School Choice–Its Time Has Come By: Anthony Pellegrino

The term “school choice” means giving parents the power and opportunity to choose the school their child will attend. Traditionally, children are assigned to a public school according to where they live. People of means already have school choice because they can afford to move to an area according to the schools available (i.e. where the quality of public schools is high), or they can choose to enroll their child in a private school. Parents without such means, until recently, generally had no choice of school, and had to send their child to the school assigned to them by the district, regardless of the school (‘s quality or appropriateness for their child.

A similar situation happens in the CNMI every new school year where many parents insist that their child attend a public school outside the district from where they live because they feel that such and such a school is so much better. Some parents succeed in getting their way and others accept quietly the school in their district.

This demand for school choice is especially vocal in the large urban schools in the mainland where so many of the schools simply cannot teach any more because of so many social and economic problems affecting the system. The dismal results are especially evident in the centers of American culture-the cities.

School choice programs foster parental involvement and high expectations by giving parents the option to educate their children as they see fit. It reasserts the rights of the parent and the best interests of child over the convenience of the system, infuses accountability and quality into the system, and provides educational opportunity where none existed before.

Full school choice programs, also known as tuition vouchers, provide parents with a portion of the public educational funding allotted for their child to attend school, and allows them to use those funds to attend the school of their choice. It gives them the fiscal authority to send their child to the educational institution that best suits their child, whether it is a religious or parochial school, another private school, a neighborhood or magnet public school. However, because of attempting to include religious schools in school choice which uses public funding, the proliferation of many of the school choice programs have become temporarily stymied and controversial.

Currently only the following cities or states have publicly-sponsored full school choice: Cleveland, Ohio; Milwaukee, WI; and Florida. Vermont has the longest running, and least controversial, full school choice program since 1869. In order to meet the demands of parents who live in towns too small to support a local school, the state pays the tuition expenses for children to attend any public school or nonsectarian private school (including schools outside the state).

Maine also has had a tuitioning system for well over 200 years because, as in Vermont, too many small towns could not afford high schools. In Cleveland, Ohio, choice scholarships allow over 3,000 at-risk children to attend private schools of their parent’s choosing, secular or religious, in grades K-4.

However all of these states are now facing court baffles because they are insisting that parents should be able to send their children to secular or religious schools even though the funds are public. This appears to be a violation of the separation of church and state.

Whether the Federal government will allow parents to send their children to either religious or secular school is still being hotly debated. Also final results on whether full school choice is really helping children get a better education are not yet fully accepted. But it is a fact that school choice is here to stay. (Continued on Tuesday).