Eva Moskowitz’s new memoir, ably reviewed in these pages by Chester E. Finn Jr. (see “Success Story,” books), might well have been subtitled “My Struggle for School Facilities.” Yes, the founder of Success Academy Charter Schools recounts her transition from New York City council member to CEO of Gotham’s fastest-growing charter school network, as well as the “core educational values and principles” that she believes drive its impressive results. But her battles with the city’s education department over space in underused school buildings resonate throughout the book, illustrating just one of the many obstacles faced by charter entrepreneurs nationwide.

The reluctance of school districts to help charter schools find suitable homes comes as no surprise: charters pose a challenge to the districts’ exclusive franchise to operate public schools. Yet the districts’ resistance runs counter to the findings of a major new study of how charters affect the performance of their district neighbors (see “Charters and the Common Good,” research). Sarah Cordes of Temple University shows that elementary schools in New York City see a notable uptick in student achievement, attendance, and grade completion when a charter school opens nearby—and that these gains are largest when the schools are “co-located” in the same facility. In short, while the expansion of successful charter networks surely threatens enrollment in district schools, the evidence indicates that it would benefit even students who continue to attend them.

Of course, it’s not likely that research findings will change the posture of districts toward charter schools. That’s why legislative victories like those achieved in 2017 by charter advocates in Colorado and Florida are essential to ensure a level playing field (see “A Bigger Slice of the Money Pie,” features). As Parker Baxter and colleagues report, both states passed laws giving charters equitable access to local tax revenues that supplement a district’s standard allotment from the state. Moskowitz’s memoir reveals how even strongly worded mandates to share resources with charter schools provide districts with countless opportunities for mischief. In contrast, these new laws seek to make it easier for charter schools to solve facilities problems on their own—which perhaps explains why several Florida districts have sued to block implementation of their state’s new policy.

Charter proponents across the political spectrum are united in seeking fiscal equity, but they have no consensus on matters of oversight and accountability. Amid widespread calls for greater care in authorizing new charters and stronger accountability for existing ones, states like Arizona and some of its Mountain West neighbors have embraced a relatively permissive stance. These laissez-faire positions have netted them mediocre ratings from organizations like the National Association of Charter School Authorizers that favor a more-regulated approach to charter growth. But could it be that the conventional wisdom reflected in those ratings, if not wrong, is too narrow?

Matthew Ladner weighs in on this debate through the lens of charter school policies in the “Four Corners” states—Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah—where rapid growth in K–12 enrollment since 1990 has inclined lawmakers to adopt a hands-off approach to charter growth (see “In Defense of Education’s Wild West,” features). Charter schools now serve 19 percent of public-school students in Arizona, 11 percent in Colorado, and nearly 10 percent in Utah (in contrast to about 6 percent nationally). Early evidence suggested that quality control was indeed a concern: The achievement gains made by charter students in Arizona, in particular, often lagged that of their district peers through 2012. But today, as Ladner shows, charter students across the four states are performing at impressive levels.

This promising pattern of performance may well reflect the fact that a surprising number of charter schools in these states serve suburban students, bucking the national trend of charters concentrating in big cities. But that may be a feature, not a bug, helping charter schools amass a broader political constituency than commonly prevails elsewhere. Viewed from Education Next’s offices in Massachusetts, where efforts to lift the state’s cap on charter growth in urban areas have failed despite the sector’s excellent track record, the contrast is striking.

So, yes, let’s continue to ensure that districts share resources equitably with charter schools; charter leaders like Moskowitz should be able to focus on instruction, not real estate. But let’s resist the temptation to insist that there is one best set of policies to promoting charter growth nationwide. What appears to work in Massachusetts may not be best for Arizona. It may not even be best for Massachusetts.

— Martin R. West

When most people think about aggressive, envelope-pushing education reform, a familiar cast of characters and a familiar set of locales come to mind: Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., Paul Pastorek and John White in Louisiana, Tony Bennett in Indiana, Kevin Huffman in Tennessee.

Not many people think of Hanna Skandera in New Mexico. They probably should.

As public education secretary of New Mexico, Hanna Skandera dug in fast, set an ambitious agenda, and broke a lot of china. Her ability to inspire and subsequently ignore controversy is clear: from the outset, she was deemed so contentious that the state senate refused to confirm her for four years, during which she performed her duties as “secretary-designate.” When those same legislators failed to vote on a new teacher-evaluation system, she implemented it via regulation.

In June 2017, Skandera stepped down after seven years on the job, prompting a series of questions about her legacy. Was the Sturm und Drang of the Skandera years worthwhile? Did her later efforts to collaborate with teachers set the stage for sustained progress? And as the next generation takes on leadership roles, what can we learn from Skandera’s challenges and successes? To explore this question, let’s get a more thorough understanding of the New Mexico story—the context surrounding the reforms, the reforms themselves, and what we know so far about their results.

Looking for a Lightning Rod

New Mexico is a state that appears ripe for education reform. It is persistently at the bottom of most national rankings for academic performance and students’ well-being, and faces daunting challenges: nearly three quarters of students are from low-income families and some 16 percent have limited English language proficiency. Statewide, more than three quarters of 4th graders read below grade level, the same share of 8th graders are below grade level in math, and nearly one third of high-school students drop out. In the most recent Quality Counts rankings, New Mexico was ranked last in the “chance for success” category and rated 49 out of 51 overall. Some 61 percent of students are Hispanic, 24 percent are white, and 10 percent are Native American.

Given these statistics, one would think that bringing in a superintendent with a desire to shake things up might be welcomed. It was not.

Skandera’s time in New Mexico began with the 2010 election of Governor Susana Martinez, a Republi-can whose campaign promises included turning around failing public schools. Her victory was groundbreaking in several ways: not only was Martinez the first female governor in the state’s history (and the first Hispanic female governor in the United States), but her election also delivered the governor’s mansion to the mainstream GOP after years of Democratic (or libertarian-leaning Republican) control.

Martinez immediately moved to shake up the state’s public schools, nominating Skandera to lead the Public Education Department. Skandera was best known as a former deputy education commissioner in Florida under Governor Jeb Bush, who had been pursuing a high-profile, accountability-focused agenda of education reforms. Both of New Mexico’s teachers unions and leaders in the Democratic-controlled state senate were openly critical of the pick.

Skandera had never worked as a teacher or school leader, so to subvert her nomination, senate Democrats argued that her appointment would be unconstitutional. The Constitution of the State of New Mexico declares that the state department of education shall be “headed by a secretary of public education who is a qualified, experienced educator.” Since Skandera had never taught, they claimed, she did not meet the criteria.

Neither Skandera nor Martinez relented, however. With Martinez’s support, Skandera simply performed her job without her title until opposition finally wore down. She was at last confirmed as secretary in 2015 on a 22–19 vote, with five Democrats voting in her favor.

As her critics suspected, Skandera adopted a Florida-style approach to New Mexico, pushing forward most major elements of the Bush approach, with the exception of vouchers and tax credits for private schools.

Starting in 2012, New Mexico issued annual A–F letter grades of schools based in large part on standardized test scores. The state also invested substantial support for early readers and focused on retaining 3rd graders who fail to read at grade level; state law allows for, but does not require, those students to be held back, which both Skandera and Martinez criticized as insufficient in a state with exceptionally low rates of adult literacy. And with ongoing implementation of Common Core standards and assessments, Skandera pursued what she calls “truth telling,” or being honest about school and student performance after too many years of failing to acknowledge a painful reality.

In an interview, Skandera said that at its heart, her strategy was to create a shift in mindset, from a “belief that children from poverty can’t learn to a belief that children from poverty can learn.”

That’s not how everyone saw it, however. Ellen Bernstein, president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, summarized the Skandera era as “flunking kids, flunking teachers, and flunking schools.”

Getting Tough on Teacher Evaluations

Martinez and Skandera’s top priority was teacher-evaluation reform—described as “number 1A with a bullet” by Paul Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation, a New Mexico–based free-market think tank. Their efforts were part of an unprecedented wave of teacher-evaluation reforms nationwide, propelled in part by the federal Race to the Top grant program. But the New Mexico system is different in two critical ways from other states’ efforts: its design and launch have been especially mired in political and legal challenges, and its implementation and application have been especially effective at differentiating teachers by the skillfulness of their work.

The evaluation overhaul began with a singular move by Martinez. Three months after assuming the governorship in 2011, she issued an executive order creating the Effective Teaching Task Force, to identify, recruit, reward, and retain high-performing teachers in the state. The 14-member panel, which included Skandera, recommended a new teacher-evaluation system that weighted 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation on student test scores. A bill to create such a system was passed by the New Mexico House of Representatives in February 2012, but then stalled in the Democratic-controlled senate.

In a controversial move, Martinez directed Skandera’s Public Education Department to implement the system via regulation, starting in April 2012. The state collected baseline data in the 2012–13 school year and fully implemented the new evaluations in the 2013–14 school year.

The new NMTEACH Educator Effectiveness system initially based 50 percent of a teacher’s rating on her “value-added” to her students’ test scores, 25 percent on classroom observations, and another 25 percent on locally determined metrics, such as attendance. (The weights are adjusted for teachers in subjects not covered by statewide assessments or end-of-course exams and for those with fewer than three years of student-achievement data.) The share awarded to value-added was the largest of any evaluation system in the nation, and at the top end of what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project research had recommended.

The power of that approach was amplified by another school-improvement effort: Skandera’s department had also been reworking the state’s end-of-course exams and early-grade assessments, as part of its efforts to implement Common Core standards. These new tests allowed New Mexico to calculate value-added scores for a greater share of its teachers than any other state. Whereas many states lump large groups of teachers together because they do not teach students in tested subjects and therefore receive similar scores based on school-wide averages, New Mexico was able to parse out their individual contributions.

Teachers unions and reform critics complained loudly about the accuracy of value-added data, and almost as quickly as the system was brought online, it was buried in lawsuits. One, filed by National Education Association-New Mexico in 2014, argued that it subverted local control of education. The most substantial lawsuit, filed in 2014 by the American Federation of Teachers New Mexico, argued that implementing test-based teacher evaluations violated state law because they could result in the termination of state employees by executive fiat. Neither case has been resolved, and a 2015 injunction has prohibited New Mexico from using NMTEACH evaluations to make decisions about pay and tenure in the interim. That suit was scheduled to go to trial this past summer, but was delayed again.

Nonetheless, insofar as teacher-evaluation programs are judged by their ability to meaningfully differentiate between the performance of different teachers, New Mexico’s system is a success. Whereas even Florida’s much-vaunted teacher-evaluation system rated 98 percent of teachers as effective or highly effective, the most recent results from the New Mexico system rated only 71 percent of teachers effective or better. Education Week referred to the program as the “toughest in the nation,” and in a study of 24 states, researchers Matthew Kraft and Allison Gilmour demonstrated that it rated 28.7 percent of teachers ineffective—more than twice as many as the next closest state in the nation, Oregon. Elizabeth Ross, managing director of state policy for the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), refers to New Mexico as a “strong positive outlier” on the teacher-evaluation front.

New Mexico’s system also drew fire for its use of teacher attendance as an additional performance measure, another step that widened the spread of ratings among teachers. Initially, teachers who missed more than three days of work were penalized in their evaluation; this has since been changed to six days. Since the evaluations were introduced, absenteeism has plummeted. Before evaluations, data from the federal Office for Civil Rights reported that 47 percent of New Mexico teachers were chronically absent, missing 10 days or more of school in a year. Today, according to the New Mexico Public Education Department, it is down to 12 percent.

