Public or Private School- FMS In The News
The below article was taken directly from the Augusta Free Press by Fishburne Military School.
August 9, 2009 by Chris Graham
www.augustafreepress.com
Dylan Owens-Wargo wasn’t enamored, to say the least, with his mom’s plans to send him to Fishburne Military School for eighth grade.
“I told her I was going to run away if she made me go to Fishburne,” said Owens-Wargo, whose mother, Heather Owens, for her part felt she had no choice but to pull Dylan out of the Waynesboro public-school system.
“He had just stopped caring. He either wasn’t doing his homework, or he wasn’t turning it in, trying to be cool like the other kids. I didn’t give him a choice. This was our only option,” said Owens, who was rolling the dice in more ways than one. Because Heather Owens isn’t the archetype for a private-school mom. She is in fact a single mother and small-business owner who takes on extra clients at her Natural Beauty Studios in Downtown Waynesboro to help pay the $15,000 annual expenses for tuition, books and uniforms for Dylan to be able to attend Fishburne.
“It’s really, really hard on me. I take clients sometimes 7 o’clock in the morning, sometimes 10 o’clock at night. Whatever it takes. There are days when I’m not sure how I’m going to accomplish it. But it falls into place,” Owens said.
Money game
Virginia doesn’t offer vouchers or tax credits for parents who send their children to private schools, so Owens goes it alone. The amounts you often hear talked about being offered to parents in the form of vouchers or tax credits, usually in the $2,500- to $5,000-a-year range, wouldn’t pay even a quarter of what it takes to send Dylan to military school. But it would help mom and son make ends meet, no question.
“I know the big argument is it would undermine the funding going to public schools, that children living in poverty wouldn’t get the funds they need to attend the public schools and everything else. But I believe if you send your child to private school that you should get some sort of tax credit,” Owens said. “I don’t have the answer as to how. I know it’s very controversial, but I’m not one of those people who is well-off and just doesn’t want my kid in the public schools, and money is not an object for me. It’s a huge issue for me. Whatever the amount of money, it would be a huge issue for me.”
Owens hit the nail on the head as far as the chief arguments from critics of vouchers and tuition tax credits. And they are valid arguments in the post-Reagan tight-as-a-tick government world that we live in. “We aren’t opposed to private-school education. We aren’t opposed to parents making what they believe is the best choice for their children’s education. But until and unless the Commonwealth of Virginia is able to fully fund public schools in the way that they are required to do by the Virginia Constitution, there is no wiggle room for allowing taxpayer dollars to go toward funding or supplementing funding for private-school educators, because their first and primary responsibility is to the children in the Commonwealth of Virginia’s public schools,” said Kitty Boitnott, the president of the Virginia Education Association, which opposes vouchers and tax credits for parents who send their children to private schools due to the funding issues that we all know are there.
The fact of the matter is that money for vouchers and tax credits would come necessarily from the state’s general fund, which also provides funding for public education in addition to its competing interests with public safety and transportation and economic development and myriad other public needs.
But it’s also a fact that people like Heather Owens are paying taxes into the system that go in part to pay for public schools that their children are not using. The question for school-choice advocate and former schoolteacher Chris Saxman is, Wouldn’t it make sense for the state to recognize that their decisions to that effect are actually helping keep the cost of public education down by reducing the impact on public-school infrastructure?
“One hundred twenty five thousand kids in Virginia go to private schools. If they all showed up tomorrow at public schools, that’s a billion dollars a year. You can’t get away from that kind of money,” said Saxman, a Republican who announced last month that he will not seek a fifth term in the Virginia House of Delegates because he wants to devote his time to advocating for school choice.
“The VEA’s mantra is that you’re taking money away from public education. No. Look at Tuition Assistance Grants. The same principle applies,” Saxman said, referencing the state program for Virginia residents who attend private colleges and universities in the Commonwealth.
“If the State of Virginia can give a kid $3,000 and send them to Bridgewater or Mary Baldwin as opposed to ODU or JMU, which is $7,000, that’s a net savings of $4,000. Plus you’re not having to build dorms and classrooms to accommodate them,” Saxman said.
Boitnott counters those contentions by pointing out that the funding issue is a lot more complicated at the K-12 level. “If you have three kids in a classroom not going to the public school anymore because they’ve gotten a voucher or tax credit to go to the private school, you still have to have a teacher for the 20-however-many kids that are still there. You still have to pay the light bill. You still have to have heat. It still has to have a full contingent of staff. It isn’t logical to suggest, then, that you’re going to save money,” Boitnott said.
