My third entry in my Benchmark Project comparing the Grosse Pointe Public School System with Ann Arbor, Birmingham, Bloomfield, Farmington, Northville, Novi, Plymouth-Canton, Rochester, and Troy.
Analysis of ten Metro Detroit suburban districts shows that eight of them lose more students than they gain in competition with other traditional and public school academy districts.
I introduced this series recently and came to this conclusion after assembling data from State of Michigan Department of Education data from 2010 to 2020. The study isolates on Full Time Equivalent (FTE) students to normalize against Michigan’s per pupil funding model. I excluded Special (or Added Needs) Student populations which have an entirely different set of enrollment policies, as well as unique revenue and expense models.
Surprising? Like other former and current policy makers, school choice is seen as a revenue driver. But in the 2019-20 school year among the ten benchmark districts I have selected, only Ann Arbor Public and Troy Public Schools gained more students than they lost via school choice.
Overall school choice enrollment is increasing (slide 1 below), a policy response by school boards to stagnant or shrinking populations and smaller proportion of school aged students (as we examined last week). As competition for students has tightened, school boards have been more inclined to increase caps on enrollment via school choice (section 105 students in Michigan policy parlance). The aggregate effect of school choice on enrollment reflects the steady increase in school choice dependence.
At first this seems like a rosy picture. Increased enrollment means more revenue. We see the aggregating effects below.
But local Michigan school districts cannot selectively compete in this game. Like it or not, you’re in it and have been for years as Michigan introduced public school academies and school choice options. The local policy choice only creates, limits, or forbids out-of-district enrollment, but cannot prevent in-district students from choosing other options. As slide 2 below reflects, over the last ten years nine of the ten benchmark districts have seen a steady increase in school choice student exports.
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Combining the imports of slide 1 with the exports of slide 2 reveals that in 2020, only Ann Arbor and Troy have attracted more school choice students than they have lost. Seven out of ten of the benchmark districts have seen this disparity widen over the last ten years.
Conclusions? Tough to say and we ought to be cautious, but we might agree that:
- School choice has amped up competition and for the most part traditional metro Detroit suburban districts have lost share
- Ann Arbor and Troy Public Schools are the exception and merit analysis as to how they have gained share in the face of competition
- Enough data is available to examine whether increased school choice is having an adverse effect on property values. (We’ll see if we can make a run at that in an ensuing post.)