UA News

Kevin G. Welner of the University of Colorado at Boulder will speak at the UA this month about the positive and negative effects of tuition vouchers for families.

Offering tuition tax credits that can be used toward a private education can be a complex issue, particularly in discussion about public financing.

Kevin G. Welner, an associate professor of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will visit The University of Arizona to discuss that issue.

Welner specializes in the area of tuition tax credit, voucher policy, small-school reformation and other topics related to the nation's education system. He is the author of a recently published book, "NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling."

The UA College of Education is sponsoring his talk, which will be Wednesday from 4-5:30 p.m. in Room 211 of the Education Building, 1430 E. Second St.

Welner has argued that while offering tuition tax credits for students who go on to attend a private institution is becoming more common, several questions remain.

The long-standing vouchers are the type that are provided directly to families by the government to support tuition at private schools.

However, "neovouchers" offer a benefit to the taxpayer. As Welner explains, taxpayers provide funds to private organizations that then provide families with vouchers for private education. For this, the taxpayer gets a tax credit from the state, many times at 65 percent or above.

One key question, which Welner poses, is that in the case of vouchers, at what point does public spending no longer become a public expenditure? Also, how should the courts handle policy associated with vouchers or neovouchers?

Welner also questions how this system affects students of color and stratification within the school system.

"This is an important topic, especially the discussion about how tax policy is used by the government to attain certain ends," said UA College of Education Dean Ron Marx.

State legislators, school superintendants, representatives from public and private schools and others are expected to attend the event.

"Whenever we have tax policy, particularly in education, that means that those policies will in fact enable certain types of institutional growth mitigated against other types of institutional growth," Marx said.

"So," he added, "doing careful policy analysis and studying possible downstream effects is very important."