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The fate of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which serves more than 107,000 low-income students, is being threatened by litigation and political uncertainty. Before taking any drastic measures, policymakers should listen to the families benefiting from the scholarships.

EdChoice’s newly released survey of Florida scholarship families (the largest ever conducted of participants in a school choice program)—combined with research showing that the scholarships improve outcomes and save money—show why the scholarship program deserves to be expanded, not eliminated.

Enacted in 2001, the program offers tax credits to corporate donors to encourage contributions to nonprofit scholarship organizations, such as Step Up for Students, which help disadvantaged children gain access to schools that are the right fit for them.

The scholarships are benefiting some of the most disadvantaged students in the state. During the 2017–18 academic year, the scholarship families’ average household income was $25,362, just 8.2 percent above the federal poverty level after adjusting for family size. More than half of the scholarship students live with one parent and three-quarters are non-white. Moreover, the state-mandated annual reports have consistently found that, far from “creaming,” the scholarship program attracts students who score lower on standardized exams than their demographic peers before entering the program. Yet after receiving a scholarship, these students perform at the national average on standardized tests, outscoring their demographic peers.

In the new survey, nine out of 10 parents expressed satisfaction with the school their child attends using a scholarship. They’re right to be happy. Not only are the scholarship students performing better, a 2017 study by the Urban Institute found that the scholarship program boosted college enrollment rates by about 15 percent. The benefit of the scholarships increased the longer a student participated in the program. Students who had used scholarships for four or more years were as much as 46 percent more likely to enroll in college than non-participating students.

But what parents desire most out of their child’s school is something that district schools generally will not—or cannot—provide: religious and moral instruction. When asked to list the top three factors they considered when selecting a school, the top factors were religious environment/instruction (66%) and morals/character/values instruction (52%). Even more than producing good students, parents want schools that produce students who are good.

The scholarships also appear to be having a salutary effect on parental engagement. Among survey respondents whose child was previously enrolled in a public district or charter school, most parents reported engaging in a variety of education-related activities more often after receiving a scholarship, including: communicating with teachers (77%), participating in school activities (72%), volunteering or doing community service (63%), reading to their child (57%), using an online educational resource such as Khan Academy (56%), and working on math homework with their child (52%).

Eliminating the program would mean ripping educational opportunities away from tens of thousands of children. When asked what they would do if the program did not exist, more than seven in ten said that they would have to enroll their child in some type of public school.

That means an end to the program would likely also entail a massive and costly influx of students that the district school system is ill-equipped to handle. Florida school districts currently spend about $9,000 per pupil on average. If just 70,000 of the more than 107,000 scholarship students switch to a public school, it could cost taxpayers north of $630 million—and that’s without factoring in the cost to build or acquire new facilities necessary to hold all the new students.

By contrast, the scholarship program saves money. In 2010, Florida’s nonpartisan Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability estimated that for every $1 in forgone revenue, state taxpayers saved $1.44 in reduced expenditures. A more recent analysis by EdChoice estimated that each scholarship student saves taxpayers between $1,122 and $1,658, or about $372 million to $550 million in cumulative savings from the program’s inception through 2013-14.

Few policies can boast a greater than 90 percent level of satisfaction. Even fewer can claim to do so while saving money. Florida’s tax-credit scholarships do both. But most importantly, they expand educational options for those who otherwise would not have many. True advocates of public education should embrace the scholarship program and the children it serves.

-Jason Bedrick and Lindsey Burke

Jason Bedrick is the director of policy at EdChoice. Lindsey Burke, PhD, is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy and Will Skillman Fellow in Education. They are the authors of “Surveying Florida Scholarship Families: Experiences and Satisfaction with Florida’s Tax-Credit Scholarship Program.”

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This girl’s unfortunate death is part of a worrisome uptick in the rate of teen suicides, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report has increased 30 percent for teenage boys in the last 40 years and has doubled for teenage girls. While some studies suggest that bullying in U.S. schools is on the decline, bullying rates are still high—according to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), between one-quarter and one-third of students say they have been bullied. Moreover, bullying not only seems to affect suicide rates, but dropout rates as well.

In light of these statistics, we began to wonder whether offering students additional educational options might reduce bullying and its tragic outcomes. Does a system that historically has assigned students to schools based on where they live and not what they need effectively trap some of them in dangerous situations where they cannot escape their tormentors?

Providing an Escape Hatch

We fully recognize the sensitive nature of this topic—and debated writing this article—but ultimately decided that the best voices to answer that question would be those parents who routinely reach out to EdChoice to share their students’ stories. The parents featured in this story have agreed to share their comments publicly to raise awareness about this important issue.

Recently, one mother from Georgia sent EdChoice a heartbreaking letter asking about school choice options in her area. She was seeking to change schools because of the effects of bullying on her daughter, who suffered panic attacks on the way to school and required medication to handle her severe anxiety.

“These kids are tormenting her,” she said, “She has always been a very funny child with a great personality… She is so traumatized that she will not go to the grocery store or any other store with me because she’s scared she will see a child from her class. She begs me every day to put her into another school.”

