A storm is brewing in education. The recent announcement that the Archdiocese of New York would close eight schools across the city mirrors a nationwide trend that’s been gaining momentum.
Between 1999 and 2003, more than 1,200 private and parochial schools in urban areas have shut their doors while enrollment has dropped by nearly 360,000. Many of these schools worked hard to keep costs down, but as New York’s Cardinal Egan recently told me, “The cost to us, even though about a third of what is spent on the competition, is rising above our financial capacities.”
With tuition averaging about $4,500 annually, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the typical family–let’s say a police officer and a nurse–to afford to send their children to the schools they want.
As a proud graduate of P.S. 39 and I.S. 2 on Staten Island, I recognize that public schools are the right choice for the overwhelming majority of American students. I have seen the outstanding achievements in our public schools firsthand. That is why I have consistently voted to provide historic levels of federal funding–more than $57 billion this year alone–for public education, an increase of 150 percent over the last decade.
Unfortunately, many low-income students find themselves trapped in failing schools, where academic achievement–and the accompanying opportunities–are all but nonexistent. For them, school choice exists mostly in name only. These young Americans, the majority of whom are minorities, are being denied a basic education because the alternatives are simply outside their family’s financial means.
In New York, between 65 percent and 80 percent of students in the archdiocese’s 116 schools live under the poverty line. In Milwaukee, more than 90 percent of the students participating in a school choice program during the first four years were African American or Hispanic.
While taxpayers save money for every child that attends a non-public school, the tax code offers these families no such benefit. This needs to change. That is why I have introduced legislation creating a $4,500 federal tuition tax credit for K-12 parochial and private-school education.
Here’s how it would work: Families would be permitted to take a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their tax liability for non-public-school-tuition expenses. For example, a taxpayer with a liability of $10,000 and a tax credit of $4,500 would be required to pay only $5,500 in taxes. Simply, it allows families to keep more of their money to spend on their children’s education.
Some already have called this a voucher program, but it is not. The Arizona supreme court recognized the difference when ruling its state-run tuition-tax-credit program did not violate the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Others claim it will lead to an exodus of students and destroy public education–statements that suggest their own lack of confidence in the very system they are fighting to protect.
The fact is that the school-choice genie is out of the bottle and it’s working in Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida and even the District of Columbia. Those who continue to embrace a cocoon-like mentality only serve to smother incentive, stifle innovation, and cultivate mediocrity in education by defending the status quo.
No less a respected educational leader than Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, agreed: “It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy…and there are few incentives for innovation or productivity. It’s no surprise our school system doesn’t improve. It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.”
Public-school students would also benefit under this plan because it would help reduce class sizes, improve teacher-to-student ratios and increase per-capita spending. A nonpartisan economic analysis of a tuition-tax-credit proposal in Utah found that taxpayers would save as much as $1.3 billion and, according to the Deseret Morning News, “dealt a blow to public education officials’ stand that tuition tax credits would drain school dollars.”
The fact that both public and non-public schools would win with a federal tuition tax credit is beside the point. What matters most is that America’s students should have every opportunity to succeed, regardless of the type of school they attend.
–The Honorable Vito Fossella represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn.