InsideSources

Do I want my child to be bilingual? 

Will the school across the street be best option for my child if he has a physical or learning disability? 

What if my child excels in the arts, STEM or a trade? Perhaps a school dedicated to that particular craft would be the best route for him.

As a mother-to-be, such questions are starting to pop into my head. I want the best for my son and know I’ll want him to be in an environment suited for his learning style. I don’t yet know what will be best; I’ll get those answers as he grows and shows his unique character and capabilities.

I also know I am not alone. Other parents across America want what’s best for the unique children they are working hard to raise. Thankfully, where I live in the District of Columbia there are options so that parents can find a good match for their children. That’s something I’m celebrating this week, which is National School Choice Week.

National School Choice Week celebrates school choice and raises awareness of the different education options available to students. These options include public neighborhood schools, public charter schools and public magnet schools as well as private schools, online academies and homeschooling.

Education is not a one-size-fits-all process. Beyond these specific schooling categories, these education providers offer different specialties. Some offer a bilingual experience; others embrace a specific curriculum or emphasize group learning or the arts. Allowing schools to focus on offering experiences that are tailored to individual needs helps more parents find the right environment for their child.

And just as we know that the new restaurant across the street helps ensure that other neighborhood restaurants are providing better value and service, competition strengthens our school system, encouraging existing schools to make sure they are focused on serving the needs of their students.

As an elected official for D.C., I am proud to be a vocal proponent of school choice in its many forms. D.C. is often recognized as a model for school choice in America. As our nation’s capital, D.C. offers the only federally funded school choice program in the country.

Since its inception, The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program has enabled more than 8,000 D.C. students to receive a voucher toward the cost of private school tuition. This puts the option of private school in reach for more families, not just those who can afford the high cost of tuition. Currently, 47.3 percent of D.C. public school students attend charter schools, showing that choice is needed, and wanted across the city.

D.C. isn’t alone. Fifteen states across America offer state-funded vouchers and many more states offer choices like education savings accounts and tax-credit scholarships to help remove the financial barriers that may come with better educational opportunities. More and more states are catching up to D.C.’s model of offering choice programs. Forty-three states now allow charter schools to operate in their state and the number of homeschooled children across America has more than doubled since 1999. This is tremendous progress, but should be just the beginning.

A ZIP code or income level should not determine a child’s future. Every child deserves an effective, challenging as well as motivating education. Today’s students are tomorrow’s leaders, and I am proud that my city offers an array of diverse options for our students to learn. I will continue to advocate for a system that empowers parents, not the government, to make the best possible choices for their children, just as I’ll make the best choices I can for mine.

High-risk opportunities with big-time payouts: That’s how John Arnold got rich as an investor, and now he’s using that same strategy to give his money away.

John and Laura Arnold may not be headline-grabbing philanthropists who’ve become household names like Bill and Melinda Gates or George Soros, but the couple is creating major impacts with their charitable giving by treating every new philanthropic venture the way John once treated his bets on Wall Street: Watching for risky opportunities that offer an outsized payoff.

In 2016 alone, according to filings, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation held $2 billion in assets and awarded grants worth $176.8 million. The result has been a philanthropic empire that, while sometimes stoking controversy, has made a clear and tangible impact on the sectors of society it has targeted.

John Arnold started his career as an oil analyst at the now-defunct Enron Corporation, where he eventually became a top trader on the company’s Natural Gas Desk. When Enron collapsed in 2002, Arnold launched his own hedge fund, Centaurus Financial, growing it and his own net worth above $1 billion. That success came thanks to some risky bets along the way. In 2006, for example, Arnold lined up his hedge fund on a high-risk position in the energy markets opposite another hedge fund. Arnold won, and the result was an overall portfolio return for investors of an astonishing 317 percent.

One year later, John Arnold was the world’s youngest billionaire.

Arnold retired in 2012 at age 38 to start the Laura and John Arnold Foundation with his wife, a former corporate lawyer. At the time, a profile published by Wired described John Arnold as a young philanthropist eager to make a concrete and substantial difference in the world, and unafraid to disrupt the world of philanthropy in the process.

The Arnolds essentially approach philanthropic ventures the way any Wall Street veteran would: they’re attracted to risky bets — as shown in their support for pretrial justice reform, increased soda tax, police surveillance support, and—despite the dangerous #MeToo-era politics—a gamble on a donation to a man accused of sexual abuse. The Arnolds are using their charitable giving to disrupt areas of society that are underserved or ignored by others.

In fact, they have had a lot to say about their fellow billionaire philanthropists. They joined with nearly 200 other philanthropists in signing the Giving Pledge (launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet), a promise to give most of their wealth away. But according to Wired, the Arnolds also criticized other philanthropists for being too safe in their giving.

Laura Arnold told Wired that their foundation seeks to be based on “thoughtful failure and fantastic success.”

That comment is very revealing about the choices the Arnolds have made over the past six years.

A review of the foundation’s website shows the Arnolds care deeply about data-driven solutions. Most of the issues they’ve chosen to tackle rely on their own data and research, rather than re-purposing work done by others.

