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8 Problems with School Choice EXAMINED (And 1 Solution)

Mack Latimer


The term school choice has been thrown around a lot over the past few years, especially in Texas.


Some people say it's the savior of a broken education system, while others say it will destroy everything.


But what is school choice? It's more complicated than you might think.


We will talk about segregation, the unschooling movement, Harvard and LBJ, Milwaukee, and, of course, High School Football.


But the history only tells part of the story. Stick around until the end to hear my solution to it all.


Before diving into the history of school choice, we must define what we mean. To do that, we will use the hypothetical of a system with absolutely no choice.


This system would require each student to go to public school from K-12 at the neighborhood school the state assigns them to.


Now, splitting off from that system, we have different versions of school choice.


The first version, right to exit, allows people to withdraw from the system to attend private school or homeschool. Right to exit is the absolute bare minimum of choice.


The second strain, public choice, is when public schools offer different options for kids within the public school system. Public choice ranges from magnet schools to allowing kids to transfer to other public schools with open slots. 


The third strain, charter schools, is a hybrid model between public and private schools. Depending on the state, they are primarily private organizations that receive only public funding to teach students. They still have to be approved by the government and, in many cases, are very regulated.


The fourth strain, tax choice, is when the government gives tax credits or deductions to people to encourage choice in some way. There is an extensive range of these programs. 


The fifth strain, private vouchers, is when the government gives parents a voucher to bring to a private school that redeems that voucher for government funds. 


The sixth and final strain, educational savings accounts, is what most people talk about when they refer to school choice today. An educational savings account, or ESA, is an account that is funded every year for each school-age child a parent has who does not attend public school. Parents can then spend that money on private school, school supplies, tutors, or anything directly related to a child's education.


So, let's dive into the history, but instead of going chronologically this time, we will explore the history of these strains since the 1950s, when our current iteration of public schools took hold. If you want to dig in for yourself, be aware that most of the content comes from pro or anti-school choice sources. So, take everything with a grain of salt.


Right to exit is pretty straightforward.


Homeschooling took off in the 1970s when John Holt proposed that children should be "unschooled" until age eight. The unschooling movement on the left was joined by an evangelical movement for homeschooling on the right in the 1980s.


Homeschooling has always been legal in Texas and is treated the same as an unaccredited private school. There isn't even a mention of homeschooling in Texas law to prohibit it or single it out.


Both of these strains of homeschooling have met legal restrictions, but homeschooling in the US has never been illegal for long. Several states have tried to ban it, and the Supreme Court has stepped in time and time again to correct them. Right to exit is a Constitutional right in the US.


Unfortunately, some school districts attack homeschooling and private schools for drawing students and funding away from neighborhood schools.


Public choice has a million different iterations, so we will focus on Texas public choice and a few red herrings that opponents bring up regarding school choice proposals.


Public school choice in Texas is handled almost exclusively at the local level. Texas doesn't mandate or prevent school districts from creating specialized schools.


First, there are magnet schools. Magnet schools are specialized programs based on competitive acceptance rather than where you live in a district.


There are three main types of magnet programs:

  • Add-on programs, which are individual classes

  • School within a school, which are specialized schools located on the campus of a neighborhood school

  • Separate and unique schools, which are whole specialized schools


Magnet programs can be anything from art-focused programs to gifted and talented programs.


BJ Stamps and Bragg Stockton planned the first magnet school in the country in the mid-1960s. The plan was to have a school within a school that focused on high achievers and allowed them to specialize in professional subjects from medicine to filmmaking. They received approval to start the school in February 1971 and began their first year as Skyline High School in Dallas that fall.


The following year, the federal government started funding magnet programs that helped them accelerate. The feds continued funding for these programs off and on through to the present day.


Despite their overwhelming popularity with the students and parents they serve, the Dallas magnet program faces opposition from the school board every year, like most magnet programs.


Magnet schools are the top schools in our public education system, but most school districts do not offer them despite their success. Out of more than 1200 school districts in Texas, less than 50 offer magnet schools.


Unfortunately, some school districts attack magnet schools for drawing students and funding away from public schools.


Then, we have the Texas Virtual School Network. Created in 2009, Texas Virtual School Network provides full-time school for grades 3-12 and single courses for public school attendees.


This program provides at least a little choice to all Texas public school students.


Charter schools are the next branch of school choice, and most people don't completely understand them.


Texas Charter schools started in 1995 when George W. Bush signed a major charter school bill into law.


