National Choice
In the past fifteen years, charter schools, voucher and tax-credit programs, and private scholarship foundations such as ACE have flourished across the nation, answering the growing cries for help from parents desperate to provide their children with a quality education.
Forty states – including Colorado – allow charter schools; there are now over 4,000 such schools across the country, serving more than a million children.
In 2007, 28 states debated school choice legislation in their state capitols: five existing school choice programs were expanded and five new programs were enacted, bringing the total to 20 school choice programs in 11 states plus Washington, D.C.
For more information, visit the national organization, The Alliance for School Choice. Below is a brief summary of several significant school choice programs across the country.
Milwaukee Parental Choice Program
Milwaukee pioneered the school choice movement for low-income children in 1990 with the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Today, 120 private schools serve close to 20,000 Milwaukee children.
Research shows that students participating in the program had an 11% higher high school graduation rate than that of Milwaukee Public School students in 2006, and 9% higher in 2005.
Research has also found that there were large academic gains after students participated in the program for four years. Students involved in the program scored 6% higher in reading and 11% higher in math than students who did not participate in the program.
While the evidence is strong that children within the program benefit, equally persuasive data exists showing an improvement for all children. Federal Reserve Bank economist Rajashri Chakrabarti found that increased competition between Milwaukee’s public and private schools often led to statistically significant improvements in the performance of public schools students.
Significantly, Chakrabarti found that schools facing the most competition had greater improvements in reading and language arts than those facing less competition.
Florida McKay Scholarship Program for Students with Disabilities
Since 1999, Florida has aided parents of children with disabilities through the McKay Scholarship Program. Enrollment has ballooned from less than 1,000 children in 2000 to close to 20,000 in the 2006-2007 school year, with $119 million in scholarship program funding.
Researchers found that 92% of parents of participating students were satisfied with the McKay schools while only 32% expressed satisfaction with the public schools their children had previously attended.
Florida A+ Opportunity Scholarship Program
School choice is not limited to Florida’s children with disabilities. The Florida A+ Opportunity Scholarship Program (often referred to as Opportunity Scholarships) provides choice to any student in kindergarten through 12th grade who attends or is assigned to a Florida school that has consistently received a failing grade from the Florida Department of Education. Students may select a private or public school, so long as that school has a grade “C” or higher from the Department of Education.
It can hardly be a coincidence that Florida ranked 14th in the “2008 Quality Counts: Tapping into Teaching” report.
Colorado ranked 38th.
Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program
Congress passed the “2003 D.C. School Choice Incentive Act” establishing the Washington, D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program as a five-year pilot program. The program provides school choice in the form of scholarships of up to $7,500 per child each year to attend grades K-12 at any of sixty participating non-public schools within the District’s boundaries.
During the 2007-2008 school year, more than 1,900 children participated in the program.
A federally-mandated evaluation of the program is currently being conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education.
The Institute of Education Sciences’ June 2007 report on the program’s first year found that parental satisfaction with schools of choice was high. Of the parents whose children received scholarships, 74% gave their child’s school a grade of an “A” or “B” compared to 55% of parents whose children did not receive scholarships
National School Choice Resources
