In one Iowa city, public schools compete in the free market. Are students better off?

This week, school choice.

Those two words cover all kinds of programs that are meant to let parents choose to send their child to a school other than their neighborhood public school. Maybe it's to another public school or a public charter school or even a private school. In the US, school choice is often politically charged and even emotional. I hate to even say that I would consider it.

“But I think I represent a lot of families that, before not looking at the best situation for our kids,”

we're going to move our kids to a private school. I don't want to do that. Today on the Sunday Story, MPR Education correspondent Corey Turner takes us to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city swimming in choice.

To understand what increased school choice really looks like for parents who want the best for their kids.

Corey joins us now. Welcome. Thanks for having me, Ayesha. So Corey school choice is this idea that covers such a wide range of programs and policies. Can you walk us through the basics?

Yeah, you bet. So think of school choice as a spectrum. Right, so on one end, you've got public school choice. Things like magnet programs and open enrollment policies that allow kids to apply to other public schools. Either in their home districts or maybe in a neighboring district.

Then you move over a little bit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. You've got charter schools, which are technically public schools, but they're managed independently. And they're often exempted from oversight.

And then finally, at the other end of the spectrum, you've got private school choice.

The idea here is to use public dollars to help families pay for private, even religious schools. Using things like vouchers or education savings accounts known as ESAs. And today, Ayesha, I want to take you to Iowa because they have the full spectrum, including one of the most generous private school ESA programs in the whole country. Starting this school year, the states offering any child in Iowa. $8,000 a year to spend in a private school.

I mean, that's nothing to sneeze at. Right, so that can January. Republican Governor Kim Reynolds made clear she's done with the old public school system status quo. Our message to the nation is simple. In Iowa, we fund students, not systems.

For Reynolds and other Republicans pushing for more school choice, the point here isn't just to help families move from school A to school B. The idea really is to put pressure on the public schools to improve by creating competition. When we come back, just what that competition actually looks like inside schools. Stay with us.

“What happens when our political party becomes the prison through which we see every other aspect of our identities?”

What we're living through, I think, is really the two parties taking opposite sides on whether we want to keep making this type of social progress or whether we want to go back in time. This is the MPR's coach podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with NPR education correspondent, Corey Turner, all right, Corey, you're taking us to see the rapids. Where do we start? Well, I want to start back in January.

We're at a school board meeting for the city's public schools. It's known as the Cedar Rapids Community School District, service about 14,000 kids. And they're in financial hole in part because they're losing students and dollars to school choice. And to really write size, the district says it needs to close up to six elementary schools. So at this meeting in January, parents are angry about this idea that they might lose their neighborhood public school.

“Have you thought about the cost of it, the emotional and mental impact it's going to have on our children?”

On the teachers' jobs that you are costing, some of the best teachers I have ever seen in my damn life, I'm sorry. Apparently Marlowe was clearly angry Elizabeth Palmer-Roy broke down. As a parent, I am trying to plan not just for one child, but excuse me. How these girls, excuse me. But how these changes were put across her entire household.

Tell me more about, like, why did the district feel like they have to start closing schools? Well, there are a bunch of reasons here I should, but they've really all come down to money. Many of the school buildings are old and they need to be either renovated or replaced.

It's one of the schools on the chopping block.

“It's 75 years old and it feels like it's from another era.”

It's not ADA compliant. It has a fire place in the library that doesn't work anymore. It's got lots of wood paneling and old windows in the main hallway. I love this, I don't know what the word would be be beveled glass, like these windows. They're pretty fragile.

I feel broken, but we make it work this way. Principal Conrad already gave me the tour. We'll hear more from her later for now. I just want you to know that line, she said, we'll make it work. It's really the mantra of a principal running a cash-strap school.

But we made it work.

It's easy to see that this school was once beautiful.

It remains a cornerstone of the community, but it needs money. And twice the district actually asked voters for help for extra money through a bond measure. But twice, voter said, no.

“I was funding formula, the per student amount.”

It's lagged in place for years. And then there is the money crunch that comes with school choice. Cedar Rapids has, again, for years, been losing students to suburban public schools through the state's open enrollment program. And now it's losing kids to a brand new charter school and to private schools. It seems like it's having a real impact, right?

