There are many good reasons to provide educational options to all children, not just some. The best reason, of course, is that all children deserve access to the education that best fits their needs. No child should be stuck in a substandard school just because of her ZIP code.
A more practical reason is the difficulty of trying to divide the will-haves from the won’t-haves. A late-breaking, nit-picking kerfuffle over Georgia’s new Promise Scholarship illustrates why.
In March, legislators approved Senate Bill 233 to create these $6,500 scholarships for students who choose to leave their public school for a non-public education, such as private school or homeschooling. Among the requirements are these two provisions:
First: “The student is currently enrolled and has been continuously enrolled in a Georgia public school” for a set period of time, unless that student is eligible for kindergarten.
Second: “The student resides in the attendance zone of a public school that is included on the list of public schools” defined later as “the lowest 25 percent of all public schools based on the cumulative individual school ratings.”
There’s only one way to read those requirements, unless you want to tie yourself in knots to arrive at some other, predetermined conclusion. Any public-school student zoned for any bottom-25% school – not just the one he attends – is eligible.
That’s how the state agency responsible for the Promise Scholarship is implementing the law. So, an elementary school student zoned for a bottom-25% middle school is eligible today, even if her elementary school isn’t listed.
Some people are not happy about that. Do they have a point? Should they?
Again, the language of the bill is clear: “resides in the attendance zone of a public school that is included on the list.” And it wasn’t part of some last-minute switcheroo. SB 233 began with universal eligibility; the bottom-25% requirement was added as a floor amendment in the Senate on March 6, 2023. The bill received final passage over a year later. Many elements of the bill were changed in between, but not that one.
Should the bill have been written differently, requiring a student to attend the bottom-25% school before opting out of it?
I don’t believe so. But even if you disagree, know that trying to enforce such a requirement would be an arbitrary, bureaucratic, anti-student nightmare:
Even small disruptions to a child’s education can be harmful. If a child is bound for a bottom-25% school eventually, why make her wait to make a change instead of finding the right educational setting now?
Not every family wants all their children to attend the same school, because every child has different needs – even within families. But many families do make that choice. Basing eligibility on all schools in their attendance zone helps them keep their kids together.
If a child is zoned for one school on the list, then the other schools he’s zoned for probably aren’t high-achieving, either. Chances are, they fall close to the threshold for being in the bottom 25% – which itself is an extremely low (and arbitrary) bar to clear. If a student lives in that attendance zone, he needs and deserves other options.
What about a child in the fifth grade? If he would be sent to a bottom-25% middle school next year, shouldn’t he be eligible to apply for the Promise Scholarship for that year?
Even if the scholarship’s eligibility is broader than some people understood, it won’t be a larger program. SB 233 set a budgetary cap that’s also fairly arbitrary and, at just 1% of total state K-12 funding, pretty miniscule. It would fund about 22,000 scholarships. Regardless of how many students meet the bottom-25% requirement, the actual size of the program hasn’t changed.
These considerations highlight a key point: Once more, adults are arguing about systems, and the effects on those systems, rather than students and their needs. The education of those students is the point of the systems, and of the Promise Scholarship.
Any discussion about anything besides providing more opportunities to more students is missing the point.