Education Choices: Like
an Iceberg the Challenges Lie Beneath the Surface
Executive Summary
Welcome
to the world of alternative forms of education and the complexities they
present to all of us: policymakers, members of the education community at all
levels and in all positions, and parents, guardians and adult caregivers. (For the purposes of this discussion on
education choices, the definitions of charter school, choice, home schooling, interdistrict choice, and voucher that are found on page
176 of "Michigan in Brief", 7th Edition, from Public
Sector Consultants will be used.)
The “EPFP
Education Choice Team” began its work intending to focus on the tensions that
alternative forms of education generate—among supporters and opponents of
choice. Upon immersing themselves in the issues, the Team moved to another
approach.
Education, particularly in
Michigan is now structured and funded differently than when many parents,
guardians and adult caregivers were in school. And it continues to change and
evolve. In order to ensure our children receive an education of the highest
quality, nearly every citizen must better understand the significant changes
that have occurred in the educational system and the new opportunities and
challenges the changes present. And, educators must understand what issues and
concerns prompt parents, guardians, and adult caregivers to demand choices in
educating their children.
The
Education Choice Team believes this is a good time to look at this issue. There
is so much changing here in
v
v
The
recent release of a report that suggests it’s time to revisit the funding of
education in
v
Ongoing
debates on appropriate caps for the number of charter schools authorized
v
Wide
discrepancies in the opinions of the outcomes of alternative forms of education
v
Debate
about the constitutionality of vouchers in some states,
National
laws and initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and the outcomes they
predict, are keeping education reform in the national spotlight as well. These
bring us to the fundamental issues that exist with respect to choice. Families
and communities need to consider what they really want: in a world of limited resources, is it reasonable to insist on either individual
attention for their children, OR do they accept the perceived cookie cutter,
one-size-fits-all approach to education?
In the
long run, each state, its school districts and families will be the final
decision-makers in their demands and responses to the realities of choice. The
above examples make it abundantly clear: the issue of education choice is ripe
for an in-depth discussion. This presentation
will only touch the tip of the iceberg, while many more elements of
"education choice" lie below the surface.
Assigned Reading
The
Education Choice Team presentation will require some reading prior to the
February 9th session. Below are those readings and the source for another reading from "
An effort
has been made to incorporate policymaking, networking and leadership in this
multi-faceted presentation.
Overview
The
recent Report of the National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education
(November 2003), funded by the
American public education in the 21st century
is far from the monolithic, one-size-fits-all system that its critics deride
and some public school advocates find themselves defending. The scale and speed
with which options have been expanding is surprising. Ten years ago, for
example, charter schools and homeschooling were
suspicious new developments that would surely go nowhere. Today, school
districts…use school chartering as part of their efforts to improve education
for…students, and six states fund vouchers to allow some students to attend
private schools. (p. 14)
The Continuum of Publicly Funded
Education Choices
The
National Working Commission describes a continuum of choice that consists of
eight levels of options that become more complex and publicly controversial as
the choice schools become more independent of the traditional district.
Although this continuum does not describe home schooling or non-public (private
and parochial) schools, it provides a basis for analysis. The eight stages
along the continuum are as follows:
1.
All
students are assigned to schools by the district--no choice
2.
District
allows some families to choose among district-run alternative or magnet
schools.
3.
District
allows all families to choose among all district-run schools.
4.
District
also allows families to choose some district-authorized schools operated by
independent parties (charters).
5.
Families
may choose among district-run and chartered schools and also schools chartered
by other government entities.
6.
Families
may choose among many publicly-funded schools, all of which are operated by
independent parties (charter districts)
7.
Families
receive vouchers but must use them only in approved schools that must employ
admissions lotteries and accept vouchers as full payment of tuition
8.
Families
receive vouchers that they may use in any school, while schools set their own
admission and tuition policies. (p. 17)
Many
would argue that
Below is
a graphic designed by the Education Choice Team that is one way of illustrating
the concept of the degrees of choice available, particularly in
Education Choice in
Michigan
In
As Arsen and Plank explain, Proposal A forced a dramatic
change in the way schools were funded by shifting the main source of funding
from property taxes to the State sales tax.
The financing shift was accompanied by a shift in
administrative and policy-making control to the state level. Decisions once
made by local voters and local officials are now made by the Michigan
Legislature. The changes produced by Proposal A have transformed
When
|
|
||
|
26 Authorizers |
PSAs |
Buildings/Sites |
|
8 universities |
149 |
173 |
|
3 community colleges |
13 |
3 |
|
11 Intermediate school districts |
27 |
27 |
|
4 local school districts |
10 |
11 |
|
Totals |
199 |
224 |
Table 1. Public School
Academies in
In 1996,
Public Act 300 was passed, permitting even more kinds of education choice
families could have within the public school system through the “schools of
choice” program. It allows children to attend other public schools in their own
and neighboring districts. Two-thirds of the 554 local school districts in
Currently
of the approximately 1.8 million school-age children in
Most
discussion of alternative forms of education focus on the options available for
children ages 5-18, or in grades K-12, for those are required components in
accordance with
Options
for parents of children prior to Kindergarten remain challenging. As it stands now, there is no school of
choice before Kindergarten entrance. If
a family wishes to enroll their child in a State of Michigan-funded preschool
program, they must enroll in the local district or a public school academy. Michigan School Readiness programs must
verify district eligibility in order to utilize funding for that child.
