Mitt Romney’s white paper on education, “A Chance for Every Child,” offers laudable support for increased parental choice and for other changes, such as tenure reform, that must occur to improve education in America. Like Obama, Romney wants to leverage federal dollars to move states in the right direction on public school choice, especially the removal of charter school caps and the adoption of open enrollment policies. He also advocates for private school choice “where permitted by state law.”
But is his plan viable? And will he lead to implement it?
Romney would remove most of No Child Left Behind’s accountability standards in favor of expanded reporting on how schools are different. He would allow states to set their own standards and tests, but print the state’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) outcomes on school and district report cards. NAEP brings much value to the discussion of education performance in America, but none to how an individual school district or school is performing because it does not test sufficient numbers or in every school and district. Implicit in this move - away from accountability by achievement measures towards improved information about schools - is that such information is lacking today. But parents are actually quite knowledgeable about local schools’ pluses and minuses and can access sites such as www.Greatschools.org for more detailed information.
So, for this information to be vastly more empowering than it is today, Romney recognizes that school choice would have to be dramatically expanded. That’s especially true for public school choice where, frankly, most of the schools will be for the foreseeable future.
The Romney plan seeks to expand choice primarily in two ways. First, he would convert Title 1 and federal special education (IDEA) funds that go to schools serving economically disadvantaged students. They would become vouchers that the eligible Title 1 and special ed students could take to any other school, including a private school, or even to a tutoring provider or digital school. Second, he would require states, as a condition for receiving these funds, to adopt open enrollment policies and eliminate caps on charter and digital schools.
The Title 1 and IDEA proposal is worthy of consideration. (more…)
The assertion that school choice somehow exacerbates segregation and separatism in American society surprises me every time it pops up. The ideal of traditional public education, a “common school” available equally at no cost to all citizens to impart a high level of academics as well as a core set of American values, has always been a myth. Yet it has amazing staying power despite the facts.
Put aside a hundred years of state-sanctioned racism that outlawed education for slaves, and then engendered “separate, but equal” schools for another 90 years until the 1954 Supreme Court decision banned the practice. Let’s look at how this “common school” system serves Americans now.
The statistics on K-12 education in the Department of Education’s "The Condition of Education, 2011" report are informative. Nationally, 31 percent of African-American students are in schools that have 75 percent or more African-American students. The figure is nearly 33 percent for Hispanic students. Nationally, 62 percent of whites attend a school with a population over 75 percent white, while those schools serve around 7 percent of the African-American and Hispanic populations.
When city demographics are analyzed, the segregation of traditional public schools dramatically jumps. Forty-two percent of African-Americans and 39 percent of Hispanics are in schools with 75 percent or more of those same students. Not surprisingly, school enrollment and especially urban school enrollment reflects how a public education monopoly assigns students to schools - by zip codes.
Another way to look at how this “common school” system is serving us is the distribution of the free and reduced lunch (FRL) population, which the Department of Education identifies as a proxy for low-income students. High-poverty elementary schools, those with 75 percent or more of an FRL population, enroll 45 percent of Hispanic students and 44 percent of African-American students. For whites, the enrollment is 6 percent in high-poverty schools. Nationally, urban areas account for 29 percent of our student population, yet 58 percent of all students in high-poverty schools live in our cities.
Combine this data with dropout statistics in the 40-60 percent range for inner-city minority populations, and abysmal academic outcomes for so many of the remaining students, and you have the “common school” myth stripped bare. (more…)
Peter Beinart, a professor at the City University of New York and a former editor of The New Republic, has a provocative opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal arguing that non-Orthodox Jews should reverse their opposition to private school vouchers in order to make Jewish education better and more affordable. Beinart writes that the U.S. “has one of the weakest Jewish school systems in the world. Less than 20% of American Jewish children attend full-time Jewish schools. That's half the rate in France, one-third the rate in Canada and Australia, and one-fourth the rate in Mexico.”
Beinart worries that allowing Jewish students to use public funds to pay for religious schooling might be challenged constitutionally, but I don't think that's an issue.
In its 2002 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled parents may use public funds to pay tuition and fees at faith-based schools provided the money goes first to the parents and their choice is “genuine and independent.” That is, parents can’t be directly and indirectly coerced into attending a religious school. (more…)
