Giving Parents a Choice ♦ Giving Children a Chance

Scholarship Fund Giving Parents A Choice

Posted: 5/14/02

By Michael Warder

Education train wrecks are in the making in school districts throughout California.

Still, foundations, corporations, and families could cooperate together to make them less likely. In fact, that is what the Los Angeles Children's Scholarship Fund works to do right now. We help K-12 children get a better education through private scholarships.

Before explaining in more detail, consider the condition of California's largest school district, Los Angeles. With 736,000 students Superintendent Roy Romer recently stated that the district is now overcrowded by 180,000 students. It is only going to get worse.

So the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) wants to build 85 schools by 2007. With construction costs at $35,000 per student, or maybe $60,000 per student if your estimates of construction costs are a little less rosy, the cost to build these schools will be somewhere between $6 billion and $11 billion! In addition, the LAUSD needs to recruit thousands of new teachers to lead an increasing number of students in the face of teachers quitting or retiring.

Yet this coming year the LAUSD is forced to cut the current budget by about $500 million. Since California has a projected a massive deficit of $20-22 billion this year, the state cannot help. To spread out the cost of building schools statewide, the state Senate has just passed an authorization for a $25 billion bond, the largest in state history.

To round out the financial picture, the leader of the teachers union of Los Angeles, representing 48,000 members, is "promising" to hold the education bureaucrats responsible for an increase in salaries for its members. That is a barely veiled threat to strike. In the meantime, the Los Angeles schools in particular, and California schools in general, are ranked among the very worst in the country. Similar stories of financial woe abound throughout the state, but Los Angeles, in terms of sheer scale, has perhaps the biggest mountain to climb.

In this context, the work of the Los Angeles Children's Scholarship Fund is an important safety valve. The mission of the LACSF is to increase educational opportunity in the Los Angeles area and beyond by offering partial scholarships to children from low-income families.

Families are considered 'low-income," basically, if they qualify for the federal lunch program. The scholarships are 25%, 50%, or 75% of tuition based on a sliding scale that takes into account household income and the number of people that live in a household.

Parents choose the school their children attend, but each family heroically pays a minimum of $500. Scholarships for the coming school year are capped at $1,850 for K-8 and $3,000 for 9-12. Reflecting the population of Los Angeles, many of our families are Latino.

Does it work? The Los Angeles Children's Scholarship Fund (LACSF) has been operating for the last three years, and 2,910 children now participate in Los Angeles and more than 700 in outlying areas. The average K-8 scholarship is $1,174 and the average high school scholarship is $2,111. The average K-8 tuition is about $2,600 and the average 9-12 tuition is about $4,600. The average household income of participants is about $21,500.

Parents choose which school their children attend and over 700 schools participate. A Harvard study by Professor Paul Peterson concerning similar programs around the country shows that parents love the program. It is too early to reach definitive conclusions about academic achievement, except one. African-American students test significantly higher after participating in the program for two years. This group of participants was compared with a control group of families that were not randomly selected for these scholarships when the program began.

Could the program expand? The LACSF had to turn away over 50,000 children when the program was announced three years ago. In Los Angeles there are now about 12-14,000 places available in private schools. These schools include Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and secular. As classrooms in private schools begin to fill, likely more schools would be built. With more donations, the LACSF could offer more scholarships. Furthermore, the Children's Scholarship Fund (CSF) will match donations dollar for dollar to extend the scholarships for children in the program.

Educating a child in the public schools of California costs the state about $9,000 per average daily attendance (ADA) in K-12 when considering money from all sources, excluding capital outlay and debt service. Since our average scholarship is about $1,200, the LACSF saves the state money and frees up classroom space. We reduce the need for busing children from the overcrowded zones to the less crowded schools. Some of these trips take two hours one way. In those instances, parents can rarely, if ever, visit their child's school. Streets are more crowded with school bus traffic moving 70,000 students each day.

In addition to relieving the over crowding, these scholarships make for a quickened atmosphere for education reform, since public schools would have to compete for students. The program also sends dollars for education into some areas of the city that could use the stimulus. Most important the program gives parents and children educational options, and with those options come hope for a better life.