For example, the foundation is currently conducting an investigation into gun violence in order to better inform policymakers. And the Arnolds seek out leading experts to drive these efforts forward. The Arnold Foundation recruited Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, to oversee criminal justice initiatives. Travis, who was a former clerk to then-U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has extensive experience in criminal justice as a former deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department and the architect of the city’s assault weapons ban.

The Arnolds practice what they describe as “evidence-based policy” and “research integrity”–two sides of the same coin, they believe.  In the Arnolds’ view data, not ideology, should drive policy and scientific research. To combat bad science and bad policy, the Arnolds have launched several “policy labs” around the country in partnership with local governments and universities in an attempt to gather more trustworthy data on local issues.

This approach is not without its critics. In the area of criminal justice reform, for example, the Arnolds have recently launched nationwide their Public Safety Assessment tool (PSA), an algorithm which uses nine factors to help evaluate whether a person accused of a crime should be released pretrial.

While using risk factors like prior violent convictions and prior failure to appear in court may help judges sift through which individuals should be detained and which should be released, civil rights advocates fear that using federal criminal justice data — which many believe is tainted by a system that engages in racial profiling — means that the PSA will only perpetuate racial discrimination. Others have pointed to those being released on the tool’s recommendation committing additional crimes while awaiting trial.

Controversy follows many of the Arnolds’ other initiatives as well.

The Arnolds are major backers of charter school initiatives and school choice, but they were criticized when that support led them to back a leader in the charter school movement who was dismissed from his own charter school program over multiple sexual abuse accusations.

Recognizing glaring inequalities and problems with pensions in the U.S., the Arnolds launched a pension reform initiative that emphasizes both fiscal responsibility and increased personal savings by retirees, which has drawn very sharp criticism from federal employees and politicians.

The Arnolds also backed the controversial soda tax in many states, most notably Pennsylvania. According to the Philadelphia Business Journal, they gave $500,000 to the City of Philadelphia’s legal defense of the soda tax in 2017, following the lawsuit from Big Soda.

The foundation has also pushed data-driven models to assess pricing for drugs, drawing ire from the pharmaceutical industry and raising questions about the use of their data model to determine what drugs are going to be most effective for a patient.

Besides giving Johns Hopkins University $450,000 to hand out free glasses to students in Baltimore, Maryland, the Arnolds also gave $360,000 to the Baltimore Police Department’s surveillance initiative, which involved camera monitoring of city residents, without telling the mayor.

Given the Arnolds’ statement to Wired, the risk and the controversy involved in their philanthropic efforts is all part of the mission. The real question is: how effective is it?

In pretrial justice reform, the Arnolds’ PSA has produced mixed results. The Arnolds are working to make the PSA available nationwide, but there is still very little data on its efficacy and whether it’s accomplishing what the Arnolds want it to accomplish — a fairer criminal justice system. This  push to take the PSA nationwide before the evidence is in doesn’t seem to align with their claim to pursue data-driven results.

Another source of criticism is the Arnold’s political partisanship.

The Arnolds were top donors to both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, and they have given extensively to the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. They’ve teamed up with other liberal philanthropists like Michael Bloomberg on the soda tax, George Soros on the Brennan Center for Justice, and they back Patients for Affordable Drugs, an organization managed by former Clinton and Obama staffers.

The Arnold Foundation have also turned to Democratic politicos for guidance in their giving. Firms headed by Obama strategists Robert Gibbs, Ben LaBolt, and Joel Benenson were collectively paid $1.5 million in 2015-2016, the two most recent years for which disclosures are available.

While it’s true that, in this election cycle, they have contributed to several Republican House candidates in safe GOP districts, they’ve simultaneously given the maximum allowed donation to Democratic candidates in key races: Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, Beto O’Rourke, and Conor Lamb.

These liberal bona fides have not protected the Arnolds from occasional criticism by the Left, particularly when they joined the libertarian Koch Brothers as lead proponents of public pension reform. The Arnolds’ efforts on criminal justice reform have taken heat from all sides: Civil rights groups complain that the Arnold Foundation’s data-driven approach is fundamentally unfair, while law-and-order conservatives point to every incident of a defendant who commits another crime while out on bail.

The Arnolds believe that philanthropy should be “aggressive, highly goal-oriented … entrepreneurial, not institutional or bureaucratic … seek[ing] transformational change, not incremental change.”

It’s a hedge fund approach to philanthropy. The jury’s still out on whether it will work.

The Arnold Foundation declined to be interviewed for this story.

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Would the expansion of publicly-funded private school choice hasten or reverse a decades-long trend of increasing de facto racial segregation in the United States’ K-12 educational system? A recently released report and an accompanying event in Washington D.C. on Thursday afternoon attacked this sensitive question in a way that drew recriminations from some on the right.

The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, released the issue brief “The Racist Origins of School Choice,” which examined a Virginia school district’s use of vouchers to evade the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that mandated an end to the practice of segregated schools. The event at which the report was unveiled was hosted at the headquarters of the nation’s second largest teacher’s union, the American Federation of Teachers, and featured remarks from Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the ranking member of the House’s education committee.

