Comparing Private School Regulations
One of my all-time favorite TV insults came from the Aaron Sorkin-written show The West Wing when Vice President John Hoynes tells communications director Toby Ziegler, “Toby, the total tonnage of what I know that you don’t could stun a team of oxen in its tracks.”
Working on our latest report, School Starter Checklist Rankings, reminded me of that insult, because this report tries to weigh the total tonnage of private school regulations in each state and compare them to each other.
In this report, we build off of the School Starter Checklist, a report published last year describing state-level regulations on private schools. We looked through statutes and regulatory documents to identify what states require private schools to do with respect to everything from whether or not schools need to be accredited by the state, to requirements on school days and school years, to testing, to recording keeping, and more.
In completing such a process, it becomes clear that different states take different approaches toward regulating private schools. Some are more prescriptive, and some are more hands off. Some have much more direct oversight and can act as gatekeepers for schools to be able to operate, for teachers to be able to teach in them, or both. Others grant private schools more autonomy.
We at EdChoice are firmly on the side of autonomy. Private schools are private for a reason. They want to act differently and be different. We do not believe that there is one right way to educate children, and parents should be free to choose from schools that meaningfully differ from each other. That means allowing schools to do different things and be accountable to parents for what they do. That said, we are not anarchists. We believe in parental rights but recognize that those rights are not absolute. There is a role for regulation.
Yet, every regulation, no matter how reasonable, imposes a cost. To measure the total tonnage of regulations on private schools we created a stoplight pattern. “Green” regulations are reasonable and appropriate. “Yellow” regulations could be appropriate or problematic, depending on how the state enforces them. We do not and cannot have granular knowledge about how each state interprets every one of its regulations, but we also want to compare states to each other. Given this, creating a relatively broad “proceed with caution” category — yellow — seemed appropriate. Finally, we have “red” regulations that are inappropriate or problematic.
We have individual pages for each state, classifying their regulations in eight areas: accreditation, nonprofit requirements, school day and year, curriculum, record keeping, testing, teacher certification, and health and safety.
Here is what the full picture looks like:
We have also created state specific pages, with appropriate quotations from the School Starter Checklist to justify the various classifications.
Before I go, I do want to try and head off one avenue of potential criticism. We were only able to use the words on the statutory or regulatory page when we were doing our classifications. When in doubt, we deferred to “yellow” because we do not have the on-the-ground granular details to know how these rules and regulations are implemented. It could be possible that a regulation that looks onerous is not emphasized by regulators and thus isn’t that big of a deal. It is also possible that what looks like a benign regulation is actually quite onerous based on the vigor with which it is enforced. We simply cannot know these details for all 50 states. We did the best we could, knowing that it is a necessarily broader brush examination than an in-depth, state-focused study could do.
So what do we think? Are some states surprises? How did your state stack up? Let us know!
