The underlying theory supporting school choice reforms, most notably articulated by Milton Friedman in his 1955 essay "The Role of Government in Education," touts the potential for competition through publicly funded school options to better meet the needs of students and families.

With respect to competition and family preferences, school choice is depicted as one way to break down the “government monopoly” on public schools while ensuring that families are at greater liberty to select schools they discern to be the best fit for their child. The efficacy and promise of school choice are inherently tied to the idea that families have adequate resources and information to make these decisions.

More than 30 years have passed since the first charter school in the U.S. opened its doors. As the number and proportion of students attending charter schools has risen dramatically over this time, so too has research attempting to address the purported benefits and drawbacks of school choice reforms.

In School’s Choice: How Charter Schools Control Access and Shape Enrollment (Teachers College Press, 2021), Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner review more than two decades of academic literature, popular media, and state and federal policies to offer a more critical perspective on school choice.

School choice is commonly framed as a straightforward decision-making process. For example, out of dissatisfaction with their traditional neighborhood school, parents opt to enroll their child in a school specializing in STEM or whose mission doubles down on college preparation and access. While this configuration of school choice has undoubtedly helped to garner political support for choice reforms in red and blue states alike, Mommandi and Welner argue this vision of school choice is far from reality. Mommandi and Welner contend that charter schools often play an outsize role in shaping enrollment.

In great depth, Mommandi, a doctoral candidate in education policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Welner, a professor there as well as the director of the National Education Policy Center, describe an assortment of barriers that inhibit charter school enrollment as well as policies and practices that charter schools have implemented to deter certain student groups from continued enrollment.

Like traditional public schools, charter schools are prohibited from discriminating against students in the admissions process. Nevertheless, many have found ways around state and federal laws intended to prevent such behavior. For instance, lengthy or complicated enrollment applications may pose undue transaction costs on parents; a lack of transportation to and from schools may change the set of schools that families consider applying to; required volunteer hours may be infeasible for working-class parents. In addition, accurate and accessible information on charter schools is not always available to students and families in given districts. Even when parents are able to enroll their child in their preferred school of choice, academic requirements and disciplinary policies may prevent enrollment in subsequent years. Each of these practices limits the extent to which families can actually exercise the level of choice that reforms expanding access to charter schools were intended to engender.

This excerpt from Mommandi and Welner’s chapter entitled “Pursuing Equity Against the Tide” sheds light on several policies and practices that districts, cities, and states have implemented to help ensure charter schools are not catalysts for further school segregation and stratification. They provide an overview of Washington D.C.’s “mystery shopper” program, which has employees of the D.C. Public Charter School Board pose as parents in phone calls with charter school staff. The calls are intended to elicit whether charter schools provide adequate enrollment information or discriminate against families interested in enrolling a child with special needs. Weighted lotteries based on location or other student demographic characteristics offer some potential for diversifying charter school enrollment but have yet to be codified into law in many states. Similarly, only 15 states specify who is responsible for providing transportation to charter schools. 

The excerpt concludes with a brief overview of the barriers to access at BASIS schools in Arizona and how these barriers are actively incentivized by state policies. The issues associated with student enrollment at BASIS schools and, conversely, promising policies to promote equity and inclusion in charter school enrollment and retention both underscore the need for regulatory oversight and more effective state and federal laws to ensure fairness in charter school admissions and enrollment.

Mommandi and Welner argue throughout their book that school choice reforms exacerbate segregation and stratification, particularly in a society with a seemingly high tolerance for stratification. Issues of access to charter schools alluded to here pose a number of threats to the mission of public education in a democratic society.

Policymakers would do well to take note of Mommandi and Welner’s research and consider what systems and policies are in place to ensure that charter schools are equally accessible to students from all backgrounds. Where such systems and policies don’t exist, schools do more of the choosing than families.

Daniel Sparks
Research Associate, NCSPE
May 8, 2023