What Mike Pence doesn’t like to admit about Indiana’s school voucher program

By Valerie Strauss January 16 at 1:20 PM

President-elect Donald Trump says he wants to spend $20 billion for a program to help states expand voucher programs, which use public funds to pay for private school tuition. As it happens, the man he chose as his vice president, Mike Pence, has experience with vouchers as governor of Indiana — and the story is a cautionary tale for anybody interested in making education policy with caution and deliberation.

The program was started as a way to give children from poor and lower-middle-class families a chance to leave public schools they felt were failing their kids. As my colleague Emma Brown explained in this story, it didn’t quite work out that way. For example:

Five years after the program was established, more than half of the state’s voucher recipients have never attended Indiana public schools, meaning that taxpayers are now covering private and religious school tuition for children whose parents had previously footed that bill. Many vouchers also are going to wealthier families, those earning up to $90,000 for a household of four.

[How Indiana’s school voucher program soared — and what it says about education in the Trump era]

Here is a piece by someone who has had direct experience with the program — and with working with (or, rather, against) Pence on education issues. She is Glenda Ritz, who was elected in 2012 by Indiana voters to become the state’s superintendent of public instruction as the only Democrat holding statewide office in the conservative state.

Ritz upset the incumbent, a Republican named Tony Bennett who was a leader of the corporate school reform movement, and she had campaigned against many of Bennett’s key policies, including vouchers. She, in fact, won more votes than Pence did in that election.

Pence didn’t take to that kindly and tried to undermine the power of the position she had won. He created a new education agency in Indiana to help further his own education agenda, with its own dedicated funding from state agencies but later moved to dissolve it even as he sought to have Ritz removed as chair of the state Board of Education. He successfully pushed a 2015 change in state law to make the chair of the state board not the democratically elected state education superintendent but rather a person chosen by members. Board members are largely chosen by the governor, and at that time they had been picked by Pence himself. Pence said it only made sense to have the chair of the board chosen by the board — not voters. Ritz, a veteran educator, lost her bid for reelection last year to an educator who supports vouchers.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/16/what-mike-pence-doesnt-like-to-admit-about-indianas-school-voucher-program/?utm_term=.994315822445