School choice
Encyclopedia
School choice is a term used to describe a wide array of programs aimed at giving families the opportunity to choose the school their children will attend. As a matter of form, school choice does not give preference to one form of schooling or another, rather manifests itself whenever a student attends school outside of the one they would have been assigned to by geographic default. The most common options offered by school choice programs are open enrollment laws that allow students to attend other public schools, private school
s, charter school
s, tax credit and deductions for expenses related to schooling, vouchers, and homeschooling. In U.S. political discourse it refers exclusively to programs that would provide public funds to privately run schools, since parents already have the option of sending their child to the private school of their choice (within their economic means).
also refers to educational policies which allow residents of a state to enroll their children in any public school, provided the school has not reached its maximum capacity number for students, regardless of the school district
in which a family resides.
In Iowa, the Educational Opportunities Act was signed into law in 2006, creating a pool of tax credits for eligible donors to student tuition organizations (STOs). At first, these tax caps were $5 million but in 2007, Governor Chet Culver
increased the total amount to $7.5 million. The Iowa Alliance for Choice in Education
(Iowa ACE) oversees the STOs and advocates for school choice in Iowa.
Dayton, Ohio has between 22–26% of all children in Charter Schools. This is the highest percentage in the nation. Other hotbeds for Charter Schools are Kansas City (24%), Washington, D.C. (20-24%) and the State of Arizona. Almost 1 in 4 public schools are Charter Schools in Arizona and about 8% of total enrollment.
Charter Schools can also come in the form of Cyber Charters. Cyber charter schools deliver the majority of their instruction over the internet instead of in a school building. And, like charter schools, they are public schools, but free of many of the rules and regulations that public schools must follow.
. Informal home Education has been around as long as human beings. Formal instruction was also very popular; however, the number of people educated using a planned curriculum at home dropped as public education grew in popularity during the 1900s. In the last 20 years the number of children being formally educated at home has grown tremendously. The laws relevant to Home Education differ throughout the country. In some states the parent simply needs to notify the state that the child will be educated at home. In other states the parents are not free to educate at home unless at least one parent is a certified teacher and yearly progress reports are reviewed by the state. Such laws are not always enforced however. According to the Federal Government, about 1.1 million children were Home Educated in 2003.
Supporters of voucher models school choice argue that choice creates competition between schools for students. Schools that fail to attract students can be closed. Advocates of school choice argue that this competition for students (and the education dollars that come with them) create a catalyst for schools to create innovative programs, become more responsive to parental demands, and to increase student achievement.
Another argument in favor of school choice is based on cost-effectiveness. Studies undertaken by the Cato Institute
and other libertarian
and conservative thinktanks
conclude that privately run education usually costs between one quarter and one half of publicly run education while giving superior outcomes.
Others argue that since children from impoverished families almost exclusively attend public schools, school choice programs would allow these students to opt out of bad schools and acquire a better education, thereby granting the decision-making power to students and their parents, not school administrators. Supporters say this would level the playing field by broadening opportunities for low-income students to attend as good of schools as the middle classes instead of the current two-tiered system which educates the middle and upper classes, but not the lower classes, particularly minorities.
The Organisation Internationale pour le Droit à l'Education et la Liberté d'Enseignement (OIDEL), a international non-profit organization
for the development of freedom of education
, maintains that the right to education
is a fundamental human right which cannot exist without the presence of State benefits and the protection of individual liberties. According to the organization, freedom of education notably implies the freedom for parents to choose a school for their children without discrimination on the basis of finances. To advance freedom of education, OIDEL promotes a greater parity between public and private schooling systems.
Worldwide supporters of school choice have found support for their position in international human rights law, which helps bring a broader understanding of the complex interrelated rights and liberties associated with education. Freedom of expression, religion, freedom of association and security of the person are all correlated to any community based educational endeavor. School choice supporters have found support for their cause in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 26.3 of the Declaration states Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children. The term prior right has been interpreted as securing the right for parents to their choice in education being publicly funded (and not limiting educational funding to only schools supported by the more politically powerful).
Freedom of educational choice as articulated in Article 26.3 can be understood as further supported for all parents in article 2, which assures the right to school choice to all regardless of social origin, property or other status (such as the ability to pay school tuition fees). Educational choice may also be seen as supported in article 3 as an expression of liberty and security of the person and article 18 in regards to faith-based schools that are protected as an expression of religious freedom.
