When she moved her daughter to a top private school in Washington at the beginning of the pandemic, Ashley Jochim never imagined she was setting her daughter up for failure.
Jochim, a mother of four and education researcher, thought her second-grade son would do better in the smaller, more flexible environment the private school offered. At first he did. Her daughter was excited, in part because the school's emphasis on student-centered learning meant her daughter had exciting experiences like creating a sculpture out of trash and building forts in the woods. “I only had good things to say about it,” says Jochim. (Jochim asked that his daughter's name not be revealed for privacy reasons.)
But when her daughter entered third grade, academic warning signs began to appear: A new teacher suggested she was struggling with reading, writing and math, Jochim says.
“This took us by surprise, because all the reports (from the school) seemed to be that he was doing well,” Jochim says.
The school encouraged the family to seek an evaluation. So, after an expensive neuropsychological exam, her daughter was diagnosed with “a trifecta of learning problems,” Jochim says, including dyslexia and dysgraphia, a neurological disorder that makes writing difficult.
It took the family nine months to get those results. But while they waited, Jochim began researching what curriculum the school used and how much time they gave students to practice the fundamental skills they needed to read, such as phonics, word recognition, and fluency. Jochim struggled with the core ideas of the school's hands-on approach and determined that it was not working for his son. During his daughter's fourth grade, Jochim pulled her out of school.
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The process took its toll. Her daughter lost friends and they both had to go through the rigmarole of changing schools. “I felt a little devastated,” Jochim says, adding that navigating the school choice process seemed almost impossible, even with her more than a decade of experience in educational research. Worse, there was no guarantee that her daughter's return to public school would improve anything. And Jochim had been wrong before.
For families like Jochim's, choosing can be extremely difficult. There is uncertainty and errors are costly. When students have to be taken out of school, it can uproot them, causing them to lose learning time and friends. For Jochim, a longtime educational researcher, the experience was also a professional reckoning. That left her wondering: “If I could make such a catastrophic mistake, how do we help families avoid this kind of thing?”
Jochim's response? School choice needs a “lemon law,” a rule that protects consumers from defective purchases. With so much at stake, families must be able to identify low-quality education providers, he says. That means forcing schools to reveal key data about their programs and going after those who routinely misrepresent what they offer, Jochim maintains.
Difficult decisions
Advocates argue that school choice delivers results Education adapted to family needs..
At the moment, 28 states and the District of Columbia allow families to use public dollars to pay for private school. The election of Donald Trump, who will take office with a Republican-controlled legislature, also emboldened school choice advocates, raising speculation that New tax credits could boost the movement.. For example, while Trump's first term failed to $5 billion a year in federal tax credits for contributions to organizations that offer private school scholarships, that could change.
But a number of obstacles prevent families from getting what they want from school choice. Especially for low-income families, exercising options is difficult. For example, in Arizona, where school choice is booming, hidden costs (including transportation due to school availability) have increased. prevented low-income families from exercising school choice.
Regardless of socioeconomic status, families have trouble obtaining information about school options, according to a new report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research center at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Additionally, the competitiveness of admissions at highly desirable schools means that not everyone can attend, the report notes.
Jochim, the report's author, argues that consumers deserve basic protections in private education choice programs and that these protections are uncontroversial in virtually all other private markets. Choice alone does not guarantee the quality of education, he says. But in other sectors, consumers receive information before the sale, so they can fully evaluate options. And they are protected if unscrupulous sellers misrepresent what they offer, Jochim says. For private choice programs, that could mean requiring them to publish information about their curriculum and data on how many students remain enrolled in all grades, a sign of a school's quality.
The report also recommended funding organizations that provide information about schools to help parents make informed decisions.
There are also many opportunities to strengthen regulatory standards in private education choice programs without negating the flexibility and innovation that some people value in them, Jochim adds.
Delayed impacts
These days, for Jochim's daughter, school has changed.
When Jochim put his daughter back in public school, the change was surprising. The school had weekly lists of spelling words, with regular homework and tests. Her daughter's scores on spelling tests skyrocketed, hitting 100 percent, and her scores on achievement tests improved. “I saw her really flourish academically, in a learning environment where she got a little more direct instruction and a little more practice of foundational skills,” Jochim says.
But she's still behind in math, which Jochim sees as a lingering effect of her daughter's previous school.
Jochim says he is not against school choice. But in his opinion, the school choice movement must take into account the cost of changing schools. “Schools are not like new restaurants you try or breakfast cereals you buy at the supermarket, but they involve people's emotions and relationships and children's learning,” he says. “And so the idea that you can move fluidly from one place to another when it doesn't work in this kind of frictionless environment… I know that's not true because I've experienced the pain that comes with having to tear a child from a school that they love.”
