Each state has already promised every student a free public education. This includes every student currently enrolled in private schools or currently homeschooled. If tomorrow those students decide to go to public schools, public schools would be required to accept them and to educate them. This means states and local communities would be required to fund the education of those students. In other words, the state currently has an obligation to provide funding for every single eligible student in the state.

The only way a parent loses access to the funding for education is by expressing choice. We discriminate on the basis of choice. Parents of school children have the opportunity to receive public funding, but only if they sacrifice their ability to choose the school they want their children to attend.

I cannot think of another public entitlement program that removes the benefit when an individual expresses choice. Poor students can use Pell grants at the school of their choice. Veterans can use the G.I. Bill at the school of their choice, public or private. Welfare recipients who receive food subsidies can choose the place where they will use those funds.

Critics of school choice might point to healthcare programs as an example of government funding with limited choice. Some doctors or hospitals do not not accept certain government funding sources, such as Medicare or Medicaid. That is true, but notice the difference. In that case, it is the provider who doesn’t accept the funds—it is not the individual who loses it based on their choice. Many private schools would like to accept funds but are not eligible to. That is a key distinction.

When we tell families they are no longer eligible to receive funding because they choose to send their children to a school that aligns with their values or provides the type of education that they want, then we are discriminating against them based solely on their choice.

This is not a system designed to meet the needs of every child, but a system designed for control. It is a system designed to force people into accepting the education that the government provides.

It would undoubtedly cost a lot of money to provide the public subsidy to those individuals who are presently in private schools. But the only reason it will cost new money is because we have been discriminating against families who use alternatives to public schools for decades. We have denied them access to the public funding that they should receive. It is time to end the discrimination against choice in our public education system. It is time to end the discrimination against parental power and educational opportunity.

The post Public Dollars for Public School Students: Discrimination of Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

My post got a bit of attention on X (formerly Twitter),  where many took issue with my claim. For the most part, the objections failed to engage with my argument but instead proved my point. As one person wrote: “My fundamental objection is that you cannot take away funding from public schools. Do what you want with your own non tax related money.” That was my point. School choice opponents do not care about rich people receiving public dollars; they object to allowing people the freedom to control those dollars.

X, for all its good traits, is not the place for a substantive back and forth. Nevertheless, this claim that school choice takes money from public schools deserves some scrutiny. There are two issues to consider. First, it is not necessarily true that a school choice program will take any money from public schools. In a system that funds schools based on a formula, such as Missouri’s foundation formula, public schools will only lose money when a student leaves. This leads me to my second point—schools that lose students should lose money.

Missouri’s schools are funded by a combination of local, state, and federal dollars. If a school choice program funds students already in private schools, as is often claimed by opponents, this would not change funding for the local public schools at all. The school district would continue to receive the funds as determined by the funding formula. The only thing that could possibly be argued is that the additional cost of paying for private school students may lead to constraints on the expansion of funding for public schools in the future, but that is a downstream argument.

The only way school choice takes money away from public schools is when a student switches from a public school to a private school. This could actually lead to an increase in per student revenue for the public school as they lose only the state (and possibly federal) funding for the student but retain local dollars. Setting that aside, it is true that the switch could lead to lower total revenue for the public school. Once again, however, this is not the real objection. Schools always lose money when a student leaves. If the student moves out of state or to another public school, the district will lose money. The district will even lose money if the student leaves to attend a public school that his or her parents pay for. Indeed, the dollar amount lost by the district is no different in any of these scenarios than it would be with a private school choice program (unless the program was designed to take local education dollars).

Opponents of school choice do not argue public schools should not lose dollars when a student leaves. They only object when the student is equipped with public dollars (or tax-deductible contributions to a scholarship fund). The takeaway is clear. Opponents of school choice are fundamentally opposed to freedom of choice in education. They do not believe individuals should be allowed to spend education dollars on the school of their choice.

