Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

(photo courtesy gsep.pepperdine.edu)

An appointed state panel headed by Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott has adopted a plan to give public school dropouts "multiple pathways" for earning a diploma, some of which could look an awful lot like private school vouchers.

If that happens, it would mean that the state through the actions of a non-elected body will have put into effect a policy that the Legislature has rejected repeatedly.

Some members of the High School Completion and Success Initiative Council, appointed by the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker under a bill approved last year, argued strongly Tuesday in Austin that the programs they are calling for are not vouchers.

But the proof of that will not be known until Scott's Texas Education Agency writes regulations for those programs -- a task that it is expected to complete by summer.

The strategic plan adopted by the council calls for using state money "through traditional and alternative education settings, including a dropout recovery program for which a variety of service providers are eligible such as school districts, open-enrollment charter schools, regional education service centers, institutions of higher education, or non-profit organizations."

Does that last phrase include private and/or parochial schools?

Board member Don McAdams of Houston draws a fine line between what the council wants to do and what are traditionally considered vouchers.

A voucher, McAdams says, is a grant of public money to individuals -- typically parents -- who can take that money and spend it on the educational services of their choosing.

The council wants to grant money to service providers who would run dropout recovery programs.

Let's not get too tied up in semantics. If private or parochial schools end up with public money, that's a voucher program.

A couple of caution flags for TEA as it writes these regulations:

McAdams' description of the council's plan might rule out parochial schools. In a 2002 decision on a voucher program in Cleveland, the U.S. Supreme Court said that public money can go to religious schools without violating the Constitution's mandatory separation between church and state -- but only if it gets there through the private choice of individuals. If it doesn't go to parents first, that's a problem. If it does go to parents first, that's a voucher.

Dropouts who enter one of these programs and get a diploma should be required to meet the same standards as students in the public schools. For instance, they must pass the same state exams. If not, the state would simply be creating a secondary, substandard pathway to graduation -- one that would encourage more students to drop out and take the easy path.

The goal of keeping more kids in school and bringing more dropouts back to school to get a diploma is a laudable and necessary one. Designing ways to do that clearly is not easy. Still, there are right ways and wrong ways to go about it.

A voucher plan would be one of the wrong ways.

We anxiously await TEA's specifics of how the council's plans will be carried out.