Most importantly, as education and school communities are premised on social interaction and association between students, parents, teachers, and administrators, article 20.2 can apply to protect students and parents from compelled association in any one kind of school community premised on school funding policies restricted to government favored groups, be they commercial, political, union, religious or other groups. Freedom of association as it applies to educational endeavors is perceived as a critical social and legal counterbalance to state enforced elements of compulsory education.
Supporters of publicly funded school choice have used these articles to support their cause and have also used article 7 to point out that undermining support for publicly funded school choice may be a form of human rights abuse under the incitement clause, as article 7 states
"All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination".
Supporters of school choice have also found support for their cause in the Convention against Discrimination in Education in particular article 1, which supports all kinds of education for all types of students.
Opponents of school choice often object to the use of the term itself, viewing it as loaded political vocabulary.
Opponents also argue that school choice in the form of vouchers could result in nothing more than a cash-handout for many middle-class and wealthy families already sending their kids to private schools, with disadvantaged families either unable to secure enrollment or unable to cover costs in addition to the vouchers. Under voucher programs, private schools may be able to reject students who are expensive to educate due to special needs or students who they feel would disrupt the learning environment, and opponents of voucher programs argue that this would leave such students under a system of de facto segregation. School choice opponents also charge that students who are unable, because of their parents' educational level or the lack of reliable transportation, to leave their local schools may be hurt as additional funding is cut from their schools.
When parents flee troubled schools under NCLB's School Choice option, the district loses not only the per-pupil funding, but must provide transportation to the new school. This causes a funding drain that may seriously impact the students left in the school.
Different solutions have been proposed to school choice that do not take away money or require schools to compete against each other. If incentive is what is needed, it already exists: the school board is elected by direct popular vote. Instead of government forcing school choice, citizens and parents need to become more aware of who runs the schools, and for laws to help improve that awareness. Any head of the school board who values their position will likely do everything possible to ensure the school runs better, if citizens are more active in deciding who stays or goes.
government subsidizes most private primary and secondary schools, including those affiliated with religious denominations, under contracts stipulating that education must follow the same curriculum as public schools and that schools cannot discriminate on grounds of religion or force pupils to attend religion classes.
This system of école libre (Free Schooling) is mostly used not for religious reasons, but for practical reasons (private schools may offer more services, such as after-class tutoring) as well as the desire of parents living in disenfranchised areas to send their children away from the local schools, where they perceive that the youth are too prone to delinquency or have too many difficulties keeping up with schooling requirements that the educational content is bound to suffer. The threatened repealing of that status in the 1980s triggered mass street demonstrations in favor of the status.
is the only large province in Canada
with limited school choice funding, Catholic, Secular and one Protestant school receive funding and are open to all students. In 2003, following an international human rights ruling, the provincial Conservative government gradually introduced a tax credit over 5 years, (when it would have been fully implemented it would have been worth up to 50% of tuition to a maximum of $3,500 at any independent school in Ontario) in order to meet the human rights norms and expand funded choice to all interested parents. However, the tax credit was retroactively canceled by the subsequent Liberal government when it had been only been in place for two years to the $1,000 point. Currently there are over 900 independent schools in Ontario. The only school choice program available to non-rich parents who wish to send their children to an independent school is a privately funded program called Children First, a program of The Fraser Institute
.
, there is an extensive voucher system in which the state pays private and municipal schools directly, based on average attendance (90% of the country students utilize such a system). The result has been a steady increase in the number and recruitment of private schools that show consistently better results in standardized test
ing than municipal schools. The reduction of students in municipal schools has gone from 78% of all students in 1981, to 57% in 1990, and to less than 50% in 2005.
Regarding vouchers in Chile, researchers have found that when controls for the student's background (parental income and education) are introduced, the difference in performance between public and private subsectors is not significant. There is also greater variation within each subsector than between the two systems.
In the U.S., the legal and moral precedents for vouchers may have been set by the G.I. bill, which includes a voucher program for university-level education of veterans. The G.I. bill permits veterans to take their educational benefits at religious schools, an extremely divisive issue when applied to primary and secondary schools.
In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris
, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), the Supreme Court of the United States
held that school vouchers could be used to pay for education in sectarian schools without violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment
. As a result, states are basically free to enact voucher programs that provide funding for any school of the parent's choosing.