Those rules prompted still another lawsuit, which was filed in early 2017 by a teacher claiming that contractually guaranteed sick leave is private property. The state’s constitution stipulates that private property cannot be taken for public use without “just compensation,” and the suit asks for damages for all teachers “for the value of their earned leave that they were deprived of.”

Looking at a Legacy

What effects have these many changes had on student performance in New Mexico so far? In high school, students are doing better. During Skandera’s tenure, the four-year graduation rate went up from 67 percent in 2010 to 71 percent in 2016. More students are taking and passing AP exams: the number of test-takers grew from 7,636 in 2010 to 10,756 in 2016, and the number of students passing the tests increased from 5,266 in 2010 to 6,440 in 2016.

On other metrics, though, the results are less clear. New Mexico’s scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) stayed essentially flat from 2009 to 2015, a period when scores nationwide also stalled.

Looking at annual PARCC tests, student performance improved slightly statewide, though pass rates remained very low. The average pass rate in reading grew 2 percent, to 29 percent overall. In math, the pass rate increased by 2 percent, to 20 percent.

But stepping back from court cases and assessment results, perhaps the most important question of education reform remains: is it sustainable? When Skandera stepped down in June 2017 after seven years on the job, Martinez lauded her for being “relentlessly committed to helping us fight the status quo—like teachers unions and other entrenched special interests—to reform education and give our students, teachers, parents and schools more of what they need to succeed.” Will those efforts continue in her absence?

For now, the answer appears to be yes. Martinez appointed Skandera’s former deputy, Christopher Ruszkowski, to succeed her (and, like Skandera, he is doing so as secretary-designate, without being confirmed by the legislature). He has committed to continuing her major reforms.

However, there is a gubernatorial election in 2018, and term limits prevent Martinez from running for reelection. A Democratic governor could turn everything upside down—and in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won New Mexico by eight points.

Regardless of who wins the governorship, criticism of the reforms comes from both the right and the left. For example, regarding the A–F school-grading system, those on the free-market right argue it is still “not transparent, not simple, and not easy to understand.” What’s more, Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation believes “the bureaucracy was not ready” for its implementation, and a policy that is so complicated to implement can’t be rushed.

He also believes that the gung-ho nature of the reforms had negative consequences. “They erred on the side of ‘my way or the highway,’” which resulted in “potential allies turned into foes,” he said. On that, union leaders agree. “Over seven years, they created an under-supported, underfunded, demoralized education system,” said Bernstein of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation.

Both Gessing and Bernstein believe that the next governor will unwind many of the Martinez-Skandera policies. In an interview, Ruszkowski was more sanguine, for several reasons.

First, Skandera did eventually take steps to build support for reform at the ground level, having recognized—to a degree—that criticisms of the speed and fervor of her reform platform had some merit. Her communications strategy was key: she worked with Teach Plus New Mexico, a teacher-leadership group, to communicate with teachers across the state. (Early attempts to communicate with teachers, principals, and parents through local superintendents had amounted to playing an error-prone game of “telephone.”) She also instituted a teacher advisory board, a parent advisory board, a teacher liaison in her office, an annual teacher summit, and a six-month listening tour of schools. Among the fruits of those efforts was an update to the component weighting in the teacher-evaluation system, which now caps value-added at 35 percent and weights classroom observations at 40 percent.

Elizabeth Ross of NCTQ is optimistic about the impact of these efforts. She argues that while the system is “not yet perfect,” Skandera’s and now Ruszkowski’s engagement with individual teachers and networks like Teach Plus “deserves to be celebrated.” Indeed, Skandera and Ruszkowski have started to highlight those efforts, in the form of a coauthored paper on investing in teacher leadership published in December by Chiefs for Change, a group of reform-minded state and district leaders of which Skandera is a longtime member. The starting point: “After many years of education reform, top-down change in public education has become a relic of the past.”

Second, with respect to the lawsuits, Ruszkowski believes that the teacher-evaluation system will be tied up in courts for an extended period of time, allowing his department time to continue implementing, tweaking, and improving it. Rarely in education issues as complex as teacher evaluation do courts issue bright-line, black-or-white rulings; rather, as Ruszkowski put it, “we are continuing to implement this year over year knowing that the courts will have to work it out.” He believes the court will look favorably on the department’s continuous efforts to compromise and that a resolution will likely involve working with the court over time.

Third, Ruszkowski has a couple of political aces up his sleeve. Whereas Skandera’s pedigree included stints working under Republican governors—in California under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and in Florida with Governor Bush—Ruszkowski came to New Mexico from working under Delaware’s Governor Jack Markell, a Democrat. He cites Prudence Carter, who codirects the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education with progressive icon Linda Darling-Hammond, as a mentor of his while he was at Stanford. And he is open about the fact that he approaches the issues from a more left-leaning perspective, something that might come in handy after the next election.

Ultimately, though, he said that whoever assumes the governorship “is going to have to look back on the last eight years and ask if they want to go forward or go backward.” Ruszkowski’s money is on forward.

A Second Wave of Reformers

There is good reason to believe that there will be fewer Hanna Skanderas in the future.

Few of the hard-charging, boldfaced-name education reformers of recent years are still in the positions that made them famous (or infamous). Michelle Rhee left Washington, D.C., after a contentious mayoral election ousted her champion, Adrian Fenty. Indiana’s Tony Bennett is no longer a state superintendent, nor is Tennessee’s Kevin Huffman. Louisiana’s Paul Pastorek is gone. And the next wave of leaders is unlikely to look the same.

There are several forces at play, such as a fissure on the right side of the political aisle, between those who see school choice as the primary mechanism for advancing education improvement and those who want to use school- and teacher-accountability systems to achieve those ends. With the ascendance of Betsy DeVos and the passage of school-choice legislation in dozens of states around the country, for the time being at least, it appears that the school choice–first crowd has the upper hand.

It is also true that the come-hell-or-high-water approach of some reformers carries downside risks, which can outweigh the benefits of the policies they espouse. Sure, if the legislature doesn’t want to support your preferred reform, you can try to have the governor implement it unilaterally or go it alone via whatever regulatory power you may have. But then your opponent can switch the playing field as well, and move the debate into the courts. Even if the opposition doesn’t win a lawsuit outright, they can stall and undermine your reforms until they’ve won the war of attrition.

Teacher-evaluation reforms are less popular now than they were in 2010. According to the most recent Education Next survey, from 2010 to the present support for merit pay for teachers has dropped from 67 percent to 56 percent. Tenure is actually more popular today, with 40 percent support compared to 35 percent in 2010 (“The 2017 EdNext Poll on School Reform,” features, Winter 2018).

But perhaps most substantially, there is a growing awareness in the world of education reform that the big battles over getting new teacher-evaluation laws passed or school accountability systems implemented are not the end of the story (“The Teacher Evaluation Revamp, In Hindsight,” features, Spring 2017). Pace Churchill: they were not even the beginning of the end, but they are, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

These new systems are supposed to set the foundation so that teachers can have better information about how they are doing and can improve their practice. They are supposed to empower school leaders to improve instruction in their buildings. They must not be an end in themselves. When advocacy organizations lose interest after the first battle is “won,” reform-minded superintendents are left to twist in the wind. As Skandera said of the education-reform superintendents of her time, “very rarely did we see them get beyond the fight to what matters most.” Who wants that as their legacy?

But maybe a legacy changes when it is shared. In states and cities with leaders who built a bench, leaders had successors that continued reforms without starting as many fistfights, and reforms have continued to the benefit of students. And with the appointment of Ruszkowski and his seeming commitment to the same agenda, there is a chance that momentum will sustain New Mexico’s reforms. We’ve seen succession work even when local politics change dramatically, such as in Louisiana under John White or in Washington, D.C., where Kaya Henderson preserved much of Michelle Rhee’s agenda, including her path-breaking teacher evaluation system (“A Lasting Impact,” research, Fall 2017).

A court victory in the teacher-evaluation case would clear the decks for even more thoroughgoing reforms of teacher preparation and support of the kind that Ruszkowski has indicated he is interested in pursuing. Perhaps Skandera took most of the heat that opponents have, and like those other second-wave leaders, he will be able to see these projects through. No matter what, the New Mexico reform story continues.

Michael Q. McShane is director of national research at EdChoice.

School voucher programs, which allow eligible families to send their children to private schools with the help of public funds, have sparked controversy since the first such initiative was launched in Milwaukee in 1991. Today, 28 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.) operate 54 private-school-choice programs, which include not only government-issued vouchers but also tax-credit scholarships, education savings accounts (ESAs), and town-tuitioning programs for rural families. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the spread of such programs across the country, the debate surrounding their merits continues. Fortunately, many studies on the outcomes of private-school-choice initiatives have enabled us to begin evaluating their effectiveness. While the jury is still out on the effects of these programs on student test scores, there is significant evidence that they positively influence how far students continue in their schooling.

Who Participates?

Private-school-choice programs disproportionately attract students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Choice participants are considerably more likely to be low-income, lower-achieving, and African American, and much less likely to be white, as compared to the average public-school student in their area. Moreover, 12 percent of the 446,000 participants in private-school-choice programs in 2016–17 were in initiatives limited to students with disabilities, which is slightly higher than the 11 percent average rate of student disability in public schools nationally.

These participation trends are not surprising, since most voucher programs are targeted to low-income urban students or students with disabilities. Even in the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, however, which is open to low- and middle-income families statewide, the percentage of low-income students enrolled is slightly higher than their percentage of the overall K–12 population.

The private schools that participate in choice programs also are distinctive. Yujie Sude, Corey DeAngelis, and I examined the patterns of private-school participation in choice programs in D.C., Florida, and Louisiana. Private schools were more likely to participate if the gap between their tuition level and the usually lower voucher amount was smaller, if they already had experience serving disadvantaged students, and if they were Catholic schools. Stringent regulations appear to dissuade some schools from opting in: more than two thirds of private schools participate in the relatively low-regulation Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, while only one third participate in the relatively high-regulation Louisiana Scholarship Program. Brian Kisida, Evan Rhinesmith, and I surveyed private-school leaders who declined to participate in their state’s choice program and found that most of them feared that regulations would increase in the future. They also viewed certain regulations as restricting their independence and organizational identity, especially mandates involving curriculum and requirements to administer the state accountability test to their choice students.

Douglas N. Harris, in his contribution to this forum, states that even religious schools willing to participate in school voucher programs “often have academic and behavioral admissions requirements.” Only three voucher programs—those in D.C., Indiana, and Ohio—permit participating private schools to apply test-based admissions standards to applicants using vouchers. None of the U.S. voucher programs permit schools to deny admission to students based on their disciplinary records. Private schools can decline to participate in voucher programs, but if they agree to serve students on vouchers, in most cases they must accept all comers.