Inside the numbers
A look at hard data would probably be helpful here. Public schools are educating nine in 10 Virginian children enrolled in school, according to analysis from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia. That number has remained relatively constant for the past 20 years, and it’s hard to imagine a major shift one way or the other in the near future, though if there were to be, I’d predict that it would be a shift in the direction of more kids going to public schools, given the hits being absorbed by many families in the rough-and-tumble economy the past 18 months.
That pain has trickled down to private schools as some parents have struggled to come up with tuitions due to job and stock-market losses and some of their annual donors have pulled some of their money back in to guard against the uncertainties of today’s markets. Stuart Hall in Staunton, for example, is anticipating something of a small decline in enrollment for the 2009-2010 school year. A bit of a double whammy could come in an expected increase in demand for financial aid
“We don’t have a real pool of money for financial aid. So if the financial-aid committee decides to give a student a $5,000 financial-aid award, I don’t have a fund over here that I go to. I’m just accepting that student at a discounted rate,” said Sally Day, the director of enrollment management at Stuart Hall.
Eastern Mennonite School in Harrisonburg does financial aid differently. Principal Paul Leaman told me that the school has an annual capital campaign in the $400,000-a-year range that it uses to provide funds for financial-aid awards, and that EMS is able to meet generally 60 to 65 percent of the identified need in any given year.
Some more math – going back to the numbers from Weldon Cooper and Saxman, roughly 125,000 Virginia students are currently enrolled in private schools in Virginia. That is on average 1,000 kids per school district, though obviously the numbers would fluctuate from district to district based on the population density of a particular locality and the stock of private schools in that locality and its surrounding region. I should call this math quick math, because even just using the average you can get an idea of the interrelationship between private K-12 education and public K-12 education in Virginia. A thousand students is another new school or two per district.
Saxman’s push for school choice is more nuanced than just pitting private schools versus public schools in a dash for cash. Saxman is also an advocate of public-school-choice options that would give parents the right to send their children to schools outside of their assigned school district. “If my kid in Staunton wants to go to school at Fort Defiance High School in Augusta County, because they have an art program there, maybe an industrial program there, and he wants that, and the county charges us $1,500, and I can’t afford it, I should have the opportunity to take what’s available to me otherwise in the financing of education and use that to send him to Fort Defiance High School,” Saxman said.
So in Saxman’s mind, parents would not only be able to apply vouchers or tax credits to private-school tuitions but to public-school tuitions as well. “Parents have a right to say, Just because I live in this neighborhood, this is my school? I get to have a choice, because I don’t pay taxes to that school, but I pay into the universe of local, state and federal tax collectors. I deserve the chance to say, Today, I don’t want a Diet Coke, I want a Diet Pepsi,” said Saxman, making the analogy to higher education and the idea that students in the Valley would only be able to attend James Madison University, and students in Hampton Roads would be limited to enrolling at Old Dominion University. “Can you imagine that bombshell going off?” Saxman said.
The idea from Saxman and others who back this approach is to instill some good old-fashioned free-market competition to education, with the thought that principals and administrators in public- and private-school environments would have to step up their offerings to be able to meet the demands of the market. “At the end of the day, ultimate accountability rests with the consumer. If at the end of the school year you feel your kid isn’t getting educated, you say, We’re going. I had parents call me when I was a teacher and say, I’m paying x number of thousand dollars to get my kid an education. Why isn’t she learning?” Saxman said.
The VEA opposes public-school-choice initiatives, Boitnott said, instead preferring to see resources are put into individual schools “so that they can be successful, and kids can achieve.”
Boitnott points out that allowing for mass movement within school districts and contiguous regions could lead to even wider disparities between school offerings in urban and suburban areas by diverting resources to already-well-funded schools that would see increased enrollments under a school-choice scenario.
The politics
“It’s all a red-herring shell game,” Boitnott said. “The people who are pushing choice are the ones who want to be able to send their kids to schools where they have some control over who their kids get to play with, what kind of community the kids are associating with, and they apparently want to turn their backs on their own community school instead of doing the hard work of making sure that the schools that their kids are zoned to go to have the resources and high-quality teachers and kind of administrative support that they deserve to have.
“Every single child in this country deserves to have a high-quality school, with high-quality teachers. All of this stuff about, We need vouchers so we can send our kids other places, we need to provide choices, we need charter schools, all of it is simply an attempt to get away from the responsibility of providing a public education, which is what this country has been founded on. This really frustrates me, and I really believe there is an underlying bigotry at the bottom of it all that nobody wants to address,” Boitnott said.
“That’s the history of school choice in Virginia, and I think 40 years later we haven’t moved far enough away from that,” Boitnott said.
