School choice is a term or label given to a wide array of programs offering students and their families alternatives to publicly provided schools, to which students are generally assigned by the location of their family residence. In the United States, the most common—both by number of programs and by number of participating students—school choice programs are scholarship tax credit programs, which allow individuals or corporations to receive tax credits toward their state taxes in exchange for donations made to non-profit organizations that grant private school scholarships. In other cases, a similar subsidy may be provided by the state through a school voucher program. Other school choice options include open enrollment laws that allow students to attend other public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, virtual schools, homeschooling, and a couple states offer individual tax credits or deductions for educational expenses. Most recently, the introduction of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA's) in Arizona has added a new alternative to the school choice regimen. This is not to say that school choice is directly opposed to public education. The greatest emphasis behind school choice is simply to provide parents with the right to choose which education they feel is best for their children. Since this is a substantially subjective choice depending on the convictions of each parent, school choice, and its counterpart education reform, has elicited intense discussion and debate across the country.
- 1 Forms
- 2 Debate
- 3 International overview and major institutional options
- 4 See also
- 5 References
- 6 External links
Scholarship Tax Credits
States with scholarship tax credit programs grant individuals and/or businesses a credit, whether full or partial, toward their taxes for donations made to scholarship granting organizations (also called school tuition organizations). SGOs/STOs use the donations to create scholarships that are then given to help pay for the cost of tuition for students. These scholarships allow students to attend private schools or out-of-district public schools that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for many families. These programs currently exist in twelve states: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia in the United States.
In a traditional public education system, schools receive funding from the state on a per student basis. Under a voucher system, eligible students receive state funding ("vouchers") which can be spent at whatever eligible private schools the parents choose for their children. The two most common voucher designs are universal vouchers and means-tested vouchers. Means-tested vouchers are directed towards low-income families and constitute the bulk of voucher plans in the United States.
Charter schools are independent public schools which are exempt from many of the state and local regulations which govern most public schools. These exemptions grant charter schools autonomy and flexibility with decision-making, such as teacher union contracts, hiring, and curriculum. In return, charter schools are subject to stricter accountability on spending and academic performance. The majority of states (and the District of Columbia) have charter school laws, though they vary in how charter schools are approved. Minnesota was the first state to have a charter school law and the first charter school in the United States, City Academy High School, opened in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992.
Dayton, Ohio has between 22–26% of all children in charter schools. This is the highest percentage in the nation. Other hotbeds for charter schools are Kansas City (24%), Washington, D.C. (20-24%) and Arizona. Almost 1 in 4 public schools in Arizona are charter schools, comprising about 8% of total enrollment.
Charter schools can also come in the form of cyber charters. Cyber charter schools deliver the majority of their instruction over the internet instead of in a school building. And, like all charter schools, cyber charters are public schools, but they are free of many of the rules and regulations that conventional public schools must follow.
Magnet schools are public schools that often have a specialized function like science, technology, or art. These magnet schools, unlike charter schools, are not open to all children. Much like many private schools, some (but not all) magnet schools require a test to get in.
"Home education" or "home schooling" is instruction in a child's home, or provided primarily by a parent, or under direct parental control. Informal home education has always taken place, and formal instruction in the home has at times also been very popular. As public education grew in popularity during the 1900s, however, the number of people educated at home using a planned curriculum dropped. In the last 20 years, in contrast, the number of children being formally educated at home has grown tremendously, in particular in the United States. The laws relevant to home education differ throughout the country. In some states the parent simply needs to notify the state that the child will be educated at home. In other states the parents are not free to educate at home unless at least one parent is a certified teacher and yearly progress reports are reviewed by the state. Such laws are not always enforced however. According to the federal government, about 1.1 million children were home educated in 2003.
