In a new Reason Foundation policy brief, Public Education Without Boundaries, our team analyzes how school finance systems can get in the way of dollars following students across school district boundaries. Advocates of backpack funding should also pay attention to how dollars follow students between individual public schools, between public and private education environments, and how the whole education funding system ultimately ties together. In each case, backpack funding hits new roadblocks and requires different policy solutions.

1.       District-to-District Backpack Funding

An important subset of backpack funding concerns how education dollars follow students when they attend public schools outside of their residentially-assigned school district boundaries. Without strong funding portability mechanisms, school districts have weak financial incentives to welcome transfer students via cross-district school choice. The recent policy brief, Public Education Without Boundaries, tackles this problem and identifies three primary culprits preventing funding portability between public school districts.

First, most states have a group of school districts that are “off-formula,” meaning the districts can raise more than all the funding they are entitled to under their state’s main funding formula from local tax sources alone. Put simply, off-formula school districts create funding portability problems because they often don’t lose or gain funding when students transfer out or transfer in.

A second problem for funding portability between school districts is local education funding, which often comes from local property taxes. These taxpayer funds are often raised to support public school operations and finance construction projects, but because these local taxpayer funds aren’t raised based on student enrollment in schools or the district, they again don’t follow students when they transfer out of a school district.

The third funding source that doesn’t follow students easily is any state funding stream that’s not based on current enrollment figures or is not based on enrollment at all. To illustrate, in 2018, Missouri’s K-12 funding system funded 194 school districts based on past revenue amounts rather than current their student counts. Again, this means that a student transferring into any of those Missouri school districts doesn’t generate new funds for the district and that a student transferring out doesn’t take any funding away from the district if they leave.

Achieving backpack funding between school districts means finding ways to make these kinds of education funding sources—which don’t typically follow students—portable. 

One model for how to do this is in Wisconsin, which sets a single, statewide per-student funding amount that follows each student to their new school when they transfer to a new district. That calculated amount accounts for state and local funds–including some dollars that are not portable–which are then deducted from a sending school district’s state revenues. While this amount doesn’t include all funding devoted to a student in their home district, it exemplifies a way that other states can factor in education revenues from different sources and ensure that they come out of a sending district’s budget and follow transfer students out and to their new schools. 

2.     School-to-School Backpack Funding

Importantly, even if policymakers follow examples like Wisconsin to ensure education dollars are portable across school district boundaries, ensuring that funding follows students within school district boundaries when students transfer to a new school within the same district is a separate challenge. While all states have funding formulas ensuring that at least some education dollars follow students across district boundaries, none have statewide policies requiring that districts implement backpack funding at the school level. Therefore, implementing school-to-school backpack funding is a district-level decision that only a small subset of school districts across the country have implemented to some degree.

The standard method most school districts use to allocate dollars within their boundaries is to allot staffing and program-specific funding to each school. Under this common model, school resources aren’t usually thought of in terms of dollars. Budgets are largely administered at the district level, so school principals aren’t directly dealing with the financial effects of students transferring in or out of their schools.

This widespread practice of districts allocating staffing and programs to individual schools has several negative effects on within-district school choice as well as overall funding fairness. When dollars don’t automatically follow children between schools, districts might not be willing to allow for within-district choice because it can complicate budgeting for each individual school. 

Additionally, it’s long been noted that this budgeting practice based on staff positions leads to large per-student funding disparities between schools within the same school district due to differences in staff salaries between campuses. And as new state reports on federally mandated school-level spending data show, this practice often shortchanges schools serving high-need students. 

Achieving backpack funding within districts requires a different toolkit than what’s required to get backpack funding between districts. At the local level, school district leaders need to commit to a weighted student funding mechanism to fund individual schools and implement it with fidelity so that schools are funded solely based on the individual needs of the students they serve. 

Similarly, state policymakers could also advance legislation that requires districts to fund their schools on a weighted funding model and that gives students the option to choose schools within their boundaries. While these efforts would require substantial cultural shifts whereby districts place more budgeting responsibility on individual schools, they would lead to school-to-school backpack funding that fosters both public school choice and funding fairness.

3.       Public-to-Private Backpack Funding

Another definition of backpack funding expands the previous definitions to include non-public education environments. An example of public-to-private backpack funding would be universal education savings accounts (ESAs)—like the accounts recently implemented in states like West Virginia, Iowa, and Arizona. Universal education savings account programs are for all students in a state, regardless of their income or whether they are currently enrolled in public schools, private schools, or homeschooling.

In most cases thus far, students only qualify for an education savings account once they have withdrawn from the public school system. Also, ESAs and private school vouchers are often tied to the per-student amounts under the state’s education funding formula. When a student withdraws from a public school district to utilize an ESA or voucher, that state per-student amount generally leaves the district and follows the student. 

However, the problems that occur with district-to-district backpack funding also apply to public-to-private backpack funding. Local funds outside of the formula and state grants outside of the formula don’t typically follow ESA students, and off-formula school districts won’t typically see a reduction in funding when a student leaves to use an ESA. 

4.       Universal Backpack Funding

Finally, having a universal ESA is not all that’s required to have universal backpack funding. To achieve true universal backpack funding, policymakers need a single mechanism that allows for district-to-district, school-to-school, and public-to-private education choices. Education savings account amounts would need to be calculated similarly to how the per-student funding amount is calculated in the Wisconsin example above so that non-portable education funds become portable. 

Coming up with a single mechanism that accommodates all forms of backpack funding requires policymakers to make the public K-12 funding system more compatible with ESAs. When public school funding mechanisms have a mixture of portable and non-portable dollars, it’s difficult to have ESA amounts that are similar to the per-student funding levels in the public schools without costing the state extra money to make up the difference between the education dollars that follow students out of a school district and the dollars that are left behind in the district losing the student. 

As more universal education savings account bills make their way through legislatures and to governor’s desks across the country, policymakers should also consider how universal backpack funding can help streamline their education funding mechanisms so that all students are funded the same way, regardless of the schools they attend or the environments they are educated in.

Universal backpack funding would help break down the divide that exists between students being educated in public and private environments and ensure that all education funding follows students wherever they go to learn.

The post Clearing up definitions of backpack funding appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In the 21 states examined, public K-12 enrollment declined in every state except for three states and the District of Columbia. The AP and Stanford found that public K-12 enrollment dropped by approximately 711,000 students in those locations. California and New York experienced massive enrollment declines, with nearly 271,000 and 133,000 students leaving public schools. 

By contrast, K-12 enrollments increased in other schooling sectors. Homeschool enrollment grew by about 184,000 during the pandemic, as likely would’ve been expected, with the homeschooling sectors in Florida and New York growing the most. 

Private school enrollments also grew, but more modestly, increasing by nearly 103,000. Florida, again, and Tennessee experienced the most significant growth in their private schools. 

Yet, the private and homeschool sector growth only accounted for about 40% of public school enrollment losses. Dee estimated that population changes, such as students moving to other states and declining birth rates, accounted for more than a quarter of public school enrollment losses. 

At the same time, the report estimated that 240,133 students remain unaccounted for. These unexplained losses featured most prominently in California and New York, where nearly 152,000 and 60,000 students remain missing, respectively. 

Some absences are likely due to unregistered homeschooling and families not enrolling their children in kindergarten, which is optional in nine of the 21 reviewed states. In these cases, Dee estimated that skipping kindergarten accounted for almost 40% of unexplained absences.

Nonetheless, some students have not attended school for multiple years now. Researchers have previously estimated that the lifetime earnings of students who experienced just one year of learning loss could be reduced by more than 9%, so there will be long-term concerns about many of these students and their futures. 

These public school enrollment declines have also hastened financial crises for many school districts that were unprepared for them, especially urban ones. For instance, Minneapolis Public Schools announced an impending fiscal crisis due to declining enrollment last fall.

With fewer students in public schools and an increasing number of families more comfortable with switching schools, public school districts will need to up their game as they navigate a more competitive education marketplace. Research shows that school districts can positively respond to competitive pressures by implementing measures like open enrollment. 

Policymakers should weaken school district monopolies, so students have options outside of their residentially-assigned schools. Oftentimes students drop out of school because of bullying by other students, not feeling like they fit in with classmates, not getting the academic attention they need, or conflicts with teaching staff. Policies, such as education savings accounts and open enrollment, provide students with flexible schooling options to transfer to schools that fit their needs. Education savings accounts, in particular, allow for significant educational customization, paying for tuition, books, physical therapy, transportation, and much more.

From the states

State policymakers continue to advance school choice proposals nationwide.

The Utah State Senate failed to pass a proposal (S.B. 166) to make microschools legal in the state.

In Idaho, the Senate Education Committee passed a proposal (S.B. 1038) that would establish approximately 6,600 education savings accounts. These accounts could be used to pay for various approved education expenses, such as private school tuition or textbooks. There are no income restrictions on the accounts. 

The Arkansas Senate passed Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ LEARNS Act (S.B. 294), which would initially establish education savings accounts for students who are homeless, in foster care, have disabilities, or are assigned to failing public schools. However, student eligibility would expand by 2026 to all K-12 students. At the same time, the proposal would also remove any caps on charter schools and student transfers through open enrollment. Currently, the bill has 25 cosponsors in the Senate and 55 cosponsors in the House, providing a supermajority and majority, respectively.

What to watch

South Carolina policymakers are thinking about expanding open enrollment. Proposals in the South Carolina House and Senate would expand public school choice, allowing students to transfer to public schools other than their assigned ones. Currently, some public school districts in the Palmetto State permit students to participate in within-district open enrollment, but the new proposal would require all school districts to participate in cross- and within-district open enrollment. During his testimony, Reason Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Christian Barnard recommended adding transparency provisions to strengthen the proposal.

Texas governor’s State of the State address calls for school choice reforms. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called K-12 education an “emergency item” this legislative session. Noting that Texas successfully implemented education savings accounts (ESAs) for students with special needs during the pandemic, Gov. Abbott stated that Texas now needs to establish universal state-funded ESAs for all Texas families. 

Recommended reading 

A Poor Poverty Measure
Ishtiaque Fazlul, Cory Koedel, and Eric Parsons at Education Next

“While it has been understood for some time that school lunch enrollment as a poverty indicator is blunt and prone to error, the magnitude of the problem has not yet been fully appreciated. In exploring the rules, features, and processes of the National School Lunch Program, we find that the program’s design, incentives, and lack of income-verification enforcement likely contribute to the oversubscription.”

Stockton, Calif., School Officials Could Face Criminal Charges after Audit Finds ‘Sufficient Evidence’ of Relief Fund Fraud
Linda Jacobson at The74

“The audit by an independent California agency largely focused on a questionable $7.3 million contract paid for with pandemic relief funds. In 2021, former officials appeared to ram through the purchase of 2,200 ultraviolet air filters designed to kill COVID despite multiple warnings that they weren’t following laws and procedures, the report said.”

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Are you a state or local policymaker interested in education reform? Reason Foundation’s Education Policy team can help you make sense of complex school finance data and discuss innovative reform options that expand students’ educational opportunities. Please reach out to me directly at jude.schwalbach@reason.org for more information.  

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Examining public school enrollment losses and sectors with gains, state education legislation, and more appeared first on Reason Foundation.

This means that access to better public education options can depend on a family’s ability to essentially “buy” seats to better public schools through their mortgage inside the right school district boundaries.

However, a new Arkansas proposal aims to level the playing field, letting families pick their schools— public or private —regardless of their income. Introduced by State Sen. Breanne Davis, the LEARNS Act (Senate Bill 294), has already garnered the support of a supermajority in the Senate. The proposal also has 55 cosponsors in the state House and is strongly supported by Gov. Sarah Huckabee-Sanders.

This proposal would provide universal school choice for all Arkansas families by 2026. Children with disabilities, in foster care, homeless, and those assigned to failing schools would first gain access to an Education Freedom Account (EFA). But all children in the state would be eligible for an account within three years. Families could use their EFA to pay for approved education expenses, such as private school tuition, fees, school uniforms, and supplies. 

In addition to private school choice, the proposal would vastly expand the Arkansas Opportunity Public School Choice Act–the state’s cross-district open enrollment program. Cross-district open enrollment lets students transfer to public schools in school districts outside their assigned one. 

While all public school districts are required to participate in cross-district open enrollment, the policy is crippled because program participation is capped at 3% per school district. This means very few students can transfer through cross-district open enrollment.

Caps on participation help school districts retain their monopoly over the students that are geographically assigned to them. This means that school districts have little incentive to compete for new students or address the concerns of the students and parents assigned to their schools.

