon, or an unlicensed brain surgeon? Are unlicensed surgeons always bad? I suppose it depends on what outcome you hope to achieve.

Would I mind being represented in court by an unlicensed attorney, one who brought no law degree or professional credential to my case? Are unlicensed lawyers always bad? Again, it may depend on whether or not you're serious about your case.

Nurses, too, are expected to bring some years of training and some credentials to their work. I'm reminded of just what those certifications represent is every time I'm given a painless injection. When a nurse spends several minutes looking for a vein, I spend several minutes wondering where to look for their diploma. Are unlicensed nurses always bad? Maybe not; my bleeding has eventually stopped, every time.

But these aren't the only people who want so badly to be seen as capable, competent and knowledgeable enough in their fields of work that they spend the years necessary to be educated, and take the tests necessary to earn a license or a certificate. I have a mechanic that I see for routine work on my car, and I've noticed for at least the past fifteen years that he hangs every new certificate or license showing his professional trainings on the wall in his shop. Three years ago, only after I came home to find water standing in my kitchen and dining room floor, I was surprised to realize that most of the advertisements for plumbers in the phone book say they're certified or licensed in some way or another.

Are unlicensed mechanics and plumbers always bad? I don't know, because I don't hire them. And when I'm forced to think about that and wonder why I don't hire unlicensed mechanic to work on my car, or an unlicensed plumber to find and replace my old and rusting pipes, I have to say it's this: When I hire someone to do a job for me and my family, I want to trust that they have been educated and trained to do the job, that some credible authority has certified that they can and will do the job.

So then the editors ask,

Are the licensed teachers doing so well that no one can compete with them?

I'm sorry, but I think this is a foolish question. And it is an especially foolish question given that Utahns brought the Olympics to Salt Lake just a few years ago. Is there a better example of high-quality competition than the Olympics? I am absolutely confident that not one athlete who competed that year was given a spot on a team out of charity. For me, one of the best parts of that experience was listening to the stories of some of those athletes, hearing how they had trained for years in all sorts of conditions, and hearing how they had competed against the best in their own communities or regions or nations to win a place on their national team. They got their education through years of hard work, and they got their medals (their licenses?) from meeting or raising the bar in their sport.

Now, were those Olympic athletes doing so well that no one could compete with them? Maybe not. Is it possible that someone could walk in off the street and run a 100-meter race just as fast as the person who came in 16th or 18th that day? Anything's possible. But what are the odds? Would we bet on those odds?

I love competition. But if I were ever to bet on the Olympics, I'd favor the athlete who had trained for years, knew his field and had earned his stripes back home against others almost as good as him. And I wouldn't discount his effort by asking if he thought he was doing so well that no one could compete with him.

Some trained and seasoned athletes are better than others, but they are trained and seasoned enough to compete. So are some educated and licensed teachers better than others, but it says something that they're educated and licensed well enough to meet standards.

And speaking of standards, the Olympics offers a great but tough lesson there, too. Regardless of what happened at the last Olympics, or the one before that, the athletes who don't meet today's standards get left behind. And the same lesson applies even to well-educated, licensed teachers. It's why there are standards in the first place, isn't it?

Lastly, the editors ask,

Does a college degree guarantee quality in a teacher?

What a question. Does a medical degree guarantee that no patient will die? Does a law degree guarantee that no case will be lost? Does a business degree guarantee that a CEO's company will thrive? If the editors' question is a valid one, then so are these. The answers to all of them will be the same.

I offer the same example that I began with: Mark Twain, who didn't earn a college degree but who was a newspaper editor, and who edited journals of his day. He wrote the great American novel, and he is still considered to be the only American ever to do so. That makes him exceptional.

The Herald's editors will recognize that I've picked an exception to the rule to make my point, because they picked exceptions to the rule to make theirs. How many Bill Gateses are there? How many Steve Jobses? Or Larry Ellisons? Have any of these men really asked to be able to teach public school in Utah?

But let's ask another pertinent question. The Herald editors have used Mr. Gates as a flashcard to support their case, but which Mr. Gates are they using: the Mr. Gates of today, who has accomplished all that he has, or the Mr. Gates of 30 years ago, when he dropped out of college?

And which George Washington, the potential principal of their editorial? The one who was the singular general and exceptional first American president? Or the 22-year-old one that hadn't yet accomplished all of those amazing things?

This, too, is a valid question, because we're not talking about singularly amazing exceptions coming to teach in Utah's schools. House Bill 148 doesn't ask private schools to be accountable for a single piece of evidence that the potential teacher brings any education, credential or any other valuable experience to their classrooms, exceptional or not. House Bill 148 allows any George, any Bill, any Steve, any Larry, any Mary, any Lizzie, any Ted, any Jeffrey or any Chester from Pahrump (who was "good with children," his girlfriend told CNN today here http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/01/rape.tape.girl/index.html)to ask for -- and be given -- a job teaching in Utah.

If I've read House Bill 148 incorrectly, I beg pardon and ask to be shown where I am wrong.

The Herald editors have made their position known on the issue, and that's good. They write,

Of course, you don't have to be famous to teach well. Neither do you always need a teaching credential. The qualities that define a great teacher do not flow from a piece of paper.

There's an easy "Amen." The greatest teacher in the world didn't have a license either. But then again, He was the greatest teacher in the world. How many like Him to do have applying to teach?

Until we have a lot more of that exceptional quality, I'm comfortable asking applicants to have a college degree and a license.