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Doubling down on a big whopper
Carter Bundy
During her Republican primary, Susana Martinez unequivocally advocated shifting public money from public education to private schools. The common term is “vouchers.”
She now claims to only want private money to go to private schools, but YouTube doesn’t lie. The key line is “the dollars that are set aside for that child should follow that child.” Susana’s been caught in one big whopper, but in a bizarre showing of chutzpah, seems to be doubling down on it.
Her running mate says that he and Susana support “vouchers.” Whoops. In every state in America, “voucher” doesn’t mean a private donor giving money, it means taking tax dollars away from public schools and giving them to private schools.
Republican Susana has been, until recently, an unabashed supporter of defunding public schools to boost private schools. Period.
How vouchers hurt
Don’t vouchers all equal out? If a kid is no longer in public school, and the public school loses, say, $7,000 for the year, doesn’t the school save all that money anyway?
Absolutely not. Things economists call “fixed costs” don’t go away when one, or 10, or 50 kids leave a school. Electricity, heating, cooling, landscaping, maintenance, libraries, sports equipment, athletic fields, travel for bands and teams, coaches, janitors, educational assistants, principals, secretaries, school busses, computers, chalk, white boards, cafeterias and cafeteria staff, and, of course, teachers all stay at the school.
If enough kids leave, maybe 100, you might be able to lay off a teacher or two (as if that’s a good thing), and maybe an educational assistant, and maybe you’ll purchase one or two fewer computers. But the vast majority of the public school’s costs will remain and the school — and its kids — lose big.
Left behind
In the meantime, you’ve left behind all the other kids whose parents don’t want to or can’t get their kids into private school. Only now, the left-behind kids have even fewer resources. Susana talks about not wanting to “trap” kids in failing schools. Well why is it OK to use tax dollars to help a private school do better and strip the public schools of their resources, making the trap even worse for those left behind?
She seems very comfortable with leaving everyone but a handful of privileged kids trapped in failing schools. Why not invest in the public schools — or even propose non-monetary solutions — to ensure every kid has a great opportunity?
What about the kids with special needs? Think they’re going to be getting into all the best private schools? What about kids who don’t quite have the grades to get into private schools near their house? What about the kids with learning disabilities or who need better social skills? What about single parents who rely on public school busses to get their kids to and from school? What about two-parent families who both work and can’t transport their kid to and from the private school?
Is Susana giving them a voucher too? Of course not — the private schools, by and large, aren’t going to take many of those kids. Even if they did, vouchers often aren’t enough to pay for the entire cost of private school, and most New Mexico families can’t afford thousands of extra dollars.
Public schools in small towns will be especially hard hit. Even freshman economics students know fixed costs are a bigger part of the budget in smaller schools. Vouchers will either make small schools unsustainable, the costs per student will go up significantly and require higher taxes just to stay at the same level of operations, or the left behind small town kids will face even more cuts.
There’s almost no single proposal that will exacerbate the state’s achievement gap more than vouchers. Public schools are America’s great equalizer, but if Susana supports gutting them by using public school tax dollars to prop up private schools, she should simply say so. Which is what she did, just a few months ago.
New Mexico is a state where most parents can’t afford to send their kids to private schools, and where most people believe that all kids should have a shot at a good education.
Given that, it makes sense that her pro-voucher position wouldn’t be popular (it’s not), so politically I don’t blame her for adopting a shiny new position in favor of public education now that she’s survived the Republican primary.
If parents want to send their kids to a private school, they absolutely have that right. But it shouldn’t come at the expense of the other kids remaining in public schools.
Integrity matters
Susana’s new position is against taking money from public schools. If she’s changed her mind, she should say so, and I (and most of New Mexico) welcome her to the pro-public education side.
But acting as if she never supported taking public school money and giving it to private schools? Stunning. Calling her opponent a liar for pointing out the flip-flop when her opponent was telling the complete truth? Galling. The fact that it’s all on video and yet she continues to seek a fight about it? That’s just not terribly good judgment.
It’ll be interesting to see if she keeps doubling down on a whopper, or if she comes clean and says she’s simply changed her mind about vouchers (which might antagonize her fellow Republicans). The latter might make her a flip-flopper, but at least there’d be integrity to it.
Bundy is the political and legislative director for AFSCME in New Mexico. The opinions in his column are personal and do not necessarily reflect any official AFSCME position. You can learn more about him by clicking here. Contact him at carterbundy@yahoo.com.
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Not about school success, not about supporting vouchers, not about teachers’ unions. This is about political perfidy, dishonesty and impunity. Yeah, she backed vouchers, then she said she didn’t and her present actions say: “So what?” This is the candidate’s response to judicially presiding over her spouse’s law enforcement cases, to claiming credit for successfully concluding (whatever that is) the Baby Brianna murder and shamelessly exploiting the dead child’s photo every day. These are violations of common decency and that is troubling but most disturbing is that she and her followers seem to successfully make the ugly assumption that she can get away with every one of them. Someone will vote for her.