The LEARNS Act, however, would eliminate these arbitrary participation requirements. This reform would make Arkansas the 10th state to adopt a robust mandatory cross-district open enrollment law and the 12th state to have a law that requires mandatory open enrollment.

Any student could transfer to a public school outside their assigned school district. Moreover, students could transfer to their new public school for free, as they should be able to, since Arkansas is one of the 24 states that explicitly prohibits public schools from charging tuition to non-resident students.

Cross-district open enrollment is an essential form of school choice since it often lets students access better schooling options. For example, research from Texas and California found that students often transfer to schools with better test scores or more highly ranked than their assigned schools.

Moreover, in 2016 and 2021, California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found that students used the state’s cross-district option to transfer to schools that offered Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses, specific instructional models, or emphasized career preparation in particular fields.

Similarly, research on Ohio’s open enrollment program showed achievement benefits. It increased on-time graduation rates for transfer students who consistently used open enrollment, particularly those in high-poverty urban areas.

Open enrollment is a popular choice among families. For instance, participation in Wisconsin’s mandatory cross-district open enrollment program increased from 2,500 students during the 1997-98 school year to 70,000 students 23 years later. 

If signed into law, Arkansas’ refurbished open enrollment program would be a noteworthy example of a good education policy that lets students attend schools that are the right fit for them. The LEARNS Act could also weaken public schools’ unfair monopoly over students and encourage competition between schools. Significantly, families’ school choices would no longer depend on where they can afford to live, and instead, parents and students could choose the best schools for them.

The post Arkansas could be the 12th state to enact a robust open enrollment law appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Instead of building large schools accommodating hundreds or thousands of students, microschool leaders plant schools in storefronts, libraries, and empty dance studios. These small schools can range in size, serving anywhere from 5 to 100 or more students in multiple grade levels. 

Don Soifer is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer and Ashley Soifer is the Chief Innovation Officer and co-founder of the National Microschooling Center. Their organization provides information about microschools to parents, policymakers, and school leaders, and supports founders to launch their own. In this interview, we ask the Soifers why families are drawn to this alternative education model, what challenges microschool leaders face, how they are funded, and much more.

Jude: What is a microschool and how is it different from other education models?

Ashley: A microschool school is a small, intimate, flexible learning environment. There’s no cap on a microschool and school sizes can range anywhere from eight kids sitting around the living room to over 100 in an office building. But that group of 100 is likely broken up into smaller groups for learning. 

Jude: How are microschools different than a traditional classroom? 

Ashley: As a microschooling parent myself with three children in a microschool, it’s so exciting to have that connection with the educators that are with my children and to really tailor their individual education for each kiddo. If a child is working on a particular math program and the educator decides it’s just not working as well as it could be, they can adapt mid-year and shift to a different program. Some microschools follow state academic content standards while others may focus on social-emotional learning, use a science-based curriculum or utilize project-based learning.

Christian: What are the pitfalls of trying to set a standard definition for microschools?

Don: Since microschooling is so flexible, we’re reluctant to adopt definitions that might be too restrictive down the road. Once you define something, you put a bullseye on its back and that makes it very easy for regulators to find problems with it. At the end of the day, some amount of definition sounds helpful for parents, but let’s make sure that we don’t do it in a way that hamstrings the movement’s effectiveness or its potential to grow.

Jude: Why do families use microschools?

Don: Millions of families across the country have reevaluated their relationships with the institutions that they had historically relied upon to meet their educational needs. This looks very different in different places. In rural communities, we’re seeing a lot of interest in microschooling taking advantage of this golden age of digital content. Others, like Montessori microschools don’t rely on technology. 

At the same time, the hybrid aspects of microschooling haven’t really existed before. Families realized that they don’t need to have one exclusive provider for all of their educational needs. For example, some kids are in a microschool three days a week while the rest of the time is spent with a combination of tutors or classes. In terms of microschooling’s market share and the potential for students’ transformation – the sky’s the limit.

Jude: The public-private microschool you started in 2020 gained almost instant popularity. Why do you think microschools gained so much attention during the pandemic?

Don: When the pandemic began, it became obvious that the fifth largest school district in the country and all of the other educational options were not adequate during the pandemic for North Las Vegas residents. Ashley and I worked up two briefing books, dropped them on the city manager’s desk the next morning and ran microschools for the city of North Las Vegas in their rec centers and library. The city made it free for all of their residents so long as microschools were in person every day with safe procedures in place aligned wih government mandates. Participating residents would withdraw from the school district and follow homeschooling rules.

Three-quarters of our microschool kids were more than two grade levels behind when they arrived. But the microschool we ran for the city of North Las Vegas changed all that. Academic results and parental satisfaction were through the roof because we trusted them as partners in their children’s learning trajectories.

As we got more positive press for what we were doing, we realized we had 25 microschooling leaders coming to our office regularly who were building this exciting, vibrant, dynamic sector that had never existed before. This led us to launch the National Microschooling Center.

Jude: What advice would you give someone who wants to start a microschool? 

Ashley: The first thing is to talk to people in your community, gather interested families, and hear about their children. At the National Microschool Center, we take calls from folks that are interested in starting a microschool and provide support and resources. Don’t be afraid to jump in and microschool! 

Don: Microschoolingcenter.org has a lot of resources from free training and learning tools about how to microschool. Many of our calls and emails are parents looking to join a microschool, but we often shift them into building mode. Researchers tell us that we’re at about a 2% market share nationally, which is about where Catholic schools are in this country. But I believe microschooling could get to a 10% market share. 

Jude: What sort of financial or policy barriers are there for families interested in microschooling? 

Don: Policymakers should avoid making deals that could hamstring the effectiveness of microschools. For instance, overbearing accountability provisions can make it difficult for microschools to operate. Some microschools care more about the social and emotional growth of their learners than they do about their academic growth. Some never want to subject their learners to a norm-referenced assessment, let alone a criterion-referenced assessment. Others reject their state’s academic content standards as not being entirely pertinent to the future of their own learners.

Ashley: One of the biggest barriers that microschool leaders experience is zoning because even though microschooling has been around for quite some time, local regulators don’t always know where to put microschools. They start asking questions like: Do we need to do a traffic study? Are you a school? Do we need to figure out if pickup and drop off is going to cause backups on this major road? What does your parking lot look like? When those really aren’t things that usually matter because microschools are so small. So often the barriers we encounter come from local regulations, such as business licensing.

Jude: How are microschools funded exactly?

Ashely: It varies from state to state. In the city of North Las Vegas, the kiddos withdrew from the public school system and all the parents filed out their notice of intent. So they became homeschoolers but were coming to the microschool five days a week and learning The program was funded by city appropriation, completely outside of traditional education funding streams.  

In other states, some microschools are private schools or are inside traditional public schools. And there are some really innovative things happening in Arizona and Idaho with charter schools. Bottomline, it depends on your state’s frameworks and what tools let you serve the needs of your community best. 

Don: When we did a microschool for the City of North Las Vegas, we did it in rec centers and libraries that the city owns already. While Nevada is not historically a school choice-friendly state, Nevada’s TOTS (Transforming Opportunities for Toddlers and Students) Grants gives $5000 grants to families with special needs kids that can be used broadly for education purposes. Those funds supported microschools. Another example from Nevada is a microschool that operates out of a library in a rural area. The free library building covers a major facility cost, while other library-funded services can be used for microschooling purposes. States with social impact bond programs or pay-for-performance programs that could be accessed for microschooling are another possibility.  

Jude: What are the major costs associated with operating a microschool?

Ashley: Facilities are one of the major costs. If it’s a partnership microschool and there’s an employer providing the facility or house of worship providing the facility, that cuts down a ton on cost. Independent microschool leaders should connect with underutilized buildings. For instance, dance studios that are only open in the evenings could be happy to rent their space out at a much cheaper cost during the day.

Being creative with facilities is crucial because that cuts down some of those big-ticket items. Staffing is another big ticket item. Sometimes we purchase bulk licenses for different learning tools that will also provide free training so that microschool leaders can use them. That way, we can help them keep their bottom line low.

Jude: To what extent can microschools be scaled by operators? 

Ashley: Provider networks like Prenda play a crucial role in the microschool movement making resources for microschool leaders. The independent microschool leaders really don’t want to scale. They want to create a small intimate learning environment that families love, and they often aren’t looking to add multiple campuses or to grow their existing campus. We see the answer to scale as growing more microschool leaders. By creating more leaders you can have more microschool options popping up all over the country.

Jude: Are there any states where the microschool movement has grown significantly in the last few years? 

Don: In Southern Nevada, we have about 24 microschools. Other emerging hotspots include the Atlanta area, Southern Florida, Wichita, to some extent parts of New Jersey. It’s just a matter of time until Indiana, West Virginia, and Arizona with their school-choice vehicles join the microschooling community with a big-time presence.

Jude: How is microschooling different from homeschooling? 

Ashley: Oftentimes, it depends on your state. Some are taught by parents or other family members who say, “Hey, we need a better solution for our kiddos.” Others come from a variety of career fields. In the microschool venture with the city of North Las Vegas, our star middle school math teacher ran pyrotechnics at one of the shows on the Strip here in Las Vegas. What middle school kid doesn’t want to hear how he uses math every day to blow things up? 

Others are veteran teachers. One of our best microschool leaders in Nevada taught in an independent school and got tired of shutting her door to teach the way that she wanted. So she opened a microschool so that she can now teach the way that’s best for kids.

Jude: What advice do you have for policymakers interested in supporting microschools in their cities and states? 

Don: They should call us! What’s exciting to me is that this is truly a permissionless education and systems don’t always know what to make of microschools. We can help people navigate the existing frameworks and especially those in their state, municipal, or locality. It’s time to upgrade and update the frameworks in which microschools operate.

Jude: What final thoughts do you have for readers?

Don: This is about empowering families to build and not join, and to be active partners in learning in ways that fundamentally change the relationship people have historically had with education. Microschooling represents a new frontier with some great forward-thinking people, it has diversified in ways that we maybe haven’t seen in school choice experiments during the past 15 years. We have as many microschooling leaders who are as hard left as hard right, and it brings together a community that in some way raises the ceiling on what happens when school choice becomes a possibility and families project into it their own values and what they want for their own kids. 

The post National Microschooling Center founders illustrate how microschools are changing K-12 education appeared first on Reason Foundation.

For example, with rural lawmakers and school districts often opposed to school choice, a new report suggests that students residing in rural areas may have much to gain from school choice policies. A report by Heritage Foundation’s Jason Bedrick and Matthew Ladner finds most children living in rural areas are often closer to private school options than some might think. In fact, seven in 10 students living in rural areas live within 10 miles of a private elementary school. The report also found that the number of tax-credit scholarships awarded to Arizona students living in five rural counties increased by 163% between the 2010-11 and 2020-21 school years, showing how school choice policies can benefit students living in rural areas. 

Arizona’s robust school choice options, which “reach further into rural areas than in any other states,” have not been a death knell for rural school districts, the report says. In fact, since charter schools were first introduced in 1994, the state has only consolidated rural school districts in two counties, closed one school district (which had no charter or private schools in it), and created one new school district, Bedrick and Ladner noted.

This phenomenon is not unique to Arizona. Last year, Ron Matus and Dava Hankerson of Step Up for Students released a report showing the positive effects of school choice policies for families living in rural Florida. During the past 20 years, the number of private schools in the Sunshine State’s rural counties expanded from 69 to 120. Matus and Hankerson point out that, “In Florida’s rural counties, the number of students using ESAs [education savings accounts] has grown from 65 in year one to 731 last year, to 1,985 and counting this fall.” This demonstrates that the education marketplace can respond to demand when given a chance to compete with the public school districts’ monopolies. 

This year’s National School Choice Week also made it clear that more policymakers across the country are realizing that education freedom and rural school districts can thrive side by side. As Matus and Hakerson noted, “School choice doesn’t make the sky fall on rural district schools. But it does help part the clouds for rural families who need options for their children.”

And this rural education marketplace should also include public school open enrollment, a valuable school choice policy. A new Reason Foundation report also highlights how states can implement open enrollment funding policies that allow state and local education dollars to follow students to their public schools of choice. “States can take three different pathways to improve portability: comprehensive school finance reform, targeted solutions, and creating a distinct funding mechanism that supports open enrollment,” the study shows.

A competitive education marketplace can be the tide that raises all boats. 

From the States

State policymakers continue to introduce energetic school choice proposals across the nation.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed the Students First Act, which would provide universal education saving accounts to Iowa families. The new law makes all K-12 students in Iowa eligible to receive a $7,598 voucher. Iowa is now one of three states to have universal education savings accounts.