The post Do Private School Choice Programs “Take Money Away” from Public Schools? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

How would your family feel if your entire neighborhood had 5G internet access and you were still using dial-up? I’m guessing the kids might complain. After all, 5G is simply better, and sticking with an obsolete system seems like a stubborn refusal to change. That’s the situation Missouri families with school-aged children face. Just about all our neighbors wrapped up their legislative sessions by finally giving up address-based school assignments and letting parents choose where to send their children to school. We’re the last one in the neighborhood sticking with the outdated system.

• Early in their session, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed the Students First Act, which will allow families to receive up to $7,600 per year to use toward private-school tuition. The law is phased in, but by 2025, every family in the state will be able to use the program.
• Heading west, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed the Opportunity Scholarships Act. Although similar to Missouri’s Empowerment Scholarships program, this bill commits twice as much money and the scholarships are available to children statewide, not just in the largest cities as in Missouri.
• Over in Kansas, a robust public school choice bill passed last year will go into effect in fall 2024. No longer will Kansas school districts be able to opt out of accepting transfer students from other districts. Previously, each district set their own policies regarding whether or not to accept students. As of this fall, Kansas families can apply to transfer to a school of their choice.
• Oklahoma took an innovative approach to school choice in its session. All families in the state can now take a dollar-for-dollar credit against their state tax bill for up to $7,500 in private-school tuition. Homeschoolers can receive up to $1,000 off their state tax bill. And the tax credit is refundable, meaning that the state will pay families back if the tax credit is more than they owed in state taxes.
• Arkansas passed one of the most significant education reform acts this year. The Arkansas LEARNS Act, signed by Governor Sanders, gives families the option of having 90 percent of their state education funding deposited into an Education Freedom Account for private-school tuition and other education expenses. By 2025–26, all Arkansas families will be able to participate.

So, there you have it. School choice is not just happening in the far-flung states of Florida, West Virginia, and Arizona.  It is literally all around us. Our neighbors have figured out what Missouri hasn’t. School assignment by address is antiquated, it isn’t what families want, and it doesn’t work.

Imagine a school district as an ice cream shop that can only stock one flavor. They’re required to do their best to satisfy every student, so if most families want vanilla, vanilla it is. If some kids show up wanting pistachio, those can be tossed in. A couple of kids want chocolate? Add a chocolate ribbon. But now some kids want bubble gum in their ice cream. Does it really make sense to insist on offering a single flavor that turns out to be vanilla-pistachio-chocolate-bubble gum? No one wants that. There is no single, secret flavor that’s everyone’s favorite.

What our neighbors seem to understand is that it is better for the kids who need pistachio ice cream to get the very best pistachio out there. Parents are in the best position to know. And they may have a pistachio kid and a bubble gum kid in the same family. Try to please everyone at once, and you end up satisfying no one.

Over half of the 50 states now have mandatory open enrollment programs that allow families to choose any public school in the state. The number of states that include private schools among the options offered is growing fast. Missouri has neither. We allow charters only as interventions in our worst performing districts, rather than opportunities for districts to expand their portfolios. We have a scholarship program that addresses the needs of children in larger communities, but not rural children. Our legislature did not have the courage or determination to overcome their differences this year to bring even voluntary open enrollment to Missouri families.

Change can’t have been easy for policymakers in neighboring states, either. But they did it. Maybe it was out of a sense of fairness to children stuck in poor-performing schools, or maybe it was because they wanted their states to be attractive to growing companies and young families. It sure would be nice if such considerations would motivate lawmakers here.

The post Missouri Becomes an Education Island appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

How would you respond if you stumbled across a headline that asked, “How much do farmers markets cost Walmart?” It’s a ridiculous question. It presupposes that the customer belongs to Walmart; that any time the individual chooses to buy cucumbers from a local grower or salsa from an aspiring entrepreneur, he or she is “robbing” the dominant grocer. That’s just absurd. Yet this is the standard frame we use when talking about education. We blithely assume that education is wholly different from any other field.

Consider, for example, a recent headline on the Education Writers Association’s website: “How Much Do Charter Schools Cost Districts?” It’s the same question, and it is just as absurd as when talking about groceries. Worse, it is unethical, because it dehumanizes children, reducing them to economic units. In this formulation, neither they nor their parents are individuals with aspirations, endowed with free will and the ability to act in their own self-interest; they are a mere funding stream for public school districts.

