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The first quote I found in The Schooled Society written by David P. Baker is, "What were once highly legitimate identities lose authority within the institution of schooling, particularly as they might be used to limit access to opportunity for the future development of the person." (2014, p. 32). This quote discusses how in education a students identity can prevent them from getting full access to educational opportunities that students who may have the certain identity that a lot of schools, especially private schools look for. When it comes to school choice students still have to complete applications to attend other schools and some private schools tend to be biased against students of certain races or backgrounds because they may be seen as problematic. Or students in special education will be passed over because of their disabilities as private schools are not required to accommodate special education students.

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In this article written by Helen F. Ladd called School Vouchers: A Critical View it discusses the different ways a voucher program would work in the US and how it would affect the education system. When a widespread voucher program is used there is very little to no effect on test scores in any groups of students. The voucher programs could actually end up costing the education system more money than the current system in place. The article also discusses how even with the school choice there is no data that shows that an increase in competition will make the public schools work better. This all is being discusses currently with school choice as all of these topics are things that everyone who discusses school choice talks about.

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In this video created by EdChoice posted on youtube called What are School Vouchers? it discusses what school vouchers are and how they are used in many states. This is one of the main parts of school choice as vouchers is how many people in different states pay for the school of their choice as most schools are unattainable for families as private schools can be very expensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSYZrZWkaxc

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What is a school voucher? School vouchers are just one way states can offer parents school choice.

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In this video created by The Heritage Foundation posted on youtube it describes what school choice is by using a grocery store analogy and two towns to describe how school choice works for people who may not understand. It describes how districts works compared to how school choice works and how the money works under both scenarios.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G9MtANh4RM

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Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana

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Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana

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In this video posted onto Youtube by PBS NewsHour it discusses two schools in Indiana one public school and one private school. The private school accepts over $400,000 in vouchers and that has caused the public schools in the area to lose funding which has caused a rise in class sizes. They discuss how one kindergarten classroom has 28 students in the class which is a very large amount for a kindergarten class. Vouchers can allow access to other schooling options for most families but it takes away funding from the public schools as seen in the video. This can allow families to choose the school their children attend but it causes issues with taking away funding from the public schools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9B2GEKQiPM

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Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana

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The next quote I choose from The Schools Society written by David P. Baker is, "Academic achievement, and its everyday manifestations as grades, test scores, teacher recommendations, and educational promotions, is the central currency of formal schooling, so much so that a person's intelligence is now largely publicly judged through indicators of his schooling performance, such as formal degrees attained: one's intelligence has become merged with one's performance of academic achievement." (2014, p. 43). This quote explains how important academics is in our culture now a days. Academics can decide what school you go to, your social status, what job you have, and many other things. The problem with academics being so heavily relied on in many areas is that when it comes to school choice schools that are able to are going to pick students that are excelling academically over the regular student as it makes their school look better to other families and to the Department of Education. Schools will be very picky on who they choose which can cause the students who may need extra support to fall between the cracks as they won't have access to the same level of education or the level of education they need as schools may not want to take them. With school choice this means they will attend the public schools which either may be closed near them or may be severely underfunded.

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Deconstructing School Choice: Problem Schools or Problem Students?

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Deconstructing School Choice: Problem Schools or Problem Students?

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In this article written by Thomas Rabovsky it discusses the main arguments for school choice. There are three main arguments when it comes to school choice and those are parents can find a better school match for their child, school choice allows students to gain better educational opportunities, and the last argument is that it increases competition between schools. In the article it ends up looking at schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The findings end up being that the test scores do end up going up but that racial segregation in the schools does get worse. Racial segregation in schools can cause a difference in test scores too. This article looks at both sides of school choice but ultimately decides that school choice needs to be researched more about the many gaps that exist in research.

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School Choice or Schools' Choice? Managing in an Era of Accountability 

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School Choice or Schools' Choice? Managing in an Era of Accountability 

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This article follows three principals in New York and how the school choice system works in New York. Students can enter into a lottery basically and rank what schools they want to attend but most schools require applications and a screening process. The problem that was found in the study with schools being able to screen students is that many schools end up picking and choosing what students go to their school. This is technically not allowed though as the schools aren't allowed to do that by the Department of Education. But schools come up with many work arounds by providing ads with the certain look of their students, emphasizing the school uniforms to certain families that may not be able to provide uniforms, or telling families with special education students they wont be able to provide the accommodations or resources that those students need. When school choice becomes popular these are all issues many students will face. Schools will be biased against students as they want families to see that their school is excelling compared to others in the area.

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Another idea is change the way school choice works. Make it to where if school choice is an option the other school options are as regulated as public schools are. Schools shouldn't be able to exclude students based off of test scores or based on whether they are a student that needs accommodations because of being in special education. School choice also shouldn't be funded by public school funds. It should come from a separate budget if school choice is going to be an option.

