How Congress Left Behind Public-School Choice
Obama calls the new law a ‘miracle.’ Tell that to students no longer able to transfer from bad schools.
When President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act earlier this month, he celebrated the bipartisan support for the legislation—which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act—as a “Christmas miracle.” Miracle or not, the new law ended the largest school-choice program in the country.
“Public School Choice,” was the simple name for the program, and it was built into No Child Left Behind. Under the law, any school failing to meet performance benchmarks in reading or math for two consecutive years was identified as “in need of improvement.” Families whose children attended one of these schools had to be offered the option to transfer to any other district school that was not so identified.
The program had some obvious flaws. Some districts were so small that they had only one school in a grade level; and all of the schools in some districts were in need of improvement.
Also, the program was run by state and local bureaucrats who had little incentive to make it work well. Not because it cost taxpayers any extra money; public funds flowed with the student to his new school, along with the federal funds to transport him. Still, the program forced school choice on districts that might have preferred their traditional assignment systems—and districts had to send letters to parents notifying them of their options.
As a result, the actual offer letters to parents tended to bury the most important information—a choice to enroll their children in a better school, along with free busing—in obscurely worded form letters. Consequently, the takeup rate was never high. Not even 3% of eligible families transferred their children to another school, which is probably why the end of the program attracted so little attention.
On the other hand, state bureaucrats, under pressure from local school districts, couldn’t wait to end the program. The Obama administration gave them that chance starting in 2012, when it began granting waivers for states to avoid the most onerous aspects of No Child Left Behind. Without any federal pressure, nearly all of the states with waivers dropped the school-choice provision and another provision offering families free after-school tutoring. Enrollment rates began falling. Congress killed both provisions when it reauthorized the federal education law.
And yet this program, despite its flaws, was a big deal. About 48,000 students transferred to a better school when the option became available in the 2004-05 school year. Eventually the number of students who transferred rose to more than 165,000 in the 2009-10 school year. As more schools were identified for improvement the number of students transferring started falling, and it fell even more as more states got waivers. But even in 2013-14, the last year for which data is available, 27,126 children switched schools.
To put this in perspective, the Public School Choice program was, at its peak, more than twice as large as the largest provider of charter schools, the Knowledge Is Power
National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) Group:
1 in 5 charter schools not doing well enough to stay open
A group that oversees more than half of the nation's 5,600 charter schools said as many as
one in five U.S. charter schools should be shut down because of poor academic performance.
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019784379_charterschools29.htmlone in five U.S. charter schools should be shut down because of poor academic performance.