This type of headline is all too common. Most people wouldn’t even bat an eye at it. But this isn’t just semantics. It gets at the heart of the way many people view public education.

It is only in education that we presume the customer is the rightful property of a specific supplier and therefore “costs” the supplier when he or she goes somewhere else. Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with the public education system in the United States: We presume the tax dollars that fund a child’s education belong to the public school district and the child belongs in a public school seat.

If, heaven forbid, parents want to use those education funds at a charter school or a private school, they must prove that “choice” works. We demand that school choice programs justify themselves by increasing student achievement on standardized tests, or increasing graduation rates, or fixing decades-old segregation issues. We would never ask the farmers market to prove its tomatoes are bigger and juicier than Walmart’s as a condition of operation.

It doesn’t stop there. A few years ago, one writer went as far as to say, “You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.” You can almost hear Snowball from Animal Farm repeating the mantra, “Four legs good, two legs bad.” It’s us versus them. We treat public education as if it — the system, the school district — were the ultimate good to be served. Just google “school vouchers” and look at the images. The internet is replete with political cartoons that characterize school choice programs as systematically dismantling traditional public schools, brick by brick.

Challenges to this concept are not new. In his 1958 book, Freedom of Choice in Education, Father Virgil Blum wrote that “our educational policy must be philosophically based on the dignity and transcendent value of the individual, on the integrity and freedom of the human person; it must be legally based on the Federal Constitution, recognizing the individual student clothed in all his constitutional rights.” We are no closer to that reality today than we were 60 years ago.

Our commitment to educating every child, regardless of wealth or ability, is a reflection of our highest and noblest ideals. What we do today in our public education system is a feat that was almost unthinkable even 100 years ago. Yet in the process of building that system, we somehow lost our purpose. Instead of the system serving the children, we now insist the children must serve the system.

If we are ever to change this, we must first change how we talk about public education. We can’t presume, as the author of the Education Writers Association piece did, that children and their funding inherently belong to the public school system. Do public school districts have less money when a student goes to a charter school or a private school? Absolutely — as they should. This is what happens in any industry when customers choose to spend their dollars at one place instead of another. More to the point, it is what happens when students leave a district school for any reason.

In the final analysis, we must realize that public education is not about the school system, but the students that it is supposed to serve. They have value. They have worth. They should have choices.

*First posted at the74million.org, found here.

The post Do Charter Schools Take Districts’ Money? Only If You Think Children, and the Funding That Comes With Them, Are District Property appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This must come as a surprise for readers of this blog, many of whom support school choice because it gives greater opportunity for minority families trapped in schools that are failing to meet their children’s needs. Sorry to break it to you! It turns out (or so we are told) that because some racists used school vouchers 60 years ago to try and thwart integration and some unsavory characters spoke ill of public schooling more than a century ago, school choice is forever tainted.

This is a terrible argument.

It is a terrible argument on the facts, which are either contradict the critics’ claims or are grossly oversimplified. (Not convinced yet? Even more detailed evidence here.)

It is a terrible argument because examples of racists twisting policies and ideas to suit their own purposes are everywhere: from the minimum wage, to federal support for housing, to labor unions, and even to traditional public schools themselves. Pointing out these examples is not a good way to argue about contemporary problems.

But more than anything it is a terrible argument because so many minority families want school choice and benefit from it.

The old lawyerly saw advises “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. And when neither are on your side, pound the table.” School choice opponents are doing some serious table pounding right now. Don’t fall for it.

The post Is School Choice Racist? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Time and again we see benefits from outsourcing public services to private companies. Yet, many fail to see how private school choice programs, such as vouchers or tax credit scholarships, could yield the same benefits. Indeed, the same principles apply to both situations

After my piece ran in the paper, I received an email from a former public school teacher who didn’t much care for what I had to say.  In his email, he asked me an important question: “What is the purpose of public education here in Missouri?”

In response, I had to ask him a question: Can you define public education for me?

