Why School Choice is Good for a Community and the State

Expanding School Choice would benefit all Vermonters

Mar 24, 2015

There are plenty of reasons for parents and kids to love school choice in the 90 plus Vermont towns that already have it, and there are plenty of solid educational and social arguments for expanding the program to all Vermont towns. But why should folks without kids care? Property values.

A recent study by Susanne E. Cannon (DePaul University), Bartley R. Danielsen (North Carolina State University) and David M. Harrison (Texas Tech University) shows that living in one of Vermont’s tuitioning towns substantially increases the value of your home. Given that a house is the largest investment most people will make in their lifetimes and the fact that in 2014 Vermont was the only state in the union to see home values decline, expanding school choice is an attractive policy.

The logic is intuitive. Many people choose where to live based on the educational opportunity their zip code offers. Towns with a good school attract more demand, which increases prices. Therefore, it makes sense that towns with access to more good schools — in fact, pretty much any good school along with the ability pick the one that’s right for you — is considerably more valuable.

How much more valuable? As much as $24,181 (or a 16.1 percent increase) more valuable for an 2,000 square foot home with three bedrooms and two baths. As the authors break down their findings:

… the presence of school choice alternatives within a 20 minute commute increases property values by approximately $10,879 (or 6.9 percent), while the more restrictive presence of higher achieving schools within this same drive time catchment area is associated with a substantively higher $24,181 (16.1 percent) increase in housing prices. Similar results are found with respect to our 30 minute commuting distances. ... Alternative schooling options within 30 minutes enhance property values by $7,618 (or 6.3 percent), while the presence of higher achieving schools within this same region increase values by $12,805 (or 8.5 percent).

Another way of looking at that is to say that when we assign students to poorly performing schools with no way to escape, we are effectively depressing real estate values in those school districts on average by more than $24,000.

One other valuable piece of information the study documents is the availability of choices. An argument critics of school choice in rural Vermont use is that there are too few schools to make choice meaningful. You may have “choice” but your still stuck with one school within driving distance. This is overwhelmingly not the case.

The typical Vermont residence, which turned over during our sample period, was also located within a 20 minute (one-way) commute of two to three schools, and a 30 minute (one-way) commute of more than five schools.

To put this in more concrete terms, the head of an independent school in southern Vermont where tuitioning is wide-spread, recently testified before the House Education Committee. She described how parents in southern Vermont can choose between the Mountain School at Winhall, the Long Trail School, Maple Street School, Manchester Elementary & Middle School and Dorset Middle School.

Having so many choices empowers parents and kids. Students with choice tend to be more invested in their education because they have made an active choice about where they want to be. Parents also play a more active role in their child’s education. As an example, this headmaster testified that at her school the percentage of parents who participate in teacher conferences is 100 percent. Choice increases the value of their education.

It also increases the value of their houses. The authors of the study note, “with each additional viable school choice and voucher alternative increasing property values by nearly $4,380 (or slightly over 3 percent).” This argues for a policy not of consolidating schools and making them more similar (the current goals being pursued by Montpelier), but rather expanding opportunities and making them more diverse.

We all want Vermont’s education policies and the opportunities we offer students and families to be unique and positive enough to attract and keep families here. This is especially important for a system that has lost over 20,000 students since the passage of Act 60 in 1997. School choice has proven its value in very real terms. It’s time we shared this value with all Vermonters.

Rob Roper is president of the Ethan Allen Institute. He lives in Stowe. All letters will be received in care of the editor.

The above piece appeared in full in the Eagle Times.

Homeschooling More Than Doubles Among Black Families

Excellent, ecstatic to see families leave a system that is failing to serve them. 

The following article appeared on EAGnews.org.

"WASHINGTON, D.C. – A growing number of black families are choosing to homeschool their children, the U.S. Department of Education reports.

Although increasing numbers of black families are choosing to homeschool, RiShawn Biddle, who runs Dropout Nation, an education news and policy magazine, says it is difficult to know exactly how drastic the increase has been.

“There are more black families that are taking up homeschooling,” Biddle said. “The question is how many. Currently the data we have on homeschooling comes from the U.S. Department of Education, which reports that 139,000 black children aged five through 17 were homeschooled in [the] 2011–12 [school year]. This is a 127 percent increase over levels in 2007.”

Biddle says some traditional public school administrators have been trying to decrease the number of students who drop out by counseling students to attend other schools or be homeschooled."

To read the rest of the story go to EAGnews.org.

“I’ve said that, Tom, that if I were the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and I wanted to sabotage any opportunity for black academic excellence, I could not think of a better means for doing so than the public education establishment in most of our cities,” Walter Williams.