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The first way we can address school choice is by providing schools with more funding. Part of the reason so many families want school choice is that they feel their public schools are failing their students academically and that can be a problem. But that problem can be solved with more funding. If you provide schools with more funding the schools will be able to hire teachers that are higher quality, they will be able to hire more teachers causing class sizes to go down creating the opportunity for more one on one support. Students will be able to learn more and be better supported in their learning.

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The first policy that has been enacted related to school choice is vouchers. Vouchers are a way for the state to help families pay to send their child to a school of the families choosing instead of public school. The vouchers are funded completely by the taxes that would normally be spent on that student when attending public school. Vouchers can be problematic as the money is taxes from the government and some families use it to attend a private school that may be religious. Which in most states is not allowed by the state constitutions as many have provisions against the funding of private religious schools by voucher programs. Vouchers are also problematic because the money students are using is being taken away from the funding public schools get which leaves them even more underfunded than they already are.

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Study Links Longer School Bus Rides to Chronic Absenteeism

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Study Links Longer School Bus Rides to Chronic Absenteeism

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The first article I found on Education Week written by Williamena Kwapo called Study Links Longer School Bus Rides to Chronic Absenteeism. In the article Kwapo describes a study that was conducted by Temple University and Syracuse University that tracked data on the communte of students that attend public schools outside of their neighborhoods. The test scores between students that had a short bus ride compared to a longer bus ride didn't vary but their number of absences did. The study found that students with over an hour long bus ride had an absenteeism rate of 12%. Missing so much school can cause issues for students because they end up missing important academic knowledge that they would be getting in class. The largest educational inequality is chronic absenteeism.

This connects to my topic of school choice as the students in the study were all able to choose what public school they went to in the area but it also shows how bad school choice can be in some situtations. When students are able to choose a different school they may end up having to drive a lot further than their local public school which can cause students to miss a lot more school days then normal. This impacts their education in many ways. It can even impact students who choose to stay in their local district as if there isn't enough school funds, schools will have to close down causing students to have to travel further to go to school causing more chances of chronic absenteeism in students and potentially causing students to get behind academically.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/study-links-longer-school-bus-rides-to-chronic-absenteeism/2022/06

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For some students, attending a high-quality or high-performing school means opting for a school that is outside of their regular attendance zones. These schools are usually a few miles away from the student's home, requiring them to ride the bus longer than some of their peers.

But a new study suggests those school choices could set up a barrier for students' success, rather than bolster it. It found that long bus rides pose a disproportionate burden on Black students and may significantly increase chronic absenteeism.

Researchers at Temple University and Syracuse University tracked data from 2011 to 2017 on the morning commutes of 120,000 bus riders in the 3rd to 6th grades in New York City, where families can apply for their students to attend public schools other than the ones in their neighborhoods, to explore the link between commuting and academic outcomes. Though the study found no difference in test scores between students with longer bus rides and students with shorter rides (30 minutes or less), there was a significant difference in absentee records. The study found an absenteeism rate of 12 percent among students with exceptionally long rides-those that are more than an hour long. That rate is quite large, the study says, and amounts to missing school one more day a year than students with shorter commutes.

"We really feel like this highlights the importance of transportation policy and that districts should really sort of consider the best way to get kids to school," said Sarah A. Cordes, of Temple University, who conducted and co-authored the study with two other researchers.

And, while the new data focused on the nation's largest, and arguably most urban school district, long bus rides are a concern across the country, particularly in rural areas.

Why chronic absenteeism matters

According to Attendance Works, a nonprofit organization working to address chronic absenteeism in students, the term means missing 10 percent or more of school days due to absences for any reason. Being chronically absent from school can lead to students having difficulty in reading as early as the 3rd grade or achieving important educational milestones, like graduating high school. Currently, chronic absenteeism is affecting more than 8 million students across the country, the organization's research has found.

"Chronic absence is a leading indicator and a contributor to educational inequity," said Hedy Chang, the group's executive director. "And if you have lots of kids who are chronically absent, it can be a sign that there are some systemic barriers that need to be addressed."

Black students have longer commutes in New York City

The New York City study finds that, by any definition, Black students are overrepresented among those taking longer bus rides to and from school.

While Black students accounted for only 27 percent of all bus riders in the study sample, they represented over 43 percentof those with long bus rides, which researchers defined as lasting 45-60 minutes, and over 47 percent of the riders with very long bus rides-rides more than 60 minutes long. Researchers said their findings echo previous studies, which have found that Black students tend to live in neighborhoods with fewer high-quality schools.

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Study Links Longer School Bus Rides to Chronic Absenteeism

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For some students, attending a high-quality or high-performing school means opting for a school that is outside of their regular attendance zones. These schools are usually a few miles away from the student's home, requiring them to ride the bus longer than some of their peers.

