Editor’s note: This commentary from Christian Barnard, an education policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, appeared today on The 74.
So far this year, 18 states have passed legislation to allow families more choices and customization for their student’s K-12 education. From Pennsylvania to Montana, states have increased access to school choice by creating education savings accounts and expanding voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs. This wave of legislation has recently led a growing number of education reformers, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, to dub 2021 “The Year of School Choice.”
Reformers have long argued that education choice should be for everyone. But when looking at the current geographic distribution of charter school and private school scholarship-eligible students, it becomes clear that the target audience for these programs is largely kids in urban centers who are most likely to be attending “failing” public schools.
Furthermore, despite years of school choice advocacy, students enrolled in private school choice programs represent only 1.2% of the nation’s K-12 population and charter students make up only 7% of public K-12 enrollment.
To build on the momentum of recent legislative efforts, education choice advocates should update their vision for school choice. It is time they move beyond seeing it as primarily an escape hatch that enables kids to leave underperforming neighborhood schools.
The strategy of focusing on providing school choice for certain populations of students was perhaps best articulated by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jason Riley in a 2014 interview, where he said charter schools and voucher programs “don’t need to be scaled up.” Using the example of the extraordinarily successful Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter school network, he said, “we don’t need a KIPP in every neighborhood. I live in suburban New York City — we don’t need a KIPP up there, the public schools are just fine. We know where we need these schools.”
This belief limits the scope of choice programs as merely a remedy in areas where public schools are underperforming and suggests that the only way to advance education choice is to help kids get into a different school building.
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