The new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos is an advocate for school choice using voucher programs, a controversial way of providing families with schooling options other than their local public high school. With vouchers, families would be given tax credits – essentially coupons – to put towards a school of their choice. Although rural and poor neighborhoods suffer from this system, how could the Bay Area, with it’s sprawling metropolis and wealth of alternative schools, be affected?
It is highly unlikely a voucher program would be initiated in California, because of the strong resistance the state has to the Trump Administration and DeVos’ opinions on public education. As Kevin Skelly, Superintendent of the San Mateo Union High School District puts it, “I don’t see any chance that we’ll have vouchers in California. The political forces are very hostile to vouchers.” But if we did have them, what groups of students would be harmed the most? Would any benefit?
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This is because when a student chooses a non-public school, the tax money that would have gone to the public school instead follows the student to their school of choice. This negatively affects public schools, because there are certain basic requirements a classroom must meet whether they have five students or 35 students. Needing to meet the same requirements but on a smaller budget (because of fewer students) means it is harder to provide a quality education, and districts may have to cut programs such as PE, after-school programs, and arts education. According to Akshaya Natarajan, a recent Political Science graduate from UC Santa Barbara, these programs, “are shown to benefit childhood development” and cutting them will mean, “that kids in low-income communities will lose out on even more resources that kids from wealthier families