A different kind of school-choice mess in DeVos’s home state of Michigan
When you think of school choice, it is highly likely you think first, or only, about charter schools as well as voucher and other programs that use public money for private and religious education. But school choice — ways that families can send their children to a school that is not their neighborhood district school — comes in other forms as well.
One of those ways is the ability to send a child to a school within the district in which a family resides but not to the one to which that child is assigned. That’s called intradistrict choice. Inter-district choice is when students are allowed to choose a public school in a district outside of the one in which they live. Some states have mandatory policies; others are voluntary.
The National Center for Education Statistics says that according to the latest data, from 2017, there are 30 states that allow districts to voluntarily decide to admit of students from other districts and 23 states that mandate districts accept students from other ones.
Some states have had open-enrollment policies for several decades. Supporters say it allows families the freedom to pick a school they think best suits their child and that it creates pressure on school districts to improve and ensure that students in their zone will stay. Critics say these programs work only for people with resources who can get their children to a different school, and some districts are significantly harmed when students leave and take funding with them, making it harder to improve.
There is no definitive research on how these programs affect students and the districts.
Jennifer Berkshire, a freelance journalist and new teacher in Massachusetts who is writing a book about the dismantling of public education, recently went to Michigan to see how it’s open-enrollment policy is working. Michigan is the home state of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who is a big supporter of all manner of school choice, having once said that traditional public schools are “a dead end.”
More than 100,000 Michigan students attend school in a district other than where they live. The outflow of students has pushed urban districts to the brink and spawned a competition for enrollment among rural and suburban districts.
Berkshire hosts a podcast called “Have You Heard” with Jack Schneider, a scholar of education history and CONTINUE READING: A different kind of school-choice mess in DeVos’s home state of Michigan - The Washington Post