Another mother from Pennsylvania wrote to EdChoice looking for information on school choice programs because her son faced “relentless bullying” and had recently received “a threat from another student to harm him.”

When the district school proved unable to protect her child, she and her husband made the difficult decision to pull their child from school. “To have the peace of mind that he is safe, we will make sacrifices to pay his tuition,” the mother wrote, though the financial hardship was a significant strain.

Fortunately, Georgia and Pennsylvania have tax-credit scholarship programs that help families like these afford private school tuition and rescue their children from terrible situations.

Voices and Choices

Are parents right to seek refuge in private schools? What does the evidence say about bullying in public versus private schools?

It appears that private schools have more robust anti-bullying programs, have students who are more likely to report bullying and yet fewer reported instances of bullying.

Why do bullying rates appear lower and responsiveness to bullying higher in private schools? We can speculate that when schools are selected by their students, they are more responsive to their needs and to family feedback. We do know for a fact that parents and students who are using the K–12 voucher program in Washington, D.C., believe their private schools are much safer, and parents often list safety as a top reason for choosing a private school.

Obviously, no parent wants to send her children to a school where they feel unsafe, and we are certain public school employees want the best for their students. But at the end of the day, a school system where students are assigned by geographic boundaries simply cannot have all the right answers for every child—and the results can be heartbreaking.

We are not here to pit public schools against private schools against other schooling types. We take a different approach: What might our communities’ schools—whether public, private or otherwise—learn from one another?

Private schools are on average half the size of public schools, potentially making them more attentive to the situations of individual students. Another possible reason private schools might have fewer instances of bullying is that private schools often find it easier than public schools to create a strong school culture centered on common values of members.

This is not to say school culture is lacking in all public schools, but it is easier to build a school culture when parents actively opt in rather than when their children are enrolled by default. As Michael Godsey wrote in The Atlantic, explaining why he—a public school teacher—enrolled his child in a private school, “if the parents are paying tuition at an independent school—one that advertises an alternative approach to education and promotes a ‘love of learning’ as its cornerstone—they are publicly claiming a stake in a specific curriculum and pedagogy.”

Private schools also have more freedom to inculcate values. As the authors of a study finding lower rates of anti-Jewish views among private school graduates than public school graduates noted, “private school teachers can lead meaningful discussions about sensitive topics, whereas public schools are constrained by rigid neutrality and are particularly sensitive to matters of religion.”

Whatever the cause, studies of the effect of school choice programs on the level of political tolerance among students consistently find that participating students display as much and often more tolerance than nonparticipating students. These studies generally measure political tolerance by asking respondents to think of the group they like the least, and then asking them whether they believe members of that group should be allowed to speak freely, march, vote, run for office, etc. School choice students are more likely to extend political tolerance even to groups they dislike.

Although these studies do not directly measure the effect on rates of bullying, it is not hard to imagine that students who are more tolerant of other groups are less likely to bully them. Indeed, a study by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network found that LGBTQ+ students were significantly less likely to experience verbal or physical harassment or physical abuse in private schools than in public schools.

That is why we believe the strongest way school choice can help alleviate bullying lies in expanding access to parents so they can choose schools where their children feel comfortable and accepted—and parents are empowered to speak up when they find their children bullied. When you know you have choice, you are more likely to demand good service from your existing provider.

Voting or Voting with Your Feet?

Of course, there are those who argue that empowering parents to leave a school if it is the wrong fit—for example, if a student is being bullied—undermines a community’s ability to address and resolve the situation by working together democratically. Instead of voting with their feet, they argue, parents should band together and use their collective voices to change the system.

While this is a noble idea, we already know that few families and students actually report bullying. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, school officials are notified in fewer than four in 10 cases of bullying. And even when they are notified, they often appear to lack the ability or the will to address the situation. Last month, the New York Times reported that a bullied 12-year-old attempted to take his own life at the same Bronx district school where a bullied teen recently stabbed one of his tormentors to death. Their reporting uncovered that the school was “place where students felt increasingly unsafe and parents said administrators failed to address their concerns,” and students believed that “they had to fend for themselves.” According to the Times:

One mother said that when she told school officials that students were pulling her daughter’s hair, they suggested she wear her hair in a bun. Another said she took her daughter out of the elementary school in the building after a high school student — Wildlife has a middle and high school — exposed himself to her daughter in the stairwell. Parents requested additional security, and when they were denied, they started patrolling the halls themselves.

The boy who tried to commit suicide at Wildlife said that he told a dean, the school social worker and the principal that he was being tormented, but ultimately, all that did was make the bullying worse.

Instead of hoping that they speak up – or that school officials will take their pleas seriously when they do – why not give them the option to get out? This puts the leverage in their hands and allows them to walk away from a dangerous situation without having to convince their peers that something is wrong—or waiting until it’s too late.

Student bullying and suicide are beyond tragic. We should be doing every single thing in our power to prevent them. Educational choice should be an arrow in every parent’s quiver as they seek to protect their children and see them through to a lifetime of success.