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts
Also referred to as Education Savings Accounts, Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA's) were created in Arizona as an alternative to straight-up voucher programs. Where precedent had deemed vouchers invalid under Arizona's constitution, ESA's were ruled constitutional in that it provided a multitude of options as opposed to directly supporting private education. ESA's give parents the ability to use 90% of what a public school would receive for that child on a variety of educational options that would best fit the needs of their child. These expenses could include tuition or fees at a private school, textbooks, curriculum, specialized tutoring, and even college. This is by far one of the most open forms of school choice in America, as the parent is given an unprecedented amount of freedom over where to spend their education dollars. Ironically, this is exactly what helped it to pass legal muster. So far only Arizona has implemented such a program, but many other states are considering the option. In order to avoid mingling public money with private money, parents who apply and are accepted to receive ESA are not allowed to benefit from any form of tax credit scholarships during the same school year. Insomuch as the state still retains 10% of the cost for each student who is approved for the program, even though they are not attending a public school, it is budget positive for the state.
Tax Credit/Deduction For Educational Expenses
Certain states allow parents to claim a tax credit or deduction as a means to provide relief for certain educational expenses. These can include private school tuition, textbooks, school supplies and equipment, tutoring, and transportation. Currently, Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have such programs.
The goal of school choice programs is to give parents more control over their child's education and to allow parents to pursue the most appropriate learning environments for children. For example, school choice may enable parents to choose a school that provides religious instruction, stronger discipline, better foundational skills (including reading, writing, mathematics, and science), everyday skills (from handling money to farming), or other desirable foci.
Supporters of voucher models of school choice argue that choice creates competition between schools for students. Schools that fail to attract students can be closed. Advocates of school choice argue that this competition for students (and the dollars that come with them) create a catalyst for schools to create innovative programs, become more responsive to parental demands, and to increase student achievement. Caroline Hoxby suggests that this competition increases the productivity of a school. Hoxby describes a productive school as being one that produces high achievements in its student for each dollar that is spends. Others suggest that this competition gives parents more power to influence their child's school in the school marketplace. Parents and students become the consumers and schools must work to attract new students with new programs. Parents also have the ability to punish schools that they judge to be inferior by leaving the 'bad' school for a better, more highly ranked school. Parents look for schools that will advocate for the needs of their child and if the school does not meet the needs required for that child, parents have the choice to find a school that will be more suitable
Another argument in favor of school choice is based on cost-effectiveness. Studies undertaken by the Cato Institute and other libertarian and conservative thinktanks conclude that privately run education usually costs between one quarter and one half of publicly run education while giving superior outcomes.
Others argue that since children from impoverished families almost exclusively attend D or F ranked public schools or districts, school choice programs would allow these students to opt out of schools assigned by zip code and seek an education elsewhere, thereby granting the decision-making power to students and their parents, as opposed to a system that may not be meeting their needs. Supporters say this would level the playing field by broadening opportunities for low-income students to attend as good of schools as the middle classes instead of the current two-tiered system which educates the middle and upper classes, but not the lower classes, particularly minorities.
The Organisation Internationale pour le Droit à l'Education et la Liberté d'Enseignement (OIDEL), an international non-profit organization for the development of freedom of education, maintains that the right to education is a fundamental human right which cannot exist without the presence of State benefits and the protection of individual liberties. According to the organization, freedom of education notably implies the freedom for parents to choose a school for their children without discrimination on the basis of finances. To advance freedom of education, OIDEL promotes a greater parity between public and private schooling systems.
Many school choice measures are not without their opponents, and are heavily criticized by public school entities, organizations opposed to religious affiliation, and self-identified liberal advocacy groups. Known plaintiffs who have filed suit to challenge the constitutionality of state sponsored school choice laws are as follows: School Boards Associations, Public School Districts, Federations for Teachers, Associations of School Business Officials, Education Associations/Associations of Educators (unions for public school teachers), the American Civil Liberties Union, Freedom From Religion Foundation, and People for the American Way.
The arguments for public school entities are chiefly that these school choice measures are either taking funding away from public education and therefore depleting their already strained resources or that the alternative forms of education are not regulated enough to be trustworthy. The arguments for entities who disfavor religious affiliation or religious preference cite the Establishment Clause and individual state Blaine amendments, which forbid, to one degree or another, the use of direct government aid to religiously affiliated entities. This is of primary concern in almost all school choice debates because most voucher and tax credit dollars end up at parochial schools.
