In the early 1980s when I was living in Washington, D.C., two Irish friends spent a month visiting with me there and with friends of mine in other cities.

Protestants were pretty much a foreign species to them and they had never met anyone who was Jewish or black so they were as curious as two anthropologists studying the lives of some remote Peruvian tribe. It made for great discussions over a pint or two into the wee hours of the morning.

Their insulation came from growing up in a heavily Catholic country and attending Catholic schools. The Protestant minority in the Republic of Ireland mostly attended Anglican Church of England schools back then.

That visit came back to me when I was discussing with Saucon Valley School Board member Ralph Puerta a plan by Gov. Tom Corbett to use taxpayers’ dollars to fund vouchers that low-income children could use to attend private and parochial schools.  Puerta pointed out that one of the reasons public schools were created in this country was to give people from a wide variety of cultures, religions and economic backgrounds a common denominator.

It hasn’t always worked out that way, of course. In the Lehigh Valley, for example, there are schools that are mostly white or mostly Hispanic, largely rich or poor. But even in the most homogeneous school district you’ll find blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, atheists, children with disabilities, poor kids, well off students and a lot of middle class kids.

And unlike the private schools that would be the beneficiaries of the vouchers, public schools are required to take all comers. Corbett, who has proposed cutting about $1 billion from public school funding this year, backs legislation that would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to give low-income families vouchers they could use at any private or religious school that accepts them.

The key word here is “accepts.” With vouchers, private schools can cherry pick the best students with the most motivated parents, leaving public schools to educate children with special needs or behavioral problems and to bear the costs associated with that. In the city with the longest running voucher program – Milwaukee, Wisconsin – only 1.5 percent of the voucher students are in special education compared to 19 percent of the population in the public schools. That’s according to education historian and former George W. Bush administration official Diane Ravitch, who once favored school choice but has since become an outspoken voucher opponent. 

Voucher advocates and critics tend to cite dueling studies of the 21-year-old Milwaukee program that reinforce their arguments. But the latest standardized tests results show the voucher students generally performed the same or worse than public school students in the city in reading and math.

(Note: I don’t believe in using standardized test scores as the main gauge of a school’s success, but voucher advocates have been doing it for years to bad-mouth public schools, so I have to fight on their turf on this one.)

Most of the voucher students in Milwaukee attend religious schools and that’s likely to be true in Pennsylvania where the average voucher amount would be too little to pay tuition at the pricier private academies. But many of the religious schools in this region wouldn’t have the resources or staff to accommodate large numbers of special education students or students with significant delays, according to officials quoted in an excellent article by Morning Call reporter Steve Esack.

In most towns, the public schools are one of the community hubs.  Once you divorce a community from its schools, you erode the motivation of people who have no school-age kids to support education funding.

Right now, if taxpayers don’t like what’s being taught in their local school district, they can go to the school board meeting and complain. Will private schools open up their meetings to the public and allow residents to vote on their board members if they accept taxpayers’ dollars?

Getting back to my Irish friends, I don’t think adopting vouchers would turn Pennsylvania into the Ireland of 30 years ago.  But I do believe that further eroding the common denominator of public schools could lead to an increased Balkanization of our people.

Next time, I’ll tell you what Saucon Valley School Director Ralph Puerta has to say about the practical problems of vouchers and a reform that could truly make a difference in schools.