— Kevin Currie-Knight and Jason Bedrick

Kevin Currie-Knight is a teaching assistant professor in East Carolina University’s College of Education. Jason Bedrick is director of policy for EdChoice.

A version of this blog post was originally published at EdChoice.

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Because such policies are growing in size and popularity, opponents of educational choice have resorted to “creative” accounting and incendiary rhetoric to discourage policymakers from adopting similar tax credits. They want the public to believe that charitable giving to benefit K-12 students helps donors more than it should; however, their claims do not withstand scrutiny.

Last month, the School Superintendents Association (AASA) and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) released “Public Loss, Private Gain,” a report focused solely on condemning tax-credit scholarship (TCS) policies, which they erroneously claim are “far beyond” the tax benefits “available for other charitable donations.” In fact, policymakers have enacted hundreds of tax credits at the state and federal level to incentivize charitable giving intended to aid low-income families, promote innovation, build stronger communities, or benefit the public in other ways. Tax-credit scholarships for K-12 education are just one example, but they are the sole focus of this report.

In addition to the usual talking points—such as lemon-picking research on school choice or warning about constitutional questions that have been long settled in favor of choice—the report alleges that tax-credit scholarship policies “drain public coffers” and “enable savvy taxpayers to turn a profit.” In reality, their allegations of “profiteering” are overwrought, and research clearly shows that TCS policies produce net savings for states. The report also overlooks what matters most: These scholarships are awarded to students who need greater access to educational opportunity.

The Profiteering Canard

One of the central claims in the AASA/ITEP report is that donors somehow profit from their donation. However, beneath the rhetorically charged terms such as “get-rich scheme,” “double-dipping, “tax shelter,” and “tax loophole,” is a rather boring reality: under certain conditions, some taxpayers subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax can reduce their federal tax liability by a larger amount if they make a charitable donation rather than paying their state taxes.

This is not limited solely to donations made to support K-12 education, and it’s not a “profit,” as they would have the public believe. It’s merely a reduction in a taxpayer’s tax liability beyond what the authors of the report believe the taxpayer should have paid.

Here’s how it works: Under tax-credit scholarships programs, taxpayers who donate to qualifying scholarship organizations can receive tax credits from their state. In a handful of states, those credits are worth 100 percent of their donations, a reflection of both the high priority policymakers place on expanding educational opportunity and the potential for the state to realize savings from the scholarship program. At the same time, taxpayers can also reduce their federal taxable income by deducting their charitable contributions.

This is what the AASA and ITEP call “double-dipping,” which they define as “receiving a tax benefit on the same donation at both the federal and state level.” However, taxpayers who itemize could have deducted their state taxes from their federal tax liability instead of donating—a longstanding policy that no one would consider “double-dipping.” For that matter, according to AASA’s and ITEP’s definition, anyone who receives both a state and federal deduction for their same donation would be considered “double-dipping” – a category that includes nearly every American who makes charitable contributions in states with income taxes!

To illustrate: John Q. Taxpayer earns $100,000 and is subject to a 10 percent state income tax and a 25 percent federal income tax. (To simplify, we’re assuming flat income taxes with no other deductions, though the math of progressive income taxes is more complicated.) If he pays his state income tax of $10,000, he can then deduct that amount from his federal taxable income, so he pays the IRS 25 percent of $90,000, or $22,500. We’ll call this Option A. However, if John goes with Option B by making a $10,000 donation to a scholarship organization and taking a 100 percent credit, he will reduce his state tax liability to $0, and then he can deduct his donation from his federal taxable income. Yet again, he will pay the IRS 25 percent of $90,000, or $22,500. In each case, Johnny has exactly the same amount of money left in his pocket—the only difference is whether he gave $10,000 to his state or a scholarship organization. Calling one scenario “double-dipping” but not the other is nonsensical.

However, federal tax policy is a bit more complicated than this. Some taxpayers are subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax, which was a policy intended to make sure that wealthier tax filers did not pay below a certain minimum after their accountants applied a variety of tax benefits and deductions. This is where the AASA/ITEP’s faulty claims of “profiting” come in.

Taxpayers subject to the AMT can deduct their charitable donations from their federally taxable income, but not their state taxes. So, in the scenario above, had John been subject to the AMT, he would have had to pay $25,000 to the IRS if he paid his full $10,000 in state taxes. The difference between Option A and Option B is what AASA and ITEP call “profit.” Option B is a “profit” only if we consider Option A the base amount that should be owed – but it is equally valid to consider Option B the base amount (particularly since all other tax filers can deduct their charitable contributions from their taxable income), in which case someone going with Option A would be getting less than what they “should” in federal tax benefits. It’s all relative to what we consider the base.

Moreover, as if their definition of “profit” were not peculiar enough, calling this a “get-rich scheme” is entirely disingenuous. In order to realize a federal tax benefit beyond what they’d already receive from just paying their state taxes, donors would already have to be well-off enough to be subject to the AMT.

In the end, none of this should have any bearing on whether state lawmakers enact these policies. State treasuries are unaffected by the difference in taxpayers’ federal tax liabilities, and state policymakers have no control over federal tax policy. The feds could decide tomorrow that state taxes are deductible from the AMT or that charitable contributions are not, and there would be no more so-called “profit.”

