A Next Step for School Choice?

A fascinating proposal is being considered by the Los Angeles school board (here). Yesterday was the first meeting on it. The district has 50 schools that will come on line in the next couple of years. Instead of having the district run all of these new schools, Yolie Flores Aguilar, the vice president of the board, has proposed that there be a competitive process to determine who runs these new school sites. The school district itself could be one of the bidders, but would have to compete against others including charter school providers, union run schools, the mayor, and other non-profit/community groups. The thought of having the school district itself compete to run these schools would truly by a new evolution in thinking about the role of a school district. Finding adequate facilities is one of the biggest barriers to creating a new charter school. Some charter schools have been able to gain access to existing school facilities in LA, but generally these schools have been the bottom of the barrel facilities. Under this proposal brand new schools would be in play. As can be expected, this proposal will face much union opposition, and would likely create a lot of foundation support. As the LA Times editorial board concluded, this is a proposal worth consideration especially for the school sites that are located in parts of the districts where students do not currently have viable high quality school choice options. Setting up an effective set of criteria to determine who would operate the schools and expectation benchmarks that would need to be met to continue to operate the school would be a must. The specifics of the proposal start on page 7 (here).