Let families choose what’s best for student

By Mary Clare Reim

Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2016 | 2 a.m.

School choice is back in the spotlight thanks to Donald Trump’s announcement that he intends to make Betsy DeVos his administration’s secretary of education.

DeVos has been a vocal proponent of policies that offer students a variety of education options and empower parents to choose the option best-suited to meet their children’s needs.

With DeVos in charge, the Education Department certainly would be in for a paradigm shift. For years, its policies have been defined by high spending and increased federal intervention in education. And in the Obama era, school choice initiatives such as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program were actively discouraged.

The secretary-designate has been right to champion school choice. A growing body of research demonstrates that choice significantly improves graduation rates for students, improves reading and math scores, leaves parents more satisfied with their children’s educational experiences and improves outcomes for students at surrounding public schools.

With all that going for it, it’s high time to expand choice to all students.

Admittedly, the federal government has limited options for advancing choice. But it could start by supporting and expanding the highly successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, and eventually working to further expand school choice throughout the nation’s capital.

Expanding options for Native American children who attend Bureau of Indian Education schools is another worthy project. This could be accomplished by providing education savings accounts for those students.

In addition to supporting education choice, the incoming administration can set a new tone on Common Core. DeVos already has made her opinion known on that matter, saying, “I am not a supporter, period.”

Under President Barack Obama, the Education Department actively encouraged states to adopt the controversial Common Core standards. It did so by pouring $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding to states conditioned in part on adoption of “common standards” and through waivers from some of the more onerous regulations imposed by the federal No Child Left Behind initiative.

It is now time to empower states fully to exit Common Core, reclaim their own standards and work on improving them by borrowing the best standards from other states.

The incoming administration, along with Congress, also has an opportunity to advance reforms to higher education. While the Education Department continues to micromanage local school policy in K-12 education, colleges are not free from federal intervention either.

Any renewal of the Higher Education Act should apply a student-centered philosophy to the higher education realm. As with K-12 education, funding should be portable and flexible, following each student to the education opportunities he or she needs to succeed. One promising way to achieve this goal is to decouple federal financing from the accreditation process. Stripping the feds of the power to use rigid and outdated criteria to declare some institutions winners and others losers would allow innovative and more effective approaches to teaching to flourish — both inside and outside of traditional colleges and universities.

Congress also should rein in federal subsidies for higher education. More evidence suggests that the Bennett Hypothesis is, indeed, correct. That hypothesis posits that the more the federal government subsidizes higher education, the more expensive college becomes. Many families — and students with tens of thousands of dollars in college debt — can attest to this. Making space for a private lending market and alternative financing options can help curtail subsidy-fueled increases in tuition prices.

For years, education spending from kindergarten through higher education has skyrocketed with virtually no progress to show for it. Students, families and taxpayers would be well-served by policies that limit federal intervention at all levels and advance education choice where appropriate.

Mary Clare Reim is a research associate in the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Family, Community and Opportunity. She wrote this for insidesources.com.