Patricia Levesque is the Chief Executive Officer for ExcelinEd.
By Patricia Levesque
As private school choice continues to grow nationwide, I often find myself asked how our organization can support, on the one hand, annual high-stakes testing for public school students but norm-referenced testing for private school choice students on the other. Why shouldn’t public funds, no matter where they are used, come with “public accountability”? Aren’t we being inconsistent?
I’ve recently had a front row seat in my home state of Florida watching legislators try to go in the opposite direction and weaken public school accountability. Since Florida passed universal education scholarship accounts last year, there have been attempts to roll back key, longstanding pieces of accountability and transparency we have in place for public schools, all under the guise of creating a “level playing field” with private schools.
What’s really going on? How can we square away these issues to create an educational landscape that empowers families to choose and provides them with the relevant data on student achievement they need to make those choices and also know how their own students are doing?
To answer these questions, we have to look at accountability along a continuum, with a parent’s ability to choose as the key factor in how much oversight a system or schooling type requires.
To borrow a line from my friend and fellow national education advocate Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, you regulate a monopoly differently than you regulate a market.
At one end of the education continuum, you have the traditional public school system, which has many characteristics of a monopoly. The system is:
As noted above, and perhaps most relevant to the question at hand, most students in traditional public schools are assigned to attend a school based on their ZIP code. Rarely within the public system are there selective enrollment or magnet schools where 100% of the students in those schools choose them. Magnet schools, for example, made up less than 5% of total public school enrollment in the 2021-22 school year. Parents have limited or little choice.
Because of the structure of this system, it is incumbent on the state to play a strong role in ensuring students in these schools are learning. That’s because the government is requiring participation by default, assigning them to the system. That assignment frequently is based not on the students’ individual needs, but instead on where they live.
We know this system of residential assignment was inequitably designed to segregate students of color. Sadly, those historical roots continue to grow today, perpetuating an education resource gap for low-income students.
At the other end of the continuum from the assigned public system is home education, where a parent has full authority to choose what to teach, how to teach and where to teach their children. The family also pays to educate their child. In this system, where a parent steps into the educator role, the state should have a much, much lighter touch, being very cautious about substituting its judgment for that of a parent teaching their own child on their own dime.
Near this same end of the continuum of home education is family-funded private education, where parents select and fully pay for a private schooling environment. While there is a role for the state to ensure fire and health codes are followed in school buildings, the state should still have a very light touch when a family is choosing and paying for a private education. They are investing their own money in what they believe is best for their child; like homeschooling, it’s not the state’s place to second-guess that decision.
In the middle of the continuum, which ranges from residentially assigned public schools to homeschooling, sits publicly funded private school choice. These types of choice programs include vouchers, tax credit scholarships and education savings accounts—all overwhelmingly popular with parents and increasingly embraced by state policymakers.
In state-backed private school choice programs, public funds are allocated to families who use them to choose among eligible, participating private schools to meet their child’s educational needs. Specifically with education savings accounts, parents can use their funding on tuition as well as a variety of other academic services and supports.
We believe this education approach requires a delicate balance between accountability and autonomy that empowers parents yet also ensures taxpayer dollars are being well spent.
What does that look like? The state has a role to ensure health, safety and general welfare laws are followed. The state also should have a fiscal role to ensure state funds are spent appropriately. But in every other aspect—including curriculum, testing, admissions and hiring—the state needs to have a very light touch.
Why? Because 100% of the students participating in these programs are in schools chosen by their families for a variety of possible reasons: smaller classes, higher academic standards, faith-based education, innovative learning models, safer school environments or other priorities.
The list of reasons why parents opt out of their assigned residential schools goes on and on. But when it comes to policy design, it’s not our job to understand their why. From our perspective, when 100% of the students are in a school because their families made a conscious decision to send them there, the state needs to be very cautious regulating those schools.
That said, we know parents want to know how their kids are doing, and we understand policymakers need to report back how public funding is being spent. From an academic accountability perspective, that’s why we recommend states adopt policies where students in publicly funded private school choice programs take a test chosen by their private school. That can be a nationally norm-referenced test and the option to take the state-mandated test.
As part of the process, parents should receive their own child’s test scores so they have an objective measurement of their child’s academic progress, in addition to the child’s report card. The state should receive an aggregate reporting of how all the students in the program are progressing as compared to their peers. But unless there are health and safety or financial fraud concerns about a school or a funding program, the state should not take any private school options off the table for parents. They should have as many choices as possible if they opt out of the default system.
Some may now say: What about charter schools? Where do they fit on the continuum? Charters are indeed schools of choice, but they exist within the public school framework. As a result, they must follow more regulations than private schools.
If I had a magic wand to undo some legal constraints, I would place charter schools on the “accountability continuum” in between the traditional public school system and publicly funded private school choice programs and provide them with more autonomy than they currently have. Most states are too hasty to remove charter options from parents.
In reality, public charter schools live in a hybrid world. They are required to exist under the same public school accountability system because of federal law and the federal funds that may reach them. Ideally, we would allow charter schools to operate much more like publicly funded private school choice programs because 100% of their students are enrolled based on parental choice, not residential assignment.
At this point, you might be asking why ExcelinEd recommends with confidence this “middle of the continuum” model for publicly funded private school choice programs to utilize norm-referenced testing.
It’s because we have seen overwhelming evidence that it works—and, especially important, it works for the most disadvantaged, low-income students.
We model our approach based on proven, long-term success of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program. Consider these facts:
Florida has had private school choice in place for nearly a quarter century, and the state’s programs are some of the most researched in America.
Launched in 2001, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which serves more than 125,000 studentsand now has universal eligibility, is a textbook example of how states can balance parental accountability with a testing requirement that is not overly burdensome.
Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship is the “best in class” program and should serve as the model for other private school choice programs. It has been in existence for 23 years and, over that time, has served more than a million students. For multiple years, it has served more than 100,000 low-income students, and it likely is the most researched private school choice program in existence.
More than a decade of research on Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship program and McKay ESA shows:
Additional research on the program shows:
Most noteworthy? The Sunshine State has made those incredible gains with a regulatory framework that puts parents first and includes a norm-referenced testing requirement.
Not all schools or schooling systems are the same, so we must ensure we are applying the regulatory framework that works best for each type.
For public schools, which operate like monopolies in most cases, that means a higher level of scrutiny to ensure students assigned to these schools are achieving outcomes that are measurable and reported across a broad playing field. This gives parents a baseline to compare schools and allows policymakers to determine where resources need to be allocated, among other factors.
Homeschooling and privately funded private schools deserve the lightest touch, as they are solely chosen and funded by parents—and in the case of homeschooling, parents also are assuming the role of educators.
Given that they are founded on the principle of parental choice, publicly funded private school programs also should have a light regulatory touch, but we believe policymakers should include a norm-referenced testing requirement so parents and the public know how students are doing compared to others in their peer group.
Finally, it would be ideal if charter schools, which are public schools of choice, could operate with more flexibility than they already have, but that will not be possible without deregulation at the federal level and further changes in state policy that shutter these schools of choice too easily.
Our long-term goal continues to be an educational landscape where parents can choose from a number of options so they can find schooling that best meets the needs of their children. As we continue to make progress toward this goal, it is important to balance accountability and autonomy along the education continuum and prioritize the voices and choices of parents, who know best what is working for their children.
