|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Applications for funding through the CHOOSE Act will open to Alabama families on January 2. Signed by Governor Kay Ivey in March, the CHOOSE Act allows families to receive $7,000 per student enrolled in a participating private school, or $2,000 per student in a homeschool program.
Currently the program receives $100 million a year in state funding and the text of the bill suggests the legislature will not be loath to increase this number if enough families want to participate in the program. In July, Alabama Arise senior policy analyst Carol Gundlach told APR that in her opinion this funding is “money that’s coming out of the Education Trust Fund, money that could go to our public schools.”
A report recently released by the Economic Policy Institute, though, suggests that the CHOOSE Act could have far greater costs for Alabama’s public schools than the sticker price alone would suggest.
The report’s author, economist Hilary Wething, said that “vouchers undermine efforts to make excellent public education available to all children by pressuring fiscal resources available to public schools.”
“These externalities are not just a problem for public budgets,” she explained. “Students stand to lose out on their potential educational achievement when funding to schools is cut.”
Wething’s recent work attempts to quantify just how much decreased enrollment caused by school choice programs could affect schools’ budgets.
In Alabama, public schools receive state funding primarily based on average attendance numbers, which determine a school’s number of “teacher units.” Teacher units are then used as the primary determinant of state funding decisions. (The state legislature is currently considering changes to this formula, however.)
Under the current system, students leaving public schools for homeschool programs or private schools due to CHOOSE Act subsidies would reduce the amount of state funding for their former schools. Of course, if schools could reduce their expenses proportionally with reductions in attendance, this could be manageable. But as the report says, and as Gundlach told APR back in July, not all costs can be easily scaled back.
The report points out that “many educational costs, such as ongoing construction contracts, heating and utilities, curriculum development and principals’ offices, cannot be changed in the first several years of an enrollment decline.”
Capital costs, the expenses associated with building construction, maintenance, operations, and outstanding debts, are the most inflexible. In other words, their adjustment rate—the “rate at which costs can be reduced in relation to enrollment changes”—is the highest.
If a school loses some state funding as a result of a downturn in enrollment and is stuck with essentially the same level of capital costs, they would have to make up the difference by reducing spending on instruction, or on other services when possible.
The report also includes a downloadable spreadsheet which lets users select different values of declines in public school enrollment and adjustment rates for instruction, services, and capital costs.
Using the EPI’s default adjustment rates, schools in Alabama would see an average decrease in per-pupil education spending of $411 following a 5 percent decline in enrollment.
However, given the uncertainty about what formula Alabama will be using to calculate funding for schools in the near future and how popular the CHOOSE Act programs may be, the actual effects of the CHOOSE Act on the state’s public schools could very easily vary wildly from this rough estimate.
The number of families participating in the premier year of the CHOOSE Act will likely only be available after the application window for the 2025-2026 school year closes in April.
