For the school choice movement, and education policy in general, most of the action happens at the state and local level. But participants in the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s latest annual Wonkathon found a few gems in the new federal education law that could give students more options.
Brian Kisida of the University of Missouri notes that while the Every Student Succeeds Act doesn’t make big changes to promote school choice, it contains a few provisions that could make school funding systems more choice-friendly.
Among other things, it contains a pilot program that should encourage more districts to experiment with weighted funding based on individual students’ needs. And it requires states to report spending at the individual school level.
So what are the implications for school choice? By shining a brighter light on actual school expenditures and, most importantly, solidifying the principle that dollars should follow students, the increased ESSA focus on expenditures will be a game changer with meaningful spillover effects for choice systems. Currently, students enrolled in charter schools and those participating in voucher and tax credit programs receive far fewer public dollars than traditional public schools would garner for educating the same students. This imposes a burden on school choice providers and is a significant barrier for many non-participating schools. Once it becomes more widely accepted that every dollar allocated for a student should be spent on that student, the same logic can be easily applied to students participating in choice programs. As a result, current choice schools will have more resources to educate their students and new schools of choice will have a greater incentive to participate.
Education consultant Alex Medler (previously of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers) notes that the beefed-up charter school grant program allows states to use up to seven percent of their grants to support state-level improvements. In other words, the money wouldn’t just flow to schools. States could use some of it to tackle systemic issues that arise when districts no longer have a monopoly on running public schools.
States are interesting places from which to drive this kind of change. My hope is that they have the credibility and reach to affect the way choice happens in both charters and district-managed schools. And they may be able to bring people to the table to solve widely shared challenges that frustrate parents and undermine the viability of school choice. States may be well placed to make the charter school system more family-friendly, or they may provide the cover and tools that make district/charter collaboration more effective and sustainable. They could also help chartering play a bigger role in the improvement of chronically low-performing schools.
And Claire Voorhees of the Foundation for Excellence in Education writes that states could have more freedom to use portions of their Title I and school improvement funds to promote parental choice for students in the lowest-performing schools.
At ExcelinEd, we are hopeful that many states will step up to the plate and use their newfound flexibility to do something dramatic: harness the power of parental choice and help turn around their lowest-performing districts and schools.
So what might that look like?
An ambitious state could distribute the 7 percent school improvement funds through competitive grants—rather than passing them straight through to low-performing districts as formula funds— incentivizing districts to implement robust public school choice programs that extend preference to students in the lowest-performing schools. Then, using the additional 3 percent set-aside for direct student services, the state could incentivize those same districts to provide transportation for their school choice programs and/or provide needed remedial or advanced courses through a state course access program.
In short, while some changes sought by school choice advocates didn’t make it into the new federal law, it could still bring some new policy developments that will be worth watching in the coming years. See the all the Wonkathon entries here.
