Public school choice is one of the many education issues that will likely have to wait until next year in Florida.
That means there’s more time to learn from other states. A new report from Missouri’s Show-Me Institute might help shed some light on the issue. It looks at the Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts — two academically struggling areas near St. Louis — where students were allowed to transfer to surrounding districts.
The report finds schools there grappled with some of the issues cited in Florida’s legislative debate, like student transportation and the impact of increased public school choice on surrounding districts’ enrollment.
There are a lot of interesting nuggets, but one finding seems especially relevant. The districts that students transferred into didn’t seem to have much trouble absorbing the influx of new students. None saw an enrollment increase of more than 5 percent due to new transfers.
Even the three districts where incoming transfer students received transportation saw enrollment gains of a few hundred students each, increases on the order of 2 or 3 percent.
However, the districts students left behind, which were already struggling, saw a sudden drop in enrollment. The Normandy school district, one of two covered by the transfer policy, was crippled financially.
Elsewhere, the dire warnings of people who opposed the transfer program didn’t seem to come true.
The report concludes:
The Normandy School District reached the brink of bankruptcy, was taken over by the state, and the district was reconstituted. Though the Riverview Gardens School District did not face as much peril, continuing the transfer program as is eventually could bankrupt the district as well. Academically, however, the impact on the unaccredited districts is not clear. They did not unequivocally get worse when faced with the transfer program. Similarly, the receiving districts do not appear to have gotten significantly worse with the influx of lower-performing students. In many ways, it seems the transfer students were simply absorbed into their new school districts with little noticeable difference.
Some of the issues dealt with in the report might play out differently in Florida. School districts in this state are larger, and the state funding formula helps equalize their per-student revenue, though local tax levies complicate the picture in some places.
More importantly, under Florida’s proposals, transfers would be able to flow in all directions, and expanded school choice wouldn’t be confined to a small number of low-performing, “unaccredited” schools or districts. That means districts at risk of finding themselves in Normandy’s position could try to find ways to attract new students (and the revenue that comes with them) from neighboring counties.
It stands to reason that fewer places in this state would see a one-way exodus, which was one of the clear effects of Missouri’s policy.
