Breaking Bad: Tax-Credit Scholarships aka NeoVouchers

Since the funds were not drawn, but given by businesses, not taken from Treasury, because they were redirected, before they arrived, in the fund.  Is it just me, or do these tax credit scholarships appear to be a creative and legal form of money laundering for vouchers to avoid the Texas constitution? Heisenburg would be proud.

What do Neovouchers accomplish? NEPC:

Last year, the first careful analysis of neovoucher outcomes was released–the official evaluation in Florida–and found that the students receiving the neovouchers performed no better (and perhaps worse) than comparable public school students.

The Friedman reports reviewed by Huerta claimed that implementing these programs would result in a net financial saving to the states. They base their conclusions, Huerta observes, on assumptions about the sensitivity of public school revenues and expenditures to enrollment declines, as well as assumptions about a pent-up demand for publicly funded private school choice and the nature and degree of supply and demand pressures. Professor Huerta tests all these assumptions and finds them to be largely groundless and frequently at odds with established research. In fact, Huerta notes that the reports’ use of research is largely confined to work from advocacy groups like the Friedman Foundation itself. He observes that this “insular approach further calls into question the validity of the new reports’ conclusions.”

And, so. The research on Neovouchers says, A) They don’t save states money and B) They don’t increase achievement. Neovouchers sounds like Walter White and Jesse Pinkman’s modus operandi— the plan always sounds good, but it never works out well in the end.

Edit 2/4/13: Thanks to Karen from Houston for digging up a New York Times piece on how Neovouchers backdoor money. Some quotes:

This school year alone, the programs redirected nearly $350 million that would have gone into public budgets to pay for private school scholarships for 129,000 students, according to the Alliance for School Choice, an advocacy organization.

While the scholarship programs have helped many children whose parents would have to scrimp or work several jobs to send them to private schools, the money has also been used to attract star football players, expand the payrolls of the nonprofit scholarship groups and spread the theology of creationism, interviews and documents show. Even some private school parents and administrators have questioned whether the programs are a charade.

Most of the private schools are religious. Nearly a quarter of the participating schools in Georgia require families to make a profession of religious faith, according to their Web sites. Many of those schools adhere to a fundamentalist brand of Christianity.

The programs are insulated from provisions requiring church-state separation because the donations are collected and distributed by the nonprofit scholarship groups.

A cottage industry of these groups has sprung up, in some cases collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in administrative fees, according to tax filings. The groups often work in concert with private schools like Gwinnett Christian Academy to solicit donations and determine who will get the scholarships — in effect limiting school choice for the students themselves. In most states, students who withdraw from the schools cannot take the scholarship money with them.

Public school officials view the tax credits as poorly disguised state subsidies, part of an expanding agenda to shift tax dollars away from traditional public schools. “Our position is that this is a shell game,” said Chris Thomas, general counsel for the Arizona School Boards Association.