OUR VIEW: State's money must follow students (poll)

School choice, the modern wave of education, is always under attack by the establishment. New schools threaten the old union-controlled, one-size-fits-all government education monopoly.
Those who liked the old way simply don’t like anything about the new way.

So, for example, they point out low-performance records of some special schools, failing to explain that many of the worst-performing schools are designed to attract and help underperforming students. Schools designed to help troubled students will obviously have poorer overall performance records than traditional schools or schools designed to attract geniuses.

Most attacks against school choice are battles for money. When money follows a child to a charter school, the money no longer funds a monopoly school. When charters schools attract students, traditional schools have to improve their games just to compete.

But not all complaints about modern school choice are baseless.

A three-part investigative series that began running in last Sunday’s Gazette pointed out concerns about online government schools that deserve serious attention from politicians and the general public. An at-home, online education is exactly what a small percentage of students need. But it’s not for everyone, and it is probably not for most.

The expose showed that an alarming number of students achieve lower test scores after enrolling in online schools. Turnover has become a problem, as students who try online educations often end up going back to classrooms.

When a student abandons an online school, the online school often keeps the state tuition cash. Colorado bases school funding on a single enrollment count. Once the count has been taken, the money is allocated and belongs to the school even if students soon thereafter.

That means another school ends up with former online students, but not the tuition.
The administration of Colorado’s largest online public school, Colorado Virtual Academy, agrees that online schools should not keep the money.

“Colorado should move away form a school-funding model based on a single-count date to a better model, such as an average daily membership,” said Jeff Kwitowski in a statement to The Gazette’s editorial board. He’s the vice president for public affairs for K12, the curriculum provider for Colorado Virtual Academy.

Under K12’s proposal, Colorado would allocate tuition based on the average number of school days that students are enrolled during the year. That’s how a lot of other states do it, eliminating the problem of schools taking full tuition for students who leave.

Only 13 states use single-count systems similar to Colorado’s.

“Schools and school district should not be funded for students who are no longer enrolled with them,” Kwitowski said.

“This has long been a policy k12 has endorsed in both principle and practice.”

So let’s change the law. In doing so, let’s make sure that it applies to all government schools.
Though online schools have transient enrollments by their very nature, Colorado is an open-enrollment state that favors school competition and choice.

That means students frequently transfer to and from all sorts of schools in a healthy effort to find the right education.

It’s a great thing, so long as the money follows the students. — Wayne Laugesen, editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend Wayne on Facebook; follow him on Twitter.