The Year of Regulatory Reform: School Choice and the Injustice of Expanding Regulations
The government is often jealous of alternative programs setup by citizens who've been failed by public services. It frequently invokes "concern for the public good" to eliminate competition.
It was Ron Paul who famously quipped, “Don’t steal. The government hates competition.”
And in this, Paul was right: when its power is threatened, government often forgets its central mandate--protect the rights of the individuals who live under its jurisdiction--and takes actions that protect its institutions. These actions frequently restrict choices made in the private sector--an area that is supposed to be beyond government’s purview--and infringe on citizens’ rights, which is ironic because government frequently invokes the “common good” in defense of itself.
Nowhere in recent public policy choices is this more evident than in government’s reaction to the charter school boom. As families whose children are not served by the public school system have sought alternatives which better serve their children and their futures, government has increasingly branded them a threat to social welfare.
That’s exactly the scenario currently playing out in Rhode Island. Reacting to charter school expansion, no doubt driven in part by the state education system’s shambolic response to the coronavirus pandemic, top-ranking Senate Democrats (backed by public teachers’ unions) have embarked on a campaign to not only put a three-year moratorium on new charter schools but to retroactively revoke the licenses of several recently approved charter schools.
In December, the state approved the license of six new charter schools. If the bill, recently advanced out of the Senate Education Panel, receives approval from the legislature as a whole, those charter schools would have their licenses revoked.
Slim hope comes in the form of incoming governor Daniel McKee. Currently the lieutenant governor, he will soon replace outgoing-governor Gina Raimondo, whom Joe Biden tapped for secretary of the Department of Commerce.
McKee helped found the Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy system, a network of public charter schools that, in an effort to attract management organizations with a documented record of success, are less subject to many regulations that apply to other charter schools. Through an aide, he’s expressed his willingness to discuss a pause on charter schools but balked at retroactively revoking the permit of charter schools already in the pipeline. School choice advocates can only hope he’ll veto the bill.
Opponents of charter school expansion have sought to make Providence, the state’s capital, the center of the battle. Providence’s school system has received national attention for its mismanagement and inability to serve students. Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green, a supporter of charter schools, has highlighted data that shows only 1 in 5 students in the Providence school system is completing grade-level work in English language arts and only 1 in 8 students is completing grade-level work in math.
It should come as no surprise, then, that families from that area are looking for ways out of the public school system. And that path seems to come primarily in the form of charter schools: last spring 11,900 of the 20,000 applications submitted from 10,000 students came from Providence. Those numbers seem to speak to Providence families’ dissatisfaction with the public school system and belief that charter schools are the best chance their kids have for success. Certain political figures, including Mayor Jorge Elorza, have also acknowledged that the best chance students have for escaping the failing school system is charter schools. Providence’s school systems have performed so badly that control of them was taken away from the city by the state.
But that hasn’t stopped certain politicians from trying to stop the expansion of charter schools. State Senator Ryan Pearson challenged Elorza over charter schools being a particularly good service for minority students in Providence’s school system.
“So you’re OK with taking $80 million away from the district to ensure that 2,400 kids have that additional opportunity?” Pearson asked Elorza. “I can’t see it. It seems like a race to the bottom to me.”
That comment says everything about the real heart of political opposition to charter schools. It’s not about the quality of education students receive (the platitude “If it helps just one child” is frequently invoked by liberal politicians in defense of policies like gun control, but somehow they don’t think it’s applicable here), but funding and the political power that comes with dispensing it.
According to reporting by The Providence Journal, “Providence would lose nearly $60 million in state education aid if 2,400 additional charter seats were approved.” It would lose an additional $21.5 million in local education aid because the money — per-pupil spending — follows the student from the sending district to the charter.”
And this gives politicians all the ammunition they need to vilify charter schools as taking money from the public education system, all to benefit a few students at the expense of the greater whole. Rather than viewing funding as being rightfully attached to the student, which is the metric the state uses to allocate it, politicians (and unions) have a tendency to view those funds as belonging to institutions.
As state Rep. Gregg Amore argued in an op-ed recommending a moratorium on charter schools, “Traditional public schools serve the overwhelming majority of students in their communities and Providence students deserve the opportunity to see the turnaround promised to them fully underway before resources are diverted.”
