It's easy to focus on education topics based on terminology. For example, in When Private Schools Take Public Dollars: What's the Place of Accountability in School Voucher Programs?, released last week, we focused solely on school vouchers. Not tax credits, or even special education vouchers, but plain vanilla schools vouchers. And we researched the rules and regulations of those voucher programs and asked our respondents to base their answers on that information. We then offered a sliding scale model for school voucher programs.
But because of these blinders, we overlooked an existing sliding scale model. Steve Bowen from the Maine Heritage Policy Center wrote in to tell us that a sliding scale mechanism has been in use in the Pine Tree state for quite some time--just not under the name of a school voucher program. Here's his fantastic overview from a comment on last week's Education Gadfly:
I don't know if it made it into the report you are soon releasing, but with regard to a sliding scale of student outcome reporting on the part of private schools, that is precisely how Maine does it.Though it frequently seems to escape the attention of the ed policy world in this country for some reason, Maine has what is essentially a school voucher system in certain communities and has had for generations. Towns that don't operate their own schools are required to "tuition" students to a school of their choice. We have some towns where kids attend a half-dozen different high schools, public and private, their tuition paid for with tax dollars. We have areas of the state where true free markets in education exist, in which schools actively compete with one another to win students over. Somehow, though, we tend to get left off the "state school choice programs" lists.
In any event, as a result of this system, we have private schools in Maine, some of them 200 years old, which serve as the default public schools - they are private, but nearly all the students they serve are paid for with public tuitioning dollars. Under Maine law, if publicly tuitioned students make up more than 65% of the student body of such a school, the school is required to administer the state achievement tests and report their results on a school-wide basis. Schools with fewer than 65% publicly-funded students do not need to do this testing or reporting.
The rationale for this is exactly as you describe - the public is purchasing a product and is thus entitled to know what they are getting in return. The private schools accept this and generally feel as though this is a fair trade-off for millions of dollars in taxpayer money. Periodically, the state, which can't help itself, tries to enact some new regulatory hoops for the so-called "65% schools" to jump through, but the private schools tend to wield quite a bit of clout and are generally able to fend off the kind of meddling that the state Department of Education inflicts on their public school counterparts.
So, Fordham Institute, a good idea, but hey, we up here in Maine could have told you that years ago!
Thanks, Steve, for calling this to our attention!
