School choice

School choice is a term or label given to a wide array of programs offering students and their families alternatives to publicly provided schools, to which students are generally assigned by the location of their family residence. In the United States, the most common option offered by 'school choice' programs are educational voucher programs. These programs offer a given student and their family the option to take a subsidy from public educational funds and put that money towards tuition in private schools. This subsidy may also be accomplished through tax-credit programs. Other 'school choice' options include open enrollment laws that allow students to attend other public schools and charter schools, and homeschooling.

Forms

Open enrollment

Open enrollment refers to educational policies which allow residents of a state to enroll their children in any public school, provided the school has not reached its maximum capacity number for students, regardless of the school district in which a family resides.

Open enrollment can be either intra-district or inter-district. Intra-district choice allows parents to send their children to any school within their designated district. Parents can enroll their children in schools outside of their catchment area. Inter-district school choice allows parents to select public schools outside of their resident district.

Inequality of Open Enrollment

An open enrollment policy allows parents to choose the school they want their children to attend from any of the schools in their area, provided there is space for them. This definition gives the impression that everyone has an equal opportunity to choose a school, but the reality of such equality has been called into question. For example, in rural areas the option of taking advantage of open enrollment is greatly diminished because of limited access to alternate schools.

A family's socio-economic status also plays a role in its ability to take advantage of an open enrollment policy. Choosing a school for a child often requires financial resources and knowledge of the available options and appropriate criteria on which to base selections, which are shaped by parental income and education. Neighbourhoods of higher poverty rates also often have the reputation of being inferior or academically less successful than other schools, and because of this there is often a higher turnover rate of teachers. Parents also have a tendency to believe this stereotype without looking further into the school's quality.

To test the relationship between a neighbourhood's contextual factors and school performance Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used. In one study complete in South Carolina using a GIS, it was found that a neighbourhood's socio-economic status played an important role in elementary school achievements.

Another criticism of open enrollment policies is that school choice in Western industrialized countries benefits middle-class families more than lower-class families. While upper-class families tend to take advantage of private schools, middle-class families are more likely to take advantage of inter-district and intra-district open enrollment. More specifically, in Westernised countries white middle-class families benefit more from school choice than minority or lower-class families.

Vouchers

Main article: School voucher

When the government pays tuition to a private school on behalf of the parents, this is usually referred to as a voucher. A voucher is given to the family for them to spend at any school of their choice for their child's study. The two most common voucher designs are universal vouchers and means-tested vouchers. Means-tested vouchers are directed towards low-income families and constitute the bulk of voucher plans in the United States.

Tuition tax credits

A tuition tax credit is similar to most other familiar tax credits. Certain states allow individuals and/or businesses to deduct a certain amount of their income taxes to donate to education. Depending on the program, these donations can either go to a public school or to a School Tuition Organization (STO), or both. The donations that go to public schools are often used to help pay for after-school programs, schools trips, or school supplies. The donations that go to School Tuition Organizations are used by the STO to create scholarships that are then given to students. These programs currently exist in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island in the United States.

Charter schools

Main article: Charter school

Charter schools are public schools with more relaxed rules and regulations. These relaxed rules tend to deal with things like Teacher Union contracts and state curriculum. The majority of states (and the District of Columbia) have charter school laws. Minnesota was the first state to have a charter school law and the first charter school in the United States, City Academy High School, opened in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992.

Dayton, Ohio has between 22–26% of all children in charter schools. This is the highest percentage in the nation. Other hotbeds for charter schools are Kansas City (24%), Washington, D.C. (20-24%) and Arizona. Almost 1 in 4 public schools in Arizona are charter schools, comprising about 8% of total enrollment.

Charter schools can also come in the form of Cyber Charters. Cyber charter schools deliver the majority of their instruction over the internet instead of in a school building. And, like charter schools, they are public schools, but free of many of the rules and regulations that public schools must follow.

Magnet schools

Main article: Magnet school

Magnet schools are public schools that often have a specialized function like science, technology or art. These magnet schools, unlike charter schools, are not open to all children. Much like many private schools, there are some (but not all) magnet schools that require a test to get in.