So let’s address the issue raised by Boitnott. Is this about school choice and the free market, as Saxman and others make it out to be? Or are we all just dancing with the numbers around the real issue at hand?
This is where I straddle the fence as a numbers guy with a social conscience. On our sister news website, AugustaFreePress.com, I ran a series of columns from a conservative think tank advocating for school choice back in the spring, hoping to instill a healthy debate on the pros and cons of school choice among our largely progressive reader base. The first three or four columns in the series focused on money and enrollment data and made the case for public- and private-school choice pretty well with that kind of grounding. The final installment in the series took a giant leap from money and hard data straight into a rant about gay and lesbian teachers promoting a homosexual agenda and prayer and the teaching of creationism in school and other such social-conservative political blather.
I’m all for injecting free-market principles into education. I’m not for having somebody use the market as a cover for diverting public dollars to advance narrow sociopolitical interests.
“And any way you slice this, the funding for any voucher program ends up in the coffers of primarily private religious schools,” said Barry Lynn, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.,-based Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “The idea that this is constitutional is that because the parents get the funds, they become kind of a stopgap, and that therefore the money somehow doesn’t benefit religion. But of course since the money goes in the form of a voucher to the parent, the parent essentially cashes in the voucher and the money ends up primarily in religious schools.”
Lynn was alluding there to a controversial 5-4 United States Supreme Court decision in a 2002 case in Ohio that provided a constitutional foot in the door for a voucher program there. The Court was divided along clear ideological lines in the decision, and it isn’t hard to figure that a change in the makeup of the Court in the future could lead to a reversal should another similar case arise down the road.
Saxman and I traded e-mails after the school-choice column rant on gays and prayer and creationism ran in the AFP in which I pressed him on how the social-conservative base of the Republican Party was muddying up the water for him getting anything substantive done on school choice by pushing the envelope in that way. His message back was that school choice has proponents across the political spectrum, and he’s actually right on that. “We’re for anything that moves the ball forward. And we don’t feel that adult interests should get in the way of what’s best for children. Obviously that’s gotten us at loggerheads with the teachers’ unions, but we feel that there needs to be a realignment of the Democratic Party’s positioning on education issues so that it’s more kid-centered,” said Kevin Chavous, a Democrat and former member of the Washington, D.C., City Council who now heads up the group Democrats for Education Reform.
School reform has been a hot topic for years in the nation’s capital, long viewed as having the country’s worst school system even with the high dollars per pupil that have been thrown into public education there. “It’s not the money. It’s what you do with the money,” Chavous said. “Funding and fueling a bureaucracy does not ensure that children are going to be educated. And that’s the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal isn’t so many dollars for public education. The ultimate goal is educating children.”
A top-end goal for Chavous with Democrats for Education Reform is to provide support for Democrats in policymaking positions who want to advocate for school choice at the risk of the loss of backing from the education lobby. “Status-quo bureaucrats, and I don’t use that term pejoratively, but accurately, they can dress it up all they want, but as long as we’re seeing this continuing slide in traditional public schools by using the same approach, you’re going to see momentum grow for change, and that’s what we’re seeing among many progressive-thinking Democrats,” Chavous said.
“Consistent with our mission, we want to promote progressive education policies that aren’t held hostage by any special interests. And we want Democrats who are policy leaders and elected officials to feel comfortable saying what they believe as opposed to muzzling their voice because they don’t want to be taken out by the lobby,” Chavous said.
Saxman, now out of the elected-politics game, offered as insight the idea that Democrats could be successful politically if they were to decide to co-opt the issue. “I don’t understand why Democrats don’t like this. Co-opt the message, and you take it off the table,” Saxman said. “Even Republicans are scared because they think they’re not going to get the VEA endorsement. I’m thinking, It doesn’t matter if they endorse you, their people aren’t going to vote for you because you’re of different political persuasions. Just deal with it. You shouldn’t worry about the endorsements. You should worry about getting the kids educated.”
Dylan
Dylan Owens-Wargo didn’t end up running away from home. He didn’t like the rat line at Fishburne, but once he graduated from rat to cadet, “it got better,” said Owens-Wargo, who has gone from not doing his homework to A-student status and from threatening to run away from home at the thought of being sent to military school to wanting to be an Army Ranger after college.
That’s the big news out of this story, incidentally. Heather Owens and her son aren’t arguing about whether or not Dylan does his homework. It’s where he’s going to go to college. Mom wants West Point. Dylan for the moment is leaning toward the University of Virginia.
“I want him appointed to West Point because that’s a full free ride. Right now he’s into UVa. That’s OK. That’s a much better argument to have than, OK, is he going to end up flipping burgers the rest of his life, or in jail?” Owens said.