Voucher Effects

The effects of private-school-choice programs on the achievement of student participants have been extensively studied using a variety of research designs. Sixteen evaluations of eight programs in Charlotte, North Carolina; Dayton and Toledo, Ohio; D.C.; Louisiana; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and New York City used “gold standard” experimental designs. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin Anderson, and I conducted a meta-analysis of the 16 experimental studies, finding that the private-school-choice programs evaluated in the United States have increased student achievement by an average of .13 standard deviations in reading by the fourth year after the study started. In total, programs have had no significant effect on average math scores. The reading effect represents a gain of about four months of learning, depending on student grade level and background. The achievement effects from school-choice experiments follow a consistent pattern. They begin slightly negative, then turn positive and cumulate over time (see Figure 1).

Four recent non-experimental studies of choice programs also tended to report positive effects in reading achievement, with some qualifications. David Figlio concluded that the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program had a statistically significant positive effect on reading outcomes for students close to the program’s income eligibility cutoff. Mark Berends and colleagues, as reported in their essay for this forum, found that students who persisted in the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program for four years experienced reading gains. I led a research team that concluded that the combination of access to school vouchers and a high-stakes-testing policy boosted the reading test scores of students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. An evaluation of the Ohio EdChoice Scholarship Program, conducted by David Figlio and Krzysztof Karbownik, was an exception, reporting negative effects of that voucher program on both reading and math scores that persisted over time.

That study, while reporting negative achievement effects for participants in Ohio’s largest voucher program, also found that students remaining in public schools performed higher on tests, owing to program-induced competition. Their study is the 15th evaluation of the competitive effects of vouchers to report consistently positive results. Six other such studies reported that competitive pressure from vouchers had effects that ranged from neutral to positive. Only one study, conducted by Jay Greene and Marcus Winters and focusing on the D.C. voucher program, found that voucher competition had no effect on the test scores of non-participants, while no empirical study of acceptable rigor has found that a U.S. private-school-choice program decreased the achievement of public school students.

The effects of choice programs on educational attainment—how far an individual goes in school—are both larger and more consistent than their achievement effects. Attainment is typically measured by benchmarks such as high school graduation, college enrollment, persistence in college, and college graduation. Higher levels of educational attainment are associated with a longer, healthier life; higher lifetime earnings; and lower probabilities of divorce, welfare receipt, and incarceration.

Fewer choice studies have examined attainment than achievement because doing so requires tracking students for many years. The five studies undertaken so far all report positive effects of private-school-choice on attainment for all participants or key subgroups, and these effects are both statistically significant and substantively large. An experimental study I led for the U.S. Department of Education of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program found that using a voucher increased the likelihood of high-school graduation by 21 percentage points, representing a 30 percent boost. In a similarly rigorous experimental evaluation, Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson reported that participating in the New York City private-school scholarship program increased college enrollment rates for African American and Hispanic students by 6 percentage points, which represented a 10 percent hike. The program also increased those students’ college-graduation rates by 3.5 percentage points, an increment of 35 percent. In a non-experimental analysis, Chingos and Daniel Kuehn found that participation in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program increased the student rate of college enrollment by 15–43 percent, depending on how many years the individual used a scholarship. Two non-experimental studies of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program reported that it increased high-school graduation rates, but by smaller amounts than the programs in D.C., New York, and Florida. One of those studies, by my research team, also followed students into college, finding that voucher students enrolled and persisted in four-year colleges at higher rates than their matched public-school peers. The fact that Milwaukee voucher students advanced through their college years at better rates than the comparison group indicates that their higher high-school graduation rate was not driven by possibly-lower diploma standards in the private-school sector.

Why Do Effects Vary?

Private-school choice begins with a school switch for all participants except rising kindergartners who did not attend a preschool. Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin have established that student achievement tends to drop the year after a school switch, as students adjust to their new schools. Such a decline is likely larger for voucher students who move to a private school immediately after a choice program is created, because the schools also have to adjust—to an influx of new, disadvantaged students. The achievement effects of choice programs after just one or two years may well turn out to be misleading indicators of the longer-term effects on test scores and attainment. Parental choice is a commitment to a journey that takes time to deliver clear learning benefits to students.

It should not surprise us that private schooling boosts student attainment more than it does test scores. Most private schools focus on educating the whole child: intellectually, behaviorally, and spiritually. For example, the Alliance for Catholic Education program based at the University of Notre Dame, which trains college graduates to teach in Catholic schools, speaks of “preparing students for college and heaven.” Although research on the question remains at a formative stage, private schools tend to focus on molding student character by fostering grit, conscientiousness, and tolerance of others. Such character traits are more predictive of educational attainment than of future educational achievement. The attainment effects of choice programs may be outstripping their achievement effects because private schools prioritize character over test scores. That prioritization of long-term over short-term outcomes likely pleases their customers: parents.

The evidence also suggests, though by no means conclusively, that voucher programs targeted to low-income urban students have larger and more consistent positive effects on participants than do statewide programs that are less narrowly targeted. Because of the entrenched practice of assigning students to public schools based on their neighborhood of residence, urban public schools tend to concentrate highly disadvantaged students in schools characterized by low levels of safety and achievement. Prior research by William Howell and Paul Peterson suggested that the reason low-income inner-city African Americans benefit most from private-school choice is that moving to the new school represents a more dramatic improvement in the school environment for them than for less-disadvantaged white and Hispanic students.

Statewide choice programs are too new to generate a clear comparison with the more established urban voucher programs. Statewide programs in Florida, Louisiana, and Ohio, however, already have demonstrated clear positive effects on the achievement of students who remain in public schools, confirming Caroline Hoxby’s claim (see “Rising Tide,” features, Winter 2001) that competition from choice generates “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Program Design

We know precious little about what makes some private-school-choice programs more successful than others—and success itself can be defined in various ways. A choice program can be called a success if it serves a large number of students, attracts a high percentage of private-school providers, improves racial integration in the community’s schools, increases test scores of participants, improves the test scores of non-participants, boosts student attainment, or enhances student civic values. Different program designs are likely to favor some of these desirable outcomes at the expense of others. There is great risk in thinking, with so little evidence, that we know exactly how to design voucher programs to optimize student outcomes.

Still, I will offer a few humble suggestions. Voucher programs narrowly targeted to income-disadvantaged urban students reach a particular student population that appears to benefit most from access to private schooling. Meanwhile, programs broadly available to both low- and middle-income students statewide attract a diverse and likely higher-quality set of participating schools. Combining these two features in creative ways, such as by providing higher-value vouchers to lower-income students, might be the best way to match disadvantaged students with a wide array of private schools to serve their educational needs. Education savings accounts could prove to be the most effective mechanism for delivering private-school choice: they provide parents with more flexibility to customize the educational experience of their child, potentially drawing from multiple schooling providers. The ESA model also encourages parents to obtain the best value for their child’s education dollars, as unspent money in one year can be rolled over to the next and even be spent on college costs.

A specific debate rages over what forms of government accountability to impose on private schools participating in choice programs, which already are accountable to parents, who can vote for or against them with their feet. There is merit to the arguments on both sides of this dispute. My main concern is that, in trying to perfect private-school choice, we could accidentally destroy it. Policies requiring private schools to administer the official state tests, which are aligned with the public-school curriculum, appear to discourage distinctive private schools from participating. Such policies also create incentives for schools that do accept voucher students to change their educational programs to match what the state tests. The fundamental purpose of vouchers is to permit parents to choose from among a diverse array of educational models for forming their children into successful adults. If policymakers impose regulations that limit the range of choice—either by disqualifying certain types of schools or by encouraging uniformity in curriculum and school identity—they will ultimately narrow family options rather than expanding them. That would be a regrettable choice.

This is part of a forum on private school choice. For alternate takes, see “Still Waiting for Convincing Evidence,” by Douglas N. Harris, or “Lessons Learned from Indiana,” by Mark Berends, R. Joseph Waddington, and Megan Austin.

Do public-school students who move to a private school with a government-funded voucher benefit from making this switch? A growing body of research is shedding light on this question. Of particular interest are findings coming out of three states and the District of Columbia, all of which have implemented ambitious voucher programs over the past dozen or so years. That evidence does not seem to justify the fervor for vouchers displayed by many education reformers and now by U.S. secretary of education Betsy DeVos.

First, what do we know about the students who choose to participate in voucher programs? It almost goes without saying that families who choose to use tuition vouchers are less satisfied with their traditional public schools than those who stay. And since the vast majority of private schools are religiously affiliated, it comes as little surprise that voucher users tend to be more religious.

Participation in voucher programs is also driven by eligibility requirements. For example, programs that target low-income families directly or indirectly (by virtue of being based in urban areas) will enroll low-income students. Even when limited to low-income populations, though, vouchers tend to serve a socioeconomically advantaged portion of that group, those who are best positioned to leverage choice. Why? Mostly because this is how markets work. Economic research shows that more-educated adults are more likely to get what they want in the marketplace writ large.

This dynamic intensifies in the schooling market. In a practical sense, families who lack personal transportation or live far away from private schools do not have access to alternatives. Also, most private schools, in the absence of vouchers, are designed for the wealthy and middle class. It is wealthier families who can afford to pay tuition, and school eligibility requirements often exclude students who have academic and disciplinary challenges. That is largely because parents know what researchers have confirmed: students benefit from attending school with more-advantaged classmates. School reputations therefore depend to a substantial degree on exclusivity. This is also why we must view parent satisfaction cautiously. Research shows that white or affluent parents often avoid schools that have high concentrations of minority and low-income students. This might make them more “satisfied,” but it is hardly a reason to celebrate.

Some evidence about exclusivity comes from my fellow participants in this forum, who have shown that private schools considering whether or not to accept voucher students often worry about having to lower their academic standards. Given the correlation between family socioeconomic advantage and the student characteristics that schools look for, this concern on the part of private schools will restrict access for voucher-bearing students. Religious schools, a partial exception, are more willing to participate in means-tested voucher programs, but they, too, often have academic and behavioral admissions requirements. In some cases, schools institute these policies in a well-intentioned effort to build strong scholastic communities, but their criteria effectively serve to exclude many students. Even though voucher programs often officially prohibit selection practices, these rules are rarely enforced, and research shows that schools have many ways to shape enrollment that fall outside the rules.

Vouchers that are targeted to disadvantaged students could theoretically help address the affordability barrier, but, in general, when governments target attractive financial benefits to one part of the population, politically powerful groups will exert pressure to loosen eligibility requirements to gain their own access. We have seen this in Indiana, Louisiana, and other places where small-scale, means-tested voucher programs gradually expanded to include families closer to middle class. The trend is toward voucher programs becoming less well targeted, with funding shifting to socioeconomically advantaged students who already have some degree of choice.

Effects of Vouchers

And what do we know about the academic outcomes of students participating in voucher programs? Most of the rigorous research, now dating back more than a decade, focuses on programs in large urban areas, such as Milwaukee and New York City. Averaging across 16 U.S.-based programs, Patrick Wolf and colleagues find that these small-scale voucher programs have statistically insignificant effects on standardized test scores across academic subjects.

This interpretation is different from what Wolf concludes from the same results in his contribution to this forum. The reason for the difference is noteworthy. In his Figure 1, Wolf shows that studies of voucher programs that examine students’ outcomes longer after they switch to a private school produce more positive results. However, this conclusion assumes that the programs had no effect on the achievement of students who switched to a private school only temporarily and, even if valid, could only be generalized to the small subset of students who used a voucher consistently when given the opportunity to do so, ignoring the smaller and perhaps negative effects on the majority of voucher users. The analysis also includes a now dated study of the Washington, D.C., program, the effects of which have since turned negative (more on this below). Moreover, the other handful of studies that lasted for four years might only have done so because they were relatively successful, so that the less successful ones are omitted. In contrast, my interpretation—that there is no statistically significant effect—places equal weight on all students observed using a voucher to enroll in a private school, including all studies and students regardless of how long they were followed, therefore capturing all the positive and negative effects at work. Note, too, that even Wolf’s more optimistic interpretation asserts a positive achievement effect only for reading, not for math.

