The Speech I Never Gave

Recently I spent a good bit of time preparing to address the City of Green Bay Finance Committee: It would be my second plea to them to please make our local property tax bill transparent by noting, not just how much tax money goes to the Green Bay Area Public Schools, but also how much of that money is immediately diverted away from our public schools to fund tuition vouchers for children to attend 12 local private schools. Some citizens believe that money comes from a state fund of some sort; they don’t realize that the cost of vouchers comes out of funds that would otherwise support local public schools 

I had addressed this committee a year ago – the only school board member present then – and had heard nothing since. So I was, once again, prepared and well-rehearsed and determined to get them to commit to a transparent tax bill.

Before the meeting even got underway, casual conversation convinced me that work had been ongoing behind the scenes with the city, and that the matter was well in hand: The committee would likely move the request forward to City Council, and we’d be successful with that step, at least. Three other members of the public spoke; I didn’t see any reason for me to take up another 3-4 minutes of the committee’s time when it was clear that things had been successfully moved forward. I remained silent. 

And then, after the motion to change the tax bill had been seconded, the discussion among the three committee members present made me realize that I probably should have spoken out. This vote, I saw, is not going to be so simple. One alder insisted on going far beyond the basic request to add one line of clarifying text to the city tax bill. She spoke at length about the need for less fortunate children to have access to private schools, about the likelihood that their needs would be much better met there, if only their parents had the money. Even when her colleagues reminded her that this is not a discussion about the wisdom or value of school vouchers, but simply a practical decision about whether or not to add a piece of financial data to the tax bill, she kept extolling the virtues of the school voucher program, suggesting that transparency about it might somehow undermine it. And then she voted against adding transparency to the tax bill. 

I realized then that I should have spoken. Sadly, I see that some members of City Council might, indeed, make this a discussion about the value of school vouchers as opposed to the value of simple tax bill transparency. And so, I’m going to share here the message I would have offered that evening as a counterpoint to her comments, because it was clear to me that possibly no one on that committee really knew the history and intent of school vouchers in this country. I now realize that some alders might make this a misguided “value judgment” rather than a simple, practical choice. So let’s go there now and lay the cards on the table and examine the “values” behind the voucher program, as I might have done that evening.

The History of “School Choice”

The idea of  “school choice” or “parental choice” is not new. It didn’t start recently or even in the twentieth century. It’s been around for 240 years. Parents have always had the right to choose private school instead of public. My parents had a choice about where to send me to school: I had 12 years of Catholic education in Appleton, as did my siblings. My parents chose it and, as poor as they were, they paid for it.

Both of my children graduated from Notre Dame Academy. We had parental choice, and we paid the tuition. I understand that today more than 35% of the students in my beloved Notre Dame Academy have their tuition paid by taxpayers at the expense of Green Bay Area Public Schools; that’s a lot of vouchers. The total voucher payment that left the local public schools this year was about $13 million. And, at the same time, our local public school district faces a $10 million shortfall for next school year! When taxpayers ponder that pending deficit, they should know where all that money went.

The Early Movement

In fact, most people likely have a very rosy, unrealistic image about the  initiation of a school voucher program. You probably don’t realize that the “parental choice” program was actually launched way back in 1955, in response to Brown vs. the Board of Education, de-segregating schools. Milton Friedman, the famous economist who led the charge, called forced school integration “the same as Hitler’s Nazism.” The movement was born of racism.

Within four short years, the movement had entered the Catholic Church, with parents in St. Louis asserting their “God-given, inalienable right to choose the school their children would attend” (no one would have argued with that), and demanding their “fair share of taxpayer dollars” to send their children to Catholic school. (I would have argued against that!) That was 1959! The “parental choice” program had nothing to do with academic quality. It was born in racism and nurtured by religious fervor.

Finally Signed into Law

It wasn’t until 1990 that the concept of taking tax dollars from the public schools and giving it to private schools became an actual fact – right in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of the gentlemen hired to assess that original program after its first two years pointed out that virtually none of the 341 students who made up that first voucher class had ever even been in public school. They were mostly private school students now getting their tuition paid at the expense of the public schools. And there was no measurable improvement in attendance or test scores – but “happier parents.”

Soon “school choice” took a new twist. In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that taxpayer dollars may go to parochial schools. You know what that did to Wisconsin and 37 other states? It rendered moot a clause in our state’s constitution. Since 1848 the Wisconsin state constitution, Article I, Section 18, has said that "no money shall be drawn from the state treasury, nor shall any public money be used or appropriated, for the benefit of religious institutions, or sectarian purposes.” Our state and 37 other states lost the right to enforce that constitutional intent.

A Broader, Meaner Purpose

And just two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such tax dollars may be used specifically for religious education, AND that religiously affiliated schools have the right to discriminate against a particular segment of the population on the basis of their religion – and still collect tax dollars to pay for that religious education! Imagine a public school trying to get away with that.

Now, most people don’t know all that voucher program history, and City Council can’t do anything about it. Alders can control only their own clear-eyed view of the situation and our local tax bill and the message it sends to our taxpayers. I’m just asking Council to be honest and transparent. I was here with the same message more than a year ago, and I’ve had to come back again. When will you add some transparency to our local tax bill?

I’m Not Against Private Schools

Look, I wouldn’t trade my Catholic education for anything. And I dearly love Notre Dame Academy, where I closed out my teaching career. In fact, as a military wife, teaching in five states, I spent nearly my entire career happily teaching in private schools.  

But I’m a property owner in Green Bay, and I pay my taxes here. I want my taxes to support my city, my county, my technical college, and my public schools. And I want my fellow taxpayers to know the truth about this huge diversion of tax dollars. I just want the full tax story to be told and the tax bill to be transparent. If you have strong feelings about private schools or religious schools, it would be best to keep that out of the conversation – and maybe to keep the scary “skeletons” in the closet too (but at least now you know about them). Let’s focus on transparency for taxpayers.

[Note: If you’re intrigued by the speech I never gave, you might want to learn more about the development of the school voucher program. You can find my full synopsis of Josh Cowen’s book, The Privateers, here in the Speakeasy.]