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McClaughry: Losing School Choice

Since 1869 Vermont has maintained a tradition of parental choice in education. Parents in towns with no operating schools, or only K to 6 or K-8 schools, have been able to choose what’s best for their kids from among both public and independent schools, within or outside of the state. There are about 91 such towns now, but there’s a real danger there will be few or none four years from now. Already two partial choice towns - Westford and Elmore – have been swallowed up into unified districts.

The agent here is Act 46, the school consolidation act passed last year. The Act offers five years of property tax incentives to taxpayers in towns that join in forming a new unified district.

If a tuition town votes to merge with another tuition town - all the students in the new larger district retain school choice. But when a tuition town votes to merge with a district that has an operating high school, its pupils will lose choice and have to attend the school within the new larger district.

Last September, the State Board of Education announced it would refuse to approve any unified district in which parents in choice towns retained choice, while parents in the other larger component towns had no choice.

The friends of parental choice in education believe choice gives parents and students a broader range of possibilities to get education that meets their particular needs, whether among public schools or, better, among both public and non-sectarian independent schools. Opponents of choice, notably the Vermont NEA teachers union, defend larger scale government monopoly schooling for ease of administration and unionization.

An important contribution to this clash of ideas came a decade ago from Prof. Caroline Hoxby of Harvard, now at Stanford. Her research showed that the availability of parental choice had a highly positive effect in stimulating lackluster government schools to improve their offerings to avoid losing pupils to their competitors. This was demonstrated in Florida, which passed a law bestowing choice on school districts where the state gave public schools failing grades over a two year period. Such a warning shot forced public schools to shape up to stay in business, to the benefit of the students who remained.

A well-drafted proposal to rescue parental choice in tuition towns – and extend it to all pupils in unified districts, wouldn’t increase education costs, and would keep Vermont at the forefront of states that recognize the value of parental choice of opportunities for their children’s education.
 

John McClaughry is founder and vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a Vermont policy research and education organization.
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