It was the best of lies; it was the worst of lies.
Richburg and Poortown both have K-12 schools with 100 students, and school budgets of $2 million.
Pat lives in Richburg. He decides to leave the local school to accept an Education Freedom Account (EFA) with $5,255 in it.
In Richburg, the State-Wide Education Property Tax (SWEPT) is sufficient to cover the state adequacy grants, so the $4,200 that would have been allocated to the ‘adequacy’ pocket gets allocated to the ‘general’ pocket instead. (The money is collected by Richburg and never leaves Richburg. What isn’t allocated to adequacy is used to offset additional taxes.) The school budget doesn’t change — just as it wouldn’t if a kid moved in or out of town. (Small changes in enrollment are already anticipated in the budget.) School taxes don’t change. The state gives Pat $5,255 from the state Education Trust Fund.
Chris lives in Poortown. He also decides to leave the local school system to accept an EFA. In Poortown, SWEPT is insufficient to cover the state adequacy grants, so some of that money is taken from the state Education Trust Fund. The $4,200 that the school system would have received from the trust fund for having Chris as a student is applied to his EFA, along with an extra $1,055. Because the school budget doesn’t change, now property owners in Poortown have to make up that $4,200 with increased school taxes.
In the first case, total spending rises from $2,000,000 to $2,005,255. In the second case, total spending rises from $2,000,000 to $2,005,225.
However, proponents of EFAs claim that in each case, the taxpayers save money. The Josiah Bartlett Center recently shared an article about EFAs written by EdChoice. The title was EdChoice analysis finds EFAs save taxpayers nearly $9 million this year, $23 million annually from currently enrolled students.
How do they figure?
In each of our fictitious schools, the cost per student is $20,000 (i.e., the total budget divided by the number of students, or $2 million divided by 100). According to the proponents, this means that when Pat and Chris leave their schools, each school can spend $20,000 less than it was spending before.
But where would these spending cuts come from? No teachers, aides, or administrators are fired. No one takes a pay cut. No bus routes are changed. It costs the same amount to run the schools regardless of whether Pat and Chris are attending them. So when they leave, the old spending (for the schools) remains unchanged, and $5,225 in new spending (for each EFA) is added to that.
Here is what the proponents of EFAs are hoping that you don’t understand: The cost-per-student of running a school is not the cost of educating one student who attends that school. If you ignore that crucial fact, you can be fooled into thinking that increased spending can magically result in decreased taxes.
Do the Josiah Bartlett Center and EdChoice really believe that when a student leaves a school, the budget goes down by the per-student cost at that school? Whether they believe it or not, we should be skeptical of any other reports they publish.
I am in favor of education alternatives. But I’m not willing to accept the party line for a program without understanding the details.
