Archives for Education

Funding the Child through Local Aid Proposed

Posted by John LaPlante on Thursday, January 26th 2012

A legislative proposal to direct more money towards charter schools is a half a step in the right direction. The idea is that if a child leaves a district school to go to a charter school, some of the locally raised money goes with the student to the charter school.

Is send local money to a school that isn’t controlled by the local board of education an untested idea? Not at all. Small towns in Maine and Vermont have been doing this for over 130 years. Under “town tuitioning” arrangements, the local government collects tax money, which children can use to spend at public or non-religious private schools elsewhere. Some of the students even attend out-of-state schools with the money. Between the two states, about 12,000 students get their schooling this way.

It’s a beautiful approach. It recognizes the widely held belief that government should levy and collect taxes to pay for the formal education of children, and still lets local taxpayers decide how much they pay for education. At the same time, it gives parents and students a choice in where the children will be schooled.

The Minnesota proposal helps address the disadvantage that charter schools when it comes to funding, so it should help encourage their development. Families will benefit from more choices in pedagogy, curriculum, and school calendars

But there’s one significant limitation: The money goes with the child to the charter school only if the school is inside the geographic boundaries of his district. Such a policy discourages the charter school from accepting students from a larger area. A charter school in Minneapolis would get extra money from students who live in Minneapolis, but not from students who live in Bloomington, for example. Charter schools must by law have open enrollment policies, but the differential funding would give them incentives to find creative ways to keep out children who lived outside certain lines on the map.

The limitation also means that if you want your child to attend a charter school that lies outside the confines of your local district, you will (effectively) be shortchanging the charter school.

I suppose the limitation is one way to limit the amount of money that flows from districts to charters. If that is a concern, however, other ideas should be in play, such as lowering the percentage of the local money that can be transferred.

Still, give Rep. Kelly Woodard, the author of HF1860, credit for advancing the idea.

category: Charter schools, John LaPlante

Why is School Choice a Free Market Issue?

Posted by John LaPlante on Sunday, January 22nd 2012

With this being National School Choice Week, the question arises: Why is school choice an issue for a free-market think tank? It’s pretty simple, really: A free market implies some element of widely dispersed decision making. Citizens make most of the decisions that affect their laws, not government officials.

That dispersal, practiced imperfectly in the United States, brings many benefits. Competition among businesses breeds innovation, restraints on price inflation, and a tailoring of services to meet the varied wants, needs, and means of consumers.

Education, especially the formal schooling of children, doesn’t exactly operate in a free market. Choice and competition exist only in a weak sense of the terms. People with sufficient means do choose school districts, usually through the very expensive and related proposition of buying a house. So not everyone has the same range of options to choose from, even though public schools allegedly advance the idea of equality.

The other reason that choice and competition aren’t very strong in education is that the supply of new schools is severely restrained. By law, we levy taxes and disperse money for the purpose of promoting education. But for the most part, we allow that money to be spent only in institutions that are owned by governments, which we call “school districts.” The districts, meanwhile, are encumbered by layers of laws and regulations, from both the federal and state governments.

Some districts do an adequate or even good job for some students. But the future of other students is stunted (sometimes, grievously so) by this top-down approach, with with local quasi-monopolies. Simply put, rather than build bigger and bigger schools (the trend of the last century), we should see more (and more differentiated) smaller schools, driven to change by the need to satisfy the needs and wants of students and parents, rather than the political system.