School Choice

Abstract

School choice is the effort of some public school supporters to encourage educational reform through competition within public schools themselves, as well as between public schools and private schools, Christian schools or parochial schools. School choice is also seen as a way to enable lower-class and middle-class parents to withdraw their children from failing public schools. As an exercise in free market education, school choice is bound up with the notion that the best schools will receive parental support, while the poorly performing schools will be easier to identify and reform. In one sense, the idea of letting parents choose a school for their children is noncontroversial, yet when school choice is defined as the use of public funds—through school vouchers—to pay for students to attend private schools, Christian schools, or parochial schools, heated disputes arise. The school voucher program in the United States began in Milwaukee in 1990 and has since spread to other US cities. Experts are divided over whether school choice actually delivers the improved educational outcomes touted by its supporters.

Overview

School choice, the notion that parents should be able to send their children to any public or private school of their choosing, or educate them at home, is not a new idea, even in the United States (West, 1996), though it has received increased attention since the middle of the twentieth century.

Private schools, even religious schools, generally are not controversial, having been a fixture on the American educational landscape since the founding of the country. According to Broughman, Swaim, and Burke, one in ten K–12 students in the United States attends a private school (Broughman & Swaim, 2006; Burke, 2009). According to the biennial Private School Universe Survey (PSS) conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics at the US Department of Education, 32,461 private elementary and secondary schools enrolled around 4.9 million students in 2017–18 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019).

School choice operates in several different ways, depending on the state and the public school district. At heart, according to supporters, school choice is an attempt to separate the excellent public schools from the public schools badly in need of reform. According to Dodenhoff (2007), school choice "assume[s] the existence of a sizeable core of good schools from which parents can choose, and on which parents can believe that their time and effort are not being wasted" (p. 12).

School Choice Options

How does school choice play out in practice? First, in most states students have the option to attend a public charter school. As of 2021, forty-five states had passed charter school laws. Approximately 3.3 million students attended a total of around 7,400 charter schools as of the fall of 2018, according to the National Center for Education Statistics ("Public Charter School Enrollment," 2021). Charter schools are a form of public school authorized by a governing body, such as a local school board, state department of education, nonprofit organization, or (in several states) a for-profit corporation. They are chartered for a period of time, with renewals based on performance. Charter schools are distinct from traditional public schools in two respects: they are free of many of the bureaucratic entanglements, and they tend to use more innovative educational techniques. Put another way, charter schools are left free to experiment in exchange for greater accountability.

Unlike private schools, charter schools are public schools supported by taxpayers, and they are not wholly free of oversight by local school boards and state and federal education agencies. Supporters refer to them as "public schools of choice" (WestEd, 2000) because it gives lower-income parents the option to send their children to charter schools instead of traditional public schools. Like wealthier parents who choose to send their children to private schools, parents without those financial resources have a choice about where their children will be educated. Another important difference is that charter schools do not charge tuition. Finally, charter schools are distinctive in that they seek to defend and improve public education, and do not challenge its legitimacy or efficacy.

Students attending charter schools might be bused, at taxpayer expense, to that school. Parents can also take advantage of busing to have their children attend another public school in a different neighborhood or even a different city. Busing has been used to send children of color into predominately White suburban schools, sometimes—as was the case in Boston in the 1970s—provoking racial tension.

Further Insights

School Vouchers

Students exercising school choice might be given the option to attend a private or religious school, at least partially at the expense of taxpayers, through a voucher. This form of school choice has become the focus of considerable controversy since the 1980s.

School choice becomes especially contentious when taxpayer dollars are involved. In a seminal 1955 essay, economist Milton Friedman proposes that parents be given same-as-cash government vouchers to help them defray the costs of sending their children to the school of their choice. The idea was first proposed by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man in 1791 (Salisbury, 2003, p. 2), but Friedman (1955) brought the idea to a wider American audience:

"Governments could require a minimum level of education which they could finance by giving parents vouchers redeemable for a specified maximum sum per child per year if spent on "approved" educational services. Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services from an "approved" institution of their own choice. The educational services could be rendered by private enterprises operated for profit, or by non-profit institutions of various kinds. The role of the government would be limited to assuring that the schools met certain minimum standards such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs, much as it now inspects restaurants to assure that they maintain minimum sanitary standards" (Friedman, 1955).

As a free market economist in the tradition of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, Friedman believed that vouchers would empower parents, force failing public schools to improve, and generally better the quality of K–12 education across the country. Friedman (1955) puts it this way:

"Let the subsidy be made available to parents regardless where they send their children—provided only that it be to schools that satisfy specified minimum standards—and a wide variety of schools will spring up to meet the demand. Parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another, to a much greater extent than is now possible" (Friedman, 1955). Friedman went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, and his thinking on school vouchers inspired several generations of economists, politicians, and parents to look at vouchers as a way to improve America's languishing public school system. For many parents, teachers, and politicians, supporting school choice has become tantamount to supporting school vouchers.

