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A campus of choices

John E. Coons June 18, 2021

John E. Coons

Multitudes in the valley of decision

Old Testament, Book of Joel

Suppose that the legislature and governor of your state agree that some legal mechanism must be adopted to empower lower-income families to exercise their constitutional right to choose the specific school – public or private – they deem best for their child.

Assume also that these public servants have agreed on the forms of parental subsidy to be made available. And now they ponder the question of the forms of school that will be appropriate for the providers, public and private; each will seek to attract a share of choosing families sufficient for its survival, and probably for more.

The realties of the real estate market have, so far, scattered them wherever room could be found for each individual school. That probably will remain the case for these early years of choice.

I would here suggest a long-term possibility that might better serve the hopes of many schools and families. Steven Sugarman and I have long viewed it as a way of maximizing the choosing skills of parents (and our use of them) while perfection the schools themselves in the market that is to be navigated.

The concept is plain and fits especially well the demographics of the big city. It proposes the creation of urban campuses that consist of both public and private schools, each with their own style and mission (within the law). There would be relatively large schools in competition offering a more or less traditional general curriculum. Others, probably smaller in clientele, would focus more on particular knowledge and skills – STEM, social sciences, history, the arts.

The student would (probably) register in one of the more general schools; these would allow a degree of coming and going to classes at neighboring providers. Billy would be enrolled at P.S. 09 but can decide to take his music instruction at Happy Garden across the yard, then to Metric High next door for math.

Each school would be rewarded by the state according to formulas sensitive to the time spent there by the student and the cost and nature of the particular instruction. Time spent in the physics lab at Einstein High might be costlier than history at Ptolemy – or not.

Religion would be available. My guess is that larger, established faiths would consider having their own brick-and-mortar sites on the campus for the teaching of a full curriculum; but there would also be less ambitious, perhaps cooperative, inter-faith options.

The deliberate mingling of believers on the same site could be a most natural opportunity to better experience and value the humanity of persons who also seek the good and true but who see our relation to God differently. The atheist family would, I assume, enjoy the same option.

Will there be inter-quarrels and misunderstandings? Yes, and – from my own experience – personal reconciliation and growth in wisdom.

The sponsorship and management of such campuses could take diverse forms. Their founding might be reserved to the State, with statutory rule and regulation (hopefully designed to maximize the freedom of both providers and families). But, in my judgment, such control might be better left to private (for profit or not) organizers of individual campuses.

The concept needs up-to-date modeling of various sorts. I don’t expect, in my own time, to witness the opening of All Schools Campus No. 1; but the device is something to consider as we ponder the variety of our options to empower not-so-well-off parents as we have long managed for ourselves.

June 18, 2021 1 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Dan Lips Demographic Research Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Research Education Savings Accounts Education Spending Featured School Choice

Project Nickel: A new search engine to help parents learn what public schools spend

Dan Lips May 18, 2021

Dan Lips

The 2019 film “Miss Virginia” was based on the life of Virginia Walden Ford, a leading advocate for parent empowerment who has fought for decades to create new educational opportunities for children and families.

In the 2019 feature film “Miss Virginia,” a working mother in the nation’s capital struggles to help her teenage son escape a violent public school and leads a grassroots movement to rally parents to
demand new school choice options for their children. A turning point in the story occurs when Miss Virginia learns that D.C. public schools were spending more per child than the cost of tuition at her son’s private school.

“When parents learn what their public schools are spending on their child’s education, they begin to ask questions,” explains parent activist Virginia Walden Ford, whose real-life story inspired the film. “They think about how those dollars might be put to better use. They start wanting more school choice options.”

Thanks to Project Nickel, a new search engine created by Lincoln Studio in partnership with EdChoice, parents in most states can now learn exactly what their local public school spends on their child’s
education.

Armed with this information (particularly after many public schools have been closed for long periods during the pandemic), parents across the United States may demand the power to use their child’s share of school funding to obtain a high-quality education.

