STARKVILLE– In the wake of one of the most divisive and bitter political battles in recent state history over equity funding in K-12 education in Mississippi, legislative leaders were wise to allow bills that would have allowed public funds vouchers to finance student transfers to private schools die in committee.
First and foremost, it’s important to note that the voucher debate has both a political component and a policy component. But in this instance, voucher legislation was a bad legislative bet on both counts – bad politics, bad policy.
 The basic question to Mississippi lawmakers was this: After the Legislature’s very narrow “victory” in the battle over Initiative 42 – in which voters made clear that they were passionate about the state improving its educational system – was the next major education initiative of the Legislature to be approval of a plan to take public funds away from the public school system to fund private schools?
 Cooler legislative heads obviously prevailed. While the Initiative 42 fight made clear that Mississippians weren’t willing to improve our educational system by dismantling the appropriations authority of the Legislature, voters made equally clear that they are concerned about providing quality public schools for all Mississippi children.
 So if the premise behind Initiative 42 and the Mississippi Adequate Education Program both are funding equity arguments that are fundamentally about a transfer of wealth from the state’s more affluent school districts to the more impoverished school districts – and that’s what it is – then the Legislature would be extremely hard pressed to respond to the near-success of Initiative 42 by enabling a plan to make existing public education funding portable to private schools.
 The fact is that Initiative 42 and the MAEP that the failed initiative sought to guarantee “full funding” of is a movement that had roots in education equity funding lawsuits that initially gained attention in the early 1970s and again in the 1980s.
 Those lawsuits, principally Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District in 1973 and later a series of related lawsuits that began with Edgewood Independent School District v. Kirby in the mid-1980s, challenged the equity of the school finance system in the state of Texas.
 The Edgewood plaintiffs argued that because Texas had a heavy reliance on property tax as an element of education finance and because there was such a wide variance in per-pupil property values, then it was necessarily so that there was a concomitant wide disparity in per pupil spending between school districts. The plaintiffs argued even if school districts with relatively poor property values levied high property tax rates, those districts would still be unable to raise sufficient revenues to finance education programs that met the state’s minimum education requirements.
 The Texas lawsuits started a revolution of sorts. Lawsuits challenging state methods of funding public schools were brought in 45 of the 50 states. In addition to lawsuits, the Edgewood case set in motion a national series of state legislative attempts to avoid lawsuits similar to Edgewood by enacting equity funding formulas that headed off such litigation at the proverbial pass.
 While it is disingenuous to say that the entirety of the Mississippi Legislature had no serious interest in true equity funding for public education in Mississippi when they adopted MAEP — many did and many fought to funnel more money into the state’s classrooms — it is also true that MAEP would have likely died on the legislative calendar had there not been a real fear of such lawsuits like those in Texas gearing up in Mississippi.
 Equity funding — equalizing the state per pupil expenditures between poor districts and more affluent districts — is at the core of MAEP and hence was at the core of Initiative 42.
 Fast forward to 2016. After legislative appropriations authority for public education survived a near-miss in the referendum process, the answer isn’t to divert scarce K-12 public education resources from the public school system to private schools.
 Vouchers don’t improve public education funding. Vouchers further dilute public education funding without holding the secure promise of actually improving educational outcomes – and more to the point, it does nothing to reduce the costs of adequately funding a necessary system of public education – which brought Initiative 42 to the ballot box in the first place.
 Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at sidsalter@sidsalter.com