Writers are told to avoid clichés, but that’s hard to do when the cliché fits the situation so well.
So it is with the anticipated legislative push by Republicans in 2025 to expand school choice in Mississippi.
The devil is in the details.
When lawmakers return to Jackson in January, a major topic they expect to consider is whether to make is easier for students to attend schools other than the public one to which they are zoned.
The two main avenues being proposed are open enrollment and vouchers.
With open enrollment, students would be free to transfer across school district lines as long as the receiving school had the capacity to accommodate them. No longer would a student’s “home” district have to sign off on such a transfer, as state law presently requires.
Since the whole idea of open enrollment is to provide students in substandard schools with a way out, one idea is to restrict open enrollment to students who attend schools that are rated at the lower end of the state’s A-to-F accountability model.
The problem there, though, is accountability grades are not fixed. Schools can see their accountability grades change from year to year, depending on how their students perform on state tests. What would happen, for instance, for a student who transfers out of a D-rated school if that school shows improvement and becomes a C-rated or better school the following year? Would the student be forced to return, leaving behind the classmates and teachers he’s come to know at his new school?
Or what about the funding to pay for the transferring student’s education? Proponents of open enrollment say the state dollars would follow the student, but that only covers about half the cost. Local funding is the next biggest chunk at about a third. How is it fair for taxpayers in one county or municipality to foot the bill for educating children who don’t live in that locality and whose parents don’t pay taxes to it?
There’s also the perverse effect that open enrollment could have on the state’s accountability system. In order to reduce the number of students eligible to transfer, the Mississippi Department of Education and the board that oversees it might be tempted to water-down standards — a temptation they already have — to raise accountability grades. Or in reverse, parents wanting to transfer their children from a school whose grade is just above the threshold might encourage those students to do poorly on the tests in order to bring down the grade.
As for the more controversial topic of vouchers, the problem is not their constitutionality. Mississippi can get around the state’s prohibition on giving public funds to private schools by instead directing the money to the families in the form of “education savings accounts.”
The difficulty comes in deciding who qualifies and in ensuring that the money is used as intended.
In the past, Mississippi’s rationale for creating education alternatives has been to help those who either can’t afford to leave their academically deficient school or who don’t have a realistic private school option. That’s why all of Mississippi’s charter schools, for instance, have been located in areas with high poverty or high minority populations.
If vouchers are really designed to help those whose only current path to a better education is to move, the vouchers would need to be limited to families of lower income. Most voucher proponents are willing to start there, but their ultimate goal is to make vouchers available to everyone, regardless of income level. That would mean subsidizing the education costs not only of families who can’t afford private education but also those who can and are already paying it. It would be a huge and expensive government giveaway that would have to be paid somehow and by somebody. Its cost could be capped by selecting the beneficiaries by lottery, but that raises the possibility of wealthy families getting help they really don’t need while poor families miss out.
There’s also the headache with vouchers of creating a regulatory mechanism to deter fraud. At $6,000 or more per year, there are going to be people who create fictitious children or who use the money in ways other than educational.
Those currently in private schools might argue that it’s unfair for them to pay taxes to support public schools that their children don’t attend.
That’s, however, no more unfair than the childless or those with grown children paying those same school taxes.
American society is based on the principle that all of us help pay for essential services, including those that we don’t personally use. A free public education benefits everyone by providing a citizenry that is better-equipped to build the economy, foster stable families and preserve democracy.
Those societal benefits are diminished, however, when the education provided is dismal. So if weak, dysfunctional schools resist improvement, other options for children who are stuck in them should be considered. The difficulty comes in designing those options in such a way that unintended or unfair consequences don’t result.
The devil truly is in the details.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