Changing Times in Public Schools

It took several decades before the idea of school vouchers became widely known to the general public. But by the 1970s, change was in the air. There was a growing consensus that the top-down, overly bureaucratic public school system was struggling to deliver the educational outcomes demanded by politicians, parents, and teachers. This was documented in A Nation at Risk, the sobering 1983 US government report on public education. There was also the sense that one-size-fits-all education was out of sync with accumulating evidence that suggested smaller class sizes and greater community involvement in schools are crucial to producing students ready to take on the challenges of a burgeoning knowledge-based economy. Moreover, many Americans were alarmed at the disparities in the education provided to poor and lower-income students, many of whom were children of color.

Justified or not, there has, since the late twentieth century, been a concern that some public schools, particularly in urban areas, are failing the students they serve. Through a combination of violence, teacher apathy, and low expectations on the part of school administrators, the poor and minority students who make up the majority of the student body in many urban schools are being shortchanged. Many critics argue that parents with children stuck in underperforming schools should be offered a government voucher to help them pay the cost of a private school education. Then, given competition from private schools, failing public schools either will be forced to improve or will save taxpayer dollars by shutting their doors.

Vouchers: From Theory to Practice

Friedman's idea of school vouchers held the promise of not only improving the quality of the nation's public schools, but also of providing poor and inner-city parents an alternative to sending their children to crime-ridden and drug-infested inner-city schools.

President Ronald Reagan, who appointed Milton Friedman to his Economic Policy Advisory Board in 1981, trumpeted the idea of school vouchers in the 1980s as a free market approach to resolving what many conservatives and liberals alike felt was a crisis in American public education. Vouchers also earned the support of Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush. By 1990, halfway through Bush's term, the city of Milwaukee had begun the nation's first educational voucher program. Other school districts followed Milwaukee's example.

But there continue to be some concerns about vouchers. According to Chick (2007),

* "Some middle class parents who currently are paying private school tuition without government assistance argue that vouchers are another form of welfare that places an additional tax burden on working families."

* "From the perspective of public school teacher unions and pressure groups such as the National Education Association, vouchers are nothing more than a scheme to undermine public education in the United States by funneling money and the best students to private schools."

* "From the perspective of some private schools themselves—especially those operated by religious organizations and churches—vouchers are an attempt to entangle private schools in government red tape and thereby hamper their educational effectiveness."

* "Some others argue that providing public money to private schools—many of which have a religious basis—is a violation of the constitutional principle of the separation of church and state, and therefore is prohibited."

* "More pragmatic critics argue that, even if one were to concede their legality, vouchers don't deliver the intended result of helping poor and minority students improve academically" (Chick, 2007).

Legal Issues

Cleveland's school voucher plan was challenged in the mid-1990s on the grounds that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which forbids government endorsement of religion. This was because the vast majority of publicly funded vouchers were used to pay tuition at Catholic schools in and around the city. The case was appealed all the way up to the US Supreme Court. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, an important ruling in 2002, the Court ruled 5–4 that the Cleveland voucher program did not violate the First Amendment because the overriding purpose of the voucher program was secular. It remained unclear whether the court's ruling applied with equal force to all existing or proposed voucher programs. In 2006 a Florida State Supreme Court banned a statewide voucher program, and in 2013 the Louisiana Supreme Court struck down the state’s method for funding the voucher program, stating that the per-pupil allocation of funds must be used for public school students. In 2020, another significant US Supreme Court ruling occurred after a 2018 Montana Supreme Court decision declared a state tax credit program for private school scholarship donations unconstitutional. Upon appeal to the US Supreme Court by those in favor of school choice, the court ruled in 2020 that Montana's constitutional provision prohibiting taxpayer aid for religious private schools was discriminatory; this meant that other states' constitutional provisions could also be challenged (Camera, 2020).

