Frustrated with public schools’ lackluster response to the COVID-19 pandemic, California families have been leaving the state’s public school system in droves, choosing education alternatives such as charter schools and homeschooling.
Family dissatisfaction with public schools has been one of the main motivators for two proposed ballot initiatives that education choice advocates are working to get on the statewide ballot this November. These proposals would both create education savings accounts and empower parents to spend their children’s K-12 education funding dollars on eligible schooling expenses, including private school tuition, tutoring, books, and transportation costs.
The first proposal, the Education Freedom Initiative, would create accounts with $13,000 in funds available initially to low-income children for the program’s first two years. It would eventually expand access to all California children. The other ballot initiative, the Educational Freedom Act, would make $14,000 accounts immediately available to California families upon request.
Anti-school choice advocates claim that spending public dollars on private school tuition and educational services would lead to a lack of transparency and accountability. “Private schools are not subject to the same educational standards as public schools, even when they accept public funding,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Heather Weaver told Education Week.
But public schools are not as accountable as one might think.
All too often, the byzantine nature of state education systems means that few experts, let alone taxpayers can see how public schools spend public education funding. In fact, until recently, many states were only required to report the average per-pupil expenditures in each school district, not how the education dollars are actually spent.
That changed in 2015 when President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which made education spending more transparent by requiring school districts to provide school-level spending data. Yet, 13 states, including California, had not complied with the federal law as of May 2021. As a result, school-level data for nearly 40% of children enrolled in K-12 public schools nationwide still goes unreported.
In California, poor-performing public schools are particularly susceptible to evading transparency and accountability. In 2019, the California Department of Education published a list of 781 of the poorest performing schools for the first time in four years. These schools suffer from problems such as low graduation rates, absenteeism, and poor student performance on assessments.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic threw California’s accountability system into limbo as the U.S. Department of Education waived states’ 2020 assessment requirements. In fact, California’s standardized test scores will be publicly reported and applied to its accountability metrics in 2022 for the first time in three years.
For instance, Westlake Middle School in the Oakland Unified School District performed poorly during the 2017, 2018, and 2019 school years. The school’s test scores declined over three years, such that the school scored more than 162 points below standard in math and more than 121 points below standard in English Language Arts during the 2019 academic year. At the same time, more than a third of its students were chronically absent that school year, and nearly 20% were suspended at least once. But the school district hasn’t had to, and won’t have to report if they were successful in improving these test scores until later this year.
Despite claims that the proposed ballot initiatives would reduce transparency, California’s public schools are the ones often failing to deliver financial and educational accountability. As EdChoice research Michael Mcshane noted, “Schools can underperform for decades and suffer functionally zero consequences.”At the end of the day, California public schools lack the most powerful accountability measure—parents having the ability to vote with their feet by enrolling their kids in the schools of their choice. Both of the education savings account ballot initiatives would, in McShane’s words, “deputize millions of parents as school accountability officers.”
The proposed 2022 ballot initiatives could be an opportunity for taxpayers to demand more accountability from schools and for parents to seize more control of their children’s educations.
Jude Schwalbach is an education policy analyst at Reason Foundation.