So, what is a charter school? A charter school is a public school that doesn't have to adhere to all the regulations that regular public schools have to adhere to, does not have the power to tax for building costs, can accept students from anywhere, and is managed by institutions of higher education, non-profits, or government entities.


This bill created three kinds of charter schools:


  • Open enrollment charters: The state approves these schools and has a yearly and total cap. Only 305 charters are allowed in Texas. Thankfully, each charter can have multiple campuses.

  • Campus charters: The local school district approves these as new charters or as a charter taking over an existing neighborhood school.

  • Home-rule charters: None exist, but theoretically, if a school district voted for it, voters could turn a whole school district into one extensive charter system.


You shouldn't be surprised that the vast majority of the charter schools in Texas are open-enrollment charters.


Unfortunately, some school districts attack charter schools for drawing students and funding away from neighborhood schools.


At least 983 charter schools currently serve nearly half a million students, but there are still roughly 130,000 students on active waiting lists.


The shortage is because the state rejects about 80% of new charter school applications, and cities are stopping even more by rejecting their zoning exceptions.


Charter schools also disproportionately serve disadvantaged communities and have better results than public schools that serve, on average, wealthier and more advantaged students.


Tax choice is the next branch of choice that people often bill as a halfway point between no choice and vouchers or an ESA.


The government can structure tax choice in many ways, but since it never passed in Texas and isn't seriously being considered now, we will just review the basics.


Tax choice is when the government gives people tax incentives (credits or deductions) to donate to private school scholarship programs. Even in states where these exist, they don't work well because not many people want to pay twice for schools.


The next branch of school choice is the one that gets the most hate: Vouchers.


The modern iteration of vouchers comes from Milton Friedman's essay "The Role of Government in Education," where he calls for the public funding of private schools.


He called for a universal government-funded scholarship that paid for private schools or a voucher.


People across the political spectrum championed vouchers.


After Brown v Board of Education, seven states reprehensively adopted a voucher program that was specifically designed to allow white students to go to segregated private schools.


On the other side, Christopher Jencks, a Harvard inequality scholar, Ted Sizer, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Phillip Whitten, another Harvard education scholar, all progressive academics, argued that inner-city public schools "destroyed rather than developed human potential.


They proposed a means-tested voucher system to help the poor out of poverty. They even convinced the Johnson administration to run a pilot program in Alum Rock, California. However, the Nixon Administration did not renew the funding for the program, and it died without conclusive results.


In the eighties, we saw support for vouchers from the Reagan administration, but they settled and supported increased funding for magnet and charter schools.


In 1990, in Milwaukee, Republicans and Democrats created the first modern voucher system in the country for the lower class. It proved so successful that they later expanded it to the middle class.


Now, we will focus back in on Texas' history with vouchers. In the charter school bill passed in 1995, George W. Bush originally intended to include a voucher program. He compromised and just included charter schools.


Then, in 2005, Rick Perry backed an attempt to pass a limited voucher program for disadvantaged students. That bill failed on a 72-71 vote in the Texas House and marked the end of the voucher fight in Texas.


That leads us to our final branch of school choice, Education Savings Accounts or ESAs.


There are two big reasons for ESAs.


The first is vouchers encourage private schools to charge up to the maximum of the voucher level because if they don't, the student loses that benefit. An ESA allows parents to use the money for any educational purpose or roll that money into a college savings account.


For instance, if the ESA is worth $10,000 per student and the private school only charges $8,000 a year, that parent can pay for tutoring services, school supplies, or even an online educational program.


Theoretically, ESAs will create competition in price and quality.


The second reason is the courts.


In 2011, Arizona's Supreme Court ruled that a voucher system is unconstitutional, but ESAs are not. Even though the Supreme Court has cleared this ruling up several times, ruling that both are constitutional, there's no reason for activists to return to an inferior system.


The school choice movement needed a shock to the system to move on to ESAs.


After the Arizona victory, Greg Abbot was elected Governor of Texas and, in 2017, pushed for ESAs. ESAs passed the Senate but didn't get out of committee in the House.


2020 changed everything. Two main events happened in 2020. One was COVID, which shut down schools and showed parents what their children were learning in classrooms.


Seeing a combination of propaganda and lack of rigor, matched with anger over school closures, created a mass exodus from the public school system.


That's when parents started to look for other options.


That same year, in June, the Supreme Court said that school choice programs that omitted religious schools violated the First Amendment freedom of religion.


ESAs took off.


In 2021, New Hampshire and West Virginia passed limited ESA programs.


In 2022, Arizona passed the first Universal ESA program.


