opinion
Last month, the Tennessee Court of Appeals heard arguments for Gov. Bill Lee’s private school choice pilot program, which was deemed unconstitutional by a Nashville judge earlier this year after a legal challenge from county and public school district officials. If the Lee administration is successful in its appeal, then the program will provide low- and middle-income students enrolled in Nashville and Memphis public schools with an education savings account worth up to $7,300 a year, redeemable for various K-12 education expenses as well as private school tuition fees.
And it’s a worthy fight. The ESA program applies to districts with large numbers of low-performing schools, and over 2,000 students have signed up so far. These are the Tennessee families who could benefit the most from more choice in their children’s education, especially when many students are set to fall a full school year behind due to COVID-19 disruptions.
Unfortunately, the legal challenges have pushed the program back until at least August 2021, thereby decimating the hopes of thousands of low-income Tennesseans set to enroll their children in new schools this year.
While the court cases concern whether the Tennessee Constitution’s “home rule” clause allows the state to issue ESAs in just two counties without local voter approval, the political opposition from district and county officials is, in fact, driven by concerns that the ESAs will take funding away from their public schools amid a state budget crisis. Anti-school choice groups, including teachers’ unions, similarly claim that ESAs transfer public funds to “unaccountable” private schools, including religious ones.
These concerns are largely misplaced.
Concerns addressed
For one, ESAs amount to nothing more than a transfer of a portion of the funds earmarked for a student’s education from public schools to their families, who can then take these dollars to schools of their choice. Schools exist to serve students, not the other way around.
Most of us would oppose the idea of limiting food stamps to government-run grocery stores. And even outspoken atheists are generally quiet about college students taking their Pell Grant money to Catholic universities. It’s hard, then, to justify why the ESA program should be treated differently from other public assistance programs. Notably, private and charter schools usually provide the same education at a lesser per-pupil cost than what states spend on public schooling.
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Fears about harm to public schools are also likely to be overstated. Tennessee’s government has promised to maintain current levels of public school funding despite the COVID-19 budget crisis, and has even pledged a relief package, subject to state appropriation, for schools that lose students to the ESA program. One must also consider the fact that schools that lose students could well end up with more funding on average for every child they retain than before. This is an important consideration when the nation’s public schools are set to be burdened by a potential influx of thousands of new students due to private school closures exacerbated by the COVID-19 recession.
Losing students, funding can spur schools to do better
Public schools that lose students and funding because of families taking advantage of different options should strive to engage with their community to better tailor services to local needs and preferences. That’s what happened after California made it easy for its students to transfer into schools in other districts. Those that lost students responded with improved offerings and more community consultation. This not only reduced the outflow of kids, but resulted in test score improvements – even for the schools that lost students. Similar results followed choice programs in New York and many other states.
More incentives to attract, keep teachers
Teachers also stand to benefit from the labor market competition that school choice programs foster. More schools entering the market means that each must offer better incentives, such as better pay or improved classroom conditions to attract and retain teaching talent. This is important, given that budget shortfalls have forced Tennessee legislators to reconsider approved raises to teachers’ salaries.
Teachers’ unions often support more funding for public schools as their main solution for boosting pay. Yet inflation-adjusted teacher salaries actually fell by 2% nationwide between 1992 and 2014, despite a 27% surge in real public school spending over that time frame. By contrast, studies conducted in Ohio, North Carolina, across the United States and even Sweden have all found that more competition from private schools increases public school staff salaries.
The notion of unaccountable private schools is also misguided. The greatest accountability measure is the ability of parents and students to “vote with their feet” by having a choice of multiple schools. While families that can afford private schools have a variety of schooling options, those with lower incomes are often limited to one public school determined by their ZIP code. And they can’t leave that school, regardless of how their child is faring.
State budget shortfalls aren’t an excuse to deny low-income families education options. If piloting ESAs in just two counties is impossible under Tennessee’s “home rule” clause, then the legislators should expand the program statewide, not scrap it.
Satya Marar is an education policy analyst at the Reason Foundation and a Young Voices School Choice fellow. Follow him on Twitter @MisterJEET.
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