Florida’s evolving public education system needs fact-based discussion

This op-ed was originally published in Tampa Bay Times on Nov. 6.

The state’s education market isn’t the problem. It just needs the right design.

I have tremendous respect for Pinellas County School Board member Laura Hine’s commitment to public service, her passion for serving our community’s children and her desire to improve Florida’s public education system. But her recent column, “Is unregulated capitalism the best way to educate Florida kids?,” frames the issue too starkly. Florida’s education system is changing rapidly, and the questions surrounding these changes are too nuanced and consequential to be reduced to a choice between traditional public education and “unregulated capitalism.”

To help ensure these changes produce improvements, we need rational, fact-based dialogue about how Florida’s evolving public education system should be designed and managed.

Public education, like health care, housing, transportation and many government benefit programs, operates within a regulated market. Students and families create demand for educational services, while schools and other providers create supply. Florida’s public education market is not “unregulated capitalism.” Government determines who may participate, how public funds may be used, and many of the conditions under which providers operate.

Some people object to calling public education a market because they associate markets exclusively with commerce and profit. But markets are simply mechanisms for matching supply and demand, and many markets exist primarily to accomplish important public goals.

Nobel laureate Alvin Roth’s work illustrates this distinction. Roth helped redesign markets that match medical students with hospital residencies, students with public schools, and kidney donors with patients. Money does not determine who receives a kidney, yet economists appropriately describe kidney exchange as a market. The challenge is designing markets that match supply and demand effectively.

Roth’s work also demonstrates why competition should not be understood solely as a process for producing winners and losers. Poorly designed markets often produce undesirable outcomes, but those outcomes are not inherent features of markets. Good market design matters.

We heard similar concerns about winners and losers when Pinellas opened its first fundamental school in 1976 and began opening magnet programs in 1984. Critics worried that choice would concentrate strong students, teachers and engaged families in a handful of schools, thereby weakening other district schools.

Those of us who helped launch these choice programs were committed to managing them and the overall system in ways that benefited students throughout the district. Nearly 50 years later, Pinellas offers 89 choice programs serving students with widely varying interests and needs.

I have a neighbor who doubts he would have graduated from high school had he not enrolled in the Automotive Academy at Northeast High School. He is now a world-class auto mechanic in his early 30s who owns a home in a middle-class neighborhood. For him, having access to an educational option that better matched his interests and abilities was life-changing.

Research by economists David Figlio and Cassandra Hart provides evidence that competition can benefit students in district neighborhood schools. They found that Florida public schools exposed to greater competition from the state’s tax-credit scholarship program experienced greater improvements in student test scores than schools facing less competition.

Hine and I agree that good market design includes appropriate requirements for providers entering the public education market, although we may disagree about what those requirements should be. I am not a fan of our current school accreditation and teacher certification requirements. Some of the worst schools I have worked with over the last 48 years were accredited, and my years as a teachers’ union president convinced me that teacher certification is a weak proxy for teacher quality.

But Florida does have a responsibility to establish appropriate health and safety requirements for educational providers receiving public funds and to protect students and taxpayers from fraud and abuse.

I also agree with Hine about the importance of information. With nearly half of Florida students now participating in some form of education choice, families are making consequential decisions with limited comparable information about educational programs and outcomes.

Building this information infrastructure will be a significant undertaking for state government. We should have started years ago. Making useful, understandable information available to families should be a priority for our incoming governor and legislative leaders.

Another immediate challenge and opportunity is facilities. Entrepreneurial educators often struggle to find appropriate and affordable space to start and expand innovative programs, particularly in urban areas, while some school districts simultaneously have under-enrolled buildings and are considering closing schools.

Rather than viewing these developments as unrelated problems, districts and state policymakers should explore ways to use excess public-school capacity more effectively and keep neighborhood schools open.

Where operationally feasible, sharing or leasing unused space could help districts preserve valuable public assets while enabling additional educational providers to serve families. Security, financing, governance and other logistical issues will need to be addressed, but those are design challenges worth solving.

Many district leaders worry that helping other providers expand could further reduce district enrollment. But that illustrates the danger of viewing public education primarily as a competition among institutions for market share.

Public school teachers, charter schools, private schools, homeschool families and entrepreneurial educators are not on opposing teams. They are participants in a public education system whose shared purpose is to serve all students well.

Hine and I agree that Florida has an obligation to protect children, safeguard taxpayers and give families reliable information about educational quality. Where we differ is whether choice and competition are inherently threats to those goals. They are not.

The challenge facing Florida is not whether we should have an education market. We already do and always will. The challenge is designing that market so families have good information, educators have opportunities to innovate, public assets are used wisely, and all students have access to educational opportunities that meet their needs.

Meeting that challenge will require district educators, charter schools, private schools, homeschool families and state leaders to see one another as participants in a shared public mission: helping all Florida students develop their full potential and prepare for productive and fulfilling lives.

Doug Tuthill is the former president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association and Step Up For Students, the nation’s largest nonprofit education choice organization. Tuthill is currently a distinguished senior fellow in education at the Pioneer Institute and author of the forthcoming book, The Third Era of Public Education.