This is the eighth entry in Fordham’s education savings account Wonkathon. This year, Mike Petrilli challenged a number of prominent scholars, practitioners, and policy analysts to opine on ESAs. Click to read earlier entries from Michael Goldstein, Seth Rau, Matthew Ladner, Jonathan Butcher, Tracey Weinstein, Andy Smarick, and Neerav Kingsland.
Recently in Florida, an eleven-year-old boy was taken by Child Protective Services for playing basketball in his own back yard without parent supervision. More than 150,000 parents opted their children out of state tests in New York this past school year. Police in Texas shut down a lemonade stand set up by two little girls who were hoping to earn a few dollars to buy their dad a Father’s Day present. And there are more children being diagnosed with Youthful Tendency Disorder than ever before.
(Sorry, that last one was an Onion headline.)
Although these headlines appear unrelated, they’re actually representative of the same phenomenon: Regardless of the merits of the policy (e.g., state testing requirements), there is a growing perception that accountability has morphed into overregulation.
In order for Nevada’s ESA option to flourish, it cannot die a death by a thousand regulations—particularly when we know three things very clearly:
- Performance on state tests is one of the least important factors parents consider when selecting a school.
- Unfortunately, that hasn't kept policymakers from using testing regulations to foist “accountability” on private schools participating in choice options.
- Private schools and other providers have significant concerns that such regulations will dominate school culture and suffocate what is unique about their particular models.
As researchers have demonstrated, leaders of participating private schools in Louisiana and Indiana are most concerned about possible future regulations, followed by the paperwork burden. Those school leaders “expressed strong preference” for a nationally norm-referenced (NNR) test rather than being required to participate in a single statewide test (as is currently the practice in those two states). Typical rationales for school leaders who chose not to participate in the school choice program included concerns about regulations, followed by worry over the future impact of those regulations on their schools’ character and culture.
Their anxieties are not unfounded. In Louisiana, the board of elementary and secondary education promulgated regulations in nine categories, more than half of which involve student eligibility, admissions, enrollment, and tuition. Participating private schools must employ a testing coordinator, and the state conducts school visits during testing time to monitor implementation. The assessment process for entire schools can be driven by a state mandate that students attending a particular private school on scholarship must take the state test.
Thus, two-thirds of private schools take a pass on participating in the state’s school choice program, leaving money on the table because they worry about the regulatory effect on their identities. And all over something parents don’t even value highly in the first place.
After all this, we’re back to a place where the schools offering something distinct from the government system are available exclusively to those who can shell out for tuition.
Apart from their negative influence on the supply side, state regulators should get out of the way because their track record is pretty lousy. There wouldn’t be such a clamor for choice if the heavily regulated government system was working well. The Silver State now has the opportunity to go a different direction—to allow parents to “regulate” their children’s education. It’s an attempt at something entirely different, so layering on the same old regulatory schemes certainly wouldn’t be appropriate.
If Nevada is to engender a healthy supply-side response to its ESA initiative, state regulators have to stay out of the way.
That’s not to say there shouldn’t be oversight. As it currently stands, the state has struck a good balance in which it oversees accountability for taxpayer dollars. Parents must report on expenditures, and the state can withhold a subsequent quarter’s distribution if it detects a misuse of funds—or even audit accounts, if necessary.
Accountability for academic outcomes is heavily tilted toward parental oversight, as it should be. Parents must provide access to academic instruction in core subjects (which they agree to do when entering into the ESA contract), and students must complete any of a number of NNR tests. Although this relies a little more on testing as a means of accountability than does Arizona’s ESA option—which includes no testing requirements—the fact that all public school students could one day be using an ESA makes a stronger case for going with the NNR requirement.
So what must Nevada get right in order for it to provide positive outcomes for kids and taxpayers? Implementation.
Clear communication with families will be key, and so will moving toward a system in which families can do the bulk of their ESA transactions online, as Jonathan Butcher has suggested. Those working to implement the ESA option should provide clear explanations of how the option functions, when families can enroll, information about when and how funds will be distributed, how much families will receive, and how families will need to provide information about expenditures.
In short, information and ease of use will mean more to the future success of the ESA option than almost anything else—besides maintaining an environment free from burdensome mandates.
If we really want to know the answer to this question, we can turn to that cinematic classic Ghostbusters, in which Dan Aykroyd proclaims, “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results!" Parents now have the option to vote with their feet—not just among schools, but also a wide universe of education services, products, providers. And parents will expect results. That’s the best mechanism for ensuring accountability, and that’s all would-be regulators need to know.
Lindsey M. Burke is the Will Skillman Fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation.