Earlier this year, Dropout Nation reminded charter school players about the importance of learning from the two-year long federal crackdown on the for-profit college sector. While charters and for-profits didn’t have, at first glance, have much in common, the fact that both were new, innovative entrants into American public education and higher education meant that they were both vulnerable to the same real and false charges of low quality and fiscal mismanagement leveled by the status quo defenders in both fields. And charter operators and authorizers needed to work on addressing the real challenges facing their schools and beating back foes who want to relegate charters to the ashbin of history.
This lesson should now be learned by school reformers supporting another new entrant on the education scene, school vouchers and tax credit programs, which like charters and for-profit colleges, serve as a lightning rod for education traditionalists. This rude awakening comes courtesy of Florida, where allegations of lax monitoring of schools participating in the otherwise wildly successful McKay voucher program — which is aimed at helping special ed students avoid the pits of American public education — has prompted a state legislative crackdown. An investigative report by the New Times alternative news chain’s Miami branch revealed that some of the schools serving McKay students were little more than shacks that offered low-quality education to its students. Even worse, the Sunshine State’s education department was doing little (within the agency’s already slim ability to monitor the schools) to weed out fraudulent players. Twenty-five of the 38 schools that the state did check out turned out to be engaged in fraudulent activity.
Certainly McKay has been largely successful in helping special ed students and their families get the high-quality education they deserve, with special ed students — especially those have been stuck with the nebulous label of having a “specific learning disability” — making gains in reading proficiency. But, as in the case of the for-profit college sector, the lax oversight of the vouchers, along with the loosening of standards for providing them to students, has perpetuated the kind of fraud that can be as damaging to special ed students — many of whom likely were really struggling with reading than actually learning disabled — as condemning them to traditional school ghettos. And once evidence of fraud is found, the perceptions of the program and its participants as being shysters making dollars off the backs of children becomes reality for education traditionalists who use class warfare rhetoric (including wrongful claims of “corporate ed reform”) to support their even more unjustifiable defense of a failed amoral system.
This problem, in turn, hits upon many of the other issues that specifically face voucher supporters (and ultimate, in general, are faced by school choice activists), That, while vouchers have proven to be successful reforms, they aren’t exactly unqualified successes. As bad studies last forever and do even more damage than the verifiable facts themselves, so do scandals involving reforms — even if they are isolated incidents compared to their overwhelming benefits.
This doesn’t just play into the hands of education traditionalists alone. Vouchers and tax credit plans are generally an anathema to centrist and liberal Democrat school reformers, who think that allowing families to use those dollars to attend parochial schools violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation between church and state, think lowly of vouchers as a school reform strategy, and argue that their party has never historically supported them.
All three arguments (which are also offered up by education traditionalists when they want to offer something substantive for their opposition to vouchers and choice) have no basis in fact. After all, the federal, state, and local governments already works with faith-based operations to provide healthcare and other services — including $3 billion in federal dollars into Catholic Charities alone — while Centrist Democrat and progressive school reformers are more than happy to back charters, which are operated by nonprofit and even for-profit organizations, and support federal and state student aid (which flows into private and parochial universities). There is plenty of evidence that backs the usefulness of charters. And generations of Democrats, from President John F. Kennedy (who unsuccessfully pushed to use funding from the National Defense Education Act to Catholic and Jewish schools through loans), to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have supported vouchers. But scandal-plagued voucher programs allow for centrist and liberal Democrat reformers to indulge in such fallacious thinking, and, in the process, weaken the multi-partisan coalition needed to overhaul American public education.
But given the deeply-held opposition to vouchers from both education traditionalists and some elements within the school reform movement itself, voucher supporters and school choice activists cannot simply hope that bad news goes away. And given the problems faced in the charter schools sector — including news stories about charter school operators that have woefully managed their financial operations (and ultimately, the taxpayer dollars with which they are trusted), and the religiously-bigoted, xenophobic suspicions about the Cosmos Foundation charter schools — voucher supporters must step up their own efforts to defend school choice. This means pushing for thoughtfully stricter regulation of voucher programs — and the development of more-robust school data systems so parents can make smarter decisions.
The first step starts with the schools themselves. Simply requiring schools taking in voucher students to be accredited would go a long way to improving quality; so would requiring participating schools to allow for at least two unannounced site inspections annually by state education officials or by an organization contracted by the state to handle such work. More-closely monitoring the academic progress of students, essentially subjecting schools to the same Value-Added analysis that is now being applied to teachers and schools in traditional public school settings also makes sense, as does monitoring their graduation rates; a private school that doesn’t make the grade shouldn’t be a school that families should send their kids. Although some will argue that it will lead some private schools to not participate in the programs, it will also mean that those schools that do will meet high standards for educating the kids in their care; such tightening could even expand the number of private and parochial school chains — including Catholic diocesan schools — serving children by forcing them to build up capacity.
The second steps lies in providing more-comprehensive information on schools that will allow families to make smarter choices. An informed education consumer, to paraphrase the old saw, is the best advocate on behalf of their kids. As much of the problem underlying the McKay scandal lies with the reality that parents aren’t provided enough information on schools — be they traditional public, charter, or private — in order to separate the proverbial wheat from the chafe. While Florida has been far better at developing comprehensive data systems overall and providing families with high-quality data on traditional schools, it hasn’t done nearly as well on informing families about private and parochial options. This, along with the overall fact that parents are just beginning to learn what a high-quality education should look like for their kids, calls for the providing a wider array of data that can be used by families in school decisions.
In Florida, the data gleaned from monitoring participating schools, for example, can be disseminated to parents in an easily-understandable manner through the state’s already-robust and useful school data system. In other states, the launch and expansion of voucher programs should be used by school choice supporters as an opportunity to team up with school data quality activists such as the Data Quality Campaign to push for the overhaul of existing data systems and the launch of new, more-comprehensive systems. Working with grassroots activists on the ground to provide parents buses that can inform families about the quality of choice options (along with information on, for example, what a child should know by third grade) would not only improve data quality, but also bolster support for school choice and education reform overall.
The McKay voucher scandal is an important opportunity for choice supporters and school reformers altogether to advance systemic reform. Our kids deserve better from all aspects of American public education. And so, we must keep all houses in order.