The Utah House and Senate both passed a proposal (House Bill 215) that would provide 5,000 K-12 students with approximately $8,000 in scholarships. Scholarship recipients could use them to pay for tutoring, private school tuition, and homeschooling. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill into law this past weekend.

In Missouri, a proposal by Rep. Ben Baker would require all school districts to participate in open enrollment. If passed, HB 559 would make Missouri’s open enrollment law the strongest in the nation.

Texas policymakers introduced two school choice proposals in January. Rep. Mayes Middleton introduced Senate Bill 176–the Texas Parental Empowerment Act would establish parent-controlled accounts which can be funded through tax credits. Parents could use these accounts to pay for approved education expenses, such as private school tuition or fees, books, or tutoring. House Bill 557, filed by Rep. Cody Vasut, would reimburse Texas parents for private school tuition and other education-related expenses, such as transportation costs.

Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears and State Delegate Glenn Davis introduced a proposal (House Bill 1508) for education success accounts. Eligible students could use these accounts to pay for private school tuition and other approved educational expenses. Upon parents’ request, Virginia would transfer a percentage of the state funds that would otherwise have been allocated to the school district in which the student resides. The Virginia House Education Committee recently voted to advance the proposal, assigning it to the appropriations committee.

What to watch

Kentucky Anti-Charter School Lawsuit Riles School Choice Proponents. Although charter schools have been legal in Kentucky since 2017, none have ever opened. A 2022 law requiring two pilot charter schools in northern Kentucky aimed to change that, but the Council for Better Education, Jefferson County Public Schools, and Dayton Independent Schools recently filed a lawsuit to block the law from going into effect. 

Dayton Public Schools Faces Heavy Fine for Failing to Bus Charter School Students. Dayton Public Schools could be fined up to $750,000 by the Ohio Department of Education for not complying with a state law that requires school districts to provide transportation to students enrolled in charter schools that reside inside the school district. Dayton Public Schools stated that it couldn’t provide necessary transportation because of conflicting bell schedules and bus driver shortages. The school district is suing the state over the citation.

The First Round of West Virginia’s Hope Scholarships Distributed to Families. Approximately 1,800 recipients received their scholarships which can be used for private school tuition. Nearly 90% of recipients received the full annual amount of about $4,298. Earlier this month, the West Virginia treasurer filed an emergency amendment that would allow scholarship recipients to use their funds to pay for microschool tuition. If the secretary of state does not approve the rule by Feb. 15, it will automatically take effect. 

Recommended Reading 

Pandemic Schools and Religious Renewal
Lewis M. Andrews at National Affairs

“Senior centers, YMCAs, town halls, and other community venues that might normally have been available were, as a result of the pandemic, either closed, operating on limited hours, or committed to their own emergency efforts. By process of elimination, many families realized that the one place large enough, safe enough, and empty enough to run a small school during the workweek was the local parish.”

We Need to Prepare Now for The School Closures That Are Coming
Tim Daly at Fordham

“My advice to cities grappling with falling enrollment is to begin planning now. Engage in robust processes to take community input on which schools will close and when. But do not drag your feet hoping for a miracle that saves you from the scourge of closures altogether… Instead, invest your time and resources in helping families transition… Give families a real voice in determining their child’s new placement—and offer assistance in the pursuit of seats in charter schools, as well as traditional district schools.”

Public Schools Have Lost over a Million Students. Here’s Where They’re Going
Matthew Lee and Lynn Swaner at National Review

“Rising enrollments in choice schools, particularly in private schools, not only provide evidence of a continuing school-choice wave sweeping the country but also demonstrate how these learning environments will continue to be an important part of the United States’ educational fabric.”

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Are you a state or local policymaker interested in education reform? Reason Foundation’s Education Policy team can help you make sense of complex school finance data and discuss innovative reform options that expand students’ educational opportunities. Please reach out to me directly at jude.schwalbach@reason.org for more information.  

The post Funding Education Opportunity: School choice in rural America, 2023 education legislation, and more appeared first on Reason Foundation.

To be sure, some of the Republican Party’s top performers in the midterms cruised to re-election after signing laws restricting public schools from teaching “divisive concepts,” including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. But these election successes could just as easily be attributed to the candidates’ minimally restrictive COVID-19 policies and being in comfortably red states. 

Republican gubernatorial candidates in other states like Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who heavily campaigned against critical race theory didn’t get enough traction from the issue to win. Similarly, local and state school board candidates running to get CRT and other controversial subjects out of classrooms saw checkered results, according to reports by The Wall Street Journal and Associated Press.  

During the 2021 and 2022 legislative sessions, Education Week found that state legislators or state school boards in 17 states successfully adopted policies that limit how school staff can address certain “divisive concepts” with students. Most of these policies restrict how educators can discuss concepts of race, gender, sexuality, and more. 

This wave of legislation came in response to a select number of troubling accounts — reported most prominently by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo — going viral online as some local public school staff adopted highly politicized curricula. For example, one California school district asked its third-graders to sort themselves on “oppression matrices” by race, class, and gender.

While these individual instances are certainly disturbing, many of the one-size-fits-all state policies adopted in response have gone too far and raise serious questions of constitutionality.

Legislation passed in Texas, for example, flat-out banned any curriculum that requires an understanding of the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine project that, while flawed, even according to its critics, pursues “a worthwhile avenue of historical research.”

Oklahoma’s 2021 anti-CRT law caused two school districts to be at risk of losing accreditation for a teacher training video that discussed implicit bias toward minorities. This summer, a similar anti-CRT law in Tennessee law gave a parents’ rights advocacy organization grounds to sue one school district over its elementary English curriculum for reasons including its presentation of the civil rights movement, segregation, Civil War, and Greek mythology.

At face value, the concepts outlined in most of these policies seem trivially easy to avoid. It’s hard to believe many teachers want to teach students that one race is inherently superior to another or that an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by their sex. But early rounds of litigation from various groups seeking to ban content from classrooms indicate these lawsuits and complaints will keep coming because concepts that some special interest group or parent object to can be detected when reading between the lines of almost any lesson plan. 

While taxpayers have a right to shape curriculum and hold schools in check when they get too ideological in classrooms, statewide policies that make sweeping, difficult-to-interpret prohibitions on lesson content are the wrong tool. Parents and voters have better avenues to express their views beyond asking governors and legislators to micromanage classrooms.

The best approach is for parents and policymakers to advocate for expanding school choice — which allows families to sidestep the culture wars and vote with their feet about the education environment they want by choosing the right school for their child. 

School choice is popular among voters, with a June poll from Real Clear Opinion Research showing 75 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Democrats supporting the concept. By contrast, an April poll from National Public Radio found that just 18 percent of parents disagreed with what their child’s school taught about gender and sexuality. 

Leading with culture war issues like banning books and opposing teaching CRT in classrooms wasn’t the political juggernaut Republicans had hoped would help them gain ground in state and federal office, but school choice could be. Rather than further politicize schools and classrooms, politicians should pursue policies that let parents choose whatever school is best for their children.

A version of the column previously appeared in the Hill.

The post Cracking down on critical race theory in public schools was not a winning issue appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The midterms helped illustrate school choice can be a winning policy issue for candidates. Voters in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, where about 75% of students are enrolled in school choice programs, issued a strong rebuke to Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor running as a Democrat, and his anti-school choice running mate Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of United Teachers of Dade. While President Joe Biden won Miami-Dade by seven points in 2020, Gov. Ron DeSantis trounced Crist with an 11-point victory in the county.

And this trend is not unique to school choice bastions like Florida. Corey DeAngelis pointed out in The Wall Street Journal that Democrats like Pennsylvania Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro, Gov. J. B. Pritzker of Illinois, and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York won their races while supporting school choice policies.

Earlier this year, Pennsylvania Democrats in the state legislature, in particular, showed significant support for school choice when most “joined all legislative Republicans in enacting the largest expansion of the Keystone State’s school-choice policy in state history.”

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, support for school choice policies is strong. For instance, nearly 80% of Pennsylvania respondents, 76% of Illinois respondents, and 80% of New York respondents with school-aged children supported education savings accounts, according to an EdChoice poll.

Support for more flexible education options is unsurprising. Gallup polling from August 2022 showed that 55% of respondents were either somewhat or completely dissatisfied with the state of K-12 education, the highest level of dissatisfaction in the poll since 2018. 

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Fredrick Hess noted, “Parents don’t really want to return to the status quo ante of public education. Indeed, more than half of all parents say—after the pandemic experience—that they’d like to retain some element of homeschooling going forward.” 

In light of some sweeping school choice victories, policymakers and candidates on all sides of the aisle should embrace school choice policies that help students and appeal to parents and voters.

From the States

Reason Foundation’s new report, “Public schools without boundaries: A 50 state ranking of K-12 open enrollment,” shows that most states need to implement better student transfer policies.

Unfortunately, the study finds most states’ open enrollment options fall short of good policy. In fact, only 11 states require all school districts to participate in open enrollment, just three states require state education agencies to publish annual reports on student transfers, seven states require school districts to post their open seats by grade level, and only 24 states prohibit school districts from charging transfer students tuition. While no state meets every policy best practices on Reason Foundation’s open enrollment checklist, some states provide good models for other states to replicate. 

Florida: The state’s open enrollment law could serve as a model for other states. All school districts in the Sunshine State are required to participate in both cross-district and within-district open enrollment and must regularly report the number of available seats by grade level so parents have access to this important information. Moreover, Florida cannot charge transfer students’ families tuition or fees, and the state’s school districts are allowed to provide transportation to transfer students, two barriers families in many other states face.

Wisconsin: The most laudable facet of Wisconsin’s open enrollment option is the state’s funding mechanism for transfer students, which ensures state and local education dollars follow transfer students. This approach maximizes transparency and financially incentivizes all districts to participate in open enrollment. Moreover, the Badger State is one of the few states to have robust, transparent open enrollment reporting. Every year Wisconsin publishes an open enrollment report which provides important data on student transfers, such as the number of transfer students, how many transfer applications were rejected, and the reasons for their rejection. 

The study also highlights policies in each that are limiting students’ options and need to be reformed. For example:

Tennessee: Although Tennessee established a good within-district open enrollment policy in 2021, the state falls short in other important ways. For instance, cross-district open enrollment is voluntary in Tennessee, and all student transfers are at the discretion of the receiving local boards of education. Moreover, school boards can charge tuition or fees to transfer students. This can be a mammoth barrier for students whose families cannot afford the cost and creates perverse incentives for schools to “sell” their seats.

Ohio: Many wealthy and high-performing suburban school districts surrounding Ohio’s eight major cities refuse to participate in the state’s voluntary cross-district open enrollment program. This policy effectively keeps inner-city and nearby rural children from transferring to better schools in the suburbs. All too often, voluntary open enrollment means that the best schools with open seats can continue to exclude children from outside their boundaries, fundamentally undermining the program’s purpose. 

Texas: In Texas, cross-district open enrollment occurs only upon the approval of the receiving school district. Similarly, voluntary within-district transfers are at the discretion of the school district, and parents must petition their school district, making a case for why their children should be transferred to another school. The school district then decides to accept or reject the transfer students’ petitions. To make matters worse, Texas allows school districts to charge transfer students tuition even though they receive additional state aid for transfer students.

What to watch

Report: Enrollment declines were larger in schools that stayed remote for the longest
A new Education Next report by Nat Malkus and Cody Christensen showed that schools that remained fully remote for longer periods suffered more significant drops in K-12 enrollment. In particular, the largest enrollment drops involved younger children in kindergarten and elementary school grades.

California voters support mandated K-12 arts funding as deficit looms
Over 60 percent of California voters approved Proposition 28, a ballot initiative that increases funding for K-12 music and arts education by approximately $1 billion. The Los Angeles Times reported that the new law establishes a “guaranteed annual funding stream for music and arts education by requiring the state to set aside an amount that equals 1% of the total funding already provided to schools each year.”

While music and arts can play important roles, the need will vary, and this new law illustrates how mandated state spending can encumber local education leaders’ decision-making and prevent them from putting resources where they are needed most. California policymakers recently approved increasing K-12 education funding by $9 billion for the 2023 school year–an increase of nearly 13% even though K-12 student enrollments dropped by 4.4% during the pandemic, so most schools should’ve already had the money needed for music and arts. As California’s state leaders predict a $24 billion deficit for the upcoming year, the new spending mandate could very well take funds away from other instructional programs educators would normally prioritize. 

Recommended Reading 

A Crypto Warning From the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan
Mike McShane at Forbes
“Making teacher benefits more portable and flexible would allow teachers to determine their own risk tolerance and invest accordingly. It would free up state funding for classrooms and the salaries of the people that work in them. And, it would help eliminate the incentives for these large pension funds to take on more and more risk, hopefully helping stabilize our financial system writ large.”