The Supreme Court has not decided, however, whether states can provide vouchers for secular schools only, excluding sectarian schools. Proponents of funding for parochial schools argue that such an exclusion would violate the free exercise clause. However, in Locke v. Davey
, 540 U.S. 712 (2004), the Court held that states could exclude majors in "devotional theology" from an otherwise generally available college scholarship. The Court has not indicated, however, whether this holding extends to the public school context, and it may well be limited to the context of individuals training to enter the ministry.
The program was challenged in court by a group of Arizona taxpayers on the grounds that the tax credit violated the First Amendment because the tuition grants could go to students who attend private schools including schools with religious affiliations. Typically, taxpayers are not allowed to bring suit against the government regarding how taxes are spent because injury would be purely speculative. The Court ruled 5-4 to let the tax credit program stand In April of 2011, a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll found that a majority of American voters (60%) felt that the tax credits support school choice for parents whereas 26% felt as it the tax credits support religion.
Dayton, Ohio has between 22–26% of all children in Charter Schools. This is the highest percentage in the nation. Other hotbeds for Charter Schools are Kansas City (24%), Washington, D.C. (20-24%) and the State of Arizona. Almost 1 in 4 public schools are Charter Schools in Arizona and about 8% of total enrollment.
Charter Schools can also come in the form of Cyber Charters. Cyber charter schools deliver the majority of their instruction over the internet instead of in a school building. And, like charter schools, they are public schools, but free of many of the rules and regulations that public schools must follow.
Private school
Private schools, also known as independent schools or nonstate schools, are not administered by local, state or national governments; thus, they retain the right to select their students and are funded in whole or in part by charging their students' tuition, rather than relying on mandatory...
s, charter school
Charter school
Charter schools are primary or secondary schools that receive public money but are not subject to some of the rules, regulations, and statutes that apply to other public schools in exchange for some type of accountability for producing certain results, which are set forth in each school's charter...
s, tax credit and deductions for expenses related to schooling, vouchers, and homeschooling. In U.S. political discourse it refers exclusively to programs that would provide public funds to privately run schools, since parents already have the option of sending their child to the private school of their choice (within their economic means).
Open enrollment
Open enrollmentOpen enrollment
Annual enrollment is a period of time, usually but not always occurring once per year, when employees of U.S. companies and organizations may make additions, changes or deletions to their elected fringe benefit options...
also refers to educational policies which allow residents of a state to enroll their children in any public school, provided the school has not reached its maximum capacity number for students, regardless of the school district
School district
School districts are a form of special-purpose district which serves to operate the local public primary and secondary schools.-United States:...
in which a family resides.
Vouchers
When the government pays tuition to a private school on behalf of the parents, this is usually referred to as a voucher. A voucher is given to the family for them to spend at any school of their choice.Tuition tax credits
A tuition tax credit is similar to most other familiar tax credits. Certain states allow individuals and/or businesses to deduct a certain amount of their income taxes to donate to education. Depending on the program, these donations can either go to a public school or to a School Tuition Organization (STO), or both. The donations that go to public schools are often used to help pay for after-school programs, schools trips, or school supplies. The donations that go to School Tuition Organizations are used by the STO to create scholarships that are then given to students. These programs currently exist in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Arizona has probably the most well known and fastest growing tax credit program. In the Arizona School Tuition Organization Tax Credit program individuals can deduct up to $500 and couples filing joint returns can deduct up to $1000. About 20,000 children received scholarships in the 2003-2004 school year. And, since the program has started in 1998, over 77,000 scholarships have been granted.In Iowa, the Educational Opportunities Act was signed into law in 2006, creating a pool of tax credits for eligible donors to student tuition organizations (STOs). At first, these tax caps were $5 million but in 2007, Governor Chet Culver
Chet Culver
Chester John "Chet" Culver was the 41st Governor of Iowa, from 2007 to 2011. He was also elected as the Federal Liaison for the Democratic Governors Association for 2008-2009. He founded the Chet Culver Group, an energy sector consulting firm, in 2011.-Early life and education:Culver was born in...
increased the total amount to $7.5 million. The Iowa Alliance for Choice in Education
Iowa Alliance for Choice in Education
The Iowa Alliance for Choice in Education was formed in 2005 as an umbrella organization for Iowa’s non-public schools. Among its priority issues was ensuring the creation and support of student tuition organizations . Through legislation passed in 2005, money donated to STOs makes donors eligible...
(Iowa ACE) oversees the STOs and advocates for school choice in Iowa.
