UF researcher: Florida voucher ruling not a threat to other states

January 11, 2006

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — School tuition vouchers are likely to survive in other states, despite the Florida Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down the program for students attending failing schools, said a University of Florida economist.

Florida has a liberal Supreme Court, with five of its seven members appointed by Democratic governors, said Lawrence Kenny, a UF economics professor who recently analyzed the results of studies on vouchers.

“I think people need to keep in mind that state supreme court rulings often reflect the ideology of the court more than the constitutionality of the issue,” he said.

Much has been made of the importance of the Florida ruling because other states have provisions similar to Florida’s constitution requiring that public education be “uniform,” but in Wisconsin, a state with such a “uniformity” clause, the state Supreme Court upheld vouchers in 1992, Kenny said.

He also noted that vouchers were unlikely to be overturned in Ohio, where the state Supreme Court in 1999 had approved its current school voucher program, and in Washington D.C., whose voucher program was approved by Congress.

Politics are important, he said, as vouchers are most likely to be approved in conservative Republican states with at least one large struggling school district.

“Political ideology plays a powerful role in explaining the success of educational choice proposals,” Kenny said. “With very few exceptions, voucher proposals have come to a vote only in states where Republicans have controlled both the executive and legislative branches of government.”

Republicans are more supportive of vouchers because of their faith in markets and private institutions, believing competition from private schools makes education more efficient, Kenny said. Democrats, in contrast, are more likely to oppose vouchers because they have greater confidence in the public sector and are politically aligned with teacher unions, he said.

And conservative Republicans are more likely than moderate Republicans to favor vouchers because they are most bullish on the marketplace, Kenny said.

Vouchers also fare better in precincts with problem-plagued schools, fewer teachers, legislators who receive smaller contributions from teacher unions and larger numbers of students already enrolled in private schools, he said.

Kenny, whose work is published in the July issue of the journal Public Choice, said the study is the first to examine what factors determine which states adopt vouchers. He believes this option for school choice is likely to become more widespread in the future.

“In a number of battles, teacher unions claim that vouchers are going to destroy the educational system,” Kenny said. “With vouchers now in place in several states, I think a growing amount of evidence will show the public school system is not threatened and that vouchers can help students learn more.”

Vouchers in Milwaukee — the only such program approved by Democratic majorities in the statehouse — and Cleveland have expanded as people have become less intimidated by them, Kenny said. “If the public school system is really having trouble, then opposition fades, even among Democratic ranks,” he said.

Florida’s voucher program was the only one to pass that did not specifically target a large, struggling metropolitan school district, Kenny said. But when Florida became the first state to authorize vouchers statewide in 1999, it was the first year that Republicans controlled the governor’s office and both chambers of the state Legislature, he said.

States with larger Republican majorities in the legislature also are more likely to authorize charter schools, Kenny said. And charter schools, as well as vouchers, are less likely to be approved in states with strong teachers’ unions, he said.

”Vouchers would cause some public school teachers to be thrust into the private, non-unionized sector, where wages are lower, there are no certification requirements, merit pay systems are more common and there are no union-imposed work restrictions,” he said. “As a result, public school teachers are staunch opponents of vouchers.”

Eric Brunner, economics professor at Quinnipiac University, said that most studies of school choice programs have focused on how expanded school choice affects school performance. “Dr. Kenny’s study is important because it provides some of the first evidence on why some states are willing to implement school choice programs while others are not,” he said.