Arizona’s Republican legislators are pushing a vouchers-on-steroids-for-everyone bill. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s new Secretary of Education, loves vouchers and private schools far more than public schools. A bill being pushed in Congress would change the way the Feds give money to the states, requiring that the money go to students attending private schools as well as public schools.
And yet, the latest research indicates that voucher students do worse than similar students who stay in public schools, according to a recent article in the New York Times.
Yeah, I know, it’s the New York Times, and what right-thinking, pro-privatization School Choice advocate listens to a paper Trump assures us is spouting Fake News and is an Enemy of the People?
OK then, you might want to listen to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative, pro-school choice think tank, whose research is discussed in the NY Times article. The institute published a study in July, 2016, about Ohio’s voucher program, which began in 2005. The results for the voucher students weren’t good.
The students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools. The study finds negative effects that are greater in math than in English language arts. Such impacts also appear to persist over time, suggesting that the results are not driven simply by the setbacks that typically accompany any change of school.
The authors were hoping for a different result, they wrote, but they showed themselves to be honest researchers.
Let us acknowledge that we did not expect—or, frankly, wish—to see these negative effects for voucher participants; but it’s important to report honestly on what the analysis showed and at least speculate on what may be causing these results.
In the same spirit of honesty, I need to add one positive the researchers pulled from their data: the achievement of students who could have chosen to use the vouchers but stayed in public schools actually improved. The authors drew the conclusion that the public schools improved their instruction out of concern that, otherwise, too many students might leave for private schools. If that finding is confirmed elsewhere — and if it’s an actual increase in student learning and not just a result of more intense teaching to the standardized tests — it’s something educators should look at more carefully.
Back to the NY Times article. The Fordham research was only one of a number of new studies.
[E]ven as school choice is poised to go national, a wave of new research has emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who receive them. The results are startling — the worst in the history of the field, researchers say.
There’s Indiana, Vice President Mike Pence’s state.
The first results came in late 2015. Researchers examined an Indiana voucher program that had quickly grown to serve tens of thousands of students under Mike Pence, then the state’s governor. “In mathematics,” they found, “voucher students who transfer to private schools experienced significant losses in achievement.” They also saw no improvement in reading.
Then there’s Louisiana.
[R]esearchers published a major study of Louisiana’s voucher program. Students in the program were predominantly black and from low-income families, and they came from public schools that had received poor ratings from the state department of education, based on test scores. For private schools receiving more applicants than they could enroll, the law required that they admit students via lottery, which allowed the researchers to compare lottery winners with those who stayed in public school.
They found large negative results in both reading and math. Public elementary school students who started at the 50th percentile in math and then used a voucher to transfer to a private school dropped to the 26th percentile in a single year. Results were somewhat better in the second year, but were still well below the starting point.
School choice proponents say we need vouchers to rescue students from “failing government schools,” using the schools’ dismal test scores to prove their point. But those same test scores appear to indicate that private schools are bigger “failures” than the public schools the students left. Voucher advocates might consider stepping back and taking a deep breath. This startling new research is a continuation of years of studies, including two studies from George W. Bush’s Department of Education which showed no significant difference between the achievement of similar students in district, charter and private schools. They should ask themselves, is their push for vouchers driven by what’s good for our school children or what advances their obsession with shrinking government and increasing privatization?
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2017.
So you are saying that failing public schools are failing because of low income students? And then to top it off the public schools are fixing grades?
“A wave of new research has emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who receive them.”
You don’t say! Just as a new policy agenda is about to be implemented, there’s a “wave” of research suggesting it should be blocked. What a complete surprise.
It would seem, David, that valid policy research should acknowledge that there are better and worse ways to frame a voucher program, and significant differences in the way these programs have been structured in the various states where they’ve been tried. Valid policy research might want to distinguish between systems where the private schools where vouchers can be applied require credentialing of the educators who staff their classrooms, for example, and systems where no such credentialing is required. Or it might want to note whether the state level departments of education in various states’ voucher programs provide any kind of oversight or enforce any standards.
It turns out making valid education policy recommendations actually requires mastery of the details and the conditions on the ground in the educational systems in question. The condition of public school systems in Southern Arizona may not be the same as the condition of public schools in surrounding Portland, Oregon, or Minneapolis, Minnesota. Diocese of Tucson schools may not be the same as other diocesan systems throughout the nation. “Catch all” categories like “students using vouchers,” which obliterate meaningful and significant differences between the characteristics of the systems the students in question are leaving when they “use a voucher” and the systems they are entering, are utterly useless as a basis for formulating policy.
