By Alex Bohan, guest contributor

The movement towards school vouchers, or opportunity scholarships, is gaining ground in Tennessee.  The program, which uses state tax dollars to provide low-income families with vouchers that they could use to send their children to private schools, has been gaining support within the state legislature over the last year.  Governor Bill Haslam has already unveiled a bill that, if passed, would allow for families in among the bottom 5 percent in income to enroll in the program.

The voucher program hinges on one very basic belief: that private and parochial schools provide a better education than public schools do.  But is that true?  Not necessarily.  The Milwaukee voucher program, which has been around long enough to produce some long-term studies, has shown that the difference between public school students and voucher school students is almost zero.  Parts of those results are here and here.

But above all, I have a few questions about the voucher program.

What about those school systems that cater almost exclusively to families that earn poverty-level wages?  Are we going to give vouchers to all of those families?  Are all of those families going to exercise the option to send their children to private schools?  What about those families who choose not to?  Can we still operate a full school where only a fraction of the students will attend the following year?  I’d be very interested to see what that school’s budget would be like after the voucher program kicks into full swing, since it seems to me that quite a bit of that money would be reallocated to go to school vouchers.  And what about low-income families who have no way to provide transportation to and from these private schools which can be many miles away?  Remember, most private schools do not provide buses, nor are they required to.

Additionally, with all of the discussion on greater teacher accountability through standardized testing, how is the state going to ensure that the dollars spent on education through school vouchers are being spent wisely unless they plan to incorporate the same standardized testing in private schools as well? Would it be fair to assume that those standardized tests would be given to all of the students within that school, whether they received school vouchers or not, or would you segregate those students who did receive school vouchers and only give them the standardized tests?

And here’s another fun scenario to think about.  If we really are going to believe in and push for that teacher accountability through standardized testing, and the state is going to make sure that the teachers who are educating the students that the state is still spending thousands of dollars to educate, then what kind of accountability are you going to give the private school teacher?  Can they be held accountable at all?  If so, how would you fairly determine whether that teacher was doing a good job if you only gave the voucher student some form of standardized testing?  Certainly you couldn’t accurately determine an educator’s efficacy based on the test results of only a few students.  You would have to give that same test to all of the students in the classroom, and use all of those test results to determine that.

We begin at that point to really blur the line on how intrusive the state government can be within the domain of a private school.  That is, unless, the state has no plans on holding private school teachers accountable.

The point is folks, public education works.  I know. I’m a product of both Tennessee public education and a Nashville private high school.  From my experience, there was no discernible difference between the two.  It is true that I received my K-8 education in Williamson County Schools, which is extremely well-funded and has widespread community support, but they were public schools.  They worked and they worked very well.  I received a phenomenal education.  But public schools work best when they are well funded.  They work best when there’s widespread community support.  They work best when teachers don’t feel like their jobs are at risk because a voucher program threatens to take away students from their classroom, forcing eventual downsizing.

It just seems to me as though the legislature is jumping on board with school vouchers because they don’t know what else to do to help students in low-performing schools.  It’s as if they’re just abandoning ship believing that the ship is sinking and unsalvageable.  I just don’t see how these schools are beyond saving, and when I see the Governor and the legislature pushing for school vouchers, I see them admitting that these schools are beyond saving.

I’m not ready to quit on these schools yet, and neither should Governor Haslam or the Tennessee State Legislature.

Alex Bohan is a MTSU graduate living in Nashville.  He currently makes a living tutoring students in the Nashville area, extreme couponing with his fiancee, and promoting Bonnaroo for the good karma. And yes, he got his Bonnaroo tickets early this year.