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Commentary: 2021 is the year of school choice, education freedom

redefinED staff
redefinED staff

American Federation for Children director of research Corey DeAngelis in a Friday interview with Fox Business extended a “formal thank you” to the American Federation of Teachers for being the driving force in the upswing of parents who are investigating school choice options.

Union posturing, DeAngelis hypothesizes, can be credited with “pushing families down the path of school choice,” resulting in the exodus of 1.5 million students from the public school system this past year and sparking a three-fold increase in the number of families who are homeschooling their children.

Contributing to the surge, DeAngelis notes, 17 states either have expanded school choice programs or have enacted new school choice programs aimed at funding students and families rather than systems.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

School choice programs are an equalizer … We spend over $16,000 per student per year in the government school system. Why not give that money to the parents?

It’s time to free our children from the government school system and the teachers union. We should not have to rely on the decisions of the teacher union bosses … the decisions should be up to parents, and the best way to do that is to fund the student directly.

You can watch the interview here.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Course ChoiceCustomizationDemographic ResearchEducation ChoiceEducation PollingFeaturedHomeschoolingMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

I’m all in!

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

The advisory firm Tyton Partners has released the second installment of its “school disrupted” study, which takes a deeper look at the drivers and barriers parents experienced when making educational decisions for their children in the face of COVID-19 challenges, as well as how their experiences will continue to shape the way they approach their children’s education after the pandemic subsides.

Part 2 of the study includes estimated enrollment by school sector for this fall. Among families who have made decisions for their children, approximately 72% chose a district school, with 28% choosing something different. If the 5.9 million families who are still undecided break in similar fashion, district enrollment could dip to levels not experienced in this millennium.

The survey also measured parental satisfaction by school sector from the previous school year. Satisfaction with supplemental pods, in which students remain enrolled in the distance learning program of a school but gather in groups with adult guidance, posted at 78%, tied with private school satisfaction. Parents whose students participated in pods full time followed with 72% satisfaction. Satisfaction with charter and traditional public schools was least favorable, at 61% and 60%, respectively.

Additionally, the survey queried families who were unaware of learning pods and micro-schools on their potential interest. A majority across all income levels expressed interest in utilizing pods and micro-schools for either supplemental or full-time attendance.

The study is well worth reading in full. The results show robust growth in alternative schooling and home-schooling during the pandemic among those who have participated as well as from those who did not. It also shows a great deal of dissatisfaction with traditional schooling.

Put all this together with a baby-bust that began in the Great Recession period and I’m willing to go all in on the following bet: Peak district school attendance lies at some point in the past for anyone old enough to read this post.

Ironically, it was the very groups that accused their opponents of attempting to “destroy public education” that have inflicted this exodus upon the system they claim to support.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Course ChoiceCustomizationDemographic ResearchEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The haboob of the future

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

COVID-19-related challenges to K-12 education resemble the type of intense dust storms that are carried on an atmospheric gravity current, also known as a weather front.

Back in 2015, I studied Census forecasts about predicted looming increases in state elderly and youth populations. Based on those forecasts, it was easy to see trouble ahead.

Six years later, it’s obvious that trouble did indeed arrive, in some cases as expected and in others, in a different form.

These grim forecasts remain on track, but an unforeseen “Baby Bust” and a global pandemic threw in some unexpected curves. The 2020s were always going to be a challenging decade for American K-12, and the chaotic opening to the decade should not overly distract us from understanding the bigger picture issues.

First off, there are the short-run issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic:

Public school enrollment fell during the 2020-21 school year. Parents around the country kept their young children out of kindergarten. This fall, school may have a larger-than-average kindergarten cohort as students return and a smaller-than-average first-grade cohort.

Schools could accommodate this situation in part by shifting first-grade teachers into kindergarten assignments. This likely will happen in many places, but then again, signs indicate parents may have other ideas. Denver Public Schools, for example announced that applications for pre-kindergarten for fall 2021 have declined by 20%v.

Although it’s too early to get a firm picture on the data, many school systems may be headed toward a second consecutive year of declining kindergarten enrollment. COVID-19 vaccines have not been approved for use in young children. Although research indicates that the flu is literally deadlier to young people than COVID-19 and that school staff has had access to vaccines, many people remain concerned. As many as one-quarter of American parents have indicated they will keep their children home this fall.