As New York City Schools Face a Crisis, Charter Schools Gain Students
Troy Closson at The New York Times
“As traditional public schools in the nation’s largest system endure a perilous period of student loss and funding shortfalls, New York City’s charter schools are on an upward trajectory. The schools gained more than 10,000 children during the pandemic, though the expansion slowed last year, even as enrollment at other schools across the city — both public and private — fell steadily.”

Beyond School Choice: A Conservative K-12 Agenda
Fredrick Hess at American Enterprise Institute
“Conservatives have generally lacked a cohesive K–12 agenda, but they can win parents over by enhancing educational choice, increasing school accountability, and adhering to standards of academic excellence.” 

The post Funding Education Opportunity: Midterm school choice success, new K-12 open enrollment report, and more appeared first on Reason Foundation.

For state policymakers looking to give families more public school options, open enrollment data transparency reform is low-hanging fruit and a key building block of sound open enrollment policy.

Open enrollment reporting promotes accountability by helping to ensure school districts uphold fair policies that welcome transfer students. Data reporting can also give policymakers the information they need to refine their student transfer laws and serve as a parent-driven indicator of school district performance by highlighting the state’s in-demand school districts.

Wisconsin shows what’s possible when a state combines good open enrollment policy with robust data transparency. The state currently has over 70,000 students attending schools outside of their assigned school districts. Each year, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction produces a report for the governor and legislature detailing key open enrollment trends for each school district, including the number of transfer applications received, transfer students enrolled, and a summary of transfer student denials.

So what can we learn from Wisconsin’s open enrollment data?

First, it’s clear that families are looking to leave the state’s lowest-performing school districts. Table 1 shows the bottom 10 school districts in Wisconsin as measured by 2018-19 accountability ratings. All but one of the school districts had more students applying for seats in other districts than applying to come in that same year. In Milwaukee’s case, the difference was staggering. For every non-resident student who applied to transfer into the Milwaukee Public Schools, about seven of the school district’s students applied to leave—7,619 in total.  

Table 1

Next, looking at Wisconsin’s 10 highest-performing school districts in Table 2, the trend is flipped, with all 10 school districts receiving a net positive number of transfer applications. Importantly, just because a school district is delivering on test scores doesn’t mean they meet the needs of all families, which is why even some high-performers are losing some students to open enrollment. Chart 1 provides additional context for these figures, showing school districts’ net transfer applications as a share of total enrollment.

Table 2

Chart 1

It’s clear that a strong open enrollment policy coupled with transparent reporting can deliver a powerful form of parent-drive accountability that can’t be replicated by merely reporting test scores or other metrics commonly used in state accountability systems.

But Wisconsin’s data also shows that far too many students are still being denied transfer opportunities. In the 2020-21 school year, 44,264 students applied to transfer to a different public school district, but 8,331 students were denied their transfers, mostly for space and reasons related to special education.

Students shouldn’t be denied opportunities simply because of their home address or disability status, and policymakers should do more to ensure that public schools welcome all comers. The first step to addressing this problem is knowing and admitting it exists. Unfortunately, due to the lack of information reported, policymakers in most states are operating without any open enrollment data at all.  

Chart 2

State policymakers across the country should ensure open enrollment data are readily available on their state education agency’s websites. Requiring this via statute is a straightforward policy reform that can pay huge dividends for students. For a good start, states can simply follow Wisconsin’s open enrollment playbook.

The post Improving K-12 open enrollment transparency is low-hanging fruit for state policymakers appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In the United States, school assignments are determined by families’ residences, casting unseen dividing lines in communities throughout the country. These government-imposed district boundaries or catchment zones divide communities, sorting children—often by wealth or ethnicity—into schools based on where they live. Many are unaware of these divisions until they realize that access to certain public schools often comes down to where you live.

Open Enrollment Best Practices by State

For example, Kelsey Williams-Bolar—a single mom completing her degree and working as a teacher’s aide—realized that she could not continue to enroll her daughters in their assigned public school in Akron, Ohio. Not only were her daughters being bullied at school, but Akron public schools were low-performing and in poor condition.

She decided to have her children live part-time with her father in the suburbs. While there, she enrolled her children in the Copley-Fairlawn School District, where her father’s home was zoned. However, Williams-Bolar and her father were charged with felonies after a private investigator, hired by the Copley-Fairlawn School District, discovered that Williams- Bolar did not live inside the school district. Williams-Bolar received two concurrent five-year sentences (suspended to 10 days) for using her father’s address to enroll her children in a better school district. Nineteen cases, similar to Williams-Bolar’s, have been reported in eight states since 1996.

Williams-Bolar’s story illustrates how school district boundaries often serve as barriers to better education options for many families. Residential assignment can have long-term ramifications for students, even after they graduate from high school. For instance, Advanced Placement (AP) courses are a valuable tool for high school students, allowing them to receive college credit while still in high school. As of 2021, however, US News reported that nearly a quarter of high schools—mostly in rural areas—did not offer AP courses. This means that students assigned to rural public high schools could end up paying thousands of dollars more for college.

In fact, the Missouri Business Alert reported in 2020 that the difference in AP courses offered at two Missouri high schools, located less than 20 minutes from each other, could cost their respective graduates thousands of dollars. Students assigned to the rural Southern Boone High School could earn a maximum of five college credits, whereas students assigned to its more urban counterpart, Hickman High School, could earn a maximum of 18 college credits. This difference in available AP courses means that graduates from Southern Boone could end up paying nearly $4,000 more in college tuition at the University of Missouri than their peers from Hickman High.

These examples show that residential assignment locks students into their assigned schools even if they aren’t a good fit. Students need flexible education options that may not be available in their assigned district, such as specialized programming, school culture or learning philosophy, or better academic opportunities.

K-12 open enrollment provides a solution for families assigned to public schools that aren’t a good fit for their children. This policy would allow children to enroll in any public school so long as it has open seats. While 43 states have some sort of open enrollment, only 11 states have mandatory open enrollment laws.

This analysis is a roadmap for developing robust open enrollment. It explores the benefits of open enrollment, outlines the core tenets and best practices for open enrollment, examines which states have the best open enrollment policies on the books, and provides an open enrollment snapshot of all 50 states. These state snapshots show policymakers what each state is doing well, where each state falls short, and the necessary steps to establish robust open enrollment.

Reason Foundation’s Five Best Practices for Open Enrollment

1. Mandatory Cross-District Open Enrollment: School districts are required to have a cross-district enrollment policy and are only permitted to reject transfer students for limited reasons, such as school capacity. Policies, including all applicable deadlines and application procedures, must be posted online on districts’ websites.
2. Mandatory Within-District Open Enrollment: School districts are required to have a within-district enrollment policy that allows students to transfer schools within the school district, and are only permitted to reject transfer requests for limited reasons, such as school capacity. Policies, including all applicable deadlines and application procedures, must be posted online on districts’ websites.
3. Transparent Reporting by the State Education Agency (SEA): The State Education Agency annually collects and publicly reports key open enrollment data by school district, including transfer students accepted, transfer applications rejected, and the reasons for rejections.
4. Transparent School Capacity Reporting: Districts are annually required to publicly report seating capacity by school and grade level so families can easily access data on available seats.
5. Children Have Free Access to All Public Schools: School districts should not charge families transfer tuition.

This report evaluated each state on these best practices to get a snapshot of where each state stands and provides recommendations for each state to improve open enrollment practices.

State-by-state Open Enrollment Analysis

State	Total Best Practices (out of 5)	Cross-District Open Enrollment	Within-District Open Enrollment	Transparent SEA Reporting	School Capacity Reporting	Law Against Public School Tuition for Students
Alabama	0	X	X	X	X	X
Alaska	0	X	X	X	X	X
Arizona	4			X
Arkansas	1	X	X	X	X
California	0	X	X	X	X	X
Colorado	3			X	X
Connecticut	1	X	X	X	X
Delaware	3			X	X
Florida	4			X
Georgia	1	X		X	X	X
Hawaii	1	N/A	X	X	X
Idaho	1	X	X	X	X
Illinois	0	X	X	X	X	X
Indiana	0	X	X	X	X	X
Iowa	1		X	X	X	X
Kansas	4		X
Kentucky	0	X	X	X	X	X
Louisiana	1	X	X	X	X
Maine	1	X	X	X	X
Maryland	0	X	X	X	X	X
Massachusetts	1	X	X	X	X
Michigan	1	X	X	X	X
Minnesota	1	X	X	X	X
Mississippi	1	X	X	X	X
Missouri	0	X	X	X	X	X
Montana	0	X	X	X	X	X
Nebraska	2	X	X	X
Nevada	0	X	X	X	X	X
New Hampshire	1	X	X	X	X
New Jersey	0	X	X	X	X	X
New Mexico	0	X	X	X	X	X
New York	0	X	X	X	X	X
North Carolina	0	X	X	X	X	X
North Dakota	0	X	X	X	X	X
Ohio	0	X	X	X	X	X
Oklahoma	4		X
Oregon	0	X	X	X	X	X
Pennsylvania	1	X	X	X	X
Rhode Island	1	X	X	X	X
South Carolina	0	X	X	X	X	X
South Dakota	0	X	X	X	X	X
Tennessee	2	X		X		X
Texas	0	X	X	X	X	X
Utah	4			X
Vermont	1	X	X	X	X
Virginia	0	X	X	X	X	X
Washington	0	X	X	X	X	X
West Virginia	1	X	X	X	X
Wisconsin	3		X		X
Wyoming	0	X	X	X	X	X
Total States Implementing Best Practices		9/49	7/50	3/50	7/50	24/50

The post Public schools without boundaries: Ranking every state’s K-12 open enrollment policies appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Arizona’s education savings account (ESA) expansion was a critical school-choice success, but the story should not stop here. Policymakers can do two things that go beyond Arizona’s reforms to truly revolutionize a state’s education system: make ESAs the default option for all students and eliminate residential assignment in public schools.

First, policymakers should not limit ESAs to those opting out of public schools but rather make these accounts the default funding system for all students. Instead of funding school districts based on factors such as property wealth, local tax effort, and complex formulas, state and local education funds would be streamlined and deposited into each student’s account. 

Under this system, these accounts would not just be used for private school tuition payments. Parents who enroll their children in public schools would pay these schools directly and could also use education savings accounts to pay for tutoring, courses at a community college, classes at a nearby public school, transportation, and more.

A funding system based on education savings accounts would let parents customize their children’s education options inside and outside the public school system. This means that students would no longer be locked into the courses offered at a single school. Instead, families could unbundle their children’s coursework and enroll in learning options wherever they see fit.

For example, students could take history and language arts classes at their local public school but also take their advanced math and science classes at a school in a nearby school district. The student’s ESA would pay for the classes in each school as well as any associated transportation costs. Ultimately, students could take classes online, at home, in a brick-and-mortar school, or any combination of available options.

Making education savings accounts the default funding mechanism to distribute state and local dollars would truly make a state’s entire education system student-centered. The versatility that ESAs provide means that public school students would no longer be locked into a particular school where one size fits all. Both public and private school students could customize their educations.

School districts would need to be nimble in this new education marketplace since dissatisfied families could leave and take their education dollars elsewhere. However, Education Next’s research on Florida’s school choice system and evaluations of California’s “District of Choice” program by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office shows that competition can spur innovation in public schools, making them responsive to market forces.

Interestingly, most parents gave high marks to their local public schools in a 2022 Education Next survey, with nearly 60% giving them an “A” or “B” grade. Most families would be likely to stay in their neighborhood public school, yet ESAs could give them options to customize on the margins. Furthermore, default education savings accounts would give dissatisfied families key decision-making power, no longer forcing them to support public schools that aren’t a good fit.

Policymakers could also eliminate residential assignment in public schools so that students can enroll in any public school with open seats, regardless of where they live. 

Residential assignment sorts students into schools based on where their families can afford to buy or rent a home. This method of public school assignment, however, inextricably links property wealth and schooling because high-quality schools are often located in more expensive neighborhoods.

To make matters worse, school district and attendance-zone boundaries often divide communities by race and socioeconomic divisions because the boundaries can reflect discriminatory and now-illegal housing redlining.

Several states, including Arizona, Florida, and Kansas, have weakened residential assignment through K-12 open enrollment. This policy allows students to transfer to public schools outside their geographically assigned school district or attendance zone boundaries.

While open enrollment lets students access different schooling options, a system of school assignment based on a student’s geographic residence remains in place. Open enrollment is good policy, but it could be vastly improved by eliminating residential assignment altogether so that no students are favored based on where they live.