Cathy

Free to Choose

Education: Why Aren’t We Free to Choose?
Education isn’t a left vs. right issue. It’s a choice vs. no-choice issue.
Yes, Milton Friedman was for school choice. But so was Elizabeth Warren; her 2003 book “The Two-Income Trap” advocated school vouchers. She pointed out that to get into a good public school required middle-class parents to get into debt to buy suburban houses, helping drive the housing bubble. Paying for all students to go to private schools is a lot cheaper than having everyone live in $800,000 suburban McMansions.
Does paying for good schools sound too expensive? Last school year, New Hampshire taxpayers spent over $16,000 per child in public schools. It’s right there on the NH Department of Education website: “The per pupil amount of all expenditures - operating, tuition, transportation, equipment, construction, interest and non-K-12 expenditures is $16,269.59.” This year, of course, the expenditure will be higher.
The US pays more for schools than any nation except Switzerland. But we aren’t paying for good schools. NPR’s Anya Kamenetz has just published “The Test”, about how US schools are failing to convey basic skills. The US math and reading scores are lower than those of most developed nations. Even worse, by forcing every child into the same rote test treadmill, we are destroying their ability to function in the high-tech, creativity-driven 21st century.
There are bright spots. Oklahoma allows parents to choose from fifteen different online schools. They can choose an all-online program, or they can enhance their local school curriculum with one or more of 800 different online courses. The online option adds a lot of options for students, lets them prepare for college work (and get AP credit), and costs the state…half what they pay for brick and mortar schools. Several other states have large-scale online programs.
No, online schools aren’t the complete solution for every family. But if a child is being bullied, or is a bad fit with the local school for some other reason, online education can get them back on track. Almost any student could benefit from some online courses… it isn’t possible for any school to offer every possible specialty.
But it’s not about technology. It’s about choice. If education money was going to parents, then every child in New Hampshire could have an individualized education. With over $16,000 per year, they could go to Costa Rica to learn Spanish, or Shanghai to learn Mandarin. They could learn dance, or martial arts, or painting. They could start their own web businesses, or go to private school… and have money left over for college. Or they could stay home, apply themselves on the Internet, and learn anything from Ruby on Rails programming to literature.
Public school is the most class-stratifying force in US society. Children that are forced into bad or mediocre public schools for 13 years of their lives may never catch up. They may never regain their self-motivation and drive. Yet there is no reason why all children couldn’t use the money we spend on them to go to good schools.
We can choose choice for everyone. Let every parent choose the education for their child. Some children do well with Montessori methods, some with more structured learning. Some may do best with self-directed immersion learning. As Kate Baker of New Hampshire’s NEO scholarship organization (networkforeducation.org) points out, students learn well under many systems… if they want to.
Or, we can continue to restrict choice only to the few. Today some children (e.g. President Obama’s children, and Governor Hassan’s children when they were school age, and the 44% of Philadelphia public school teachers’ children that go to private schools) have benefited from school choice. Other children, through no fault of their own, get compulsory attendance at one-size-fits-all public school desks.
The NH Department of Education is fighting choice in the Croydon case. They have our tax money paying for their lawyers, in their case against four children that dared to choose. It is time for us to demand that our tax money be used to give parents and students more choices, not fewer.
Shouldn’t everyone be free to choose?

Bill Walker

"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role." - William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889

Stop Common Core

There are many parents and teachers against Common Core.  For more information visit the Stop Common Core page in New Hampshire on facebook. 




¨“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.” - Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Croydon Plans to Fight

 The School Board plans to challenge the New Hampshire Department of Education..... for more information visit the Union Leader.

Another article of interest for Croydon. 

The comments are an interesting read as well.

Cathy

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense. -

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G. K. Chesterton, English writer, publisher (1874-1936):

JIllustrated London News, September 7, 1929

History not a Conspiracy

"“They’re looking out for what is best for the teachers union, best for the Democratic Party and best for those that agree and will be complicit to the wishes,” Curlee declared in a video released as part of this year’s Concerned Educators Against Forced Unionism Conference." For more information click on the below link.

If more parents only cared they would find the truth like this woman from Tennessee. 
Cathy

Free Math Course

 Math Lessons For a Living, is offering their math courses for free, for the 3rd and 5th grades. 

Cathy Peschke

Grammatical errors are left as an exercise for my readers.


"[T]he child should be taught to consider his instructor...superior to the parent in point of authority.... The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous.... Parents have no remedy as against the teacher." - John Swett, Superintendent of California Public School System (1860s)