DOUBLE STANDARD:

Pivotal Battleground (KENNETH BLACKWELL, September 13, 2007, NY Sun)

Earlier this year, Utah's legislature and governor — in the state's rugged western tradition — bucked the powerful teachers' unions and provided parents with true educational choices for their children. [...]

Called the Parents Choice in Education Act, the program was carefully crafted to address the concerns typically associated with previous voucherdriven school choice programs.

Children receive between $500 and $3,000 in scholarships depending on their parents' income. Every child currently in public school can participate. Children attending independent schools will be evaluated according to criteria such as prior qualification for federal lunch programs where lunch is either free or at a reduced cost. Students entering kindergarten this year are immediately eligible, with all students qualifying by 2020.

Non-government schools must meet rigid state standards to participate. The schools must give students nationally approved achievement tests. The results of the testing must then be given to state officials and parents.

The schools must meet important accountability standards and disclose credentials of educators as well as the institution's own accreditation status. Independent auditors also must pour through the school's financial records and report the information to the state. Under the program, vouchers can only be used at non-government schools. Before parents are given access to the scholarship funds, they must actively opt their children out of a conventional public school.

When parents opt their children out of a conventional public school, the state will continue to fund that school — for five years — as if the students never left. Therefore, if a public school loses a significant number of students, it will have a few years to address the root causes of the departures before state funding is shifted.

The program seems to address the most often mentioned concerns of school choice opponents. It provides for non-government school accountability. It continues to fund underperforming government-run public schools and gives those schools five years to get their act together. And, it serves a very real public need — the need for quality enhancing, freedom-expanding competition in the education marketplace.

As it has been useful to test how well the public schools are educating kids in trivia like math and reading, so that the monopoly could be broken, it will be necessary to test how well independent schools are educating them in citizenship, which is the purpose of universal public education.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 13, 2007 8:29 AM