Excellent PenPal.
The fundamental model is flawed; you cannot herd cats. You cannot take 30 kids with nothing in common but their age, and move them lockstep in the same direction at the same speed for 12 years.
There are hundreds of thousands of years of teaching experience in the state and, no seat at the table.
Why cut what is arguably the most educated and most experienced minds out of the decision making process.
Could it be that the good ol’ boys are reticent to share (lose) some of their power?
This “issue” is little more than a tempest in a teapot. While Denish supporters attack on minor issues, the big, fat (literally) elephant in the room is Denish’s refusal to unlink herself with the last 8 years of corruption by Richardson and La Politica. And her head-in-the-sand routine on the many decades of La Politica cronyism and corruption. She has just about lost my support due to her denials of what has been going on here for so many years by her party, and her hypocrisy on cap and trade, global warming issues. She is just looking like one more La Politica politician for NM.
I’m a scientist so I look at the research and see what results have actually come out of policy ideas. It seems that today we are too quick to assume we know cause and effect and how things play out and never look at the consequences of policy decisions (intended and unintended).
A quick google search shows many, many studies on the correlation or lack of correlation between per pupil expenditures and student performance outcome. Guess what? Little correlation.
Sara Cook’s comprehensive senior thesis at Brown University in 2001 reviewed all the literature and concluded, among other things “The data, however, do not support the idea that lack of achievement can be attributed to expenditure levels”. One of her examples was the improved correlation when the dynamic of the school system was changed in addition to the increased expenditure. She reviewed an Austin, TX study that showed decreasing class size was not enough to produce increased student performance in 13 schools vs. two others that varied testing, parental notification, health services among other things.
We need to generate competition and innovation in the schools to create a different dynamic; this is what vouchers can do. It wasn’t just Frank Zappa that knew necessity was the mother of invention.
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Taubman_Center/taubman/HonThesis/sc.pdf
Ms. Denish and Mr. Bundy seem to advocate more of the same static education formula that preserves the current arrangement and system of fixed benefits. After 19 years of having my own children in APS I have seen this status quo first hand.
Vouchers represent a challenge to the statist mindset, and hence the vigorous challenge to Susana Martinez for even daring to bring it up.
How her current position compares to previous interpretations of her use of the term is a distraction from the real issue of incentive for change, and methods to break the status quo.
We cannot solve the problems in education be devoting our energies to blaming people. The first three comments point to the writer, the parents, and the teachers; perhaps later comments will point to administrators, school boards, and bureaucrats. And then what? Out of all the finger-pointing comes not one idea for improving anything.
The problem is that none of the components of the system are working. All cannot be reformed t once, and the parents may not be and perhaps should not be reformed at all. There is a particular problem that no one addresses. One of the great and attractive virtues of the Hispanic culture is the closeness of most families. In the smaller cities–almost all except Albuquerque–getting a pre-college education may require the college graduate to leave family for a suitable job. Not surprisingly, many Hispanic families are ambivalent about college education. (And we are not even talking about traditional roles calling for young women to marry early and start families.) So we are not talking bad parenting; we are talking a preference for family over far-flung career success.
I have two two starting points. One is a state curriculum specifying and sequencing course content, not benchmarks or standards, as at present. Two is the colleges of education, whose course requirements and course contents for elementary school teachers in particular are not aligned with what they must teach according to the curriculum in place.
Underlying these two points (and all the others which I have) is a core belief that education is the transmission from teacher to student of information, skills, attitudes, and values. Everything else which politicians and bureaucrats like to talk about, like money, materials (from textbooks and computers to buildings), and management (accountability, testing, silver-bullet programs) is peripheral and usually distracting.
My review of the debate appears Monday on this website.
Boy you nailed it right on the head. I was amazed at Martinez’ strategy. She advocated vouchers and then denied that she was doing that. I think she did that at least four times very clearly. Now, with an audience that doesn’t know the terminology maybe that works. But the entire audience for this had to be people fairly well versed in all the terms and the issues.
I would think that any middle school debate teacher would have graded her down for that.
Yeah the status quo is working great, lets not change a thing. Secure jobs,, no competition, unacceptable success rate, what’s not to like? In other shocking news, there’s no correlation between spending per student and academic progress. Straw Man Alert!
Putting the blame solely on teachers and teachers unions is idiotic. I’ve seen my fair share of disinterested parents with abysmal parenting skills who could obviously care less if their children are successful students.
Carter, don’t forget to point out your main concern. Vouchers to private schools also means less dues money going to Teacher’s Unions that work to keep those same failed educators who have failede our children on staff year after year instead of allowing the hiring of teachers who can be effective in the classroom.