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This image explains a school voucher program and how it can function in terms of the costs of private school tuition. While yes with a voucher they use taxes to help cover the cost of private school tuition the amount that most states give families isn't enough to fully cover the full amount of tuition since private schools are very expensive.

https://rethinkingschools.org/special-collections/tuition-tax-credits-vouchers-in-disguise/

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Tuition Tax Credits: Vouchers in Disguise

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I have been writing about vouchers for more than a decade. Hardened as I am to often arcane voucher debates, three words still send shivers into my brain. Tuition tax credits. Please, don't stop reading. Yes, taxes scare everyone.

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This image is titled Voucher Crew and in the image there is a crew of workers taking apart the building public education and adding the materials to the private schools building. This represents school choice as a huge part of school choice and the debate around it is the funding. State governments are taking public school funding to allow students the choice to attend private schools instead. This takes away funds and materials that public schools desperately need as they are very underfunded as it is. In the end this causes public schools to try and compete with private schools since the money that students are using to attend private schools come from public school funding.

https://progressive.org/magazine/private-school-vouchers-levin/

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This year was supposed to be better for the nation's schools. Hope sprung from the receding threat of COVID-19 and a new administration committed to public education. But the legacy of the Donald Trump presidency and continuing pandemic-related disruptions for students have led to the enactment of numerous state laws establishing or expanding private school voucher programs.

Private school vouchers undermine the fundamental promise of a high-quality, equitable education for all students.

Republican state legislators, exploiting the crisis to invigorate their school privatization agenda, are using school closures to push for vouchers. The decades-long underfunding of public schools by these same legislators meant the resources needed to ensure student and staff safety in the pandemic weren't there. And many state capitol buildings were closed to the public earlier this year, preventing the demonstrations and testimony that often put pressure on state legislators to vote against school voucher bills.

This was a perfect storm for privatizers, and resulted in the introduction of voucher bills in dozens of states. Many failed but too many passed, and the effort to undermine education as a public good and a key pillar of our democracy got a significant shot in the arm. The effects of this will be felt for years to come.

Private school vouchers, in a nutshell, redirect public money to private institutions. They undermine the fundamental promise of a high-quality, equitable education for all students, as private schools often discriminate based on factors like religion, fluency in English, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Vouchers also drain resources from public schools, which are not only required to serve all students, but are also vital community hubs and local units of democratic government.

There are several kinds of private school vouchers:

Traditional vouchers pay for a student's private school tuition with direct payments from the public treasury. Legislatures typically don't enact traditional "voucher" programs because voters don't like them.

Education Savings Accounts, or "ESA" voucher programs, direct public funds (generally a percentage of the per-pupil amount provided by the state to public schools) into a personal account. These funds can be used to pay for a student's private school tuition, as well as a broad range of other private education expenses, including tutoring, online coursework, transportation, or even homeschooling.

Tax credit scholarship programs, also known as "neovouchers," provide individuals or corporations with up to a 100 percent, dollar-for-dollar credit to send the money they would otherwise owe in taxes to private organizations. These organizations then fund private school vouchers for families to pay for tuition and other private education costs.

At least eight states have enacted new voucher programs in 2021 (as of mid-summer). Some of these states, including Arkansas and Indiana, already had one or more existing voucher programs. This multiplication of voucher schemes is common once an initial program is pushed through.

Other states with new voucher schemes this year had previously been voucher-free. Kentucky, for example, established an education opportunity account program, an ESA voucher funded by a tax credit mechanism that provides $25 million annually in tax credits to individuals and corporations in exchange for donations to third-party voucher-granting organizations. The bill was vetoed by Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, but the state legislature overrode his veto.

The Kentucky law places almost no restrictions on voucher-granting organizations, which can set their own criteria for the distribution of voucher funds. The private schools accepting these vouchers have virtually free rein to operate. They are often not held to high standards of academic quality or fiscal management, nor required to meet state accountability standards. The voucher law allows these schools to discriminate based on race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, English fluency, and academic ability. The law is now being challenged in court by Kentucky public school parents and school districts.

The idea that vouchers simply shift to private schools the funds that would have been used on public education is a myth.

West Virginia also enacted the state's first voucher program in 2021. The state zoomed from zero to sixty, enacting a near-universal voucher that is the broadest in the country. The new voucher law permits any student enrolled in public school or entering kindergarten to receive an Education Savings Account voucher, with the public school enrollment requirement ending in 2026 if participation is low in the first few years. The ESA amount is 100 percent of state per-pupil funding.

The West Virginia law, notably, requires parents be notified that the use of vouchers to send students with disabilities to private schools constitutes a "parental placement" under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This means students and families waive most of their rights under the federal law that protects students with disabilities and guarantees them a free public education with all the programs and services required to meet their needs. The loss of rights isn't what's notable-this is true for almost all voucher programs. The fact that parents are informed of this loss is what's unusual.

