School choice: Vital, but not automatic

Post-pandemic America is in a heyday for school choice, at least in red states. From Florida to Ohio to Arizona, parents can get new state subsidies via education savings accounts (ESAs) to choose extracurricular activities, support homeschooling, or pay at least partial tuition in private schools. 

Elected officials and advocates behind these new supports for choice will start a virtuous cycle—partial support for some choices leading to demand for universal and more generous vouchers that can pay for all a child’s schooling, leading to innovative and personalized models that attract so many students that school districts are forced either to upgrade their offerings or go out of business entirely. 

But despite this window of opportunity for school choice, growth is far from certain. Recent experience suggests that partial choice programs—those that support only students in some places or pay for only a fraction of school costs—do not reliably create demand for more. To the contrary, there is evidence that parents who are mildly dissatisfied with their children’s school often decide to stay put, rather than to upset their child, disrupt her friendship ties, and take on transportation burdens. Parents are more likely to move when they have high confidence in schools of choice, but they need to be persuaded.  

Many public and private choice programs have petered out, disappointed their sponsors, or generated enough opposition to prevent any such virtuous cycle. There is a lot to be learned from charter schools, which cleaned up their admissions processes and practices on student discipline and expulsion in response to charges that:  

• Schools hand-pick the easiest students to educate, leading to under-enrollment for low-income students and students with special needs
• Relatively advantaged families (even in low-income areas) are the quickest to apply to the best schools and grab all the seats, leaving much worse options for everyone else
• Schools find ways not to report test scores for students who would pull down their averages, or quietly expel them.   

There are also predictable and avoidable problems with ESAs and vouchers that pay only partial tuition:

• The tuition amounts are too small to encourage creation of good new schools.
• The families that can take advantage of small amounts are mostly those already in private schools.
• Some private schools raise their tuition and serve the same students as before the public program began.   

District-run schools can cheat for their own advantage too. But, the kinds of bad results listed above can discredit choice programs and lead to regulations, court orders, or funding caps that can block growth. 

Because public funds are involved, vouchers and other instruments for funding school choice are never purely economic entities. They also exist in a world of politics where discrimination, segregation, inequality, and unfair competition can generate backlash. Choice programs falter if they do not admit the possibility of  abuses, discrimination and bad performance. The hoped-for virtuous cycle of growth becomes a vicious cycle of disappointment and tightening constraints.

In this pro-choice heyday, real progress is possible. With the right kinds of voucher and savings account programs, families who most need choices can get them, and innovative providers available to be chosen.   But not every form of choice program can accomplish that. Advocates must not  fall for the fantasy that any initiative with some choice elements will have all the advantages of a fully functioning, openly competitive, information-rich market.

It matters whether public funding for choice actually pays full tuition, families have valid information, school cheating on admissions and student retention is prevented, and schools of choice get supplementary funding to serve kids with disabilities. Choice programs that are cobbled together in blind faith that everything will work out are self-limiting. They discredit themselves and invite negative political consequences for their programs and others.