Project Nickel is made possible by the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, bipartisan legislation updating the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ESSA requires that states report per-student spending by public schools to the federal government. The Department of Education recently has begun aggregating and publishing this data.

To make this information more accessible to the public, Lincoln Studio partnered with EdChoice to develop a website. Project Nickel is a first-of-its-kind search engine of U.S. public school per-student spending data required to be reported to the U.S. Department of Education under a bipartisan 2015 law. Parents and anyone interested in what a public school spends per child can quickly get an answer by simply entering the school’s name.

As of May 2021, Project Nickel presents data from each of the 37 states that have complied with federal law and reported spending data to the Department of Education, which has published the data. The remaining states and territories have not yet complied with the 2015 law to report information to the Department.

The search engine currently includes data from nearly 50,000 public schools across the United States and will be adding more schools as the Department publishes more data.

New transparency about what public schools are spending has the potential to change how the public thinks about public education funding and the value students are receiving.

Many Americans underestimate what public schools spend. Fifth-three percent of Americans think public school funding is too low in their state, according to a 2020 EdChoice survey. But most people
don’t understand what public schools actually spend.

The survey found that the median estimate was $5,000 per child. But that’s well below the lowest state’s average per-pupil expenditure. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that the average per-pupil spending at public schools in 2017-18 was $13,800. This means that the average child who entered first grade in 2017 will likely have more than $160,000 spent on her education through high school.

Current per-pupil spending levels are likely to balloon in the coming years. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Congress has provided $190 billion in emergency funding for K-12 public education. According to Department of Education data, $63.3 billion of the $65.5 billion in federal funding awarded in 2020 remained available as of the end of February.

That means just 8% has been spent. Overall, state departments of education have an extra $120 billion in new federal emergency education funding still available.

Virginia Walden Ford thinks this new transparency about school spending will be valuable for parents.

“I am so excited about Project Nickel and its potential to reach parents and give them additional information as they make decisions for their children’s education. The question of education spending ALWAYS comes up, especially after parents see the film,” Walden Ford explained.

A growing number of states across the country are enacting policies like education savings accounts to give parents direct control of education funding. Greater public awareness about what public schools are spending per child will start new conversations about whether students are receiving a high-quality education from that investment, particularly after prolonged closures in many districts during the pandemic.

“Project Nickel’s search engine can help parents and everyone concerned about the quality of public education understand exactly what public schools are spending,” reasoned Virginia Walden Ford. “That’s a key step in building greater support for expanding parental choice in education and promoting equal opportunity.”

May 18, 2021 0 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education Choice Education Equity Featured Jack Coons

In a word

John E. Coons April 23, 2021

John E. Coons

A word spoken in good season, how good it is!

— Proverbs, the Old Testament

The various forms of government subsidy for parental choice of a child’s school have been pictured by leftist media, almost without exception, as a dangerous, politically conservative device. They stress that our modern hero of choice theory, the late “free market” economist, Milton Friedman, remains the patron saint of the political right; Betsy De Vos, et al., have remained his unshaken votaries.

Friedman deserves their eclat. His name still draws deep-pocket support for “right” minded think tanks, for whom conservative political banners are thus appropriate.

But is this libertarian connection so clear? Suppose that the proverbial visitor from Mars arrives hoping for wisdom to improve his own planet’s schooling. He is given a glimpse of a working voucher plan in our mythical state of Ohiowa. There, every family is provided a tuition grant sufficient to send each of its children to whichever participating school, public or private, that the parent prefers.

How different is this from food stamps? The two seem similar in many respects, including the paper qualification for the beneficiary – shall we say, the “school stamp.”

School choice can seem a social welfare program for those families subsidized. In addition, most such programs include commitments of various sort by participating schools which are meant to assure fair treatment of the family and child.

For example, voucher schools may be asked to set aside a modest portion of their admissions for random selection – even while remaining free to teach the religious creed or ethic of its own or to use some unusual method of instruction.

The Ohiowans would suggest that our Martian visitor observe and compare the school system of neighboring Montucky, a state which still sends the children of its poor to whichever public school draws from their neighborhood. There, our Marsman witnesses the more typical urban American schools that await the poor.

