RALEIGH – Following up on earlier Daily Journal columns about school choice in other states and countries, please allow me to direct your attention to two new reports that you might find interesting and useful.
First, the Washington-based Alliance for School Choice recently published its yearbook for 2007. It’s an indispensable guide to school choice policies, programs, and participation across the United States. Some key points to remember:
• There are now 16 major programs fostering private-school choice in 10 jurisdictions (nine states and the District of Columbia). The programs include vouchers, tuition-tax credits, tuition-tax deductions, and hybrid programs that allow individuals and businesses to take dollar-for-dollar tax credits when they donate funds to scholarship-granting nonprofits. The total participation in these programs exceeds 150,000 students, and has nearly doubled in just five years.
• Florida’s and Pennsylvania’s choice programs serve the largest enrollment (39,000 and 38,000 students, respectively, attending private schools with state assistance).
• Disabled students have been a particular focus of school-choice legislation in recent years, with five states creating voucher or scholarship programs serving more than 21,000 students.
The second report worth your perusal is a new study published in the Hoover Institution’s EducationNext journal by three Chilean scholars. They examine the pertinent question of whether networks of private or charter schools are likely to outperform freestanding schools. Many successful school operators, such as KIPP and North Carolina’s own Roger Bacon Academy, have branched out from their original schools to, in a sense, “franchise” successful models in other communities. In Chile, which has had a voucher program in place since the early 1980s, private schooling networks have been in operation for long enough to provide sufficient data for analysis. Some of the networks are church-based, while others are secular nonprofits or even for-profit companies.
As I and other Lockeans have previously written, America is actually an outlier in severely limiting parental choice in education. Most developed countries have higher rates of private-school enrollment, much of it facilitated by subsidies or tax breaks. The case of Chile is interesting in that it boasts both the highest performance (by most measures) as well as most market-driven education system in Latin America. Nearly half of Chilean students either attend private schools funded by vouchers (38 percent) or private schools entirely funded by tuition or philanthropy (9 percent).
Within Chile’s private-school market, there is significant variation among schools based on organization, ownership, and curriculum. In their EducationNext article, Gregory Elacqua, Danta Contreras, and Felipe Salazar present convincing statistical evidence for the proposition that networked or franchise-model schools significantly outperform not just government schools but also standalone private schools. The trio are careful not to oversell the effects of market-based school reform, but the effects they do find are certainly worth replicating.
Just a little soon-to-be-summer reading for those interested in fundamental education reform. I know that the General Assembly is busy working on the state budget today, but that’s okay – unfortunately, a majority of state lawmakers seem uninterested in the subject, anyway.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.