A scholarship to help those students trapped in failing public schools to attend a school of their choice is near the top of the legislative agenda for several top lawmakers.  In his State of the State address this year, Gov. Rick Perry advocated “scholarship programs that give students a choice, especially those who are locked into low-performing schools.”  Senator Dan Patrick, at a December news conference with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, proposed a scholarship program that would allow students to attend any school, including those outside the public education system.  “It is immoral to say to any student or any parent, ‘You must go to a poor-performing school,’ ” Mr. Patrick said.  Since 1995, Texas has had the Public Education Grant, which allows students in struggling public schools to transfer to better performing campuses nearby, but it has been underused.  For students in schools that are designated unacceptable, the program provides a slightly higher amount of financing to allow them to attend better ones nearby. The new school district, if it chooses to accept the student, receives an additional 10 percent in state financing for that student.  In 2012, 566 of the state’s roughly 8,500 campuses had either an accountability rating of “unacceptable” or fewer than half their students passed state standardized tests in language arts and science — the two measures the state uses to determine whether students there can qualify for the grants.  That amounted to about 400,000 eligible students. Of those, 824 — two-tenths of 1 percent — took advantage of it that year. Through seven years of Texas Education Agency data, the number of students enrolled in the program has never reached 1 percent of those eligible.  “The idea at the time was to create choice for parents and for children that were struggling,” said Mike Moses, a former Dallas Independent School District superintendent who served as Gov. George W. Bush’s education commissioner when the state enacted the law. “It has never been heavily subscribed to.”  He said the program had not attracted wider enrollment primarily because of the cost of transportation and parents’ desire to keep children closer to home in neighborhood schools.  Students must provide their own transportation to their new schools if they transfer under the program, and the state does not provide financing for the transportation.  Parents tend to prefer improving community schools over sending their children to a new one across town, Mr. Moses said.  “Most people want their neighborhood schools to perform,” he said.  Mr. Patrick said that the issue of transportation was one that required “careful study” — and that no barriers should be placed between students and their schools of choice.  He added that he did not believe that underenrollment in the existing grants led to any conclusion about the need for a wider program.  “We have 100,000 people on the wait list for charters. I just look at the facts, and I see there are roughly 400,000 students that can look at a PEG grant,” he said. “That tells me that we aren’t getting the information out at the local level.”  If students apply for transfers under the grant, there is also no guarantee that the better-performing districts will accept them.  Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in an e-mail that some districts might make it easier to transfer under other policies, causing students to choose those routes instead.  She added that another reason for low enrollment could be that under the state’s accountability system, a school could be labeled unacceptable because certain subgroups, based on demographics, underperform on standardized tests.  But such a rating, while making every student who attends that campus eligible for a grant, does not always translate to widespread dissatisfaction with the school’s overall performance.  “Most people who have children enrolled in eligible schools never seek a transfer,” she said. “They are happy where they are.”
Top state lawmakers are taking another look at an underutilized scholarship program meant for students in poorly performing schools who want to transfer.