Beyond the constitutional complications, there is an emerging fissure within the choice movement between charter school advocates and those who prioritize the late Milton Friedman’s free-market approach of using government-funded vouchers and similar mechanisms to pay for tuition at private and religious schools. Friedman’s market model holds that empowering parents to choose their children’s schools would lead to a more efficient and effective system of education than aggressive government oversight.
In June, Robert Enlow and Michael McShane wrote an article for Education Next celebrating the rise of private-school choice, noting that more than half the school-age population in America is now eligible for state funding to attend private and religious schools. Enlow and McShane serve as president and research director, respectively, of EdChoice, an influential nonprofit founded in 1996 to carry on Friedman’s legacy. Their estimate does not account for students who will soon be eligible for a federal education tax credit program recently passed by Congress.
But Enlow and McShane’s essay also conveyed a more pointed message. They argued against government oversight of how vouchers are used and in favor of “broader, innovative, decentralized school options” that are accelerating the school choice movement towards offerings like microschools, private tutoring, and home schooling. Referring to charter school authorizers as “unelected functionaries,” they claimed that charter schools have been “stymied” by a regulatory framework that has “buried potential operators in the very bureaucratic structure charter schools were created to correct.”
This marked a hinge moment in the history of the school choice movement, signaling that at least some free-marketeers have become disenchanted with charter schools, which they find to be overregulated. Instead, they embrace vouchers for all-comers, with little to no regulation or accountability.
Enlow and McShane’s broadside against regulatory structure of charters could rock the school choice movement—and has not gone unnoticed. Michael Petrilli, president of the reform oriented, pro–school choice Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently posted a response to the Education Next article in Fordham’s Flypaper blog. Noting that Fordham has served as an authorizer for 20 charters in Ohio, Petrilli referred to Enlow and McShane’s charges as “fighting words,” and cautioned that we should “not be Pollyanna about the potential for fraud, abuse, bad ideas, poor execution, and all the rest.”
The charter school model was based on the idea that participating public schools would be given more regulatory flexibility in return for heightened accountability. Studies like the Stanford evaluation have credited that accountability—including the closure of low-performing schools—as a factor in the sector’s academic success. While there is persuasive evidence that private-school vouchers can lead to better graduation and college attendance rates, I know of no voucher assessment that is as comprehensive as the Stanford charter school study, which updates a larger series of observations going back some 25 years.
This widening division within the choice movement could be most harmful to charter schools in the long run, given the current momentum towards private-school choice. There was never unanimity between the “charterists” and the privateers—nor, as Howard Fuller would tell you, within the latter camp between those who supported universal choice like Friedman and those like Fuller’s allies in Milwaukee who demanded means-tested choice for the poor and underserved. It is those students who are now more vulnerable as divisions within the choice camp become more apparent, and Democratic partisans remain steadfast in their opposition to all forms of choice.
