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In this issue:
 • Independent School Spring Symposium a Success!!!!
 • Thoughts on School Choice — National Charter Schools Week, May 1–7

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ENM’s Independent School Spring Symposium
The 2005 Independent School Symposium attracted 36 independent school and foundation administrators representing 19 schools and four charitable foundations located throughout New Mexico. Participants toured both New Mexico Academy and McCurdy School in Espanola. Roundtable discussions were held at both locations. The symposium provides school administrators with an opportunity to network, build partnerships, and learn from each other.

One example of such a partnership that emerged from last year’s Independent School Symposium was a recent collaboration between Rehoboth Christian School, located near Gallup, and New Mexico Academy. Academy high school students and teachers recently spent one week at Rehoboth Christian School performing service work on the school’s campus and learning about Native American culture, history, and traditions. Academy students teamed with students from Rehoboth Christian School in learning how to use the school’s ropes course. Later, Academy students and teachers attended a traditional Navajo Taco Dinner at a local Gallup church. New Mexico Academy administrators worked in collaboration with Rehoboth Christian School officials after meeting each other at Educate New Mexico’s 2004 Independent School Symposium, held at Rehoboth Christian School last April.

Educate New Mexico awarded the “Educate New Mexico Independent School Leadership Award” to New Mexico Academy for Sciences and Mathematics. In presenting the award, Troy Williamson, Executive Director of Educate New Mexico, praised the Academy for “taking the lead in the effort to provide children with the highest quality education possible. You are truly a light on a hill that I hope others will attempt to emulate.”

New Mexico Academy is an independent, college preparatory school that serves students in grades 6–12. Many Academy students attend the Academy on scholarships made possible by charitable donations from generous contributors. Its graduates have been sought after and accepted for enrollment by Barnard College, Columbia University; Carnegie Mellon; Colby College; Northwestern University; Carleton College; Wellesley College; and Bowdoin College, among others. To date, these and other institutions of higher learning have offered New Mexico Academy graduates more than one million dollars in scholarship awards.

Educate New Mexico also recognized the work of the Apple tree Educational Center in Truth or Consequences with the “Educate New Mexico Excellence in Education Award” for serving a large number of children with limited resources. Apple Tree Educational Center is a non-profit organization providing care and education to the children of Sierra County New Mexico. Go back to the top of the page

Thoughts on School Choice
May 1–7, 2005 is National Charter Schools week.

Charter schools & choice: What is all the fuss about?

     Debra England (archive)              May 1, 2005 | Print | Send

At a recent conference on education held at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a panel of MBA alumni working in the field of education were asked by their moderator what each one thought was the single most important innovation or reform necessary to improve the K–12 public education system. Answers varied widely from “better governance” to “more highly qualified teachers” to “improved reimbursements for charter schools.” The panel included the principal of a charter school, the founder of a web-based teacher professional development site, a boutique Wall Streeter who invests in for-profit educational companies, and a senior-level administrator brought in by the State of California to turn around a failed school district. Each offered a sensible and eminently reasonable tactical suggestion based on his or her personal professional experience in the field.

What the panel respondents did not provide, however, was a strategic overview of the field. It would have been illuminating had they stepped back from the tactical level to respond to that question. The overarching strategic driver of substantive educational gains visible in the public school system today is the mechanism of free market-based competitive pressure exerted through parental choice options. The introduction of competition is the single most important innovation necessary to improve the K–12 public education system.

In The Road to Serfdom, a brilliant treatise on the dangers of collectivist ideologies, Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek demonstrated the contradictions inherent between command economies and personal liberty. Hayek deftly illustrated how attempts to control entire economies—or even significant portions of an economy—result inevitably in the growth of totalitarianism and a commensurate loss of personal freedom. Where better to apply Hayek’s analysis today than to the $400 billion anachronistic government monopoly that is our public K–12 educational system?

