Education choice principles Utah should not forget

• Utah legislators in the current session should remember how the state became a leader in education choice: by focusing on giving parents real options.
• Education choice policies must protect the uniqueness of options.
• Serving parents must take priority over administrative interests.

Utah has made great strides in education choice in recent years. This session, our legislature should build on those gains and avoid unintentionally losing ground.

To move forward toward more robust education choice, Utah policymakers should start by remembering why it’s such a powerful policy in the first place. Education choice recognizes the reality that parents have the primary responsibility and the right to educate their children by providing access to, or protecting, options. Policy should not narrow, reduce, or impinge on this as the state seeks to address other issues.

Here are two key principles policymakers should remember as they debate education choice policy this session.

Education choice policies must protect the uniqueness of options

Every family is different, and every child is unique. We should seek to meet students’ unique learning needs so each student can thrive as an individual, which is why education choice and accompanying policies are so important.

In a technical sense, education choice has existed for decades, with a variety of public district schools and innovative private schools being available to families for many years. But popular private education choice policies, like education savings accounts, go further by giving public dollars to families to access private options. What such policies shouldn’t do, intentionally or unintentionally, is simultaneously require the removal of the unique features of these private options by over-standardizing them. In the end, this can reduce education choice by eroding the uniqueness of options.

For instance, Utah made headlines in 2023 with its expansive universal education savings account, the Utah Fits All Scholarship program. While it awaits a ruling from the Utah Supreme Court, legislators are seeking to adjust it in ways that could create problems down the road. The third substitute of H.B. 467 Utah Fits All Scholarship Program Modifications passed out of the House Education Committee on Tuesday morning. The bill modifies several provisions of the program, including introducing a novel definition of private schools.

Introducing this definition could have the impact of stifling innovation among those who would create private schools that families may seek in the future.

The bill also includes an effort to move toward accrediting private schools, which tends to standardize schools in the name of quality and reduce the number of players in a space that should be open for innovation.

The bill also imposes requirements on private schools and what they post on their website. While seemingly harmless, the impulse to mandate these kinds of things for private schools could grow over time and pave the way for more regulation.

Private schools and vendors must retain their distinctiveness for education choice to exist. If private education choice policies like the Utah Fits All Scholarship are to have meaning, additional policy changes should not run counter to the original purpose by imposing regulations that standardize, to the detriment of real choices.

Serving parents must take priority over administrative interests

Education choice policies need to make it easier for parents to make choices, not just easier for administrators to oversee programs. When it comes to any education choice program, it is legitimate to consider how the state will administer it and how to meet the burden this requires. But helping kids should always be the north star, and, in most cases, serving parents should take priority over administrative ease.

Utah’s open enrollment law is strong on the books but lacks implementation on the ground, mostly through a lack of compliance by school districts. This session, H.B. 529 Local School Board Reporting seeks to increase transparency of open enrollment information for parents by requiring districts to report data directly to the Utah State Board of Education and requiring the state board to aggregate and share this data on its website. It will likely increase the workload for district or state board staff to make that data available to parents, but the outcome is something the state should value. While we all want to reduce unnecessary administrative burdens on public schools, we should remember that if better service to parents sometimes brings some administrative impact on schools, it may be necessary anyway. Regulations that serve parents should be prioritized over other regulations.

Furthermore, private education choice programs, such as education savings accounts, can impose administrative burdens. Because they use tax dollars, they admittedly require a thoughtful framework to ensure accountability for those funds. At the same time, the purpose of the program – serving parents and students – ought to outweigh considerations like administrative burden in overseeing it.

Serving parents in their role as education decision-makers should guide decisions about administrative burdens or other interests.

Conclusion

Utah legislators in the current session should remember how the state became a leader in education choice: by focusing on giving parents real options. This session, they should focus their current work around the original zeal they had for helping parents find what works for their students.