Charter schools
Charter schools are public schools with more relaxed rules and regulations. These relaxed rules tend to deal with things like Teacher Union contracts and state curriculum. The majority of states (and the District of Columbia) have Charter School laws. Minnesota was the first state to have a charter school law and the first charter school in the United States, City Academy, opened in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992.Dayton, Ohio has between 22–26% of all children in Charter Schools. This is the highest percentage in the nation. Other hotbeds for Charter Schools are Kansas City (24%), Washington, D.C. (20-24%) and the State of Arizona. Almost 1 in 4 public schools are Charter Schools in Arizona and about 8% of total enrollment.
Charter Schools can also come in the form of Cyber Charters. Cyber charter schools deliver the majority of their instruction over the internet instead of in a school building. And, like charter schools, they are public schools, but free of many of the rules and regulations that public schools must follow.
Magnet schools
Magnet schools are public schools that often have a specialized function like science, technology or art. These magnet schools, unlike charter schools, are not open to all children. Much like many private schools, there are some (but not all) magnet schools that require a test to get in.Home schooling
When a child is educated at home, or is having his or her education instructed or directed primarily by a parent, then this is usually referred to as Home Education or Home SchoolingHomeschooling
Homeschooling or homeschool is the education of children at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, rather than in other formal settings of public or private school...
. Informal home Education has been around as long as human beings. Formal instruction was also very popular; however, the number of people educated using a planned curriculum at home dropped as public education grew in popularity during the 1900s. In the last 20 years the number of children being formally educated at home has grown tremendously. The laws relevant to Home Education differ throughout the country. In some states the parent simply needs to notify the state that the child will be educated at home. In other states the parents are not free to educate at home unless at least one parent is a certified teacher and yearly progress reports are reviewed by the state. Such laws are not always enforced however. According to the Federal Government, about 1.1 million children were Home Educated in 2003.
Support
The goal of school choice programs is to give parents more control over their child's education, and to allow parents to pursue the most appropriate learning environments for children. For example school choice may enable parents to choose a school that provides religious instruction for their children; stronger discipline; better foundational skills including reading, writing, mathematics, and science; everyday skills from handling money to farming, or other desirable foci.Supporters of voucher models school choice argue that choice creates competition between schools for students. Schools that fail to attract students can be closed. Advocates of school choice argue that this competition for students (and the education dollars that come with them) create a catalyst for schools to create innovative programs, become more responsive to parental demands, and to increase student achievement.
Another argument in favor of school choice is based on cost-effectiveness. Studies undertaken by the Cato Institute
Cato Institute
The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane, who remains president and CEO, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc., the largest privately held...
and other libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
and conservative thinktanks
ThinkTanks
ThinkTanks, also called TT, is an online multiplayer third-person shooter available for Microsoft Windows, Mac, and Linux. It was developed by BraveTree Productions and marketed by GarageGames and Shockwave.com.-Gameplay:...
conclude that privately run education usually costs between one quarter and one half of publicly run education while giving superior outcomes.
Others argue that since children from impoverished families almost exclusively attend public schools, school choice programs would allow these students to opt out of bad schools and acquire a better education, thereby granting the decision-making power to students and their parents, not school administrators. Supporters say this would level the playing field by broadening opportunities for low-income students to attend as good of schools as the middle classes instead of the current two-tiered system which educates the middle and upper classes, but not the lower classes, particularly minorities.
The Organisation Internationale pour le Droit à l'Education et la Liberté d'Enseignement (OIDEL), a international non-profit organization
Non-profit organization
Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...
for the development of freedom of education
Freedom of education
Freedom of education is a constitutional concept that has been included in the European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol 1, Article 2 and several national constitutions, e.g. the , the Belgian constitution and the Dutch constitution...
, maintains that the right to education
Right to education
The right to education is a universal entitlement to education, a right that is recognized as a human right. According to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights the right to education includes the right to free, compulsory primary education for all, an obligation to...
is a fundamental human right which cannot exist without the presence of State benefits and the protection of individual liberties. According to the organization, freedom of education notably implies the freedom for parents to choose a school for their children without discrimination on the basis of finances. To advance freedom of education, OIDEL promotes a greater parity between public and private schooling systems.
Worldwide supporters of school choice have found support for their position in international human rights law, which helps bring a broader understanding of the complex interrelated rights and liberties associated with education. Freedom of expression, religion, freedom of association and security of the person are all correlated to any community based educational endeavor. School choice supporters have found support for their cause in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 26.3 of the Declaration states Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children. The term prior right has been interpreted as securing the right for parents to their choice in education being publicly funded (and not limiting educational funding to only schools supported by the more politically powerful).