Voucher Support

Despite these and other legal wranglings, there have been many supporters of vouchers, including those minority parents whose children are, in their view, forced to attend poor quality schools. Many of these parents argue that vouchers will help address the implicit racism in a public educational system that lets middle-class White families choose better schools while not allowing poor families of color the same privilege. They also note that many of the fiercest critics of vouchers in the US Congress—both Black American and White—send their own children to private schools (cf. Burke, 2009). Friedman touched upon these themes in an interview shortly before his death in 2006:

"As to the benefits of universal vouchers, empowering parents would generate a competitive education market, which would lead to a burst of innovation and improvement, as competition has done in so many other areas. There's nothing that would do so much to avoid the danger of a two-tiered society, of a class-based society. And there's nothing that would do so much to ensure a skilled and educated work force" (as cited in Gillespie, 2005)

Other supporters of vouchers argue that the success of school vouchers depends on how many regulatory strings are attached. While not arguing for or against vouchers, one researcher compared the methods of funding education in five countries, including the United States, and concluded "it is not the source of funding that is important; it is whether the funding carries political restrictions on the decision-making powers of the private schools that matters" (Toma, 1996, p. 146).

Viewpoints

Why do Parents Choose Private Schools?

Despite the popular conception that parents choose private schools merely for academic reputation, there are various reasons why parents choose private school over public school for their children.

A 2001 study from Brown University looked at reasons why parents in Brown's immediate vicinity of Providence, Rhode Island, were choosing private schools. When the researchers talked to private school parents, they identified a wide variety of reasons.

The researchers found that 43 percent of private school parents had students who had previously attended public schools. When asked what, if anything, would lead them to put their children back in public schools, the leading responses were smaller class sizes, school safety, better trained teachers, and more attention given to their children. When private school parents were given a list of four hypothetical public school improvements, "[t]he most popular change was programs for gifted students (named by 58 percent of parents), followed by reading programs (48 percent), after school programs (42 percent), and new computers and Internet access (25 percent)" (West, 2001).

Following months of school closures and teachers, students, and families having to adapt to variations of either full remote, virtual schooling or a hybrid mix of in-person and virtual learning due to the public health concerns caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, by 2021 an increased number of states had begun introducing or passing bills to create or expand school choice funding options such as education savings accounts and tax-credit scholarship programs. According to some reports, interest in school choice had only seemed to rise due to the pandemic having forced families to shift to or embrace different methods of education other than what had been traditional (McShane, 2021).

How Public School Choice Works

School choice presupposes a core of quality public schools worth fighting for. School choice, when applied to public schools, involves a complex matrix of government funding and government regulation. As illustrated in Figure 1 below, the goal of public policymakers is to strike the appropriate balance so that public schools benefit from needed reforms and innovations while also remaining accountable for a set of minimum academic standards.

As the National Working Commission on Choice in K–12 Education figure indicates, public schools with the greatest amount of spending and the lowest degree of regulations tend to produce the best results. The hope and expectation of school choice advocates is that increased competition will lead to a proliferation of quality public schools that can compete effectively with their charter school, private school, and religious school counterparts.

Does School Choice Make a Difference to Children & Communities?

The debate over school choice is not simply about dollars and cents. Rather, it goes beyond money to more fundamental questions: Do most parents make informed choices about where to send their children to school? Does school choice help improve the quality of life in communities across the country? Taking the first question about informed parental choices, a 2007 study of the school voucher program in Milwaukee found the following:

* "It is estimated that just under 35 percent of [Milwaukee Public Schools] MPS parents actively choose a school for their child, rather than simply opting for the default neighborhood school."

* "About 45 percent of parents who actively choose a school for their child are estimated to do so after considering at least two schools."

* "64.8% of 'two-choice parents [considered] academic factors when choosing' a school" (Dodenhoff, 2007, p. 1).

Only one in ten Milwaukee Public School parents fit into all three categories, leading some critics of school choice to conclude that school choice in such cases is more imagined than real. How, then, is this situation an improvement over states and school districts that do not allow school choice? Dodenhoff (2007) suggests that this lack of parental involvement is taking the pressure off public schools in need of reform:

"When it comes to public school choice, the estimates presented above indicate that few parents are sufficiently invested in the choice process to create the kind of serious pressure on individual schools that would result in necessary, dramatic improvements" (Dodenhoff, 2007, p. 12).

In terms of community development, a 2007 report noted that school choice in Milwaukee since 1990 had led to $126 million in school building and improvement projects, many in economically distressed areas of the city (School Choice Wisconsin, 2007). Similar results have been found elsewhere.

Another interesting aspect of school choice is the argument that it might even have environmental benefits in controlling suburban sprawl:

"The standard formulation is that sprawl harms urban school systems by draining middle-class students and their tax-paying families. But any parent will tell you that urban schools also promote sprawl by driving away families who can afford to leave. Michael E. Lewyn, a visiting professor of law at George Washington University, has observed that we give urban parents three choices: They can send their kids to the lousy and possibly dangerous public schools in the city. They can ante up the exorbitant tuition for private school, assuming their kids can get in. Or they can move to the best suburb they can afford, where decent public schools are available to anyone with the price of a house" (Akst, 2005, par. 4).

