This fall, 10,000 Utah students will start on a new education venture in Utah — each student’s family will have access to $8,000 to spend on private and homeschooling. Their $8,000 voucher was made available by legislative appropriations of over $80 million the past two years.
The Utah Fits All website has a public list of over 450 eligible providers — schools and service providers — on which the vouchers can be spent. For a private school with more than 150 students to become an eligible provider, the school must submit a financial audit, meet federal anti-discrimination law and do a criminal background check on employees. Smaller enrollment private schools are excused from the financial audit.
The online handbooks for parents and for schools and educational service providers give helpful guidelines for what expenses are legitimate, which are forbidden and which would need pre-approval. The program’s rules and regulations are structured to account for the expenditure of these public funds.
That is not enough. The Utah Fits All Scholarship lacks educational accountability. While Utah school children in school districts and charter schools take annual assessments which provide educators and families information about student’s academic abilities and progress, Utah voucher students are not required to take those tests.
We will not get that important information from Utah’s voucher students. Every year, students receiving Utah Fits All vouchers are required to “compile a portfolio” describing their educational “opportunities and achievements” for that school year and submit it to the program administrator. As an option to the portfolio, parents can request that their child be given a national test, an industry certification test, the ACT, SAT or ASVAB.
This minimal level of accountability for voucher-using students is not universal. There are more than 60 educational voucher programs in 31 states and Washington, D.C. Thirty-five of those private school choice programs in 20 states have some sort of testing requirement for students receiving financial aid to attend private schools. Utah is one of 13 states that have no testing requirement for any of their students receiving state dollars to attend private schools or to support homeschooling.
Research studies in states that require students who use vouchers to take the same tests that public school students take show that vouchers don’t automatically improve student performance. Published research in Louisiana, Ohio and Indiana showed voucher students in those states performed more poorly on state tests than did students with similar characteristics who remained in public schools.
I am not predicting that Utah students using the Utah Fits All voucher scholarships will perform more poorly than similar students who remain in Utah’s public schools. Utah has often done better than expected, including our students’ performance on some measures during and since COVID. Maybe Utah Fits All students will outperform their public-school peers, but we will never know if they don’t take the same tests.
I sponsored HB400 in the past session, Student Testing Amendments, which would require students receiving vouchers in Utah to take the same end of year tests that Utah’s public-school students take. I was disappointed that the members of the Rules Committee were never given the opportunity to assign HB400 to a committee for a public hearing.
Early in the legislative session, voucher proponents were planning on spending $200 million on the Utah Fits All scholarship launch this year. Whether the amount was $200 million or $80 million, such a large expenditure of state income tax dollars that otherwise would have gone to public education should have had a chance for the public to weigh in.
Invariably voucher programs grow over time, sometimes very quickly. Arizona’s Universal Voucher program created in 2023 was projected to cost $65 million in its second year of operation. The actual cost was $708 million. Ballooning costs have occurred in other states that have introduced programs to send public dollars to private education.
Researchers have also looked at states that have created significant voucher programs between 2007 and 2021 and compared their per pupil expenditures to states without voucher programs. In 2007, the difference between per pupil spending in states with voucher programs and states without voucher programs was $900 better in states without voucher programs. In 2021 the difference between the two sets of states was $2,800, in favor of the states without voucher programs. Spending per pupil for public school students decreased in states with voucher programs.
As a policy maker, a taxpayer and an educator, I would like better information about how well students using vouchers in Utah perform in private schools. Better information helps make better decisions.
(Photo courtesy of Joel K. Briscoe) Joel K. Briscoe
Rep. Joel K. Briscoe is a retired high school teacher and a member of the Utah House of Representatives. He represents Utah House District 24 and is running for re-election in the Democratic primary on June 25, 2024.
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