Morning Shots

When Secretary Spellings announced a few weeks ago that NCLB hasn’t provided nearly enough school choice, no one should have been surprised.

Since day one, it’s been no secret that in the districts where parents need choice the most, it’s been offered the least. Chicago, for instance, made stonewalling on choice into an art form in the law’s first year, chiseling down the number of children eligible for transfers from 125,000 to 2,407, and in the end letting only 1,165 move schools. In Detroit, it wasn’t until March 2004 that the school district announced that it had finally figured out its choice plan – for the 2003-04 school year. And this year, the Alliance for School Choice and the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education launched a suit against the Los Angeles and Compton Unified school districts for restraining choice; in woeful Compton no child has ever received a transfer to a better school.

This was completely predictable. Who would really have thought that a federal law, assembled by a “bipartisan” team, would have had any kind of meaningful choice? Were politicians really going to throw special interest groups like the NEA, AFT, and NSBA under the proverbial school bus by giving parents some control over their children’s education? Hardly!

Parents just don’t have the political power they need to influence Washington the way entrenched special interests – who owe their livelihoods to captive children and taxpayers – do. Heck, the NEA has been chartered by Congress and owns its own huge headquarters in Washington, where every day 600 people work to expand the union’s intake of children and money.

The wise men who crafted America’s Constitution knew that if power were concentrated in the national government the politically adroit would abuse it and squash

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The second year report on the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (pdf) focuses on participation. It’s just an appetizer—the main course, a study of the effect of the vouchers on achievement, is coming next year—but this report still has some interesting stuff to chew on.

Participation increased in the second year, a sign that people like the program:

• More students applied for the scholarships (3,126 vs. 2,692), even though there were fewer spots available. The program is now operating at capacity.
• All the schools that participated in the first year returned for the second year, plus ten more schools, bringing the total from 58 to 68. That’s an increase from 53 percent of all District private schools to 65 percent. The enthusiasm of private schools suggests that, contra the fears of some school choice advocates, accepting vouchers does not impinge on their “privateness” with burdensome government regulation—at least not yet.

If you’re worried that vouchers create church-state entanglements:

• Of the 63 participating schools for which a religious affiliation could be determined, 28 are Catholic, 14 are religious but not Catholic, and 21 are independent.
• Of the 10 schools that joined in the second year, 6 are independent. (The others are non-Catholic religious schools.)

There’s mixed news on equity issues:

• In the first year, for some grades, fewer public school students applied than there were spots available, so some of the scholarships went to students already attending private schools—which offended the usual suspects. In the second year, however, no scholarships went to students already attending private schools.
• As designed, students from schools designated as “in need of improvement” received priority. About 40 percent of the scholarship applicants over the two years of the program were from schools in need of improvement, and they were more likely than other students to receive the scholarship.
• On the

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April 18th in New Jersey saw citizens from across the state vote down almost 50% of proposed school budgets. This low level of approval, when viewed as a product of the typically low voter turnout of budget and school board elections, has sent a resounding message to the New Jersey school establishment. Indeed, when one considers the state’s “spend spend” take on school reform, and its widely known equity history for urban school systems under the Abbott v. Burke cases, the defeats are a heads up for many other places in the nation looking to finance their way out of poor school performance on the backs of suburban property owners.

Briefly, the Abbott decisions identified 31 districts believed to have too little property wealth to fund their school systems at a level sufficient to ensure the students therein received the state’s constitutionally mandated “thorough and efficient” education. There were many reforms adopted under the Abbott decisions, but the most important was a court mandate that these 31 “special needs” districts spend at the same level as the state’s wealthiest districts. To that end, New Jersey now has seven of the country’s top ten school districts over 10,000 students in terms of per pupil funding. Newark tops this list with a nearly $1 billion budget this year for its 42,000 students. Newark pays approximately 10% of its own school costs, with almost 80% being distributed in the form of aid granted directly from the state. The result of this spending? Seven of the cities 13 high schools have student failure rates on the state’s high school exit exam of over 65%, with two in the 80s. Clearly, Abbott students are not getting the education we are paying for.

Of course, state aid is a zero sum game. And every dollar that

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