Defeat of Voucher Plan in Utah Raises Questions for Supporters
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The defeat of a plan to bring school vouchers to Utah is raising questions among supporters of vouchers about whether they should scale back their ambitions. Vouchers can be used to allow parents to opt out of public schools and into private ones, without having to cover the cost themselves. Programs across the country built on the idea have been growing, but most are limited, operating in a single city, such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington D.C., or letting certain kinds of students participate, such as poor children or children with disabilities.
Supporters of the Utah program saw it as a much fuller realization of the idea: The law, passed by the state Legislature in February, would have made every parent of a kindergarten-age Utahn eligible for a voucher.
But following the law’s defeat by a public referendum Tuesday, 62% to 38%, a spokeswoman for a Utah group leading the push for the program, Parents for Choice in Education, Leah Barker, said vouchers no longer seem like a realistic goal.
“I think that we maybe need to take a step back and think about, ‘What’s Utah ready for?’ Maybe something a little bit smaller,” Ms. Barker said. She cited merit-based pay for teachers as a change that could be more palatable.
The main financer of the Utah campaign, Patrick Byrne, who donated more than $4 million of the fortune he has accumulated running Overstock.com, said he is looking for other states that might have more desire for a voucher program. But as he moves elsewhere — he named Texas and South Carolina as possible next stops — Mr. Byrnes said he is open to pushing for a less-than-universal voucher program, perhaps one targeted at low-income children or at African-Americans.
As it was, he said, the Utah program, which required participating private schools to undergo some government monitoring, was merely “half a loaf” in his opinion and that of his mentor, the late voucher proponent Milton Friedman. But now, he said, “I would take a quarter of a loaf. I would take an eighth of a loaf.”
Even small programs, he said, could prove so popular that they would lead to demand for broader ones.
That pattern of growth is already occurring in many states across the country, the executive director of the Milton & Rose Friedman Foundation, Robert Enlow, said.
In the last year, five new variations on voucher programs have passed and four others have been expanded or modified in states from Georgia to Iowa and Rhode Island.
“I know states where if they could pass universal bills, they would. They’re passing right now what they can,” Mr. Enlow said. Mr. Enlow said the Utah loss carries some lessons — including, perhaps, the difficulty of passing a program in one of the 22 states that lets public referendums overturn legislative action. But he said universal programs remain a real possibility. “This movement is still strong,” he said.
The director of the Education Intelligence Agency, Mike Antonucci, said he thinks the lesson from Utah is more brutal. “If you can’t pass a universal statewide voucher program in Utah,” he said, “you can’t pass it anywhere in the United States.”
Proponents of universal vouchers, he said, should give up the dream.