I am grateful to Rebecca Sibilia and Sean Gill for their thoughtful response to my blog post encouraging Michelle Rhee to replace her failing schools model of school choice with an approach based on equal opportunity.
Rebecca and Sean defended StudentsFirst’s support of the failing schools model on pragmatic grounds. They wrote: “When state resources are limited or the existing supply of desirable private schools is limited, it also makes sense to prioritize vouchers or scholarships for those low-income children attending a low-performing school or living in low-performing school districts.”
Every community suffers from an insufficient supply of effective schools for low-income students. But in Florida we’ve learned that increasing demand - not limiting demand - is the best way to increase supply.
Access to Florida’s tax credit scholarship program for low-income students, which I help administer, is limited by a state-imposed cap. But our demand is not limited, so it often exceeds supply. This excess demand has not had a negative effect on students or the program. Instead, it has generated political pressure on the state Legislature to allow our cap to rise to meet this additional demand.
In 2010, as a result of excessive demand, the Florida Legislature voted to allow our program to grow 25 percent every year the demand hits or exceeds 90 percent of supply. The result has been extraordinary growth of supply and demand. While we have been awarding scholarships since 2002, 34 percent of our growth has occurred in just the last two years. This school year we added 10,000 more students to the program and had more than 12,000 students add their names to our waiting list after we hit our cap.
We’ve also been adding about 100 new private schools per year to the program, and some have started to expand their physical capacity to serve more students. Had we adopted the StudentsFirst approach of limiting demand when faced with limited supply, this extraordinary growth would not have occurred.
Today, more than 43 percent of Florida’s preK-12 students attend a school other than their assigned district school. Charter schools, magnet schools, virtual schools, career academies, dual enrollment and homeschooling are all growing dramatically. Private schools are already struggling to maintain their market share given all these choices. If we were to limit our scholarships to low-income students in state-designated failing schools, then many private schools serving low-income students might be forced to close - to everyone’s detriment. (more…)
Editor's note: This guest post from StudentsFirst is authored by Vice President of Fiscal Strategy Rebecca Sibilia and fiscal policy analyst Sean Gill.
We appreciate Doug Tuthill’s recent redefinED post challenging StudentsFirst to consider supporting voucher or tax-credit scholarship programs that aren’t just limited to what he describes as the “failing schools” model. We agree with his assertion that school choice policies, including private school options, are about empowering parents to select the best school for their child.
It is true that we believe voucher programs should prioritize low-income students in low-performing schools. However, we want to make clear that this position is not based simply on a “politically safe compromise.” Indeed, our entire State Policy Report Card judges not what is politically popular, but rather the laws and policies we believe, through evidence, best practices, and common sense, will deliver the best results for kids.
We think it is important that states focus on more than policies that just provide access to schools; states must prioritize expanding access to high-quality choices for families that traditionally lack them. A Brookings study found that students from low-income households are much more likely to attend low-performing schools than middle or high-income students. This is important because the same study further confirms that low-income kids can actually achieve at high levels when they attend high-performing schools. Unfortunately, as Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett has mentioned, low-income families often lack the resources to enroll in potentially higher-performing private schools or to relocate to a school district that offers a better public education.
Policymakers must always consider tradeoffs and unintended consequences when considering how to budget limited resources. Consider if a state adopted a universal voucher program. This would provide the most theoretical choice, but it could also easily have the unintended effect of simply subsidizing the students already enrolled at private schools and those in families who may otherwise be able to afford private school tuition. This would result in few new students being able to attend a high quality school option, and wouldn’t expand access to those who need it the most. Presumably, avoiding this problem is one of the reasons why the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program is currently limited to low-income children.
Using this logic, we believe that when state resources are limited or the existing supply of desirable private schools is limited, it also makes sense to prioritize vouchers or scholarships for those low-income children attending a low-performing school or living in low-performing school districts. There are practical, administrative considerations that also make targeted programs more effective. For instance, when looking at the state of Tennessee, where Gov. Haslam has proposed a voucher program, we’ve determined that the four districts with the lowest performing schools also have both higher concentrations of low-income families and private schools in their communities.
We find that most voucher and scholarships programs are capped by enrollment or appropriation levels. Given that low-income students can be found in most counties throughout a state, these caps then create an unintended consequence of spreading out scholarship recipients among multiple communities, which would not provide enough demand to create new private school options. (more…)