Home schooling

Main article: Homeschooling

"Home education" or "home schooling" is instruction in a child's home, or provided primarily by a parent, or under direct parental control. Informal home education has always taken place, and formal instruction in the home has at times also been very popular. As public education grew in popularity during the 1900s, however, the number of people educated at home using a planned curriculum dropped. In the last 20 years, in contrast, the number of children being formally educated at home has grown tremendously, in particular in the United States. The laws relevant to home education differ throughout the country. In some states the parent simply needs to notify the state that the child will be educated at home. In other states the parents are not free to educate at home unless at least one parent is a certified teacher and yearly progress reports are reviewed by the state. Such laws are not always enforced however. According to the federal government, about 1.1 million children were home educated in 2003.

Support

The goal of school choice programs is to give parents more control over their child's education, and to allow parents to pursue the most appropriate learning environments for children. For example school choice may enable parents to choose a school that provides religious instruction for their children; stronger discipline; better foundational skills including reading, writing, mathematics, and science; everyday skills from handling money to farming, or other desirable foci.

Supporters of voucher models school choice argue that choice creates competition between schools for students. Schools that fail to attract students can be closed. Advocates of school choice argue that this competition for students (and the education dollars that come with them) create a catalyst for schools to create innovative programs, become more responsive to parental demands, and to increase student achievement. Caroline Hoxby suggests that this competition increases the productivity of a school. Hoxby describes a productive school as being one that produces high achievements in its student for each dollar that is spends. Others suggest that this competition gives parents more power to influence their child's school in the school marketplace. Parents and students become the consumers and schools must work to attract new students with new programs. Parents also have the ability to punish schools that they judge to be inferior by leaving the 'bad' school for a better, more highly ranked school. Parents look for schools that will advocate for the needs of their child and if the school does not meet the needs required for that child, parents have the choice to find a school that will be more suitable

Another argument in favor of school choice is based on cost-effectiveness. Studies undertaken by the Cato Institute and other libertarian and conservative thinktanks conclude that privately run education usually costs between one quarter and one half of publicly run education while giving superior outcomes.

Others argue that since children from impoverished families almost exclusively attend public schools, school choice programs would allow these students to opt out of bad schools and acquire a better education, thereby granting the decision-making power to students and their parents, not school administrators. Supporters say this would level the playing field by broadening opportunities for low-income students to attend as good of schools as the middle classes instead of the current two-tiered system which educates the middle and upper classes, but not the lower classes, particularly minorities.

The Organisation Internationale pour le Droit à l'Education et la Liberté d'Enseignement (OIDEL), an international non-profit organization for the development of freedom of education, maintains that the right to education is a fundamental human right which cannot exist without the presence of State benefits and the protection of individual liberties. According to the organization, freedom of education notably implies the freedom for parents to choose a school for their children without discrimination on the basis of finances. To advance freedom of education, OIDEL promotes a greater parity between public and private schooling systems.

Criticisms

Many opponents of school choice such as Martin Carnoy argue that public schools perform similarly to private schools when teaching similar groups of students, and that the conception of public schools as "failing" in comparison to private schools is more due to the demographic differences between public and private schools than to actual differences in the quality of the education the schools offer. "School choice" as it entails a switch from public to private schooling would therefore do little to solve the problems facing the educational system, since a private school would perform no better than a public school when faced with exactly the same student body.

Opponents of school choice often object to the use of the term itself, viewing it as loaded political vocabulary.

Opponents also argue that school choice in the form of vouchers could result in nothing more than a cash-handout for many middle-class and wealthy families already sending their kids to private schools, with disadvantaged families either unable to secure enrollment or unable to cover costs in addition to the vouchers. Under voucher programs, private schools may be able to reject students who are expensive to educate due to special needs or students who they feel would disrupt the learning environment, and opponents of voucher programs argue that this would leave such students under a system of de facto segregation.^{[citation needed]} School choice opponents also charge that students who are unable, because of their parents' educational level or the lack of reliable transportation, to leave their local schools may be hurt as additional funding is cut from their schools. Research indicates that adoption of current public school reform proposals, particularly the idea of providing parents with education vouchers, is likely to lead to an increase in private school enrollment or at least an increase in enrollment at schools traditionally defined as private with a blurring of the distinction between public and private schools due to the public source of the voucher financing.

