The cause of school choice took a major step forward in Florida last week when Governor Rick Scott signed a bill codifying open enrollment and increasing funding for charter schools. The new law directs $75 million toward capital projects for the state’s 650 charter schools, weighted especially toward those that serve disabled students or those from low-income families. (In addition to the funding carrot, legislators introduced an accountability stick: Charters will now submit compulsory financial statements on a monthly or quarterly basis, and those that receive F ratings for two consecutive years will be automatically shuttered.) But the headline result is undoubtedly the introduction of open enrollment, which will allow students—with particular preference given to highly mobile kids in military families and foster care—to attend any public school in the state with slots open.
Scant weeks after their narrow victory in the Supreme Court’s Friedrichs case, teachers’ unions have won another critical battle—this time at the state level—with a friendly ruling in Vergara v. California. A three-judge appeals court panel overturned the original ruling from Judge Rolf Treu, which invalidated state laws around teacher tenure and due process rights. The case, which hinges on guarantees of equitable education in the California Constitution, will soon head to the state supreme court; meanwhile, copycat litigants in New York and Minnesota are pursuing a similar strategy in their own state courts. Reformers are right to try to reshape teacher tenure in public schools—even the Vergara panel conceded that ineffective teachers are being disproportionately assigned to schools servicing mostly poor students, though they blamed districts rather than state law—but not every grievance can be cured through the legal system. If we want to create a new, better version of public school employment, it’s worth doing the old-fashioned way: by winning elections and passing sensible, durable new laws.
Education observers end up splitting their attention between a lot of disparate facets of schooling: choice, teacher quality, testing and accountability, curriculum, local democracy (in the form of school board elections), and governance. Probably the most unloved and unsexy aspect of all this, though, is school finance. It shouldn’t be so; a simple perusal of major city newspapers will provide abundant examples of struggling districts that lost sight of the bottom line and paid a dear price. Thankfully, National Public Radio is embarking on an important (and, in a decidedly un-school-finance-y twist, totally riveting) project to document the importance of money in K–12 education. The audio and web series will include three weeks of stories about the huge resource disparities between America’s school districts—and how they affect the students enrolled in them. The first installment even comes with a terrific interactive map of school spending by every district in the country, adjusted for regional cost differences. Don’t let this one go unnoticed.