Tyton Partners, an advisory firm serving clients in the education, information and media markets arenas, performed a panel study of enrollment decisions and education spending of a panel of parents last fall. Based on parent response, the firm estimated trends illustrated in the chart above for fall 2020. The closer you study these trends, the more dramatic they seem; large increases in home-schooling, charter school attendance and micro-schools.

Nationally, charter schools took more than a decade and a half to reach the same 1.3 million student mark reached by full-time micro-school students last fall.

Almost out of thin air, 7-million students, by Tyton’s estimate, attended supplemental pods last fall. These students remained enrolled in a pre-existing school through digital learning arrangements, but participated in small “pandemic pod” gatherings for socialization and custodial care.

Scattered formative assessment data from pods during fall 2020 have been released, and the news is academically encouraging.

An investigation of student engagement in Chicago Public Schools with distance learning, for instance, found that one-quarter of students failed to log on once during the week studied. Students “enrolled” in a system continued to generate resources for that system, but whether they actually engaged in any learning is an entirely different question.

The longer-term age demography challenge involves an ever-growing cohort of aged retirees and funding imbalances in retiree entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. At any given time, working aged people carry the primary financial burden of providing the resources to pay for the education of the young and the retirement of the elderly.

Much of the working-age population of the later 2020s, 2030s and 2040s just took an impromptu break from schooling.

The ability of American policymakers to sustain the social welfare state always has been a bet on the ingenuity and productivity of future generations. The pre-pandemic school system did far too little to instill confidence in this bet.

Shutting schools down and losing track of millions of students in the process makes matters worse still.

Our best hope for overcoming these challenges lies in an anti-fragile system of K-12 education that grows stronger in times of distress. Federal K-12 emergency funding, however, seems likely to simply preserve the past rather than bridge the way to a brighter future.

Bottom-up pressure, however, points entirely in the opposite direction. An entirely new sector of micro-schools has grown, home-schooling has surged, and state lawmakers have enacted the most far-reaching set of education choice bills in the nation’s history.

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCourse ChoiceCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedJack CoonsParent EmpowermentParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The powers that be

John E. Coons
John E. Coons

It’s the same the whole word over,

It’s the poor wot gets the blame,

It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure,

Ain’t it all a blooming shame.

— Anonymous

Little Susie doesn’t enroll in a particular kindergarten because that is her personal choice among schools; when she is a bit older, she may influence the selection of her middle and high schools, but the legal authority to do so is never hers, so long as she remains a minor.

But who says she even has to go to school?

The parents enjoyed that authority in most societies eons before American state legislatures, in mid-19th century, made school compulsory for every child, the term “school” entailing minimum requirements to be met by public and private providers alike. One state even tried by force to place all children into its own government schools; Oregon it was, and the Supreme Court found this to violate the constitutional right and power of the parent to choose the school.

So, the state and the parent each holds a certain range of authority. The state decides what qualifies as a school; the parent decides which one, be it public, private, religious – or home school.

So far, the picture of power seems clear enough; the state has, and employs, the authority to say, “Go!” The parent has the power to say, “Go here!” And so, off go the kids to their parent-preferred school. Such a happy democratic family story!

Yes, but be clear. This is not a case of liberty and justice for all. Justice, yes; the child and society both deserve to have, and do, the parents’ will on this, our young person, enriched by his close personal experience and affection. But “liberty”? Not so; the parents’ decision is an act of power. So must it be. The child lacks the experience to protect his or her own best interest.

Some adult human must choose – and best for the task is one who knows young Tom and cares. Who better could we nominate but that family member who has been close to and responsible for the child?

But … you know the next line. The parents, for varying reasons, may know and prefer a certain public school, but it is in an attendance zone where they can’t afford to live; or they may decide on a private religious school but can’t afford the tuition, though it is half the per-pupil cost to the taxpayers of P.S. 22.

Clearly it lies with complete strangers to Susie and Tom, with elites whose political ancestors long ago designed a system to “rescue” such children from the religious superstitions and lower-class habits of their immigrant families – Jews, Catholics and the like – thus to be redeemed by the true message of the New World.

In our own time, the legislators and governors of the states (today with hopeful exceptions) make this weathered system flourish, preserving the Victorian structure that collects and assigns children of the poor willy-nilly to their inner-city destiny. The teacher unions applaud and assure that the lawmakers don’t stray off course. All the while, the more comfortable among us here in suburbia deploy our power over Susie and Tom while voting for the very politicians who have disempowered the inner-city family.

Meanwhile, “the people,” that ultimate authority – in poll after poll – express their strong endorsement of some form of subsidized parental choice. Why doesn’t our “democratic” system reflect this political reality in an exercise of its obvious power?

Apparently, some subtle locus of prior control has it in thrall. I wonder what that obscure power could be.

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Course ChoiceCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedNewsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Frustrated by district bureaucracy, teacher launches new learning center based on students’ interests

Lisa Buie
Lisa Buie

Sapna Academy, brainchild of former district teacher Jo Lawson, offers student-centered learning experiences two to four times per week and is housed in the link, a 22,500 square-foot, high-tech community hub in St. John’s County.

Jo Lawson never experienced the stress of taking a high-stakes standardized test. The private schools she attended from kindergarten through 12th grade weren’t required to give the tests, which can be used to determine student promotion, teacher employment evaluations, and whether a school lands on the dreaded “underperforming” list.

After graduating with an education degree from Flagler College in 2009, Lawson began teaching in district schools. The idealistic rookie found the red tape and seemingly endless testing soul-crushing.

“I was just kind of thrown into this world and I felt very alone,” Lawson recalled.  “I didn’t realize the bureaucracy of a public school and how difficult it really is to get anything done.”

Lawson’s frustration reached a fever pitch when, after questioning the direction to administer yet another test, her principal admitted the only reason Lawson’s students had to take the test was because the district had already paid for it, and leaders didn’t want to waste money.

So, Lawson took a stand. Not only did she refuse to give the test, she put it in writing. Soon after, she informed her bosses that she wouldn’t be back the following year. She took a break to be a full-time mom to her infant daughter.

Jo and Justin Lawson and their daughter Juno

The episode convinced her that education, which she always had experienced as an adventure, needed to look radically different if students were going to succeed in the 21st century. Her epiphany, coupled with a desire to provide that experience for her two daughters, inspired her and her husband, Justin, to start Sapna Academy, a learning and tutoring center in St. Johns County that focuses on self-directed learning.

The center is affiliated with Agile Learning Centers, a rapidly growing global network of secular alternative schools where kids design their own education. It resembles the unschooling movement that began in the late 1960s that allowed students to focus on their own interests.

(You can listen to a two-part podcast with an unschooling expert here and here.)

Sapna, which offers experiences two to four times per week, is housed in the link, a 22,500 square-foot, high-tech community hub. With a mission statement of learn – play- think – do, the link offers co-workspace and serves as a business incubator. Perhaps its most impressive feature is the immersive room, a space that uses virtual reality and other technology to allow occupants to have experiences as if they were physically present.

“It lets you go anywhere in the world,” explained Lawson, who expects to use it for virtual field trips.

Lawson and her husband began their project by setting up as a limited liability company and naming it the School of Athens. While looking for a space, they met Raghu Misra, the link’s founder and an advocate of student-led learning. When Misra, an opponent of high-stakes testing himself, heard about the Lawsons’ plans, he was so impressed that he offered to let them partner with him and operate at the link as a nonprofit. They changed the name to Sapna Academy.

“Sapna Academy has a vision of providing different ways to learn” Misra said. “We want each person to feel like they can succeed at their own pace with the help of our knowledgeable instructors and state-of-the-art experiential learning tools that will provide them with unique experiences geared towards developing skills in areas they are interested in, all while having fun.”

At Sapna, students are divided into two groups, “Roots” ages 4 to 8, and “Branches” ages 7 to 18. Students are free to move between the groups if they choose. Summer programs, called “offerings,” include algebra prep, “The Art of Storytelling,” and “Getting to Know the Masters,” in which students study the world’s greatest visual artists.

“We might start with Monet and then let students do watercolor paintings,” Lawsons said. “The first offerings were driven by our passions, but we will add new offerings based on the students’ passions.”

In addition to virtual reality field trips, Lawson’s long-term vision includes guest speakers, yoga classes taught by a certified yoga instructor, and seminars for middle schoolers considering district high school career academies.

