Don’t regulate private schools — deregulate public schools.
Don’t regulate private schools — deregulate public schools.
T he backlash to how traditional public schools handled Covid turned the first half of the 2020s into the half-decade of school choice, but now, the public education empire is striking back.
In this year’s midterm elections, in states including Arizona, Iowa, and my own Arkansas, school-choice opponents are arguing that to (indirectly, via parent choice) get taxpayer funds, “accountability” requires saddling private schools with public-school regulations. This may sound good at first blush, but it has it exactly backward: Instead of crushing private schools with more red tape, we should empower public schools with less.
School-choice skeptics claim more regulations mean more accountability. I admit we need some regs, and we have them. Abuse and unhealthy conditions can and should be reported to authorities no matter what school sector (or homeschool) kids learn in. Like most other Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), Arkansas’s Education Freedom Accounts covering private schooling require standardized testing for transparency about learning. That makes sense.
Years back, a teacher-union activist showed me that a loophole allowed teachers who resigned their jobs for alleged sexual abuse (you read that right) to find new teaching jobs before investigations ascertained their innocence (or guilt). Apparently, this happened often in the traditional public-school sector. I quietly informed policymakers and offered to go public with the issue, just to gauge public sentiment, mind you. So informed, policymakers quickly closed the loophole. Likewise, when a colleague found that one popular charter school held a nontransparent admissions lottery, I worked with a Democratic state legislator to force transparency and equity. No one should rig an admissions lottery.
But too many regulations do far more harm than good. Often, regulations start well and then expand to become everything and nothing. Boston College political scientist R. Shep Melnick writes about how regulations for Title IX and to desegregate schools initially promoted equality but were eventually corrupted, enriching lawyers and empowering bureaucrats and interest groups without helping kids.
As Harvard’s Robert D. Behn argues in Rethinking Democratic Accountability, accountability for process (paperwork) often drives out accountability for effectiveness. For example, in theory, requiring teacher certification improves teacher quality. In practice, as my former colleague Sandra Stotsky showed, for decades certification systems became burdensome exercises in compliance without assuring effective teaching. Luminaries such as John Kerry, John McCain, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and both Presidents Bush attended private prep schools that do not even consider certification when hiring teachers. When I called their headmasters and asked a few years back, most seemed amused or confused by the question!
Former Massachusetts School Superintendent Nate Levenson, himself a special-education student in his youth, wrote books including Six Shifts to Improve Special Education, arguing that special-education “equity” regulations imposed worst practices, with special-education students getting less instruction in reading and math when they actually needed more, all the while saddling their teachers with massive paperwork. I know a charter school that has two kinds of special-education teachers: One-quarter are “compliance teachers” who just do paperwork for the state while the other three-quarters teach. Teachers thought up the idea and prefer it to everyone doing compliance — but can’t we do better?
Then there are special education’s massive inequities. As scholars like Colin Ong-Dean and Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides detail, highly complex special-education rules designed for equity in fact heighten inequities, with powerful parents gaining their kids privileges like extra time on tests unavailable to others. Downstream, this has created a culture in which privileged college students at elite institutions like the UC Berkeley law school routinely demand and get extra time on tests for their “disabilities.” Berkeley now has more “disabled” law students, 37.5 percent, than male law students!
“Accountability” regulations rarely hold anyone accountable — usually they just mean more paperwork. Back in 2004, I asked a charter school leader how much paperwork he faced annually. Even back then, most compliance reporting was online, but physical paperwork remained dense and immense. And remember, charter schools were less regulated than traditional public schools. Whatever your school sector, more time filling out forms means less time working with teachers, parents, and kids. As an education principle, the required paperwork for the average principal should weigh less than the average teacher.
Paper accountability distracts from hiring and mentoring good teachers and leaders, and sometimes, after a trial period, demoting or terminating those who are not helping kids. That’s real accountability, and too few do it. Massive regulations also mean that everyone is always out of compliance on something, so if state department of education bureaucrats hate you, they can always find some reason to get you. As one of Stalin’s secret police put it, “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Is this the real motivation for more regulation? To find private schools “out of compliance” to shutter the competition?
Then consider the money. In my state, public schools spend a mean of about $13,000 annually per student; private schools accepting Arkansas’s ESA funds typically receive $7,000 from state coffers. If ESA opponents want private schools regulated like public schools, will they fund them like public schools? If so, they have never mentioned it.
To tout a fellow Arkansan, let’s learn from the highly successful Bill Clinton and his work with a Republican Congress to reinvent government bureaucracies during the 1990s, which saved hundreds of billions of dollars and made the federal government work better. Instead of regulating private schools more, we should regulate public schools less, because whatever their school, no good educator wants more red tape.