In 2023, Arkansas, Iowa, Utah, and Florida passed universal ESAs


Greg Abbot joined the fight once again. In 2023, he pulled out all the stops to pass universal ESAs.


His problem was that there were only 65 pro-ESA Republicans in the House, and there were not nearly enough Democrats to close that gap.


He tried to solve this issue by combining a historic teacher pay raise with ESAs.


He still only got 65 Republicans and one Democrat to vote for ESAs, and the measure failed.


Betting on the popularity of ESAs after COVID, Abbot decided to challenge anti-ESA representatives in the primary.


With 65 pro-ESA lawmakers starting, five anti-ESA lawmakers retired, replaced with five pro-ESA representatives. Then, nine challengers beat anti-ESA incumbents, and two anti-ESA challengers beat pro-ESA incumbents.


This results in 77 of 150 house representatives who are pro universal ESAs.


In all likelihood, Texas will pass universal ESAs in 2025.


That brings us to the present, so what are the problems with school choice? Let's go through the arguments one by one. Hang on with me because there are eight.


The first argument is that ESAs are racist and just another way to segregate schools.


Just because there are segregationists who once wanted school choice doesn't mean that it is racist. Segregationists also once wanted public schools because they were a way to segregate.


That said, what we have seen when we offer people a way out of public schools is that the people who leave are overwhelmingly disadvantaged students, no matter what their race is.


In 2022, the GAO came out with a study that public schools are increasing in segregation due to increasing segregation in neighborhoods.


Public schools aren't racist because they used to be, and ESAs aren't racist because they once had racist supporters. Most people who support ESAs want to see better outcomes for every student.


The second argument is that ESAs take money away from public schools, and guess what? They do.


Every student who leaves the public school system lowers their funding by the amount of money that the school was receiving for that one student. However, per-student funding increases due to school funding not based on attendance, such as building funds.


Funding is still a valid argument against school choice. The schools that see the most students leave will struggle to stay afloat and, in extreme cases, will shut down. We are already seeing this in cities like Miami.


The third argument is that ESAs increase overall government spending.


This claim is valid... at first.


At the start of the ESA program, the first wave of parents to use it are parents who have already left the public school system.


These parents would shift the burden of paying for their student's education from themselves back onto the state. That increases government spending.


However, they decrease spending once these programs expand and start drawing people away from public schools. Since the ESA funding is less per student than public school funding, the government saves money each time a student switches to a private school.


Once the second effect outweighs the first effect, overall government spending decreases.


The fourth argument is that it would decrease participation in school sports.


The argument for this is that most private schools won't have sports teams, and once enough people leave public schools, they won't have the funding to support the big sports anymore.


This effect entirely depends on the demand. If parents want their students to attend a school with sports, they will. If they don't, they won't.


The fifth argument is that rural communities will suffer because their school is their most significant employer.


The story goes that if a private school pops up in a small town, it could draw all the students away from that public school. Then, the public school would have to shut down.


If the public school is bad enough that most students leave, it shouldn't have been there in the first place. But even if that does happen, all those people can still work at the private school serving just as many kids.


The sixth argument is that some people in nice neighborhoods might lose home equity if school choice passes.


That is true. Some people in bad school districts also might gain home equity.


The seventh argument is that these schools don't have accountability. And in the traditional sense, that is correct.


A private school can choose its metrics to measure its success, and the state cannot shut it down without cause. But the massive increase in accountability is parents.


If a private school isn't working, the parent can leave and go to another school, public or private. The market is the accountability system for private schools.


And finally, the last argument against school choice is the strongest one.


Public schools have too much red tape and cannot compete with the flexibility of a private school. There is no way for them to win this fight.


This argument is entirely accurate and is one of the reasons we need choice.


So how can we fix that last problem?


School choice, at its core, is a funding question.


How do we fund the education of minors?


We already have several options: homeschool, private school, public school, charter school, and magnet school, but they are all funded differently.


That's the problem.


We need to unify school funding and remove the red tape to let these models compete.


ESAs could be the vehicle for that. We can decide how much funding per student each year and let all parents choose where that funding goes. All the different choices will set a price, and the parent will decide.


But that means that all the red tape would have to go away, and we would have to learn to be okay with different types of education we don't like.


Yes, there will be Christian schools. There will be Islamic schools. There will be liberal schools, and there will be conservative schools.


We have to be okay with that. The left talks about coexistence, and the right talks about freedom, but this is where we can live those values.


So what do you think? Is changing school funding at its core too much?


Let me know in the comments.

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