The idea that funds are being “diverted” from schools, rather than following pupils--which most politicians usually invoke in their passionate pleas for ever-more funding for public education--gives the whole game away.
It’s not about the quality of education students are receiving: it’s about power politics. Though Amore in his op-ed says he wants to see better schools that are more responsive to students’ needs, he nevertheless couches his argument in terms of “equality”: “equal opportunity turnaround should put the focus on engaging students and parents, providing support structures and after-school and weekend enrichment opportunities, and narrow in on a high quality, common yet flexible curriculum that is supported by substantial professional development opportunities for educators.”
And that’s clear from the way supporters of charter schools were treated in recent hearings held on the bill pushing for the moratorium. The chair of the Senate Education Committee forced pro-charter school parents wishing to testify to wait for over two hours while she heard the testimony of labor officials and politicians. Spanish speaking parents who wished to testify in favor of charter schools were forced to wait over three hours before they were called upon. Pro-charter school voices were the very last ones called upon by the Committee, which then voted to approve the moratorium.
Such treatment makes it clear who’s important. And it’s not the students and their families.
This is evident in another bill being considered by the House Education Committee which seeks to shackle charter schools’ ability to be deterministic about their own student bodies.
The bill would require not only that charter schools actively recruit students from every district in which it is active, but would also require schools to prioritize admissions to ensure the student body’s demographic makeup reflected the districts it serves.
From the bill:
The composition of the student population of all charter public schools shall reflect the demographics from throughout the school’s district, in proportion to the demographics of each municipality that the school is chartered to service and receive students from, in terms of:
(i) Special education;
(ii) English language learners; and
(iii) Students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch.
What’s more, schools would not be allowed to enroll new students or accept students from waiting lists until these requirements had been met. And they would regularly have to show to the General Assembly and the state’s Department of Education that they were meeting these requirements.
It’s hard to see how reducing the self-governing capacity of charter schools and bringing them more under the influence of the state--which has already acknowledged its inability to manage schools--would help anyone.
In order to be successful, charter schools need to be able to set their own policies. That is the sole reason they exist: to be an alternative choice to public education and its myriad failures. But government apparently can’t handle the competition, not just because charter schools must provide results or risk losing funding and having students pulled from their classrooms, but because of the federal and state money they lose when fewer students are in public schools.
What’s particularly grotesque about Rhode Island’s attempt to stop charter schools is that, at the same time it’s taking away choices from families, it’s invoking their welfare as some kind of unassailable defense of its actions.
Since local education funding follows a child, regardless of whether he or she is enrolled in a public school or a charter public school, it’s hard to see how charter schools reduce the resources public schools can call on or how this would deteriorate the quality of education. That money is supposed to be earmarked for that individual child’s education. If that child isn’t in a public school classroom, operating costs should decrease in proportion with the drawdown in enrollment (unless, of course, public schools don’t use those funds for that intended purpose).
Families whose taxes contribute to this fund ought to have say over how best to employ this. They know their child’s learning needs a lot better than the state and should be able to determine what kind of school they think will contribute best to their child’s success.
But government is trying to take this away from them, not just by making charter school expansion essentially illegal but by regulating student bodies and taking control over them away from charter schools.
This is unjust. The public sector is meant to be the “things we do together.” And beyond that is the private sector, untouched by government initiatives, where people dissatisfied with what government provides can go for a reprieve.
Public charter schools sit in an uncomfortable space between the public and private realms: they’re not fully private, but they’re fully public, either. Yet, they’re supposed to have autonomy over their own affairs so that, unlike public schools which are beholden to public teachers’ unions and ridiculous regulation, are not driven by performance-based metrics. They are supposed to extend that autonomy to families who want control over their childrens’ education.
But government, clearly, is jealous and not willing to cede control over an area it’s claimed for itself. The Rhode Island legislature’s response to expanding charter public schools shows how unjust government can be: it uses its monopoly on force to bend society towards outcomes it has deemed in the common good, but takes away power over those it supposedly served to do the same. It is looking after its own interests, not the interests of those under its jurisdiction.