Choice Overview

October 2002
Public School Choice
Vouchers
No Child Left Behind
Related EdSource Online articles

Public School Choice

The concept of public school choice has been around for a long time. Public school choice allows parents and students to select among a variety of public schools within their district or community. Within districts, options first showed up as magnet schools, which generally specialized in areas such as science, the arts, or technology. Magnet schools continue to thrive today in many districts.

When the charter school movement began, new charter schools increased the public school options for parents and students.

Current law in California requires school districts to allow parents and students to choose any public school in their district—not just magnet or charter schools—provided the school has the room to take them. However, provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are creating some changes in the state’s choice process. (To learn more, see the NCLB section below.)

Vouchers

A voucher is a promise of payment for all or part of a student’s education expenses at a school of the student’s choice. This term is generally used for the certificates or promises that governments provide public school students so they can attend private schools. In some cases, eligible private schools include those with religious affiliations.

For several decades, economists, political scientists, educators, and policymakers have debated the merits of school vouchers. Vouchers continue to be a hot topic today with high profile court cases, such as the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Cleveland voucher program, and with periodic initiatives on state ballots to attempt to establish programs. For example, Californians voted on Proposition 38 in November 2000. If the proposition had passed, the California Constitution would have been amended to offer tax-free scholarships for private school tuition to all California public and private K–12 students.

For more history and analysis of California’s Proposition 38, see our September 2000 election brief at: www.edsource.org/pub_prop38.cfm

To learn more about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the Cleveland case and to read policy essays by key thinkers on this topic, visit The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s website, particularly the Religion and Public Schools section. Look for its 2002 publication, School Vouchers: Settled Questions, Continuing Disputes, which can be downloaded for free at: http://pewforum.org/publications/.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), reauthorized by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in January 2002, places a new and heavy emphasis on giving parents a choice in where their children go to school. Otherwise known as "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB), this legislation creates several federally supported public school choice programs. District participation in these programs is voluntary. The federal programs support magnet schools, charter schools, and partnerships between a state or district and public or private entities to offer more public schooling options for parents.

A public school choice component not voluntary for school districts is the NCLB’s requirement that districts provide students at failing schools with the option of transferring to higher-performing schools elsewhere in the district. According to the federal legislation, a failing school is a school that does not meet Adequate Yearly Progress, as defined by the state. In addition, students attending "persistently dangerous" schools, as determined by the state, also qualify for a school transfer. (See www.cde.ca.gov/pr/nclb/unsafeschl.htm for California’s definition of such schools.)

By law, the district must allow students at these schools to transfer to another and must provide transportation to the new school.

This law poses several challenges for districts. Districts must figure out how to effectively communicate to parents what their choices are. They must also determine how to handle space issues when the number of students wishing to transfer exceeds the number of spaces at the schools of their choice. Districts will also face transportation challenges and will have to sort out the complexities of reallocating funds and other resources when students transfer to new schools.

For the 2002–03 academic year, relatively few parents in districts across the country are opting to transfer their children to other schools, according to an August 2002 Education Week report. The U.S. Department of Education, however, predicts that as word gets out about their children’s eligibility to transfer, many more parents will take advantage of this opportunity in future years.

To learn which schools in California have been designated by the California Department of Education as having failed to meet adequate progress and whose students, thus, are eligible to transfer to a higher-performing school, go to: www.cde.ca.gov/iasa/titleone/pi/query.asp

Once on the webpage, you can use the database to search by school, district, county, or region, or you can obtain a complete list of the 1,003 qualifying schools by checking all of the boxes under "Program Improvement ID Year". Increase the "Maximum Records to Display" to 5,000 to make sure you capture a complete list.

The Education Commission of the States (ECS) has published some excellent policy briefs that analyze particular aspects of the NCLB, including school choice. Briefs are available online at www.ecs.org.

The official NCLB site is: www.ed.gov/nclb