To the extent that federal policymakers are concerned about TCS policies—or various other state tax credits, such as Arizona’s 100 percent tax credits for donations to organizations that help low-income families such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters, YMCA, United Food Bank, etc.—they could simply disallow taxpayers subject to the AMT from deducting tax-credit-eligible donations. On the other hand, they may want to keep the existing tax code in place to spur private giving. As Nobel Laureate economist Robert Shiller argued in the New York Times, such tax benefits can provide an even greater benefit to society:

We have to clear our minds of the idea that the charitable deduction is a “loophole” that benefits the rich at society’s expense. Income that is freely given away should not even be considered as taxable income.

Yes, the wealthy use this deduction more often, and give greater amounts of money. But society benefits. And beyond the money involved, the tax break for donors conveys a sort of official recognition, and encourages a habit and a culture of giving.

We don’t rely on government to set all of our goals — even our social goals, our wishes for the nation’s future. The essential question we all must answer is how we can achieve the good society.”

The Fiscal Impact of Tax-Credit Scholarships

The AASA/ITEP report also claims that TCS policies “divert over $1 billion per year toward private schools” instead of public treasuries and district schools. Setting aside that this is less than 0.16 percent of the more than $625 billion spent annually on public education nationwide, the report tells only half the story. It’s true that tax-credit scholarships reduce state revenue, but they also reduce state expenditures on K-12 education. Focusing exclusively on one side of the balance sheet is a highly misleading tactic we’re used to seeing from those who’d rather pump money into a system than have it follow individual students.

State funding of district schools is generally tied to enrollment. If a student leaves a district school for any reason—whether she accepted a tax-credit scholarship, started homeschooling transferred to another public school district, or moved out of town—the state generally no longer pays the district for that student, though in some cases, “hold harmless” provisions mean the state does pay for “ghost students” who are no longer enrolled. Moreover, regardless of enrollment, school districts keep all locally raised revenue and most federal funds.

When a donor receives a tax credit, that reduces the amount of revenue the state collects. Likewise, when a student switches out of a district school to accept a tax-credit scholarship, that reduces the state’s expenditures. A 2010 report from the Florida legislature’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability found that for every $1 in decreased revenue, the state’s TCS policy produced $1.44 in reduced expenditures.

Florida is not unique. A recent analysis of 10 tax-credit scholarship programs by EdChoice estimated savings worth more than $580 million nationwide in FY 2014, even after accounting for students who would have enrolled in a district school anyway. From FY 1998 through FY 2014, the TCS policies produced an estimated $1.7 billion to $3.4 billion in savings, the equivalent of approximately $1,650 to $3,000 per scholarship student.

Source: Martin Lueken, “The Tax-Credit Scholarship Audit,” EdChoice, October 31, 2016.

Of course, to the extent that AASA and ITEP implicitly recognize the existence of a reduction in state expenditures, they claim the TCS policies “drain” funds from district schools. The unstated assumption is that those funds—and therefore the children to whom they are attached—were somehow owed to the district schools. Parents are unlikely to agree. State constitutions impose a duty on states to ensure that its young citizens have access to an education, but those students do not have a duty to attend assigned schools. Indeed, policymakers are increasingly seeing the wisdom in having state funding follow a child to the school of their family’s choosing.

Moreover, it is worth repeating that TCS policies only affect state funds, not local or federal funds. This is important because schools face both fixed and variable costs. Although some school choice opponents would have the public believe that nearly all district school costs are fixed, Dr. Ben Scafidi has estimated that, on average, only approximately 36 percent of district school costs are fixed. Indeed, if it were true that most or all school costs are fixed, then there would be little need to fund enrollment growth—but we know that’s not the case. Rather, nearly two-thirds of the typical district school’s costs change with student enrollment. This means that even where TCS policies might reduce state funding for some district schools, most schools are unlikely to notice a significant difference.

Finally, it should be noted that state policymakers have broad discretion in how they use the savings from TCS programs. They could lower taxes, pay down state debt or invest the savings in district schools or other student services.

Contrary to the claims of the AASA and ITEP, tax-credit scholarship policies neither enrich donors nor drain the public coffers. Such frivolous charges are intended to distract from what TCS policies actually do: provide taxpayers with an incentive to help low- and middle-income families choose schools that work for their kids. They are the true beneficiaries of TCS programs, and expanding educational opportunity should always be considered a worthy public policy goal.

–Jason Bedrick and Marty Lueken

Jason Bedrick is Director of Policy at EdChoice. Martin Lueken, Ph.D., is Director of Fiscal Policy and Analysis at EdChoice.