Returning to Ohiowa, he sums up and compares what he has experienced in this planet’s schools. “I guess you are all socialists; your states empower different adults to decide for the child, but I suppose that is still socialism.”

The school folk try to correct him, explaining that government money to subsidize parental choice is free market capitalism at its best, even though it is a creature of government and a free ride for its beneficiaries – food stamps for the mind.

Whatever these civic-minded individuals on both sides believe, it might be helpful to their conversation to find a common and more precise vocabulary to distinguish their competing ideologies. Both “free market capitalism” and its “socialist” opponents seem semantically unprepared for clear conversation about these complex phenomena.

The consequent confusion has its costs.

A major one is the long-term effect of the old system upon both the private and civic image of the self, forged in the mind of the conscripted student. It seems to me even worse than that predicted for Oregon’s complete elimination of private choice in the 1920s; at least that mistake drew no distinction among social classes.

By contract, our message to the poor – child and parent – is their essential and unique unfitness to govern themselves. It is an insult that parent and child alike may continue to accept and to affirm in lifestyle; it becomes their identity.

Of course, the “free market” descriptions of choice by the unions, et al., are assisted by many an untrue indictment. Among these are assertions, rarely true, that the participating private school retains total control of its affairs – secret and public.

The poor family thus hears that the more popular ones will simply not admit people like us. Such fables endure even among our intellectual “liberals” whom I have often heard struggle to justify the old system’s abuse of those same poor whom these same elite claim to champion.

Perhaps we need a new vocabulary to describe more appropriately and precisely the concept of subsidized parental choice. Among available nouns, I would move consideration of the European term “subsidiarity,” invented by the Vatican in 1931 and prominent today in the various international agreements of the E.U.

Simply put, formal government should avoid preempting decisions that could be made as well or better at a level of control nearest, first, the individual affected, then the family, next voluntary associations, local government … and soon to the State.

Applied here to our schools, the State would recognize the low-income parent as the natural and proper locus of legal and practical authority to choose.

According to the doctrine of subsidiarity … social problems should be dealt with at the most immediate (or local) level consistent with their solution.

J.P. Wogaman, Christian Method of Moral Judgment (1976)

“Subsidiarity” is 12 letters and six syllables; if there be a more appropriate and simpler utterance, I have not found it. The word would a least have the advantage of clarity in our debates about school choice.

April 23, 2021 0 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Featured Jack Coons Parent Empowerment Parental Choice School Choice Unionism

From where will common sense emerge?

John E. Coons April 2, 2021

John E. Coons

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”

— Macbeth, Shakespeare

Our national fuddle over the role of government (public?) schools during the pandemic is yet another throwback to the days of their inception in the 1840s. Their founders saw these conscriptive institutions as a mechanism for control and enlightenment of the children of low-income families, mostly immigrants, whose social and religions caste needed redesign.

What history confirms is that, while the specific ideology of the system was to change with the cultural winds, the public school has managed always to maintain its control over the minds and bodies of the poor, both parent and child. These remain the instrument of whoever controls the state’s “free schools” and enjoy their per-pupil tax support.

From Protestant patriots to John Dewey Nationalists, the Supreme Court and, today, the teacher union bosses, our public schools for the poor have ever functioned as a paternalistic intellectual dominion. As always, they serve the comfort and purpose of a controlling elite, even though these cadres have failed either to raise test scores or to achieve the civic enthusiasm of its drafters.

The advent of a Democratic White House has brought little hope of deliverance from the teacher union for lower-income parents, whatever has been their vision of the intellectual and social future of their child. To the contrary, the president for whom I voted has specifically endorsed the enduring vision of the unions with new money to maintain the conscription of their lower-class subjects.

Some today suppose that our epic indifference to the civic hobbling of child and parent shows signs of public remorse and possible repair. Indeed, states like Ohio and West Virginia have, over union resistance, taken surprising legislative steps to empower parents at the expense of the monopoly.