International overview and major institutional options
The French government subsidizes most private primary and secondary schools, including those affiliated with religious denominations, under contracts stipulating that education must follow the same curriculum as public schools and that schools cannot discriminate on grounds of religion or force pupils to attend religion classes.
This system of école libre (Free Schooling) is mostly used not for religious reasons, but for practical reasons (private schools may offer more services, such as after-class tutoring) as well as the desire of parents living in disenfranchised areas to send their children away from the local schools, where they perceive that the youth are too prone to delinquency or have too many difficulties keeping up with schooling requirements that the educational content is bound to suffer. The threatened repealing of that status in the 1980s triggered mass street demonstrations in favor of the status.
Sweden reformed its school system in 1992. Its system of school choice is one of the freest in the world, allowing students to use public funds for the publicly or privately run school of their choice, including religious and for-profit schools. Fifteen years after the reform, private school enrolment had increased from 1% to 10% of the student population.
Ontario is the only large province in Canada with limited school choice funding, Catholic, Secular and one Protestant school receive funding and are open to all students. In 2003, following an international human rights ruling, the provincial Conservative government gradually introduced a tax credit over 5 years, (when it would have been fully implemented it would have been worth up to 50% of tuition to a maximum of $3,500 at any independent school in Ontario) in order to meet the human rights norms and expand funded choice to all interested parents. However, the tax credit was retroactively canceled by the subsequent Liberal government when it had been only been in place for two years to the $1,000 point. Currently there are over 900 independent schools in Ontario. The only school choice program available to non-rich parents who wish to send their children to an independent school is a privately funded program called Children First, a program of The Fraser Institute.
In Chile, there is an extensive voucher system in which the state pays private and municipal schools directly, based on average attendance (90% of the country students utilize such a system). The result has been a steady increase in the number and recruitment of private schools that show consistently better results in standardized testing than municipal schools. The reduction of students in municipal schools has gone from 78% of all students in 1981, to 57% in 1990, and to less than 50% in 2005.
Regarding vouchers in Chile, researchers have found that when controls for the student's background (parental income and education) are introduced, the difference in performance between public and private subsectors is not significant. There is also greater variation within each subsector than between the two systems.
A variety of forms of school choice exist in the United States.
Scholarship Tax Credits
Scholarship tax credit programs currently exist in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
Arizona has probably the most well known and fastest growing tax credit program. In the Arizona Individual Private School Tuition Tax Credit Program, in accordance with A.R.S. §43-1089 and §1089.03, individuals can claim up to $1,053 and couples filing joint returns can claim up to $2106 (for 2014, amounts are indexed annually). Nearly 24,000 children received scholarships in the 2011-2012 school year. Since the program has started in 1998, over 77,500 taxpayers have participated in the program, providing over $500 million in scholarship money for children at private schools across the state.
The Arizona program was challenged in court in ACSTO v Winn by a group of state taxpayers on the grounds that the tax credit violated the First Amendment because the tuition grants could go to students who attend private schools with religious affiliations. The suit was initially brought against the state until the Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization (ACSTO), one of the largest School Tuition Organizations in the state, voluntarily stepped in to represent the defense with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly Alliance Defense Fund). Typically, taxpayers are not allowed to bring suit against the government regarding how taxes are spent because injury would be purely speculative. In addition, insomuch as a donation to a School Tuition Organization is still a charitable act, just like any donation to a charity, there would be no standing unless all charitable deduction programs nationwide were brought under scrutiny. The Court ruled 5-4 to let the tax credit program stand. In April 2011, a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll found that a majority of American voters (60%) felt that the tax credits support school choice for parents whereas 26% felt as it the tax credits support religion.
In Iowa, the Educational Opportunities Act was signed into law in 2006, creating a pool of tax credits for eligible donors to student tuition organizations (STOs). At first, these tax caps were $5 million but in 2007, Governor Chet Culver increased the total amount to $7.5 million. The Iowa Alliance for Choice in Education (Iowa ACE) oversees the STOs and advocates for school choice in Iowa.
