The first involves a system of full public school choice, coupled with management decentralization to make individual schools responsible for their own decisions about budgets, staffing, and spending priorities. The second option also would involve full public school choice, but all public schools essentially would become charter schools. School districts would continue to fund, authorize, and oversee the performance of schools but would get out of the business of operating them. The second option envisions private and parochial schools coming into the public school mix, but the Commission's report offers no details about how much autonomy such schools could lose in the process. The Commission and ECS staff have committed to engage in a national debate over K-12 public education governance, and to work directly with state and school district leaders interested in rethinking and redesigning their governance systems.
Further debate seems likely.