In a system without residential assignment, parents and students could use various factors to select their school, such as academics, parents’ work commute, safety, transportation options, or specialized programming.

Residential school assignment is an archaic and often discriminatory policy. Eliminating these government-imposed boundaries would unfetter schooling from housing and make public schools responsive to market forces since they would no longer hold an artificial geographic monopoly.

In sum, school-choice proponents should celebrate Arizona’s groundbreaking victory, but they should not rest on their laurels. Making education savings accounts the default funding mechanism for K-12 education and eliminating residential assignment would establish a robust education marketplace that is parent-driven and student-centered.

A version of this column previously appeared at RealClearEducation.

The post The future of school choice: Funding all students through education savings accounts appeared first on Reason Foundation.

O’Rourke has repeated this claim in radio and newspaper ads targeting rural Texas areas. But Texas’s K-12 education spending data do not support O’Rourke’s allegation. Between 2002 and 2020, inflation-adjusted education spending in Texas increased by 16%, going from $11,473 per student to $13,346 per student.

Much of this funding increase went to staffing costs, with spending on employee benefits — a Census Bureau data category that includes teacher pensions and healthcare expenses — rising by  24% per student. Capital expenditures, such as building construction and equipment, have shot up by nearly 18% per student since 2002.

While it’s true that Texas trails the national spending average by $2,716 per student, that is partly because Texas is a relatively low-cost-of-living state. Legal rulings have also prompted policies restricting what single school districts can raise locally for their own operating costs, such as salaries and classroom supplies.

These policies mean wealthy school districts can’t drive up the statewide spending average as easily as they do in other states, resulting in a more equitable funding system that complies with the state’s constitution. For example, Austin, where property values are among the highest in the state, was required to send over $762 million of its local education-focused property tax money to other school districts across the state last year.

O’Rourke’s defunding claims also ignore important school finance legislation Abbott signed into law in 2019 with overwhelming bipartisan support. House Bill 3 made critical changes to the state’s funding formula and added $6.5 billion in new education spending, including bumps to the minimum teacher salary schedule and other assurances that increase teacher compensation.

The reform also directs more money to low-income students and rural school districts while creating new allotments for early childhood education, bilingual education, and students with dyslexia. These changes target a greater share of the state’s education funding to students who need it most.

Rather than cutting funding, Abbott and taxpayers have given Texas public schools a financial boost since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Education funding is typically tied to student attendance levels, but widespread enrollment losses during the pandemic would’ve decimated many school district budgets if not for key policy tweaks Texas made to help stabilize public school funding. For example, the Houston Independent School District lost 6.1% of its enrollment in 2020-21 — 12,759 students in total — but rather than losing 6% of its funding, its total revenues increased by 1.7%.

“Providing this adjustment to the 2021-22 school year will ensure school systems have the funding they need to retain the best and brightest teachers and provide quality education to all public school students across Texas,” Abbott said.

Putting it all together, there is nothing in Abbott’s record indicating his recent endorsement of school choice is aimed at defunding public education. Spending on K-12 education has increased since he took office, and many would agree that Texas’s school finance system is better than the one he inherited. If anything, taxpayers might question whether these investments were put to good use and why public schools aren’t being held financially accountable for enrollment losses incurred in the past couple of years.

While O’Rourke is criticizing Abbott’s embrace of school choice, many education advocates might ask the governor and Texas Republicans, who have controlled every branch of state government for 20 years, why it has taken this long to start providing more educational choices for families.

But, belated as it may be, if Abbott follows through on promises to let students attend “any public school, charter school, or private school with state funding following the student,” that’s not defunding schools. Instead, that’s finally an effort to give all families access to additional educational opportunities.

A version of this column previously appeared in the Washington Examiner.

The post Has Texas defunded public schools? appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In fact, the median cost of housing in zip codes associated with highly ranked public schools was four times higher than the median cost of homes in zip codes associated with the lowest ranked public schools, according to a 2019 report by the Senate Joint Economic Committee.

When the price of admission to a public school is built into the cost of housing, mortgages function like fees to a private school. Accordingly, residential assignment’s de facto sorting mechanism—property wealth—often isolates students into socioeconomic enclaves. 

New research from Harvard University Economics Professor Raj Chetty explains why this segregation sets low-income students up for failure. His work, Social Capital Volumes I and II, shows that schools are important institutions where students form key social networks and explains how cross-class interaction can form “‘bridging’ social capital,” which is most closely connected to upward mobility. In fact, Chetty finds that students with more cross-class interactions, or economic connectedness, are more likely to rise out of poverty.

Chetty’s research identifies two equally important factors that affect good economic connectedness: exposure to higher-income individuals and friending bias. Exposure to higher-income individuals at school can translate into upward mobility because students have more opportunities to build relationships with people with high social economic status. 

Unfortunately, residential assignment is a major barrier to economic connectedness for many students because it limits their exposure. 

“About half of the social disconnection between low- and high-income Americans is due to differences in exposure. For example, high-income people attend high schools that are disproportionately attended by other high-income people,” Chetty observed.

Weakening the ties between housing and schooling through school choice, including K-12 public school open enrollment, could be a key way to provide students with greater exposure. 

Open enrollment lets students enroll in any public school with open seats regardless of where they live. Strong open enrollment policies operate as a form of public school choice and provide pathways for children to transfer to schools that are a better environmental fit, are safer, or offer AP courses and specialized curricula. For instance, Reason Foundation research showed that families in Texas and Florida use open enrollment to find better educational opportunities for their children.

Most importantly, however, Chetty’s work shows how open enrollment could give more students the opportunity to achieve the American dream. 

Overcoming residential assignment barriers is key to student-centered education. Government-imposed boundaries wrongly lock students into geographic monopolies, limiting their education options. Not only could these students access education options that are the right fit via robust open enrollment policies, but students could also unlock the social networks that are crucial to upward mobility.

From the States: Education initiatives on statewide ballots this November

In Massachusetts, voters may impose an additional 4% tax on incomes over $1 million. The new revenue would fund K-12, college, and university education, as well as public transportation spending. Massachusetts already spends more than $21,000 per pupil on K-12 education and has increased total education revenue by 26% in the last two decades, despite experiencing a 6% enrollment loss.  

California voters will have the chance to approve or deny an initiative that would earmark at least 1% of all state and local tax revenue from public schools exclusively to arts programs. Proposition 28’s opponents are wary of tying local school district leaders’ hands through “ballot-box” budgeting, especially as public school student enrollment declines. The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office proposal estimates Prop. 28 would cost $800,000-to-$1 billion annually. The proposal comes after California allocated an additional $9 billion to its public school system in 2022.

Illinois voters will choose whether or not to add workers’ collective bargaining rights to the state constitution via Proposition 1, which is supported by teachers’ unions, among others. Critics say, if the proposition is passed, public sector unions would be given a newly-created constitutional right that would allow them to negotiate on a potentially limitless list of subjects and potentially block all future laws and reforms that might impact them.

In Idaho, a ballot initiative to increase education spending by more than $300 million through new corporate and individual taxes, even if approved, will now be voided following this month’s emergency legislative session. Gov. Brad Little signed a bill with a sales tax-funded annual spending increase of $330 million for K-12 schools, which will effectively replace the ballot initiative. Pressure to reform Idaho’s funding system overall was a frequent subject of the emergency session’s debate. 

What to watch

School spending vs. student enrollment
Data from Burbio released this month tracks enrollment declines in districts across the country, from Los Angeles to Fairfax, VA. It shows how severe many school districts’ enrollment declines have been since the pandemic started. Yet, while enrollment numbers are declining, education spending continues to increase in most states. This latest data mirrors education spending and enrollment trends seen well before the pandemic. For example, New York increased inflation-adjusted public school spending by over $26 billion between 2002 and 2020 while losing 10% of its student population over that time. 

Arizona school choice opponents fail to prevent education savings accounts expansion
The Arizona citizen’s referendum led by Save Our Schools (SOS), appears to have failed to block the nation’s biggest expansion of education savings accounts (ESAs). Despite its initial claim of gathering 141,714 signatures last Friday, this week, SOS all but conceded that its collected signatures fell well short of the 118,823 needed to overturn the law. This reversal occurred after the Goldwater Institute released projections that SOS was likely to have submitted approximately 88,866 signatures. Arizona’s secretary of state is expected to release the final signature count in mid-October.   

Corey DeAngelis: Why the COVID-19 pandemic changed the face of education forever
In a new ReasonTV interview, Corey DeAngelis explains why “backpack funding” is here to stay, why Texas is terrible on school choice, and why even non-parents should care about education reform. 

Recommended Reading 

On a Per-Student Basis, School Staffing Levels Are Hitting All-Time Highs
Chad Aldeman at The74Million
“In the 2020-21 school year, staffing levels hit all-time highs, and the typical public school district employed 135 people for every 1,000 students it served.”

‘Flagrantly Illegal’: Law Firm Files Lawsuit To Stop Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness
Robby Soave at Reason
“President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt violates both federal law and the Constitution, according to a just-filed lawsuit from the Pacific Legal Foundation.”

The End of School Reform?
Chester Finn, Jr. and Frederick Hess in National Affairs
“It goes without saying that opportunities for agreement are difficult to spot right now, and such a coalition would have to pull against the centrifugal forces of polarization — a marked contrast to the previous era in which prominent politicians and advocates found centrism a source of political reward.”

The post Funding Education Opportunity: How public school open enrollment impacts upward mobility, education issues on statewide ballots, and more appeared first on Reason Foundation.

State policymakers could drastically expand the K-12 public education options that are available to families through open enrollment policies, which diminish the role of residentially assigned school districts and attendance zone boundaries by allowing students to transfer to any public school that has available seating.

• Allow within-district and cross-district open enrollment, only rejecting incoming students for limited reasons, such as insufficient capacity.
• Clearly post their open enrollment policies and procedures on their public websites, including all application deadlines.
• Publicly report the number of open seats that every school has so families know which schools have availability.
• Do not charge transfer students tuition or fees.

These policies make it easier for families to use open enrollment and ensure that public schools are open to all students. 

In addition to the above requirements, policymakers should also ensure that state education agencies (SEAs) annually report key open enrollment data, including the number of transfer students, the number of transfer students accepted and rejected, and the reasons why any transfer applications were rejected in each school district. This transparency helps hold schools and districts accountable, ensuring that they don’t reject transfer applications for superficial reasons. It also allows state lawmakers to continually measure the success of the open enrollment program.

States, such as Florida, Arizona, and Oklahoma, require each school district to post the number of seats that are open and available to transfer students in each school by grade level. Some states, like Delaware, provide an open enrollment portal that shows which school districts have available seats, are nearing capacity, or are operating at full capacity.

Unfortunately, most states do not currently require school districts to post their available capacity online, making it hard for families to know which school districts have open seats. Transparent open enrollment reporting is crucial to helping families find and understand their education options. 

For instance, Florida school districts, adhering to all federal desegregation requirements, can only refuse to enroll transfer applicants for limited reasons, such as an insufficient number of open seats at a school. This policy ensures that the number of students does not exceed available facilities and staff. 

However, other states allow school districts to discriminate against transfer applicants for a variety of reasons, regardless of the number of seats that are available at public schools. For example, New Hampshire lets school districts reject transfer applicants due to their previous academic performance.

At the same time, Arkansas does not allow the number of transfer applicants leaving a school district to exceed more than 3% of the assigned school district’s total enrollment of the previous year. These policies unnecessarily limit the number of transfer students. These discriminatory policies are overly deferential to school districts, letting them cherry-pick students or artificially protect their residentially assigned monopolies.

Wisconsin has one of the most successful open enrollment policies in the nation, in part because of the state’s transfer funding policy. A statewide per-pupil funding amount, which is updated each year by the legislature, follows each transfer student to his or her new school. At the same time, transfer students are still counted in their residentially assigned school districts, allowing them to still collect some education funds for each transfer student. This scenario creates a win-win situation for both the home and receiving school districts.

Research from California’s public schools also shows it’s critical to get the financial incentives right in order for school districts to accept transfer students. Reason Foundation’s Aaron Smith reported: 

“Because California’s Basic Aid school districts have virtually no financial incentive to enroll new students from outside of their district boundaries, the state previously provided those that participated in the District of Choice program with 70% of each transfer student’s base amount. However, this inducement was slashed to 25% in the 2017-18 school year with predictable results. By the 2019-20 school year Basic Aid districts reduced transfer enrollments by 24% and several stopped participating in the program altogether.”

At the very least, states should not prohibit transporting transfer students across school district boundaries. If it so chooses, the receiving school district should be able to create new bus routes to transport transfer students. For instance, Florida school districts can provide transportation options to transfer students.

