Education Reform and the Limits of Policy: Lessons from Michigan

6. Schools of Choice

163 6 Schools of Choice Following passage of Public Act 362 of 1993 and subsequent legislation that created Michigan’s charter school program, the Michigan legislature expanded the state’s educational choice initiatives by creating a schools of choice program in 1997.1 This legislation, Section 105 of the SchoolAidAct, required all local school boards to decide whether or not they would accept nonresident students in their schools. Those districts opting into the program were required to publish the schools, grades, and programs open to nonresidents and then accept applications . If the number of applicants exceeded available slots, enrollees would be selected by random lottery.2 Prior to this legislation, students could enroll in other districts as nonresidents in one of two ways. First, they could enroll as tuition students , with tuition calculated according to a (nearly incomprehensible) section of the School Aid Act.3 Alternatively, the student’s district of residence could release the revenue associated with the student to the enrolling district, enabling the student to receive free tuition. As one would expect, such permission was rarely granted. The new “schools of choice” law allowed students to leave any district of residence to enter a choice school within the same intermediate school district (ISD), and the associated revenue (i.e., foundation allowance) followed automatically . Specifically, the enrolling district receives the lesser of the foundation allowance of the resident district and the enrolling district. Further, the enrolling district is prohibited from charging tuition in any form to make up any revenue differences. Michigan’s schools of choice program was expanded in 2000 to include contiguous districts outside the ISD and to include districts in any contiguous ISD the following year.4 As with the 1997 legislation , local school boards electing to enroll nonresidents were required to select such students by lottery if their district was oversubscribed and, again, the enrolling district receives the lower of its own and the resident district’s per pupil foundation allowance. Districts electing to enroll nonresidents are not required to provide transportation to choice 164 Addonizio and Kearney schools, although anecdotal evidence reveals that some districts do send school buses into neighboring districts for this purpose. While adopting both charter schools and schools of choice, Michigan legislators and voters defeated two efforts to institute school voucher programs in the state. In 1999, Senate Bill 31 was introduced to give vouchers to students in cities with a population exceeding 750,000. The proposal, of course, would have impacted only the Detroit school district. Students from families earning less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level would have been eligible for the vouchers. The bill, however, died in committee. Following the demise of Senate Bill 31, business executive and former Michigan Board of Education member Richard DeVos led a coalition of education, civic, and business leaders in forming Kids First! Yes! which sought to amend the Michigan Constitution to give parents whose children attend school in districts that failed to graduate twothirds of their students a publicly funded voucher worth one-half of the district’s per pupil expenditure to attend a school of their choosing. As a sweetener, Proposal 1 would have guaranteed that public school spending would never fall below the current level and would have required teacher testing in academic subjects.5 Opponents of the proposal organized under the name All Kids First! On November 7, 2000, Michigan voters defeated Proposal 1 by a margin of more than 2 to 1. Among the various forms of K–12 school choice, voucher programs , which encompass private as well as public schools, are easily the most controversial. This controversy stems primarily from the use of public revenue to fund religious school education, a practice prohibited by most state constitutions, including Michigan’s.6 In addition to constitutional issues regarding the separation of church and state, critics cite the potential of vouchers to increase social stratification along racial, ethnic, academic, and socioeconomic lines (Goldhaber and Eide 2002). Concern over such stratification has also been raised in connection with charter schools and interdistrict choice, but the objections have been less strident, probably because these reforms involve only public schools, which are tuition-free and, with rare exception, equally accessible to all applicants.7 Consequently, these public choice initiatives have enjoyed much more public support in Michigan and across the states. Schools of Choice 165 RATIOnALE FOR SCHOOLS OF CHOICE This form of educational choice...