Education Week - March 11, 2020 - 15

friends, church, and the internet,"
said Enlow. "They're doing the same
thing you and I would do when we
look for a new restaurant: You don't go
to the state regulator, you go to Yelp."
Or, you see a sign while you're driving around, as Natalie Gillepsie did.
She first learned about an incomebased tax-credit scholarship program
available in Florida when she saw garage-sale type signs on the lawn of a
Methodist church in Brooksville, Fla.
That was 10 years ago. Since then,
two of her nine children have used
tax-credit scholarships to attend private schools. A third, her daughter
Axi, is enrolled in Florida's Gardiner
program for students with severe special needs.
Axi, 15, has cerebral palsy and
found the public school she used to
attend "big and overwhelming," Gillepsie said, and she felt Axi was not
receiving the one-on-one services
required in her individualized education program.
"She couldn't sit up on her own or
walk and certainly if you can't even
balance your body on a chair, you
can't focus on learning," said Gillepsie. It can also be difficult to find
information on public schools, she
added.
Under the Gardiner program, state
funding allocated to Axi goes into
an education savings account which
Gillepsie can draw from to pay for approved education-related expenses-
in her case, private school tuition and
physical therapy.
Gillepsie, so far, has been happy
with the services that Axi has received at the private schools she
has attended with the help of the
Gardiner program. She's grateful to
the teachers who have taught to the
needs of Axi as well as the physical
therapists who helped her daughter
learn to stand.
Half of the 29 states with voucher
and related programs have ones exclusively for students with disabilities. Most have created programs for
low-income students.

Reasonable Regulations?
The list of state regulations that
were analyzed by the EdWeek Research Center is not exhaustive, and
private schools may be subject to additional accountability rules that are
not captured in the analysis.
For example, students using taxcredit scholarships in Florida must
take a nationally norm-referenced
test. While schools do not have to
report those scores directly to the
state, they must provide the results
to their students' parents and to an
independent research group selected
by the state to conduct an annual
evaluation of the program.
In Indiana, the state is not required by law to publicize how well
students in participating private
schools do on tests, but nonetheless
the state uses academic achievement
data to assign private schools A-F
grades just as it does its traditional
public schools and charter schools.
And while only 11 states require
that all teachers in participating private schools have bachelor's degrees,
some programs-such as the feder-

ally backed program in the District of
Columbia-do mandate that teachers of core subject areas, such as math
and English, have a college degree.
Nor does the Education Week
analysis touch on curriculum requirements for private schools that
receive public aid, an issue of major
concern for some groups such as the
American Civil Liberties Union.
"Private schools are not subject to
the same educational standards as
public schools, even when they accept public funding through vouchers," said Heather Weaver, an attorney for the ACLU, in an email to
Education Week. "This leads to taxpayer funding of curricula that are
deeply troubling and that run counter to recommended and legitimate
educational practices."
She cited several examples the
ACLU has found in Louisiana: "A
math textbook declared that 'the
laws of mathematics are a creation of
God and thus absolute' and thus restricted its lessons to 'workable traditional mathematics texts that are
not burdened with modern theories
such as set theory,'" she said. "One
school's history textbook stated that
'God used the Trail of Tears to bring
many Indians to Christ.' "
But it's because of religious rights
that states may be hesitant to more
thoroughly regulate private schools
in choice programs, many of which
are affiliated with a church, said
Marie A. Failinger, a professor of
law at Mitchell Hamline School of
Law in St. Paul, Minn., whose work
focuses on religion and policy. There
are still a lot of legal gray areas that
have not been hammered out yet
when it comes to what states can tell
private religious schools to do, even
if they're participating in a statesponsored school choice program,
she said.
"That's probably why states have
been reluctant to pass very comprehensive regulations," she said. "Because they don't know at what point
the courts are going to say, 'This violates the religious rights of parents to
educate their kids the way they want
to.' "
Or it may violate the religious freedom of schools. Maryland is one of
three states that explicitly require
schools to admit students regardless of their sexual orientation. The
state has been sued in federal court
by a private school it booted out of its
tax-credit scholarship program over
what the state described as a discriminatory policy toward LGBTQ
students. The school contends the
state unconstitutionally removed it
from the program because of its religious beliefs.

Finding a Balance
Many school-choice advocates-
including U.S. Education Secretary
Betsy DeVos-are deeply skeptical of
regulation in general and whether,
unchecked, it creates more bureaucracy than educational improvement.
"We don't know that taxpayer
funds are being used right just because we collect a lot of data," said
Enlow, the head of EdChoice. He

pointed to students who graduate
from high school with good grades
and then have to take remedial
classes in college.
Additionally, the whole point of
giving families school choice is to
have schools that look and operate
differently from one another, said
Enlow, and regulation may have the
effect of squeezing out the features of
what makes private schools distinct.
"You don't want to create a structure
of private schools that makes them
look like public schools," he said.
But supporters of school choice-
even among those who favor vouchers-are not a monolith. Some
believe that private school choice
programs should be more regulated.
Among them is John Schoenig, the
senior director for teacher formation
and education policy at the University of Notre Dame's Alliance for
Catholic Education.

"I think there is a threshold of
reasonable regulation on which
we can predicate receipt of public
funding," he said. "Now, we can
have debates about where the red
line should be drawn. I think it
is fair to draw the red line at, for
example, being able to in some
way verify that the teachers in
the schools meet some minimum
standard of reliability and quality."
Shoenig is worried that the debate
over private school accountability
in voucher programs is often cast in
extremes: that there needs to be little to no state regulation, otherwise
the state will take over the schools.
That misses a bigger issue, Schoenig contends, which is that private
school choice advocates right now
should be helping develop more
thorough accountability measures
that work for private schools before

states impose one-dimensional
measures of school quality.
After all, Schoenig said, private
schools can be autonomous and
more transparent-the two are not
mutually exclusive.
"Often in education we will talk
about accountability, but the antecedent to accountability is transparency," he said.
Librarian and Data Specialist Maya
Riser-Kositsky and Research Center
interns Xinchun Chen and Yukiko
Furuya contributed to this report.
Coverage of how parents work with
educators, community leaders, and
policymakers to make informed
decisions about their children's
education is supported by a grant
from the Walton Family Foundation.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

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