Virginia Is Considering Four School Voucher Bills. Each One Is A Bad Deal For Taxpayers.
At Forbes, I take a look at the newest versions of a super-voucher bill under way in Virginia.
This year, legislators in Virginia have offered at least four bills to enact education savings accounts. While there are distinctions between the bills, each one is a bad deal for Virginia taxpayers, providing little oversight or accountability for how taxpayer’s education dollars will be spent.
There are plenty of problems that I consider, but one of the big ones is accountability for the education service providers.
Is there any accountability for the vendors who will be collecting taxpayer dollars?
The short answer is “not really.”
HB 1508 calls on the hired program administrators to come up with a procedure for “creating, preapproving, approving, maintaining, amending, and updating” a list of education service providers, but it says nothing about any qualifications the law would require (meaning that, once again, a hired program management company would be setting education policy for the commonwealth).
HB 1371 and HB 1396 list requirements for education service providers which are 1) inform the department it wants to be on the list and 2) promise not to give parents kickbacks of ESA money. That’s it.
These three bills also call for an Amazon-style system of “reviews” of vendors to be created; presumably proponents believe that this sort of message board provides accountability.
SB 823 says nothing about education service providers at all. Under this bill, parents are apparently just supposed to find places to spend the voucher money on their own.
No accountability for service providers means little protection for families and students. If they fall victim to fraud, are abandoned mid-year by a failed edu-business, or simply run out of voucher money, families have no real recourse.
Are there protections for education service providers?
You bet. In what has become standard boilerplate for these bills, all four bills explicitly state that the taxpayer money must come with no strings attached. The money does not make them “an agent of the state or federal government.” They will be given “maximum freedom.” And a provider shall not be required “to alter its creed, practices, admissions policy, or curriculum.”
So even though they are accepting taxpayer dollars, they may still discriminate as they wish, reject certain students as they wish, and teach whatever they wish.