Our Views: Jindal floats voucher plan

• Advocate Opinion page staff
• Published: Apr 8, 2008 - Page: 6B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Is there a case for vouchers so that public money can pay for tuition in private schools?

We don’t know, and the problem with Gov. Bobby Jindal’s lightweight proposal in this area is that it obscures the policy implication of such a big change.

As the governor and his people tell it, he wants to spend $10 million on scholarships — avoiding the real name, vouchers — for children in failing schools in Orleans Parish. To the extent there are any details at all on this plan — for it’s merely a concept at this point — the money would allow the lucky recipients to get maybe $5,000 for a student’s tuition at private schools.

We shall be interested to see how this is fleshed out in the legislative process. But similar bills have come to grief before, because legislators correctly have seen these as diverting state aid to private and parochial schools. As a practical matter, to the extent these proposals have been pushed in the past by Catholic schools in New Orleans, it’s a $10 million subsidy to the church’s schools; that’s where the likely openings are going to be.

This is on top of a tax break statewide on income taxes for private and parochial schools. That was amended to include uniforms and some costs of public-school parents. That is also a subsidy mainly for church schools, which always lobby heavily for this kind of public aid, to the tune of more than $25 million a year.

The governor uses broad-brush rhetoric to stigmatize opposition to this vague plan.

“Too many families, particularly those in low-income areas, are forced to send their kids to a failing school simply because of their ZIP code or their bank balance. That must end,” the governor said. “No child in America, and no child in Louisiana, should be trapped in a failing school.”

We remain skeptical.

We are not entirely against some vouchers in some circumstances. There might be a case for a targeted voucher program because of the peculiar circumstances of the New Orleans area after the 2005 hurricanes. But if the governor wants to make that case, he’ll have to do better than this vague $10 million plan.

If students are trapped in failing schools, the governor is riding to the “rescue” of few of them.

This governor has vast power over what happens in Orleans Parish because of the state takeover of schools there, and he has a great deal of say in public education elsewhere in the state.

And he has the means to make more charter schools — public schools run independently of local school districts — available as a public school choice.

As Rep. Jean-Paul Morrell, D-New Orleans, noted before the session, there’s no lack of failure for the governor to chew upon. “You can go to rural districts that have LEAP scores just as bad as in New Orleans,” he said.