Not just an issue for conservatives anymore
By Eric Boehm | PA Independent
HARRISBURG — Americans like to choose.
As consumers, we have an endless number of options when it comes to spending money — we choose everything from the clothes we buy to the colleges we attend. Our grocery stores carry dozens of varieties of breakfast cereal, our ice cream parlors have 31 or more flavors and our towns have churches that represent diverse denominations.
It’s not a new phenomenon.
But increasingly, that desire for choice is muscling its way into one of America's largest monopolies — the public school system.
“School choice is definitely the fastest growing sector of American educational reform,” said
Andrew Campanella, spokesman for National School Choice Week, a weeklong observance including more than 500 events in all 50 states and Washington D.C. The events celebrate opportunities for school choice and provide a means for urging lawmakers to offer more educational options to more students.
The Wall Street Journal declared 2011 as the year of school choice, and the numbers back up that claim. More than 500 new charter schools were created nationwide last year, and more than half of the 50 states debated some form of school choice legislation, with 13 states passing laws that either created or expanded educational opportunities for students.
More than 2 million students in the U.S. now attend a charter school, another 2 million are homeschooled and more than 200,000 attend a private school with the help of vouchers or tax credits.
School choice as a concept takes many forms — including school voucher programs, tax credit scholarships for private schools, homeschooling and online education — and it has taken hold in communities as demographically divergent as Washington D.C. and Iowa.
There is no single approach and no national formula, but advocates say that's the point.
The belief shared by all school choice programs is a simple one — no two children are the same, and school systems should not treat them as such.
The same can be said of the school choice movement nationally — what works in one city or state might be different from the solution to educational problems elsewhere.
Some states — such as Virginia — are advancing tax credit programs in which corporations can receive a tax break in exchange for donations to scholarship organizations that help students afford a private education.
The proposal in Virginia has the backing of Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell and would be similar to existing programs in Florida, Pennsylvania and several other states.
"When we have failing schools, we know we have failing students," said Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican who supports the voucher plan. "We can't keep going down the same road and think we're going to get different results."
In Wisconsin, where one of the nation’s first voucher programs has been operating in Milwaukee since 1990, Gov. Scott Walker last year signed a bill uncapping the previous limit, which allowed 22,500 students to use the vouchers annually.
Indiana made national headlines in 2010 for creating a statewide voucher program that allows close to 50 percent of all students to participate, and lawmakers in Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and elsewhere are holding hearings and debating plans to expand existing charter schools, set up tax credit programs or give homeschoolers more rights.
It all adds up to an expansion of school choice on a national level.
From 1993 to 2007, the percentage of children attending a "chosen" public school (a public school other than their assigned public school) increased from 11 percent to 16 percent, while the percentage of children attending an assigned public school decreased from 80 percent to 73 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.
Republican victories in statehouses nationwide in 2010 pushed education reform to the top of the agenda at the same time an economic downturn was ravaging tax revenues and leaving school districts and states looking for better, cheaper alternatives.
At the same time, a new generation of parents — many of whom grew up with choices in almost every aspect of their lives — are dissatisfied with the factory model of education that takes more money out of their pockets each year.
But education spending at a national level has never been higher. According to the U.S. Department of Education, school districts spent more than $10,400 per pupil in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available.
That total is more than double that of per pupil spending in 1980, when adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, student performance in the United States has not kept up with the rest of the world, according to one study.
According to the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment — every three years, the study examines the performance of 15-year-old students — the U.S. ranked 14th in the world in reading and 25th in math.
“People are fed up with a system that does not work and they are tired of school buildings that are failing their children,” Campanella said. “People are tired of paying more money and getting worse results.”
Opponents of school choice argue that charters, vouchers and scholarships redirect tax dollars and resources from the public school system to help private schools and the students who attend them.
“If people want to operate private schools they should operate private schools. People are not paying property taxes to go to the private sector,” said John Matthews, executive director of Madison Teacher’s Inc., the teachers union in the Madison Metropolitan School District of Wisconsin.
Despite the opposition, the school choice movement has gained political ground.
Conservatives and libertarians have long seen school choice as a way to save taxpayer money and foster competition, which creates a more efficient delivery of goods and services.
But in recent years, those groups have fostered political alliances with Democrats — particularly those from urban areas, where most of the nation’s struggling public schools are located — who see school choice as a way to provide a brighter future for students.
As a result, school choice initiatives are popping up in “blue” or “purple” states with more regularity.
In Illinois, for example, a pair of Chicago Democrats have led a so-far-unsuccessful push to create a voucher program for students in economically distressed areas.
“I’m a strong supporter of public education where public education is a supporter of its taxpayers. When I see that there is a struggle in meeting the needs of communities, then we have to look at other options,” said state Rep. LaShawn Ford, D-Chicago, who has sponsored one of the voucher bills.