Before we can begin to discuss the purpose of public education, we have to know what public education is. Our words have to have the same meaning. My suspicion is that the gentleman who emailed me would define public education as synonymous with public school districts. As I wrote in my piece “Redefining Public Education” a few years ago, that is not the case. School districts are not public education; they are a delivery method. Public education is simply an idea, that everyone has a right to an education financed at public expense. How we deliver that education can vary.

 A school choice system, in which parents get to direct public dollars to the school that they want their child to attend, is perfectly in line with this definition of public education.  

The post A Common Definition of Public Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Many public schools are unable to do all of this. To meet the needs of students, they often—to borrow a word from the business world—“outsource” jobs. Just like your paycheck gets printed by an outside company or your office is cleaned by an independent janitorial service, schools often hire a private company to manage the district’s bus services, to provide before- and after-school care, to cook children’s meals at lunch time, and to clean the buildings. Schools contract with outside healthcare professionals or private schools to meet the needs of students with special needs. A district can even contract with an outside management firm to run the school if they want. Some schools are even outsourcing who teaches your children, at least when they have a substitute teacher.

Filling all of the vacant classrooms when teachers are absent can be a challenge for school district officials. Some districts hire full-time aides who act as floating subs, filling in here and there as needed. Others employ a cadre of retired teachers, individuals looking to gain experience in the profession, or others simply looking for part-time work. The process of recruiting, hiring, and placing substitute teachers can be cumbersome. Rather than hire an assistant superintendent or other central office staff member to take on this responsibility, some schools have begun outsourcing this job to a private company.

In Saint Louis, for example, Kelly Educational Staffing provides this much-needed service to several school districts. As Dale Singer of St. Louis Public Radio reports, the privatization of substitute teachers has been a success. In Normandy, a district that has had many struggles in the past few years, “the rate of filling classrooms with substitutes had been in the 55–60 percent range”; with Kelly, “that figure rose to around 90 percent.”

Time and again we see benefits from outsourcing public services to private companies. Yet, many fail to see how private school choice programs, such as vouchers or tax credit scholarships, could yield the same benefits. Indeed, the same principles apply to both situations.

When a public school chooses to outsource services, they make a voluntary decision. Companies compete for their business and district administrators choose the company that they believe will best meet their specific needs. If the company fails to perform, the representatives of the school district can choose to take their business elsewhere. The same can be said for school choice. When parents have options, they are able to choose the school that will meet their needs. That’s the beautiful thing about a market—it allows people to voluntarily get the services they need.

We should celebrate when public schools find a way to better deliver public education by collaborating with the private sector. Similarly, we should celebrate when parents are given the ability to choose their child’s school.

While Missouri currently allows public schools to outsource just about everything, it does not extend that opportunity to parents. It is time for that to change. Parents should be given the opportunity, through vouchers or tax credit scholarships, to enter into the educational marketplace and contract with the school that is going to best meet their child’s needs. 

The post Outsourcing Public Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In a classic episode of The Three Stooges, the phrase “Niagara Falls” triggered a visceral reaction from Moe and Larry, which ended with Curly getting punched, slapped, and thrown to the ground. I am often reminded of that episode when I talk to policymakers and public school officials about school choice. Like Moe and Larry, they seem to have their own trigger word—privatization.

Many reject outright the idea of allowing public dollars to follow a student to the school of his or her choice—including a private school. Never mind that there is a long history of individuals using public dollars at privately operated pre-schools and universities. When faced with this proposition for K-12 education, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) said that is where he draws the line. Missouri Rep. Jeff Grisamore (R–Lee’s Summit) echoed his sentiment: “Public schools should be publicly funded and private schools should be privately funded, period.” Like the reaction to Niagara Falls, these responses are almost comical.

They are laughable because public dollars already flow to private institutions. Examples abound. Nixa Public Schools outsourced maintenance to Sodexo based out of Paris, France. St. Louis Public Schools contract with First Student, “the largest bus company in North America,” for transportation services. More than 100 public school districts contract with Chesterfield, Mo.-based Opaa! to provide food service for public school students.

Every day, school districts rely on private, for-profit providers to deliver services and supplies. Some even contract with private schools to serve their most at-risk students. Yet, for some reason there is strenuous objection to private school choice programs that allow individuals to direct their education dollars to the school of their choice.