Moreover, there is a growing awareness that criticism of, and resistance to, our proprietary unions of government employees is something wholly different from the classic and healthy competition and compromise between employer and union in the profit-seeking part of our private economy. Incompetence or sloth of the worker in private business is hurtful to both employer and fellow employees; each has a stake in the survival and success of their joint enterprise.

As yet, there is no guarantee of a general reform that empowers families which are unable to afford private tuition and have come up loser in the charter lotteries. The charters themselves are under constant threat from the union. The Supreme Court, though it will annihilate the “Blaine” amendments, is not about to order vouchers or other specific remedy in the offending states.

And it is from there, our 50 “sovereign” jurisdictions, that fundamental reform must come. As always, the solutions will come out of practical politics and the awakening and broad engagement of those with most at stake – the not-so-rich family and its political heroes.

It is paradox, but fact, that the final rescue of parent and child could come, in large part, as a liberal enterprise.

Milton, enjoy the irony.

April 2, 2021 0 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Customization Education Choice Featured Homeschooling Parental Choice School Choice

Is hybrid homeschooling the future of Florida education?

Michael McShane March 23, 2021

Michael McShane

For those of us not living in Florida, the story we keep hearing is that y’all have kept your schools open full time while the rest of the country has shuttered theirs. That would appear to make the Sunshine State less fertile ground for hybrid homeschooling, as there appears to be a strong appetite for sending children to school five days a week.

Since many of you might not have experienced it, schedules have been altered in schools across the country to have students in class part time and at home part time to comply with social distancing guidelines. The practice has gotten mixed reviews.

That makes it a precarious time for the launch of my new book, Hybrid Homeschooling: A Guide to the Future of Education. If we just had our big experiment in hybrid homeschooling, and that experiment failed, maybe I should have written about something else!

To cut to the chase, I don’t think that is true.

First off, our polling has shown that parents are still super interested in hybrid homeschooling models, and are interested in the idea of flexible schedules going forward. But, more than that, the schools that I profiled in the book (that were traditional public schools, public charter schools, and private schools) were hybrid homeschooling before the pandemic started—social distancing had nothing to do with it.

Real hybrid homeschooling is not done on the fly or grafted onto schools that were built to operate differently. Good hybrid homeschooling programs need to be built from the ground up and designed from the start to foster the kinds of pedagogical practices that can make the most of part-time in-person schooling.

Hybrid homeschooling has a lot going for it. In interviews with families and educators, participants spoke of tight-knit communities, supportive learning environments, and a rhythm that better matches the needs of children. Families are more in control, and educators are real partners in helping children learn and grow. There is less pressure from day to day, as no one person or institution is solely responsible for what a child learns. The adults lean on each other.

But even if I am wrong, and five-day-per-week education will be the dominant form of education in Florida, that doesn’t mean that Florida educators can’t learn lessons from hybrid homeschools.

Any and every school in America should ask itself tough questions about how it uses the limited time that it has with students. Is it really making the most of every week, day, and hour? Is the school wasting time or energy with pointless busywork or administrivia? Are disruptions interrupting learning?

But more than examining what goes on in school, educators need to ask if their schools are in sync with the rhythms of family life and the needs of the young people who attend them. Are students, for example, pursuing a schedule that causes them to fill their afterschool time with extracurricular activities and then homework that prevents them from being able to spend quality time with their families?

And on the topic of homework, are schools assigning useful homework that is helping students better master subject matter, or are students limping through it after a long day, getting it done, but not improving in any way their knowledge or skills as a result?

Schools also need to think about how they work (or don’t work) with parents.

Many hybrid homeschools are tight-knit communities that foster real cooperation between parents and teachers. Sure, it takes some relationship management, and some grace and charity from both sides, but when lines of communication are open and there is a high level of trust between parents and teachers, amazing things can happen.

Students can be enmeshed in a coherent educational environment that bridges home and school, where educators reinforce what parents are doing and parents reinforce what educators are doing. While it takes work, such environments are amazing places in which to teach, as teachers know that parents have their back, and vice versa.

