Create More School Choices

Strategy 2.1: Create more high-quality, publicly funded school choices.

StudentsFirst will fight to remove barriers to parental choice in education. More effective school options increase the ability to meet the needs of all children, and the resulting competition encourages innovation and continuous improvement.

In spite of strong resistance, entrepreneurs have slowly built various forms of school choice in many ZIP codes over the past 30 years. Open enrollment policies allow some children to choose better-suited schools outside of their neighborhoods or even their school districts. Some school districts have opened magnet schools to create more school options and, in essence, compete with their own traditional schools. Most states have enacted charter school legislation, enabling independent educators to develop public schools and manage them outside of the district bureaucracy. A few places — notably Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, and Wisconsin — have even empowered low-income families to attend private schools with publicly funded scholarships.

That is not to say we have created enough parental choice — not by a long shot. Too many parents still suffer heartbreaking disappointment when they cannot get their child into a high-performing public school. "Choice" can be reduced to a lottery where hundreds of families compete for a handful of slots. Even many well-intentioned "open enrollment" policies do not actually provide additional choices for parents as these are limited by a shortage of high quality schools.

There simply are not enough good options to meet demand, and there will not be until policy-makers take bold steps to expand access to high-quality schools. StudentsFirst will stand for parental choice, recognizing that we can only increase the scale of quality schools through a mix of strategies. Parents must be empowered to place their children in the learning environment that will work best for them, in a high-quality traditional public school, a district-run magnet, a charter school, a private school, or even a virtual school. StudentsFirst will be agnostic about school choice vehicles as long as the schools deliver results for students.

The biggest barriers to increasing school options are regulation and funding. While accountability is key to quality, new school providers must have a pathway to demonstrate their capabilities. To earn the privilege of educating our students, all providers (district, charter, and private) must agree to transparency of results and a process that ensures accountability and consequences for poor results that include closure or discontinuation of funding. Additionally, there should be no limits on the number of schools that can compete with the district, and there should be no limits on their autonomy over school governance and management. To ensure that all students are valued equally, comparable students should take comparable funding with them to their school of choice. In the specific case of public charter schools, which are often authorized by districts, states must provide authorization processes that do not hold schools hostage to district politics.