NOTE: State Sen. Cliff Hite is holding a series of events around Ohio to discuss the topic of extracurricular activities and the fees being charged by schools for those activities. He intends to introduce a bill soon that could call for the banning of so-called pay-to-play fees. Chad Aldis spoke at one such event today. These are his written remarks.
My name is Chad Aldis. I am the vice president for Ohio policy and advocacy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Thank you for the opportunity to provide public comment today on pay-to-play fees.
Before I begin, I would like to commend Senator Hite for his focus on these issues. Policies like pay-to-play may aid schools with their immediate budgetary concerns, but they also put a strain on families. While many of the proposals that you will hear about today are a good start, I encourage you to think broader and perhaps even outside the box.
For years, the Fordham Institute has focused on education as a means of social mobility. Schools have long been championed as places where we can level the playing field for low-income children. Unfortunately, that leveling doesn’t happen as often as it should or even as often as it used to. Instead, schools have become the epicenter of not only the achievement gap, but also the opportunity gap— the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities that contribute to the achievement gap.
The opportunities that I’m referring to include extracurricular activities like sports, clubs, and teams. But they also include field trips and experiential learning that happen outside the walls of a classroom. These areas don’t get as much attention. Recent research has given us more insight into the power of these experiences. For example, education professor Jay Greene has conducted research on the educational value of field trips. In particular, he studied the impact of a field trip to an art museum and found that students retained a great deal of factual information from their tours. Beyond that, he found that the trip exposed students to a diversity of ideas, peoples, places, and time periods, thereby creating higher measures of empathy and tolerance among students. In addition, students who attended the museum tour later displayed a demonstrably stronger ability to think critically than those who didn’t attend. Perhaps most important, though, is Greene’s finding that these benefits were generally much larger for students from less advantaged backgrounds. Students from rural areas and high-poverty schools, as well as minority students, typically showed gains that were between two and three times larger than those of the total sample.
Robert Putnam, the author of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, explained in his book that extracurricular activities were “invented in American schools, by social reformers, for the purpose of training kids in what we now call soft skills.” Fordham Institute President Mike Petrilli has called extracurriculars the “secret sauce” of American education. In short, these opportunities—the opportunities that policies like pay-to-play severely limit—are exactly what low-income students need in order to attain social mobility.
One potential solution is to create a competitive grant program that allows schools to compete for funds to lessen the consequences of the opportunity gap. Similar to the Straight A Fund, this program would allow schools struggling to provide extracurricular activities and field trips to come up with creative ideas, partnerships, and methods for ensuring that all students are given an equal chance to participate in valuable experiences. The students in grant-winning schools would certainly benefit, but schools across the state could also profit from the innovative ideas that such a program would showcase.
Education savings accounts (ESAs) could also be a solution. When policymakers think about ESAs, Nevada's recently enacted program probably comes to mind. The program, which was passed in 2015 and will launch in 2016, allows parents with children enrolled in a public or charter school to apply for an ESA that contains a percentage of what the state pays for their children’s education. Parents can then use these funds for education-related expenses from approved organizations including private schools, virtual schools, and tutoring facilities. Parents can also purchase supplemental materials and special needs services or pay for fees associated with tests like AP exams or the ACT and SAT.
Despite their potential, ESAs have been politically divisive. Considering recent battles over Common Core and charter schools, Ohio policymakers may be reluctant to start a battle over ESAs. But the Buckeye State doesn’t have to craft an ESA program identical to Nevada’s—in fact, Nevada’s program only allows ESAs to be used for after-school or summer activities if students opt out of public school. Ohio’s ESA, on the other hand, should allow students to stay enrolled in their traditional public or charter schools and still receive funds via the ESA. Low-income families could apply for and receive assistance to mitigate the effects of the opportunity gap without ever leaving their public schools. Funds that are housed in an ESA could be spent via a restricted-use debit card that applies only to state-approved programs. These programs don’t need to be limited to traditional museum tours or ending pay-to-play fees for athletics and clubs both inside and outside of school. There are plenty of other great experiences that kids can benefit from.
In conclusion, I urge you to consider unconventional measures for making true opportunities a reality for low-income families in Ohio. Ordering schools to immediately cease requiring payments may solve issues in the near future, but it carries the risk of creating a financial burden down the road that could force them to stop offering such activities altogether. Extracurricular activities and field trips have the power to make a massive and meaningful difference in the lives of thousands of Buckeye children, and we must protect those opportunities. I’m excited to see the attention being given to this issue, and I look forward to working together to make these reforms a reality.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak with you today. I am happy to answer any questions that you may have.