However, more states should consider innovative proposals, such as those in Colorado and Ohio, which encourage school sectors to work together to provide transportation. Policymakers should also consider Wisconsin’s policy, which reimburses low-income families using the state’s cross-district open enrollment option up to $1,218 annually for mileage expenses for school transportation.

For instance, Texas’ Lovejoy Independent School District can charge families of transfer students up to $14,000 in tuition. Instead of letting school districts charge tuition, states should allow education funds to follow students when they transfer, as Wisconsin does. Aligning financial incentives for both the assigned and receiving school districts is a key to developing a robust open enrollment program.

As such, policymakers do not need to change eligibility requirements when adopting open enrollment reforms. 

However, if state policymakers desire, they can look to Florida’s policy on athletic eligibility for transfer students. In 2016, Florida passed a controlled open enrollment law that allows students to transfer to any school in the state with few exceptions and also mandates immediate eligibility for student-athletes. This means, unlike in Arizona or Oklahoma, families in Florida don’t have to make difficult tradeoffs between academics and athletics and can instead make student transfer decisions based solely on what’s best for their circumstances, which is impossible for distant bureaucrats to assess.

On Florida’s approach, my colleague Aaron Smith wrote:

“​​A common pushback against Florida’s approach is the claim that participating in athletics is a privilege for students and shouldn’t be prioritized over academics. It’s easy for some to sympathize with this critique, but then why aren’t similar restrictions applied to other privileges such as debate club, school bands, or performing arts? 

Extracurricular activities—sports or otherwise—help develop positive skills and traits that aren’t readily taught in classrooms, and forcing families to make arbitrary choices seems to be more about adult agendas than what’s best for kids. Granting student-athletes immediate eligibility can even help with socialization and adjusting to their new environment.”

Florida: An Open Enrollment Policy Standard Bearer

Florida’s open enrollment law could serve as an ideal open enrollment model for other states. All school districts in the Sunshine State are required to participate in both cross-district and within-district open enrollment. The state’s public schools must regularly report the number of available seats by grade level and cannot charge transfer students’ families tuition or fees. While not required to do so, school districts can provide transfer students with transportation options.

During the 2018-19 school year, nearly 273,500 Florida students used open enrollment. More than two-thirds of the students using cross-district open enrollment transferred to schools “with graduation rates above the state mean and more than 90% of inter-district transfer students attend A- or B-rated school districts,” Reason Foundation’s Vittorio Nastasi reported.

Wisconsin’s Model Funding Solution to Open Enrollment

Wisconsin’s open enrollment law requires all school districts to participate in mandatory cross-district open enrollment so long as they have open seats. Beginning with a mere 2,464 students in the 1998-99 school year, Wisconsin’s cross-district open enrollment program grew to 70,428 students in the 2020-21 academic year.

Like Florida, Wisconsin school districts must post about their cross-district open enrollment option on their websites. In the case of oversubscription, students are selected through a randomized lottery with a waiting list for students who aren’t selected. The Badger State also has a voluntary within-district open enrollment option. 

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction provides detailed reports about available capacity in each school district including the number of transfer students and the reason transfer applications were rejected. School districts cannot charge tuition to transfer students. 

The crown jewel of Wisconsin’s open enrollment program is its cutting-edge student funding mechanism allowing education dollars to follow each transfer student regardless of where they go to school. 

For example, students using Texas’ cross-district open enrollment during the 2018-19 school year were more likely to transfer to school districts ranked as “A” under the state’s district report card accountability system and less likely to transfer to school districts with lower rankings, such as “C,” “D” or “F.” 

California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office’s 2016 and 2021 reports showed that most students participating in the state’s District of Choice program transferred to school districts with higher test scores. According to Reason’s Vittorio Nastasi, more than 90% of students using Florida’s robust cross-district open enrollment option transferred to schools rated as “A” or “B” and “over two-thirds of transfer students crossing school district boundaries enrolled in districts with graduation rates above the state mean.”

These findings show that students typically use open enrollment to access better schools outside their residentially assigned option. 

A 2017 report on Ohio’s open enrollment program found achievement benefits and increased on-time graduation rates for transfer students who consistently used open enrollment, especially for black students and those in high-poverty urban areas. 

Better academic opportunities are not the only advantage of open enrollment policies. The 2016 report from California’s LAO indicated that school districts participating in the District of Choice program attracted students who were bullied at or did not fit in at their assigned school or who wanted a shorter school commute. 

At the same time, transfer students are not the only ones who benefit from open enrollment policies. A robust education marketplace can make school districts responsive to students and families. For example, both the 2016 and 2021 California LAO reports found that many students transferred schools because their assigned school lacked educational opportunities, such as advanced placement or international baccalaureate courses, school instructional models, or courses that emphasized career preparation for students interested in particular fields.

In response, some school districts “took steps to mitigate enrollment losses including gathering feedback from families and communities, evaluating programmatic offerings, and implementing reforms that led to fewer students transferring out,” Reason’s Aaron Smith pointed out. Similarly, a 2014 report found that Colorado’s transfer students tended to come from school districts with fewer AP offerings and higher dropout rates.

The post Frequently asked questions on public school open enrollment appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In some cases, this means that top-performing school districts now have swathes of open seats. For instance, the New York Times reported last month that Orange County’s Capistrano Unified School District — an A-ranked school district in the state — has lost more than 2,800 students since 2020.

Enrollment decline isn’t unique to California. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Return to Learn Tracker, Kansas City’s top-performing Olathe Public Schools District lost more than 800 students between 2020 and 2022. Similarly, in Illinois, the highly ranked Barrington Community School Unit #220 lost nearly 500 students since 2020.

Unfortunately, just because seats are available at top-notch public schools doesn’t mean new students can enroll there.

In most states, where you live determines where you can go to school. This method of residential assignment intertwines property wealth and schooling because high-ranking public schools are often located in more expensive neighborhoods.

Open enrollment, however, can break down the barriers that prevent families from accessing public schools other than their residentially assigned ones. This form of school choice allows families to enroll in any public school if there are open seats, thus weakening the connection between housing and schooling. Research from Texas and Florida shows that families in states with strong open-enrollment laws use the policy to find better educational opportunities for their children.

But a crucial component of a good open-enrollment policy is mandatory participation for all school districts. This stops protectionist school districts from opting out of the program, even when they have open seats.

Ohio’s voluntary open-enrollment policy is a perfect example of how suburban school districts often exploit this weakness by refusing to accept transfer students from the state’s metropolitan or rural school districts. Cleveland’s highly rated Lakewood City School District opts out of the state’s open enrollment. This means that students residentially assigned to the neighboring Cleveland Municipal School District — where only 32 percent of students scored at or above the state’s proficient reading level — cannot attend the better schools in the Lakewood City district, even though Lakewood City’s enrollment declined by nearly 470 students since 2020.

To make matters worse, Lakewood City School District’s boundaries reflect historic housing redlining. Although now illegal, the lingering effects of housing redlining will continue to affect the public-education options available to families in cities across the country, as long as school assignment is tied to housing.

Protectionist public-school districts are quick to oppose mandatory open enrollment since the policy would weaken their exclusive educational enclaves, where the price of admission is a pricey mortgage.

For instance, even though Olathe Public Schools District had more than 800 open seats, two Kansas superintendents of top-performing school districts, including Olathe, unsuccessfully opposed a robust open-enrollment proposal.

“While we can certainly empathize with parents in lower-performing districts . . . without intending to sound elitist, it is nonetheless true that housing costs in our districts often provide a check on resident student growth now,” they wrote.

Despite such opposition, this year, Kansas policy-makers established a robust open-enrollment law that allows families to transfer to schools outside their assigned school district, assuming there are open seats. Kansas’s law is exemplary. It requires school districts to publicly report the number of open seats by school and grade level on the district website. Moreover, the Kansas Department of Education will annually audit school capacity and non-resident enrollment to ensure that school districts are reporting accurately.

Kansas joins Florida, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma as states with robust open-enrollment laws.

More states should follow Kansas’s lead and establish open-enrollment laws that expand school choice by allowing students to transfer to schools outside their residentially assigned school district. With public-school enrollments declining nationwide, many school districts can no longer claim to reject transfer students because they don’t have enough seats available.

A version of this commentary first ran in National Review.

The post Top-performing public schools are rejecting students even though they have open seats appeared first on Reason Foundation.

In the 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation redlined neighborhoods in California, using residents’ characteristics, such as race, to vet homebuyers for federal aid housing loans, often labeling minority neighborhoods as “hazardous.” Although Congress outlawed housing redlining through laws passed in 1968, 1973, and 1977, many geographic school district and attendance zone boundaries still mirror racist neighborhood lines from the 1930s, limiting children’s education options today.

For example, Los Angeles’ Ivanhoe Elementary School’s attendance zone had an 86% reading proficiency rate and 75% math proficiency rate in 2018-19. The bordering elementary school, Atwater Avenue Elementary School, less than two miles away, had proficiency rates that were 49 percentage points lower for reading and 41 percentage points worse for math.

In his book, “A Fine Line,” author and financial analyst Tim DeRoche noted that Los Angeles residents might pay $100,000 or more in additional housing costs “just to gain access to specific coveted ‘public’ schools” because of the stark difference in performance of neighboring public schools.”

Education is a public service, yet, in Southern California and other areas of the state, high-quality public education is a scarce resource that wealthy families can purchase through their mortgages.

Policymakers, however, can start to remedy years of inequality in education through robust open enrollment policies that weaken the ties between housing and schooling. This policy lets students enroll in any public school that has open seats, regardless of where they live. While California has some piecemeal programs that do allow students to transfer schools, each program falls short of being a comprehensive policy that would do away with some of the lingering effects of government-sanctioned redlining.

The Golden State’s inter-district open enrollment options–the Interdistrict Permit System and District of Choice–allow students to attend schools outside their assigned school district. In the 2018-19 school year, 146,109 and 9,568 students participated in these programs respectively.

Unfortunately, school districts can opt out of participating in each program, allowing protectionist districts to exclude students from their schools—which they often do. For example, Fordham Institute’s Deven Carlson found that most of the affluent school districts in Ohio opted out of that state’s open enrollment program.

California policymakers should scrap the state’s labyrinthine open enrollment policies and adopt a single program that requires all school districts to allow both inter-district and intra-district open enrollment. Schools should only be able to reject applications because they’re full. To ensure that district admissions are fair, policymakers should also incorporate transparency requirements, such as requiring school districts to report to the California Department of Education the number of transfer applications the districts received and the reasons why they rejected any applications.

At the same time, policymakers should make sure schools are compensated for taking on new students. The Legislative Analyst’s Office found the 2017 reauthorization of the “District of Choice” program “significantly reduced funding for students transferring to basic aid districts (districts with high levels of local property tax revenue). We found that this reduction has led these districts to accept fewer transfer students. In addition, the students transferring to these districts are more likely to be disadvantaged than other transfer students. We recommend setting the funding rate closer to pre-2017 levels and providing a higher rate for low-income students and English learners.”

If open enrollment policies are going to succeed in giving families and students more education options, California’s school districts can’t be financially shortchanged for accepting transfer students, especially disadvantaged students. California policymakers should streamline and expand the state’s open enrollment policy to eliminate the archaic barriers that are stopping children from attending better schools.

A version of this column first appeared in the Orange Country Register.

The post Stronger open enrollment laws would help California students appeared first on Reason Foundation.

But the rate of school choice policy proposals becoming law has slowed. Below is a look at notable school choice-related education reform policy wins and defeats in states that have already gaveled out of their legislative sessions for the year.

Alabama

In Alabama, the Parent’s Choice Act (SB 140) would have provided families with an education savings account of $5,500 for each school-aged child. This money was set to be used to pay for private school tuition, standardized test prep, and homeschooling, among other qualifying education expenses. The measure introduced by Sen. Del Marsh (R-Anniston), stalled in early March, despite passing the Senate Education Policy Committee.

Sen. Dan Roberts (R-Mountain Brook), however, successfully passed an increase to the Alabama Tax Credit Scholarship (SB 261) which could benefit up to 2,000 new students. The program, which provides funds that students can use to attend a private institution, will continue prioritizing students attending a state-designated “failing school.” Currently, 3,431 students use the tax credit scholarship to attend a private or non-failing school. Families who qualify must have a household income at or below 185% of the federal poverty guidelines. The new law increases Alabama’s existing 50% tax liability cap on individual and corporate donations to 100% (not exceeding $100,000). 