It is absolutely, absolutely. And so when I went to Cedar Rapids, my goal was really to visit the competition and to see how this works. So I want to start you off here with a visit to that brand new charter school I just mentioned. How far away is it? Am I going to have maybe?

I got a driving tour from Justin Blitz. He's the charter school's founding principal. He showed me around the modest industrial town of Cedar Rapids, which by the way is home of Quaker Oats. You can usually figure out what cereals being made by my dad actually works at Quaker. What am I smelling?

Yesterday was really weird in sweet. Was it crunch berries? Was it crunch berry day? Maybe. Might have been.

Crunch berries. As in cat and crunch. So his school, Cedar Rapids prep, is in its first full year as a middle school. But Blitz took me to see the much larger spot that they planned to grow into and that he hopes to have ready by the fall.

The future middle and elementary school was in the middle of a multi-million dollar floor to studs remodel.

And it was already clear, Aisha. Justin Blitz envisioned a pretty incredible school. This area, which was all cubicles essentially prior, will be our science wing. So we'll have premier lab space in the middle that we'll have all the features of a college level lab. But the building's coolest feature is in the cafeteria.

Well wait, there is literally like a playground slide down here by the cafeteria that appears to go up to the second floor. Yeah, so it was not hard to sell our kids on moving to a new space. When I said well guess what? You can take a slide from class to lunch every day. They were sold so.

So I had to try it out. Here we go. Oh, that's pretty good. That's a nice slide. I mean, you sounded very composed there. You went down like, I would down.

I mean, like, I mean, you went down like totally stoic. Because I would have left. But I have to say my kids would love that. So I can see how the kids would love it. I mean, if I were 10, I would want to go to this school.

And that's part of the point here, Aisha. It's an easy sell, which is one more reason Justin Blitz who used to work for Cedar Rapids public. Schools told me he's actually been taking some heat from folks for going over to the competition. I've received, you know, anonymous mail saying, you know, I hope you're glad you're ruining public education. And, you know, which is, you know, it hurts.

So ruining public education. Like that.

“I mean, that's a strong accusation of what impact is he having?”

Well, the district told me it lost about 230 kids. To blitz his new school. And when a child leaves to go to a charter school, they take more than $8,000 of state and local funding with them. So even though prep is technically a public charter school,

their gain is absolutely the district's loss. So I guess my next question is like, why are families leaving the traditional public schools? Well, I spoke with a bunch of families when I was there, including Oscar and Adam Kasvara, who took three of their children out of their local public school. And then rolled them at Cedar Rapids prep.

Adam told me that he and Oscar fully support public education.

You know, I'm engaged you from Wisconsin with six Latino children married to an Argentine.

I am a liberal through and through.

“But Oscar Kasvara told me something happened at their daughter, Erica's traditional public school.”

"When did this call call me?" It's like, "It can't need to be with it police." "And I am like, excuse me." She had witnessed something at the school. So they were calling to tell us that the police were about to question her.

The case varies told me, Erica also needs extra support at school. But her teachers were often too busy managing behavior to give it. Even asked Erica about this when we were in the car with Oscar. And they were just trying to like control the students, which didn't really ever work out. Because they just end up arguing with them.

And then they just have to call someone to get the students, which still didn't really do anything. Was that pretty common? Yeah. Nice book with several charter school families who all told me pretty similar stories. So I looked at the data.

Last year, the Cedar Rapids School District recorded nearly 4,000 incidents that led to a suspension or expulsion. And this is in a district that serves around 14,000 kids. That's a lot of disruption considering this level of punishment is supposed to be reserved for the most severe behavior. I asked the district about this too, and they said a couple things that they are more accurately recording incidents. Now that might not have been recorded in previous years.

And that after COVID, they did see a rise in intense behavior that led to more safety issues and more suspensions. Adam Case vera told me, he still supports the mission of public education. I believe in the greater good.

But my kids have to come first for me, for us, where two guys living in a small town in Iowa with six foster adopted kids.

And they came with some challenges and needs. And we have to make sure that we make the choices that best suit those needs. Greater good has to come second. The greater good. You said at the top that public charter schools have to accept everyone who applies.

So, is that also the case for Cedar Rapids prep? Yes, prep is not selective. If more kids apply than they have slots, they have to use a lottery. Which is why the student body at prep mirrors pretty closely the public schools.

