Katherine Schulze: Welcome to Tough Questions with Robert Enlow, where we tackle the biggest myths in education and give you the real story. Today’s tough question, how do we know school choice actually works?
Robert Enlow: Great question. Good one to start with. It’s the get tough with Bob question.
Let’s go. So as a family, as a parent, right, the first thing we got to ask ourselves about school choice is what do I care about most? And I care if my child’s learning.
I care if my child’s safe. I one clear way is to find out whether families feel and parents feel that their children are learning. In report after report that we look at across all the programs, families are incredibly satisfied with their children’s progress.
Their kids are in safer schools. Their kids are in schools where they’re not anxious. Their kids are in schools where they’re not being bullied.
This is great. Now, if you look at it from a different level, we want to know how kids are doing. We want to know how schools are doing.
We want to know how kids are doing after school. We want to know how public schools are doing. We want to know how taxpayers are doing.
So if you look at all these levels of how is school choice impacting all of those issues, we find a ton of evidence. So at EdChoice, we publish something called the one, two, threes of school choice. And if you look at how children are doing on test scores and choice programs, the vast majority of studies find that children are performing slightly better, not terrifically better, but slightly better than their public school peers.
And particularly they do so after the third and fourth year of the program, which makes a lot of sense. If you’re a child, your family moves you to one school, you have an adjustment period. As you stay in that school, you start to increase your scores over time and you start to pass your public school peers.
But it’s just not how they’re doing on a test score because a child is not a test score. It’s how are they doing after school? Are they attaining more?
And I think this is a really critical question. School choice programs have been shown, like charter school programs, that children graduate at higher rates. They matriculate in college at higher rates, and they persist in college at higher rates.
This is tremendously important data because it’s great if they score well on a test score. We’d love that. But I want them to have success later in life.
So we know that on the whole, kids are doing better both in achievement and in attainment. We also know that taxpayers are benefiting. There’s hundreds of studies showing that school choice is actually benefiting states by allowing families to relocate and reallocate their dollars to nontraditional schools, which often cost significantly less.
So in my home state of Indiana, a child in third grade who goes to Indianapolis public schools will get around $17,000. That same child who goes to a charter school will get around $9,000 or $10,000. And that same child who uses a scholarship program to go to a private school will get around $7,000.
I always ask, why is that child worth $10,000 less? But we do know that states and localities are not spending as much on children in these programs. It’s just the reality.
So we know that taxpayers are benefiting. We know that students are benefiting. We know that parents are immensely satisfied.
And lastly, I think one of the most underrated part of the studies that we find is that children are more tolerant. So when you look at the civic outcomes of these programs, I want to know my kid is a good kid. I want to know my kid is in schools where they’re learning to be a good human being.
And the study after study shows, and it’s sort of a, you don’t expect this result, but study after shows that if you want your child to be more tolerant of other people’s opinions, more understanding of the issues like free speech, and more civically tolerated, civically minded, integrated school, you want them in a private school. And it’s because that’s where these kids are learning more of these behaviors. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true.
So if you look at it, the vast bulk of the evidence, I think somewhere around 90% of all the evidence shows that these programs are benefiting students, parents, society, and taxpayers, and our society at large. And so I think the toughest thing to remember about whether school choice works is that all of those studies aside, every family gets to determine how school choice works in every parent. And that’s the great thing about choice because if it’s not working, they can move.
That is the power of choice, is the power to vote with your feet.
Katherine Schulze: Definitely. So knowing that EdChoice has been around for about 30 years, what are some of the biggest skepticisms that you’ve encountered as we’ve pushed this movement? See, we have all this data that we’re able to prove, but what are the initial questions we get when we enter a state?
Robert Enlow: So this is a great question. Part of the digression. About two years ago, we were in Indiana, and we were trying to increase the scholarship program to universal.
And it was late at night, they were having a Senate hearing, and I was the last one out of like 100 to testify. And I got up and I changed my entire testimony because I basically said, I cannot believe that 30 years into this effort, I’m hearing the exact same criticism from the same people about the exact same issues. And none of them have been proven to be true.