These early programs’ effects on non-achievement outcomes, such as graduating from high school, tend to be somewhat more positive. Even if we place more weight on these outcomes, however, we need to keep in mind that effects found in small-scale programs often do not generalize to larger scales. School-choice initiatives, including charter schools, seem to work better in cities than statewide because it is easier to exercise choice where there is better mass transit and higher population density, and the performance of traditional public schools is generally worse in urban areas, making it less challenging for choice programs to improve on baseline student outcomes.

The limited scale of the programs examined in most prior studies is important, because the United States is now in the midst of a full-scale nationwide expansion of these policies. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have some type of voucher program. Just four statewide voucher programs have been formally evaluated, and only one has shown any signs of success. Ohio’s statewide program has shown clear negative effects on test scores. Two others, in Indiana and Louisiana, started off with some of the worst test-score results any education program has ever demonstrated, though these subsequently improved somewhat so that the net effects are now essentially zero. In the fourth program (Florida), the authors conclude that test-score effects cannot be determined with any confidence because of the program design.

Why are the results for test scores not more positive? One possible reason is that the state-mandated tests were not well aligned to the curriculum taught in private schools. However, the most recent experimental evaluation of the D.C. voucher program showed negative test-score effects after one year, even though the study did not rely on a state-mandated test—and despite the fact that an earlier study of the program showed no effects. The more likely explanation is that private schools in the city are competing with a public- and charter-school system that has demonstrated substantial academic improvements in recent years. More generally, where vouchers are competing with charter schools—which have produced increasingly positive results over time—the voucher results are likely to continue to be less positive. It is harder to look good against stronger competition.

Another possible reason for the uninspiring results is that the private schools that participate in statewide voucher programs are simply not very effective. This could be interpreted as a failure of the voucher concept or, as voucher supporters have asserted, it could be that the regulatory burden of the programs, while very small compared with those of public or charter schools, kept the best private schools from joining. Research by Wolf and colleagues does not seem to support the latter interpretation, however. Based on ratings from the organization GreatSchools, the schools participating in the Louisiana voucher program were not of lesser quality than those that did not participate, though the voucher-accepting schools did charge lower tuition.

The effects of the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) scholarship program on college outcomes have been widely cited as a success story, but several caveats apply here. First, unlike the other studies mentioned above, the design of the FTC program precludes a rigorous research design. In their Florida study, Matthew Chingos and Daniel Kuehn do their best by matching students on observable characteristics that are somewhat removed from the outcome of interest. But this strategy is unlikely to yield an apples-to-apples comparison. In studies using test scores as the outcome, matching is much more effective, because the treatment and comparison groups of students can be matched on their scores—the variable
of interest—before students receive vouchers. This is not possible when studying college-going. Also, because the assignment to the FTC is not random, the more positive effects they see for students participating for more years may, as they acknowledge, reflect selection bias; that is, any student who stays in the same school for more years is likely to have better outcomes.

Earlier research in D.C. provides evidence of positive effects on another important long-term outcome, high school graduation, but these findings are now difficult to interpret for another reason. The downward trend in test-score results in D.C. calls into question whether prior outcomes still reflect the current reality, given increased competition from charter schools.

Still Waiting

What has all this taught us about how states ought to design and oversee voucher programs—and, indeed, whether they should do so at all? How about slow down? The latest results should give everyone pause.

Try this exercise: Let’s drop the word “voucher” and simply say, “Statewide _________ programs show a mix of tenuously positive and negative results.” Now, fill in the blank with your favorite non-performing program. It is hard to
imagine that any objective observer would respond by saying, “Great, let’s expand this to states across the country.” Yet this seems to be what DeVos and half the states in the country have concluded about vouchers.

Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has argued that empirical evidence is largely irrelevant to determining whether vouchers and other forms of choice programs should be adopted, because choice aligns schooling with a core American value: freedom. Certainly, it is desirable that education policy support our most fundamental principles, and freedom is at the top of the list. However, this argument assumes that choice policies, by definition, increase freedom. Whether that assumption holds true depends on what form of freedom we mean and how policies are designed. A voucher program that allows schools to set their own rules and does not provide transportation will increase freedom only for those students who meet the schools’ standards and who can find their own way to and from school.

Even that interpretation assumes we mean freedom in the libertarian sense—that is, freedom from restrictions on individual choice. School attendance zones, which assign children to a particular school by their neighborhood of residence, do curtail this kind of freedom. But the freedom that comes from promoting educational opportunity is also important. Unlike the libertarian form of freedom, opportunity is mostly an empirical issue, as it requires not only that families be unfettered by government policies in selecting schools for their children, but also that they are able to choose from among accessible, high-quality options. We can debate what criteria define quality—strong test scores versus parent satisfaction, for example—but the assertion that opportunity is an empirical issue is hard to dispute.

It is also important to consider how voucher programs contribute to or detract from other salient cultural values such as equity, community, and democracy. The fact that vouchers are likely to open access only for some creates an immediate concern for equity. Apprehension that vouchers will undermine neighborhood schools—and the neighborhoods themselves—is also well founded at a time when geographically based communities are already under great stress.

The voucher debate, therefore, is a question not just of values but also of effectiveness, and research should play a significant role. So how should we interpret the available evidence? At most, only one of the more than two dozen states that have tried statewide vouchers and tuition tax credits has yet to demonstrate convincing, measurable success with them, Given this reality, it is hard to make a case for substantially replacing our system of public schooling on a national scale. The American workforce continues to be the most productive and creative in the world. This does not mean we cannot do better, but it does indicate that we should proceed with caution and care.

Finally, we cannot interpret the voucher evidence without thinking about the alternative policy options. Vouchers represent just one form of choice. Given the multitude of ways in which we would expect a free market in schooling to fail, perhaps other forms of choice that strike a different balance between government and market forces would be more effective. The evidence on charter schools, for example, is increasingly positive—even at scale. Perhaps what some call the “portfolio model,” and what I have called “managed competition,” will do more to increase freedom, equity,
efficiency, and community. A system of managed competition gives families genuine choice in schooling, but it also ensures 1) true accessibility to these options; 2) transparency, including data reporting and open board meetings; 3) coordination of school operations with a government body that has some degree of authority; and 4) government enforcement of the rules and protection of students’ civil rights. It also seems likely that different localities need different systems, and many might be best served by maintaining traditional public schools.

We have been debating vouchers for decades, even centuries, without much evidence to inform those debates. Today, policy advocates are way out in front of the evidence, especially with the current proliferation of statewide voucher programs. The new federal expansion of tax-favored 529 savings plans to include tuition for private schools, a move that constitutes reverse targeting to the affluent, has even less justification. It would be wise to put a hold on further broad-based experiments until we see whether the dozens of relatively new programs yield more positive results than the older ones. When it comes to convincing evidence, we are still waiting.

This is part of a forum on private school choice. For alternate takes, see “Programs Benefit Disadvantaged Students,” by Patrick J. Wolf, or “Lessons Learned from Indiana,” Mark Berends, R. Joseph Waddington, and Megan Austin.

The Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, launched in 2011, offers a rich opportunity to study how a large-scale tuition-voucher program works and to analyze the results it has produced in its first few years. As we consider the merits of private-school choice and what it would take to make it succeed, this initiative deserves particular attention: it is the nation’s largest voucher program, accounting for nearly 20 percent of all voucher students nationwide, with 34,299 students receiving vouchers and 313 private schools participating during the 2016–17 academic year. And in terms of student eligibility, Indiana’s program is the broadest, with its vouchers aimed at both low- and moderate-income families and no cap on the number of students who can take part. The average scholarship amount, based on the public-school district in which students live, ranges from nearly $4,500 in kindergarten to $5,600 in high school.

Our four-year evaluation of the Indiana program is one of a few recent studies that finds statistically significant negative effects on student achievement of using a voucher to switch from a public to a private school in the first years after a choice program’s launch. But that is only part of the story. Our research also shows that voucher students begin to recoup their academic losses in their third and fourth years of attending a private school. Students transitioning to a private school may need time to acclimate to what are usually more-rigorous academic standards and higher expectations for homework and schoolwork. Our findings also speak only to the achievement gains of students using vouchers to switch to a private school in grades 5–8. Starting students in private schools in earlier grade levels, and thus giving them more time to adjust, might produce better outcomes.

Given that many state and federal policymakers support the expansion of private-school choice, Indiana’s experience can offer lessons for the design of future voucher programs.

Who Participates?

About 76 percent of Indiana’s private schools—and almost 100 percent of its Catholic schools—participate in the voucher program. Not long after the program began, we conducted a survey of all Indiana private schools to learn why they did or did not decide to participate. Those that chose to join most frequently specified their mission, service orientation, and school finances as reasons (see Figure 1). Schools that opted not to participate cited reasons such as the desire to maintain autonomy from government, their lack of required accreditation (and unwillingness to become accredited), and concern that enrolling voucher students would require the schools to lower their academic standards.

When examining student participation, we looked at those who joined the program early and those who are participating now, because the program has changed over time. Initially, students could receive a voucher only if they had attended a public school for at least one year, or if they had attended a private school with the help of the state’s less-generous tax credit for some parents paying private-school tuition. In 2013, the program dropped the public-school attendance requirement. Thus, in its first year, 90 percent of Indiana Scholarship students had previously attended a public school, but by 2016–17, over half—55 percent—had never attended one. In other words, the program started out serving students who wanted to leave public schools, but it now serves a majority of students who have attended private schools from day one.

As the program changed, so too did the demographics of participating students (see Figure 2). In the first year, 24 percent were African American, but this number declined to 12 percent in 2016–17. Conversely, the percentage of white students receiving vouchers increased from 46 percent in the first year to 60 percent in 2016–17. The shares of Hispanic students (20 percent) and multiracial students (6–7 percent) remained consistent over time. Statewide in 2016–17, the K–12 student population was 69 percent white, 12 percent African American, 11 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent multiracial.

In the program’s first year, 69 percent of its students lived in metropolitan areas, 16 percent in suburbs, 7 percent in rural areas, and 7 percent in small towns. By 2016–17, the proportion of students from metropolitan areas decreased to 61 percent, while the share of those from suburban areas increased to 23 percent. Statewide in 2016, about 31 percent of students in grades 3–8 lived in metropolitan areas, 27 percent in suburbs, 14 percent in small towns, and 28 percent in rural areas. (Corresponding figures for the full K–12 enrollment were not readily available.)

How the Program Works

When the voucher program first began, we conducted about 100 interviews with principals, teachers, parents, and students in 13 participating private schools. We sought to learn how schools were providing educational opportunities to students using vouchers; how schools adapted their curriculum and instruction; and how students were integrating into their new environments academically, behaviorally, and religiously.

