A new arena for school choice to help at-risk kids

Editor’s note: School choice supporters see expansion of choice as especially promising for at-risk students. In this guest post, Alan Bonsteel, president of California Parents for Educational Choice, suggests they turn their attention to an under-the-radar, public-school sector that doesn’t have much success with the students who struggle the most.

by Alan Bonsteel

The nation’s continuation schools are probably the most dysfunctional of our public schools, and yet the large majority of parents, taxpayers and voters – and even many education researchers – are unaware of their existence.

As a 30-year veteran of the school choice wars in California, I am familiar with how we handle this issue in our state. But data on the rest of the nation is extremely hard to find.

In California, 56 of our 58 counties run what we call county offices of education. The two exceptions occur in counties in which there is only a single city.

These county offices run “continuation” schools for students who are floundering in traditional public schools, often because they have behavioral problems. They run a different brand of continuation schools for students incarcerated in the juvenile justice system (and who initially arrive at the schools in the backs of police cars). They operate schools for kids with learning disabilities. They also teach adult high school dropouts who are returning to complete their high school education.

Surveys done by our organization, California Parents for Educational Choice, show only about 25 percent of adults in California are aware of the existence of the county offices. With such weak oversight by voters, it is hardly surprising that the quality here is abysmal.

Dropout rates in the county offices are stratospheric. In California, an estimated 85 percent of students who enroll in them drop out, often within days or even hours.

Outside of my knowledge base in California, things get murky. In researching this blog, I phoned the National Center for Educational Statistics to determine how many states have county offices. None of their three Ph.D. data specialists who interpret their statistics for educational researchers and the general public had ever heard of county offices of education. They checked with other education experts in Washington and found no one who knew anything about this subject.

One would think that somewhere, someone has written a treatise about how we organize these crucial educational functions throughout the nation. If such a treatise has been written, however, it remains well hidden.

One could imagine school districts handling these tasks themselves — as does San Francisco Unified, for example. But in small districts, the continuation classes would need to be uneconomically small.

The opportunity for school choice advocates is obvious. If at-risk students and their families, instead of being forced into schools of low quality and high dropout rates, could choose among voucher schools or charter schools offering vocational training, or faith-based schools, or bilingual/bicultural schools, or performing arts schools, we could easily double their graduation rates.

We must raise awareness about the existence of these county offices and their equivalents throughout the nation. Then we must put the word out about their dropout rates.

Once that’s done, closing the sale for school choice will be easy.

(Image from blog.learninginafterschool.org)