I am bullish on hybrid homeschooling. After listen to those who do it, it is hard not to be. But, even if hybrid homeschooling isn’t for you, it might be worth taking a page or two out of their book to make traditional schools happier and healthier places.

March 23, 2021 0 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Featured Jack Coons Parent Empowerment Parental Choice School Choice

Choice and the civic soul

John E. Coons March 19, 2021

John E. Coons

“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

G.B. Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

Shaw’s wit suggests the primary harvest of our “public” school systems for children of the poor and for their parents. We have only recently learned of its relatively dim outcome as measured by standard tests of basic learning.

This monolith of 19^th century design is, at last, damned by professional media for its dimming effect upon the intellectual, economic and social prospects for these children of poverty who are collected by the state with a warrant for their presence in a certain “public” school of the city. Like criminal suspects who can’t afford bail, these kids will stay here for rehabilitation.

The evidence of student learning today consists mostly of comparative test scores and their relation to parental social types. This much is no longer in doubt: Those lucky kids whom a lottery has delivered to mom’s chosen charter school learn more of whatever is taught; and this holds true whether the parent has any particular mindset or sophistication.

I am no statistician; I merely read the conclusions of these respected scholars of numbers and their significance. What I can hope to contribute comes only as a conviction of a long observer of this scene that the civic effects at stake in our wars over parental choice count more than any puff or decline in test scores.

These social consequences would be important even were chosen schools merely equal or even trailing in their scores. Our literature on this subject wants for insight that numbers alone can’t give – a sense of the long-term effect upon the souls and minds of those humans who experience intellectual and moral exit from the dignity and civic responsibility so dear to the luckier among us.

Shaw’s ambiguous tweet make us ponder.

For 59 years, I have written and/or taught the structures of schooling here and abroad and the roles of parent and child as I and others perceive them. Yet my experience as a middle-class human with five children, plus now their descendants, is still my best claim to insight.

It is limited and often flawed, but I trust it to be as reliable as that of other patriarchs who hail from the 1920s and claim some insight from experience. And, further, I can even imagine my message as common sense for old and young.

It is essentially this: There are two profoundly corruptive symbolisms in our making the poor family be the servant of the state, as we do. The device encourages a mindset in both parent and child that is (in manner, not content) faintly suggestive of that which Beijing seeks to secure among the Uighurs. Their child is to be made happy with a life of moral and intellectual suppression.

The American child of the poor shall, by contrast, be made happy by the state with no clear moral suppression at all; they will be assured that the good life is whatever one chooses for his or herself – but, of course, just so long as you remain good.

“Good?” But you just told me to choose the way I want; now you tell me always to be good to my neighbor. Just why must I do that when it gets in the way of my own plan?

Yes, okay, I’ll obey the law; one must. Is that all you mean? Outside of that, who is there to tell me what’s “good?”

In our public school, the mind of the American child of the poor could be, but is never allowed a clear portrayal of the crucial relation between human freedom and an authentic moral good. I will not here review what I think to be the necessary structure of that relation. My bibliography is full of the particular version of it which I would trust.

The second poisonous implication, and at least as corruptive of the social order, is the unsubtle message of the school system to the non-rich parent and her child regarding the role that each is being assigned to play in this society.

“Here is your status as parent: You produce the child whom you then shall feed, clothe and care for until we call upon you to deliver him or her to a school which the state shall identify, there to learn this truth that it teaches. You shall continue to provide for the physical needs of the child until high school graduation; up to a point, the state will leave you free to express to the child your own view of the good life.”

This reality is corruptive of the civic order through its enduring effects upon the minds and hearts of both child and parent. Watching their loving but decommissioned parents, the child grasps that “Mom and Dad must surrender without alternative; being a parent is a form of intellectual and moral vassalage to some higher order called ‘the state,’ which makes P.S. 22 the vehicle for its message to me. At dinner, my folks may fret at my report of the day’s lessons or classroom events, but they can do nothing such as finding another school.”