At least fourteen states expanded their existing voucher programs this year, sometimes extending eligibility to a broader set of students or lifting the cap on the number of vouchers or the ceiling on tax credits. Unlike new programs, these expansions often fly under the radar, but they are far from trivial.

In Montana, the voucher program enacted in 2015 provides 100 percent tax credits for donations up to $150. The expansion bill passed in 2021 raised that amount to $200,000. The bill reduces the cap on the size of the program from $3 million to $1 million in 2021, and $2 million the following year, but provides that in the future it will increase by 20 percent following any year where at least 80 percent of the cap is used. The new law also raises limits on the size of the voucher and does away with a requirement that voucher schools administer and publish the results of standardized tests.

The expansion of initially small voucher programs is a favored tactic of pro-voucher groups. First, legislators propose a targeted or pilot program for a vulnerable group of students-often students with disabilities. Then they expand that to other student subgroups, even if there's no evidence of need or clear evidence of harm.

In 2021, Arkansas passed two bills expanding the existing voucher program for students with disabilities and youth in foster care. This was despite a 2020 report by the state revealing inequitable enrollment by race and income, a glaring lack of usable data on academic outcomes, and little accountability for the public funds funneled to private schools. The new laws expand the definition of a disability that makes students eligible for vouchers and now include children of military families in the program.

In Georgia, the establishment of a new voucher program was avoided in 2021, but the state still expanded its special needs voucher. Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, like Montana, expanded their tax-credit voucher programs. Florida, which already diverts nearly $1 billion per year to private school voucher schemes despite severe and chronic underfunding of its public schools, streamlined and expanded the state's myriad voucher programs.

Much of the school privatization battle is fought at the state level. Thus, despite the ouster of pro-voucher former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and the Biden Administration's opposition to voucher programs, the struggle over policies that divert public funds to private schools has only intensified.

At a very basic level, private school vouchers don't do what education policies are supposed to: promote positive educational results. Study after study has shown that students who use vouchers to attend private school don't perform any better than their public school peers. In fact, some studies have found that academic outcomes worsen for voucher students.

The claim that vouchers save money is only persuasive if you don't have all the facts. The idea that vouchers simply shift to private schools the funds that would have been used on public education is a myth. Voucher programs often subsidize private education for families that can already afford it, and whose children would never have attended public schools.

The amount of a voucher often falls far short of the full cost of private school tuition, meaning families must make up the difference. And vouchers often shift expenses for essential services to parents that are normally included in a free public school education, such as transportation, free and reduced price lunch, and disability-related services. If vouchers save the state money, it is on the backs of children and families.

But vouchers don't save money for the government, either. A recent study published by the National Education Policy Center concluded that implementing universal vouchers would increase the total cost to the public by 11 to 33 percent, or up to $203 billion per year. Because private schools can discriminate in enrollment and services, voucher programs can concentrate in public schools those students who require increased resources to access equitable educational opportunities, such as students with disabilities and those learning English.

Public school systems also have substantial fixed costs-including facilities and staff contracts-that cannot be reduced when students from different classrooms, grades, and school buildings exit to use vouchers. Fraud and waste are common in voucher programs, and there is scant fiscal accountability for private schools or voucher-granting organizations.

Finally, privatizers' assertions that vouchers promote civil rights are absurd. Voucher programs came about after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision so white families could attend segregated private schools and thereby avoid integration. Today vouchers often play a similar role, or at least have similar segregative effects. A 2017 Century Foundation report concluded that "voucher programs are more likely to increase school segregation than to promote integration or maintain the status quo."

Private school vouchers rob the public treasury, pay for discrimination, do not improve student outcomes, increase segregation, and weaken an enormously important public good. Many parents and community members know this, and through their advocacy a significant number of these bills die, including bills proposing larger expansions or additional programs in states like Arizona, Georgia, and Kansas during their 2021 legislative sessions. Public education supporters have succeeded in beating back voucher legislation by forming bipartisan coalitions, including recruiting rural Republican legislators, and through grassroots mobilization. Strategies like these have defeated voucher proposals every year in Republican-controlled Texas.

That's good news but not good enough. Much work needs to be done to counter this push to defund the nation's public schools, stratify communities along racial and economic lines, and create an education "marketplace" with no regard for quality or accountability. That work is happening everywhere, taken up by students, parents, educators, advocates, lawyers, elected officials, and everybody else who values public schools as crucial community institutions.
This article was edited from the version that was published in the magazine to correct a phrasing error.

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The Problem with Private School Vouchers

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This year was supposed to be better for the nation's schools. Hope sprung from the receding threat of COVID-19 and a new administration committed to public education. But the legacy of the Donald Trump presidency and continuing pandemic-related disruptions for students have led to the enactment of numerous state laws establishing or expanding private school voucher programs. Private school vouchers undermine the fundamental promise of a high-quality, equitable education for all students.

