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by Richard O Jones
Hamilton Journal News
September 18, 2012

One of the most prominent K-12 education reform movements in recent decades has been the idea of “educational choice,” allowing parents to use their child’s portion of state-allocated funds to send students to private and charter schools.

Much of the focus in this area of education reform has been on charter schools, K-12 schools that receive public money, usually supplemented by private endowments and grants, and do not charge additional tuition.

Some education experts expect charter schools and for-profit facilities will continue to grow and will transform education in the next decade. Others say if profits continue to drive these schools, the education aspect will suffer.

“Under the current system, if a school isn’t doing a good job, the only way to get a better school – purchase private schooling or move to a new neighborhood – are expensive and cumbersome,” said a 2011 report by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

The nation’s first charter schools laws were passed by Minnesota in 1991. Within four years, 18 additional states passed charter school laws. Currently, 42 states and the District of Columbia have charter school laws in place, and the Center for Education Reform notes that nearly 2 million American children were enrolled in 5,196 charter schools for the 2011-12 school year.

The Richard Allen Academy in Hamilton, a satellite of the Dayton-based charter school, began operating in 2003 when Hamilton City Schools were ranked low. Although the public school has since improved, the Allen Academy has been able to keep its charter and now serves around 200 students with a staff of 18 teachers on Hamilton’s East Side, according to Principal Aleta Benson.

One of the primary reasons families choose the charter school, Benson said, is because of the low class size.

“My largest class size is the first grade with 25 students,” she said. “I have a class of 20, but all of the other classes have fewer than 18 students.”

She said parents like that the school is able to give individualized attention, especially to children who may be struggling in some academic areas.

There are also voucher programs available for students with autism and special needs to attend schools such as the Summit Academy Community School for Alternative Learners in Middletown, a non-profit school designed to meet the educational needs of students who are at risk for academic failure due to having ADHD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and related disorders.

Ohio’s EdChoice program, enacted in 1995, enrolled 13,915 students in the 2010-11 school year, providing vouchers — officially called “scholarships” by the Ohio Department of Education — worth up to $4,250 each for grades K-8 and $5,000 each for grades 9-12.

Advocates of school choice, including the non-profit School Choice Ohio, say that charter schools can be more innovative and less bogged down by big administrative costs, and that parents and students can be more empowered to have a voice in education. Others argue that schools will respond to the competition created by school choice and will thus be motivated to improve educational performance and opportunities.

Critics, however, say that school choice will divide the educational system, serving the most motivated families leaving public schools with increasingly disadvantaged students while siphoning away money that could be used to foster improvement, and that profit-motivated charter school operators will be beholden only to the interests of shareholders and not the students they serve.

In the United States, total spending on K-12 education amounts to over $536 billion per year, according to the most recent numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics, with 45 percent coming from states, 37 percent from local governments.

The research on the effectiveness of charter schools has been mixed at best. Mathmatica Policy Research’s 2010 study of charter middle schools in 15 states found that there was a wide variation across schools in performance, that they were more effective for lower income and lower achieving students, for students in large urban areas.

“Those outside these large urban areas had negative impacts on achievement,” the report concluded. Study charter schools did not significantly affect most of the other outcomes examined, including attendance, student behavior, and survey-based measures of student effort in school.”

If the charter schools weren’t really doing better, at least the families felt better about it as the only positive impact across the charter schools studied was in the levels of satisfaction with school among both students and their parents.

Charter schools don’t necessarily cut down on the administrative cost of education that proponents suggest. A University of Michigan study on the charter schools in that state, released in March this year, concludes that “compared to traditional public schools, charter schools on average spend nearly $800 more per pupil per year on administration and $1,100 less on instruction.”

On the higher education front, education for profit is proving to be a big bust, according to a recent study released by the U.S. Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which outlines widespread problems evidenced by internal documents that education companies submitted to the committee at Harkin’s request.

“In this report, you will find overwhelming documentation of overpriced tuition, predatory recruiting practices, sky-high dropout rates, billions of taxpayer dollars spent on aggressive marketing and advertising, and companies gaming regulations to maximize profits,” said committee Chair Sen. Tom Harkin, (D-Iowa) in a press release. “These practices are not the exception — they are the norm; they are systemic throughout the industry, with very few exceptions.”

Taxpayers invest more than $30 billion a year into companies that operate for-profit colleges through student aid funds, Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits and Department of Defense Tuition Assistance funds, the report said.

Still, most for-profit colleges charge 19 percent higher tuition than community colleges or public universities for bachelor degree comparable programs and set tuition to satisfy profit goals, rarely setting tuition below available federal student aid. Partially because of these high costs, 96 percent of for-profit students take out federal and private loans to cover the cost and more than one in five will default on those loans within three years.

Further, the report says that many companies train recruiters in tactics of emotional exploitation in order to get prospective students to enroll.

“Some companies have also been using tactics that mislead prospective students with regard to the cost of the program, the time to complete the program, the completion rates of other students, the success of other students at finding jobs, the transferability of the credit, or the reputation and accreditation of the school,” the report said, noting that veterans and service members are prime targets for these aggressive recruiting tactics.