Despite wave upon wave of touted educational “reforms” over the past several decades, this failed government monopoly has succeeded in producing a sclerotic bureaucracy that has flatlined American K–12 academic achievement for the past 35 years. Interestingly, this same timeframe has seen the birth and rapid growth of modern teachers’ unions and a nationwide explosion in average annual per pupil spending, which has more than doubled since 1970—from $4,700 to roughly $10,100 today in constant dollars. Basic economics tells us that when expenditures increase by more than 100% while outputs remain unchanged, we are witnessing a huge productivity decline in the public education sector. Money is clearly not the problem.

Enter the Charter School.

Charter schools are free public schools whose existence is largely dependant upon their ability to achieve good enough student academic growth—as measured by their transparent performance on all required state testing—to attract parents and students and to justify renewed chartering by their authorizing agents. In exchange for operating in this high-accountability environment with lower government reimbursements, charter schools are freed from much of the onerous bureaucratic and union regulations burdening regular public schools. This permits them to allocate resources more flexibly and efficiently to achieve greater academic gains for their students. Most charter schools target the lowest-end socio-economic demographics where the most at-risk children are likely to be trapped in wretched urban public schools which augur poorly for their futures. Not surprisingly, parental demand outstrips supply and most charter schools must utilize a lottery system to allocate available student positions.

Given the sturm und drang which has accompanied the arrival of charter schools on the public education scene, one might be surprised to discover that charter schools enroll only 1.5% of the public school students nationwide. Three times as many U.S. children are home schooled as are educated in charter schools. What, then, accounts for the vehement resistance charter schools have encountered including state caps on the numbers permitted, localized fights against granting charters, and union attacks on charter school achievements?

Here again, economics provides the answer. The educational bureaucracies and their political allies have largely managed to maintain what Milton Friedman rightly calls “a tyranny of the status quo” in their fight against school vouchers for impoverished inner-city children trapped in the most dysfunctional parts of this failed government monopoly. But they have been less successful in their fight against charter schools. Thus, despite the near-epic battle waged against the introduction of any form of parental choice, charter schools have become the camel’s nose inside the educational bureaucracies’ tent.

Not only do charter schools support parental choice by providing a variety of educational alternatives to regular public schools, they also create competition by the nature of their existence. It is a rare monopoly that voluntarily gives up the advantages of monopolistic control for the rigours of competitive free markets. Charter schools, vouchers, tax-credits for corporate-funded scholarships, home schooling—these all introduce market-based competition into the educational arena by providing choice to parents whose socio-economic status had previously ensured their children were trapped in undesirable or failing public schools.

The threat these competitive innovations represent to “business as usual” among the various educational unions and bureaucracies is genuine and they have responded quite rationally with fear and defensive attacks which serve to underscore the fact that their first priority is not to optimize the educational achievements of children under their control but to serve the needs of their own members’ survival. A valuable rule of thumb when confronting histrionic accusations or suspect “research findings” leveled at the vehicles of school choice: ask yourself who is the source of the claim and what is their stakeholder value in supporting the status quo? In short, do they have a dog in that fight?

One of the most frequent charges brought against charter schools is that support for any competitive educational option undermines the regular public education system by snatching desperately needed dollars away from the system. Public K–12 schools receive government reimbursements based largely on average daily attendance. If parents have the freedom to remove their children from undesirable or failing schools, those attendance dollars are lost to the school. The educational bureaucrats and unions would have you believe that parents freed to seek the best educational opportunities for their children will thus bankrupt or severely wound the public school system.

In fact, the introduction of parental choice through the availability of competitive options also introduces an incentive for public schools to respond to parental demands and to be accountable for producing educational achievement. When regular public schools must compete with charter schools, vouchers, or other forms of competition, these formerly unresponsive bureaucratic monopolies are forced to find ways to improve the educational outcomes of the children they serve in order to compete successfully for students. The greater the competitive pressures, the greater their incentives to find ways to improve educational outcomes for students. This is how free markets work in theory, and this is how extensive research and empirical evidence show us that free markets are working in the K–12 educational arena. Competition is the closest thing we are likely to find to a “silver bullet” for K–12 public education.

Debra England is the Program Officer for Education at the Koret Foundation. She welcomes reader comments at debraengland at gmail.com Go back to the top of the page

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