Although school choice does give parents the option to move their children to a better school, opponents of school choice draw attention to the effects this choice has on the ‘bad’ schools left behind. They argue that the movement from bad schools leaves behind an increased ethnic segregation. Although the neighbourhoods around a school may be ethnically diverse, because of the option for intra-district choice, there has been an increasing amount of segregation within some schools. Schools that are failing to attract students often are found to have larger students poverty rates as well as higher proportions of minority students.

Within countries with high immigration rates, such as Canada, parents within the dominate group leave behind schools that have high levels of immigrant students in order to attend schools that have a higher majority of students that are fluent in the national language. Parents move their children away from these schools in order to protect them from ethno-linguistic neediness that may cause their children to receive less attention or get behind academically because of new immigrant students. It has also been found in countries with large proportions of immigrants, that although school choice is an option for all parents, parents who do not fluently speak the official language have a much harder time accessing information related to ratings of schools and school activities that would give them the necessary knowledge to make the appropriate school selection.

School Choice is also criticized as being beneficial to urban and suburban families, but not to families living in remote rural areas. School Choice is not practical for rural families who live in areas with limited accessibility to different choices of schools within reasonable distances. While urban schools provide more options to move away from schools that are failing, rural families do not have the options available to provide an 'escape' from bad schools, making the use of school choice as competition for schools to create innovative programs, unproductive in rural areas. Families in rural areas are therefore only able to make improvements in academic quality is to actively work toward these changes instead of creating competition to encourage the school to make changes on its own.

International overview and major institutional options

France

Main article: Education in France

The French government subsidizes most private primary and secondary schools, including those affiliated with religious denominations, under contracts stipulating that education must follow the same curriculum as public schools and that schools cannot discriminate on grounds of religion or force pupils to attend religion classes.

This system of école libre (Free Schooling) is mostly used not for religious reasons, but for practical reasons (private schools may offer more services, such as after-class tutoring) as well as the desire of parents living in disenfranchised areas to send their children away from the local schools, where they perceive that the youth are too prone to delinquency or have too many difficulties keeping up with schooling requirements that the educational content is bound to suffer. The threatened repealing of that status in the 1980s triggered mass street demonstrations in favor of the status.^{[citation needed]}

Sweden

Main article: Education in Sweden

Sweden reformed its school system in 1992. Its system of school choice is one of the freest in the world, allowing students to use public funds for the publicly or privately run school of their choice, including religious and for-profit schools. Fifteen years after the reform, private school enrolment had increased from 1% to 10% of the student population.

Canada

Main article: Education in Canada

Ontario is the only large province in Canada with limited school choice funding, Catholic, Secular and one Protestant school receive funding and are open to all students. In 2003, following an international human rights ruling, the provincial Conservative government gradually introduced a tax credit over 5 years, (when it would have been fully implemented it would have been worth up to 50% of tuition to a maximum of $3,500 at any independent school in Ontario) in order to meet the human rights norms and expand funded choice to all interested parents. However, the tax credit was retroactively canceled by the subsequent Liberal government when it had been only been in place for two years to the $1,000 point. Currently there are over 900 independent schools in Ontario. The only school choice program available to non-rich parents who wish to send their children to an independent school is a privately funded program called Children First, a program of The Fraser Institute.

Chile

Main article: Education in Chile

In Chile, there is an extensive voucher system in which the state pays private and municipal schools directly, based on average attendance (90% of the country students utilize such a system). The result has been a steady increase in the number and recruitment of private schools that show consistently better results in standardized testing than municipal schools. The reduction of students in municipal schools has gone from 78% of all students in 1981, to 57% in 1990, and to less than 50% in 2005.

Regarding vouchers in Chile, researchers have found that when controls for the student's background (parental income and education) are introduced, the difference in performance between public and private subsectors is not significant. There is also greater variation within each subsector than between the two systems.

United States

A variety of forms of school choice exist in the United States.

Vouchers

Vouchers currently exist in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and, most recently, the District of Columbia and Georgia.

The largest and oldest Voucher program is in Milwaukee. Started in 1990, and expanded in 1995, it currently allows no more than 15% of the district's public school enrollment to use vouchers. As of 2005 over 14,000 students use vouchers and they are nearing the 15% cap.

