With his proposal for a limited-value voucher program for students in failing schools, Gov. Bill Haslam has embraced private schools at the expense of public schools.The mental gymnastics that allow Gov. Bill Haslam and state lawmakers to praise the governor’s proposed limited-voucher program for students in so-called failing schools are staggering.
These vouchers would siphon off state education funds to private schools for a limited number of students — 5,000 across the state in 83 high-poverty schools — whose parents want to take them out. That would leave the schools that the governor says need help with significantly reduced state funding and with fewer motivated parents and students.
These are precisely the type of students and parents the hard-pressed schools need as models, advocates and leaders. But for those left behind under, the problem of improving student performance, not to mention the lopsided financial burden left to local school boards, would instantly become dramatically harder.
Yet this is Haslam’s and the Republican legislative leaders’ pretense for solving the tough issues of lagging student performance in what are conveniently labeled “failing schools” or “low-performing” schools. They couldn’t be further from the truth. And their semantics can’t disguise the disingenuous flaws in this approach.
In reality, the introduction of a limited number of vouchers for schools with low-performing students is a back-door way to dismiss and ultimately dismantle re-segregated schools burdened by the socio-economic problems of mostly minority students in the state’s largest urban centers — Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville. The problem with these vital neighborhood schools is not that the schools themselves are under-performing: Reconstitution of these schools’ teachers, staffs and administrators in recent years has largely cleaned out whatever deadwood there once was.