Welcome to The Heartland Institute’s Education Issue Suite, a place where all the resources related to school reform on Heartland’s Web site are brought together and made easy to access.

To the left of this essay are links to School Reform News, The Heartland Institute’s national outreach publication of the school reform movement; Heartland Policy Studies, peer-reviewed original research on education topics; Research & Commentaries, collections of the best available research on hot topics in the education reform debate; Heartland books and booklets on education; bios and contact information for experts on school reform who work with The Heartland Institute; and a comprehensive directory of organizations in the U.S. that support school choice.

Below those links is a “What’s New” feature that presents titles, short reviews, and links to research and commentary on education most recently posted on Heartland’s Web site. This list is continuously updated, so we hope you’ll check it regularly.

Under those links is a list of subtopics that appear under the “Education” topic in PolicyBot, the database and search engine that resides on The Heartland Institute’s Web site. You can click on any one of those subtopics and see the titles, authors, date of publication, and short reviews of credible research and commentary from a wide range of sources. Then just click to open and read the entire article. PolicyBot is free, easy to use, and fast.

The essay below presents an overview of the debate over school reform taking place in the U.S. today. It contains links to individual articles and subtopics in PolicyBot, so the reader can go into much deeper depth on the issues the authors address.

What is Public Education?

The education of the public has been a high priority for Americans since the first settlers arrived here. The Founding Fathers suggested that a free society would be impossible without an educated population. As the third president Thomas Jefferson put it, “A nation that is both ignorant and free is something that never was and never will be.”

Throughout out history, access to education has been identified as a key element of our democratic institutions, our ideals of equal opportunity, and what makes economic growth and prosperity possible.

While it is common for people to use the terms “public schools” and “public education” as if they were synonymous, in fact they have quite distinct meanings. “Public schools” in the U.S. are financed by taxes and government-operated. Plenty of “public education” takes place in private schools and in homes and workplaces.

Public education can be advanced by promoting either public or private schools, or homeschooling. Public schools (that is, schools funded and operated by government agencies) enrolled 55.8 million students in 2007. Governments at all levels spent $473 billion in 2004-2005. Private schools enrolled 6.2 million students in 2007, about 11.0 percent of all K-12 students. Charter schools enrolled over 1.2 million children. An estimated 2 million children are home-schooled.

The Need for Reform

The 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk had warned Americans of a national crisis because of the poor performance of their public school system. In response to that warning, a series of reforms were instituted, directing vastly increased resources and expenditures to the public schools. However, in a 2003 follow-up report, the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education concluded the reforms “have not improved school performance or student achievement.” In the intervening 20 years, noted the Task Force, about 80 million first graders “have walked into schools where they have scant chance of learning much more than the youngsters whose plight troubled the Excellence Commission in 1983.”

Today, evidence of inadequate public school performance comes from many quarters: from the U.S.’s poor standing in international comparisons, mediocre high school graduation rates, stagnant test scores and a large achievement gap between white and minority students, more graduates requiring remedial education for college and the workplace, and deficiencies in school curriculum, such as neglect of civics.

There is widespread concern among parents, lawmakers, business leaders, college professors, economists, and historians that U.S. public schools are delivering too few graduates with reading, writing, and workplace skills and knowledge necessary to meet the challenges of a global economy in the 21st century. Indeed, without a well-educated citizenry, the U.S. is truly “a nation at risk.”

Which Way for Reform?

There is little disagreement, then, that public schools need to be improved. The disagreement is about what reform ideas show the most promise.

Responsibility for organizing and funding schools rests mostly with the states, though the federal government plays a growing role since adoption of the No Child Left Behind law. Much of the focus of the reform debate is on funding – either federal or by the states – but this attention is misplaced. There is actually little relationship between spending and student achievement.

Many reform proposals call for changes that would require more resources - smaller class sizes, higher teacher pay, improved teacher training, more preschool programs, and more technology in the classroom. But past reform efforts of this kind have consistently failed to produce the improvements expected.

What is missing from these resource-oriented and management-oriented reforms is competition and parental choice. Because the public school system is the exclusive provider of “free” K-12 education, its annual revenues -- and revenue increases -- are largely independent of student achievement. As a result, public schools have no structural incentive to improve their overall performance, despite the best efforts of dedicated teachers and principals within the system. Competition would change all that.

Competition in K-12 Education

Competition in K-12 education does not mean closing down the public schools. Rather, it involves allowing other education providers to compete with public schools for the opportunity to educate children. Parents choose a school for their child and the taxpayer dollars assigned to educate that child follow the child to the chosen school. The principal of each choice school individually decides how best to spend the education dollars that students bring to the school.

By allocating existing education funds to students, funding becomes child-centered rather than school-centered. A district’s per-pupil revenues become portable entitlements of individual students, who automatically take the funds with them if they transfer from their assigned public school to another school -- whether that is another public school in the district, a public school in another district, a public charter school, or a private school.

Competition of this kind – called “vouchers” or “scholarships” – occurs in Cleveland, Washington D.C., Florida, Milwaukee, and elsewhere. It has been closely studied and found to advance student achievement, facilitate integration, increase parental satisfaction, and save taxpayers money. Tuition tax credits, another way to encourage parental choice, has also been found to be an effective kind of school reform.

Who Opposes School Choice?

Opposition to school choice exists, though most of it is based on misconceptions about how choice programs work and who benefits from them. Teachers unions spend millions of dollars opposing school choice because they fear that choice would make it more difficult for them to organize teachers.

As the national movement for school choice has grown in size and political influence, it has experienced some internal disagreements over tactics and strategies. This is hardly surprising, and a sign of the movement’s maturity, but opponents of school choice often seek to exploit this internal dissent. The following articles address specifically the concerns of some conservatives and libertarians who think vouchers “don’t go far enough” or will lead to new regulations on private schools, and who sometimes think tax credits might be a superior alternative.

Joseph Bast, “The Promise and Limits of Tuition Tax Credits,” Heartland Perspective, April 2001, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17227

Joseph Bast, “2002: The Year of School Vouchers,” The Heartlander, February 2002, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10708

Joseph Bast, “Tax Credits vs. Vouchers: Time to Decide,” The Heartlander, March 2002, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10705

Joseph Bast, “Why Conservatives and Libertarians Should Support School Vouchers,” The Independent Review, October 2002, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10644

Joseph Bast, “Three Objections to School Vouchers ... Answered,” The Heartlander, August 2004, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=15487

George Clowes, “Reformers Can’t Decide Between Tax Credits & Vouchers,” ALEC Policy Forum, American Legislative Exchange Council, January 2003, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=11663

George Clowes, “Still No Consensus on School Choice,” April 2004, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16914

George Clowes, “Are Tax Credits Really Not Public Money?” School Reform News, July 2005, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17372

David Kirkpatrick, “Does Government Funding = Government Control?” School Reform News, April 2004, http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=14664