Three ways to improve coverage of private education choice

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Three ways to improve coverage of private education choice  

Choice is reshaping educational opportunity in America. For the public to understand, journalists must better detail its implementation and its effects. 

By Ashley Jochim, independent education researcher 

In just a few short years, interest in publicly funded private education programs has skyrocketed.

Eight states added or expanded private education choice programs last year. Several more are expected to make the leap in the 2025 legislative session. The dizzying pace of change has shocked even the most bullish of advocates and left many others struggling to keep pace with an evolving landscape.
 
There is no question that private education choice programs are already reshaping the contours of educational opportunity in the United States.

But it’s hard to find this story in education journalism. With a few noteworthy exceptions, journalists have focused on trumpeting the talking points of pro- and anti-choice advocates or on the power struggle between the dueling sides.
 
As an education researcher who has spent a decade watching policymakers’ and advocates’ good intentions and grand promises meet disappointing ends, I know the results of private education choice programs aren’t guaranteed. Whether families use today’s programs to secure the educational opportunities they seek or end up no better off for the effort is a story worth telling.

With a few noteworthy exceptions, journalists have focused on trumpeting the talking points of pro- and anti-choice advocates.

Part of our series on covering school choice (see also Cowan, Fitzpatrick, and Kunichoff).

Here are three ways journalists can complicate the narrative about private education choice programs and help the public better understand not just the opposing viewpoints but what these programs actually deliver in the real world for the families who make use of them:

1. Make families the protagonists
 
Amid a media culture preoccupied with political winners and losers, it’s easy to neglect the human-scale impacts of education choice programs. As the single largest public investment in the work of childrearing, public education is intimately bound up with families’ hopes for the future and struggles to secure all that their children need. Telling the story of private education choice programs is fundamentally an exercise in illuminating these hopes and struggles.
 
This is less straightforward than it might appear at first glance. A recent Wall Street Journal story that illustrates how families used private education choice to escape public schools where their children faced violence and educational neglect may help readers understand why families turn to school choice and what they sometimes are able to secure with it.

But education choice, like anything in life, is full of both joy and disappointment.
 
Families turn to private education choice for a variety of reasons and bring varying needs and resources to their search for educational alternatives. Whether families can secure what they want hinges on many factors, most of which they do not control, including where they live, their household income, their religious, racial, and ethnic identities, and their children’s educational needs. Families who represent minority interests in their communities — a Jewish family in a predominantly Christian community, for example — may have different experiences with choice compared to majority interests.
 
Families' education choice journeys are also full of unexpected obstacles. Families can invest time and energy into researching their educational options — reviewing online information, visiting schools, talking with other parents — only to discover upon entry that the chosen school is nothing like they thought it would be, sending them fleeing towards the exit. Or they may put all their hopes on securing a seat at the “perfect school” only to learn that 300 other families had the same idea and they did not win the admissions lottery.
 
Understanding families’ real-world results with education choice means holding complexity and helping people understand the root causes of good and bad experiences.

Understanding families’ real-world results with education choice means holding complexity.
 

2. Use data to contextualize families’ stories — both good and bad
 
Depicting the variability in families’ experiences with private education choice programs is essential to bringing more nuance to a debate increasingly characterized by one-dimensional portraits. But journalists must do more than share compelling anecdotes and narratives; they must contextualize families’ stories with data and facts about private education choice programs.
 
Unfortunately, basic facts about private education choice programs are in short supply. This is in part because these programs are new and state data systems haven’t yet caught up to demand. But it is also a function of policymakers' decisions to shield private education choice programs from public scrutiny by intentionally and systematically limiting access to basic data on the schools and vendors that are benefiting from taxpayers’ investments.
 
Compare the data made available in Wisconsin, where members of the public can access data from 1990 to present on the payments received by participating private schools, to Florida, where not only has this information never been available, but the state has recently opted to stop producing information on private education choice altogether.
 