As documented in the brief, Prince Edward County’s school system in Virginia was one of the defendants in the Brown vs. Board of Education suit. (Multiple anti-discrimination lawsuits were combined by the courts in the Brown action). Once the Supreme Court had ruled against them, the school system opted to close all of its public schools rather than integrate. White students who transferred to all-white private schools then had their education publicly subsidized through tuition grants, or what are today known as vouchers. Meanwhile black families, who were barred from most of the area’s private schools, either had to cobble together their own educational accommodations, or in some cases, missed five years of formal schooling before the public system was restored. The unfair process was replicated in other local school districts around the country, particularly in the South, where much of the opposition to the Supreme Court decision was concentrated.

According to the Center for American Progress researchers, and many of the panelists at the Thursday event, racial inequities remain endemic to most, if not all, publicly funded school choice voucher programs. Essentially, the argument is that private schools are not held to the same level of accountability as traditional public schools. Therefore, while some students may benefit from a publicly funded private school education, in many cases, either through self-selection or opaque private school admissions policies, racial segregation gets worse under voucherized educational systems.

“The research basically suggests that private school vouchers will lead to more segregation, not less,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a panelist at the event. “That isn’t the story that Secretary DeVos and others try to paint. Whenever we see advocates of private school choice talk, they will highlight adorable African American children who are trapped in failing [public] segregated schools, and the idea is that this will allow them to attend high quality integrated private schools… That almost never happens.”

Instead, according to Kahlenberg, “Most voucher programs involve African American students going from one set of segregated schools to another set of segregated schools, and we certainly don’t see any net increase in integration.”

While Kahlenberg and some of the other panelists left the door open for some types of school choice, they mostly argued that choice should be offered under the umbrella of the public system where government has more sway to regulate admissions practices. Furthermore, while Kahlenberg and other organizers of the event said multiple times that the discussion was not intended to demonize or accuse contemporary voucher proponents of racism, press releases and online responses from groups on the right expressed frustration at how their views were represented.

For example, one prominent backer of private school choice, Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, penned a blog post that cited polling data showing strong support of voucher programs within the black community. Furthermore, McCluskey argued that the concept of vouchers actually preceded the Brown decision, and was first broached by turn-of-the-century Catholic educators who questioned why their tax dollars were going to support public schools that taught Protestantism.

“Asserting that the origins of school choice are racist reeks of politicized guilt by association. But far more important, it ignores historical, current, and logical reality. Government, including the public schools, often forced segregation, and the public schools continue to be massively segregated,” wrote McCluskey.

Similarly, a press release issued by the Indianapolis-based school choice advocacy, EdChoice, cited a statement from the group’s CEO, Robert Enlow. “More than six decades after the Brown decision, America’s public schools are more segregated than ever. Vouchers and school choice didn’t cause that. Assigning students to schools based on where they live, not what they need, created a system where quality schools are linked to property values. Those families who can afford to move to ‘better’ districts do, and those who can’t remain in low-performing schools or have to find another way out of the ZIP-assigned structure. It’s fundamentally un-American.”

Enlow went on to argue that allowing parents to choose the best fit for their child gives them the market power to enroll in, or leave a school, based on whether or not their child’s needs are being met. The EdChoice release also cited an op-ed that appeared in The Hill, which elaborated along similar lines of reasoning.

With an avowed proponent of school choice at the helm of the Education Department in Washington, one can expect the tense public policy debate over school choice to continue. Just recently, a debate over the airing of a pro school choice documentary on PBS elicited another battle in the ongoing disagreement.

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Because state and local level school choice policies have proliferated in Louisiana, some point to the state, and New Orleans in particular, as a case study in the effectiveness of empowering parents to choose educational options for their children. Despite a few caveats, early results from studies in the state have not delivered ideal news for school choice advocates.

A research brief issued in June by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization headquartered in Arlington Virginia, reiterated findings from a 2016 study that examined school choice policies enacted in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The brief, “Does School Choice Mean Students Attend Better Schools?” focuses on the demographics of the students changing schools as a result of a choice-friendly environment in New Orleans.

The New Orleans’ school system, like much of the rest of the city, was in disarray in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. State officials took the unusual step of using its school turnaround powers to take direct control over many of the hardest hit schools in the city. The state-run “district,” called the Recovery School District, then operated in parallel with the Orleans Parish School Board, and the city’s vibrant charter school ecosystem.

Therefore, before the Recovery School District gradually returned control of its directly run schools to the city in 2015, students in the city had a number of public school options to choose from. The researchers did find that historically underserved populations, like the black, Hispanic, and low-income students were more likely to change schools than their wealthier, whiter, and more gifted peers. The trouble, according to the RAND evaluation, was that the desired effect of a school choice policy regime—that students from low-performing schools move to high performing schools, thereby raising overall averages—did not happen. Instead, students were mostly moving laterally (low-performing students to other low-performing schools and high-performing students to other high-performing schools).

Andrew McEachin, a policy researcher at RAND and a co-author of the study, said in an interview with InsideSources that “choice is complex.” While policy-makers may hope that students will flock to academically strong schools, McEachin said that there is growing evidence that some parents and students may choose schools for other reasons—such as extra-curricular offerings or a school’s social climate.

Furthermore, while New Orleans does offer more choice than most cities, McEachin said that the system does not represent “unconditional choice”—particularly for some disadvantaged communities. Transportation obstacles, for example, made it unlikely that working parents would be able to enroll in and shepherd their children to a school across town that might be a best fit academically. Parental access to information about the school systems was another problem cited by McEachin and his report. The researchers questioned whether government officials and community outreach organizations had done enough to successfully educate parents, especially at the program’s outset, about the options at their disposal.

