It is National School Choice Week. This is a week in which we celebrate and uplift a family’s right to send their kids to a school they choose as opposed to one they were sorted into by zip code. This is a week that always confuses non-educators because it sounds like something we should obviously be in favor of. Truth be told according to most survey data people do support it. It’s only the people who have something to lose or think about it from a political angle who oppose it. The initial reaction of survey respondents is the correct one. It is natural to want choice.
So why do so many people around the country want to stop you from having a choice about where you send your child to school? The answer is obvious: They think you will use it.
Opponents of school choice often talk about charter schools and vouchers as “stealing” money from traditional public schools. What they are talking about is headcount or per pupil spending from the state. That money follows the student so if a student in a traditional public school boundary goes somewhere other than the traditional public school, they don’t get that money. Most rational people realize to describe this as “stealing” is asinine. The money should go where the kid is being educated. However, this “loss” of funding is what school choice opponents are going on about.
That funding going somewhere else does matter. Decreasing the number of students in a school doesn’t magically decrease the amount that day to day operations cost like people might think it does. However, this is not the problem of the school educating the student, and if the only way a school can do right by a child is by monopolizing the choices of other students, it might be time to re-examine the whole system.
Funding is not the only reason these school districts need to look in a mirror instead blaming choice. It takes time and effort to go to a school that is not the default traditional public option. Families are doing that for a reason. It’s not a coincidence that choice is more popular in failing school districts.
I live down the street from an excellent public school. A charter school moved in this year, and nobody cared. The school district was not worried about some mass exodus of students. If the school down the street from you feels threatened by another school opening the question they should ask is “why don’t families want to be here?”
This is not to say that every school choice option is great either. The school kids run to can be just as bad as the one they are running from. The difference: In a school choice model, one bad charter school doesn’t undermine the system because they don’t have to go there. However, one bad public school that has monopoly does. The government prevents monopolies from forming in business because they are bad for consumers. Education is no different.