Statewide, students receiving vouchers were low-achieving before entering private schools (on average, performing at the 42nd percentile compared to public- and private-school students statewide). Principals, teachers, and students we interviewed said that students who transferred into private schools using a voucher had not been required to do much homework in the public schools. These students moved to private schools whose students were performing, on average, at the 53rd to 57th percentile in mathematics and English language arts (ELA), respectively. Schools responded to their new students by providing more individualized instruction and in some cases, by adding an “ability” group. One teacher, for example, observed a much larger gap between her high-achieving and low-achieving students than in previous years. In response, she provided more differentiated instruction and worked with smaller groups when possible.

Voucher students themselves also had to adapt to the higher academic and behavioral expectations in their new private schools. A principal’s comment typifies what we heard in our interviews: while the school did not change its expectations, he said, teachers worked to help the new students adjust to the expectations and understand that such standards applied not just to them but to all the students.

Effects on Achievement

Because Indiana does not cap the number of vouchers awarded, it has no lottery process to determine who’s in and who’s out. Without the benefit of random assignment, we used a variety of statistical approaches to determine the program’s impact on student achievement immediately after its launch. We focused on students using a voucher to switch from a public to a private school in grades 5–8 during the program’s first four years (2011–12 through 2014–15). Because Indiana public and private schools use the same assessment in grades 3–8, we could identify public-school students who shared similar achievement trajectories and demographic characteristics with these voucher students at baseline (the year prior to a student switching from a public to a private school) and track both groups’ academic progress for up to four subsequent years.

Overall, we found an average loss in mathematics of 0.12 standard deviations (roughly 3–4 percentile points) from baseline for students who used a voucher to transfer from public to private schools (see Figure 3a). The largest losses occurred during years one and two. However, voucher students began to show signs of improvement by their fourth year in a private school, and in that year there was no statistically significant difference between them and their public-school peers in terms of total achievement gains from baseline. The negative math effects in the early years are similar to recent findings for students participating in new statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Ohio, though smaller in magnitude. In ELA, we find no statistically significant average difference in the performance of voucher and public-school students across all four years (see Figure 3b).

Our estimates of the effects of voucher use after three and four years are based on a relatively small number of students: fewer than 200 in year four, as compared to roughly 3,000 in year one and 1,700 in year two. That’s mainly because state test scores are not available for voucher students who had reached high school by that time. Nearly 15 percent of voucher students also return to a public school within one or two years, so our longer-term estimates represent the most persistent students. Furthermore, our main results are averages across all participating private schools, and estimates of the effects of using a voucher to attend specific private schools vary widely (that is, voucher students excel in some private schools and perform poorly in others). Even so, our analysis provides the most complete picture to date of the early effects on student achievement of a voucher program operating at scale.

Implications for Program Design

Although further research is necessary to understand the variation in the Indiana program’s effects—including the organizational and instructional environments of voucher schools—our research to date offers some clear policy implications:

Allow enough time for preparation. Implementing voucher programs incrementally might be more prudent than scaling up quickly. The state legislature passed the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program in the spring of 2011, and students began using vouchers that fall. Our interviews reveal that, despite their strong support for the program, private schools felt rushed in their communication with families and enrollment of students. Giving schools, families, and students more time to prepare for change might ease adjustment all the way around.

Start smaller. Before expanding voucher programs statewide, it might be better to start with smaller programs using a lottery process. This way, the randomization can allow policymakers, educators, and researchers to assess more definitively the programs’ effects.

Measure broadly, and begin in early grades. States should rely on a wider set of measures to evaluate voucher programs and begin this appraisal at earlier grade levels. Certainly, test scores are important proxies for what students are learning, but currently there is no standardized assessment taken by both public- and private-school students in grades K–2 in Indiana. What’s more, researchers know that other outcomes (for instance, social-emotional skills, engagement, motivation, and progression through K–12 schooling) are critical when considering the impact of education reforms on students of all ages. Going forward, our study will examine the impacts of vouchers on high-school students’ achievement and attainment.

Start students early. As we mentioned at the outset, it may be that implementing voucher programs in early grade levels would better acclimate students to private schools. Voucher students in upper grade levels appear to need time to adjust to the more demanding homework and high expectations in their new schools. In this regard, it is worth noting that a majority of students currently using vouchers in Indiana have enrolled in private schools from the start.

Make it easy for good schools to participate. States implementing voucher programs should ensure the quality and number of private schools willing to take part. About three quarters of those in Indiana are participating. This contrasts with Louisiana, where the supply of private schools has posed a challenge, likely due to the regulatory burden they would face if they signed on.

Consider teacher training. Private-school educators may need additional training to prepare for serving voucher students. Our findings suggest that teachers would benefit from professional development in mathematics curriculum and instruction and in learning to lead more-diverse classrooms.

Although we have much to discover about the impacts of statewide voucher programs, we are beginning to understand what policymakers and educators should consider when implementing new ones. Until research can show the conditions under which voucher programs succeed, the policy debates will rage on. In the meantime, Indiana’s experience to date provides useful guidance for states intent on moving ahead now.

This is part of a forum on private school choice. For alternate takes, see “Programs Benefit Disadvantaged Students,” by Patrick J. Wolf, or “Still Waiting for Convincing Evidence,” Douglas N. Harris.

In the past few years, new statewide voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio and the steady growth of a tax-credit funded scholarship program in Florida have offered a glimpse of what expansive private-school choice might look like. What have we learned about the students and schools who choose to participate in statewide private-school choice programs and the academic results for participants? How do these programs work in practice? And what does research tell us about how states should design and oversee voucher programs—if indeed they should do so at all?

In this forum, we hear from Patrick J. Wolf, education policy professor at the University of Arkansas, Douglas N. Harris, professor of economics at Tulane, and the trio of Mark Berends, professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, R. Joseph Waddington, assistant professor at the College of Education, University of Kentucky, and Megan Austin, researcher at the American Institutes for Research, Chicago.

 

Programs Benefit Disadvantaged Students
by Patrick J. Wolf

 

 

 

Still Waiting for Convincing Evidence
by Douglas N. Harris

 

 

 

Lessons Learned from Indiana
By Mark Berends, R. Joseph Waddington, and Megan Austin

To what extent does the First Amendment apply to students’ off-campus communications on the Internet?

Do schools have the authority to punish students for offensive messages they send via social media? Four years ago, Martha Derthick and I argued that the U.S. Supreme Court would eventually be drawn into the debate over off-campus cyber-speech (see “Digital Discipline,” legal beat, Summer 2013). The court has yet to step in, but a recent federal case out of Pennsylvania illustrates the growing controversy around the issue.

In B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, a high school sophomore was kicked off the junior-varsity cheerleading squad for a vulgar image she sent via Snapchat, a messaging platform that is supposed to protect against rash juvenile behavior by deleting photos soon after one sends them. As “B.L.” learned, though, social media is forever, even with Snapchat, since users can take and share screenshots of any images they receive.

The squad rules stated that cheerleaders were “representing” their school “at games, fundraisers, and other events. Good sportsmanship will be enforced, this includes foul language and inappropriate gestures. . . . There will be no toleration of any negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders, or coaches placed on the internet.” However, in May 2017, B.L. shared a Snap of herself and a friend holding up their middle fingers, with the words “f— school f— softball f— cheer f— everything” superimposed on the image.

B.L. took the picture at a local convenience store on a weekend, but the image made its way to her coaches, who kicked her off the team, prompting her lawsuit.

The relevant case law appeared to be on B.L.’s side. Student speech, according to the Supreme Court, can only be punished if it causes a substantial educational disruption, violates the rights of others, is lewd, or is pro-drug. These exceptions, the court has made clear, do not apply to out-of-school speech. Hence, B.L.’s vulgarity should not be punishable.

But the school district argued that other cases sanctioned the student’s dismissal. In 2002, for instance, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that a school could expel a student for a website he created off campus that contained “derogatory, profane, offensive and threatening comments” about a teacher and the principal. Because at least one student had accessed the website via a school computer, the court said, one could “consider the speech as occurring on campus.”

Similarly, in 2011 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the suspension of a student for a Myspace page mocking a fellow student’s alleged contracting of herpes. The court held that the speech was “sufficiently connected to the school environment” to justify the school’s action.

In B.L., the school district argued that since her Snap referred to a school activity, these two precedents applied. The district also claimed it was within its rights because B.L.’s punishment—dismissal from an extracurricular activity—did not infringe on a “protected property interest,” as a suspension or expulsion might.

In October 2017, federal district court judge A. Richard Caputo rejected the school district’s defense. The Pennsylvania website case, he said, did not apply, since the student had made death threats that could have caused a substantial disruption of school activities. He also dismissed the Fourth Circuit decision, since Pennsylvania falls under the Third Circuit. The latter court had, in fact, ruled in 2011 that a student could not be punished for a Myspace page on which he implied that his principal was an alcoholic with an affinity for marijuana. Caputo said that this decision controlled in B.L. He also noted that, by the district’s reasoning, a student could conceivably be “barred from an extracurricular activity if they were at home with friends and uttered a profanity that was subsequently reported to the school,” which would amount to deputizing “school children to serve as Thought Police” for the district.

With significant conflicts dividing the lower federal courts, it’s time for the Supreme Court to resolve them, especially given that some district administrators fear schools could be held liable for not regulating off-campus speech if, say, online bullying should culminate in violence.

One hopes the justices will share Caputo’s skepticism toward the practice of punishing students’ out-of-school speech. In loco parentis on campus is supposed to be dead, and it would be unwise to resurrect it for off-campus behavior. Educators should of course refer student speech that rises to the level of criminal conduct—say, for example, a true threat—to appropriate authorities. But schools are not community hall monitors, and the Constitution requires the protection of First Amendment rights, even when they are exercised by young people of questionable judgment.

Joshua Dunn is professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

For many teachers, a defined-benefit pension plan at retirement is hardly a “fringe” benefit—rather, it is a long-anticipated payoff at career’s end, after years of modest take-home pay. Public school teachers who stay on the job for 25 or 30 years count on retiring in relative security, with monthly benefit payments until death.

But for many young teachers, that pension promise is broken. Nationwide, teachers’ plans are drowning in $500 billion in debt, driven in part by a financial crisis in which nearly all state plans failed to meet their target rates of return. To balance the books, states are requiring increased employee contributions and are making vesting rules more stringent—using new teachers’ paychecks to protect legacy payments to older colleagues. As a result, month after month, many teachers turn over a substantial portion of their pay to a plan whose benefits they are unlikely to receive.

While these changes may improve the short-term financial health of teachers’ pension plans, their long-term viability looks bleak without more significant structural reforms. This will prove a challenge for public school districts, most of which are required by law to participate in their state’s plan.

In some states, however, public charter schools provide an important alternative: charters have the flexibility to opt out of the state pension plan and develop their own retirement plans. The charter sectors in these states have the opportunity to serve as laboratories of innovation, not only in terms of educational programs but also as examples of management strategies that could be applied to the broader teacher labor market.

To explore this possibility, we studied retirement plans and surveyed charter schools in five states with such flexibility: Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, and Michigan. We find a growing number of schools, especially those run by management organizations, are choosing to opt out of state pension plans. In lieu of standard plans, charters are providing various, more portable defined-contribution options and incentives such as 401(k) and 403(b) plans, potentially providing a new way to ensure that teachers’ retirements are secure. In interviews, charter operators detail their reasons for these choices, providing important context to a retirement challenge that is unlikely to be resolved without significant action.