Opponents of school choice claim that private schools are unaccountable. That is, they do not have to teach the state’s academic standards, administer state standardized exams, or comply with a host of burdensome regulations.

This argument assumes that the only way to have accountability is through government regulations. That is not the case. Accountability simply looks different in a school choice system.

When parents choose a school for their child, they essentially are entering into a contract with the school for the education of their child. In the traditional system, parents have little recourse if the school fails to meet that obligation. They can meet with teachers, principals, and central office staff. They can even take their plight to the school board. At the end of the day, however, they have very little ability to hold the school accountable for meeting their needs. They are dependent upon the school for change.

In a school choice system, however, the dynamic is very different. In fact, the arrangement between parents and schools in a school choice system closely resembles the contracts between public schools and private service providers. If Opaa! fails to provide nutritious meals, they can be fired. Similarly, if a school fails to keep a child safe or does not live up to the expectations of the parents, the school can be fired.

Choice is a powerful accountability tool.

Opponents of school choice like to throw out the word privatization as if it was a bad thing. Yet, public schools contract with private providers in nearly every aspect of our K-12 education system.

If the goal is to provide a world-class education to students, policymakers need to avoid the knee-jerk reaction against school choice and recognize that the private sector can help deliver on the promise that every child should have access to great schools.

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post Privatization in Education-Not as Scary as Some Think appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Kansas City Star recently ran a piece with the headline, “Private school provision could doom Missouri student transfer bill…” It certainly is possible that Missouri Senate Bill 493, which “fixes” the problems with Missouri’s student transfer law and creates a small private school choice program, could fail to be passed and signed into law. If this happens, the blame undoubtedly will be heaped upon the tiny school choice aspect of the bill. In truth, the blame should fall directly on the education establishment, whose all or nothing approach is bent on stopping school choice rather than creating an effective public education system for kids.

Saint Louis area school leaders have boldly claimed that choice and competition work everywhere, except in education.

In the private sector, choice does create competition in the marketplace. It works there. But is [sic] does not work in public schools, at least not in Missouri.

That statement was not made based on careful examination of the evidence or grounded in any factual proof. It was pronounced on the basis of protectionism.

Of course, the establishment’s opposition to school choice is not surprising. In 1975, noted economist Milton Friedman wrote, “There is no doubt what the key obstacle is to the introduction of market competition into schooling: the perceived self-interest of the educational bureaucracy.”

As it currently stands, the proposed private school choice program would allow students to transfer to a handful of small non-religious private schools that are located within the boundaries of an unaccredited school district. When I testified before the Missouri House Education Committee about this matter, I pointed out that state representatives from these districts were debating whether there are one or two private schools that meet the criteria for inclusion in the choice program. If anyone is being intractable or uncompromising on this issue, it is not the school choice supporters. It is the education establishment.

The post Education Establishment’s ‘All Or Nothing’ Approach May Kill Transfer ‘Fix’ appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Dr. King was a tireless advocate of civil rights and I am happy to say that most of my students could not even grasp the concept of discrimination based on race.

In recent years, many have begun to call school choice the civil rights issue of our time. This has led many to ask whether Dr. King would have been a supporter of school choice. In a 1997 article, his niece, Alveda King, remarked, “I can’t presume to know exactly what my uncle would say about the current debate over school vouchers and choice. But I know what principles he taught . . .”

Those principles have led her to become an ardent supporter of school choice, including private school vouchers. She writes, “Is it moral to tax families, compel their children’s attendance at schools, and then give them no choice between teaching methods, religious or secular education, and other matters? Is it consistent to proclaim, meanwhile, that America is a nation that prides itself on competition, consumer choice, freedom of religion, and parental responsibility?”

I agree with Alveda that we cannot presume to know what Dr. King would have thought about school choice. Nor can I say whether school choice is indeed the civil rights issue of our time. I can say that school choice works because it gives options and hope to individuals who otherwise might not have them, and opportunity and hope certainly are worthy of our support.

The post Dr. King And School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.