“If you build it, they will come” makes a great tagline for a mythical baseball movie but a poor strategy for educational improvement. Markets are not magic and are shaped by external factors that encourage or discourage participation.
School choice programs are no exception. How they are structured, how much money they offer, what regulations they place on families and providers, and more will determine if schools choose to participate and the level to which they will choose to participate.
For researchers, the fact that some states have choice programs and some states don’t and some schools choose to participate and some schools don’t provides the variation necessary to understand the differences in participation rates.
A new paper by Matthew Lee, Benjamin Scafidi, Roger Tutterow, and Damian Kavanagh does just that. Using a brief survey of 473 private school leaders, they collected information on school characteristics, including ethos (Liberal arts, Montessori, Classical, etc.), methods (language immersion, boarding, single-gender, etc.), enrollment, tuition, and private school choice program participation.
They then used some fancy statistical modeling to examine what factors are correlated both with participation in choice programs as well as the timing of that participation.
Here are the key findings:
In our preferred specification, we find ceteris paribus that religious private schools are nine percentage points more likely to participate (p < .10); private schools in the northeastern US (Pennsylvania and Maine in our sample) are 23 points more likely to participate than schools in the southeast (p < .01); and private schools that are specialized to focus on special needs students are 39 points more likely to participate in choice programs (p < .001), where the reference category on school type is private schools that are neither religious nor designed to serve only or mostly special needs students. Private schools with tuitions above $20,000 are 33 points less likely to participate than schools with tuitions below $20,000 (p < .001). Finally, small private schools that serve less than 250 students are 14 points less likely to participate in choice programs than larger private schools (p < .01).
With respect to timing, they found:
Among private schools participating in choice programs at the time of our survey, 43% participated in choice program at launch, but 40% of participating schools “waited” an average of 7.35 years to participate (SD = 6.15, ranging from one to 28 years); and the remaining 17% of participating schools were unsure about the first year of program participation.
I think of these findings as falling into three buckets: ones I expected, ones I didn’t expect, and ones that I can’t really make heads or tails of.
Expected findings
That schools whose tuition far exceeds the scholarship value do not participate should not surprise us. Given the smaller dollar value of scholarships in many of the states studied, it also shouldn’t surprise us that smaller schools are less likely to participate, as larger schools can take advantage of economies of scale that stretch the scholarship dollar.
The special needs finding might seem surprising, but given the fact that many programs are specifically for students with special needs and others plus up the value of scholarships for students with special needs, the fact that those schools participate at higher rates makes perfect sense.
Unexpected findings
I was surprised at the mean time schools waited to participate in choice programs. I wasn’t surprised that a healthy chunk of schools chose to participate from the outset and another sizeable chunk decided to wait and see, but I would have thought that waiting and seeing would have happened for a shorter period of time than nearly seven and a half years. What became apparent in year seven that wasn’t clear in year six or year five? That one is worth thinking about and trying to unpack.
Not sure what to do with these
I don’t really know what to think about the regional differences in participation. Why Northeastern schools are more likely to participate than Southeastern ones is not clear to me. Perhaps digging into the specific states and the funding/regulatory combinations would explain that.
Takeaways
Matt Continetti wrote a wonderful piece for the Wall Street Journal at the end of July titled Milton Friedman was Right. When thinking about research like the paper above, I sometimes ask WWMT (What Would Milton Think)?
I imagine he would tell me that organizations respond to incentives. If they get enough money to cover their tuition costs, they’ll participate in the program. If they get additional funding for students with special needs, they will enroll them. If they don’t, they won’t.
This is why, for years, I’ve been a sliding scale guy. I think that the amount placed in a student’s ESA should vary based on his or her needs. John broke down how the Arizona ESA program has a series of plus-ups for students with different identified disabilities, and how that varied funding has ensured that the program serves children at all points on the spectrum of special needs.
The same could be true for student disadvantage or anything else that we think might cause a child’s education to cost more. More disadvantage, more money. It is how public school funding formulae work. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
But regardless of my half-baked thoughts, this was an interesting and thought-provoking paper that everyone should check out.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Informed Choice.
