by Ron Matus and Travis Pillow
As school vouchers, tax credit scholarships and related educational options continue to grow, the school choice movement will have an increasingly visible debate over the right regulatory consequences for providers whose students persistently fail to make academic gains.
So said a leader of the nation’s largest school choice organization Thursday during an education reform summit in Washington D.C. As if on cue, Scott Jensen with the American Federation for Children and his fellow panelists proceeded to politely sketch out different positions.
It’s an issue that has surfaced repeatedly at a national conference on education reform and will gain importance as choice becomes more common and a growing school choice movement pushes to improve quality.
Jensen, who hails from Wisconsin, home to the nation’s longest-running school voucher program in Milwaukee, made the case for some sort of government response. Jensen said school choice supporters in Wisconsin believed in the beginning that poor performing private schools wouldn’t survive, because parents would naturally gravitate away from them. But in an educational marketplace that’s still maturing, that hasn’t always happened, he said. And the resulting negative publicity has been bad for the movement.
“We get haunted by the small number of bad stories,” said Jensen, a senior strategist with AFC. They “drive the political conversation” and it’s hard to convince politicians and the public that “there’s an acceptable level of failure.”
On the flip side, Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up For Students, flatly answered “no” when asked if poor-performing schools should be shut down. Step Up is a nonprofit that administers Florida’s tax credit scholarship program, which serves about 69,000 students this fall. It also co-hosts this blog.
Tuthill pointed to the lack of high-quality educational options in many low-income communities, and pointed to the recent, widely publicized closure of an F-rated charter school in St. Petersburg, Fla. In many cases, he said, parents of those charter school students were then forced to send their students to even lower-performing district schools.
“It’s a mistake shutting down schools based on some arbitrary definition” of quality, he said.
Adam Peshek with the Foundation for Excellence in Education said the key is finding the right regulatory balance – one that can shutter low performers yet not hinder the growth of higher quality ones. “There is a problem with bad schools,” said Peshek, the foundation’s state policy director of school choice. “But an equally big problem is we don’t have enough good schools.”
Chester Finn, the president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said during a separate panel that the think tank has grappled with similar issues in its role authorizing charter schools in Ohio. It’s an easier decision to close an under-performing school in an area with a well-developed school choice ecosystem. But in a community with low-performing schools and only a single charter, “closing that charter school is a heavy lift.”
There’s broad agreement that the movement needed to focus more on developing tools that would help parents better determine which educational options are best for their children. That hasn’t happened yet because there has been so little choice, Tuthill said. But now that options are blossoming, “We have to build out that infrastructure.”
Regardless of how lawmakers balance choice and regulation in an accountability system, Florida state Sen. Bill Galvano said parents and policymakers need better information about how schools of choice are performing. He said lawmakers took steps in that direction with legislation this year that, among other things, will increase reporting on the academic results of students in the tax credit scholarship program.
“Choice, by the stakeholders, based on data, needs to be a factor.” he said.
