Dive Brief:

• President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos clearly value school choice as a potential model for the future, but many education experts admit that a variety of factors make the efficacy of school choice options like charter schools or voucher programs difficult to measure, according to NPR.
• Vouchers can have different impacts depending on where they are used. For students enrolled in a school like Eminence Community Schools in Eminence, IN, there are not private options for students to use vouchers, but the state allocates millions of dollars toward vouchers, draining money from a school like Eminence for little reward.
• The success of these programs vary widely, not only from situation to situation but analysis to analysis. Charter schools do seem to have an initial positive effect on public schools, but this is not uniform, and the success of voucher programs can vary widely.

Dive Insight:

Part of the issue in measuring school choice options like charter schools is that the scenarios of how these schools are formed and in what way they interact with their public counterparts can vary. Charter schools tend to have a positive impact on public schools, and charter students in urban areas tend to perform better than their public counterparts, but these urban areas likely offer more options of schools — at least on paper. In New York, for example, there are zoned public schools, non-zoned schools, selective schools, private and charter schools, often within relatively short distances of each other. This does not often work in practice, but there still remain options that are simply not available to rural students.

Rural charter schools only make up about 16% of charters nationwide, according to Penn State University College of Education Associate Professor Karen Eppley. In an interview with The Atlantic, she said that many of these charter schools were being created “in response to school closures and consolidations.” These school openings may be beneficial for students who are losing out after a public school closure, but it makes it difficult to see the challenge many rural students face as one of legitimate "choice." A voucher program assumes students have a plethora of options available, with the only barrier being cost. These rural students may find cost to be a barrier, but availability may be an even larger one.

It is similar to a recent study about early childhood education, which found that city pre-K parents were concerned with the cost of such programs, while parents in rural communities were finding the lack of such programs to be a bigger factor in their concern. It is difficult to see the value of a voucher that could bring costs down if other options are not existent. What could that student use the voucher for? Still, Eppley said that the number of charters were rising in rural areas, so it is possible that with time, there may be more real choice in these locations.