A Growing Pension Problem

Keeping public-school teachers’ pensions plans flush is expensive, and it accounts for a growing share of education spending.

In 2017, employer costs for teacher retirement benefits accounted for 21.9 percent of teachers’ salary costs, up from 11.9 percent in 2004 (see Figure 1). By contrast, in the private sector, retirement benefit costs for workers account for roughly 11 percent of salaries, a share that has remained relatively flat over the same time period. Pension costs, excluding Social Security and retiree health insurance, have grown from $520 per student in 2004 to $1,220 today in current dollars—or from roughly 5 percent to 10 percent of current expenditures per student.

Since the start of the financial crisis in 2007, 32 states have increased employee contribution rates and 37 states have increased employer contribution rates. States like California have publicly stated that these contribution rates will continue to increase in the future. In other states, like Illinois and Michigan, future increases to employee and employer contributions rates seem like a near certainty given the poor fiscal health of their plans.

At the same time, many states have reduced benefits for new teachers. Between 2007 and 2015, nine states passed laws that increased the vesting period for new teachers from 5 years to 10 years on the job. In addition, 29 states tightened retirement eligibility rules by increasing the retirement age, required years of employment, or both.

This is problematic because, unlike in most professions, teachers’ pension plans are not portable across states—and, in some cases, even within states (see “Golden Handcuffs,” research, Winter 2010). For example, a teacher who moves from New Jersey to New York has to change plans and cannot continue to accrue benefits. If she moves before she is vested in the New Jersey plan, she may only withdraw her contributions and loses out on any pension benefits. This severe penalty is widespread: in most states, fewer than half of new teachers are expected to stay long enough to receive any pension benefits at all (see “Why Most Teachers Get a Bad Deal on Pensions” at www.educationnext.org). In Washington, D.C., and 10 states—Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming—fewer than 10 percent of new teachers are expected to remain in the state system long enough to be eligible for normal retirement benefits. Yet state pension plans remain a central part of teachers’ pay packages, especially since 40 percent nationwide do not participate in Social Security.

Data

One group of public school teachers is not automatically locked into these pension programs: teachers working in charter schools. In 19 states, charters may choose to participate in their state’s pension plan, or may offer teachers an alternative.

Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, and Michigan have large numbers of charter schools and allow for flexibility regarding state plan participation. All five states provide traditional final average salary defined-benefit plans to teachers, with some differences. Florida allows all teachers to opt into an alternative defined-contribution plan. In Arizona, Florida, and Michigan, teachers participate in Social Security. In California and Louisiana, teachers in district schools do not participate in Social Security, but teachers who work in a charter school that has opted out of the state pension plan must do so.

To gather details on the schools, we use two years of data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools: 2014-15 for Arizona and Michigan, and 2015-16 for California, Florida, and Louisiana. The organization maintains a comprehensive database of every charter school’s management type, year opened, grades served, and geographic location, among other variables, collected from state education departments and the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data. We also reviewed individual state pension-plan information, in the form of either a list of schools that participated or annual financial audits that list the members of the plan. In Louisiana, plan participation data were provided by the charter support organization, the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools.

Which Charters Opt In?

Across the five states that we studied, 47 percent of charter schools participated in their state’s pension plan. However, the rate varied considerably from state to state, from a low of 11 percent in Michigan to a high of 87 percent in California (see Figure 2).

In Figure 3, we plot the charter participation rate against the year in which the charter opened. Because it is very difficult for a charter school to opt out of a state plan once it has enrolled teachers, whether a school is currently participating generally reflects a decision it made before it opened its doors. Once doors are open and teachers are hired, the in-or-out status is largely fixed. It is therefore notable that we find a clear downward trend from about 2010 on, when pension costs began to rise sharply, with newer charter schools much less likely to participate in the state plan.

Since California has as many charter schools as the other states combined, as well as much higher participation rates, we plot its trend separately. The share of new charter schools opting into the state plan hovered around 90 percent until 2013—the tail end of the Great Recession. Since then, the participation rate of new schools has dropped precipitously, reaching a new low of 63 percent in 2015‒16. The downward trend began when a new state law intended to shore up ailing plans set dramatic increases in contribution rates. Districts’ and charter schools’ contributions were set to more than double in seven years, from 8.25 percent to 19.1 percent of payroll by 2020; currently, they are at 14.4 percent. Teacher contributions grew as well, from 8 percent of salary to 10.25 percent.

However, of the five states in our study, only California also provides a direct payment from the state legislature to subsidize the cost of the pension plan. Currently, the state contributes 8.8 percent of payroll toward teacher pension costs. In the past, this subsidy seemed to incentivize charter schools to stay in the state plan; however, rising employer contributions have undoubtedly changed that calculation moving forward.

Differences by School Type

In order to better understand some of the factors that influence charter participation, we estimate a statistical model relating charter school participation to characteristics of the charter school, the market in which the school operates, and a time trend. We look at single-site, independent charter schools, and schools that are part of two different kinds of networks: nonprofit charter-management organizations (CMOs) and for-profit education-management organizations (EMOs).

Our model indicates that schools that are part of CMOs and EMOs are considerably less likely to participate in state plans compared to single-site charters. EMOs seem particularly averse to participation in costly defined-benefit plans, and participate at one-quarter the rate of similarly situated independent charter schools. For example, if 60 percent of independent charter schools participated in the pension plan in a particular state, then we would expect that only 15 percent of EMOs would participate.

Both nonprofit and for-profit management organizations appear more likely to opt out and offer individual defined-contribution plans for employees, such as 401(k) plans (or for nonprofits, similar but lower-cost 403(b) plans). CMOs and EMOs may be better positioned to absorb the fixed costs associated with setting up an alternative retirement plan, can more easily assemble the required expertise, and often operate in more than one state, and thus would likely favor mobile benefits that facilitate staff moving from one school to another.

In Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, and Michigan, we also find differences among school types: charter middle schools and particularly high schools are more likely to participate in state plans than are charter elementary schools. Middle schools and high schools are 21 percent and 91 percent, respectively, more likely to participate in state plans. Survey data routinely show that the public elementary schools have an easier time filling teaching vacancies compared to their middle-school and high-school peers. It is thus not surprising that elementary-level charter schools would be more likely to find that the costs of pension participation exceed any potential benefits in recruitment and retention, since they find it easier to fill their teaching vacancies.

Geographic surroundings matter, too. Charter schools operating in urban and suburban areas are considerably less likely to paticipate in state plans than rural charter schools, although the gap is not statistically significant in California. One interpretation is that charter schools operating in more populated urban and suburban markets may find it easier to fill vacancies with teachers who do not have previous public-school experience. They may also find it easier to tap alternative sources of teachers like local teacher residency programs, Teach for America (TFA), or other college graduates who are less inclined to spend a full career in teaching. Charters in rural environments may have a smaller pool
of such candidates, forcing them to more aggressively recruit teachers from district schools and to offer a retirement
benefit package that is comparable in order to recruit qualified candidates.

Charters Explain Their Pension Choices

To better understand why charter schools choose to opt in or out of pension plans, we administered surveys to a random sample of schools across the five states. By design, half of the schools in our sample participated in their state’s pension plan and half opted out. Our overall response rate was 22 percent; on the whole, respondents resembled non-respondents. Roughly 100 schools are included in our analysis. In addition, for the subsample of schools that indicated a willingness to do so, we also followed up with a phone interview.

We find that, for charter schools that participated in the state plan, the primary reasons were recruiting and retaining teachers, as well as input from staff and/or board members (see Figure 4). As one charter school administrator put it:

In the State of California, participating in the State Teachers’ Retirement System is an expectation for teachers. They actually anticipate their participation in the retirement system. If we did not participate, we would impact our ability to recruit highly effective, quality teachers.

However, for charter schools that opted out, the primary drivers were lower costs, flexibility of investment options for teachers, portability of benefits, and greater control over total compensation costs. Below are two examples from phone interviews with two different school administrators:

Our 401(k) matching structure incentivizes staff to continue working for us by increasing our match over time. However, we also immediately vest employees so that they have the security of a fully portable plan; they can take their contributions, our matching dollars, and all the earnings when/if they leave our employ. We have found that many high-quality teachers don’t necessarily have the next 20 years planned out. Giving them a retirement benefit that is much more flexible than the state’s pension plan is very attractive to them.

Opting out of the state pension plan frees up about $1 million at each school. We then have the freedom to use that $1 million in ways that our employees most value and that ultimately drive student achievement. We’re able to direct our personnel budget to the items that staff most value, like higher salaries, matching contributions on a portable 401(k) plan, offering flexible spending accounts, and setting up discounted quality childcare. It also frees up money for classroom items, computer labs, afterschool sports, and field trips.

Alternative Retirement Plans

When charter schools opt out of state plans, what, if anything, do they put in its place? The vast majority offer their teachers an alternative—mainly portable, defined-contribution plans. Some 68 percent offer a 401(k) and 25 percent offer a 403(b) plan (a similar, but lower-cost option for tax-exempt organizations). In states like California and Louisiana, where district teachers do not participate in Social Security, charter teachers not in the state pension plan also receive Social Security coverage.

One dramatic difference between charter and traditional plans concerns vesting periods, or the amount of time a teacher must spend at her job before she becomes eligible for full pension benefits. In traditional state pension plans, it often takes at least 5 years for new teachers to become vested, and 15 states currently require 10 years to vest. As a result, many short-term or mobile teachers will fail to become vested and will not receive the full benefits matched to the contributions they made. By contrast, alternative retirement savings plans for charter teachers have much shorter vesting periods: in 61 percent of plans, teachers are fully vested within a year or less.

Nearly all of the charter schools that opted out of the state plan and created alternative plans provided some type of matching contribution to their employees. Of these schools, 80 percent provided a 100 percent match on the employee contribution, up to an established limit. On average, that match for employee contributions was equal to 4.3 percent of a teacher’s salary.

Unlike defined-benefit plans, workers with retirement savings accounts must actively choose to contribute to them in order to save for retirement. Some 71 percent of charter schools report that new teachers are knowledgeable about the school’s alternative retirement-plan offerings. Roughly two-thirds of the alternative plans are optional, while one-third automatically enroll teachers. In interviews, the majority of respondents say their teachers are knowledgeable about and satisfied with their plans, and that their teachers find the plan to be as good as or better than the state pension. However, charter schools did have to spend a significant amount of time educating teachers about the benefits of creating an alternative retirement-savings plan as compared to staying in the state pension system, which was far more familiar for most career teachers.

Looking Ahead

State pension plans that in the 1990s seemed like a good deal for start-up charter schools appear to be far less attractive today. Their financial health remains precarious, and the schools and employees who participate in them have reason to be concerned about promised benefits and the substantial cost of providing them. Our analysis shows that charter schools are increasingly opting out of state plans, especially schools with access to greater administrative capacity and knowledge and thicker labor markets.

Nearly all state pension plans failed to meet their target rates of return in the years following the financial crisis, which has necessitated sharp increases in contributions from employers and employees. But instead of saving for future benefits for current teachers, these stepped-up contributions are typically being used to pay down the unfunded liabilities of the plan. Together with stricter eligibility and vesting rules, that is making pensions a less-appealing prospect for new teachers, and by extension, new charter schools.

