The Real Obstacles To School Choice
Happy National School Choice Week. From Forbes.com
It’s National School Choice Week, a week for choice supporters to argue that “a child should be stuck in a failing school district because of their zip code.” Their preferred policies remain ideas like charter schools and school vouchers, yet choice advocates still largely ignore some of the greatest obstacles to the freedom for parents to send their children to the school of their choice.
Cost
In New Hampshire, a roughly $5,000 school voucher will not cover the tuition at Philips Exeter Academy (roughly $60,000). To provide true choice for less wealthy students, vouchers would need to cover the full cost of tuition, no matter the school. Tiny Croydon, NH, had such a system, and Libertarian residents staged a brief revolt over the cost to taxpayers.
Choice advocates argue that less expensive alternatives like microschools or “unbundled education” should be good enough, but that turns school choice into a bait and switch game, attracting parents with a promise of “the school of their choice” and then telling them, “Well, the available choices for you are just these over here in the bargain section.”
To make matters worse, many areas are seeing vouchers followed by an increase in tuition costs, in some cases by thousands of dollars, keeping those schools out of the reach of poorer families, even with a voucher. To truly make choice available to all students, more taxpayer money would have to be spent on voucher programs— which are already threatening to strain some state budgets.
Discrimination
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently told a gathering of Arkansas Christian School leaders that she “would fight for those protections,” by which she meant fighting for their right to discriminate.
Recent voucher laws deliberately preserve the school’s right to discriminate based on a variety of criteria: No LGBTQ family members. At least one family member must be a born again Christian. No special needs. No low grades. Or this, from a private school in Pennsylvania:
We maintain the right to refuse admittance at our discretion and to suspend or expel any student who violates the standards set down and defined by the administration. The administration also reserves the right of not defining the criteria or reason when applications are not accepted.