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Richard Epstein explains the economic rationale for school choice and considers the successes of the charter school sector.
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You’re not going to convince me that the taxpayer should pay for multiple public school systems. You can either send your kid to the public school, or you can send the kid to a private school (or you can home school them, I am totally fine with home schooling). There’s no way I can approve of a public school where only selected kids can go by virtue of some arbitrary selection process (that is not academics).
Back in the early 2000s I worked in a summer program developed by some great teachers in Seattle Public School, but not funded by the school district. The program was an attempt to give kids who had failed basic skills classes and were subject to retention because of that failure to make up the missing credits and be promoted with their class to the next grade. The idea was that kids who are retained tend to drop out of school at a much higher percentage.
Because we were funded privately by organizations like the Gates Foundation, we did not have many of the restrictions placed on us that public schools did. We made it very clear to any parent enrolling their child in our program that 3 absences for any reason would lead to their child being dropped from the program. We also set up strict behavioral codes which also had as their most serious consequence expulsion from the program. In the two summers I was associated with the program in that non-publically funded form we have very few kids who did not complete the program. In my third and fourth years in the program Seattle Public Schools took over the program. The rules changed and the entire structure of discipline began to collapse. The stipulations we were able to make with parents in the earlier generation of the school were deemed unacceptable to Seattle Public Schools administration. After a couple of years the program simply disappeared having proven totally unsuccessful and economically wasteful.
I don’t have much knowledge or experience with modern charter schools. I did attend private schools throughout my own childhood, and I well understand the difference between a school in which parents and their children feel that they are entitled and one in which their presence is contingent on maintaining certain standards.
I spent a lot of mornings outside of the school building awaiting the arrival of Special Education student buses. I saw a great many parents dropping off their kids, and a lot of kids who simply walked to school since they lived too close to be provided bus transportation. A remarkable number of these kids carried no visible supplies, books, or other necessary implements. Many had a basketball, iPod, or game console. School to them was a social gathering place, not a place they were coming to work and learn. For their parents it was some place to leave their kids so that they didn’t need to supervise them.
Charter schools and private schools are more successful because one way or the other parents have skin in the game. They need to actively participate in some form or the other. This, in itself, acts as a filtering device which gives credence to the concept that Charter and Private schools drain the best students from the schools leaving the public schools with the dregs.
I admire Professor Epstein enormously, but he does no have all of the facts on this issue.