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This image relates to school choice as it looks at the regulations that school districts are required to follow compared to what private schools are required to follow. With school districts they have many more laws and regulations they have to follow to make sure that they are being held accountable and is available for every student. Private schools aren't required to accept every student so they can pick and choose who attends their school. They also aren't required to assess or report student performance to the public compared to public schools who are required to assess and report student performance to the public. Private schools also have little to no interference from state government when students aren't performing well. Where as when a public school is not performing well the state will step in and help either improve the school or decide if the school needs to be closed. When it comes to allowing vouchers to be used there either needs to be more regulations on other schooling options or vouchers should not be used to allow every student the opportunity to get an equal education as their peers.

https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/policy/where-we-stand-on-school-vouchers/

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Voucher Programs Gain Strength With Help From the Courts, An Expert Says

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Voucher Programs Gain Strength With Help From the Courts, An Expert Says

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The next article written on EducationWeek is by Mark Lieberman called Voucher Programs Gain Strength With Help From the Courts, An Expert Says. In this article Lieberman interviews Joshua Weishart who is a professor at the West Virginia University College of Law to discuss school choice and a recent court decision made by the West Virginia Supreme Court to strike down a lawsuit challenging the states schools’ choice program. The article discusses how the decision to strike down the lawsuit can cause problems in the future as the state constitution has very specific language in it that prevents vouchers from getting funding from different sources while the courts approved a workaround for legislatures. You also run into the issue of state money going to fund religious institutions as some private schools are owned by religious institutions. This is an issue as church and state are supposed to be separate but if the schools that are private are owned by religious institutions then they are being funded by public funds then the government is not keeping church and state separate. This is one issue that school choice can cause plus with the issue of taking away funding from public schools and moving those funds to private schools, the public schools are going to be even more underfunded and the states or counties may have to raise taxes to get more money to fund the public schools.

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/voucher-programs-gain-strength-with-help-from-the-courts-an-expert-says/2022/12

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The movement to publicly fund tuition for students to attend private schools has gained momentum on the heels of a handful of recent court decisions-raising concerns for some advocates who fear consequences for public schools.

The West Virginia Supreme Court voted 3-2 in October to reject a lawsuit challenging the state's school choice program, which provides education savings accounts for K-12 students who wish to attend private schools. A similar law went into effect in Arizona this summer after opponents failed to garner enough signatures to place a challenge on the ballot.

In Tennessee, a panel of judges last month upheld another such program, saying there wasn't sufficient evidence that offering vouchers hurts students and public schools. Buoyed by recent electoral victories, GOP lawmakers in Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas have vowed in recent weeks to pass new school choice policies next year.

Criticisms of public schools that stemmed largely from the pandemic contributed to a burst of school choice programs in the last couple years. Some states extend school choice funding to narrow categories of students, while others have universal programs.

But voucher programs have faced their fair share of recent setbacks and criticism as well. The Supreme Court of Kentucky this week struck down a law that established tax credits for residents who donate to private schools. In Ohio, a federal judge last week rejected a challenge from school choice advocates and ruled that 130 school districts can continue their case arguing that the state's voucher program is unconstitutional. And in Michigan, voters in November overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure, backed by former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, that would have created scholarship accounts for students to attend private schools on the state's dime.

Critics of the school choice movement argue that diverting public resources to private institutions puts public school students' needs at a disadvantage, and places struggling students in a system that doesn't have a track record of strong academic outcomes. Supporters argue families should be able to send their children to the school that works best for them, regardless of the cost.

Education Week earlier this month interviewed Joshua Weishart, a professor at the West Virginia University College of Law who studies school choice and has been a vocal critic of voucher programs, about how the recent court decisions in his state and elsewhere could affect public schools.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you summarize the West Virginia decision? What exactly did the court say?

What we're learning from these recent constitutional challenges in West Virginia and elsewhere is that courts are loath to accept this argument that a legislature can never fund a voucher program. The [state] constitutions confer a lot of power over education. Unless there's specific language that would preclude funding vouchers, then courts are going to say they pass muster.

The most charitable view from their position is they don't want to violate separation of powers-what they see as a policy decision made by the legislature on the pros and cons of vouchers. The reality, of course, is that these are elected state court judges [in West Virginia and roughly 20 other states]. They're keenly aware that vouchers are contested political issues and they don't want to find themselves on the wrong side politically. Even when state constitutions contain very specific language that would preclude vouchers from being funded from certain sources, courts have approved legislative workarounds. That's why we're seeing tax credits, scholarships, savings accounts that accomplish the same thing as vouchers.

You tweeted that you've "never been more concerned about the future of public education in West Virginia" than after the state supreme court decision in October. Why did this decision concern you so greatly?