However, our interviews with charter schools uncovered a major barrier to innovation: across all five states in our study, charter schools said they often struggle to understand whether or not they should participate in their state’s pension plan. Pension and retirement rules are complex and ambiguous, and navigating these systems is especially challenging for independent charter schools. There is a clear opportunity for advocates and supporters, such as state charter support organizations, to create a shared knowledge base and provide additional resources in this area.

Public school districts are facing twin challenges: maintaining a labor supply of qualified teachers while shoring up the deteriorating system that compensates them.
As promised payouts grow, this could have a dramatic impact on what schools can achieve in the classroom going forward. Fortunately, the autonomy provided to charter schools positions them to lead by example on this and other important issues. As we continue to gather information about
how charter schools innovate in both of these areas, it is important to share this knowledge with the larger public-education system.

Michael Podgursky is professor of economics at the University of Missouri–Columbia. Susan Aud Pendergrass is the vice president of research and evaluation at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, where Kevin Hesla is director of research and evaluation.

Kenneth Eastwood is thinking about the future. That’s how he frames his role as superintendent of the Enlarged City School District of Middletown, New York, delegating much of the day-to-day work of running a high-poverty turnaround district of 6,800 students to look ahead and concentrate on the big picture.

“My office is always planning for 5 to 10 years down the road,” he said. “We identify ideas, figure out their legitimacy by testing them, and if they work, then we find the money to implement them. It’s different from being buried in the today.”

On his mind a lot these days is the new technological habitat of children younger than five, who are surrounded by digital devices that can adapt to their specific needs and strengths. This next generation of students is growing up in a world not only where learning is ubiquitous, but also where talking to devices—asking them questions and giving them instructions—is commonplace.

That observation has generated a series of questions in Eastwood’s mind: What should a “voice-activated classroom” look like? How do we design it?

“We need to have the appropriate learning environments” for these students, Eastwood said. “I’m extremely concerned that this new flock will come in and will be used to voice-activated environments and technology-based learning programs that know them well enough to move with them at appropriate paces.” For these kids, chalk-and-talk isn’t going to cut it.

From Living Rooms to Classrooms

The potential of voice-activation technology to disrupt incoming students’ abilities and expectations is no hypothetical. In 2015, the market for smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home was roughly $360 million (a corresponding Apple device, the HomePod, is expected in early 2018). Estimates suggest that the market could reach $2 billion—and about 75 percent of U.S. homes—by 2020.

As a result, students will be expecting “individualized resources,” Eastwood said. “And when they don’t get that, more kids will be classified as ADHD, special education, and so forth, because they are not used to a passive environment and will be frustrated.”

So for forward-looking educators, the question is how best to put these new devices to work. Eastwood is an obvious person to ask.

Since 2013, Middletown has transformed instruction in all of its schools through incorporating technology and blended learning. Tour one of its elementary schools now, for example, and you see students actively using computers in one station while others work in small groups with their teacher or peers. The culture is crisp, and students know why they are working on any given task and what they are trying to achieve. The district also has embarked on an ambitious project to build a robust open educational resources (OER) curriculum with learning pathways that meet the needs of different students.

Middletown has achieved some notable results, too. It has entirely closed the graduation-rate gap between white and minority students, even as the percentage of nonwhite students in the district has doubled to 84 percent and the percentage of students who receive free and reduced-price school meals has climbed over 30 percentage points to 74 percent. The district’s schools have also narrowed the achievement gap in test scores, which NWEA MAP measures show are trending upward.

So how would Eastwood design a voice-activated classroom? He shared a few ideas.

In one design, each classroom would contain a few microphones around the room, which would recognize individual students’ voices and distinguish between different students’ questions and commands. In turn, a connected-learning application could provide verbal responses to an individual student’s device. Students could work wearing headphones to create an intimate, quiet experience in a shared classroom environment. In another potential classroom design, instead of allowing
all students to ask a question in an impromptu fashion, they might visit a question station instead.

These devices could also send teachers real-time data to help them know where and how they should intervene with individual students. Eastwood imagines that over time these technologies would also know the different students based on their reading levels, numeracy, background knowledge, and other areas, such that it could provide access to the appropriate OER content to support that specific child in continuing her learning. For example, in Middletown the district saw that their special education population responded better to learning through three-dimensional education resources in biology and experienced a big increase in proficiency attainment, whereas the rest of their student body did not experience those same results.

Importantly, he doesn’t see these devices as replacements for teachers but as amplifiers for their work. Voice-activated devices can allow students to avoid getting stuck because they can’t ask a question to unlock their growth in real time, and the technology has the potential to provide far more data to teachers about where their students need supports.

Time for Testing

No matter where voice-activated devices are physically placed in a classroom, Eastman thinks schools should start testing out different designs to understand everything from the quantity and timing of questions to what instructional changes teachers might have to make to leverage these technologies.

In addition to experimentation and tests of efficacy, there are other questions. Who will underwrite the development of a classroom that is not only voice-activated but also can learn to understand unique student needs? When is the best time to jump in with a costly reconfiguration of the classroom powered by “smart” devices? Perhaps personal devices—mobile phones, tablets, and laptops—will ultimately embed these voice-activated assistants in a more appropriate way for an educational environment—and spare schools the costs of purchasing standalone devices. After all, iPhones and iPads have Siri and Android devices have Google Assistant already.

What is the best use of big data and artificial intelligence in education? Can they help solve the most intractable—and costly—problems, or would they be put to better use supporting more routine challenges or, as Michael Petrilli recently argued in this column, helping advance basic education research (“Big Data Transforms Education Research,” what next, Winter 2018)?

Still another question is whether voice-activated devices are an advancement over what we have today—Google searches, texting, and online chatting. Eastwood believes they will be, because the modality of verbally asking a question, as opposed to typing something on a device, is more natural and will cause fewer interruptions in a student’s train of thought.

And there are bound to be privacy concerns. Devices that can recognize individual students’ voices and “understand” their specific learning needs are certain to raise questions with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

But Eastwood is unfazed. These are real issues, but ones that should be tested and learned from because that’s the goal for everyone in an educational environment. The rapid emergence of voice-activated tools in all other parts of society is too profound to leave outside the classroom door.

Michael B. Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and an executive editor at Education Next.

The Senate confirmation of Betsy DeVos as the U.S. secretary of education saw critics hurl accusations that the charter school sector in her home state of Michigan was a “Wild West” of low student performance and authorizing chaos. These charges seemed odd, given that the best studies available on the subject—from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO)—show that Michigan charter students make large academic gains relative to similar students at district schools, particularly in Detroit. The use of “Wild West” to describe Michigan seemed odder still to those of us who live in the actual West, especially those of us who pay attention to charter school results. Many of us are happy to embrace the “Wild West” label as it pertains to charter schooling.

Four Corners Charter Policies

The point at which the corners of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet is the only spot in the United States where the borders of four states converge. Beyond geography, the Four Corners states share a similar approach to charter schooling. All four states have adopted relatively freewheeling authorization policies, and charter schools there show signs of prospering—and delivering substantial benefits to students.

National organizations that rank charter-school laws have varying opinions on the charter laws of the Four Corners states. The Center for Education Reform gives the Arizona law an A, Colorado’s a B, and both New Mexico’s and Utah’s a C. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools ranks Arizona 11th, Colorado 5th, New Mexico 22nd, and Utah 23rd among the states in terms of how their laws stack up against the alliance’s “model” state charter law. In essence, these two organizations differ on whether Arizona or Colorado ranks higher, but they both place New Mexico and Utah in the middle of the pack nationally.

A third organization, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), gives low marks to the laws of all four states. In 2014, for instance, NACSA rated New Mexico’s law highest of the four but still gave that state’s law just 14 points out of a possible 30. Arizona and Colorado were a step down from there, earning only 9 points. Utah’s charter law received one of the lowest NACSA scores in the country, at just 8 points. NACSA’s rating system places a higher weight on regulatory features of charter school laws than either the Center for Education Reform or the National Alliance rankings.

The Four Corners states had consistent failings in the eyes of the NACSA raters: None of the states’ laws had a renewal standard tied to academic performance or a default closure provision, under which a school would lose its charter “by default” if it did not meet a minimum standard of performance. Arizona, Colorado, and Utah also did not perform evaluations of authorizers, another part of NACSA’s recommended policy framework. New Mexico’s efforts in this area boosted its NACSA scores above those of its neighbors. (Arizona has since required that authorizers submit annual reports to the state’s auditor general, earning it additional points from NACSA, but the change is too recent to have influenced its charter sector’s results yet.)

Not everyone, however, would hold that the absence of such regulatory policies is a detriment.

Growing K–12 Enrollment

A permissive approach to charter schooling suits the needs of rapidly growing states. Between 1990 and 2014, K–12 student enrollment increased by 22 percent nationwide. In Arizona, the increase was 74 percent; in Colorado, 55 percent; in New Mexico, 13 percent; and in Utah, 42 percent. The limits on charter schools in each of the four states correlate strongly with enrollment pressure—how fast the K–12 market is growing. Neither Arizona nor Colorado, which are both experiencing explosive increases in the student population, has any sort of cap on charters. Facing somewhat lower growth pressures, Utah’s law limits the number of new charter-school students and gives priority to new charters in high-growth areas. In 2015, Utah’s enrollment cap allowed for a 13 percent increase in charter school enrollment. New Mexico limits the number of new charter schools to 15 per year and 75 per five-year period, with unused spots rolling into an expanded future cap.

Strong overall enrollment growth also tends to engender relatively liberal regulatory practices toward charter schooling. While still prevalent in the West, permissive laws have become rarer around the country. Nationally, charter school growth has slowed in recent years. Robin Lake from the Center on Reinventing Public Education cites high legal barriers to entry, high startup costs, and the challenges of obtaining funding among the possible factors that are at play in this trend.

“Gone are the days when a couple of successful teachers like Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, the founders of KIPP, could get a charter on their own,” Lake wrote in The 74. “By some estimates, it now can cost half a million to a million dollars to open a charter school. Startup funds are available, but federal and private funding is increasingly targeted to CMOs [charter management organizations] with a proven track record.”

The Four Corners states have seen rapid charter growth and even more-rapid growth in demand since the turn of this century. All four have experienced charter-school enrollment growth above the national average (Figure 1). In 2014–15, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah were respectively ranked first, second, and third among states in the percentage of K–12 public school students attending charter schools. Arizona had as many as 619 charters as of 2014–15, trailing only California in absolute numbers, yet the net impact of this growth was merely to slow the rate of enrollment growth within school districts—at least until the advent of the Great Recession, which (temporarily) moderated statewide population growth. New Mexico’s charter enrollment growth, like the growth of its student population at large, has been more modest, but it is still above the national average.

This relatively rapid pace of charter growth in the Four Corners states, however, has not been enough to satisfy demand. In 2010, the Colorado Department of Education estimated that charter schools statewide had 38,000 waitlisted applications—including 7,500 at a single school. In Arizona, the Great Hearts charter-school network reports 20,000 students on their waiting lists. “We have more students on our wait list than we do in our schools,” Great Hearts cofounder Dan Scoggin reported to the Phoenix Business Journal. “We could open another Great Hearts right away if we had the funding.”