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In a recent editorial, the New York Times asserted that DeVos “faces a big challenge in explaining the damage she’s done to public education in her home state, Michigan.” The Times editors fault DeVos for supposedly supporting “legislative changes that have reduced oversight and accountability” for charter schools—a charge that treads a thin line between exaggeration and falsehood—and laments that DeVos wants to expand school choice in Detroit, where supposedly “charter schools often perform no better than traditional schools, and sometimes worse” [links in the original]. The Times editorial relies on an op-ed they ran by Tulane Professor Doug Harris, who asserted in November that Detroit’s charter school system is “the biggest school reform disaster in the country.” As evidence, Harris cites what he calls a “well-regarded study,” which “found that Detroit’s charter schools performed at about the same dismal level as its traditional public schools.” Likewise, in an article last June, Times national education correspondent Kate Zernike claimed that in Motor City, “half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.”

It matters a great deal whether these claims are true not simply because the truth matters, but because DeVos was nominated due to her record as an education reformer. If her work expanding choice in Detroit and Michigan really has yielded “disastrous” results and done great “damage,” then the American people should be very concerned. But if her efforts in Michigan have improved a dire situation, then Americans should take heart—and put less faith in what they read in the Times.

In order to get a clearer picture of what’s really happening in Detroit, we thought it would be useful to assemble all the available data on the performance of Detroit’s charter and district schools into one place.

1. Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes

Source: CREDO (2013), Table 7, page 44; and CREDO (2015), Table 12, page 44, and Table 13, page 31.

Harris’ Times op-ed cited the 2013 CREDO study on charter school performance nationwide. That study, and a follow-up report published two years later, found that in Detroit, about half to three-fifths of charter schools outperformed demographically similar district schools on reading and math assessments. Between a third and half of the charters performed about the same, and only a small number—between one and eight percent—performed worse. The 2013 CREDO report concluded:

Based on the findings presented here, the typical student in Michigan charter schools gains more learning in a year than his [traditional public school (TPS)] counterparts, amounting to about two months of additional gains in reading and math. These positive patterns are even more pronounced in Detroit, where historically student academic performance has been poor. These outcomes are consistent with the result that charter schools have significantly better results than TPS for minority students who are in poverty.

Likewise, the 2015 CREDO report concluded that Detroit’s charter sector was one of only four urban charter communities that “provide essential examples of school-level and system-level commitments to quality that can serve as models to other communities.”

Like all empirical studies, the CREDO reports certainly have limitations, including some Harris outlined here at EdNext. Nevertheless, the CREDO findings do not support the notion that charters in Detroit have been a “disaster,” certainly not compared to district schools.

2. Excellent Schools Detroit

Excellent Schools Detroit (ESD) is a local nonprofit dedicated to improving education. Their scorecard does not control for race or socio-economic status. It grades K-8 schools based on a combination of static test scores, value-added test scores, and the results of a school climate survey, and their high school grades also factor in rates of high school completion and college matriculation. Using these metrics, ESD assigns schools letter grades and one of four “performance tiers.” According to ESD, “Tier 1 and Tier 2 schools are considered excellent-to-good performers. Tier 3 schools are considered average-to-weak performers. Tier 4 schools are weak-to-failing performers.”

Source: Excellent Schools Detroit. (Note: We include as “DPS schools” the public schools currently under state management, as they were and soon will be under DPS’s jurisdiction.)

The ESD data include charter schools, traditional public schools, and selective-admissions magnet schools run by the Detroit Public School (DPS) system. The chart above compares the performance of Detroit’s charter schools (the top bar) to all the DPS schools (middle bar), as well as to Detroit’s traditional public schools, excluding the schools that require passing a test or maintaining a certain GPA to gain admission (the bottom bar). Comparing the top and bottom bars yields the most apt comparison because Detroit’s charter schools must take all comers and hold lotteries for oversubscription.

Detroit’s charter schools significantly outperform Detroit’s district school sector even when selective-admissions magnet schools are included, and even more significantly when they are excluded. Although the only school to achieve a Tier 1 ranking was a selective-admissions school, the percentage of charters that earned a Tier 2 ranking is double the percentage districts and selective-admissions schools combined. Moreover, when those schools are excluded, charters are three times more likely to achieve a Tier 2 ranking. Likewise, only about one third of charters ranked in the bottom tier, compared to more than half of the combination of district and selective-admissions schools and more than six in ten traditional district schools.

3. The Mackinac Center

The Mackinac Center is a center-right public policy think tank based in Michigan. Mackinac uses a regression analysis accounting for the socioeconomic status of a school’s students to predict academic performance, and grades schools by comparing the school’s actual results to its predicted performance.

Source: Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

The chart above shows the Mackinac grades for the same school groupings as the ESD chart. Once again, charter schools show a clear advantage. The percentage of charters earning an “A” is double the percentage of non-selective district schools. Nearly six in ten charters earn a grade of “C” or higher compared to only a quarter of non-selective district schools. Likewise, less than a quarter of charters earned an “F” compared to more than six in ten non-selective district schools.

Three separate reports using three separate methodologies all reached the same conclusion: Detroit’s charter schools outperform the city’s district schools. Now, that’s not to say that Detroit’s charters are very good. They are just much better than Detroit’s district schools, which as Robin Lake has noted, is a very low bar. Most schools in Detroit leave much to be desired. But if the question is whether Detroit’s charter schools are a significant improvement over the status quo, the results are unequivocal.