On the other side of the equation, there were concerns that some of the better schools in the city were manipulating their enrollments in a bid to only accept the best students applying to their schools. Practices like these are a frequent concern for school choice opponents, many of whom argue that when given the option, schools will discriminate against students that are harder to educate—including poor, minority, special education, or disciplinarily challenged students. School choice opponents worry that the traditional public schools are then eventually left with only these more difficult cases, leading to poor learning conditions and greater societal inequities.

In the research brief, the RAND researchers highlighted possible policy changes that could improve school choice systems. These included ideas like ensuring better outreach to parents, strengthening open-enrollment policies, and giving preferential treatment to students enrolled in schools that get shut down. Notably, since the report’s 2007 to 2011 study period, New Orleans has implemented some of the changes McEachin and his colleagues have called for. Most significantly, the enrollment and application process has been significantly streamlined through the city’s ONEAPP which has standardized school applications and due dates.

The RAND study is not the only negative news for school choice backers coming out of the state. Last week, a University of Arkansas study looked at the first three years of a statewide voucher program underway in the Pelican state. The voucher program, which used public funds to pay the tuition of public school students transferring to private schools, found that the participating students did no better or worse overall than they were doing in their public schools. (The same researchers at University of Arkansas had published a similar study with similar findings last year that garnered national media attention. This study linked above is an update to that older study.)

In their efforts to rebut the University of Arkansas report, school choice advocates have countered mostly along two lines. Some have noted that the private schools participating in the voucher program were subject to tight regulations, which, along with small voucher-values, may have scared off some of the better-performing private schools from participating. (In fact, the University of Arkansas study did show that most participating private schools are low-cost, low-enrollment, Catholic schools with disproportionate numbers of minority students). Others have questioned whether it makes sense to draw grand conclusions about a school choice program’s effectiveness only a few years in. More time should be given to let students acclimatize to their new schools, they argue.

Nevertheless, despite these arguments, still other school choice proponents appear to be deemphasizing the argument that school choice improves academic outcomes for students. While discussions about a parent’s right to choose a school that is best for their child regardless of their economic means feels like a point worth examining, one would imagine that this would not be the school choice advocate’s first line of attack if the academic data coming out of places like Louisiana were more favorable.

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A documentary airing on a publicly funded television network examining innovation—or the lack thereof—in America’s educational system has garnered bitter complaints from traditional allies of the network. On the other hand, groups staunchly opposed to the very concept of federally funded programming have stepped up to support the Public Broadcasting System, or PBS, in its decision to inject another perspective into the education debate.

“School Inc.,” the documentary series in question, consists of three episodes hosted by Andrew Coulson, the late former director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. Over the course of three episodes, available online to PBS members, Coulson seeks to dissect the reasons why successful models in education don’t scale in the same way they do in other industries.

By the end of the series, Coulson concludes that the primary difficulty is that the wrong incentives exist in the education sector. By selectively pulling examples from other nations and pockets of experimentation within the United States, Coulson builds the argument that more free-market forces should be unleashed in education. Like many conservatives, who tend to support school choice, Coulson argues that government bureaucrats don’t have a personal stake in the public system’s successes—and that central planning inherently leads to wrong-headed regulations and inefficiency.

The American public school system, which actually comprises thousands of small, local-level monopolies, is an obstacle to change, according to Coulson’s reasoning. He points to models in Chile, Sweden, Korea, and India where privatized for-profit educational options have proliferated, and in some cases, have outstripped public competitors.

Coulson also highlighted successful public charter school networks in the United States, like the KIPP academies, as beacons of hope. He does also note, however, that investors and donors to charter school networks are not as discerning as they should be in which charter networks they support financially, which has created a situation in which the charter sector is scaling “at random.”

The decision to air the documentary has been met with howls from some progressive education advocates. Diane Ravitch, a leading education historian whose analysis has drifted far to the left in recent years, penned an op-ed in the Huffington Post pillorying PBS for giving airtime to “paid propaganda.”

In particular, Ravitch noted that the documentary’s funders are free-market school choice advocates, some of whom could stand to profit from expanded charter laws or voucher programs. She says such programs are problematic because they tear down barriers between Church and State by allowing public funds to send students to private religious schools.

Ravitch also criticized the documentary for leaving out relevant context in some areas, for example that the documentary fails to highlight the fact that the KIPP academies enroll low numbers of special education students, or that the European nation with the strongest academic performance, Norway, runs an entirely traditional public school system.

She suggested that PBS’s decision to air the documentary is a cynical ploy to curry political favor with a newly elected Trump administration that is pro-school choice and has proposed slashing funding to public broadcasting. (In this case, Ravitch’s own argument lacks the context that the documentary has been in the works for years, long before President Trump was elected.)

School choice critics have noted studies showing subpar performance for students enrolled in voucher programs (though some of the studies do show that public schools tend to improve when faced with competition for enrollment). Some also worry that school choice measures, like the large scholarship program in Florida, don’t cover the full cost of a private school education. The result, therefore, is that well-off students have their schooling subsidized, while the public schools become defunded holding centers for low-income students and students with special needs. Others worry that bad actors will inevitably be incentivized to skimp on services to students in an effort to widen profit margins.