Greater Opportunities for Access to Learning (GOAL) is the Georgia program which offers a state income tax credit to donors of scholarships to private schools. Representative David Casas was responsible for passing the Georgia version of the school choice legislation.
Vouchers currently exist in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and, most recently, the District of Columbia and Georgia.
The largest and oldest Voucher program is in Milwaukee. Started in 1990, and expanded in 1995, it currently allows no more than 15% of the district's public school enrollment to use vouchers. As of 2005 over 14,000 students use vouchers and they are nearing the 15% cap.
School vouchers are legally controversial in some states; in 2005 the Florida Supreme Court found that school vouchers were unconstitutional under the Florida Constitution.
In the U.S., the legal and moral precedents for vouchers may have been set by the G.I. bill, which includes a voucher program for university-level education of veterans. The G.I. bill permits veterans to take their educational benefits at religious schools, an extremely divisive issue when applied to primary and secondary schools.
In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), the Supreme Court of the United States held that school vouchers could be used to pay for education in sectarian schools without violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. As a result, states are basically free to enact voucher programs that provide funding for any school of the parent's choosing.
The Supreme Court has not decided, however, whether states can provide vouchers for secular schools only, excluding sectarian schools. Proponents of funding for parochial schools argue that such an exclusion would violate the free exercise clause. However, in Locke v. Davey, 540 U.S. 712 (2004), the Court held that states could exclude majors in "devotional theology" from an otherwise generally available college scholarship. The Court has not indicated, however, whether this holding extends to the public school context, and it may well be limited to the context of individuals training to enter the ministry.
The majority of states (and the District of Columbia) have charter school laws. Minnesota was the first state to have a charter school law and the first charter school in the United States, City Academy, opened in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992.
Dayton, Ohio has between 22–26% of all children in charter schools. This is the highest percentage in the nation. Other hotbeds for charter schools are Kansas City (24%), Washington, D.C. (20-24%) and the State of Arizona. Almost 1 in 4 public schools in Arizona are charter schools, comprising about 8% of total enrollment.
Charter schools can also come in the form of Cyber Charters. Cyber charter schools deliver the majority of their instruction over the internet instead of in a school building. And, like charter schools, they are public schools, but free of many of the rules and regulations that public schools must follow.
Magnet schools are public schools that often have a specialized function like science, technology or art. These magnet schools, unlike charter schools, are not open to all children. Much like many private schools, the students must test into the school.
The laws relevant to homeschooling differ between US states. In some states the parent simply needs to notify the state that the child will be educated at home. In other states the parents are not free to educate at home unless at least one parent is a certified teacher and yearly progress reports are reviewed by the state. Such laws are not always enforced however. According to the Federal Government, about 1.1 million children were Home Educated in 2003.
The United States has school choice at the university level. College students can get subsidized tuition by attending any public college or university within their state of residence. Furthermore, the U.S. federal government provides tuition assistance for both public and private colleges via the G.I. Bill and federally guaranteed student loans.
- "School Choice Virtual Yearbook". Alliance for School Choice.
- "School Choice Programs". Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.
- "Clinton touts success of public charter schools". CNN. 2000-05-04. Retrieved 2008-08-27.[dead link]
- Elliot, Scott (2005-12-02). "Catholic schools: Victims of choice". Dayton Daily News. Retrieved 2008-08-27.
- "1.1 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2003". National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved 2008-08-27.
- The ABC's of School Choice, 2014 Ed., Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, 107.
- Davies, Scott; Janice Aurini (Dec 2011). "Exploring School Choice in Canada: Who Chooses What and Why". Canadia Public Policy 37 (4): 459–477. doi:10.1353/cpp.2011.0047.
- Gulosino, Charisse; Christopher Lubienski (May 2011). "School's strategic responses to competition in segregated urban areas: Patterns in school locations in Metropolitan Detroit". Education Policy Analysis Archives 19 (13): 1–29. Retrieved 17 October 2012.
