About a month ago, I wrote about the pros and cons of school vouchers as a solution for “school-based sprawl” (that is, parents moving to suburbs to avoid urban public schools). I noted that a voucher program that included private schools might be expensive, since some private schools are quite costly.
By contrast, a school choice program limited to public schools would avoid these fiscal problems: the state could simply forbid public school districts from discriminating on the basis of residence. If a school district wanted to avoid radical increases in enrollment, it would have to use a lottery to decide which students were admitted. This plan might discourage sprawl by making prestigious suburban schools available to urban parents. And if both students from affluent families and students from poor families entered these schools, the class differences between urban and suburban schools might be erased in the long run. So such an open enrollment program might both expand student choice and be more egalitarian than the status quo.
This plan has one major cost: it would require a considerable investment (either public or private) in transportation, since students in search of good schools might wish to go all over a metropolitan area. Either government will have to buy many more school buses, or parents will have to spend a lot more time transporting their children to faraway schools. Moreover, suburbanites will be unwilling to pay property taxes for schools that other people’s children will attend; thus, states might have to take over school financing.
I note that most states have in fact enacted “open enrollment” laws allowing some interdistrict transfers. However, these laws are generally toothless; suburban school districts can generally refuse to admit students from other districts on the ground that there is insufficient space for them. Moreover, open enrollment statutes do not grant students the right to be transported across district lines, which means that students will not be able to attend an out-of-district school unless parents transports them.
The reason for private school vouchers is recognizing that the state has a role in seeing that everyone is educated, but education is also a religious function and that many parents recognize this. The GI Bill was not limited to public universities, and we were the better for it.
William Fischel, in his book on zoning, argues that one of the motivations for California’s Prop 13 limits on property taxes was the fact that in the ’70s, the state started trying to equalize funding between school districts. Once school districts couldn’t be treated as private property jointly owned by the residents of the community, the residents of the community did everything they could to stop spending money on the schools. I wonder if this proposal would have similar side effects.
I think the writer is conflating “schools” with “districts” -using them interchangeably – regarding choice. In many places, there are numerous school choices within one district. If you use private or public (non-school owned) transport, you are free to attend any school you want – within the district. The school district controls the money, and apportions funds as they see appropriate.
The problem is that popular schools are often oversubscribed, and neighborhood proximity often trumps other factors. A San Francisco-like system of preferences based on neighborhood demographics and local test scores would be ideal, but then vexes low-information parents. http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/17/anxious-parents-try-to-game-system-in-san-francisco-school-lottery http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Data-or-no-data-school-choice-isn-t-working-6324361.php
Where is the market in this proposal?
State and local governments have a duty to ensure that children receive a decent education – that doesn’t mean the government has to provide that education.