School Choice And The Broken Promise Of Accountability
From Forbes, a look at one thread that the school choice movement left by the side of the road.
Back in November of 2016, Shavar Jeffries (then head of Democrats for Education Reform—DFER) and Peter Cunningham (then of Education Post) wrote a piece considering whether or not the “bipartisan alliance on public school choice” could survive the Trump Presidency. In that piece, they articulated one of the ideas that was supposed to be at the heart of the modern school choice movement:
The grand bargain at the heart of the school choice movement is accountability for autonomy.
In exchange for freedom from “bureaucracy and red tape,” school choice was supposed to have held feet to the fire for clear and concrete results.
One could argue whether or not that pledge was ever kept. A tiny number of charter schools were ever shut down for failing to deliver, and in some states they were barely regulated.
But if the pledge of accountability was bent in those days, currently it seems to have been tossed in the policy dustbin.
School voucher bills now typically include “hands off” clauses that expressly forbid government oversight or accountability. The laws specify that schools accepting vouchers are not state actors (and therefor are not subject to any state rules or regulations). The laws also typically forbid states to interfere with the private school’s instructional content or admission policies, and thereby forestall any attempt to see what the school is managing to teach its students.
That kind of workaround has allowed voucher-funded schools in Florida and other states to teach creationism and other questionable content. A 2017 investigation by Rebecca Klein for Huffington Post found hundreds of private, voucher-accepting schools across the country use teaching materials that promote ideas such as the notion that Satan created psychology, Nelson Mandela was a Marxist, and God wants only modest women.