Of course, any reporter or researcher worth their salt knows that a close examination of the data can reveal more nuanced results than a superficial reading, but doing so rarely yields the exact opposite results. Yet the exact opposite is what the New York Times would have its readers believe. The Times has consistently pushed a narrative about Detroit’s charter schools that flies in the face of all the available data, and it should correct the record. Their readers—and the American public—deserve better.

We are not saying that Betsy DeVos made Detroit schools great again. We are saying that a plain look at the data suggests that the charter sector she supported is significantly outperforming the traditional district system. As the Senate, and the American people, considers her nomination for Secretary of Education, this fact should matter.

— Jason Bedrick and Max Eden

Jason Bedrick is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. Max Eden is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The post The Data on Detroit appeared first on Education Next.

The schism is often portrayed as being between those who support or reject “accountability,” but this isn’t quite accurate. The real disagreement is not whether there should be accountability, but to whom schools should be held accountable: parents or bureaucrats. As Lindsey Burke and I argue in a new report published by the Heritage Foundation and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, educational choice programs like education savings accounts should place the accountability for academic outcomes with parents.

For decades, the term “accountability” primarily referred, in education policy circles, to government regulations intended to ensure quality. That’s because most children attend their assigned district schools, which are not directly answerable to parents and function as de facto monopolies. As Lindsey and I explain:

A distinctive feature of monopolies is lack of accountability. Because district schools are not held directly accountable to parents, some policymakers have attempted to impose accountability through top-down government regulations. Yet decades of attempts to regulate district schools into quality have had little effect. Unfortunately, too many policymakers have still come to see centralized government regulations as synonymous with “accountability” rather than an inferior alternative to direct accountability to parents, and have therefore sought to impose similar regulations on choice programs. However, regulations designed for a monopoly system are inappropriate for a market-based system.

In a market-based system, producers are held directly accountable to consumers for results. The government sets certain rules against fraud or health and safety standards, but the consumers ultimately decide whether a product or service meets their needs. Likewise, the government could ensure that ESA funds are spent on qualifying educational products and services, but the accountability for results should lie with parents, who are in the best position to evaluate those results. Holding education providers directly accountable to parents creates a feedback loop that does not exist in more centralized, top-down systems like the district schools. As social scientist Yuval Levin has argued, this enables the system to “channel social knowledge from the bottom up rather than…impose technical knowledge from the top down.” This channeling is accomplished “through a process of experimentation, evaluation, and evolution.”

If we want an education system that makes significant improvements in quality over time, education providers must be free to innovate and parents must be free to choose the providers that work best for their own children. This system evolves over time because higher-quality providers will attract more parents and lower-quality providers will face pressure to either improve or shut down.

However, technocratic attempts to guarantee quality through imposing uniform standards can interrupt this evolutionary process.

The Price of Technocratic Accountability

The technocratic approach to accountability requires that all schools are judged according to uniform metrics, therefore the technocrats rely heavily (indeed, almost exclusively) on standardized test scores, particularly in math and language arts. The technocratic reformers want to use these scores to set a minimum standard, meaning “underperforming” schools would be excluded from receiving voucher funds–or, in the case of charter schools, be shut down entirely–even against the will of parents who still want to enroll their children there.

Let us be clear about what is at stake. The technocratic approach would eliminate a family’s least-bad educational alternative, leaving children worse off “for their own good.” For example, parents may have chosen a private or charter school that did not perform well on the state’s standardized test overall, but the school may have provided a safer environment than the local district school. Or perhaps the school was succeeding at its mission to aid the most at-risk students, but the state’s uniform “accountability” system failed to take its mission into account. The damage done to children who lose the opportunity to attend schools that their parents believe are better than the alternative is incalculable.

We should also be realistic about the unintended consequences of over-reliance on test scores. Although standardized tests can provide parents with useful information about their child’s academic performance, using them to impose uniform standards that so narrowly define “quality” creates perverse incentives that narrow the curriculum, stifle innovation, and can drive away quality schools from participating in the choice program. As Lindsey and I explain:

When schools are rewarded or punished based on their students’ performance on math and reading tests, they have a strong incentive to divert their time and resources to tested subjects and away from others. A study by the Center on Education Policy found that the time district schools spent on subjects besides math and reading declined considerably after Congress enacted the No Child Left Behind Act (NLCB), which mandated that states require district schools to administer the state standardized math and reading tests in grades three through eight and report the results. In the five years after NCLB was implemented, approximately 62 percent of elementary district schools reported increasing the amount of time spent on English language arts and/or math, and 44 percent reported decreasing time spent on social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch, or recess.

The narrowing curriculum is particularly alarming because, as Jay P. Greene has noted, recent research has found that “later success in math, reading, and science depends on early acquisition of the kind of ‘general knowledge’ and fine-motor skills learned through art and other subjects.” In other words, a narrower curriculum not only deprives students of having a broader and more enriching education, but also negatively impacts their performance in the tested subjects. “If we narrow education to the mechanics of math and reading as captured by yearly testing,” Greene concludes, “we short-change the broader knowledge that is the key to academic success later.”