In that case, the state was forced to concede that this voucher program is going to divert funding from chronically underfunded public schools to private schools-$100 million or more when the program becomes universal. The court still refused to find a constitutional violation, insisting that the plaintiffs have to show precisely how the diversion of millions of dollars from public schools to private schools is going to harm the quality of public education.

What makes that sort of a demoralizing outcome is we know money matters, especially for disadvantaged students. We have our fair share in West Virginia. Requiring that additional evidentiary burden strikes us as egregiously unfair. It allows the voucher program to come into existence and then requires future plaintiffs to wait potentially years for them to amass very specific evidence in which, at that point, the court's going to be even more disinclined [to rule against vouchers].

It becomes a Catch-22, because if you delay these challenges until after a voucher program becomes operational, you can't put that genie back in the bottle. If you launch into a challenge before the program becomes operational, they're probably dead on arrival in courts. Future challenges are going to have no choice butto pursue these cases after voucher programs come into operation. That's what makes it so ominous.

In what ways will public schools feel the effects of decisions like these?

We know what it's going to do, it's going to reduce public education funding, and that's going to exacerbate existing inequities and inadequacies, which we know that public schools are struggling with, particularly now. We'll see other states go in this direction. You already have systems of public education that are not fully and fairly funded. This is just going to make things worse.

How will the U.S. Supreme Court's decision earlier this year in the Carson v. Makin case affect the school choice movement?

We used to be able to rely on state constitutional provisions that prevented the flow of public money to religious institutions. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has said, if you're going to open it up to all private schools, then you can't discriminate against the religious schools, notwithstanding a state constitution or the U.S. constitution.

That pretty much eliminates any challenge that you could have, even under state constitutions. The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land. If a state constitutional provision conflicts with that, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision is going to be effectively the law. It eliminates a challenge based upon even specific provisions that would include funding religious schools.

Has there been any advocacy around amending state constitutions to protect public schools from losing funds to private institutions-similar to how some states added abortion rights protections to their constitutions this year?

I haven't seen any movement to resist voucher programs by ratifying a constitutional amendment. What I've seen is just the opposite. In West Virginia, lawmakers put on a ballot provision that would effectively give them ultimate decision-making authority over the state board [of education] and the state department of education. Whatever regulations they would promulgate, the legislature would have a veto. Voters saw that for what it was and rejected that power grab.

In Ohio, too, lawmakers are trying to take power from state departments of education and state boards. Those institutions are supposed to be insulated from politics so they can make their judgments based on what's best for children.

I haven't seen any movement in the opposite direction. That's what's probably needed-a political social movement to insist these constitutions be changed. It would be easier to change state constitutions than the U.S. Constitution.

We shouldn't have to resort to amending the constitution. We should be able to rely on the authority that's supposedly given to education in most state constitutions. But unfortunately, the prospects there look very bleak.

What issues does the proliferation of voucher programs raise?

There's a theory that if you have public schools compete with private schools, that makes the public schools better. Even if you accepted that, and that's a big if, I think that it carries certain state-created dangers. One of them is that we lose this focus on the state constitutional duty to educate democratically, through public schooling that's open to all, inclusive, geared toward the common good, and [that] houses democratic experiences in the classroom. That's a big loss. We do need to talk more about the kind of education we're interested in supporting and prioritizing, and not just choice for its own sake.

Why do you think the voucher movement has persisted despite being relatively unpopular among a broad swath of the electorate and even many elected officials?

I think it's an easy story in certain red states that the politically powerful want them. They want the government to subsidize their children's private education. They control the levers of power to prevent the voters from deciding these things directly.

I think it's a little more complicated in blue states and purple states. There you have racial dynamics as well. And this flirtation with choice-it's so seductive. Even if you tell them and show them and prove to them that it's not going to improve outcomes, it doesn't matter. They want it because someone else has it.

Of course we have the narrative that prevails in this country that our public schools are dismal failures, and that prevailing narrative causes people to distrust and lose faith in public schools and consider other options.

What's next for the voucher movement?

Once these vouchers get up and running, what it's going to cause is higher taxes to make up for the losses, and this is going to cause county school districts to put levies on the ballot. Even if the voters decide to tax themselves more, those economies of scale in these rural counties are going to exhaust any kind of surplus from any increased property taxes.

What that's going to cause, I think, is more school consolidation, particularly in rural counties. We don't need more of that in West Virginia, where you have students riding buses for an hour or more in these counties. That is going to be an unintended consequence of more focus on choice.

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Voucher Programs Gain Strength With Help From the Courts, An Expert Says

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The movement to publicly fund tuition for students to attend private schools has gained momentum on the heels of a handful of recent court decisions-raising concerns for some advocates who fear consequences for public schools.