School vouchers are legally controversial in some states; in 2005 the Florida Supreme Court found that school vouchers were unconstitutional under the Florida Constitution.^{[citation needed]}

In the U.S., the legal and moral precedents for vouchers may have been set by the G.I. bill, which includes a voucher program for university-level education of veterans. The G.I. bill permits veterans to take their educational benefits at religious schools, an extremely divisive issue when applied to primary and secondary schools.^{[citation needed]}

In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), the Supreme Court of the United States held that school vouchers could be used to pay for education in sectarian schools without violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. As a result, states are basically free to enact voucher programs that provide funding for any school of the parent's choosing.^{[citation needed]}

The Supreme Court has not decided, however, whether states can provide vouchers for secular schools only, excluding sectarian schools. Proponents of funding for parochial schools argue that such an exclusion would violate the free exercise clause. However, in Locke v. Davey, 540 U.S. 712 (2004), the Court held that states could exclude majors in "devotional theology" from an otherwise generally available college scholarship. The Court has not indicated, however, whether this holding extends to the public school context, and it may well be limited to the context of individuals training to enter the ministry.^{[citation needed]}

Tuition tax credits

Tuition tax credit programs currently exist in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and recently Georgia.

Arizona has probably the most well known and fastest growing tax credit program. In the Arizona School Tuition Organization Tax Credit program individuals can deduct up to $500 and couples filing joint returns can deduct up to $1000. About 20,000 children received scholarships in the 2003-2004 school year. And, since the program has started in 1998, over 77,000 scholarships have been granted.

The Arizona program was challenged in court by a group of state taxpayers on the grounds that the tax credit violated the First Amendment because the tuition grants could go to students who attend private schools including schools with religious affiliations. Typically, taxpayers are not allowed to bring suit against the government regarding how taxes are spent because injury would be purely speculative. The Court ruled 5-4 to let the tax credit program stand In April 2011, a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll found that a majority of American voters (60%) felt that the tax credits support school choice for parents whereas 26% felt as it the tax credits support religion.

In Iowa, the Educational Opportunities Act was signed into law in 2006, creating a pool of tax credits for eligible donors to student tuition organizations (STOs). At first, these tax caps were $5 million but in 2007, Governor Chet Culver increased the total amount to $7.5 million. The Iowa Alliance for Choice in Education (Iowa ACE) oversees the STOs and advocates for school choice in Iowa.^{[citation needed]}

Greater Opportunities for Access to Learning (GOAL) is the Georgia program which offers a state income tax credit to donors of scholarships to private schools. Representative David Casas was responsible for passing the Georgia version of the school choice legislation.

Charter schools

The majority of states (and the District of Columbia) have charter school laws. Minnesota was the first state to have a charter school law and the first charter school in the United States, City Academy, opened in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992.

Dayton, Ohio has between 22–26% of all children in charter schools. This is the highest percentage in the nation. Other hotbeds for charter schools are Kansas City (24%), Washington, D.C. (20-24%) and the State of Arizona. Almost 1 in 4 public schools in Arizona are charter schools, comprising about 8% of total enrollment.

Charter schools can also come in the form of Cyber Charters. Cyber charter schools deliver the majority of their instruction over the internet instead of in a school building. And, like charter schools, they are public schools, but free of many of the rules and regulations that public schools must follow.

Magnet schools

Main article: Magnet school

Magnet schools are public schools that often have a specialized function like science, technology or art. These magnet schools, unlike charter schools, are not open to all children. Much like many private schools, the students must test into the school.

Home schooling

Main article: Homeschooling

The laws relevant to homeschooling differ between US states. In some states the parent simply needs to notify the state that the child will be educated at home. In other states the parents are not free to educate at home unless at least one parent is a certified teacher and yearly progress reports are reviewed by the state. Such laws are not always enforced however. According to the Federal Government, about 1.1 million children were Home Educated in 2003.

College

The United States has school choice at the university level. College students can get subsidized tuition by attending any public college or university within their state of residence. Furthermore, the U.S. federal government provides tuition assistance for both public and private colleges via the G.I. Bill and federally guaranteed student loans.

See also

• Calfee School Guide
• Milton Friedman
• Tax choice

External links

• Families in the 'Public-markets': School choice in the comprehensive school (in Finnland)
• What is School Choice? (in the United States), by the Friedmann Foundation for Educational Choice
• Special Report #125 on Education: Choosing to Succeed, by the Heritage Foundation
• National Center on School Choice, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee
• Society for Quality Education, an organization, mostly of parents, with the mission "To significantly improve student learning in Canada"