Curiously, some of PBS’s biggest critics, like the libertarian Cato Institute, have rallied to the public broadcaster’s defense. In a response to Ravitch’s piece, Neal McCluskey, Coulson’s successor, pointed out that PBS does not hide the opinionated nature of the series—he notes that the documentary’s subtitle is “A Personal Journey with Andrew Coulson.” Attempting to censor the series, he said, does a disservice to a legitimate and relevant public debate. He argued that viewers should be allowed to make their own decisions about the series.

McCluskey also disputes some of Ravitch’s arguments on their merits. He made the case for weaknesses in the studies that have sparked bad headlines for voucher programs. He also rejected the idea that public schooling has long been separate from religion, pointing out that many of the fierce educational debates in the late 19th century were over whether Catholic institutions should be allowed to encroach on the territory held by the mostly Protestant public school system.

Inarguably, the school choice debate has ramped up since Betsy DeVos was nominated as Education Secretary. The position DeVos now occupies is less powerful than many realize, though she does have a large bully pulpit that she is using to promote school choice. Coulson, who died of brain cancer before his documentary was completed, would likely be heartened by the fact that his work has contributed to the ongoing dialogue.

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In a nationally representative survey, the vast majority of high school students reported an intrinsic desire to learn and grow intellectually. Nonetheless, persistent dropout rates and complaints that schoolwork isn’t engaging are raising the argument that schools—or the entire education system—need to adapt to capture and retain student enthusiasm for learning.

The survey released today, “What Teens Want From Their Schools,” solicited responses from over 2,000 high school students. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right education policy group that supports well-regulated school choice and rigorous academic standards, issued the study.

While representations of “slacker” high school students abound in popular culture and media, the survey’s findings suggest that the vast majority of students in American high schools try hard to do their best scholastically. More than 90 percent of the students surveyed said they agreed with the statements that “I complete my assignments” and “I pay attention to things I am supposed to remember.” Over 80 percent reported “I go back over things I don’t understand” and “I try to figure out the hard parts on my own.”

Beyond their desire to learn, however, the researchers identified different motivations related to what most appeals to students about school. Borrowing from other studies and commonly used psychological classifications, the researchers first sorted students into behavioral, cognitive, and affective categories. In other words, a behaviorally motivated student could be expected to participate because of social expectations, a cognitively engaged student would find the act of critical thinking to be rewarding, and an affectively engaged student might develop a positive emotional attachment and sense of community on campus.

The researchers then broke down the categories further to create six “engagement types” in classrooms. Nearly half were determined to be primarily affectively engaged students: the “social butterflies,” the “emotionals,” and the “teacher responders.” Another third were classified as cognitively motivated: the “deep thinkers” and the “subject lovers.” The remaining 17 percent of behaviorally engaged students all fell into one category: the “hand raisers.” The report then goes into depth on the social and demographic breakdowns that are most represented in one engagement type versus another.

Some of the most interesting details to emerge included the fact that “deep thinkers” are not always the best students, in fact many are uninterested by what is taught to them in class and they disproportionately think seriously about dropping out. On the other hand, as one would expect, “teacher responders” tend to value and seek out strong bonds with their educators.

The authors of the report explained the decision to segment students into groups is necessarily an artificial heuristic. The authors explained that “segmentation” is commonly used by advertisers, but can also be useful for developing social science research and policy solutions. The researchers stressed that students may not fit perfectly into a category and that their assigned category should be considered their “dominant” engagement type—among others that they may be more or less inclined to.

While the researchers did find commonalities among the students within engagement types, the methods used by the researchers also fit with the educational philosophy supported by the group that issued the study, the Fordham Institute. Because, generally speaking, the Fordham Institute supports expanded school choice options, the forward and concluding sections of the survey used the classifications to advance pro-education reform arguments.

For example, the forward, co-written by Fordham president Michael Petrilli and Amber Northern, the group’s senior vice-president for research, concludes thusly: “In other words, Betsy DeVos—now Secretary DeVos—was right: One-size-fits-all high schools can’t possibly engage all students effectively.”

The solution, according to Fordham, is more diversity in public school options (including charters), greater access to private schools, and more study of alternative schooling methods such as homeschooling or online learning.

Meanwhile, other education reform advocates, who often agree that education needs to become more personalized, would differ in the conclusion that the education system needs to be fundamentally restructured. For example, longtime Rochester teacher’s union leader Adam Urbanski recently told InsideSources that, with some tweaking, public schools can provide engaging offerings to all types of students from all types of backgrounds.

The debate over engagement types and supply-side solutions is likely to continue as long as Secretary DeVos, an avowed school choice advocate, remains at the helm of the Education Department. Though her team has poured cold water on the prospects for a federal voucher program, the administration’s proposed budget sets aside extra funds for school choice and numerous parental choice laws have been enacted or are being seriously debated at state and local levels.

CORRECTION: 

Originally, the penultimate paragraph of this post tentatively contrasted the Fordham study’s use of “engagement types” to work done by Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, that is critical of the popular misconception of “learning styles.”

In response to this article, Michael Petrilli tweeted “To be clear, learning styles and engagement styles are VERY different things. We agree with @ulrichboser that learning styles are bunk.”

