Does School Choice Need a Lemon Law?

When she moved her daughter into a reputable private school in Washington at the beginning of the pandemic, Ashley Jochim never imagined that she was preparing her daughter for failure.

Jochim, a mother of four and an education researcher, thought her second-grader would do better in the smaller, more flexible environment the private school offered. At first, she did. Her daughter was buoyant, in part because the school’s emphasis on student-centered learning meant that her daughter had exciting experiences like creating a sculpture from garbage and building forts in the woods. “I only had good things to say about it,” Jochim says. (Jochim asked that her daughter not be named for privacy.)

But by the time her daughter entered third grade, academic warning signs started to flash: A new teacher suggested that she was struggling with reading, writing and math, Jochim says.

“We were caught off guard by this, because all the reports [from the school] seemed to be that she was doing well,” Jochim says.

The school encouraged the family to seek an evaluation. So after an expensive neuropsychological examination, her daughter was diagnosed with “a trifecta of learning disabilities,” Jochim says, including dyslexia and dysgraphia, a neurological impairment that makes it hard to write.

It took nine months for the family to get those results. But while they were waiting, Jochim started looking into what curriculum the school used and how much time they were giving students to practice the foundational skills they need to read, such as phonics, word recognition and fluency. Jochim wrestled with the core ideas of the school’s hands-on approach and determined it wasn’t working for her child. During her daughter’s fourth grade year, Jochim pulled her out of the school.

The process took a toll. Her daughter lost friendships, and they both had to go through the rigmarole of changing schools. “I was kind of devastated,” Jochim says, adding that navigating the process of school choice felt almost impossible, even with her decade-plus experience in education research. Worse, there was no guarantee that moving her daughter back to public school would improve anything. And Jochim had been wrong before.

For families like Jochim’s, choosing can be exceedingly difficult. There’s uncertainty, and mistakes are costly. When students have to be moved from school it can uproot them, causing them to miss learning time and friends. For Jochim, a longtime education researcher, the experience was a professional reckoning, as well. It left her wondering: “If I could make such a catastrophic mistake, how do we help families avoid these types of things?”

Jochim’s answer? School choice needs a “lemon law,” a rule that safeguards consumers from faulty purchases. With such high stakes, families need to be able to identify low-quality education providers, she says. That means making schools disclose key facts about their programs and going after those that routinely misrepresent what they are offering, Jochim argues.

Tough Choices

Advocates argue that school choice delivers education attuned to family needs.

Currently, 28 states and the District of Columbia allow families to use public dollars to pay for private school. The election of Donald Trump — who will take office with a Republican-controlled legislature — also energized school-choice advocates, prompting speculation that new tax credits could boost the movement. For instance, while Trump’s first term failed to deliver $5 billion a year in federal tax credits for contributions to organizations that offer private school scholarships, that could change.

But a number of obstacles prevent families from getting what they want from school choice. For low-income families especially, exercising choice is tough. For example, in Arizona, where school choice is booming, hidden costs — including transportation because of where schools are available — have blocked low-income families from exercising school choice.

Regardless of socioeconomic status, families run into trouble getting information about school options, according to a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research hub at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Plus, the competitiveness of admissions in highly desirable schools means that not everyone can attend, the report notes.

Jochim, who authored the report, argues that consumers deserve basic consumer protections in private education choice programs and that these protections are uncontroversial in virtually every other private market. Choice on its own won’t ensure quality in education, she says. But in other sectors, consumers are empowered with information before the sale, so they can evaluate options fully. And they are protected if unscrupulous vendors misrepresent what they’re providing, Jochim says. For private choice programs, that could mean requiring them to publish information on their curriculum and data about how many students remain enrolled through all grades — a signal of a school’s quality.

The report also recommended funding organizations that provide information about schools, to help parents make informed choices.

There’s also a lot of opportunity to strengthen regulatory standards in private education choice programs without quashing the flexibility and innovation that some people value in them, Jochim adds.

Delayed Impacts

These days, for Jochim’s daughter, school has turned around.

When Jochim moved her daughter back to public school, the change was startling. The school had weekly spelling word lists, with regular homework and tests. Her daughter’s spelling-test grades shot up, all the way to 100 percent, and her scores on achievement tests improved. “I watched her really blossom academically, just in a learning environment where she had a little bit more direct instruction, a little bit more foundational skills practice,” Jochim says.

But she’s still behind in math, which Jochim considers a lingering effect of her daughter’s previous school.

Jochim says she’s not against school choice. But in her view, the school-choice movement needs to reckon with the cost of switching schools. “Schools are not like new restaurants you’re trying or breakfast cereal you’re buying at the grocery store, and they involve people’s emotions and relationships and children’s learning,” she says. “And so the idea that you can just fluidly switch from one place to another when it’s not working in this kind of frictionless environment — I know that it’s not true because I’ve experienced the pain that comes with having to rip a child out of a school that they love.”