Checkpoint: School Choice Includes Funding Public Education

Klaus Vedfelt

2009 saw the introduction of the highly polarizing Common Core academic standards aimed at increasing the quality of the baseline American education and promoting an informed citizenry. Organized by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, the standards sought to differentiate themselves from average curriculums by operating instead as a set of expectations for student proficiency based upon grade level. Today, “forty-one states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have adopted the Common Core State Standards.” Unfortunately, it has been shown that the Common Core alone is insufficient in meeting such lofty targets; finances often play a greater role in influencing the success of an academic institution. Thus, many parents advocate for alternatives in the private sector such as religious schools and charter schools. However, advocacy of “school choice” and access to chosen educational institutions does not excuse government from its ethical obligation to fund a strong public school system.

Common Core

The Common Core is an initiative aimed at ensuring all public high school graduates would be qualified for workforce entry or prepared for ongoing collegiate education. Many parents and teachers nonetheless oppose the new standards, criticizing frustrations with the curriculum and the proposed frames of thought. Others challenged the federal government’s involvement in education at all. The adoption of Common Core standards allows for the comparison between states and their standardized test scores; NPR reported that “school districts that are well-resourced — and that have typically been high-achieving — continue to score well under the Common Core exams. But many districts that have majority low-income students, and that have typically performed below the state average, continue to be low-performing.” It has been plainly shown that funding and access to educational tools and resources result in better education. The implication of this variance in quality of Common Core education forms the foundation of the argument for “school choice”- that parents should have the right to choose where their children are educated.

Educational Variance

According to the Education Commission for the States, “There are two general categories of school choice programs: public and private. Public choice options… include open enrollment, magnet schools and charter schools. Private choice programs use public dollars to fund… the private sector… include vouchers, education saving accounts and scholarship tax credits.” Where charter schools do not require tuition for admission, they are established by independent bodies as opposed to state-operated public schools and thus are not held to the same instructional requirements. Private schools, in contrast, charge tuition and are focused on specific teaching philosophies supported by the parents- whether religious or secular. Magnet schools are public, but typically focused in a specialized field such as sports or the arts. This specialization is one of the key arguments of school choice proponents. A Fordham Institute headline notes, “Choice and specialization are important levers for parents of students with disabilities.” Where public school systems often offer a baseline Common Core education, specialized schools offer opportunities for students to hone their strengths and excel.

School Choice

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of public school institutions has drastically decreased in the last century- “In 1929–30, there were approximately 248,000 public schools, compared with about 98,500 in 2017–18.” However, the number has increased recently from 85,982 in 1981 to 98,469 in 2018. In addition, the number of private schools increased from 20,764 in 1981 to 32,461 in 2018. This increase in the availability of private institutions sparked parental interest in non-public education, and objections to federal Common Core standards accelerated further desires for such institutions. One common means of implementing school choice systems are voucher programs for students. Paid for by tax dollars which usually fund public education, vouchers are given directly to parents to fund tuition at a school of their choice. It is argued that the money saved in taxes would fund the rest of the student’s tuition not covered by the voucher.

It is easy to see the ways such programs could undermine their own goals and become engines for further restricted education and inequality of access to quality learning environments. Voucher programs would serve to further siphon money out of an already underfunded public school system, and force those schools into competition with each other. “A Wall Street Journal analysis of the data” regarding Milwaukee’s school voucher initiative “suggests vouchers worked best when enrollment from voucher students was kept low.” Therefore, school choice policy founded on the basis of voucher programs would be ineffective at scale. Further, because vouchers would not pay for students’ full tuition, high-income families would still have an opportunity to access elite institutions offering specialization and valuable interpersonal connections. Even if vouchers granted more families access to education itself, the quality of that education would remain in its current skewed and unequal state without a strong public sector.

Public Education

Despite access to voucher programs and additional options, many low-income families will nonetheless be forced to remain in the public school system; however, public school plays a vital role in the American education system, and many public schools produce high-quality educations. However, quality suffers from a lack of funding, and non-public institutions incentivize talented students to abandon public school systems. If such non-public and for-profit institutions exist as contrasts to public education, it follows that a well-funded and strong public education system will incentivize those schools to raise their standards further in response. The Economic Policy Institute states, “Extensive research has conclusively demonstrated that children’s social class is one of the most significant predictors—if not the single most significant predictor—of their educational success. Moreover, it is increasingly apparent that performance gaps by social class take root in the earliest years of children’s lives and fail to narrow in the years that follow. That is, children who start behind stay behind—they are rarely able to make up the lost ground.”

This research shows that access to quality instruction is a necessity from the beginning of one’s cognitive development. If access to non-public schooling will continue to expand, it must not expand in lieu of funding public education but in addition. The argument for parents’ right to choose schools misdirects from the ethical requirement that a strong public education system is necessary to incentivize a strong non-public system in contrast. Arguments against the Common Core include motivations for teachers to teach according to standardized tests resulting in stifled creativity, and low scores received on those tests regardless- a 2018 Business Insider report ranked the US 38th in math scores and 24th in science. However, “well-resourced” districts have been shown to excel under the new standards. Solving the problem of poorly funded public schools does not include abandoning public schooling as a concept; robust funding for struggling districts must be implemented to correct such issues and allow them to thrive.

Modern attempts at facilitating equitable education remain adjacent and insufficient. For example, the Secure Rural Schools program is an initiative that “provides critical funding for schools, roads, and other municipal services to more than 700 counties across the U.S. and Puerto Rico… as a measure to support rural counties whose tax base was limited by the growing amount of Federal land.” This “critical funding” program, paying for not only schools but local infrastructure as well, is operated by the US Forest Service, an underfunded department itself, struggling in the wake of the massive wildfires spreading throughout forests. Further, many lawmakers allocate rural funding from logging revenue, in decline due to increasing amounts of federally protected land and said ravaging wildfires, toward educational funds which are thus restricted as a result. Such roundabout means of funding education contribute to the difficulty faced by so many in accessing quality instruction.

Conclusion

Public school is a foundational educational institution for Americans across the country; failure to capitalize on this cognitive time period with effective schooling leaves irreparable damage on the student. Federal funding for quality education is not equivalent to federal intervention instituting the Common Core- where the latter is an attempt to increase expectations and standards, the former ensures that schools have the means of achieving said expectations. Where Common Core standards may or may not constitute an effective set of expectations, it has been shown that increased resources engender increased test scores and preferable results. If Americans seek to increase our international rankings, we must invest in a strong public school system. Regardless of tax revenues being returned for tuition payment, school districts must not be left to struggle for funding and be made to compete for resources. Whether school choice is to be embraced by modern education or rejected, government is not excused from its role in promoting an informed citizenry through effective and well-resourced institutions.