Per links provided by Boser, more can be learned about “learning styles” here and here.

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Universal K-12 education should be publicly financed, but not publicly administered, say many of today’s educational reformers approaching the issue from the ideological right. Such proposals that aim to increase accessibility to educational options for all students have set off charged political debates as the school choice movement has picked up national momentum. Despite internal disagreements over whether school choice should be promoted at the state or federal level, or whether vouchers or tax-credit savings accounts should be employed, conservative free-market thinkers mostly agree that the current public school system is operating inefficiently.

The theoretical basis of the conservative school choice consensus is rooted in an essay published over sixty years ago by the Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman. In addition to laying out a free market-driven vision of universal public education, Friedman’s 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” also anticipates many of the theory’s potential weaknesses and the objections that opponents continue to voice today as more states adopt school choice reforms.

While Friedman’s thinking drifted to the right over the course of his long career in the public eye, an underestimated legacy of the economist’s work is the impact his writings on education have had on the political left. One possible reading of Friedman’s early article on school choice and vouchers places his thinking in line with the Obama administration’s policies on public charter schools and other forms of state-regulated choice. One could make the argument that some conservative proposals for deregulated school choice initiatives are in tension with Friedman’s early writing on the topic, and that moderate groups, or even some liberal groups like the Center for American Progress, are behind policies closer to parts of his early theoretical framework.

Friedman began his essay with a full-throated defense of the importance of universal general education for all young people. He argued that an educated populace creates ancillary benefits for communities: a society of good citizens. The key distinction for Friedman is that just because education should be publicly financed does not mean that it should necessarily be publicly administered. In his essay, Friedman laid out an early rationale for issuing publicly-backed educational “vouchers” that families could redeem at the public or private K-12 school of their choosing.

“Parents would then be free to spend this sum and any additional sum on purchasing educational services from an ‘approved’ institution of their own choice,” he wrote.

The advantage to such an approach, according to Friedman, would be the introduction of free-market principles into a staid education system that was (and still is) predominately run by government. By letting parents choose freely among educational providers, in theory the best schools would attract the most students and expand, while subpar institutions would lose students and revenue, and would eventually whither away. In this way, the school system would improve overall through competition.

Or as Friedman argued: “Government would serve its proper function of improving the operation of the invisible hand without substituting the dead hand of bureaucracy.”

The key questions, both for Friedman at the time and for school choice backers today, center on how much government regulation should be involved in picking out “approved” K-12 schools. Should religious private schools be included? Should participating private schools be allowed to discriminate on the basis of family income or race? Would a hands-off approach to regulation create social stratification? How would the system be administered to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse? Would the proposed system work in rural areas where low population densities might not support school choice?

While Friedman acknowledged each of the above as valid concerns, he argued that none should be used to prevent government from seeking to expand a parent’s freedom to choose among educational providers for their children. When weighing whether private religious schools should be approved to accept publicly-funded vouchers, for example, Friedman acknowledged the difficulty of balancing an economically-disadvantaged parent’s right to choose their child’s educational path (like their wealthier peers), against the risks associated with using public funds to promote retrograde or divisive curricula.

“How [does one] draw a line between providing for the common social values required for a stable society on the one hand, and indoctrination inhibiting freedom of thought and belief on the other? Here is another of those vague boundaries that it is easier to mention than to define,” he wrote.

Neil Campbell is the director of innovation for the Center for American Progress’s education policy work. While Campbell and the liberal group oppose the use of vouchers for private school choice, they do support well-regulated public charter school programs.

As Campbell explains, he supports “public funds to public schools that are open to all kids and accountable to the public,” but later in a discussion with InsideSources, he also said that “parents do want choices… and ignoring that is a risky proposition.”

Though they may appear to be hostile to Friedman’s thinking at first blush, the conditions Campbell laid out for backing a public charter school system are not inconsistent with Friedman’s original school choice philosophy. Campbell said that public charters should provide the same civil rights protections, shields for students with disabilities, and be subject to the same accountability requirements as traditional public schools.

While such a model does call for a more muscular “approval” process than Friedman may have intended, and it notably leaves out the for-profit sector, in practice it allows space for the same free-market forces that Friedman was advocating on behalf of.

On the other hand, some of today’s conservatives, like Education Sec. Betsy DeVos, have pushed for heavy deregulation of the charter school sector in states like Michigan. While these light-touch proposals bring the possible upside of faster churn and supplier selection, they also raise the potential risks for a temporary flourishing of inferior providers that could hurt entire cohorts of students and market instability that could cripple traditional public offerings. By calling for a government role in authorizing voucher recipients, Friedman was therefore implicitly rejecting systems that would entirely defang regulation in the sector. (DeVos has said that she backs accountability for all schools including charters, but critics say that in practice her lobbying efforts in Michigan blocked meaningful state oversight).

By way of example, Campbell argued that a family’s choice of school is a much higher stakes proposition than choosing a restaurant to dine at, and therefore demands a higher level of regulation. “It’s not like an afternoon of food poisoning… you only get third grade once,” he said.