Parenting and marriage itself gradually appear as downside experience with very little independence and authority, and lots of grief. “Who needs it? Will I ever want to lose my own freedom to such a trap? Not as long as I can hang with a gang – and probably never.”

The parents’ own experience of impotence in the shaping of their own child’s mind has its equally poisonous effect upon both their personal and civic visions. To strip them of authority is a clear invitation to reassess their own identify.

“This society wants me helpless to shape the mind of my own child in the manner so precious to the rich. Oh well, at least it has spared me responsibility for whatever happens in the streets and the civic order. It’s not all bad; I will just stop worrying about it and enjoy whatever government has to offer poor people like me.”

Shaw has his point. This corruption of the civic souls of child and parent is the poisoning of society.

March 19, 2021 0 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Featured Jack Coons School Choice

Equality, equity and reality

John E. Coons March 12, 2021

John E. Coons

“I am equal and whole.”

A.C. Swinburne, Hertha

“There is but one law for all … the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice … equity …”

Edmund Burke, Impeachment of Warren Hastings

To my mind, it is sad that many admirable political writers seem to overlook the utility in this distinction, thereby turning the words into an occasion for media conflict instead of clarity of expression in our hope for the welfare of the human individual and the civic order.

The more conservative among them tend to regard “equality” as the only proper term for describing not only what is a crucial fact of human nature but also for the moral and political implications that follow from that reality.

The more “progressive” voices seem to see and embrace this distinction between fact and act, using “equity” as the civic entailment of the datum.

The moral and economic implications that these “progressives” then draw from this distinction are seldom my own, but their vocabulary seems the more lucid in describing the political issues at stake. I am envious of their corner on this weapon of ethical thought.

For a very long time in the last century, I tried my best to grasp a clear and distinct meaning for our revolutionary gospel of 1776 retrieved from the Middle Ages – the concept that “all men are created equal.” In 1999, happy after collaboration with my then student (ever since professor) Patrick Brennan, that hope became our book, “By Nature Equal: the Anatomy of a Western Insight” (Princeton, 1999).

There is, we said, a need for a convincing recognition and description of a factual equality of every ungifted, inexperienced, uneducated human being with the likes of Lincoln, Einstein and Mother Theresa.

No such message was evident in that recent burst of political literature (not yet defunct) that, for me, was a dangerous intellectual mess but which purported to speak for our human equality. I refer to that slice of the academy that sees equality as an attribute of the three races when taken separately as a whole. Seen thus as clusters, each population, we are told, had the same share of the dull and the brilliant.

What these gurus are plainly saying is that we classic and superior geniuses are to be found in similar proportions among Blacks, whites and Asians (thus the same proportion of dodos). And this was the equality of mankind.

It is my happy impression that view of equality as a declaration of one’s own superiority is in decline. By now, many of these savants may be entering that same stage of human deficiency that they have attached to their intellectual inferiors. It should be a comforting possibility to these now fading savants that some of us think them still “equal.”

In the end, of course, each human must be so in order to merit equitable treatment according to his or her distinctive individual needs, deserts and prospects. Here we encounter the ideal structure of human law viewed as the response to the universal entitlement to equity in treatment.

Each of us has peculiar circumstances and deserts, and the law is to be rationally ordered to sustain, reward or punish accordingly. Equality demands it; equality delivers it.

Brennan and I concluded that there is no factual equality among humans save in that one concept seen by the Founders as “created equal;” this is intelligible as the claim that we humans, however clever, are in our freedom and power either to seek or ignore the good, embody the same (equal) “right” and “power” to perfect ourselves in some ultimate way that is beyond our grasp in its entirety but ours to embrace in faith.

This very American conception of reality might best be kept distinct from, though necessary to, the concept of social and legal equity and rights. But is this even relevant to schooling and the curriculum? To me, it seems to be the first and fundamental question for the human mind—however one answers it.

And it is an inequity to deprive the equal human child of its challenge.

