Parental Involvement Is Key

It’s a fact that parental participation helps advance academic performance. The question is whether or not parents should have the right to make the ultimate decision about where and how their child is educated.

Parents - who understand their children’s needs best - should have the opportunity to decide what the optimum educational environment is for their child. Opponents of school choice often presume that minority and lower-income parents do not know the difference between good and bad schools and that the government will make better school choices than parents. This condescending assumption ignores the evidence that poor or minority parents are just as capable as higher-income, better-educated parents of distinguishing between good and bad schools. The problem is that low and middle-income parents rarely have the opportunity to do so because 100 percent of their tax money for education is automatically sent to the public school system. Common sense, solid research, and years of experience tell us that, when given the opportunity, most parents in fact do make good decisions with their children’s best interests in mind.

School Choice Programs Improve Public Schools

Public schools have many opportunities to be more efficient and responsive to families, and public schools pay attention when school choice is on the table. School choice will introduce competition, which has been credited for improving the academic performance and curricula of public schools, stimulating greater responsiveness to parents and increased focus on students, while making public schools more financially responsible with the resources they receive from taxpayers.

For example, in Florida, site of one of the country’s newest school choice programs, schools identified as failing are already publicizing their efforts to improve by hiring more teachers, increasing funds for after-school tutoring and lowering class sizes. One superintendent, Earl Lennard, even vowed publicly to take a five percent pay cut if any of his county’s schools received a failing grade. Information gathered through the Freedom of Information Act showed that in Escambia County, site of Florida’s first two failing schools where choice was offered, officials responded to competition by providing tutoring on Saturday, hiring new teachers and requiring parent teacher conferences each grading period.

School choice has had a similar positive impact on public schools in Milwaukee, Cleveland, San Antonio and Albany. The Milwaukee Public School Board, in addition to closing six schools identified as failing, now guarantees that they will teach kids to read by the second grade or provide a tutor. In Albany, the introduction of school choice for every child in Geffen Elementary School led the school board to replace the principal, hire new teachers, and set aside $125,000 for books, equipment and teacher training. (Forbes, June 1997)

No study of American public schools exposed to school choice has ever found a decrease in the academic performance of public school students. Ultimately, children benefit when public schools compete because public schools rise to the challenge of school choice by focusing on the bottom line: improving student achievement and responding to parental concerns.

School Choice Will Help Middle and Low-income Families and Students Struggling in Public School

School choice allows all parents the freedom to select the best schools for their children, not just the wealthy parents that can afford to move to a better district or pay tuition at an alternative school. The current, one-school-fits-all approach can’t provide equal opportunity and denies options for the majority of children.

Some say school choice is “elitist.” But evaluations of the Milwaukee and Cleveland school choice programs have shown that the programs successfully targeted very low-income families, offering them opportunities that they otherwise would not have. The average income of families participating in the Milwaukee program was $10,860. In Cleveland the average income was $18,750. In New York it was $10,540. In D.C. it was $17,774, and in Dayton it was $17,681.

School choice is a life vest. Research shows that before transferring, the majority of participating students scored well below the national average on standardized tests. In Milwaukee, for example, children scored in the 31st percentile. In New York, children scored in the 27th percentile. A recent study showed that most charter schools enroll academically under-served children. Basically, prior to school choice legislation, students who later enrolled in the choice programs performed in the bottom third academically.

School Choice Strengthens Accountability

Competition ensures that all schools are ultimately accountable to those who matter most – parents and students. In a system without choice, parents are too often ignored. Sometimes parents must fight for years with stubborn administrators and incorrigible bureaucrats to try to get important changes for their children. By contrast, parents who have choices in education can “vote with their feet” by sending their children to a different school when their current one is not serving their child’s individual needs. Private schools are also subject to many of the same regulations as government schools and are routinely held to the same or higher standards of performance than public schools.

Public schools often lack real accountability. Many people, particularly policy-makers, confuse rules, regulations, and red tape with accountability. Although public schools must adhere to many laws, this fact has failed to make schools answerable to either parents or the public. As long as children cannot escape a school system that is failing to meet their needs, real accountability will never exist in the public schools.

Giving parents choices in how and where their children are educated creates a level of accountability that no law or regulation can ever match. Schools that fail to respond to parental concerns will constantly face the prospect of losing students to other schools that do.

School Choice - Other Considerations

Implementing school choice will result in a net gain in per pupil spending. Common sense dictates that if a child transfers to another school and takes with him less than half the funding that is spent on his education, and the remainder of the funds stay with that school district, per pupil spending will increase because there will be more money directed at less students. We’ve seen it happen around the country. In Milwaukee, per pupil spending has increased 38%, from $8,520 o $11,772 since school choice was implemented. Cleveland’s choice program started in 1995 and per pupil spending has grown 20%, from $8,000 to $10,000 during that period. And in Arizona, research shows that the state will save $10 million annually by 2008 due to its tax credit program. It’s incumbent upon the administrators to use these savings for educational purposes that will increase the per pupil spending average.
More choices for parents also mean more choices for teachers. Today, if a teacher believes he or she is underpaid, overburdened by red tape, not respected as a professional or otherwise treated poorly by administrators, the only real option is to leave town and move to another school district. This is because the same employer, the school district, operates nearly all the schools in the area. When parents are allowed to choose, schools not only will have to compete for students, they will have to compete for teachers as well. As a result, there will be increased pressure on school administrators to treat teachers well or risk losing them to other schools.
Labor unions and the education bureaucracy that argue against school choice do not necessarily represent the interests of children. Perhaps the strongest reason for them to oppose school choice is their financial self-interest. Unions stand to lose millions of dollars of dues income as school choice grows. Similarly, school boards and other education officials stand to lose some of their power and a portion of your tax dollars. Unions and administrators have their place in a working education system. But it’s not fair that the current system values them more than parents, teachers, and students. Until we empower parents as stakeholders, children as the focus of our efforts, and teachers as professionals - that is, until we enact school choice - we will never have the educational system that we want, deserve, and need for success.

South Carolinians for Responsible Government appreciates the assistance of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which permitted adaptation of a portion of its study, 'The Case for Choice in Schooling: Restoring Parental Control of Education' by Matthew J. Brouillette, February 2001."