RALEIGH — Don’t look now, but Colorado is about to become the next national leader in the emergence of parental choice in education.
On Wednesday, Gov. Bill Owens signed into law the nation’s most sweeping choice plan. Taking effect in Fall 2004, the system will allow students in Colorado’s 11 largest school districts to receive scholarships worth 75 percent of the cost of their public-school instruction (85 percent at the high-school level) with which they can access private schools. Only low-income and low-performing students will be eligible. And the number of students receiving scholarships is capped. Still, choice advocates say that as many as 20,000 Colorado children could end up participating in the program.
School districts won’t have to offer the scholarships unless they have a critical mass of underperforming schools. There’s another kicker for districts: they get to keep the remainder of the per-pupil allotment (25 percent for most and 15 percent for high schoolers) of every children exercising the choice option.
This doesn’t mean that choice won’t “cost” districts some money, as the issue is more complicated than simple arithmetic allows. For example, if only one student per class in a school opts out, the savings wouldn’t be significant as positions wouldn’t be impacted. But if several students in each class do so, the school could reorganize and save significant money. In economics terms, it is the difference between the average cost per pupil and the marginal cost per pupil. What the Colorado plan’s remainder policy does is reduce any (already modest) revenue loss on the downside, if only a limited number of students opt out, and increases the revenue gain to districts on the upside, if thousands of students choose private schools.
The Colorado policy will surely be tested in court, as every other tax-funded choice plan has, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in a Cleveland case establishes pretty clearly the constitutionality of such scholarships as long as they are designed to assist families, not religious schools or denominations. Already in North Carolina, students use state and federal funds to attend private or church-run preschools, to attend private schools offering special services (such as those serving the disabled), and to attend private colleges and universities, even pervasively religious ones.
It’s not that radical a leap to envision a similar policy for K-12 students trapped in low-performing schools. Colorado’s governor and legislature have decided to take that leap. North Carolina should be next.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.