Alaska

Rep. Ron Gillham (R-Kenai) introduced two school choice bills in Alaska, neither of which moved out of committee. The first, HB 328, would have allowed interdistrict open enrollment, a policy that provides public school choice to families. There are two types of open enrollment: Interdistrict open enrollment allows families to attend schools outside of their assigned district while intradistrict open enrollment lets families enroll in schools inside their school district, but outside their attendance zone.

The second of Gillham’s failed measures, HB 329, would have provided almost $6,000 in a portable education savings account scholarship for students with disabilities, those attending low–performing schools or who have parents in the military. 

Arkansas

SB 63, introduced by the Joint Budget Committee, was amended by Rep. David Ray (R-Maumelle) to increase the Succeed Scholarship program from $3.3 million to $6.3 million. Starting in the fiscal year 2023, the scholarship’s one-time federal funds were set to run dry and would no longer cover some 200 current recipients, the majority of which are students with dyslexia and other disabilities. Although the amendment repeatedly failed to garner enough votes from the bipartisan, bicameral committee, Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson secured additional appropriations from an emergency education relief fund to boost the program’s funding.

Colorado

If a Colorado school was required to be on a turnaround plan for 5 consecutive years, Rep. Dan Woog’s (R-Erie) HB 22-1207 would have allowed any of those enrolled students to take their $5,000 per-pupil funding through education savings accounts to attend a private or charter school. 

Sen. Paul Lundeen (R-Monument) presented SB 22-039, creating the Hope Scholarship Program, in order to provide individual students with funds to directly pay for various education expenses of their choice. 

Sen. Rob Woodward (R-Loveland) sought to establish learning pods that could be eligible for those Hope Scholarship dollars in SB 22-071. Learning pods and micro-schools are becoming increasingly popular education alternatives. 

None of these reforms moved out of their assigned committee. 

Connecticut

In Connecticut, two initiatives that did pass from their assigned committees both failed to become law. 

SB 229, introduced by Sen. Anthony Nolan (D-New London), was an attempt to streamline the public charter school authorization process. Instead of the legislature allocating operational funds for each newly established charter school, a grant would be funded directly and operated by the Board of Education under the bill. Language, however, did mandate that no more than two new charter school applications could be approved each year.

HB 5283, introduced by Rep. Raghib Allie-Brennan (D-Bethel), would have created a new student-centered funding formula for Connecticut’s K-12 school system. The language also provided students a choice program if attending interdistrict magnet schools and vocational agriculture programs. 

Delaware

Rep. Kim Williams (D-Wilmington) introduced HB 270 in the hopes of streamlining the application process for charter schools and other education alternatives. The bill also gives admittance priority to siblings of already enrolled students. The bill awaits a signature from Democrat Gov. John Carney to become law. 

Georgia

The Georgia Educational Freedom Act (SB 601), introduced by Sen. Butch Miller (R-Gainesville), was defeated on the Senate Floor this spring. If passed, the bill would have provided $6,000 annually for students to cover private school tuition and other education costs like tutoring, specialized therapies and homeschool curriculum. The House version, HB 999, was introduced by Rep. Wes Cantrell (R-Woodstock). 

HB 517, introduced by Rep. John Carson (R-Marietta) has been signed into law by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. The reform will double the cap on donations to student scholarship organizations. It is estimated that 4,000 additional Georgia students will gain access to additional educational choices each year because of this move. 

Hawaii

The Strong Students Grant Pilot Program was introduced in the House as HB 1834 by Rep. Troy Hashimoto (R-Maui) and in the Senate as SB 2816 by Sen. Michelle Kidani (D-Mililani). The proposals would have created a one-year pilot program where students (prioritizing those from low-income families) could receive $1,000 to purchase educational equipment or therapies. Neither version of the reform advanced. 

Rep. Val Okimoto (R-Honolulu) introduced the School Choice Scholarship Program (HB 2326) which would have secured funds for families with proven financial need to enroll in a nonpublic school of their choosing. The bill was stalled in Committee.

Idaho

In Idaho, the Self-Directed Learner initiative (S 1238), which mirrors the innovative approach New Hampshire has taken to learning that happens outside of the classroom, passed the legislature and was signed by Republican Gov. Brad Little. Under the new law schools can grant academic credit to students taking authorized advanced courses or engaged in extracurricular activities and even part-time jobs. The bill was introduced by Sen. Steven Thayn (R-Emmett).

The Empowering Parents Grant Program (S 1255), introduced by Rep. Wendy Horman (R-Idaho Falls), was also signed into law by Gov. Little. The program provides $1,000 per student (with a maximum of $3,000 per family) to cover educational expenses such as technological equipment, textbooks, standardized testing fees, and other educational services. The grant will be offered first to students in households making less than $60,000 per year, followed by $75,000, and then eventually becomes available to any student, regardless of family income. Funding is initially derived from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). Instead of seeing those dollars consumed by the general education budget, legislators are directly sending them to families.

Gov. Little did, however, veto H 723 which would have changed the way students are counted in the state’s education funding formula. Under the legislation, instead of measuring average daily attendance (ADA), the state would measure using full-time equivalent enrollment (FTE-E). Idaho is only one of seven states currently using the outdated ADA formula.

Additionally, H 669, the Hope and Opportunity Scholarship Program, introduced by Republican Rep. Dorothy Moon (R-Stanley), was defeated in the House Education Committee. It would have established a $5,950 education savings account for families to use on private school tuition, tutoring, laptops, special-needs therapy, and other approved, education-related expenses.  

Illinois

Rep. Curtis Tarver (D-Chicago) introduced HB 4126 to grant super-priority status to current recipients of the Invest in Kids Tax Credit Program. The new language provides assurance to students that they can continue in their current schools by ensuring if they receive a scholarship one year, they will also receive it next year. The measure is awaiting action by Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Iowa

Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds championed The Student First Scholarship. The language was included in SF 2369, a Senate Appropriations Committee initiative, which, among other provisions, would have allowed students in underperforming districts access to roughly $5,000 in state funds which could be used for other educational opportunities. Though it passed the Senate, it stalled in a House subcommittee. 

An amendment to budget bill SF 2589, successfully passed and will eliminate the open enrollment deadline of March 1st, which now allows student school transfers throughout the academic year. The bill has been sent to Gov. Reynold for her signature. 

Kansas

SB 61 sought an expansion to the state’s tax credit scholarship for students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. This initiative by the Senate Education Committee died in the House K-12 Education Budget Committee. 

The Student Empowerment Act HB 2550, introduced by Rep. Patrick Penn (R-Wichita) was also stalled in the K-12 Education Budget Committee. This education savings account measure would have been accessible to students currently eligible for free or reduced lunch or who have been designated to receive at-risk services. Funds would have beenn set aside for educational materials such as tutoring and textbooks, special-needs therapy, and private school tuition. 

The Kansas House Ways and Means Committee, however, passed open enrollment reform through HB 2567, which was recently signed into law by Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly. School districts throughout the state will now be required to develop plans and guidelines laying out how many total students the school district can handle, and how many nonresident students they can accept into each grade.

Kentucky

Kentucky Democrat Governor Andy Beshear vetoed HB 9, introduced by Rep. Chad McCoy (R-Bardstown), which sought to provide a permanent charter school funding mechanism based on student enrollment. Lawmakers were successful in overriding the veto, making charter schools in the commonwealth easier to open. While the state’s ban on charter schools was lifted in 2017, none have ever actually been approved, in large part because of funding issues. Kentucky is one of only seven states without a single operational public charter school. 

Both education savings account bills, HB 305, introduced by Rep. Josh Calloway (R-Irvington), and SB 50, introduced by Sen. Ralph Alvarado (R-Winchester) stalled in their respective committee. They were attempts to expand the program passed into law last year, as well as address issues cited by a recent judicial ruling. 

Maryland

The Right to Learn Act, introduced through HB 737 by Del. Jeffrey Ghrist (R-Caroline), stalled in the House Ways and Means Committee. It would have established the Right to Learn Program to provide students attending a failing school with scholarships for an alternative education plan. 

Del. Delegate William Wivell’s (R-Washington) education savings account measure HB 1156 never moved past the House Appropriations Committee. It allows any student to receive funds to pay for educational expenses, such as non-public school tuition, textbooks, uniforms, tutoring, and therapeutic services.

Minnesota

SF1525 introduced by Sen. Roger Chamberlain (R-Lino Lakes) and HF 1528 introduced by Rep. Sondra Erickson (R-Princeton) would have created education savings accounts to meet the costs of tutoring or supplemental curriculum, mental health treatment, special education services and therapy, or tuition at a non-public school. 

Neither measure made it to the governor’s desk. 

Missouri

Sen. Rick Brattin’s (R-Harrisonville) education savings account program, SB 841, stalled in the Missouri Senate Education Committee. It would have reduced the current program’s existing restrictions, including lifting the $25 million dollar cap and eliminating geographic boundaries.

Comprehensive open enrollment reform nearly passed the General Assembly this year through Rep. Brad Pollitt’s (R-Sedalia) HB1814. While the original language did not succeed, Sen. Cindy O’Laughlin’s (R-Shelbina) SB 681, a much narrower version primarily allowing families who own residential or agricultural property to send their children to any school within the district they pay taxes, did succeed and has been sent to Republican Gov. Mike Parson.

Mississippi

Mississippi saw the defeat of an education savings account reform, the Mississippi Scholarship Act bill (HB 874), introduced by Rep. Chris Brown (R-Littleton), along with bills HB 1349 introduced by Rep. Jansen Owen (R-Poplarville) and SB 2177 introduced by Sen. Chris Johnson (R-Hattiesburg) that would have established open enrollment reform for public school students in the state.

Nebraska

LB 364, the Opportunity Scholarship, introduced by Sen. Lou Ann Linehan (R-Elkhorn) in Nebraska’s unicameral legislature, would have provided low-income students a path to attend private schools through state tax breaks. After failing to garner enough votes to cut off an eight-hour, bipartisan filibuster, the bill died.

New Hampshire

HB 607 would have created school vouchers for parents between $291-$41,000 per student to use on education-related costs such as non-public school tuition. The reform, introduced by Rep. Kevin Verville (R-Rockingham) was tabled early this winter. 

New Mexico

The Charter Schools Facility Improvements bill (HB 43), introduced by Rep. Joy Garratt (D-Albuquerque), passed and was signed into law by Democrat Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. The measure standardizes public charter school facility funding and allows the state to loan funds for their capital projects, including renovation and construction, as well as paying off lease-purchase agreements. School districts will also be required to make any facility available for lease or purchase to charter schools if not in use for educational purposes.

Oregon

In Oregon, SJR 201 was filed to establish the right of parents to choose the school their child attends. The measure was introduced by Sen. Arthur Robinson (R-Cave Junction) and stalled in the Senate Education Committee.

South Dakota

South Dakota saw a school choice victory through SB 71 which increased the South Dakota Partners in Education, an education savings account scholarship, from a maximum of $2 million to $3.5 million. At least 143 South Dakota students were on a waiting list to obtain the scholarship for private schools before the increase passed. The measure was introduced by Sen. Lee Schoenbeck (R-Watertown) and signed into law by Republican Gov. Kristi Noem. 

Tennessee

Tennessee House Leader William Lambert (R-Portland) and Senate Leader Jack Johnson (R-Franklin) moved a historic overhaul of the K-12 funding formula through both chambers that was signed into law by Republican Governor Bill Lee. The Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) (HB 2143/SB 2396) establishes a student-centered funding system, as opposed to the resource-based model of the past. 

Utah

Utah saw the Hope Scholarship Program (HB 331) defeated by the House of Representatives after Republican Gov. Spencer Cox vowed to veto the reform, even if passed. The scholarship, introduced by Rep. Candice Pierucci (R-Herriman), would have given priority to low-income children experiencing documented and reported bullying in their currently enrolled school. 

Washington

HB 1215 would have allowed parents to apply for a $7,000 per child education savings account scholarship for the costs of educational materials such as tutoring or textbooks, as well as private school tuition. The measure was introduced by Rep. Vicki Kraft (R-Vancouver) but did not advance. Some 130,000 students would have been eligible, with 25% specifically earmarked for students who are homeless, in foster care, have special needs or come from low-income families. 

West Virginia

In West Virginia, the recently passed SB 268 will allow both micro-schools and education pods to be established in the state and ensures there are no enrollment caps for either such program. The measure was introduced by Sen. Amy Grady (R-Mason) and signed into law by Republican Gov. Jim Justice. 

Wisconsin

Democrat Gov. Tony Evers’ veto of AB 970 could not be overridden by the state legislature. The measure, introduced by Rep. Robert Wittke (R-Racine), would have universalized the state’s voucher program by striking enrollment and income limits for all Wisconsin students. 

