Of the nation’s school choice programs, six are rated “excellent” for how easy they are for parents to access and use in a new report from the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. Two programs received “poor” ratings.
The report, “Using School Choice: Analyzing How Parents Access Educational Freedom,” evaluates the process parents must go through to participate in the nation’s school choice programs, rating each program’s ease of access and use. It also collects, for the first time in one place, historical data on participation in school choice programs.
“Where parents cannot exercise school choice without taking on burdens and coping with uncertainty, they are being denied real choice,” said Greg Forster, Ph.D., author of the report and senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation. “We wanted to analyze just how much choice for parents these programs allow.”
Key findings include:
* The Milwaukee voucher program has unusually extensive participation (21 percent of eligible students). After an injunction arising from a court challenge ended in 1998, the program underwent the sharpest growth of any school choice program in the country.
* The A+ voucher program in Florida began with relatively strong participation (7 percent) but has seen a steady decline. Current participation is low (2 percent). The most likely cause is the extraordinarily short application period; most parents probably do not know until it is too late that they must apply within two weeks of learning their schools are eligible.
* Washington D.C.’s voucher program has low participation (2 percent). The program also is unusually difficult to join; parents must appear in person to apply and must fill out an application that runs 17 pages.
* The only voucher-type programs with participation greater than Milwaukee’s are the century-old town tuitioning programs in Maine and Vermont (43 percent and 52 percent, respectively). For eligible families, participating in private school choice is just as easy as attending a public school.
* Cleveland’s voucher program has robust participation (8 percent) even though until this year students had to enroll by third grade or lose eligibility.
* Voucher programs for disabled students have seen strong growth in participation. Florida’s McKay program has grown from 0.3 percent of eligible students to 4 percent; Ohio’s much smaller voucher program for autistic students also serves 4 percent of eligible students.
“We haven’t always been vigilant against hostile bureaucrats imposing regulations on these programs,” said Forster. “That’s a quick way for the government school monopoly to deny families a real choice.”
Six programs—Milwaukee vouchers, Maine and Vermont town tuitioning, Arizona tax-funded scholarships, Illinois personal tax credits and Iowa personal tax credits—received “excellent” ratings. Two programs—Florida A+ vouchers and Washington D.C. vouchers—received “poor” ratings.
“Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman came up with the voucher concept 50 years ago,” said Robert Enlow, executive director of the Friedman Foundation. “Yet, school vouchers are often viewed by the media as if all programs were the same. In reality, there is a great deal of variation in how accessible these programs are for parents.”
Read the full report, here