My Choice for School Choice

The topic of education has come up a lot in the past few weeks as decisions are being made about how schools will respond to the coronavirus this fall. Some colleges are going all online, and some are limiting their campuses to just freshman and sophomores. Local school districts are trying to decide whether to go fully open or to mix in-school and home-school learning. 

Even without ’Rona complicating education, the Chester-Upland School District has been recently hit with several consequential changes. Juan Baughn was appointed the district’s new receiver. Baughn hired a new superintendent, Carol Birks, who started in June. A judge ordered “For Sale” signs put up around the entire district, potentially outsourcing transportation, facilities, and even the operations of schools. (I’m not sure about the other charter school operators, but I’m pretty certain the Chester Community Charter School will be bidding on some of the Chester-Upland schools.) That’s a heck of a summer break, if you ask me. 

Even with some charter schools, school choice is very limited in Chester. There just isn’t much variety to choose from.

I know it’s not on the table, but maybe one day someone would consider allowing students from one Delco public school to use vouchers to attend school elsewhere in the county. Right now, Chester-Upland funding follows the student to a charter school. What if it also followed them to Strath Haven, Garnet Valley, Haverford, or Radnor?

I was talking to a guy from a Delco town where housing prices are too high for middle-class families and below to afford to move there. He says the townsfolks’ biggest concern is maintaining their top-10 ranking among Pennsylvania school districts. To his credit, he considers his neighbors full of crap for thinking that way. But that’s the way they are.

I offered him this risk-free experiment to prove whether that really is their biggest worry. It doesn’t involve moving anyone into their exclusive township. It goes like this:

Through some intelligent process, we identify five Chester-Upland students to invite to attend school in his town’s district and use a voucher to pay for their education.

At the end of the school year, in order to maintain their school ranking, his school district will remove the five lowest-performing students. 

If any of the five lowest performers is one of the Chester-Upland students, we’ll take them back. Otherwise, they can stay another year. 

My guess is the only reason the rich community wouldn’t go for that deal is because they’d be afraid a few of their current students would not make the cut and would have to transfer somewhere else. Since the ranking would remain the same — or improve — in this scenario, that would prove school ranking isn’t really their concern. 

This could work at any school. If we had a regional school district mindset, we could easily give good students in a bad school district the opportunity to be a good student in a much better school district. 

But closed minds maintain that poor districts must continue to offer only poor education choices, resulting in poorly prepared students who only perpetuate the burden on the community that didn’t, or couldn’t, educate them. 

Stefan Roots blogs at Chester Matters and at Covid While Black.