Hallcraft’s view on school choice
In the US and many other countries, free K-12 education is written into law as a universal right.
Schooling is perceived as a semi-public good, and perhaps it’s because of this perception that we easily forget that education still operates as a marketplace where the suppliers (schools) compete for customers (families).
In the US, high-income families have access to a broader swath of options within the marketplace, ranging from their local public school to the top local or even national private schools. Some families opt for home schooling or some alternative form of education. Other families are bound to the local public school system as their default option. In any case, Americans generally expect that all families will have access to at least one supplier of education.
In addition to education as a universal right, let’s tack on two more assumptions to our list.
All families have a right to choose which of their locally available programs, cost permitting, is best for their children.
It’s a good thing if the education marketplace as a whole, including public schools, benefits from new technology, new learning tools, better instructional methods, and continuous improvement.
Hallcraft’s work rests on the belief that school choice, managed well, can lead to higher quality schools, more options for families, and a marketplace that remains innovative and dynamic.
What is school choice?
The term school choice encompasses a broad range of government programs and school models that share a common goal: to enable families to pursue more options for educating their children outside of the single supplier of their local public school system.
Programs like ESAs (education savings accounts), school vouchers, and tax-credit scholarships; school models like charter schools; and educational methods like homeschooling and online learning all fit under the umbrella of school choice. It can be helpful to think of school choice as a matter of resource allocation. Local governments allocate a certain dollar amount within their budgets for each student, which in theory represents the cost of educating that student for the year. Financially speaking, many school choice mechanisms allow families to take these government dollars (and by proxy their right to a year’s worth of education) and shop around for a different program for their child.
Click here for a longer list of the various types of school choice.
Hallcraft’s view
In general, we’re fans of optionality. We believe in giving families more optionality for how and where their children are educated. Having access to more options increases the likelihood that a family is able to find the right option. An optimistic vision of the option-abundant future goes as follows:
Because of school choice mechanisms, families have more power to choose between a slew of schools in their area. As a result, the local education marketplace becomes more demand-sensitive. This, in turn, spawns better, more diverse schools that cater to families’ needs. Within the robust marketplace, established schools and new entrants alike are incentivized to innovate. Schools are forced to provide high-quality options that are tailored to the desires of real families. No longer are families bound to a single, one-size-fits-all option.
As with any set of policies, there are nuances to manage with school choice. The trick to achieving the vision outlined above is to maintain the right equity standards, accountability mechanisms, regulations, and entrepreneurial environments. Check out this excellent breakdown of the nuances of the issue from our friends at Allovue. We believe that smart and effective school choice is possible. To the extent that it is done thoughtfully and effectively, we are firmly in favor of increasing school choice across states. Put another way, school choice is desirable if it delivers more value to families and increases the success and delight of real students in real schools.
Our other guiding belief here is that families can only exercise their right to great education if the supply side of the market is thriving. This means that we must be able to build great new schools, and in order to do that we must both generate ideas for schools and bring those ideas to life quickly and with high-fidelity.
How school choice relates to our work
At Hallcraft we focus on the supply side of the school marketplace by building bold, imaginative, and well-run schools. Many of the schools we build will set their tuition at a price point that is rendered low- or no-cost by a program like an ESA or a voucher.
We operate under the assumption that great education is a universal right. If we want to raise the standard from good to great, we need systems that incentivize building better, more varied school models.
Check out one of our favorite pieces of media on school choice from someone who knows a little something about building bold, imaginative products:
