Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a speech last year, gave a strong hint at his views on taxpayer support for religious schools when he praised his “first judicial hero,” Justice William Rehnquist, for determining that the strict wall between church and state “was wrong as a matter of law and history.”
Mr. Rehnquist’s legacy on religious issues was most profound in “ensuring that religious schools and religious institutions could participate as equals in society and in state benefits programs,” Judge Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, declared at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization.
.. Can a church-school playground pave the way for taxpayer funding to flow to private and parochial schools for almost any purpose?
Over his decades-long legal career, Judge Kavanaugh has argued in favor of breaking down barriers between church and state. He has filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of school prayer and the right of religious groups to gain access to public school facilities. He was part of the legal team that represented former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida in 2000 when he defended a school voucher program that was later ruled unconstitutional. The program had used public funds to help pay the tuition of students leaving some of the state’s lowest-performing schools for private or religious schools.
Do School Vouchers Work? Milwaukee’s Experiment Suggests an Answer
A Wall Street Journal analysis of the data suggests vouchers worked best when enrollment from voucher students was kept low. As the percentage of voucher students rises, the returns diminish until the point when there is little difference between the performance of public and private institutions. The vast majority of private schools participating in the program today have high percentages of publicly funded students.
.. The city’s nearly 29,000 voucher students, on average, have performed about the same as their peers in public schools on state exams, the analysis shows. The successful voucher students, who often performed better than their public-school peers, were mainly found at private schools that worked to balance numbers of voucher students and paying ones.
.. “The schools that have 20% to 30% voucher kids and 70% to 80% fee-paying kids, they look more like the private schools that we sort of put on a pedestal—that have very ambitious programs,”
.. “Ones that enroll a very high percent of voucher students tend to be low-resourced.”
.. President Donald Trump has called for allocating $250 million for scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools, part of a plan to eventually pump $20 billion of federal money into school-choice measures, including vouchers.
.. Some educators suggest the voucher students who score well do so precisely because they attend private schools with lower proportions of their peers. They benefit from superior resources and support services funded by wealthier families
.. At Marquette University High School, a popular all-boys private school where voucher students notch high state-exam scores, annual tuition was $12,445 this past school year, not including books and fees—about $5,000 more than the voucher program pays to the school.
.. Public-school officials say they have greater expenses, such as for transportation and for providing services to special-needs students
Donald Trump’s huge, ambitious school voucher plan, explained
Trump says he’d pay for the $20 billion program by cutting elsewhere in the education budget. That almost certainly includes the $14 billion the federal government spent in 2015 on grants to educate disadvantaged children, defined as children from families making at most 185 percent of the poverty line (just under $45,000 for a family of four). The grants, known as Title I grants, go to states and districts to pass on to schools based on the proportion of disadvantaged students those schools enroll.
.. This idea, known as “Title I portability” in education circles, is by now a mainstream Republican policy proposal. Ronald Reagan called for turning Title I into vouchers during his presidency... Dividing $14 billion in federal funding among the 25 million students poor enough to count as “disadvantaged” yields a voucher of $580. Private school tuition costs, on average, nearly $11,000 per year... But the big idea Trump is touting is that he could get states to kick in enough money to give the vouchers some real buying power... If states added $110 billion of their own money to the $20 billion the federal government would spend, Trump says, every student living in poverty could get a $12,000 voucher, well over the average cost of private elementary school tuition and slightly under the average cost of private high school... If states added $110 billion of their own money to the $20 billion the federal government would spend, Trump says, every student living in poverty could get a $12,000 voucher, well over the average cost of private elementary school tuition and slightly under the average cost of private high school.