Freedom of educational choice as articulated in Article 26.3 can be understood as further supported for all parents in article 2, which assures the right to school choice to all regardless of social origin, property or other status (such as the ability to pay school tuition fees). Educational choice may also be seen as supported in article 3 as an expression of liberty and security of the person and article 18 in regards to faith-based schools that are protected as an expression of religious freedom.
Most importantly, as education and school communities are premised on social interaction and association between students, parents, teachers, and administrators, article 20.2 can apply to protect students and parents from compelled association in any one kind of school community premised on school funding policies restricted to government favored groups, be they commercial, political, union, religious or other groups. Freedom of association as it applies to educational endeavors is perceived as a critical social and legal counterbalance to state enforced elements of compulsory education.
Supporters of publicly funded school choice have used these articles to support their cause and have also used article 7 to point out that undermining support for publicly funded school choice may be a form of human rights abuse under the incitement clause, as article 7 states
"All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination".
Supporters of school choice have also found support for their cause in the Convention against Discrimination in Education in particular article 1, which supports all kinds of education for all types of students.
Criticisms
Many opponents of school choice such as Martin Carnoy argue that public schools perform similarly to private schools when teaching similar groups of students, and that the conception of public schools as "failing" in comparison to private schools is more due to the demographic differences between public and private schools than to actual differences in the quality of the education the schools offer. "School choice" as it entails a switch from public to private schooling would therefore do little to solve the problems facing the educational system, since a private school would perform no better than a public school when faced with exactly the same student body.Opponents of school choice often object to the use of the term itself, viewing it as loaded political vocabulary.
Opponents also argue that school choice in the form of vouchers could result in nothing more than a cash-handout for many middle-class and wealthy families already sending their kids to private schools, with disadvantaged families either unable to secure enrollment or unable to cover costs in addition to the vouchers. Under voucher programs, private schools may be able to reject students who are expensive to educate due to special needs or students who they feel would disrupt the learning environment, and opponents of voucher programs argue that this would leave such students under a system of de facto segregation. School choice opponents also charge that students who are unable, because of their parents' educational level or the lack of reliable transportation, to leave their local schools may be hurt as additional funding is cut from their schools.
When parents flee troubled schools under NCLB's School Choice option, the district loses not only the per-pupil funding, but must provide transportation to the new school. This causes a funding drain that may seriously impact the students left in the school.
Different solutions have been proposed to school choice that do not take away money or require schools to compete against each other. If incentive is what is needed, it already exists: the school board is elected by direct popular vote. Instead of government forcing school choice, citizens and parents need to become more aware of who runs the schools, and for laws to help improve that awareness. Any head of the school board who values their position will likely do everything possible to ensure the school runs better, if citizens are more active in deciding who stays or goes.
France
The FrenchFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
government subsidizes most private primary and secondary schools, including those affiliated with religious denominations, under contracts stipulating that education must follow the same curriculum as public schools and that schools cannot discriminate on grounds of religion or force pupils to attend religion classes.
This system of école libre (Free Schooling) is mostly used not for religious reasons, but for practical reasons (private schools may offer more services, such as after-class tutoring) as well as the desire of parents living in disenfranchised areas to send their children away from the local schools, where they perceive that the youth are too prone to delinquency or have too many difficulties keeping up with schooling requirements that the educational content is bound to suffer. The threatened repealing of that status in the 1980s triggered mass street demonstrations in favor of the status.
Sweden
Sweden enacted school choice in 1992. Its school choice system is one of the freest in the world, allowing students to use state funding for the public or private school of their choice, including religious and for-profit schools. In the fifteen years after enactment, private school enrollment increased from 1% to 10% of the student population.Canada
OntarioOntario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
is the only large province in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
with limited school choice funding, Catholic, Secular and one Protestant school receive funding and are open to all students. In 2003, following an international human rights ruling, the provincial Conservative government gradually introduced a tax credit over 5 years, (when it would have been fully implemented it would have been worth up to 50% of tuition to a maximum of $3,500 at any independent school in Ontario) in order to meet the human rights norms and expand funded choice to all interested parents. However, the tax credit was retroactively canceled by the subsequent Liberal government when it had been only been in place for two years to the $1,000 point. Currently there are over 900 independent schools in Ontario. The only school choice program available to non-rich parents who wish to send their children to an independent school is a privately funded program called Children First, a program of The Fraser Institute
Fraser Institute
The Fraser Institute is a Canadian think tank. It has been described as politically conservative and right-wing libertarian and espouses free market principles...