So it’s shocking to me, they say, oh, it’s going to drain money from our cash-strapped public schools, except public schools have gotten more money than ever before. Oh, it’s going to hurt the quality of education in our public schools, except public schools get better in choice program. Oh, it’s going to erode the fabric of our democracy, except children who learn more, vote better, and vote more.
And families who are in choice programs, it’s really interesting, the parent data on this. The longer a parent is in a choice program, the more they engage with their teacher, the more they engage with their child’s school, and the more they become voters. So it’s interesting that criticisms have remained the same, and all that comes down to the sky is falling unless you only have public schooling.
But let’s be very clear what we mean by that. We at EdChoice believe in public education. We think that’s different from government-run schools.
So we believe that the public has a right and should, as a society, fund the education of the public. We don’t necessarily think that has to be run through a government-run monopoly. And so I think what we’re really fighting in every single state, whenever we come in, is you’re going to hurt our public schools, you’re going to take money away.
And then, ironically, some of our private schools say, don’t regulate us, you’re going to regulate us. So those are the sort of, you get it from both ends. None of that has been proven to be true all the time.
Katherine Schulze: Correct. We’ve never seen a government entity then encroach upon what private school curriculum gets changed. We’re specifically looking at our religious schools.
That’s always a big fear we hear, is especially from small town, little denominations, they’re afraid that we’re going to somehow, if they accept some sort of ESA or voucher dollar, that they will have to change their fundamental curriculum. And that’s not true.
Robert Enlow: That is not true. Now, look, these programs do come with reporting functions, right? So there is sometimes more paperwork, which is harder for some schools, and we get that.
But it’s the same type of paperwork you’d have for Title 1 dollars, Title 2 dollars, that private schools get access to, right? So you have extra paperwork, and that’s been the only thing we’ve seen is sort of a little additional paperwork. There’s this great fear among certain private schools in certain communities that with government shackles come government shackles.
I find that disappointing because we know the evidence over time is that private schools have remained largely free in school choice programs. Moreover, we know the shackles that are caused in our current system, and so we need to be free. If we want to have an entirely free system of education, the only way to do that is to go from here to there, and the only way to do that is through school choice.
Katherine Schulze: Definitely. Let’s talk a little bit about paperwork. You brought this up.
So one of the most common debates we see when these programs are being set up in a new state is, don’t worry, there’s guardrails. We have put in rules so that parents can’t spend money oddly, so there can’t be a litany of fraud. And then what we see two, three years down the road by program administrators is, please make it less regulated.
Please allow there to be less paperwork. Seeing the iteration of school choice go from, you know, small grants to vouchers, now to ESAs, do you predict more freedom in programs?
Robert Enlow: The challenge, so this is a great question, and one I don’t know if there’s an answer to. I will tell you, in the charter school movement, you’ve seen the tendency towards more regulation, and you see the charter schools, many of the leaders saying, please free us. Please free us now because we’re overregulated.
And so I do worry about that. I think the difference between the private school movement and the charter school movement and the public schools is that it really does flow through the parents’ hands. So when dollars flow through an actual parent’s hands or their pocketbooks or their cards or some way that they’re making a direct choice, that changes the nature of the relationship in a way that it doesn’t when you buy a house.
Right? And so I think that power to have the direct consumer involved in purchasing decisions in private schools really does have an impact on the level of regulations that exist. And so, but we hear this all the time.
Well, we’re policy makers. We’ve got to have guardrails. We’ve got to have, it’s shocking.
You know, like some of these things are really funny to me because, oh, well we can’t have parents buying Legos, for example, in an ESA program. Except, as I recall and I understand, I need to verify this, but I’ve heard that Lego company has a whole division for education that charges like seven thousand dollars for a classroom set. Right?
So it’s okay if we spend these things in a traditional school, but not a family spend it on their own. And I think the real challenge here is how much do we trust parents? All this comes down to is legislators ultimately have to trust parents.
And we know over time that parents are trustworthy.
Katherine Schulze: Along with trust, I think there needs to be encouragement of innovation. So I often see lawmakers afraid of headlines of saying, we had 30,000 families buy Legos this year. And I would argue you should approach that with, how great is it that families have identified a new way to approach learning to encourage their child to be engaged in the classroom they’re going to?
And we just need to work on rephrasing that and being more optimistic into the innovative space.