The idea, Lawson said, is to help them make more informed choices before it’s too late and they end up on a career track that isn’t the right fit.

“We want to help public school students, too,” she said.

The possibilities are pretty much endless, which Lawson said is the beauty of self-directed learning.

“My vision for my learning center is that children will take the helm,” she said. “They will be at the forefront of their education, and I will be there to facilitate it and to help them get on the right path.”

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AnalysisCourse ChoiceCourtsEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFaith-based EducationFeaturedParental ChoicePrivate SchoolsReligious EducationSchool Choice

U.S. Supreme Court to conference on Maine school choice case

Patrick R. Gibbons
Patrick R. Gibbons

Two states, Maine and Vermont, have devised ways to circumvent the 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Espinoza vs. Montana.

States can’t discriminate against religious schools because of their religious identity. But can states discriminate if the school teaches religious things?

If you thought this debate was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer, think again.

Two recent circuit court rulings say yes, states can discriminate against religious instruction. Lawyers for the Institute for Justice briefed the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month and are waiting to hear if the nation’s highest court will resolve this issue once and for all.

The 2020 landmark Supreme Court case Espinoza v. Montana was supposed to settle the debate over “separation of church and state” in publicly funded education programs. That ruling determined that, “A State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

Despite this proclamation, Maine and Vermont have found clever ways to ignore the court ruling.

Maine has been offering publicly funded private education through a town tuition assistance program since 1873. The program is available to students living in towns without an available public school. Students may choose to attend a public school in another town or attend a private school. That private school, however, cannot be religious in nature.

But just a few months after the Espinoza ruling, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the religious exclusion in Maine’s program.

The court got clever with the wording. The judges argued that the Espinoza case prohibited states from discriminating against the schools’ religious status, whereas Maine was not discriminating against religious status but prohibiting religious use.

In other words, Maine’s ban on selecting private religious schools was not over the school’s religious identity, but because the religious school taught religious things.

It may be a distinction without meaning.

Could religious schools in Maine receive publicly funded tuition if they did not provide the publicly funded student religious instruction? That is unclear, as Maine’s prohibition appears to be a blanket ban.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a similar argument in a case over Vermont’s tuition program earlier this month.

The Institute for Justice, which represented parents, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the Maine case.

“Maine is discriminating against students that pick religious schools and the High Court should grant review and put an end to such exclusions nationwide,” Institute for Justice managing attorney Arif Panju said in a press release. “By singling out religion—and only religion—for exclusion from its tuition assistance program, Maine violates the U.S. Constitution.”

The U.S. Supreme Court justices will consider on June 24 whether to grant review.

You can read the Institute’s Supreme Court brief here and supplemental brief here.

 

*Updated to clarify the results of the Vermont case decided on June 2nd.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Course ChoiceCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedParental ChoicePrivate School ScholarshipsSchool Choice

Commentary: Move to trash

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: This piece from Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, appeared recently on Education Next.

A crisis like a pandemic can spark unpredictable changes in trends and behavior, like widespread mask wearing in the United States. But it also can accelerate changes that were already underway but otherwise would have taken root much more slowly.

For example, working remotely was a relative rarity in early 2020; now many organizations may never again expect all employees in the office five days a week. And outdoor eating spaces, an occasional curiosity in some cities, have popped up nearly everywhere. Lots of cities and small towns have made it clear that they would like to keep this innovation even after the crisis recedes.

So too in the world of K–12 education, where some new pandemic-era practices are likely to persist for the long term.

Some of these are simple and straightforward. Using Zoom for parent-teacher conferences and PTA meetings makes life easier for working parents. Online curriculum materials rather than printed textbooks may also have staying power, since so many students have Chromebooks or other internet-connected devices.

Others are more complicated, such as recording a school’s or district’s best teacher giving key lessons and using those videos in multiple classrooms. That frees up other teachers to provide support and individualized instruction—a nimble, but politically sensitive, way to rework teachers’ roles and use technology to improve instruction (see “How Big Charter Networks Made the Switch to Remote Learning,” feature, Spring 2021).

But as both common sense and classic conservatism would submit, not all of the changes that have occurred in education during the pandemic are positive. And just as there are some innovations that we should strive to maintain in the post-Covid era, there are others we should leave behind.