“But is there a downside to having Cedar Rapids prep as part of the public system?”

You know, this idea that this is ruining public education? It really depends on who you ask. So, the families I talk with say, "No, it's good, it's fair, and it's diverse, and it's free." But the district told me, again, the students in funding they're losing to schools like Cedar Rapids prep are part of the reason. They're now having to consolidate and close traditional neighborhood schools.

One thing I don't understand is if Cedar Rapids prep is trying to win over families like with the state of the art lab and the cafeteria slide, but it's still a public school, how can it afford all this stuff? This is where the plot thickens. It turns out, as a charter school, Cedar Rapids prep is largely funded for now by a billionaire philanthropist, Joe Ricketts, who founded TD Ameritrade. And so, in the free market that Iowa Republicans have tried to create in Cedar Rapids, the traditional public schools have to compete with prep,

even though they don't have Ricketts deep pockets.

“And families are asking, "Why does this charter school look so much nicer than those other public schools?”

You know, I want my kids to have Apple computers, and a college level chemistry lab, and an indoor slide?" And you know, not an obsolete fireplace, and all of that. And look, that's understandable. You want your kids to be in the nicest, best of the best, but also just because you don't have the best facilities doesn't mean that you don't have great teachers or what have you complicated. It's complicated. It's complicated thing. It's complicated. And since you put it that way, I have one more thing I need to share about Cedar Rapids prep that is very complicated.

And that is that after I left Cedar Rapids, principal Justin Blitz was arrested and charged with harassment for verbally threatening a woman.

Now, he is pled not guilty. At first, the school put Blitz on leave, it has since fired him, but that has definitely complicated the story for Cedar Rapids prep.

I mean, that is a plot twist. That is out of left field. Are there any larger implications to that?

Well, I think this is really interesting. Again, we're talking about in the ideal of free market. You're selling a product.

And Justin Blitz, as principal last year, was meeting with parents and selling a product. Prep was shiny and new. And now it is somewhat tainted. You know, Blitz's arrest was a big story locally. Now, I got back in touch with Adam K's Vera and find out how he's feeling. He told me he was shocked. But, quote, as long as the school moves forward, we remain on board.

And the school is moving forward. They have an interim principle.

“I think the real challenge is going to be next year in the year after,”

can they continue to attract parents if one of the only things families in the city know about the school,

is that their first principle was arrested.

When we come back, we'll visit with a family that chose to leave their local public school for a private Catholic school. Now that the state is helping to foot the bill, stay with us. We're back with this Sunday's story, and we're talking with MPR's Corey Turner about school choice, and specifically what's happening and see to wrap its Iowa. So where are we going next?

All right, we're going to Xavier High School, so private Catholic school on a beautiful sprawling campus on the city's north side. And I want to start, I use you in the hallway at the moment I saw what is the largest trophy case I have ever seen. Oh, my. You all take sports seriously. I'm just the runner up trophies. Wait, are you joking?

“No, I guess we do have a few championship ones.”

Only because we've run out of room. Chris McCarvel is the president of the entire Xavier Catholic school system, which includes roughly seven private elementary and or middle schools, plus Xavier High School all in and around Cedar Rapids. And I started with the trophy case because as somebody who's visited a lot of schools in my career,

what I really see here is success and money upstairs at the school. The high school has a beautiful chapel seats about a hundred students. They shouldn't be getting faith development just in theology. It should be part of the science curriculum, part of the math curriculum. It should be part of football. To be part of everything that we do.

That makes sense for a Catholic school religion would be a big part of its mission. How does Xavier pay for all of this? So it used to be a combination of tuition and financial support from alumni and the local parish. Next year families will pay between nine and ten thousand dollars a year in tuition, non Catholic families will pay a little more. Until recently tuition was high enough that Xavier was out of reach for some families in the city.

“And so what has this new private school choice program then meant for Xavier?”

I would think that more people could go. Yeah, it's meant a lot. Iowa Republicans created those education savings accounts. Again, essays back in 2023 and Chris McCarvel told me he remembered the day very clearly when it got signed into law. That was a really happy day for a lot of us in out in the speak for Catholic schools statewide.