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The Push for School Choice Is Accelerating

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The Push for School Choice Is Accelerating

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The article in Education Week written by Libby Stanford called The Push for School Choice is Accelerating discusses how families are wanting school choice laws to be passed. Families want more schooling options to choose from for their children. The article also discusses the different options from education savings accounts to vouchers that states are trying to pass into law making school choice an option for families. The article also discusses the implications of school choice and how schools in rural areas are going to be majorly impacted as they will lose most of their funding causing them to have to shut down.

https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/the-push-for-school-choice-is-accelerating/2023/01

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Emboldened by frustrations with pandemic-era policies and battles over what schools are teaching, conservative parents and politicians have accelerated a push for school choice policies that would funnel public funds into private schools.

Though school choice has been debated for decades, the movement is in a unique moment as advocates use parent concerns over COVID-era mask requirements; curriculum addressing race, gender, and sexuality; and library book content to bolster their argument that families should have more options outside of traditional public schools. And the school choice proposals states are considering-and, in some cases, have already passed-are more sweeping than previous iterations.

Already this year, lawmakers in at least 11 states-Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia-have introduced and, in some cases, passed school choice bills. Although they vary in scope, many of the bills would establish or expand private school voucher and education savings account programs that give families public funds to pay for tuition at private schools, cover the costs of homeschooling, or pay for other schooling expenses.

The resurgence of school choice action shouldn't come as a surprise. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, 19 Republican gubernatorial candidates advocated for school choice, mostly in the form of vouchers and education savings accounts, on campaign websites. This year, seven governors so far have talked about school choice policies in their state of the state addresses, according to the Education Commission of the States.

The policies are a result of parents' declining satisfaction with schools following the pandemic, said Jonathan Butcher, an education policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that advocates for school choice policies.

"Public schools lost track of tens of thousands of kids. And, in some places ... the unions were able to keep those schools closed to in-person learning even when district officials were saying they wanted teachers to come back for in-person learning," Butcher said. "I don't think that was lost on [parents]."

But while supporters view the policies as a key to unlocking academic opportunities for students, opponents worry they threaten public schools' ability to operate.

Where politicians are supporting school choice

Thirty-two states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have some sort of policy on the books supporting school choice, including tax credits for parents who switch to different schools, private school scholarship programs, and education savings accounts, according to EdChoice, a nonprofit that tracks school choice.

Of those states, eight have education savings accounts, in which the state gives eligible families a set amount of public funds to cover school-related costs, including private school, online learning, tutoring, community college, and college expenses. Sixteen states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have voucher programs, which are often branded as scholarships, giving students all or part of their public per-pupil funding to pay for private school, according to EdChoice.

Soon, Iowa and Utah are expected to join that list after both states' legislatures passed bills establishing education savings account programs this week, which was also National School Choice Week. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill that would give families up to $7,598 each for an education savings account for private school tuition, the Des Moines Register reported. The policy would cost $345 million annually after being phased in over the next five years.

In Utah, a bill that passed both chambers of the legislature would allow up to 5,000 students to access $42 million in taxpayer-funded scholarships to attend private schools. The legislation awaits a signature from Gov. Spencer Cox, who has signaled his support, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

There's been action on the federal level, too. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, recently reintroduced the Children Have Opportunities in Classrooms Everywhere, or CHOICE, Act, which would deposit Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds into education savings accounts for private schools, virtual learning, tutoring, homeschooling, therapy services, and more.

How school choice bills work

While they can take many different forms and have different names, education savings accounts and vouchers are both ultimately designed to allow families to use funds that would otherwise go to public schools to enroll their children in private schools, said Douglas Harris, director of the Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University.

Savings accounts typically include a smaller amount of money to support educational expenses while vouchers give students a large portion or the entire amount of their per-pupil funding to cover private school costs. But now those lines are getting increasingly blurred, Harris said.

For example, the Utah bill is effectively a voucher program, but lawmakers have avoided using that term.

"The term 'vouchers' doesn't poll very well," Harris said. "But there's no savings element to [the Utah bill]. It's not designed for small things; it's designed to be enough to send students to [private] school. So they're just changing the name to make it sound better."

The pro-school choice argument is that more options give students the chance to find an educational experience that best suits them.

"Education savings accounts are the future of learning in the United States because it allows families to find a set of education services that meet their child's needs," Butcher said. "We're not just shifting all of our options into one singular solution, we're actually opening up all of the available [options] to families with these accounts."

Concerns mount that bills will hurt public schools

All the measures come with criticism from public school advocates, including teachers' unions and school board associations, who say they'll drain public schools of resources by pushing students out. The Utah Education Association vowed to fight the state's scholarship bill after the legislature passed it this week.

"Lawmakers should focus on providing solutions to our public schools' most urgent needs, like large class sizes, increased student behavior issues, and severe staffing shortages," the union's president, Renee Pinkney, said in a statement. "A voucher bill does nothing to support educators and public schools."