So it comes down once again to what your real motive may be in writing this, as a die-hard Democratic party machine propagandist. Your motive, as you have shown many times in your various writings on vouchers, on charters, and on our largest local DISASTER of a public school district, is to keep the $$$$$ in the public district system that is interwoven with the Democratic party both locally and nationally.
So why not just say so?
Oh yeah, because “Adopt policies that benefit my party!!!” doesn’t generally go over well with the masses you are trying to sheep-herd into your policy corral. Nevertheless, that is precisely what you are saying, over and over again in this sad little blog.
We don’t support school choice necessarily for the choices that are available now, we support if for the choices that will be available 20 years from now.
District schools are a dead end for children of color and poverty. An absolute dead end.
The percentage of parents rating their child’s school an “A” plunged to a 47 year low and PhiDeltaKappa freaked out so bad they fired Gallup and quit asking the question in 2016. The percentage of teachers rating themselves “Very Satisfied” with the school they were teaching at fell to a 30 year low and MetLife quit dong the survey.
The productivity of US schools fell 15% to at least a 15 year low and perhaps a 40 year low in 2015.
We need infinite innovation to find out how to achieve the potential of these children.
School choice has been nothing but good for Arizona. We led the nation in combined reading and math scores from 2011 to 2015 and murders by juveniles have dropped from 70 in 1992 to 7 in the most recent FBI report (2012) – despite a tripling of the at-risk population.
Those school districts doing rigorous surveys of parents hit all-time high ratings in 2016.
Past time to open it up wide open.
My daughter attends Tucson High. She came home complaining that her History teacher was instructing the students in the doctrine of the Muslim faith. According to her, the teacher doesn’t even mention the history of America. He spends most of his time bashing President Trump and American values.. He insists that the Muslim faith is a peaceful religion and the students are given assignments and shown ‘You Tube’ videos in the study of Islam. According to my daughter, if anyone of the students contradict him in any fashion, he retaliates by giving the student a failing grade. Most of the students of the district are predominantly Roman Catholic. With this mind, he has cleverly placed a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the class room. However, the teacher involved never mentions a single word in reference to the religious photograph. In my opinion, he’s deliberately and with malice deceiving the students by making seem as though he’s a friend of Catholicism and therefore opening a door of communication and trust between student and teacher for the introduction of the Muslim faith. Parents beware, get involved with your children, take the time to ask your sibling what they’re being taught in your school district. P.S. My child will not be attending public school as of 2/24/2017.
Not much to see here, the researchers were pretty confident in the effects of eligibility, but not at all confident in their conclusions of participation.
“although the empirical approach implemented in section 4 can help to
identify the effects of EdChoice eligibility, it cannot help to identify the effects of EdChoice participation”
“These are averages, of course, and there are some reasons to believe that
the private school experiences of EdChoice participants may be better than what we estimate”
As was pointed out in the comment stream on another of Safier’s recent “ANTI-VOUCHER!!!!” blog posts, the direction of American education policy will not at this point change and there is a lot of policy work to be done in framing the new reality in a way that ensures student benefit.
As a student, parent, and teacher, I have seen the insides of a high functioning public district school system in a blue state and a low functioning public district school system in Southern Arizona. I have seen the insides of private schools, both Independent and Roman Catholic, and one high functioning charter school.
One thing holds true: the uniform application of meaningful and appropriate academic and teacher credentialing standards — if working together to formulate such standards would actually be possible in our current toxic, “monetized” and politicized climate — would improve every one of these systems, and could potentially inspire some of the lower functioning actors within each system to make efforts to improve their practice and better serve their constituents.
“Supporters of Public Schools” could help the development of better education policy considerably if they would drop their cultural imperialism and discredited modernist epistemologies and acknowledge the reality: they are one voice in this conversation, and a voice representing a value system and a type of schooling that has not shown itself capable of delivering uniformly excellent educational services to all citizens in this country. The conspicuous failures in large portions of their system are at this point entirely obvious. They cannot be papered over by the continuation of transparently disingenuous, irresponsible propaganda and aggressive attempts to BLOCK valid information from getting to the public, i.e. what we see locally in the remarkably unprofessional and undemocratic operations of PCDP and the relentless ineffectual yipping of the party’s various devoted media lapdogs, including David Safier.
HT Sanchez has resigned from TUSD. What will it cost,us to get rid of him? Thanks a lot Grijalvas.
Looks like it took $200,000 to get him to leave. Once again putting the students last. How fitting.
Shusssh, be quiet. You’ll wake David up.