Because that was something that we had been advocating for for many, many years decades. Now, any Iowa kid can get about eight thousand dollars from the state to help pay for private school tuition. And McCarvel told me almost all of the families now at Xavier are using it this year, about 98%. So what about the kids who are already enrolled in a private school last year and the year before whose families were already paying tuition? They're also using this benefit.

Yeah, the state's paying for them too, which is why it's costing now more than $300 million a year.

According to one estimate, more than half of students using the program were already at a private school. And I was not alone in this. I've seen this in other states, new choice programs. Rob Sand is Iowa state auditor and he's a rare Democrat elected to statewide office in Iowa. He's not a fan of this idea of paying private school students to keep doing what they were already doing.

That is dumb. We should not be using tax dollars to subsidize behavior that would exist without it. We're not making a difference. We are literally wasting money when we give it to people to do a thing that they would be doing anyways. That said, Aisha, I did talk to some public school parents who told me, look, these ESAs made a huge difference. And they opened the door to private school that was closed to them before.

I think for me to make the change that ESAs was necessary.

A few years ago, King, who is not Catholic, sent her youngest to public school. And she kind of bristled at the fact that many of her neighbors were using private schools. You don't send your kids to public school, that's so awful. But there was a reason. The reason, she said, was the same reason that she ended up switching to.

Her daughter's public school was pretty distracting, she said, with lots of fighting and yelling. I feel like I'm doing my duty. My duty is to pay my taxes, which I do.

“And if I am able to take some of the money that I've paid in to educate my child to a place where I feel like my kids getting a better education, I think that's okay.”

Even with this new choice program, the data suggests that Xavier schools may still be out of reach for the city's poorest families. So, of Xavier's more than 2,500 students, about 13% are low income. Compared to the public schools, where 57% of kids are low income. I actually asked McCarvel, if the point of public education is to serve all kids, to serve the common good, can private schools be relied on to do the same?

How are our schools not for the common good? If, again, our schools serve families that have a desire to have faith be an extension of what they get at home,

what they get at their parish, and our kids go out in the world and do amazing things, how and why is that any different than a public school?

Well, Corey, I want to ask you the same question that I asked about the charter schools, under the school choice program to get state dollars, do private schools have to accept all students? No, it's a very different story. Private schools by law have lots of say over who they accept. So they can turn away a child for poor grades or say a history of misbehavior. They can also say no to kids with disabilities.

By saying, look, we don't have the resources to give you what you need, which may be true. But it also means for those students, it's the schools doing the choosing. I asked Chris McCarvel about this. Often times for us what it comes down to is can we serve your child adequately?

And sometimes, unfortunately, the answer is no.

He told me he has been trying to make Xavier more welcoming for kids with disabilities. But that special education can be incredibly expensive, which helps explain why I issue. Again, the data. The share of kids with a special education plan known as an IEP is more than four times higher in the public schools than it is in Xavier's schools.

“Yeah, I mean, that's what I was thinking the whole time we're talking is I'm thinking, well, what about those students who are left behind?”

Because everybody isn't going and doing the school choice. You know, and that might take a parent who's really involved and understands the system, understands. And if you, you may not have those resources if you are grandma taking care of your grandkids and you don't even get on the internet. So who are these kids who are being left behind in a sense in these public schools? Well, I want to take you to Cleveland, I'm a trainer.

Come on. See if this is open. So this is the moment we played earlier, Isha. That's principal Conrad Alred. She's showing me the schools old library. It's now subdivided in smaller areas by these metal shelves and in one of these spots, a student with autism is walking in a circle with an adult enjoying a sensory break.

So that's like our sensory area that makes shift in our library. New or schools probably have a space for that, but we made it work. There it is. We made it work. Alred were a pink fanny pack with a walkie-talkie, so she could respond to a crisis at a moment's notice. At Cleveland, she runs a district wide program for kids with disabilities. And when we reached her office, there was actually student there too, who was calming down with an adult after a meltdown.

It's fitting that even all reds office is a kind of refuge.

“I remember thinking this in the moment, and it's because children with disabilities have federally protected rights to special education in public schools.”

But it's a very different story in private schools. Allred told me she has seen choice schools in Cedar Rapids either rejected disabled student outright or admit them only to push them out when they become too much work.