It’s arguments like these that have pushed some localities with thriving charter school sectors to bring the new schools under the same accountability frameworks as their traditional public schools. Washington D.C., for example, which has one of the largest shares of students enrolled in charter schools in the country, announced its intention to rate charters and public schools on the same five-tier scale in its new federal accountability plan. Reforms like Washington’s allow parents to make informed apples-to-apples comparisons, say proponents of regulation like Campbell.

The fact that education wonks across the political spectrum have opened to public charter schools (with the exception of some strong elements within the teacher’s unions) suggest that Friedman’s core premise—that the free-market should be introduced to the education system—has gradually moved from a theory to a mainstream accepted practice. The main debate today is over the degree to which government should intervene in how public educational dollars are steered to non-governmental education providers.

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Libertarians harboring suspicions of the federal government are bucking establishment GOP leaders and vowing to oppose a nationalized school choice proposal backed by the Trump administration. Though they support the school-choice doctrine in principle—which calls for empowering parents and students to choose among traditional public, public charter, private, and alternative educational options—some federalists are worried that a Washington-run program would necessarily result in regulatory mission creep.

The worst kept secret in education policy circles in Washington is that the Trump administration is eyeing a tax-credit scholarship program to satisfy a $20 billion school choice campaign promise. The program would be modeled on those in states like Arizona or Florida, which allow individuals and businesses to deduct contributions to accredited non-profits that award educational scholarships to K-12 students. Details on the federal proposal can be expected to emerge on Wednesday, when the president has said that a larger tax overhaul agenda will be unveiled.

In theory, the proposal is appealing to many mainstream conservatives because it could be sold as a tax break, rather than a spending increase. Furthermore, many on the right say that the national program would break up the public school system’s hegemony over education by allowing students to homeschool or attend private schools (including religious options). Liberals and the teachers’ unions largely oppose the initiatives on the grounds that they are “vouchers in disguise,” intended to privatize the school system by diverting public school dollars to private schools.

The first of two panels at a Tuesday event, “A $20 Billion School Choice Tax Credit Program: Yes, No, Maybe, How So?” pit a pair of school choice supporters against each other on whether the federal government should take the lead in the policy area from the states. The event was organized by the Fordham Institute, and hosted by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, both of which are right-leaning public policy think tanks active in the education policy space.

Neal McCluskey, the director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s efforts in education, argued during the first panel that backing the GOP proposal would be a political, strategic, and legal mistake. In a six-point opening statement, McCluskey’s primary arguments stemmed from his reading that the Constitution does not give the federal government the power to regulate education. The issue should be left to the states, he said.

The libertarian scholar also expressed the worry that if private schools were to begin accepting students participating in the government-regulated scholarship programs, the funds connected to those students would also come with strings attached. Even if Congress passed an ostensibly “clean” school choice law without regulatory requirements, McCluskey said that the door would be wide open for a future big-government liberal administration to adulterate the system.

McCluskey’s concern, which is also shared by the homeschooling lobby, revolves around the idea that once private schools start accepting federal scholarship dollars, they would be unable to wean themselves off—and would then be at the mercy of federal regulators. Washington could then force the schools to make curricular and religious concessions or face losing a major source of income, according to his reasoning.

Finally, McCluskey raised the argument that for a school choice supporter, injecting the toxicity of high-stakes national politics into what has historically been a locally-driven bipartisan issue is a mistake. He questioned whether it makes sense for Republicans to link the school choice movement, which has on-the-ground appeal in deep-blue urban inner cities, with the Trump brand.

Since the inauguration, McCluskey said, “Now we are having to fight a much bigger, much more national debate which requires a lot more resources and a lot more time.”

“Is this ultimately going to be good, politically, for the cause of school choice?” he wondered.

Thomas Carroll, the president of the non-partisan school choice advocacy Invest in Education, disputed many of McCluskey’s assertions, and gave tentative support to a push for national school choice. His main argument was that the combination of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and a Republican president gives school choice activists a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to pass legislation over the teachers’ unions’ objections.

Carroll said that, like McCluskey, he would only support a national tax credit scholarship program that comes without onerous regulations. Carroll also conceded that there was a risk of the federal government using the program in the future as an excuse to interfere in private schools, but he also noted that most such K-12 schools already take federal dollars for low-income students, so that threat already exists anyway.

Carroll argued that because the progressive interests backed by the unions would always be a threat to the right’s school choice agenda, conservatives should instead capitalize on political tailwinds and focus on passing the school choice initiative—and then dig in for a long defensive fight.

“I like to joke that after a nuclear attack, the only thing left will be cockroaches and the teachers unions… I say that actually with admiration,” said Carroll to the audience’s laughter.

Carroll also disputed McCluskey’s argument that the federal education department’s role is unconstitutional, by pointing to the fact that the courts have not struck down its core functions in the decades it has operated since the Carter administration.

Two more school choice proponents followed Carroll and McCluskey on stage for a second panel oriented toward coloring in the wonky details of what an effective school choice tax credit scholarship program would look like. One of the participants, Travis Pillow, the editor of the Florida-based conservative educational news outlet redefinED, fielded a question from InsideSources during a question and answer portion of the event that further illustrated the political complexities for Republicans hoping to act on the president’s agenda.

When asked whether opposition from rural conservatives, who tend to be more attached to their public schools, poses a threat to the passage of school choice legislation, Pillow answered affirmatively:

“Rural Republicans are a big barrier to the advancement of the school choice movement at the state level right now,” he said, pointing to recent legislative defeats in states like Arkansas and Texas.

