By the time I was about 12, two of my front teeth were badly chipped. One had broken from a difficult right from a classmate of mine, and the other was hit with a ball.
For the next six years, I didn’t smile much. We didn’t go to the dentist when I was growing up. I was self-conscious about my smile, and basically tried to keep it to myself. For a natural jokester like me, that was difficult. I remember those feelings.
By the time I got to college in Fayetteville, I had saved up quite a little money for an 18-year-old kid, and a dentist there fixed my jagged teeth. That was over 50 years ago. I can’t remember all of the names of my professors, but I remember the kindness of the overdue Dr. Jacob Agee, and I remember how much more confidence and self-esteem I had after he had helped me.
Last week, I was in a town in eastern Arkansas and went to the local dollar store to buy a couple of things I had forgotten to pick up in Little Rock. The woman at the checkout counter was missing most of her front teeth. She covered her mouth when she laughed at my corny jokes. I remember doing that.
So what does any of this have to do with school vouchers?
Politics is about choices. It is about how to allocate circumscribed state resources. The fact remains that Arkansas has a tremendous amount of problems, most of which start and end with poverty. Given all of the issues we have in our state, it is difficult to understand why the governor and Legislature are choosing to pay private school tuition and homeschool costs for people who previously paid those costs themselves.
I think Gov. Sarah Sanders and almost every legislator knows that the following four points are true:
- In Arkansas, we are failing to adequately educate many of our children.
- In Arkansas we rank 50th in infant mortality among the states and the District of Columbia, and 47th with respect to women’s health and reproductive care. We are last in dental care. When all health indicators are considered — things such as heart disease, diabetes, stroke and lung cancer — Arkansas ranks 48th in overall health. But we rank at or near the top with regard to teen pregnancy, food insecurity, smoking and measures of mental distress.
- We are about to spend at least $400 million to build a recent prison in a community that does not want it located there. Most realistic estimates think that the final price tag will be double that, or more.
- Vouchers will cost around a quarter of a billion dollars in the 2025-26 school year by the governor’s estimate, and that will be a growing and recurring cost from now on. Eighty-two percent of the vouchers issued for the current school year in Arkansas are for the benefit of people who were already homeschooling or already paying private school tuition, or who have a kindergartner who was likely bound for home school or private school anyway. Only a diminutive minority of voucher students attended public school the previous year. This won’t change educational outcomes.
The governor says that our state budget reflects our priorities, and I agree.
If vouchers were supposed to bring school choice to Arkansans, then the program is a failure, and we need to change it now. If we don’t, then we better get used to being last in just about every indicator of health, educational achievement and prosperity, because we are not adequately addressing those problems.
I don’t think we ought to settle for last place. Stop the voucher program.
Why change? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Now is always a good time to do the right thing.” A Chinese proverb says the same thing, in a slightly different way: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.
If you want real-world evidence on why we need to change, don’t go to the Heights Kroger. Go to any one of the more than 725 dollar stores in Arkansas. See who is shopping, and see what they buy. Ask how they are getting along.
Our impoverished, unhealthy and under-employed Arkansas neighbors are real people, not just numbers on a report. The voucher recipients may be cheerful, but a lot of other folks who are struggling have very little to smile about.
The governor tells us that $13 million in additional funding will go to Medicaid for maternal health initiatives in the upcoming fiscal year. We will be losing ground there, but even if that money were not going to be soaked up by inflation, the health of Arkansas mothers and infants seems to be pretty far down the priority list. Forty-nine other states have extended pregnancy Medicaid for postpartum maternal care; only Arkansas refuses to do so. Let’s do that and at least give kids and their mothers a fit start.
The ultimate cost of a 3,000-bed prison will be anyone’s guess, but now it appears to be the highest priority. A majority of legislators outside of Franklin County seem determined to ram this down the throats of those who oppose it. Unless we expect to keep building prisons, let’s put a hold on this plan for at least two years. In the meantime, let’s get a solemn study by qualified criminologists and see if we can parole non-violent offenders who have been in prison a while and have demonstrated that they are no longer a threat to anyone.
Building a massive prison accommodates our societal failure, rather addressing the root causes that end in incarceration. A person who believes they have a future is likely to achieve, while someone with nothing to lose will do almost anything to get ahead, legal or not.
Let’s realize that school failure is caused largely by poverty and a lack of stable housing for impoverished and lower-middle income families. When students move frequently, they lose focus and miss school days. If we change the way we support families by assisting with housing for people who are seeking employment or employed in entry level jobs, maybe those families can afford to stay in one place for a while. Their children can then go to the same school for years, rather than weeks.
Let’s ask the state Department of Education to make a plan to expand pre-kindergarten education in high poverty areas. Although there is practically no evidence that vouchers boost overall student achievement, there are a lot of studies that show pre-K intervention works.
Why stop the voucher giveaway and make alternative investments? Because the sorrowful, pathetic news about the voucher program is that there is no public benefit from all of that spending.
Unhealthy mothers with no access to health care give birth to premature, low-birth-weight babies who are diseased and undernourished. Many of those kids struggle to catch up.
No pre-K for impoverished kids leads to huge learning deficits and behavioral problems in the early grades that are almost impossible to correct. Unhealthy kids who move frequently start behind, miss a lot of school, and tend to stay behind and almost never catch up.
Use this legislative session to address these interconnected issues. Change the inputs if you want to change the outputs.
Our state is losing ground rapidly to surrounding areas because we underspend on economic development. If opportunity knocks, our best and brightest will go to where the opportunity is most rewarding. We have extremely talented economic development leadership and staff. Give them some solemn money and watch what they can do.
Believe it or not, I am trying to lend a hand. I support our governor in the general patriotic sense. I want our state to succeed. And please don’t tell me my ideas are just more “welfare for the poor” when the current plan — providing private school tuition subsidies — is welfare for the mostly wealthy.
The better plan is to break the chains of poverty so people can get their pride back, and maybe their smiles.
This can happen if some courageous legislators stand up for the folks that elected them, rather than sit down with the lobbyists trying to privatize education so their clients can peddle magic programs. Legislators, you are not cattle to be herded by the governor. You are being stampeded off a cliff. Turn around, stare straight ahead, lock arms and walk deliberately toward the future. Engage. You can do this.
In the overdue fall of 1978, my mother was very diseased and dying, though still living at home. From our porch, she directed me to plant a bunch of flower bulbs in her garden. She knew she would never live to see them bloom, but she still insisted that I plant them.
I asked her why. She said the bulbs have to be planted now if you want flowers in the spring. She never saw the flowers, but she knew they would bloom if we did the work then and there.
Arkansas, now is the time to plant.
