OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — An Oklahoma bill would require students whose families receive public funds in return for sending their child to a private or home school to take the same standardized tests public school students are required to take to measure their performance.
House Bill 3585 would require any student attending a private school accredited by the Oklahoma State Board of Education, or any student “for whom a taxpayer has successfully claimed a tax credit pursuant to the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit Act” to take the same standardized tests as the law already requires Oklahoma public school students to take.
“We test every year in our public schools that we can look and see if we’re successfully or not educating these kids,” said the bill’s sponsor, State Representative Judd Strom (R-Bartlesville).
And with taxpayer dollars now being handed out to private school and homeschool families through Oklahoma’s Parental Choice Tax Credit, Strom says he wants to be able to see if the taxpayers supporting the program are getting a return on their investment.
“We, the legislature, devoted hundreds of millions of dollars resources over the next few years to the tax credit,” Strom said.
It’s why he says he introduced HB 3585.
“It simply gives us an opportunity to look on a year-by-year basis to see if we’re expending these resources… are they being spent well,” he said. “We need a metric to measure whether or not that’s a successful program, just like we do with any other appropriated dollar in the state of Oklahoma.”
The bill would not apply to private or home school students who do not take part in the tax credit program.
“And so I thought with this, really the very basic thing that we could do, was ask to assess reading and math and science only to kids that take this credit,” Strom said.
On the other side of things, are people like Tom Newell.
Newell is the vice president of the group ‘Yes, Every Kid,’ a national lobbying group pushing for public-funded school voucher and charter school programs across the country.
“You don’t need the state doing some kind of standardized tests that tell a parent whether their child is learning or not,” Newell said.
Strom told News 4 the bill would also serve to measure whether parents who receive the tax credit to pay for homeschooling expenses effectively put the money toward those expenses.
To that, Newell says he believes all parents should be trusted to use the funds they receive, without needing a safeguard from the state.
“You’re making the assumption then that parents are just thieves, and they don’t want to educate their children and do what’s best for their children,” Newell said. “I think the parent gets to decide what an effective education is.”
Newell also said he’s concerned any requirement to measure a child’s academic performance—through a test or any other assessment—would deter families from taking part in the tax credit program, which he wants to see expanded.
“If we force every private school and even every home school curriculum to all look the same because they’re teaching to the test, then we’re taking that choice and those alternatives away from parents,” Newell said.
Strom says families would still receive their tax credit regardless of how their student scores on the test.
“This is not pass or fail,” Strom said. “There’s no there’s no punitive measure to this. There’s no clawback for where you measure with those scores or how you score.”
Strom maintains the bill’s only intention is to give the state data on how students whose families utilize the tax credit are performing in the same way as the state does for students in traditional public schools.
“It gives us the opportunity to compare apples to apples with state resources,” Strom said.
