School choice advocates often say they “empower” parents by offering them scholarships to spend on a school of their choice. Their vision is of parents operating in an open market of vendors, free to select and shape how their children are educated. But in reality, the market-based approach limits the choices available to parents.
In an unregulated school choice environment, for example, are parents really choosing schools or are the schools choosing which students they want to serve? Modern charter schools have developed a variety of techniques for selecting their student bodies. In School’s Choice: How Charter Schools Control and Shape Enrollment, Kevin Welner and Wagna Mommandi explain how charter schools attract and retain low-cost students while refusing to admit those who pose the most challenges.
Are parents really choosing schools or are the schools choosing which students they want to serve?
These practices can begin with targeted marketing. By only reaching out to certain kinds of families and selecting school locations that are far from low-income neighborhoods, charter operators can limit enrollment to only enroll the students they want. And, in curating their student rosters, they’re able to avoid having to pay for services like special education, transportation, and free lunch.
In How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice, Robert Pondiscio, a policy fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on K-12 education, details the ways that Success Academy—the charter chain founded by Eva Moskowitz—screened out certain families. “Success Academy is cherry-picking parents,” Pondiscio wrote, highlighting how the charter schools often place a variety of hurdles in parents’ paths, from meetings to requirements to volunteer hours. Charters also use subtle techniques to push students out, such as Success Academy’s use of a secret “got to go” list.
For voucher programs, which give parents money to move their children from public to private schools, the barriers are even stronger. Most new voucher legislation includes a “hands off” clause that explicitly denies that a voucher-accepting school is a government actor, meaning that the state may not interfere in any way with how the school operates.
Most voucher programs, in other words, provide free reign to private schools to discriminate as they wish. There are entire businesses set up to help private Christian schools strategize how to exclusively retain “mission-appropriate” families. And, with the outcome of the U.S. Supreme Court case Carson v. Makin likely to yield a conservative decision, the religious right’s ability to openly discriminate in private schools—by refusing, for instance, to admit LGBTQ+ students or people of color—seems poised to only get worse.
Many parents who were promised the power to choose a school that best fits their child are finding that, in practice, they actually have no choice at all except to return to a public school that has been stripped of resources in order to fund choice for other peoples’ children. In such a system, public schools become the schools of last resort because by law they must accept all students within their district.
Furthermore, school choice likely won’t empower parents because the parents are making these choices without being able to access all of the relevant information. This is a clear example of asymmetric information, a phenomenon in marketplace transactions where a seller knows more than the buyer.
In theory, consumer regulations are designed to balance this division. But, in the world of school choice, there’s almost nothing in place to require a charter school to disclose how it compares to other schools—other than, of course, school-wide scores from the annual Big Standardized Test. For private schools, the information gap is even wider, as what they choose to disclose is usually crafted by the school itself. Plus, third-party rankings for both, such as the list put out by GreatSchools and U.S. News & World Report, typically nudge families toward whiter, more affluent schools.
Parents, as a result, have few sources of reliable information when making a choice that is supposedly transparent. This is especially true in states like Michigan, where there are fewer rules around what charter or private schools need to disclose.
School marketing is also largely unregulated, allowing charter and private schools to make whatever claims they choose about everything from programming and the financial stability of the school to the very use of the word “public” in their title. Public schools, by contrast, may be reluctant to be as transparent as parents would like, but the law is on parents’ side when it comes to requirements for district transparency.
Finally, because charters and private schools only need a small portion of the total local market to stay in business, dissatisfied families that threaten to or decide to leave the schools are easily replaced. The Elmwood Village Charter School in Buffalo, New York, for example, has an enrollment of 445 students. Since Buffalo’s school district enrolls roughly 30,000 students, Elmwood has ample replacements to draw from if a student decides to leave. This waiting pool of applicants, as we’ve seen with Success Academy, makes it easier to screen out some families rather than put effort into keeping each one happy.
Instead of empowering parents, the unregulated market gives parents no leverage and no legal protections.
Nor can families resort to the law. While it’s unfortunate that parents of students with special needs must take public schools to court to have the legal requirements met, those same parents in private schools may have no recourse at all, having waived their child’s rights in order to enroll them in the school of their choice.
Choice advocates argue that regulations are unnecessary because the market forces will sort itself out. But in most situations, if parents say, “I want this fixed, or I’m pulling my child out of here,” the response will be some version of “there’s the door.” Charter and private schools only need a tiny percentage of available students to fill their roster. Instead of empowering parents, the unregulated market gives parents no leverage and no legal protections.
Public schools are owned and operated by the public via elected representatives who are, at least in some ways, able to be held accountable. If parents want to voice an opinion about how a school is run, they have several avenues available, from public school board meetings to direct contact with their elected officials. A charter school may be owned and operated by an unelected board that meets privately far away from the parents’ community.
The dangled promise of parental empowerment is appealing, but for the most part, charter and private schools offer less parent power, not more.