March 12, 2021 0 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Equity Featured Parental Choice School Choice

Attendance zone boundaries: Barriers to educational opportunity

Special to redefinED March 1, 2021

Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: Jude Schwalbach, a research associate in the Institute for Family, Community and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation, wrote this commentary expressly for redefinED.

For a century, public schools have been billed as the center of a community, with Friday night football games, clubs, theater, and arts activities. But not all students have access to these “community” schools.

Within school districts, most public schools have attendance zones determined by district officials. These “lines within districts,” as author Tim DeRoche describes them, mean all families that reside within the geographic boundaries of the attendance zone are assigned to the public school in that zone. These zones, however, often divide communities by race, socio-economic divisions, and social capital.

In his book, A Fine Line, DeRoche illustrates how much school zones can affect the make-up of a school’s community. For instance, students attending Mount Washington in Los Angeles during 2019 lived in a zip code with a median home value of $847,522. Mount Washington Elementary is ranked a B+ school on Niche.com – a school rating website – with nearly 68% and 75% of students meeting or exceeding state standards in math and reading, respectively.

Meanwhile, just a little more than a mile away, Aldama Elementary School’s student body lives in a zip code where the typical home value is $47,000 less than in Mt. Washington’s zip code. Niche ranked the school a C school, with only 33% of students meeting or exceeding state standards in both math and reading.

At the same time, each school’s number of eligible students for the Free Lunch and Reduced-Price Lunch Programs — historical poverty proxies—illustrate a marked difference in student body. More than 70% of Aldama Elementary students — nearly seven times the number of eligible students at Mt. Washington — are eligible for the Free and Reduced-Price Lunch program.

Depending on which side of the boundary line a student lives on, she will be assigned to either Mount Washington or Aldama — likely having a significant impact on the educational opportunities available to her.

Even though students who attend Aldama and Mount Washington are in the same school district, paying the same property taxes to support all public schools within the district, government officials draw lines around which “public” schools they may attend. This hardly seems fair.

The school zone boundaries sharply divide families that live literally next door to each other. Which side of the street a family lives on can determine the educational opportunities fostered by their “free” public school.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is all too common; families in cities across America, such as New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Chicago, to name a few, find themselves in similar situations.

For example, in 2019 the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee reported that enrollment in a high-performing public school and greater educational opportunities is often associated with purchasing a more expensive home.

The committee’s report found that “The average U.S. zip code associated with the highest quality (A+) public elementary school has a 4-fold ($486,104) higher median home price than the average neighborhood associated with the lowest quality (D or less) public elementary schools ($122,061).”

At the same time, the gerrymandered nature of school zones means that in many cases some children assigned to a poorly performing school actually live closer to a higher performing school.

For instance, children living between San Adreas Ave and Oneonta Dr. in Los Angeles are closer to the high-performing Mt. Washington Elementary — just a 15-minute walk — but are assigned to the lower-performing and more distant Aldama Elementary.

“No matter the goal, an attendance zone always creates sharp inequalities of opportunity for families who live in the same neighborhood. Some children will be allowed to enroll in the best public schools, and their playmates across the street will be excluded because of where they live,” writes DeRoche.

School zones can divide communities, shepherding children from different social and economic backgrounds into different schools. Such divisions are antithetical to the free and voluntary collaboration essential to American institutions.

Instead of assigning students to schools based on attendance zone boundaries, school districts should stop drawing attendance zone boundaries and instead adopt open enrollment policies, which would allow students to enroll in any school within their school district. Open enrollment, Heritage’s Lindsey Burke and Jonathan Butcher write, “effectively separates housing from schooling.”

However, Burke and Butcher note that even though 47 states in addition to the District of Columbia already allow some type of open enrollment policy, many school districts choose to not participate.

For instance, Alaska only requires that school districts provide open enrollment to students in persistently dangerous schools. By contrast, families in Florida can enroll their children in any school operating in the state’s 67 districts that is not at full capacity.

Expanding open enrollment to benefit all children would mean all children within a district have equal opportunities to attend public schools that are the right fit for them.

March 1, 2021 0 comment