Several
alternatives exist. Universal Pre-K is a program that has been successful in
other states. It provides for preschool for every four-year-old (and sometimes
three-year-old) to attend a quality (hopefully) preschool program. There are
several scientifically based research projects that demonstrate that children
can benefit from at least one year of high quality preschool programming. Two
of these studies are well known: the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project, and
the Abecedarian Project.
Another
option often suggested would allow for the same choices offered to parents of
school-age children to their preschool children. This would provide for
efficiency for families by allowing engagement of parents via school
involvement, and would include but not be limited to, dropping off and picking
up children at one site.
The Choice Debate
The
National Commission on Choice (November 2003) report states:
At its worst, the public debate about choice is partisan,
shedding more heat than light on the subject. Pitting ideologues on both sides
of the question against each other, it is reminiscent of political campaigns at
their worst, complete with personal attacks and attributions of base motives.
The debate over choice is too rarely what it should be: a reasoned discussion
of alternative arrangements for educating children.
The most extreme pro-choice position is that public schools left to themselves will never improve and that market forces alone
are enough to produce both quality and fairness in education. Ideologues on the
right claim that public schools have become a little more than coalitions of
intransigent unions protecting incompetent teachers, recalcitrant bureaucrats
defending the status quo, and politically motivated school board members
worrying about the next election. To extreme choice supporters, anyone opposing
choice is doing so to protect their own political or economic advantage.
The most strident case against choice is that market forces inevitably
corrupt public purposes. This view holds that public school districts alone can
be trusted to work in the public interest. Opponents say that markets are
incompatible with the goals of public education, both because they always
produce winners and losers and because they systematically put the interests of
individuals above the public interest in education. Ideologues
on the left claim that choice and competition will stratify schools by race,
class and religion, while making them less accountable to the public.
(p. 15-16)
There are
many who are optimistic about educational choice. These people hope that choice
will improve the learning of students who have chosen, and that good new
schools will emerge that other children who currently have few options, will be
able to enroll in. There is also hope that competition may, in fact, improve
public schools.
For those
who don’t agree, the fear is that choice will lead to increased segregation, as
“people sort themselves by different kinds of preferences, that as competition drains students away from certain public schools, that those
public schools will plummet in quality, thereby hurting the kids that are in
them. And some people fear that as groups with more diverse agendas get to run
public schools, there will be more civic disunity”, and people from quite
different value systems will clash more. (National Commission
on Choice press conference
The
The
phenomenon of adding choice in
More
examples of the array of opinions, perceptions, levels of satisfaction, amount
of effectiveness and general impact that alternative forms of education are
having in
v
The
Detroit Free Press explored home schooling in
v
The
Commission on Charter Schools, Final Report. Chaired by MSU President Peter
McPherson, this Commission is sometimes called the “McPherson Commission”. It
was charged by a joint resolution of the
v
The
Michigan Auditor General’s Performance Audit of the Michigan Department of
Education’s (MDE) Office of Education Options (OEO) in June 2002 intended to:
1) assess the effectiveness of the State’s oversight of public school academy
(PSA) authorizing bodies; 2) assess the effectiveness of the State’s evaluation
of PSA contracts issued by authorizing bodies and associated applications; and
3) assess the effectiveness of the State’s administration of other selected
operations. The AG concluded that the OEO and the MDE were not effective
in their oversight of PSA authorizing bodies; that the OEO was somewhat
effective in its evaluation of PSA contracts and the associated applications;
and that the OEO was, for the most part, effective in its administration of
other selected operations. (
v
v The parents/guardians
stated the main reasons for sending their children to a PSA were:
v
Academic Programs – 47%
v
School Environment – 15%
v
Size of School – 8 %
v
Location of School – 8%
v Eighty-three percent
of the parents/guardians were either satisfied or “very” satisfied with the
progress of their children during the past year.
v Seventy-five percent
of the parents/guardians were either satisfied or “very” satisfied with their childrens' teachers during the past year.
v Seventy-one percent of
the parents/guardians were either satisfied or “very” satisfied with the
location of their childrens' PSA.
v Nearly eighty percent
of the parents/guardians stated that their children will return to their PSA in
the fall. (Eastern
v
An
EPIC-MRA "Kindergarten-12th Grade Education Survey,
v
The
The National Scene
National
research and interest in alternative forms of public education is extensive and
strong. Most prominent is the report released in November 2003 by the National
Working Commission on Choice in K-12. It that argued that
choice programs can be designed to achieve many of the benefits predicted by
proponents while avoiding the pitfalls feared by critics.
Composed
of thirteen members, the Commission worked for two years. It included high
school administrators, university professors, and scholars from research
institutions around the country. Its Chair was Paul Hill of the University of
Washington, who explained in the press conference presenting the report, that
the Commission was charged to “try to move the debate about choice off the
extremes, where some people claim that choice will surely do good, while some
people claim that choice will surely do bad, and into the zone where
constructive discussion can take place about what is it about the design and
operation of choice programs that might have good effects and what has to be
done to make sure it doesn’t have bad effects”.
The
Commission report cautions that positive outcomes require thoughtfulness,
careful planning and substantial financial support. Some of their
recommendations were that schools of choice make the following adaptations:
v
Provide
good parent outreach and information
v
Design
a fair admission system
v
Find
venture capital for new school buildings
v
Help
school teachers and leaders learn how to operate under conditions where they
have more control of the money, their programs, and have a strong and loyal
support from parents