In Utah, charter schools have experienced similar success. “The explosive growth in the number of charter schools has been just wonderful,” Royce Van Tassell, executive director of the Utah Association of Public Charter Schools, told the Deseret News. “If you look back over the past decade, I think charter schools have absorbed half of the growth in the number of students in Utah public schools. And there are literally thousands more on the waiting list hoping to [make] that same choice.”

In 2017, the New Mexico Public Education Department responded to a legislative proposal to implement a charter school moratorium by noting, “The families of New Mexico continue to seek alternative, quality choices for the education of their children. The best charter schools throughout the state have unbelievably long waitlists. By enacting a charter moratorium, this bill would deny the families of New Mexico the opportunity to make the best choices for their students’ education.” The measure did not survive.

Naturally, parents are most interested in finding the best schools for their own children; they have less incentive to care about the overall performance of an entire system of schools. But that performance is the rightful concern of policymakers. Further growth of charter schools in these states would serve both individual families and the greater population, because it would address unmet family demand and numerous studies indicate that parental choice has, if anything, a positive impact on district performance.

Where Charter Schools Locate

In general, charter schools tend to concentrate in cities. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reports that, nationwide, 55.6 percent of charter schools operate in urban areas, as compared to only 24.5 percent of district schools.

Conversely, charter schools are underrepresented in suburbs, towns, and rural areas, and their sparse presence there poses political barriers to those who would hope to develop a strong and diverse advocacy coalition for charter schools. As Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, the education-reform movement’s “achievement gap mania” does little to enlist the support of the affluent parents who largely populate these areas. “Because middle-class parents and suburbanites have no personal stake in the gap-closing enterprise, reforms are tolerated [by them] rather than embraced,” Hess wrote in 2011.

The 2016 Massachusetts charter-school ballot initiative illustrated the reality of this dilemma. In that election, voters decisively rejected a statewide measure that would have raised a cap on the number of charter schools that was binding only in the state’s urban centers. Afterward, some charter advocates expressed concern that suburban voters might view charter schools as something that they pay for through their taxes but which does not benefit their communities. Derrell Bradford, executive director of the New York Campaign for Achievement Now, asserted that the failure of the Massachusetts initiative indicated a need for a “suburban strategy” for the charter school movement.

Relatively liberal charter laws in the Four Corners states have produced a broader distribution of charter schools there relative to the nation as a whole. Charter schools in all four states are concentrated in urban areas, but to a lesser degree than in the nation as a whole. In Arizona—a highly urbanized state with population primarily clustered in the Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan areas—both charter and district schools are concentrated in urban areas, yet as of 2010 there were more than 200 charter schools operating in suburbs, towns, and rural areas. Colorado had more than 100 charter schools operating in non-urban communities that same year.

Utah’s focus on relieving district growing pains by focusing new charters in high-growth areas has led to charter schools being underrepresented in towns but overrepresented in rural areas.

New Mexico’s charter cap shields small districts from enrollment loss, and as a result, the state’s charters cluster primarily in urban settings (51 percent of charter schools operate there compared to 21 percent of New Mexico’s district schools) and in suburbs (which host 12.3 percent of the state’s charters but only 8.2 percent of its district schools).

An analysis of transfer transcripts performed by the Scottsdale (Arizona) Unified School District reveals an often overlooked benefit to inclusive choice policies: they incentivize suburban districts to participate in voluntary open enrollment (the practice of allowing students who live in one school district to apply to attend school in another). Scottsdale Unified, a wealthy suburban district, hired a team of demographers to study enrollment trends, and in 2012, Arizona’s auditor general released a report on the district. Scottsdale Unified has the capacity to serve 38,000 students but educates only 25,000—4,000 of whom opted for Scottsdale schools through open enrollment. These 4,000 transfer students would have ranked Scottsdale Unified as the ninth-largest charter school management organization in Arizona that year, if indeed it were a CMO.

In many areas of the country, well-to-do suburban districts choose not to participate in open enrollment, but in Arizona almost all districts do. Compare that state’s situation to the one in Ohio. The Fordham Institute released a study of open enrollment in Ohio, documenting that all of the state’s urban centers are surrounded by suburban districts that do not accept open-enrollment students. The fact that 72.6 percent of Ohio’s charter schools operate in urban areas likely has something to do with the fact that the state’s suburbs continue to opt out of enrolling students from other districts.

Refusing such transfers isn’t a practical option for Arizona’s suburban districts; they need the students. Scottsdale Unified’s analysis, for instance, showed that there were 9,000 school-age children living in the district but not attending its schools. The analysis of transcript requests from students exiting Scottsdale schools revealed that a large majority of them were leaving to attend charter schools. Scottsdale Unified was using only 65 percent of building capacity, despite taking in 4,000 out-of-district children. Reflecting a statewide trend for both districts and charters, Scottsdale Unified shows consistent signs of academic improvement on the state’s test, the AzMERIT. Choice programs have put pressure on Scottsdale Unified, and academic results there have improved.

Academic Success

What else, beyond population growth, explains the rapid rise of the charter sector in the Four Corners states? Higher test scores among charter students are probably part of the equation. It is difficult to pin down the relative quality of charter and district schools with confidence without studies that use admissions lotteries to compare the achievement of students who win charter-school admission to those who don’t. Few such studies exist, and indeed this approach is impractical for studying entire sectors of charter schools within a state, not all of which are consistently oversubscribed. The factors explaining the performance of charter school students thus remain a bit of an academic holy mystery—hotly debated, though possibly unable to be resolved for the time being.

While scholars and advocates can and do pore over less-definitive types of evidence, hundreds of thousands of parents make practical schooling decisions based on information they gather through word of mouth, campus visits, and the rankings available on online platforms such as GreatSchools. Several websites provide analysis of raw test scores, and some also collect parental reviews of schools. Research suggests that parents trust nonprofit sources of school data more than state government sources, and that parental reviews have a significant impact on other parents’ impressions of schools.

To the extent, if any, that parents prioritize test scores in their decisionmaking calculus, they are likely to approve of the data from charter schools in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (Figure 2). Proficiency rates on the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) among charter students are not only consistently higher than those of students in their respective district sectors, but many of these rates compare favorably to the states with the highest average levels of performance. Four Corners charter students do well on NAEP, even when compared to public school students in Massachusetts, the highest-performing state. Massachusetts holds its own in these comparisons but doesn’t always win—despite its considerable socioeconomic advantages. On 8th-grade math, for instance, Arizona charter students nearly match the average performance of Massachusetts, while Colorado charter students surpass the average level of proficiency of Bay State students.

Factors other than school quality could help to explain high levels of achievement of charter school students in these states—including the ability of parents to close underperforming schools. In theory, parents will opt to close the lowest-performing charter schools, allowing only the better ones to continue (and eventually report test scores). Long waiting lists for charter seats, however, indicate that many Four Corners parents are finding charters to their liking, whether they are basing their judgments on test scores or any of a host of other factors.

Parent Power

In March 2017, nearly 25 years after the first charter school opened in Colorado, the Denver Post published a retrospective piece on the growth of charters in the state. The story noted that 50 charter schools had closed over that time period, and that this rate was about twice the national average. “Most [schools] shuttered because of enrollment projections that fell short, changes in leadership and lagging test scores,” the article noted. Consistent with Colorado’s low NACSA score, the Post quoted a Colorado superintendent as positing that the state board believes that charters should “rise and fall only on parental choice.”

Alex Medler, a consultant and former NACSA vice president for policy, provided a striking illustration of why Colorado’s sector seems to be flourishing. “Take the roughly 1,700 public schools in Colorado, multiply that by 20 years, and the odds of a district-run public school being shut down by the state is 34,000 to one,” Medler said to the Post. (In other words, the Colorado State Board of Education had shut down only one public school for poor performance over the preceding two decades.) “Compare that to one in 10 charters closing—one in five for Colorado—and you’ll see the imbalance. The lopsidedness of district-run school versus charter public school accountability is striking,” Medler concluded.

In Arizona, parents seem to be even more active in closing undesired charter schools than their Colorado counterparts have been. A nationwide list compiled by the Center for Media and Democracy of charter school closures between 2000 and 2013 included 290 Arizona schools. Also supplied were the year of each school’s closing, enrollment at the school in its final year of operation, and, for 150 of the Arizona schools, the year the school opened. For those 150 schools, the average length of operation was four years. The average enrollment for all 290 closed schools in the final year of operation was 62 students.

By statute, the state of Arizona grants 15-year charters, but a very large majority of closed Arizona charter schools are out of business many years before their charters are scheduled for renewal. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools does occasionally revoke charters or choose not to renew them. The board listed 13 instances of revocation or non-renewal of charters between 2010 and 2014—a small percentage of the total closures.

Administrative attempts to close charter schools are often met with fierce parental opposition and lawsuits, but when parents don’t like a school, they can simply vote with their feet, either by withdrawing their children from the school or by not choosing it in the first place. It is therefore parents, rather than state officials, who play the primary role in holding Arizona charter schools accountable, in a highly efficient manner. An abundance of K–12 opportunities—including charter schools, district schools, district open enrollment, magnet schools, and private choice programs—gives Arizona parents many exit options. Another key factor contributing to charter school closure may be that Arizona’s suburban districts, unlike those in many other states, are actively involved in accepting open-enrollment transfers.

Opening a charter school in Arizona is not for the faint of heart—if your school lives to see year five, odds are you are doing something right. If one assumes the wisdom of crowds, the Arizona charter sector’s 2015 NAEP performance and its sizable score advantages on the AzMERIT were not surprising. Educators opened a large number of schools, and collectively parents took the lead in deciding which would grow and which would close.

NAEP results also reveal that K–12 education in Arizona is improving overall. NAEP provides statewide data on six subjects (4th- and 8th-grade exams in math, science, and reading). Arizona was the only state whose students made statistically significant gains on all six exams for the entire period for which complete data are available (2009 to 2015). That improvement stands in contrast to that of other states: If one subtracts the number of significant declines in scores from the number of significant increases in the individual states, the average state experienced a statistically significant increase on only one NAEP exam during this period.

Arizona shows signs of a virtuous circle: suburban charters and private choice programs helped to encourage school districts to offer open enrollment. In suburban districts, this open-enrollment policy not only provided the opportunity for outside students to attend these schools, it also increased the competitive pressure on new charter schools.

Learning Together

Just as the country benefits from political diversity, we also benefit from a diversity of policy approaches at the state level. There are those who seek greater uniformity among state charter-school policies—urging that all charters should be for five years and that default closure provisions should be spelled out, among other guidelines. Such advocates should consider the success of these western states, which have chosen not to adopt such policies. The 50 states will become less useful as laboratories of reform if we adopt a single set of policies everywhere.

Many states—including three of the four featured here—have experienced high rates of overall K–12 enrollment growth, which raises the opportunity cost of imposing a stringent charter-authorizing process. It does not follow that every state should rush to amend its charter policies to match those of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, or Utah, but the obvious flourishing of the charter sectors there offers food for thought. Questions to consider and debate include: What factors have led to success in these states? What steps can policymakers and philanthropists take to enable parents to take the leading role in closing undesired schools? How important a role does open enrollment in suburban districts play in creating a successful bottom-up accountability system?

We don’t know the answers to these questions. But we do know that relatively freewheeling charter-school systems have prospered in multiple states. Surely we have as much to learn from these success stories as we do from the cautionary tales from states that have experienced difficulties.

Matthew Ladner is a senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute.