If the question is, “How do we give parents greater flexibility in selecting schools for their children?” there’s one clear answer: School Choice. But if the question is, “How can we improve the quality of education in America?” we probably need to look elsewhere. School choice doesn’t seem to lead to increased school achievement, based on nearly every credible study.
Here’s a new study about school choice in Louisiana. A few years back, the state instituted a lottery to decide which students get vouchers to attend private schools. That’s a golden opportunity for an educational researcher ever there was one. You have a significant number of students who receive vouchers to attend private schools, and you have the same number in a nearly perfect control group: students whose parents wanted them to get the vouchers for their children but lost out in a random lottery. Here’s what happened, according to a study by three economists.
In 2014 12,000 students from low-income families applied for more than 6,000 vouchers to attend 126 private schools. . . . The three economists found that those who received vouchers and moved to private schools had worse test scores in maths, reading, science and social studies than those who missed out.
The study is far from conclusive. It only covers a one year period, and all kinds of other factors could have contributed to the voucher students’ lower test scores. But this is only one of a string of similar studies which have been conducted in recent years.
Washington, D.C., has a significant voucher program, courtesy of the Republican-majority Congress which makes the rules for the city. Conservatives have studied the academic impact of vouchers in D.C. and haven’t been able to point to a significant difference in achievement between voucher and non-voucher students. One analysis of the data was so desperate to find something positive to say about the vouchers that it praised the fact that parents of voucher students felt their children were safer at the private schools than in the public schools they left. The students, by the way, saw no difference.
The results were similar in an in-depth study of the effect of vouchers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where vouchers have been in force for over twenty years. Try as they might, a group of conservative researchers couldn’t find a significant difference between the achievement of voucher students and similar students in public schools. They went over the data a second time and discovered that the high school graduation rate was higher among the voucher students, which they used as evidence that vouchers work. That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t say the private school students got a better education. It only says that something about the private schools made students stick it out to the end.
Charter schools, the other leg of the school choice movement, have shown mixed results in studies comparing their students to similar students in schools run by school districts. Sometimes in some places they’re up, sometimes in other places they’re down, but in the end, it’s pretty much a wash.
So, is there anything that looks like a reasonable answer to the question, “How can we improve the quality of education in America?” In fact, there is, but it has less to do with classrooms and schools than society in general. Every indicator in every reasonable study around the world points to the fact that students’ achievement improves as their economic status and their parents’ educational level rises. If we spent more money and effort working to lessen the negative effects of poverty on children and their parents, if we removed some of the stressors on children raised in poverty which make it so hard for them to learn in school, we would see improvement in student achievement even if we didn’t change a thing about their schools. If at the same time we invested more in our schools and our teachers, the improvement would be even greater.
In one of those studies of identical twins where researchers look at people with identical genetic makeup growing up in different circumstances, the conclusion was, the difference between one twin growing up in poverty raised by parents with little education and another raised by higher income parents with more education can be as much as 14 I.Q. points. Forget that old myth that I.Q. scores represent innate abilities. That was long ago proven false. However, the correlation between I.Q. scores and student achievement, while not absolute, is very strong. So if you have two genetically identical children and the one raised in poverty gets an I.Q. score of 98 while the other raised in middle class or better circumstances gets a score of 112, it’s likely the difference in the achievement between those two genetically identical children in school will be dramatic. School choice programs don’t even come close to those kinds of results.
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2016.
David your first paragraph completely explains your inability to understand the problem. It has never simply been about the outcome. It’s the process. The public schools took over as parents, right or wrong, and those parents that felt slighted by the warehouse mentality are taking their kids and leaving. They want a say, less bureaucracy, and a little bit of individuality.
I can’t say that I blame them. People should want choices. These children are individuals. Let’s treat them that way.
The question to which “choice” is one of the answers is, “What do you do when the poor, urban school district serving almost 50,000 of our local young people descends into such a state of disrepair and dysfunction that even devoted defenders of public education cannot in good conscience urge parents to enroll their children in it. (They cannot urge families to enroll, that is, IF they take the trouble to understand the actual conditions in the district and to speak honestly about them, which is a big IF when you’re talking about the people who like to defend TUSD and its machine politics.)
As for your other question, “How can we improve the quality of education in America,” one of the answers is by developing effective advocacy organizations that know enough about education and are persistent enough in their observation and reporting that they can require elected officials to accurately identify and effectively treat some of the diseases that have developed in our democratically controlled institutions of public education.
What you don’t seem to understand, David, is that honestly and accurately diagnosing the disease (rather than hiding the wound and lying about the fact that it is there) is the first step towards finding a cure. When you talk about “public education” generally and how it is “better” according to some tests and some standards, which you conveniently do not name, you are lumping districts like TUSD together with districts like Catalina Foothills (a high functioning, high SES district) and Flowing Wells (a relatively high functioning , low SES district). Apples, oranges, and bananas. “Public schools” versus “charters” versus “privates” — these are not meaningful categories of analysis. Within each of those categories are examples of successes and failures. The failures, as I have said above, need to be honestly addressed and remediated. Perhaps, instead of continuing to be a propagandist for ongoing dysfunction, you should start being part of the solution.
Should every private “choice” be subsidized by the taxpayer? Then the public should pays for all reproductive choice. Rat, please, run for your school board. You can contribute to a public process outcome, rather than yelling ignored slogans. Thats the difference in all this “choice”. The public has a say in only one “system”. The public has no say in private schools,or charter school operations. They self perpetuate their control, but expect public money.
You sound desperate Francis. I have no desire to fight the public school bureaucracy. I did it for 20 years. I support private schools and encourage parents to understand the real value. These children are only yours for a little time. It is worth whatever you can afford to pay. We need to focus on breaking up the public school monopoly.
Frances: the public has a “say” by voting with its feet. Why have annual attrition rates in TUSD been somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 students for over a decade now? If “the public has a say” in this system, why are they leaving to attend schools that either cost them money (privates) or are less convenient to attend (charters, to which most who enroll must provide their own transportation)? Why is TUSD having more trouble than other local districts recruiting and retaining fully qualified teachers? Do you think it might be because though the public, in theory “has a say” in public schools, in practice, in districts like TUSD there are many, many effective mechanisms in place to ensure that the only people who REALLY have a say are parasitic self-serving middle-management bureaucrats and the politicos who back them? Or the contractors who benefit from their relationships with the district? Take a look at the ugly solar panel arrays on any number of sad, barren-looking TUSD campuses: that is TUSD in a nutshell: the on-site effects of deals struck in some office between a bureaucrat and a contractor, with little thought for what the effects will be on the children utilizing the facility where they are installed. I heard a father speak in the call to the audience at a TUSD board meeting one night to complain about a solar installation on his child’s campus, saying that the it had made the areas where the kids played dangerous and unattractive, that the parent community had not been consulted before it was done and that their complaints and concerns for their children’s safety were not being heard. That’s what the public “having its say” in TUSD amounts to.
The supposed superiority of “public schools” to every other type of school system can only be defended by people like you who dwell entirely in theory and not at all in practice. Try coming down from your Swiftian Cloud-cuckoo land occasionally and taking a good, hard look at what’s actually going on in some of the real-world institutions belonging to the theoretical category you like to defend.
Couldn’t have said it better myself Get Real. The private school students will be our best and brightest leaders of tomorrow. Solar panels at TUSD allow them more money for administrators. But nothing for the teachers and the classroom. Or building maintenance. They have become old, worn out warehouses.
Thousands of great things happen everyday in our public schools. Solar panels? Those are worth complaining about? I have hear the “too much middle management” , or “too much administration” for 50 years whenever someone complains about public schools or doesn’t want to vote for a bond issue. Please, tell everyone exactly which administration position should go. With your extensive skills and experience the various school districts need your great wisdom. It is easier, however, to constantly assert that taxpayer should pay for private choices. I am going to being my gym member ship to the Goldwater Institute dinner and ask them to subsidize it. Goldwater, the most crooked organization in Arizona, but one that owns the legislature, the ice cream governor, and now the Supreme Court. That is an organization worth complaining about, there, rat.
Never mind, Rat T: apparently, Ms. Perkins wants to continue living in Cloud-cuckoo land. Invitations to visit the realm of reality will be rejected; more trashing of her favorite “privatizing” groups will be offered.
Take it from someone with one kid enrolled in a TUSD nightmare school (and, ironically, one of the few they operate that is supposed, according to their BS criteria, to be “excelling”) and one enrolled in an extremely high-functioning, responsible private school: public dollars invested (as they are, through individual and corporate tax credits) in this particular private school are doing much, much more good than dollars thrown away on the abuse that passes for education in the TUSD school with which I am most familiar.
And yet, I will not overgeneralize from my own individual experience. I will not say, “All private schools are superior to all public schools.” I will say, “There are responsible and irresponsible actors within each sector.” I will not say, “Close TUSD.” I will say, “Reform TUSD; we cannot afford, as a community, to allow a school system that serves this many young people to continue to be so low functioning.”
David Safier’s commentary is not serving the cause of improving education. Where he should be reflecting the reality of what is going on in our local schools, he instead blows utopian, theoretical smoke that further clouds the minds of many susceptible readers. I suppose pretty soon he will be urging us to vote Kristel Foster and Cam Juarez back into their TUSD board seats, where they have consistently and unforgivably bungled the serious responsibilities entrusted to them for the past two years. Bring it on, David. I look forward to responding to that.
FYI, Ms. Perkins, I vote in support of every public school bond issue in the high functioning public district where I reside, which is not TUSD.
I would never, however, vote in support of a TUSD bond or override. Why? Because anyone who follows what is going on in the district understands that it has been badly mismanaged for the past two and a half years, and until we can get better leadership in place any increased funding they receive will be wasted.
You can bus kids to the best schools and give them all the education freebies you want. If the parents are not involved in the child’s education and do not make education a priority, the kids will underachieve. Parental involvement has a massive influence on the educational success of a child.
Who else comes to Comrade David Safier articles to read comments by “Being balanced would improve your credibility”?
Great stuff, I actually learn more from this individual’s neutral stances that the author.
I can only assume that this person’s comments will be the real reason Comrade Safier eventually closes his comment sections, instead of the supposed “inflammatory” comments, as he can’t handle being BTFO every single time, repeatedly.
Great job all, while I was at the horse track. What a fun time Saturday. Good to see so many friends.
Frances you lost me when you tried to trade abortions for vouchers. That ought to have the little brothers and sisters with pregnant mothers running scared. That is unbelievable.