- Lubienski, Christopher; Jack Dougherty (August 2009). "Mapping Educational Opportunity: Spatial Analysis and School Choices". American Journal of Education 115 (4): 485–491. doi:10.1086/599783.
- Hoxby, Caroline M. (2003). "School Choice and School Productivity Could School Choice Be a Tide that Lifts All Boats?". The Economics of School Choice: 287–342. Retrieved 31 October 2012.
- Lessard, Claude and Andre Brassard. "Education Governance in Canada, 1990-2003: Trends and Significance" Canadian Perspectives on the Sociology of Education. Ed. Cynthia Levine-Rasky. Don Wells: Oxford University Press, 2009. 255-274.
- Bosetti, Lynn (June 2004). "Determinants of School Choice: Understanding How Parents Choose Elementary Schools in Alberta". Journal of Education Policy 19 (4): 387–405. doi:10.1080/0268093042000227465.
- "$5000 School Vouchers Would Give Most Students Access to Quality Private Schools". Cato Institute. 2003-09-02. Retrieved 2008-08-27.
- Salisbury, David (2003-08-28). "What Does a Voucher Buy?" (PDF). Cato Institute. Retrieved 2008-08-27.
- Murray, Vicki (2005-03-01). "Arizona Private Schools Half as Expensive as Public Schools". The Heartland Institute. Retrieved 2008-08-27.
- "K-12 Public Education Spending in Washington". Washington Policy. Retrieved 2008-08-27.[dead link]
- "12 million languish in failing public schools, report says". The Washington Times. 2004-08-29. Retrieved 2008-08-27.
- "OIDEL - A Presentation" (Portable Document Format). Organisation Internationale pour le Droit à l'Education et la Liberté d'Enseignement. pp. 1–2. Retrieved 2009-04-18.
- The ABC's of School Choice, 2014 Ed., The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, 109.
- "Free to choose, and learn". The Economist. 2007-05-03. Retrieved 2010-11-29.
- McEwan, Patrick J.; Martin Carnoy (Fall 2000). "The Effectiveness and Efficiency of Private Schools in Chile's Voucher System". Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 22 (3): 213–239. doi:10.3102/01623737022003213.
- Mizala, Alejandra; Pilar Romaguera (August 2000). Determinación de Factores Explicativos de los Resultados Escolares en Educación Media en Chile. Economy Series No. 85. Centre for Applied Economics, Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Chile.
- Private School Tuition Organization Income Tax Credits In Arizona: A Summary of Activity FY 2013. Arizona Department of Revenue, p.5.
- Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn et al. 987 U.S. 9 (2011)
- Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind Poll "Public Blesses Arizona Christian School Tuition" press release (April 4, 2011)
- Bell, Daniel (October 27, 2009). "GOAL to aid private schools, donors: Saturday is the deadline for a tax break to benefit schools and their contributors.". Rome News-Tribune. Retrieved 2009-10-31.
- Allen, Greg, "Tax Credit Scholarships Reignite Voucher Debate", NPR All Things Considered, August 15, 2012. Retrieved 2012-08-15.
- Georgia State Representative David Casas discussing HB 1133 and HB 325, scholarship tax credits, YouTube video
- Kafer, Krista (2005-04-25). "Choices in Education: 2005 Progress Report". The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 2008-08-27.
- "School Choice - Wisconsin". The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 2008-08-27.
- "Clinton touts success of public charter schools". CNN. 2000-05-04. Retrieved 2008-08-27.[dead link]
- Families in the 'Public-markets': School choice in the comprehensive school (in Finnland)
- What is School Choice? (in the United States), by the Friedmann Foundation for Educational Choice
- Special Report #125 on Education: Choosing to Succeed, by the Heritage Foundation
- National Center on School Choice, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee
- Society for Quality Education, an organization, mostly of parents, with the mission "To significantly improve student learning in Canada"
- National School Choice Week, organization dedicated to raise awareness and acceptance of the growing school choice movement across America.
- Alliance for School Choice, one of the largest school choice advocate organization in the US.