Here are my top five—including several that are close cousins (perhaps evil cousins?) of more promising ideas.

To continue reading, click here.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Course ChoiceCustomizationDemographic ResearchEducation ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingParental ChoiceSchool Choice

American K-12 has been permanently changed by the pandemic

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

And these children that you spit on

As they try to change their worlds

Are immune to your consultations

They’re quite aware of what they’re going through

David Bowie, Changes

A district school superintendent recently told me: “COVID has kicked the education reform can down the road 15 years. I’m not sure we are all aware of the implications yet, but the belief that we are returning to 2019 ‘normal’ is folly.”

Wired reported this month on the increase in homeschooling during 2020:

In 2019, homeschooled students represented just 3.2 percent of U.S. students in grades K through 12, or around 1.7 million students. By comparison, 90% of U.S. students attend public school. But a March 2021 report from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates an uptick in homeschooling during the pandemic: In spring 2020, 5.4% of surveyed households reported homeschooling their children (homeschooling being distinct from remote learning at home through a public or private school).

By fall 2020, the figure had doubled to 11.1% … The U.S. Census Bureau’s survey indicates that homeschooling rates increased across all ethnic groups in the past year, and the greatest shift was among Black families, who reported a 3.3 percent rate of homeschooling in spring 2020 and 16.1% later in the fall.

Tyton Partners made another set of estimates based upon a survey of parents. Nothing looks revolutionary at first glance in these estimates, but look closer and you can feel the earth shift under your feet.

 

The Tyton estimates show a less profound (but still sizeable) move to homeschooling. You probably shouldn’t get overly attached to either estimate because the situation is very fluid, and we’ll know better in the fall. Even if the Tyton numbers are closer to reality, as the Wired article notes, the ease with which people can homeschool has increased, as have the incentives to do so.

There will be no putting this toothpaste back in the tube.

If the Tyton estimates are accurate, district and private schools will have suffered their largest single-year declines in history while charter schools, micro-schools and homeschools enjoyed large increases in enrollment, and supplemental pods emerged spontaneously to educate 7 million students. We see, for instance, a rate of charter school enrollment almost four times that of the average between 2000 and 2018. The shakeup likely isn’t finished.

The largest decrease in enrollment nationwide came from kindergarten students, with parents choosing to “redshirt” rather than enroll them in fall 2020. A National Public Radio survey of 100 school districts found an average kindergarten enrollment drop of 16%.

Assuming most of those families choose to enroll for fall 2022, schools likely will have to shift teachers out of first-grade assignments (where there will be fewer students) into kindergarten assignments (where there will be more). Which school sector they sort themselves into and at what rate also will be of interest. A back-of-the napkin estimate of the number of redshirted kindergarteners based upon the typical size of recent cohorts and the 16% figure would fall between 500,000 and 600,000 students.

The Wired article contains a point-counterpoint between a representative of the American Association of Superintendents and the Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars. The Superintendent’s representative makes the usual worried statements about money for the system. The Black homeschool advocate seems much more focused on the interests of students:

… Ali-Coleman, of Black Family Homeschool Educators and Scholars, warns against over-emphasizing the limitations of low-income families. She says that not all homeschooling families are necessarily financially privileged, either, pointing to Fields-Smith’s research on single Black mothers who homeschool their kids in spite of low-income status.

Moreover, adequately funded public school systems can still harm children of color: More money won’t shield a child from unequal discipline, a biased curriculum, or a pervasive school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately pushes Black youth out of schools and into criminal justice systems.

Sure enough, when you plot academic growth for Black students in the top five spending states – in order, New York (1); Connecticut (2); New Jersey (3); Vermont (4); and Alaska (5) – in the Opportunity Project at Stanford University explorer, only Alaska has a rate at or above the national average.

 

 

Of greater interest still will be Tyton Partners’ estimated 7 million students who engaged in supplemental pods. These students remained enrolled in another school online but joined small education communities to do so.

The Tyton Partners survey found 15% of parents made shifts in their child’s schooling situation this past fall. More change is likely on the way for this fall. In the medium to long term, the most significant change likely will be the availability of entirely new sectors and methods of education.

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