What Really Really Limits School Choice
EdChoice, formerly named for its patron saint, Milton Friedman, in a recent post tackles a real question-- What Really Limits School Choice? They do not, however, come up with real answers.
Martin Lueken and Nathan Sanders tip off from a Michigan study that looked at a study of Michigan’s Tuition Incentive Program, a program that was supposed to make college scholarships available to students who grew up in low-income households-- and yet only 14% of eligible students used the scholarship. Lueken and Sanders (who do not link to the actual study) blame “bureaucratic friction, unclear rules, and poor communication,” and from there jump to the idea that these same “implementation challenges” also get in the way of K-12 choice programs.
Bureaucracy, they argue, makes it hard for folks to take advantage of choice programs. It’s the friction of all the confusing processes, informational missing links, and missed communications. They are not wrong, although they would do well to look at the number of choice schools that deliberately use that kind of bureaucratic friction to keep Certain People from getting into their school. Success Academy is a well-documented example of a school that uses bureaucratic friction to filter out families that they don’t want to serve. They sort of get the idea:
Administrative hurdles can quietly limit who benefits from choice. Complicated application forms, documentation requirements, narrow enrollment windows, or poor outreach can all dampen participation—especially among families with less experience navigating state programs.
Yes-- but it’s the schools themselves creating most of these hurdles, and they’re doing it deliberately. And that’s before we even get to the business of voucher school tuition inflation, where the school bumps up tuition costs enough that the school is no more affordable to Certain Families than it ever was.
The authors point to an “awareness gap” for choice programs, a problem of marketing and PR that keeps parents from knowing that the program even exists. So part of their fix is essentially better marketing. Advocacy groups, think tanks, private schools and churches could do more “outreach” to get the word out.
States could also follow the lead of Florida by allowing funds to be spent on a “choice navigator” to help you find your way through the education marketplace. They also want more timely payments, clearer lists of allowable expenses, and more certainty about the program’s future.
Most of this bumps up against the real factors that limit school choice, but Leuken and Sanders either don’t see it or want to say it. I give them credit for skipping the classic arguments, which claimed that “entrenched interests” and those terrible teacher unions and misguided legislators are creating all the barriers to choice.
No, when it comes to limits on school choice, the same thing has always been true-- the call is coming from inside the house.
It is charter and private schools the erect bureaucratic barriers, economic barriers, and “we’ll reject your child if we feel like it” barriers, and “pro-choice” legislators who pass the laws that allow them to do it. School choice-- the idea of every child having a selection of schools from which they can pick the one that best suits them-- is pushed by a whole lot of people who don’t really want to see it happen. Some of these folks are only interested in finding a way to get taxpayer dollars funneled to private Christian schools, and some would prefer a system in which everyone was responsible for their own kid’s education and nobody else had to pay to educate Those People’s Children.
In short, what really limits school choice is that it’s a policy pushed, promoted, and instituted by people who don’t really want school choice.
If we really really wanted school choice, we would require all schools that wanted to accept public dollars to also accept any and all students who applied. We would fund vouchers so that they covered admission at any school of the student’s choice, no matter how expensive. We would make every school that accepted taxpayer dollars accountable to those taxpayers; we would have a certification process that provided the same certainty of quality that we get from the USDA stamp on beef, so that families could exercise their choice with confidence.
But because the choice systems we’ve got prioritize the interests the owners of these education-flavored businesses over the interests of the actual students, we get a “choice” system with a whole assortment of restraints and obstacles not to the businesses, but to the families.
Would better marketing and PR help? Well, it would give the choice schools a bigger pool to choose from, and I’m sure they’d like the chance to have even more students to box out.
But if EdChoice wants to get rid of the limits on school choice, they should start by talking to their own people.
More competition with govt and less regulation, in my opinion. I think now’s a time to completely rethink education in this country. The Public education system is a joke, but their funding and expenditures is more of a joke. And kids are become less and less proficient in math and reading at a staggering pace. While at the same time, Catholic, and or other private schools, have become extremely costly over years as inflationary circumstances are a future prevailing certainty with the trillion dollar deficits year in year out, plus wars to fund. I think homeschooling or a a close knit community/neighborhood homeschool setting of some sorts could be interesting to explore but overall, an atmosphere of new approaches to education by allowing more schools to be created and induced by govt via massive regulatory pull backs.