Understanding what’s happening in private education choice programs requires us to look beyond enrollment statistics. We need to know how many families return to public schools — often worse for wear — after short stints in private education choice programs. These data help us contextualize the ratio of good and bad experiences in private education choice programs, given that families tend to “vote with their feet.”
 
We also need to know more about the entities that are benefiting from taxpayers' dollars — including the financial incentives they operate under, whether they opened after the establishment of publicly-funded private education choice programs, and the number of newly-founded schools that subsequently close. 
 
In Milwaukee, which operates the nation’s oldest private education choice program, private schools purpose-built for the voucher program demonstrated startling high rates of failure, with the average one closing in just four years. While market enthusiasts sometimes celebrate such churn as evidence of a competitive marketplace, this ignores the steep costs to children and families, not to mention the taxpayer dollars wasted on ephemeral schools that were poorly designed from the start.

Journalists that bring data like these can help the public and policymakers contextualize families’ stories — good or bad — while bringing greater clarity to the question of whether private education is working as intended.

Journalists that bring data like these can help the public and policymakers contextualize families’ stories.

3. Question the talking points of researchers turned advocates
 
The hyper-partisan debate about private education choice programs has left trusted sources and reliable evidence in short supply. Both sound and unsound research is being wielded strategically by advocates to make misleading claims. Journalists who fail to ask hard questions risk parroting the very misinformation that good journalism is supposed to counteract.
 
While journalists can’t expect to have the methodological expertise to know whether every claim is supported by evidence, they can vet claims made by advocates using the advice of trusted experts who do have that expertise.
 
For example, an article written by Mark Keierleber for The 74 reported on a study that purported to show that students who participated in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program were significantly less likely to commit crime. Rather than simply parrot these findings — which hinge on expertise in evaluation methods — Keierleber turned to other experts and then brought their concerns back to the authors of the research paper to respond. The result: the lead author acknowledged more uncertainty in the research findings than would have otherwise been reported.
 
They can also do more to contextualize advocates’ claims by making links to the empirical evidence. A common talking point from private education choice advocates, for example, is that requiring private schools to test taxpayer-supported students using the state test is a “poison pill” that will undermine private schools’ good results.
 
Journalist Greg LaRose of the Louisiana Illuminator talked about this debate in his write-up of Louisiana’s new education savings account program, but he didn’t provide readers with any way to make sense of the claims on each side about whether state tests were essential or completely unnecessary. We have a lot of evidence on whether parents value state achievement tests, how they use them to make school choice decisions, and what impact, if any, testing has on the marketplace for schooling. But neither policymakers nor the public would know any of this, despite its material importance to a debate that is central to all private education choice programs.

Journalists who fail to ask hard questions risk parroting the very misinformation that good journalism is supposed to counteract.

This advice echoes some of what others have provided to The Grade.

I would double down on Josh Cowen’s suggestion to ask questions like “are parents getting what they’re promised?” as well as Cara Fitzpatrick’s concern over stories that parrot research findings from outlets (left or right) that aren’t reliably neutral arbitrators.
 
The stories journalists cover today will profoundly shape policymakers and the public’s understanding of the value of education choice and the opportunities to improve it.

Don’t squander the chance to shift people’s thinking based on the real-world results.
 
Ashley Jochim is an independent education researcher and part-time Consulting Principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University. Find her latest thoughts on education choice and everything else on X at @aejochim.
 
 
Previously from The Grade
 
CHOICE
 
'Agency in the system?': How to cover school choice (Yana Kunichoff)
Covering school choice during the 2024 campaign season (Josh Cowen)
‘A little bit shallow’: Cara Fitzpatrick calls for context & immediacy (Cara Fitzpatrick)
 
ELECTION 2024
 
Improving media coverage of state and local ballot measures
How to cover state education initiatives
How to prevent meaningless controversies from dominating school board coverage
What if school board races don’t really matter the way we think they do?