If we’re talking about impacts of school choice, let’s look at real examples, not guesses

First, I want to mention that Kentucky House Bill 149, which currently is being subjected to a lot of off-target commentary, actually establishes a very exciting Education Opportunity Account Program to provide Kentucky parents some really helpful school choice options. The provisions include a lot more than just creating an opportunity for low to moderate income parents to enroll their child in a private school if that appears to be the best option. Just a few of the other education choice features HB-149 provides to parents include:

• Enrolling their child in another public school in another district;

• Providing tuition or fees for online learning programs;

• Paying for tutoring services provided by an individual or a tutoring facility;

• Contracting with a public school for such services as individual classes and extracurricular activities and programs;

• Paying for textbooks, software and computer hardware;

• Paying fees for assessments like AP exams and college entrance tests and for preparatory materials and courses for those assessments;

• Paying for summer education programs;

• Covering tuition and fees for technical schools and

• Paying for occupational, behavioral, physical, speech-language, and audiology therapies provided by a licensed professional and transportation to such services.

Especially at this time with COVID-19 creating serious educational challenges for students, including big increases in course failure rates, the assistance to parents in HB-149 is more crucial than ever before.

But that’s not stopping self-interested folks involved with Kentucky’s public education system from bemoaning supposed negative impacts they say HB-149 will have on the state’s public school system. The moaners and groaners wail that implementing HB-149 will take a lot of money away from the traditional public schools in Kentucky and assert that will have terrible consequences.

Really?

Well, the moaners and groaners predictions of gloom simply ignore “the rest of the story,” as the late Paul Harvey used to put it so nicely. Let’s look deeper.

Let’s go beyond fanciful guessing and take a look at actual public school performance over time in a state that is a leader for adopting many important school choice initiatives, namely Florida. Those Florida initiatives include some similar to what HB-149 offers.

Given its massive school choice options, the moaners and groaners would have us believe that Florida’s public schools must certainly have suffered dramatic decline after the various school choice programs came along.

Well, decline isn’t even close to what actually happened to Florida’s public school performance following the introduction of school choice options.

Consider how Florida’s public school system progressed in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing over time. The first example is Grade 4 reading.

State-level NAEP Grade 4 Reading was first assessed back in 1992, before Florida really got into education choice programs. The state faired rather poorly, being outscored by a statistically significant amount by 26 other states and only statistically significantly outscoring four states plus the Washington, DC schools.

Now, flash forward to the latest NAEP results from 2019. My what a change for Florida!

Now, only one state scores statistically significantly higher while 32 other states and the Washington, DC schools score significantly worse.

By the way, if you check the color-coding carefully in these graphics, which were assembled using the NAEP Data Explorer, back in 1992 Kentucky scored statistically significantly higher than Florida on NAEP Grade 4 Reading. By 2019 Kentucky was scoring statistically significantly lower than Florida. Choice in Florida was actually accompanied by a major improvement in Grade 4 reading compared to what happened in choice-devoid public schools in Kentucky.

Now, let’s look at Grade 4 math results.

Florida’s NAEP Grade 4 Reading Assessment picture is pretty much duplicated when we look at the math results. In fact, things actually look slightly better as in NAEP Grade 4 math Florida now scores significantly higher than 39 other jurisdictions while in reading it was 33 jurisdictions that Florida outscored in 2019.

One slight change is that back in 1992 Florida statistically tied Kentucky’s NAEP Grade 4 Math results. But just like for reading in 2019, Florida now outscores Kentucky for math at this grade level, too.

As you will see in the next two graphics, Florida also moved ahead with the Grade 8 NAEP results over time, though not as dramatically as with the Grade 4 results. In both Grade 8 sets of results, Florida in 2019 outscores notably more states than it did in the first years each of these assessments was given.

Also, in the Grade 8 NAEP results, Florida moved from behind Kentucky in reading in 1998 to tying the Bluegrass State by 2019.

Both states were tied in the 1990 and 2019 Grade 8 math assessments.

However, the overall trend for Florida’s public schools (again, the graphs above only cover public school results) has been an increase in performance over time while that state’s school choice programs have multiplied dramatically.

By the way, it’s interesting to examine how the student demographics in Kentucky and Florida varied during the time covered by the graphics above. The NAEP Data Explorer has such information and the Grade 4 Reading NAEP provides representative numbers.

As you can see, Florida’s public school system has experienced a much more significant increase in minority student racial groups that don’t score as well as white students on NAEP than Kentucky has. Florida is now solidly a white minority state. In sharp contrast, Kentucky remains very solidly white in its public school classrooms.

So, forget about using some sort of student privilege excuse to explain away Florida’s impressive academic achievements compared to Kentucky’s. Actually, given the demographic shifts, Florida should lag, not lead, the Bluegrass State. But, that’s not what happened.

Since the arguments we hear against HB-149 are generally all about money, it’s also interesting to compare changes in spending per pupil in Florida and Kentucky over about the same time frame as the NAEP results shown above. I don’t have data for 1990 or 1992, but the 1988-89 data below come from an old print edition of the US Census Bureau’s Public Education Finances series while the 2018 data are from the latest information available online from the Census Bureau.

As you can see, under the influence of KERA, which was enacted in 1990, Kentucky has seen a much sharper rise in public school funding than Florida experienced. In fact, the US Census Bureau shows that back in 1988-89, Florida’s per pupil public school education funding was ranked in 15th place, which was notably higher than Kentucky’s 47th place ranking. By 2018 Florida’s ranking for per pupil revenue massively decayed to 44th place while Kentucky’s ranked 35th. Per the doomers’ and gloomers’ theories, Florida’s public education system should have sunk into the pits. But as the NAEP results we already discussed show, it just didn’t work out that way. Florida’s public education system pretty much stomped Kentucky’s

An important message in this concerns the idea of simply throwing more money at education – this simplistic approach just doesn’t work very well. Given more money absent other stimulation, the monopolistic public school system will just drift on casually. Gains for students will come at the slow rate Kentucky has already demonstrated in the last 30 years rather than at the much more impressive improvement rates enjoyed in Florida.

It’s quite clear: real results indicate school choice programs don’t result in performance declines for public schools. In fact, quite contrary to what doomers and gloomers would have us believe, it appears that the competition created by school choice programs actually spurs the public school system to better performance.

And, that’s why Kentucky needs HB-149 rather than still more poorly targeted spending on a public school system that has already shown it isn’t likely to budge very much without some external stimulus.