.
Chile
In ChileChile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
, there is an extensive voucher system in which the state pays private and municipal schools directly, based on average attendance (90% of the country students utilize such a system). The result has been a steady increase in the number and recruitment of private schools that show consistently better results in standardized test
Standardized test
A standardized test is a test that is administered and scored in a consistent, or "standard", manner. Standardized tests are designed in such a way that the questions, conditions for administering, scoring procedures, and interpretations are consistent and are administered and scored in a...
ing than municipal schools. The reduction of students in municipal schools has gone from 78% of all students in 1981, to 57% in 1990, and to less than 50% in 2005.
Regarding vouchers in Chile, researchers have found that when controls for the student's background (parental income and education) are introduced, the difference in performance between public and private subsectors is not significant. There is also greater variation within each subsector than between the two systems.
Vouchers
Vouchers currently exist in Wisconsin, Cleveland, Florida, and, most recently, the District of Columbia and Georgia. The largest and oldest Voucher program is in Milwaukee. Started in 1990, and expanded in 1995, it currently allows no more than 15% of the district's public school enrollment to use vouchers. As of 2005 over 14,000 students use vouchers and they are nearing the 15% cap. School vouchers are legally controversial in some states; in 2005 the Florida Supreme Court found that school vouchers were unconstitutional under the Florida Constitution. (Cite?)In the U.S., the legal and moral precedents for vouchers may have been set by the G.I. bill, which includes a voucher program for university-level education of veterans. The G.I. bill permits veterans to take their educational benefits at religious schools, an extremely divisive issue when applied to primary and secondary schools.
In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, , was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court which tested the allowance of school vouchers in relation to the establishment clause of the First Amendment....
, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), the Supreme Court of the United States
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
held that school vouchers could be used to pay for education in sectarian schools without violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
. As a result, states are basically free to enact voucher programs that provide funding for any school of the parent's choosing.
The Supreme Court has not decided, however, whether states can provide vouchers for secular schools only, excluding sectarian schools. Proponents of funding for parochial schools argue that such an exclusion would violate the free exercise clause. However, in Locke v. Davey
Locke v. Davey
Locke v. Davey, , is a United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of a Washington publicly funded scholarship program which excluded students pursuing a "degree in theology." This case examined the "room....
, 540 U.S. 712 (2004), the Court held that states could exclude majors in "devotional theology" from an otherwise generally available college scholarship. The Court has not indicated, however, whether this holding extends to the public school context, and it may well be limited to the context of individuals training to enter the ministry.
Tuition tax credits
Tuition tax credit programs currently exist in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and recently Georgia. Representative David Casas was responsible for passing the Georgia version of the school choice legislation. Arizona has probably the most well known and fastest growing tax credit program. In the Arizona School Tuition Organization Tax Credit program individuals can deduct up to $500 and couples filing joint returns can deduct up to $1000. About 20,000 children received scholarships in the 2003-2004 school year. And, since the program has started in 1998, over 77,000 scholarships have been granted.The program was challenged in court by a group of Arizona taxpayers on the grounds that the tax credit violated the First Amendment because the tuition grants could go to students who attend private schools including schools with religious affiliations. Typically, taxpayers are not allowed to bring suit against the government regarding how taxes are spent because injury would be purely speculative. The Court ruled 5-4 to let the tax credit program stand In April of 2011, a Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll found that a majority of American voters (60%) felt that the tax credits support school choice for parents whereas 26% felt as it the tax credits support religion.
Charter schools
The majority of states (and the District of Columbia) have Charter School laws. Minnesota was the first state to have a charter school law and the first charter school in the United States, City Academy, opened in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992.Dayton, Ohio has between 22–26% of all children in Charter Schools. This is the highest percentage in the nation. Other hotbeds for Charter Schools are Kansas City (24%), Washington, D.C. (20-24%) and the State of Arizona. Almost 1 in 4 public schools are Charter Schools in Arizona and about 8% of total enrollment.
Charter Schools can also come in the form of Cyber Charters. Cyber charter schools deliver the majority of their instruction over the internet instead of in a school building. And, like charter schools, they are public schools, but free of many of the rules and regulations that public schools must follow.