Support Our Schools!
The Nebraska legislature passed the so-called Opportunity Scholarships Act, or Legislative Bill 753, which allows taxpayers to divert up to half of their state income taxes to organizations providing scholarships to attend private and religious schools. A petition drive has been launched to repeal this scheme to defund the public schools.
Legislative Bill 753 is a “solution” in search of a problem. Nebraska already has excellent public schools. U.S. News and World Reports rated Nebraska schools seventh in the country. That same publication ranked Nebraska number four in education in best states overall.
This legislation is dangerous because it jeopardizes our excellent public schools. This new law will significantly reduce future tax revenues that could go toward funding our public schools. In addition, LB753 will significantly reduce other charitable donations. The dollar for dollar credit for donations to private schools gives preferential treatment to this particular donation. The ridiculously generous incentives in this bill will not be provided to other worthy non-profits such as churches, animal shelters and foundations.
This dangerous experiment has been implemented in other states and the results have been disastrous. “In other states, these credits have started small but steadily ballooned in cost, reducing what’s available to districts to pay teachers, provide counseling services and fund vocational and technical programs fundamental to achieving many of the things that we want in the state.” Open Sky Policy Institute.
Time Magazine posted an excellent article on April 19, 2023, titled: “How School Voucher Programs Hurt Students.” The pertinent excerpts are as follows.
“Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students…. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school — either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocates market these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.
But for the children who do transfer using a voucher, the academic results in the recent scaled-up statewide programs are catastrophic….New evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record — between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans…And these harmful voucher impacts from existing statewide vouchers lasted for years, with little else on balance to show for it.
Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.
Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs.
Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools.”
If private schools need more funding, they can hold a bake sale or raffle off some tickets— like public schools do. Perhaps they can find a right wing billionaire to fund them. Perhaps the Ricketts family would be interested. They have plenty of money.
A petition drive has been launched to repeal this dangerous scheme. The petition to repeal the private school bailout is a local grassroots campaign organized by teachers and parents.
Please sign a petition to keep this bad law off the books. You can go to Support Our Schools to find out where petitions are being signed.
In contrast, the opposition is funded and organized by out of state special interest groups. That is pretty revealing. Do they really care about Nebraska’s children? The organization that started running the “decline to sign” TV ads on local stations last week is the so-called American Federation for Children based in Maryland. This effort is being funded by former Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
This is a fight that we can win. “The perception that this is popular (with voters) is a complete misnomer,” said Brian Mikkelsen, the political action director for NSEA. He added that Nebraska voters have rejected providing public funds for private schools three previous times.
Now let’s get it done!