School Choice Plus Student Based Budgeting: Destroys Public Schools in Poor Neighborhoods
Those who favor school privatization and school choice through the expansion of charter schools and school voucher programs frame their advocacy by privileging individual choosers. They assume that the mass of individual families’ choices in an educational marketplace will improve services for and protect the rights of a city’s children. These assumptions are wrong.
In a major 2016 report for the Economic Policy Institute, Bruce Baker, the education finance expert at Rutgers University, rejected the contention that the expansion of school choice will improve educational opportunities overall. Baker argued that what matters is the balance of educational opportunity across the school district: “If we consider a specific geographic space, like a major urban center, operating under the reality of finite available resources (local, state, and federal revenues), the goal is to provide the best possible system for all children citywide… Chartering, school choice, or market competition are not policy objectives in-and-of-themselves. They are merely policy alternatives—courses of policy action—toward achieving these broader goals and must be evaluated in this light. To the extent that charter expansion or any policy alternative increases inequity, introduces inefficiencies and redundancies, compromises financial stability, or introduces other objectionable distortions to the system, those costs must be weighed against expected benefits.”
Washington, D.C. is the latest example of a place where it is becoming clear that school choice for some children is damaging the overall operation of public education. This is the conclusion of new research conducted by Johns Hopkins University for the Office of the D.C. Auditor.
The Washington Post’s Perry Stein explains: “When D.C. families choose a school that is not their assigned neighborhood campus, they tend to select schools that educate fewer students CONTINUE READING: School Choice Plus Student Based Budgeting: Destroys Public Schools in Poor Neighborhoods | janresseger