"Ignoring the chain of causality between bad schools and [suburban] sprawl leads environmentalists to overlook the simplest and potentially most powerful anti-sprawl measure available, which is to let urban parents choose their kids' schools—even if those schools aren't in the city or aren't even public" (Akst, 2005, par. 6).

Terms & Concepts

Christian School: Often operated by Christian religious organizations or various Protestant Christian denominations, these schools tend to emphasize conservative social values and a biblical world view in addition to academic excellence.

Educational Reform: An umbrella term used to describe various efforts to improve educational outcomes for schoolchildren.

Free Market Education: The idea that loosening government regulation of education will lead to an educational system that delivers results superior to those of a government-run public school system. Many free market reformers support vouchers as a means to this end.

Parochial School: Private schools operated by the Catholic Church that stress the moral and ethical development of the child along with their intellectual development. They were started in the 1840s in response to what Catholics perceived to be the Protestant nature of the American public school system, but they now accept students of any religious background.

Private School: A type of school that does not admit all students who apply, is not funded by taxpayers, and operates with a minimal amount of state or federal regulation and oversight.

Public School: A type of school funded by public funds collected through taxes. Public schools are legally obligated to accept all students seeking an education. Some public schools serve students in their community, while others serve students from a wider geographical region.

School Choice: The notion that parents should be able to send their children to any public or private school of their choosing, or educate them at home.

School Vouchers: Taxpayer-funded credit slips that parents can use the same as cash to pay for all or part of the tuition and fees at a private school of their choice.

Bibliography

Akst, D. (2005, October 6). Choose you can use: School choice could be an answer to sprawl. Grist. [Online version]. Retrieved November 7, 2007, from http://www.grist.org/comments/soapbox/2005/10/06/akst/.

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Broughman, S. & Swaim, N. (2013). Characteristics of private schools in the United States: Results from the 2011–2012 Private School Universe Survey. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved November 15, 2014, from the National Center for Education Statistics http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013316.pdf.

Burke, L. (2009). How many members of the 111th Congress practice private school choice. Retrieved November 14, 2014, from http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/04/how-members-of-the-111th-congress-practice-private-school-choice.

Camera, L. (2020, June 30). The Supreme Court's far-ranging ruling on school choice. U.S. News & World Report. Retrieved June 22, 2021, from https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2020-06-30/the-supreme-courts-far-ranging-ruling-on-school-choice

Center for Education Reform (2005). Nine lies about school choice: Proving the critics wrong. Retrieved November 4, 2007, from the Center for Education Reformhttp://www.edreform.com/index.cfm?fuseAction=document&documentID=825.

Chick, K. (2007, June 22). Voucher students don't star. Washington Times, (DC).

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Linkow, T. (2011). Disconnected reform: The proliferation of school choice options in U.S. school districts. Journal of School Choice, 5, 414–443. Retrieved December 5, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct =true&db=ehh&AN=67458213&site=ehost-live

McShane, M. (2021, May 24). Oh, what a year for school choice. Forbes. Retrieved June 22, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemcshane/2021/05/24/oh-what-a-year-for-school-choice/?sh=45d5f8ff6790

National Center for Education Statistics. (2006). Private School Universe Survey. Retrieved November 4, 2007, from U.S Department of Educationhttp://nces.ed.gov/surveys /pss/index.asp

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Suggested Reading

Abernathy, S.F. (2005). School choice and the future of American democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Cato Institute. (n.d.). Education and child policy: School choice. Retrieved November 4, 2007, from the Cato Institutehttp://www.cato.org/education/choice.html.

Ehrcke, T. (2015). Is school choice undermining public education? Our Schools / Our Selves, 25(1), 107–122. Retrieved January 15, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=111398973&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Enlow, R.C., & Ealy, L.T. (Eds.). (2006). Liberty & learning: Milton Friedman's voucher idea at fifty. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

McGinn, K. C., & Ben-Porath, S. (2014). Parental engagement through school choice: Some reasons for caution. Theory & Research in Education, 12, 172–192. Retrieved November 15, 2014, from EBSCo Online Database Education Research Complege. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=96284755

Villavicencio, A. (2013). "It's our best choice right now": Exploring how charter school parents choose. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 21, 1–19. Retrieved December 5, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com /login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=91720483&site=ehost-live

Yongmei, N., & Arsen, D. (2011). School choice participation rates: Which districts are pressured? Education Policy Analysis Archives, 19, 1–26. Retrieved December 5, 2013 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=t rue&db=ehh&AN=67047009&site=ehost-live