This isn’t how you improve Alabama schools

My sister and I attended Catholic schools for 12 years.

These were not elite institutions. None of my classmates, as far as I know, went to Ivy League universities. On balance, the education we got was on par with what the local public schools offered.

But it was important to our parents that we pray in class and get Catholic religious instruction. Public schools couldn’t deliver that, and our non-Catholic neighbors wouldn’t want them to.

So my parents paid the tuition, understanding that a family choosing this route had to make sacrifices. No one thought of using public money to support private education.

But that idea may be front and center in this year’s Alabama legislative session.

Gov. Kay Ivey and several Republican legislators want to expand the state programs that put public money into private schools. They’re talking specifically about “education savings accounts.”

These programs allow parents to take the equivalent of what gets spent on each student in the state and apply it to private school tuition, online learning, or other services. Sen. Larry Stutts, R-Tuscumbia, proposed a bill last year that would have eventually given every student in the state an education savings account of $6,900.

It’s not clear yet what will emerge. Legislators balked at Stutts’ bill last spring.

But some proposal will come forth. And when it does, it will be sold as an antidote to the Alabama public school system. The struggles of our state schools, and their low performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), will be invoked again and again.

Alabama does have low NAEP scores. But that’s not because of a lack of paths to private schools.

It’s because of poverty and 150 years of Alabama lawmakers refusing to adequately fund education.

Caps on taxes, and achievement

In Alabama, property taxes have been capped at the state and local level since 1875. The 1901 Constitution, our current governing document, tightened them further.

These caps were not born from some vague yearning for freedom or small government. The white planters who designed them hated the thought of Black children getting an education and resolved to starve the system that did so.

“The property tax restrictions were intended to prevent the possibility that taxes could again be levied on the property of Alabama planters in an onerous amount for the purpose of educating blacks,” U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith wrote in 2011 in his 854-page decision in Lynch v. Alabama, a lawsuit challenging Alabama’s property tax structure.

Or take this 1901 editorial from an Elba newspaper urging passage of the state constitution: “The old section providing that each race shall share equally in public school money is stricken out and a section substituted which will give the white people the school taxes paid by the white taxpayers.”

This led to appalling funding disparities between white and Black students. But it also means local governments, especially those in rural areas, struggle to raise an adequate amount of money for their school systems. According to the U.S. Census, in 2022 about 42% of school funding in the United States came from local sources. In Alabama, it was just 31%.

As a result, Alabama’s per-pupil spending was $11,819 per student in 2022, 36th in the nation. The national average was $16,340.

Money works

Plenty of legislators will scoff and insist that money alone can’t improve student achievement, even as they propose paying private schools to improve student achievement.

The NAEP scores tell another story. All but two or three of the top 10 scoring states for 4th-grade and 8th-grade reading and math in 2022 spent more money per pupil than Alabama. Massachusetts, which spends the 6th-most per student in the nation, is in the top 10 in every category. So is New Hampshire, which ranks seventh.

Are these wealthier states than Alabama? Yes. Would a little more investment in Alabama students help us raise our performance? Also yes. Does Alabama overtax the poor and lightly tax the rich? The answer can be found in your grocery bill.

Moreover, the high-achieving NAEP states draw far more from local sources than state ones. New Hampshire gets 62% of its school revenue from local sources; Massachusetts gets about 49%.

How does depriving Alabama schools of money help us compete with those states?

Imagine that Stutts’ bill went into effect, was fully implemented, and that 10% of Alabama’s public school-age children — about 74,000 people — used it.

That instantly takes $510.6 million out of the Education Trust Fund. That’s more than what the state is spending on transportation this year ($432 million). It’s over five times the Alabama Reading Initiative’s budget ($94.2 million) and over seven times the funding of the Alabama Math Science and Technology Initiative ($73.3 million).

How are you going to replace that?

And it’s not clear the big beneficiaries would be kids in struggling schools. The average private school tuition in Alabama this year is $8,350. That’s bigger than $6,900, and there have been reports private schools raised tuition rates when other states implemented education savings accounts.

Without means-testing (there was none in Stutts’ 2023 bill), wealthy families would rush to use the credit to reduce the cost of going to places like Altamont School in Birmingham (high school tuition: $27,262 a year) or Montgomery Academy in Montgomery (Grade 10-12 tuition: $17,654 a year). In Arizona, anywhere from 51% to 78% of students using that state’s educational savings account program had never been to a public school.

If you want to send your kids to private schools, that’s your right.

If you want to improve educational outcomes in Alabama, you need to keep public money in public education. And demand more of it.

Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006, and worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register and The Anniston Star. His work has won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association and Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. He lives in Auburn with his wife, Julie, and their three children.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, an independent nonprofit website covering politics and policy in state capitals around the nation

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: This isn’t how you improve Alabama schools