Doing School Choice Right: Preliminary Findings
April 2006
Paul Hill, James Harvey
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Will school choice be the end of public education? Or will it be the salvation of thousands of students who would otherwise fail in district-run schools? There is only one honest answer to these questions: it all depends.
Any form of school choice, whether new options offered by school districts, charters, or new independent schools funded by vouchers, can either support or harm public education. Everything depends on factors under human control, such as how choice is funded and organized, who can choose, what information parents can get, and who takes public funds to run schools. That was the message of the National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education, which issued its final report in late 2003.
The Commission looked closely at how choice could work—how it could lead to good outcomes (improved learning for children of parents who choose), or to bad ones (greater segregation or harm to children who remain in traditional public schools). The Commission learned some important lessons:
On funding: Choice can help children only if they can transfer to good schools, and good schools require reasonable amounts of money to operate. If little public funding is allowed to follow children to schools of choice, few schools will offer to accept students—and even fewer good new schools will start up. Under those circumstances, schools of choice would also have a strong incentive to avoid children who might be difficult to educate.
On parent information: Choice can benefit poor children only if their parents have good information about schools, so they can choose the one that best matches their child’s needs and interests. Unfortunately, low-income parents have little experience choosing schools, and in most communities the information available to them is thin.
On possible harm to children who remain in traditional public schools after others have departed: Choice does not directly cause a decline in public Doing Sc hool Choice Right school quality, but district policies virtually guarantee that a school that loses many students will also lose its best teachers and end up with a much lower per-pupil expenditure than other schools in the district. Avoiding harm to children left behind requires changes in district policies that now permit the ablest teachers to avoid the most challenging schools, leaving such schools with the least qualified and least experienced teachers.
On performance accountability: Family choice is one mechanism for holding schools accountable, but in some cases parents will choose schools that do not teach children effectively. Even with choice there is still a need for public oversight to protect children from schools that do not adequately prepare them for higher education, good jobs, and engaged citizenship.
Although the Commission report left a lot of questions unanswered, it is clear that school choice is neither a certain disaster nor a sure thing. Choice, like bureaucracy, is a human creation that can be regulated, tinkered with, and made to work.
Reactions to the Choice Commission’s 2003 report were positive. Community leaders across the country agreed that it had focused attention on the practical issues associated with choice and away from ideological posturing. However, they insisted that the practical issues identified by the report—how to properly fund schools of choice, fully inform poor parents, and protect children remaining in traditional public schools—were too hard to solve.
In response, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) launched a new initiative entitled “Doing School Choice Right.” Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates, Annie E. Casey, and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations, the initiative’s goal is to help state and local leaders handle practical issues whose resolution can determine whether school choice helps or harms children, especially low-income children in big cities.
The first activity was in August 2004, when CRPE and the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings co-sponsored a two-day seminar on communities and choice held in Washington, D.C. The meeting drew together parents, researchers, and community leaders to explore the practical challenges of implementing school choice programs. As a result of this discussion, the Doing School Choice Right initiative mounted four major lines of inquiry:
Explore what it takes to inform parents (especially low-income parents who normally get very little information about schools) about the choices they have so they can match their child’s needs with a school’s offerings. Paul Teske, a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Denver, and a recognized national expert on parent information use, leads this study.
Initiate case studies on how school districts can try to help traditional public schools cope with the challenges of choice and competition. Christine Campbell, Michael DeArmond, and Kacey Guin, all with CRPE, jointly lead this study.
Examine issues involved in moving toward pupil-based funding, particularly technical, legal, and regulatory barriers. Marguerite Roza of CRPE, and the recognized national leader on studies of school district budgeting and spending, leads this study.
Create models for how school districts can oversee public schools in multiple ways—including direct operation, chartering, contracting, and licensing private schools to admit voucher students. Work to date on this study has been led by Kate Destler of CRPE, and Stephen Page of the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs. Bryan Hassel of Public Impact, one of the few scholars ever to study public oversight of schools of choice, will lead a major fieldwork effort starting in spring 2006.
This paper gives an advance report on the results of these studies, each of which will produce extensive reports in the coming year.