Mandating a single test exacerbates this phenomenon. Within the tested subjects, schools have a strong incentive to teach the concepts that will be on the mandated test. This incentive to “teach to the test” can result in a de facto curriculum. For example, if a school had been teaching math concepts A, B, and C in grade 7, but the new state test was going to cover concepts B, D, and E, the school would almost certainly drop concepts A and C in favor of D and E, even if the math teachers believe that the original curriculum was superior. Keeping the original curriculum would put their students at a disadvantage on the state test vis-à-vis students at other schools that had aligned their curriculum to the test. This standardization might make sense in a world in which there was one right way to teach math, or at least one right order to teach concepts, but that is not the case.

Again, this isn’t to say that we should do away with testing entirely. As Robert Pondiscio recently wrote, standardized tests should be “used to illuminate and inform parent choice, but not to limit it.” Tests can provide valuable information, but using the tests as the sole or primary metric of performance does more harm than good. What’s needed is a more comprehensive understanding of quality that considers the needs of individual students, not just the “typical” student, and that’s something that parents are in a much better position to determine than technocrats.

The Potential of Parental Accountability

Parents are interested in more than scores. Parents consider a school’s course offerings, teacher skills, school discipline, safety, student respect for teachers, the inculcation of moral values and religious traditions, class size, teacher-parent relations, college acceptance rates, and more. Schools held directly accountable to parents, rather than technocrats, have to take all of these factors into account.

Of course, parents need information in order to make good decisions about their child’s education. Fortunately, research has shown that the vast majority of parents from all racial and socio-economic backgrounds are willing to take several steps in order to acquire that information. This is where independent organizations can satisfy parents’ demands for information with expert reviews and ratings and by providing platforms for parents and students to share their personal experiences:

Perhaps the most popular source of expert knowledge about college is the plethora of college ratings providers, such as U.S. News & World Report, Princeton Review, Forbes, Kiplinger’s, and Business Insider. These ratings offer prospective students a variety of information about student outcomes, expected earnings, course offerings, campus life, and so on. No rating system is perfect, but parents and students can compare multiple ratings to get a clearer picture of the strengths and weaknesses of different colleges and figure out which features are most important for them. Some outfits even rate the raters.

Parents and students are also relying in increasing numbers on user reviews to find the information they seek. Sites like College Times, Students Review, Rate My Professors, and Get Educated provide a platform for students to share information about their actual experiences at the college they attended.

The K-12 education sector has historically lacked high-quality sources of information about school performance, but to a large extent that is because the vast majority of students attend their assigned district school. With little to no other educational options, there has been little parental need for information to compare competing options. And without much in the way of competition, existing private schools don’t feel great pressure to be forthcoming about performance data. However, as states implement educational choice policies, the demand for information will increase and schools that refuse to share their data will be at a competitive disadvantage. We are already seeing parents to turn organizations like GreatSchools.org and Niche.com to find information about schools they are considering and we should expect to see more organizations emerge as demand increases.

In the interim, we should avoid the technocratic temptation to have the government rate schools directly. We have no good reason to believe that the government will do a better job of assessing school quality than private, third-party reviewers. U.S. News & World Report may offer crummy ratings, but the solution is having more independent reviewers (as the market has provided) rather than crowding them out with a single government rating system that is subject to political pressures.

Parents are adept at holding schools accountable when they are empowered with choices and armed with information about their options. As Matthew Ladner has shown, Arizona parents voting with their feet closed down low-performing charter schools earlier and more often than state regulators:

Arizona parents seem extremely adept at putting down charter schools with extreme prejudice. Arizona parents detonate far more schools on the launching pad compared to the number we see bumbling ineffectively through the term of their charter to be shut by authorities (or to give up the ghost in year 14 in an ambiguous fashion). Both of these things happen, but the former happens with much greater regularity than the latter. Having a vibrant system of open enrollment, charter schools and some private school choice means that Arizona parents can take the view that life is too short have your child enrolled in an ineffective institution.

There is no panacea. There is no perfect information just as there are no perfect bureaucrats or, for that matter, perfect parents. The question before us is how to design a system with imperfect people and imperfect information that will come as close as possible to providing every child with access to a high-quality education. The technocratic approach empowers bureaucrats at the expense of parents, often eliminates their least-bad educational alternatives, and creates perverse incentives that narrow curricular options. By contrast, making education providers directly accountable to parents allows for a more comprehensive understanding of quality that considers the needs of individual students and fosters greater innovation and diversity.

Rather than attempting to design systems that override parental preferences, education reformers should focus their efforts on empowering parents with more choices and work to build institutions that will help them make more informed decisions.

– Jason Bedrick

Jason Bedrick is a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. This first appeared on Cato@Liberty

The post Want Accountability in Education? Empower Parents appeared first on Education Next.

If a city has a large charter sector, state government could create a new authorizer with an elected board (or require existing authorizers to move to elected boards). That democratically controlled authorizer would then have a performance contract with each of the city’s public schools, including those operated by the district.

