Education media-watcher Alexander Russo marks Throwback Thursday with a look at 16 years ago, when school vouchers were a relatively novel idea. A July 1999 Atlantic article questioned whether they could ever reach enough students to have a real impact on the larger school system.
Add these numbers up and you get 74,000 children — about 0.1 percent of students. Add 200,000 for those students in the 1,200 charter schools around the country (which also give parents a choice), and the proportion comes to only 0.5 percent of schoolchildren. In other words, the school-choice debate is taking place utterly at the margins. At this rate, for all the fuss, it’s hard to imagine that any impact could be made on the skills and life chances of students stuck in our worst public schools in time to prevent what the Reverend Floyd Flake, a voucher advocate and a former Democratic congressman from New York, calls “educational genocide.”
At the time, the article notes, Gov. Jeb Bush had just approved Florida’s first statewide voucher program. Over the next three years, the state created a second voucher program, for special needs students, and a tax credit scholarship program for low-income students (which is often conflated with vouchers). Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog and employs the author of this post, helps administer the tax credit scholarships.
While the first voucher program was later ruled unconstitutional, the other two private school choice programs have recently been joined by a third. They now enroll more students than all the voucher programs in the country did when the Atlantic article was written. Florida’s charter schools similarly enroll more students than all the charters in the country enrolled in 1999.
But the larger impact of charters and private school choice can be seen in this recent Palm Beach Post interview with a new district superintendent.
Asked about the perception that the school district is in competition with charter schools, he said that he sees a role for both.
“I think families should have more choice,” he said.
But he added that “we’re responsible for making sure people aren’t running from the public schools.”
The key to prevent more parents from ditching traditional schools for charters, he says, includes recruiting and retaining more high-quality teachers.
Another key: more varied course offerings that draw students into learning by catering to their passions.
How many district chiefs were talking like that in 1999?