Gov. Evers also vetoed AB 122, defining and establishing “micro education pod” programs (referring to a program provided to between two and ten family units at a physical location). The measure was introduced by Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers) and would have also added the new term to all current homeschooling statutes. 

Wyoming

HB 138, introduced by Rep. Ocean Andrew (R-Laramie), sought to establish the Hope Scholarship, allowing funds to be distributed to students and made eligible for private school tuition, tutoring, therapies, transportation, and other education-related expenses. The reform was defeated on the House Floor. 

The post How school choice legislation has fared in 2022 appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Without viable transportation options, some families can’t reap the benefits of school choice even if they want to. States can pass laws to allow students to enroll in public schools outside of their zip codes — but those opportunities are meaningful only if families can afford to make the trip.

While solving the transportation puzzle is as much a logistical challenge as it is a policy one, one thing is clear: Traditional yellow school bus routes alone won’t cut it.

K-12 school transportation is one of the most regulated sectors in the nation’s economy. At the federal level alone, at least 20 congressional committees and federal agencies can promulgate laws and regulations that directly affect the industry. Generally, these laws and rules are related to safety standards for school buses as well as the vehicles’ sales and manufacturing. States impose additional requirements regarding who qualifies for K-12 school transportation, how it’s paid for and the types of vehicles public school districts can use.

Understandably, these heavy regulations aim to maximize student safety. But they aren’t without their tradeoffs.

First, federal and state rules heavily limit the types of vehicles districts can employ for school transportation. For instance, according to research from Bellwether Education Partners, only eight states allow for the use of smaller passenger vans for carrying children to and from school. And even in this small group of states that don’t limit themselves to big yellow buses, the availability of alternative vehicles is severely restricted by federal regulations prohibiting the sale of any vehicles to schools, public or private, that don’t meet the definition of a “school bus” determined by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. The agency only allows for seven types of buses to be sold for the purpose of transporting students to and from school. These are specialized vehicles that leave schools with limited choices, and myriad regulations concern every aspect of their design, from stop safety arms to seat size. 

State laws also make it difficult to accommodate students who cross residential assignment and district boundaries. According to a 2020 paper published by EdChoice, only six states require transportation services for any student enrolled in a public school district outside their own at a level roughly equivalent to what districts must provide for students who live within their boundaries. In most cases, state laws either don’t address who is responsible for school transportation when students cross district lines or put the onus on the families.

Of course, districts can’t be expected to provide whatever level of transportation service nonresident families might desire — that would be unreasonable. But if a district is prepared to receive the education funds that accompany a new enrollee from outside its boundaries, some level of transportation support should be provided for that student, ideally by the district. 

In the same way that schools are expected to use a students’ education dollars to teach them, they should provide transportation services or, at least, funding to help the family organize alternatives.

Wisconsin, for instance, places responsibility for transportation across district boundaries on parents, but there is state reimbursement of up to $1,200 a year for low-income families who participate in interdistrict school choice. While the policy isn’t perfect, it prudently recognizes both district limitations in providing transportation services and families’ limitations in paying out of pocket to get their kids to a school that serves them best.

In addition to clearing away policy barriers that restrict transportation access for students exercising school choice, state legislators should also allow districts to look beyond big yellow buses. While federal regulations make it difficult for school districts to purchase a more diverse fleet of vehicles, states like Arizona now provide financial incentives for school districts to partner with ridesharing companies like HopSkipDrive, which specializes in school transportation. 

HopSkipDrive operates similarly to other ridesharing companies like Uber, albeit with more thoroughly vetted drivers who can use any four-door vehicle that’s less than 10 years old. The company offers specialized services that the yellow school bus system can’t efficiently provide, such as transportation for individual students with disabilities or for small groups of children to schools of choice or sporting events. 

No silver bullet will solve the transportation challenges brought about by increasing public school choice. But if state policymakers place greater responsibility for transportation on public education providers and give school districts greater flexibility to find solutions, school choice will be more attainable for more families.

A version of this column previously appeared in the 74.

The post How states and schools can provide students more transportation options appeared first on Reason Foundation.

California’s District of Choice program started in 1993 and aims to provide families with greater choices within the state’s public education system. School district participation is optional and unlike the state’s primary student transfer law—the Interdistrict Permit System—families can apply directly to Districts of Choice without the consent of their home school districts, removing bureaucratic obstacles that can prevent students from accessing open seats in other schools.

Although California’s policy falls well short of robust open enrollment laws in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Arizona, its 45 participating school districts open their doors to nearly 10,000 students each year. In 2021, the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) produced a follow-up evaluation to its 2016 report, once again giving high marks to the program and providing valuable insight for state policymakers across the country.

LAO’s findings largely align with other research on open enrollment. Importantly, nearly all participating students transferred to higher-performing districts as measured by test scores and college-going rates, with families also seeking out specialized courses such as foreign languages, arts, and Advanced Placement programs. They also found that low-income students have used the program at disproportionately lower rates, but account for a rising share of participants at 32% up from 27% in the 2014-15 school year. In total, 40% of participants are Latino, 28% Asian, and 26% white, with the remainder belonging to other racial groups.  

Additionally, LAO uncovered evidence indicating positive effects from competition that the program has created. School districts that lost students to the Districts of Choice program took steps to mitigate enrollment losses including gathering feedback from families and communities, evaluating programmatic offerings, and implementing reforms that led to fewer students transferring out. They also had greater improvements in math and English language arts proficiency rates over time compared to the statewide average and a comparison group of similar districts, which should help alleviate concerns about students who remain in these school districts.  

But LAO’s findings on financial incentives stood out from the rest of the analysis. In California, education funding is a shared responsibility between state and local coffers, with education dollars following students rather seamlessly across school district boundaries for most districts. But about 10% of school districts—so-called Basic Aid districts—generate local dollars in excess of their revenue entitlement (i.e. they raise more money than what the state’s funding formula determines) and don’t generate additional formula dollars when new students enroll.

Because California’s Basic Aid school districts have virtually no financial incentive to enroll new students from outside of their district boundaries, the state previously provided those that participated in the District of Choice program with 70% of each transfer student’s base amount. However, this inducement was slashed to 25% in the 2017-18 school year with predictable results. By the 2019-20 school year Basic Aid districts reduced transfer enrollments by 24% and several stopped participating in the program altogether. The LAO’s report noted: 

“Several basic aid districts we interviewed indicated this reduction had caused them to become more cautious and reduce the number of students they were willing to accept through the program.”

For policymakers in other states, LAO’s finding highlights the importance of financial incentives when designing open enrollment policies. Good policy design requires close attention to how dollars flow across school district boundaries when students transfer. If school districts don’t receive sufficient funding when they accept a student from a neighboring district, they’re not going to be as willing to participate in an open enrollment program. They could also attempt to game the system to avoid accepting students if they’re required to participate in open enrollment without financial incentives. 

In California’s case, policymakers need to do more to ensure funding for Basic Aid districts is sensitive to enrollment. For other states, the problem and fixes might look different but the takeaway is the same: open enrollment works best when good policy is coupled with education dollars following the child. 

The post Data shows financial incentives matter for K-12 open enrollment policies appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Last year, Oklahoma legislators passed a historic reform prohibiting school districts from denying transfer requests except in limited circumstances such as capacity constraints or student absenteeism. As a result, families now have more access to educational opportunities outside of their residentially-assigned public schools, including schools across district boundaries.

When the legislation was being considered, concerns were raised that the new law would usher in the Wild West for student-athletes, where transfer decisions would be driven by on-the-field factors rather than academics. While student-athletes should be free to transfer to schools of their choice in the same way as students focused on science or music do, these worries were unfounded as Senate Bill 783 left the athletics status quo in place for the state. The Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) still sets eligibility requirements and, under its rules, student-athletes may not participate in extramural athletic competitions for one year unless granted a hardship waiver by the OSSAA.

In fact, the only mention of athletics in Oklahoma’s open enrollment law is that local education agencies “cannot accept or deny transfers on the basis of ethnicity, national origin, gender, income level, disability, proficiency level in English, measure of achievement, aptitude, or athletic ability.” Athletic ability can’t factor into a school district’s enrollment decisions, and if demand at a school is greater than available seats then students must be admitted on a first-come-first-served basis.

In Arizona, where open enrollment is immensely popular with both families and school districts, student athletic eligibility decisions are also made by a third party. As with Oklahoma, the Grand Canyon State’s policy only states that admission may not be based on athletic ability, and is otherwise silent on athletics. That job is left to the Arizona Interscholastic Association (AIA), which unfairly requires student-athletes to sit out half a season when they transfer to a new school, even if their residence has changed. 

These states’ policies, while unfair to student-athletes, prove that athletics need not stand in policymakers’ way of crafting strong open enrollment policies. However, to better ensure students who want to participate in athletics have access to the schools that best meet their learning needs they should follow Florida’s lead on the issue.

In 2016, Florida passed the Controlled Open Enrollment law that allows students to transfer to any school in the state with few exceptions and also mandates immediate eligibility for student-athletes. This means, unlike in Arizona or Oklahoma, families in Florida don’t have to make difficult tradeoffs between academics and athletics and can instead make decisions based solely on what’s best for their circumstances, which is impossible for distant bureaucrats to assess. 

A common pushback against Florida’s approach is the claim that participating in athletics is a privilege for students and shouldn’t be prioritized over academics. It’s easy for some to sympathize with this critique, but then why aren’t similar restrictions applied to other privileges such as debate club, school bands, or performing arts? 

Extracurricular activities—sports or otherwise—help develop positive skills and traits that aren’t readily taught in classrooms, and forcing families to make arbitrary choices seems to be more about adult agendas than what’s best for kids. Granting student-athletes immediate eligibility can even help with socialization and adjusting to their new environment. 

In any event, evidence from Arizona suggests that punitive policies don’t always work as intended. Even after the Arizona Interscholastic Association adopted more restrictive rules for the 2016-2017 school year in an effort to curtail athletic-related transfers, they still increased in subsequent years. The only difference was these student-athletes were punished and weren’t immediately eligible to play for their new schools. 

For policymakers, the priority should be to adopt universal open enrollment that gives families access to greater educational opportunities, and there’s no reason to let concerns about who plays for which high school team prevent this from happening. Policymakers should be giving families the freedom to choose the schools that best suit them and should also consider eliminating restrictive provisions that unfairly punish student-athletes. 

The post Open enrollment policies don’t have to affect student athletics  appeared first on Reason Foundation.

But Michigan’s program wouldn’t just serve students who decide to leave their public school to homeschool or attend a private school. It would also make $500 available annually to qualifying students who remain in public schools and provide $1,100 annually for public school students with disabilities. While those amounts are only a fraction of the funds that would be available to students who withdraw from public school, it would be the first time a school choice proposal puts education dollars directly in the hands of students who remain in public schools. 

This would be a big deal because granting the option of small-scale customization to families who are happy with their public schools may be exactly the reform strategy the school choice movement has needed for decades.

Opting out of a public school system to transfer to a private school is a big change for most families. Even with access to a publicly-funded private school scholarship, a change of that degree might not be worth it for families who are only somewhat unhappy with their public school. This reality can help to explain why private school choice programs have grown at a slow pace over the last few decades and why the U.S. spends less than 0.4 percent of public education funds on private school choice programs.

It should also be noted that most families are generally happy with their public schools. A 2021 Gallup Poll found that “73% of parents of school-aged children say they are satisfied with the quality of education their oldest child is receiving.” There simply isn’t enough dissatisfaction with the current system at this time to catalyze a large-scale shift away from traditional public schools and toward a customized, private sector-led education system.

Because of this, school choice proponents need policy solutions that meet most families where they are, something Michigan may be on the cusp of accomplishing with its education savings account (ESA) for public school students. 

Most families might not be ready to leave the public K-12 system, but they would be excited for a chance to customize on the margins. While many parents can’t imagine curating their child’s entire curriculum, they can certainly envision the benefits of having some funds to pay for an SAT tutor, enroll their student in a financial literacy course at a community college, or buy them a laptop.

This incremental step can introduce education choice to a large swath of previously unreached public-school families, whetting their appetites for more customization. And while there are already programs in other states that resemble something like a public school ESA, Michigan would build on these programs by providing public school students with even more flexibility over how they can use their funds.

For more than 20 years, the private school choice movement has focused on bringing a lot of choice to a relatively small contingent of families lucky enough to have access to vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and ESAs. Maybe it’s time for school choice proponents to consider Michigan’s approach of also giving a taste of choice to the majority of families who, understandably, aren’t ready to leave their traditional public schools.

A version of this column previously appeared in The Hill.

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