Nevada Education Savings Accounts: 6,000 parents devising 6,000 different ways to teach kids! What could go wrong?

Nevada is a voucher dream come true for conservatives and profit driven privateers a like, who see our kids as exploitable commodities until they're not anymore.

But as a parent, you have to ask, "do you have the time for something this costly, convoluted and crazy?" It's not like you can make up the time if you get it wrong. Oh, and it's costly!!!

Freedom and liberty loving Nevadans can now get their own "education savings account" with $5,700 of taxpayer money in it. Oh, and if the school or customized plan costs more in fees, supplies or transportation, you're on the hook for the rest. Nice...and expensive. 

And what could go wrong giving every parent the power to devise their own educational reform program, mixing and matching classroom time, online courses, home schooling and religious instruction just the way they see fit? 

I'm will enjoy watching all of this unfold from the comfort of Wisconsin, where our state constitution forbids tuition of any kind from being charged in our public schools. I still can't figure out how taxpayer vouchers can be spent at tuition charging private schools, since that turns the voucher into tuition, but that's a whole different topic.

Here's what total privatization looks like, for those who apparently have a whole lot more time than I do staying on top of my own kids, to create their own public school system at home. And you thought making sure they had their homework done was frustrating...be enlightened:    

1. Nevada allows virtually all parents of K-12 students to opt out of public school but use their children’s state education dollars for a customized education, including private or religious schooling, online classes, textbooks, and dual-enrollment college credits.

2. The money goes into an education savings account (ESA), and dollars not spent by the parent in a given year roll over for future spending – until the student finishes high school or opts back into public school.

3. The private and religious schools accepting ESA funds are not prohibited from discriminating based on race, gender or disability ... can use their admissions rules, including competitive pretesting, transcript evaluation and letters of recommendation ... free to select students based on who they decide fit their religious or secular mission, culture and program. Nevada public schools have to educate all children with disabilities and those children whom private and religious schools choose not to admit or decide to remove from school. 

4. ESAs are designed to be a “subsidy” by more affluent families who can already afford to send their children to selective private and religious schools. Conversely, ESAs are insufficient for students from low-income families, and those who need more costly English language instruction or special education services.

5. The law offers 100 percent of state funding (about $5,700 annually) for students with disabilities or whose families are below 185 percent of the federal poverty level ... For all others, it offers 90 percent. There is only a handful of private schools in Nevada with tuition low enough to be covered by $5,710.

6. Participants will have to account for expenses and take an annual test in math and English that is nationally norm-referenced, meaning their score can be compared with peers around the country. They need not be comparable to Nevada public school tests.  

7. For parents, the appeal is that they can combine online, private, and even some public courses to tailor an education that suits their child. 

And because the $5,700 may not be enough for most students, parents will "self-ration," to save money, and elected officials don't have to work so hard or take responsibility: 

For state policymakers, it’s attractive because parents are incentivized to spend wisely and carry over savings, and that “puts downward pressure on prices,” says Lindsey Burke, an education policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. Because the ESA per student amount does not cover the full cost of tuition at private and religious schools, families must have the personal means to cover any remaining tuition. This will also include the cost of fees, uniforms, books, transportation and other expenses associated with private and religious schooling.

But do Americans hate their public schools, or is privatization really about placating a small minority of like minded anti-government voters?

While some opponents might worry about a steady stream of students leaving public schools, that hasn’t been the case in Arizona. Out of about 250,000 students who are eligible, about 1 percent applied for the 2014-15 school year, and currently there are about 1,200 participants, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Education told the Monitor.

To put even this in perspective:

Lawmakers in nearly two-dozen states have made education savings accounts or private school scholarships available to families. Yet only 350,000 of the 50 million students in the U.S. are participating. (To put this in perspective, imagine you visit the reigning World Series Champions, the San Francisco Giants, for a game this summer and only 290 seats in their 42,000-seat ballpark are filled.)

I mixed and matched stats from these two sources: Christian Science Monitor and DianeRavitch.

Republican Solution for Everything? Vouchers, the Convoluted Plan falsely portrayed as "Free Market."

Salon's MICHAEL LIND wrote the definitive piece on conservative Voucher-Mania. We kind of knew something was deeply wrong with this snake oil scheme:

Voucher-mania: Why the right is diseased (and out of ideas): Conservatives have exactly one answer for all spending questions -- and it has little to do with serious economics.

“Vouchermania” may be the term used by future historians to describe the puzzling rage for vouchers that has swept the right wing in the last few decades. You got a problem? I got a voucher.

Education? The right wants to give people vouchers to buy K-12 schooling from private schools, or, failing complete privatization, from charter schools.

Healthcare? The right wants to replace Medicare and Medicaid with vouchers to let people shop for health insurance or healthcare in a deregulated healthcare marketplace.

Retirement?  The right wants to privatize Social Security, replacing it with tax-favored individual contributions to private retirement savings accounts — a de facto voucher system.

There's a trick, a gimmick, to vouchers; an excuse to use unlimited taxpayer funding for special interest groups:

In order to be electable, conservatives have to abandon pure libertarian principle and accept the idea of vouchers funded by taxation — even though this is really just “voucher socialism,” as hardcore libertarians sometimes point out. How are voucher systems, funded by taxation, supposed to save the taxpayers money, compared to public programs?  

Conservatives and libertarians put forth ... Competition among multiple providers of education, health or retirement security will drive down prices. This rests on the assumption that the government is an inefficient monopoly. 

This is where voucher logic goes off the rails:

Vouchers will reduce costs by discouraging over consumption of particular subsidized goods and services by citizen-consumers. This rests on the assumption that rising costs in healthcare and higher education tuition are caused by Americans buying too much of both.
In the medical realm, if citizens have to pay more — for example, in the form of higher deductibles — they will either force medical providers to cut costs and offer them bargains or, failing that, will go without drugs and treatment and die sooner. Either way, the public cost of healthcare to taxpayers — particularly to the rich people who pay most taxes — is reduced. 

The cost-shifting argument ... implies that most Americans, including most Republican voters, are “overconsuming” healthcare and higher education ... plans to use “premium support” to voucherize Medicare ... the savings would probably come from forcing Americans to consume less healthcare by making them pay more out of pocket, not from competition among providers. If major insurance companies lack the leverage to bargain down drug prices, hospital prices and physician fees, can any rational conservative honestly believe that Grandma can do so, by comparison shopping? 

But vouchers should not be used, as many on the right want to use them, as a camouflaged way to cut benefits to working-class and middle-class Americans, by increasing out-of-pocket costs. If the right wants to cut benefits for most Americans, it should say so honestly, and not try to disguise what it is doing by inflation adjustments like “chained CPI” or vouchers accompanied by high out-of-pocket payments. 

And comparison shopping is impractical in medicine, because even if prices were transparent and publicly available — and they are not in the U.S. — patients would lack the ability to evaluate particular physicians, hospitals and kinds of treatment. That’s why, in the field of medicine, the consumer can never substitute for a combination of public oversight and professional self-regulation.

All of this should be common sense. But the political-intellectual game on the right of devising new vouchers as panaceas for America’s problems continues. While conservatives have proposed housing vouchers as the solution to poverty, there appears to be no voucher that can reduce the poverty of conservative public policy thought.