Robert Enlow: Couldn’t agree more. We also need to be more direct about the failures of all the spaces. So look, when we say, oh, it’s terrible that these guardrails, these parents are spending this money, but yet we’re okay with 18 percent of third African-American third graders on grade level.
That’s unacceptable to me. I think we need to start saying what we really care about. And it isn’t about whether a parent buys a Lego, it’s whether our entire system is failing all of us.
Katherine Schulze: So let’s talk about evidence a little bit. How do we know school choice works? And I would say I’d point to demand.
In every program that we see open, we see a floodgate of families applying for whether it be a voucher or an ESA. I look at Tennessee. We just, that state took a bold step forward with adding 20,000 ESAs to their state.
They had 38,000 students apply for that program. So I would argue that is blanket evidence for demand, at least. What about outcomes?
What evidence do we have to prove that students’ test scores are better, that students are more actively participating in their communities?
Robert Enlow: So we have a ton of studies from all across the country and all across the programs that show students are doing better, that public schools are doing better, that they’re attaining more, they’re achieving more. This is super clear in our one, two, threes of school choice at EdChoice. There’s a lot of conversation, though, that some of the programs aren’t showing as many benefits on the test scores as the older programs, and the bigger programs aren’t showing as much.
That is actually not true in a place like Ohio, where they just released a study from David Figlio showing that schools are doing better. Or in Indiana, we’re going to see here out of Notre Dame, the first two reports showed there was a dip, but we’re hearing the last few reports are showing that there’s an increase. And so what happens over time is kids get in these programs, they get acclimatized to them, they get into the system, the culture of the school, and they do better over time.
So I think that’s really important. But we also, we have to redefine what we mean by success. One of the challenges of our movement is we’re putting impossible standards of success on an ESA or bachelor program, while we have the lax standards in the world of success on every other school in many ways.
So if a test score is success, I think our non-public schools are doing a pretty good job. But not every single parent and every single child learns the same way. It’s really important to think about this.
My child didn’t do well on the test, one of them. The other one did great. And so you have to figure out what’s best for your child, and there’s all sorts of different ways to measure that.
Katherine Schulze: And then do you have any real-life examples that stand out to you? Are there any stories that you think about when you’re talking about new programs, when you go state to state? Are there any impactful stories that really resonate with you that you’ve carried in your career?
Robert Enlow: That’s a great question. That’s one I don’t get every time. There’s two that come to mind.
There was a parent in Indiana when we started the program. And the program in Indiana at the beginning was a low-income scholarship program. And that parent, the voucher was only worth 90% of what the state would have given the child to go to private school.
So that meant in many cases there was a cost to the private school on top of the voucher. There was a parent that I knew that literally had to decide which one of their children was going to get the voucher, right? That literally like Solomon, you know, had to decide which part of my child gets to succeed and doesn’t get to succeed.
And I can’t imagine how hard that was for her to have to say, I’m going to trust you in this private school with the voucher, and hopefully I can get you in later, but I can’t afford it because I’m not wealthy enough. Is that heartbreaking when you see that kind of choice, the unfortunate choice that is put on families? On the positive side though, I’ve seen so many stories like in Arizona where, you know, Jordan Visser, that was Kathy Visser’s son, where she’s like, I became my child’s teacher.
You know, the public school didn’t work. The private school didn’t work. The ESA was the only thing that worked, you know.
And my child used horse equine therapy to start being able to walk and talk and be more engaged in life. And you see these stories of individual families from across the spectrum where all the families are being able to show that their child is getting something different and something better. And that something different is sometimes a better school, sometimes it’s a safer school, sometimes it’s a school where they’re not bullied, or sometimes it’s a school that has better services for special needs.
It’s a whole host of different reasons, and I think the like the Vissers. And again, we have tons of them on EdChoice’s website you should go look at. There’s all these family stories, but two of the ones that strike me is the one family member who had to make a choice of which child got in and which child didn’t, and then the positives coming from what could happen if you allow a parent to customize and be in charge.
I think the famous line from Kathy Visser is that I became my child’s teacher, right? And that’s so powerful.
Katherine Schulze: That is, that is. Well, thank you for tackling all this, Robert. We’ll be back next time where we take up another tough question to discuss, but I appreciate your time.
Robert Enlow: Thanks for having me.