Until now, school choice programs have mostly been too small to have much of an impact on traditional public schools, but as states pass more sweeping school choice policies, there is a concern that lawmakers are starting down "a slippery slope," Harris said.

"If you make these programs big and lots of people start to use them, then you start pulling out so many families that that ultimately undermines the traditional public schools, and that's probably right," he said.

The impact could be especially significant on rural schools with small enrollments. In those communities, it wouldn't take the departure of many students to have a major effect on a school's ability to function. The policies are also harder to sell in rural areas, even among conservative voters, because of concerns about how they'll change community culture and climate if students leave local schools.

"Public schools are really a center of life in a rural town," Harris said. "If you get rid of Friday night lights, you've got a problem."

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The Push for School Choice Is Accelerating

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Emboldened by frustrations with pandemic-era policies and battles over what schools are teaching, conservative parents and politicians have accelerated a push for school choice policies that would funnel public funds into private schools.

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The next quote I choose from The Schools Society written by David P. Baker is, "Providing widespread educational opportunity for nations populations is not only thought of as desirable; it is now approaching the cultural status of a basic human right, not unlike nutrition, health care, and civil rights" (p. 56). This quote discusses how in our current society education has become a natural human right. Every child deserves an education and when it comes to school choice that isn't always attainable because when you start pulling funding from public schools they start having to shut down and then students wont have easy access to schooling anymore making it to where students may just not attend school or have access to a very poor education.

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Jennings, J. L. (2010). School choice or schools’ choice? Sociology of Education, 83(3), 227–247. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040710375688

Ladd, H. F. (2002). School Vouchers: A Critical View. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(4), 3–24. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.und.edu/10.1257/089533002320950957

Rabovsky, T. (2011), Deconstructing School Choice: Problem Schools or Problem Students?. Public Administration Review, 71: 87-95. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.und.edu/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2010.02309.x

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The topic I chose is school choice in K-12 education. The school choice movement is the movement where many people are advocating for the right of families to choose where their child goes to school. School choice is a controversial topic as many believe that instead of improving all public schools that school will have to start going up against other schools so that they can still receive the tax dollars that the student brings with them to the school to help fund the school.

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Another policy that has been discussed a lot is school reform. School reform can mean many things but it mainly covers funding, curriculum usage, standards, and staffing for schools. In theory school reform is a great policy but the problem is that many states aren't agreeing on what school reform looks like or what should be covered in school reform. For example you have states like Florida who is banning many things in the classroom because they have bills like the 'Don't Say Gay' Bill which bans teachers from discussing things like discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in K-12 classrooms. Alongside that many southern states are banning certain books that go against peoples beliefs. Then there are many northern states that aren't enacting laws like that at all. This is the problem as schools state to state are varying on what they believe school reform should be when schooling across the country should be similar. Students is Florida should be learning the same things or similar things students in Minnesota are learning as then no student is being left behind or getting a worse education.

The same goes with funding. All schools should be receiving adequate funding to provide their students with the education they need. Schools shouldn't have to scrape by with what little funding they receive from taxes and if you take away the funding because of school choice then schools will be forced to close down creating a lack of access to a proper education.

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Kwapo, W. (2022, June 16). Study links longer school bus rides to chronic absenteeism. Education Week. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/study-links-longer-school-bus-rides-to-chronic-absenteeism/2022/06

Lieberman, M. (2022, December 28). Voucher programs gain strength with help from the courts, an expert says. Education Week. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/voucher-programs-gain-strength-with-help-from-the-courts-an-expert-says/2022/12

Stanford, L. (2023, January 30). The push for school choice is accelerating. Education Week. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/the-push-for-school-choice-is-accelerating/2023/01

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EdChoice. (2016, July 29). What are School Vouchers? [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSYZrZWkaxc

Here is where we stand on school vouchers. Here is Where We Stand on School Vouchers - Raise Your Hand Texas. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/policy/where-we-stand-on-school-vouchers/

Levin, J. (2021, August 11). The problem with private school vouchers. Progressive.org. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://progressive.org/magazine/private-school-vouchers-levin/

Miner, B. (2020, June 25). Tuition tax credits: Vouchers in disguise. Rethinking Schools. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://rethinkingschools.org/special-collections/tuition-tax-credits-vouchers-in-disguise/

PBS NewsHour. (2017, March 14). Are school vouchers good for education? That debate is playing out in Indiana [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9B2GEKQiPM

The Heritage Foundation. (2011, August 2). What is School Choice? [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G9MtANh4RM

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Currently some states have tuition assistance programs where families can request the state help pay a portion of their child's private school tuition bills. There are also education savings accounts called 529 accounts where parents can put aside money to pay up to $10,000 worth of tuition each year tax free in K-12. This way not as much money from the state is going towards funding private schools. Plus it also gives families the option to fund their child's private school tuition if they choose to send their child to a private school.

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Baker, D. P. (2014). The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture. Stanford University Press.