Regardless, Pillow argued that the concerns expressed by those lawmakers about the impracticality of school choice in rural areas mostly don’t hold water. He cited the example of high usage of Florida’s tax credit scholarships in rural counties, particularly for students seeking to attend private schools, as evidence.

One element that could work in the school-choice coalition’s favor is the widespread expectation that the tax credit scholarship will be part of a larger tax reform push, that is (on paper) agreeable to all of the Republican conference. The hope is that the measure can pass under-the-radar with the help of sweeteners in other areas of the overhaul.

Nonetheless, if considered in isolation, a national school choice tax credit scholarship initiative would likely be a heavy lift for mainstream GOP leaders acting on their own.

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The House Education Committee heard testimony on a Senate bill Tuesday that would establish “education freedom savings accounts” for students in the state. Emotions ran high during the crowded hearing in what has been a battle of school choice advocates versus supporters of public schools. Yet, the terms “school vouchers” and “education savings accounts” (ESA) haven often been thrown around synonymously at the New Hampshire State House, resulting in misinformation being spread around about Senate Bill 193.

The bill would allow parents of students between the ages of 5 and 20 to work with an approved scholarship organization to receive 90 percent of the per-pupil state grant funds (approximately $3,500) to be used to cover tuition or other costs at a school of the family’s choice. The family can use the funds to pay for private school tuition — including religious schools — homeschooling expenses, and other academic expenses. The bill passed the Senate on a 14-9 vote in March.

Opponents of the bill claim the ESA would take funding away from public schools that need it most, since students from underfunded or struggling school districts would most likely take advantage of the program. The critics also said the program would unconstitutionally provide taxpayer dollars to religious schools.

Supporters argue the bill would give parents more options for their students, since they know what’s best for their own children. They also claim that by granting parents alternatives to public schools, it would create competition and encourage public schools to increase their performance.

“The American education system has substantially failed to produce what they’re charging for,” said bill sponsor Sen. John Reagan, R-Deerfield, at the hearing.

“It is trying to resolve the problem of having the most expensive education system in the world, and not having the best prepared students in the world,” he added. “The argument we hear is, if we take all this money from our public schools – and this is what our public school administrators tell us – they tell us they won’t know what to do.”

Yet, several opponents of the bill have been using the terms ESA and school vouchers interchangeably to describe what the legislation would do.

The state’s largest teacher union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT-NH), has also been telling its supporters that the ESA bill is code for a school voucher program.

“SB 193 is a voucher bill under the guise of ‘Education Freedom Savings Accounts,'” they wrote on their website.

Voucher programs and education savings accounts are similar, but not identical. However, the distinction between them is often muddled by politically-loaded terms. A state school voucher program grants parents a credit for a certain tuition value that they can use to enroll their child in a private school

ESAs are similar, but offer more flexibility to the parents. When parents get an ESA, they are awarded a yearly sum that can be mixed and matched to suit their children’s educational needs. The funds can be used all for private school tuition, like a voucher, or they can split it among many education opportunities like private tutoring, textbooks, and even saving for college.

The AFT-NH encouraged their supporters to fill out a robo-petition that would be sent to lawmakers encouraging them to vote “no” on SB 193 and creating ESA for students.

“Despite being labeled an ‘Education Freedom Savings Account,’ make no mistake this is a voucher bill which will directly take taxpayer dollars intended for our public schools and divert to private and other institutions,” the petition website states.

House Education Committee Chairman Rick Ladd, R-Haverhill, said his panel would likely vote on the bill at the end of the month. The committee has until April 26 to act on this legislation, at which point, it would probably go to the House Finance Committee before reaching the House floor for a vote.

Due to Republicans holding a slight majority in the House, it’s likely the bill will pass committee. What ultimately happens when it comes to a floor vote in the full House is anyone’s guess.

A recent survey from Citizens Count, NH’s Live Free or Die Alliance found 54 percent of respondents were opposed to “granting parents a portion of state funds to pay educational expenses for private or home-schooled students” and 46 percent supported the measure.

The bill has even grabbed the attention of former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who wrote a Monday op-ed in the New Hampshire Union Leader expressing his support of the ESA bill.

“Empowering parents with the freedom to choose encourages positive change because the right to educate their children no longer can be taken for granted,” Bush wrote. “It must be earned. I commend Sen. John Reagan and Rep. Joseph Pitre for introducing this legislation, and Gov. Chris Sununu, who has been a passionate advocate for school choice.”

There are still some questions to be answered and changes the bill needs before the House votes on it. House Finance Committee Chairman Neal Kurk, R-Weare, said he supports the bill, but the question over funds going to religious schools would need to be addressed. The state constitution expressly forbids taxpayer funds going to religious schools.

Anne Edwards, an attorney with the state’s attorney’s office, warned lawmakers at the Tuesday hearing that if they don’t tweak the bill in regards to the religious school issue, the state could face legal and constitutional challenges.

However, Kate Baker, director of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, said legislators shouldn’t let the threat of litigation stop them from passing the bill.

“I believe this will be in the courts, no matter what you do,” she said. “Parents want to go to court and fight for their right to make these choices for their children.”

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