Resident Scholar Frederick M. Hess

In October 2006, the American Enterprise Institute convened a meeting in Washington, D.C. to discuss what might be done to grow the human capital pipeline to support entrepreneurship in K-12 education. Participants included foundation officers, educational entrepreneurs, and policy analysts. While the gathering did not seek to formulate any grand consensus or blueprint, the authors hope that the following summary will spark further discussion and action on this critical issues in education reform.

Over the last two decades, there has been a surge in public policies seeking to give low-income families more choice about where to send their children to school. These changes in policy have both reflected and accommodated an influx of new educational providers, including school operators, technology firms, back-office service providers, tutors, and recruiting and hiring organizations. Particularly noticeable has been the creation of new schooling options, especially charter schools, but also private schools funded with public scholarships. In some places, like Washington, D.C.; Dayton, Ohio; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, these new options have achieved fairly substantial market share, sometimes reaching 25 percent.

What has become clear in these cases and elsewhere, however, is that the quantity of new entrants hasn’t always been matched by quality. While there is clearly a strong demand for options on the part of parents, and increasing demand from policymakers for new schools, new tutoring options, and new providers of back-office and support services, the supply side has failed to equal the demands. Even in school choice hotbeds, observers are likely to see much of the same kind of mixed performance, bureaucracy, and stagnation they are used to seeing in the district sector. Not only is this situation a lost opportunity; it also poses a real risk that policymakers’ enthusiasm for new options and choice will diminish over time as the supply-side reality dampens their hopes for progress. . . .

Click here to view the full text of this working paper as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI. Bryan C. Hassel is co-director of Public Impact.