Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a new concept began to grow in prominence in American education. We might know the umbrella term for that concept as school choice, but school choice can come in a wide variety of forms and the differences in those forms can be confusing to those who don’t work in education.
To simply define school choice, we can just say it is the existence of programs, organizations, or institutions that offer an alternative to traditional schools. As American schools are most clearly governed at the state level, each state has addressed school choice by now but the approach to that has varied significantly.
In some ways, school choice has been around for a long time. Students have always had the choice to attend private or parochial schools instead of traditional public schools and more recently, home schooling has been an option. Those still are options, but now students might choose to attend a charter school which is a school that receives public funding but is operated outside of traditional government control. Students who do attend a traditional school but one that has been regarded as producing poor results might now have the option to attend a different and presumably better school even if they do not live in that school’s attendance zone. Online schools have seen a meteoric rise in popularity as well, as those students usually have the ability to work and learn at their own pace and in their own time.
The problem with some of these options is that they might cost money. How or why would a student pay tuition at a school if the public school was available for free. After all, as a taxpayer, it could be frustrating to pay taxes that funds the schools if you choose to not send your children there. In response to those sentiments, financial programs that surround school choice have been created by a number of states. Again, the extent of these can vary greatly from one state to the next. In some states, families and corporations are granted tax breaks if they contribute to organizations that provide scholarships to K-12 students that attend alternative schools. In other places, K-12 tuition might simply be a tax credit reported on a family’s state income tax.
In other places still, students might be able to participate in a school voucher program. In this case, a student can apply for a voucher from a state that they may use to pay their tuition at a private or online school. About 18 states have voucher programs and there is an array of criteria to qualify for them. In Florida, where I live, one voucher program requires a student to have a disability that is documented with either an IEP or 504 plan. Another, requires a student’s family to fall under an income threshold.
The important thing for any family to know is that options exist for their child’s education. Families should explore these options as they decide which educational route is best for their child.
