School choice, or education freedom or voucher scheme – whatever you want to call it – is clearly politically charged, at least in part, because choice programs unquestionably impact racial and economic segregation.
It’s true that school choice options can ease segregation pressures by luring students into select magnet and other specialized programs. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has said exactly that. “Empirical evidence finds school choice programs lead to more integrated schools than their public school counterparts,” she said. But, as you’d expect, the “empirical evidence” is not so clear. Some research has found links between school choice programs and increased segregation.
That can happen because it’s possible that, when choice options exist, only students whose families can research those options, navigate the application and acceptance process, and get their children to those options can and will use them. Moreover, in many cases, the students and families that can best utilize school options need them least – leaving behind those students who could not exercise their choices.
“I think that the focus on addressing economic disadvantage in choice opportunities is great and worth doing,” said Jinal Jhaveri, cofounder and CEO of SchoolMint.
Jhaveri is an important voice in the ongoing discussions about choice because his company, since its launch in 2014, has run the application, admissions, enrollment and lottery systems at more than 8,000 public and private choice schools for more than four million students. SchoolMint manages that process for some of the nation’s largest districts and choice programs including Los Angeles Unified, Chicago, Oakland and Denver. Few people sit closer to the front lines of what’s actually happening in and around school choice opportunities.
On the crucial issue of access, advantage and result, Jhaveri is clear and not shy. “Simply having a choice program is not enough and it can actually reinforce problems of access,” he said. To do what school choice partly intended to do, he said, “it has to be implemented correctly.”
Simply getting kids to and from choice schools, for example, can be an issue. If you think you can’t transport your kid to and from a school across town, you simply won’t apply for it, no matter how good it may be. That’s why, Jhaveri says, some districts with robust choice programs such as Oakland and Denver provide transportation for students to and from their chosen schools.
But an even larger challenge, according to Jhaveri, is the application and admissions process.
“In many cases, the whole process has remained archaic, opaque and extremely manual,” he said. “Parents have had to pick up 15, 20 different forms, different ones for each school, fill them out, take them back,” he said. That’s an access killer. And that’s if parents even know they have options in the first place.
A key to ensuring choices are real options – and ensuring some level of equity in who’s benefiting from them – is greatly simplifying and streamlining the application and admissions process. “Getting it on their smartphones, in their own language, in a common way so that you only have to answer a question one time for every school makes a big difference in how many families apply and who those families are,” Jhaveri said.
Some districts, Chicago and Denver and New York City are examples, now have a common application for choice schools. “In New York,” Jhaveri said, “you can now apply to all 215 choice schools using one form. In other places you can apply to 50 or 60 schools in less than two minutes on your smartphone, and that’s greatly leveled the field of access,” he said.
And language – getting application forms in native languages of families – is a major democratizer of choice applications. According to SchoolMint data, nearly half of all choice applications submitted in their systems are now done in languages other than English. That’s important because even though a student may speak English at school and with their peers, their parents (the ones finding and filling out the forms) may not.
To work, school choice options can’t follow the “Field of Dreams” model of “if you build it, they will come.” Many simply can’t. Effective choice programs have to not just build it, but they have to be sure people can get there – literally and figuratively. After all, a choice you cannot use is no choice at all.