Smarick’s “middle path” approach is an interesting idea that’s worth consideration, but education reformers should have serious reservations about it. In particular, it’s not clear what the problem is that this approach is trying solve or why this approach wouldn’t lead to the same problems that political control over traditional district schools has caused.

Smarick’s case rests on the claim that “communities” are “demanding more democratic control.” But are they? Which communities? Or, more precisely, which voices in those communities? After all, it’s exceedingly rare that everyone in a given community speaks with one voice. And what are these voices saying? Smarick name-checks a few cities but cites no evidence that would answer any of these questions. He merely asserts that “authority that is both local and democratic has also been in demand.” Okay, sure, maybe. But it’s still not clear why ed reformers should accede to these (anonymous) demands.

Smarick continues:

A community’s voters want to have a say over what types of schools exist, what constitutes “good schools,” who runs them, how an area’s culture and traditions are passed on, and much more. Decisions are more reflective of the public’s will when these issues are litigated through the democratic process. Additionally, we can have faith that the discussion is transparent, that people feel agency, and that the results—even if imperfect—will be durable and respected.

Are any of these claims necessarily true?

• Is it true that democratic control is necessary for communities to pass on their culture and traditions? Aren’t most mediating institutions — churches, private schools, non-profits, sports leagues, museums, farmer’s markets, small businesses, professional organizations, etc. — decidedly not subject to political control? And to the extent that some of these organizations employ some measure of democratic decision-making, isn’t it only the members of those organizations (and not the community at large) that have the right to vote?

• Is there such a thing as “the public will”? At best, this means merely the will of the majority, which often comes at the expense of the will of the minority (or several types of minorities). Moreover, as Terry Moe and others have detailed, political control often means control by well-organized special interests like teachers unions. In any case, political control entails citizens fighting against each other to have their preferences reflected rather than each being able to have their preferences met in a market. To the extent that a “public will” exists, it is multi-faceted, hence a system of decentralized choices better reflects the public will than a centralized system.

• Is it true that there is more transparency when institutions are subject to political control? Forget Clinton’s emails — elected school boards regularly lack transparency.

• Do people feel more agency in political systems? Perhaps the majority does, but do the minorities? Wouldn’t those minorities prefer options that weren’t subject to majority control?

• Is it true that political decisions are “more respected and durable”? 2016 is an odd year to be making that argument.

On Twitter, Smarick claimed that a democratically controlled charter board’s “incentives [and] ability to interfere [with] schools drop dramatically when board authorizes but does not operate schools.” Possibly. But as Jay Greene pointed out yesterday, traditional school boards don’t “operate” the district schools either, yet there is plenty of room for mischief. After all, Smarick himself argued that these boards should decide what “types” of schools exist and what constitutes a “good” school. That’s an awful lot of control.

As Smarick himself recognizes, elected boards shift power away from families to “the community” (i.e., whichever group can seize political control). As he explained:

Today’s decentralized systems of choice empower families and enable a wide array of options, but they inhibit the community’s ability to shape the contours of the local school system.

It seems that Smarick — who is generally quite conservative — is embracing the progressives’ preference for political control over mediating institutions that Yuval Levin has so insightfully described:

Progressives in America have always viewed those mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the government with suspicion, seeing them as instruments of division, prejudice, and selfishness or as power centers lacking in democratic legitimacy. They have sought to empower the government to rationalize the life of our society by clearing away those vestiges of backwardness and putting in their place public programs and policies motivated by a single, cohesive understanding of the public interest. This clearing away has in some cases consisted of crowding out the mediating institutions by taking over some of their key functions through direct government action. In other cases, it has involved turning elements of civil society and the private economy into arms of government policy — by requiring compliance with policy goals that are foreign to many civil-society institutions or consolidating key sectors of the economy and offering protection to large corporations willing to act as public utilities or to advance policymakers’ priorities.

I hope that Smarick will reconsider his support for empowering the government at the expense of school autonomy and families’ preferences. Perhaps the angel on his right shoulder will whisper Yuval Levin’s counsel into his ear:

Conservatives have always resisted such gross rationalization of society, however, and insisted that local knowledge channeled by evolved social institutions — from families and civic and fraternal groups to traditional religious establishments, charitable enterprises, private companies, and complex markets — will make for better material outcomes and a better common life. The life of a society consists of more than moving resources around, and what happens in that vital space between the individual and the government is at least as much a matter of character formation as of material provision and wealth creation.

As I noted above, I do believe that Smarick’s proposal merits serious consideration. Although I don’t think he has made a strong case for a democratically controlled charter board, I do think he’s onto something when he says that there is strong demand for democracy, at least in some quarters. That said, I think the more viable “middle path” is down a different road. There are numerous mediating institutions in society that engage in democratic decision-making, but only members have a vote. Instead of giving a vote to everyone in the community — wolves and sheep alike — perhaps charter schools could give a vote to parents of students who are enrolled there. This way, parents who want democratic agency can enroll their children in democratically run charters, while other parents can choose schools that have different missions, and in no case will outside special interests be able to seize control.

I’m sure there are other arrangements that could also achieve the balance that Smarick seeks. But please: don’t give power to the wolves!

—Jason Bedrick

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