President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of school choice advocate Betsy DeVos as America’s prospective education secretary has fueled speculation about a coming school choice push at the federal level.
Pundits have weighed in on Trump’s vague campaign pledge to steer $20 billion in existing federal education funding toward school choice.
But a recent report by the American Enterprise Institute, reporting by Education Week and others, and a review of school choice legislation that’s already been introduced in Congress – and, in some cases, endorsed by DeVos or her allies – point to five potential paths to expanding educational choice through federal policy, which we’ll break down before the end of the year.
They are: Funding portability, tax benefits for private school tuition, tax credit scholarships, startup grants and new choice programs in federal jurisdictions. In recent years, bills have been introduced in Congress to address all five.
Funding portability
Media accounts have described Trump’s school choice plan as a $20 billion voucher proposal.
But during the campaign, he seemed to indicate he wanted to leave the creation of voucher programs to individual states. He was mostly interested in federal funding following individual children to whatever school they attend.
This idea isn’t exactly new, and it may face an uphill political battle. Congress debated Title I portability while enacting the Every Student Succeeds Act, but ultimately rejected it.
Downsides
Right now, Title I provides roughly $15.5 billion in federal funding to help children in poverty. The money is distributed through a complicated set of formulas that steer about a third of the money directly to schools with high concentrations of students in poverty. And since a typical school may only receive about $500 or $600 per student, schools need a high concentration of low-income kids to amass enough funding to have an impact.
Sara Mead, among other thoughtful analysts, has argued that letting this money follow individual children risks spreading the funding too thinly. A school with 100 low-income students could potentiality afford a full-time staff member to support them. A private school with a handful of students on vouchers could receive a piddling sum that would result in very little new support for those students.
Upsides
Consider a state like Nevada that wants to offer an education savings account to almost every student. It might make sense to let low-income parents who participate in that program to receive a few hundred extra dollars – which they could spend on tutoring or supplemental curriculum.
Or consider a district like Orange County Public Schools in Florida, which already provides equitable services to private schools that serve large numbers of low-income students. (I’ve personally visited private schools that use Title I funding to hire staff dedicated to helping low-income students.) Then consider other districts, which may require private schools, or even public charter schools, to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get those same services for their disadvantaged students.
Also consider the disparities under the existing Title I funding arrangements, which sometimes wind up steering more money toward wealthy districts.
It’s at least possible that a money-follows-the-child approach to funding high-poverty schools, while not perfect, could lead to a more equitable system of funding education for low-income students The best way to find out may be to allow states to create such systems voluntarily (as legislation by Rep. Luke Messer would allow), and then keep track of how states, districts and schools actually allocate that money.
Real talk
While making funding portable might help federal education programs for children in poverty adjust to the new definition of public education, it’s unlikely to create many new options for children on its own — even if it includes incentives for states to create voucher programs, as Trump hinted during the campaign. If this idea becomes politically viable (and many observers have their doubts) it might need to be coupled with other ideas to expand options for students. We’ll dig into those next week.