It's also clear though that families who don't need special services, some of them at least are taking their kids elsewhere and they're not coming back.

“Allred told me she has gone from more than 300 kids at Cleveland to about 250.”

Another reason the district suddenly announced Cleveland was on the chopping block, which led to a hard talk between allred and her family. My own son came home and said, "Are you going to have a job? Because it was all over social media, so he knew."

I said, "Yeah, I'll have a job. It's just where." So I will support, I will go wherever the district needs me to go, but it's sad to think about not coming here with the staff that we have.

Because we have a great staff who will do anything for kids.

“I mean, that's really tough. She just sounds really dedicated to these kids into the school.”

I mean, she lives in Brazil. And also going back to something you said earlier, Ayisha, Principal Allred told me, she really worries that school choice the way it's been built in Iowa is dividing families into those that have the time and the money and the know how to seek out these other options. You don't, but I do want to be really clear here. I spoke with a number of parents who could leave, but they don't want to. They love Cleveland. They love what it stands for, the staff, the legacy for 75 years.

Parent Antoine Jones has three kids at Cleveland. He says he's not going anywhere.

One of the reasons why I bought the home, why I did is because of Cleveland. You know, so it's very sad because I just think schools are the backbone of a community and not only do I fear like what will happen to my investment that I made into the community. I just fear what might happen to the community as a whole. Jones wakes up at two thirty in the morning to load cargo plans at the airport and when he's done around seven goes home helps his kids get ready for school. And then he goes with them, Ayisha, because he works during the day as a parent educator at Cleveland for kids with disabilities.

He told me he had no idea how hard all red and our teachers were working until until I had opportunity to come into the school system myself and see that it's so many kids that need help in the public school and then the job that the teachers are doing. I told Jones what we were talking about earlier, some parents saying they left the public schools because they felt like they'd gotten too disruptive and distracting even unsafe. But Jones pushed back on that. He's black. He told me he grew up in Chicago and said he remembers moving into a suburban neighborhood when he was in middle school and watching white families leave.

It's not for me to say it was right or was wrong, but a lot of the time like they say safety just because they don't want to say what it really is. I don't feel comfortable with my kids going out with those kids. And it turns out again, you look at the data, the share of white students in the district has dropped a lot over the past decade while the district share of students with disabilities and kids living in poverty has increased. And this isn't unique to see to wrap it. I've seen this in other cities too with school choice going back to principal already. She got really emotional when she talked about the old public school way, you know, serving the common good.

It's getting harder to harder to teach in public education and those of us that are here and who've been doing it for 25, 26 years, we truly believe in public education because someone needs to let someone needs to love and care for these kids. Nobody cares about. And it's not that the parents don't care. They don't have the access and know the federal laws and the laws to take to get them somewhere and even if they did, they might be denied.

“So, how do you make sense of all of this? Like, like, what do you feel like this means for the country?”

I don't think the takeaway from my trip to Cedar Rapids is school choice is unequivocally bad because it's not for the case veras and Stephanie King. You know, it got their kids into schools where they are happier and doing better. I don't think what's happening in Cedar Rapids is that unusual either. We've seen many states in recent years, really go all in on school choice, especially private school choice. The takeaway for me, Iesha, is public schools are still vitally important and they need protecting.

They are not businesses. They are not designed to compete. They're designed to serve every child.

Regardless of race or disability or income, whether they have one parent or two or none, whether they live in a big city or the tiniest town.

Our loose local networks of free public schools grew imperfectly out of that value to serve the common good.

“Now, it is possible that some version of school choice can also serve the common good, but I think it is really important.”

When politicians and communities ask themselves, is this working that they're not leaving the most vulnerable children behind?

Well, thank you so much for giving us some things to think about and for all of this reporting.

“Thanks for having me. It's going to pleasure.”

That was in PR education correspondent Cory Turner. This episode of the Sunday Story was produced by Justin Yan with help from Lauren Mugaki. It was edited by Jimmy Schmidt and Nicole Cohen, fact checking by Will Chase. The engineer was Jimmy Keely, special thanks to James Kelly at Iowa Public Radio and Grace King.

“The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior supervising producer Leonis Semstrum. Our executive producer is Irene Naguchi.”

I'm Aisha Roscoe and up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week until then have a great rest of your weekend.