Posted on 02/15/2008 11:44:54 AM PST by neverdem
I began writing about school choice in City Journal more than a decade ago. I believed then (as I still believe) that giving tuition vouchers to poor inner-city students stuck in lousy public schools was a civil rights imperative. Starting in the 1980s, major empirical studies by sociologist James Coleman and other scholars showed that urban Catholic schools were better than public schools at educating the poor, despite spending far less per student. Among the reasons for this superiority: most Catholic educators still believed in a coherent, content-based curriculum, and they enforced order in the classroom. It seemed immoral to keep disadvantaged kids locked up in dismal, future-darkening public schools when vouchers could send them to high-performing Catholic onesespecially when middle-class parents enjoyed education options galore for their children.
But like other reformers, I also believed that vouchers would force the public schools to improve or lose their student customers. Since competition worked in other areas, wouldnt it lead to progress in education, too? Maybe Catholic schools success with voucher students would even encourage public schools to exchange the failed progressive education approaches used in most classrooms for the pedagogy that made the Catholic institutions so effective.
Choice is a panacea, argued education scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe in their influential 1990 book Politics, Markets and Americas Schools. For a time, I thought so, too. Looking back from todays vantage point, it is clear that the school choice movement has been very good for the disadvantaged. Public and privately funded voucher programs have liberated hundreds of thousands of poor minority children from failing public schools. The movement has also reshaped the education debate. Not only vouchers, but also charter schools, tuition tax credits, mayoral control, and other reforms are now on the table as alternatives to bureaucratic, special-interest-choked big-city school systems.
Yet social-change movements need to be attentive to the facts on the ground. Recent developments in both public and Catholic schools suggest that markets in education may not be a panaceaand that we should reexamine the direction of school reform.
One such development: taxpayer-funded voucher programs for poor children, long considered by many of us to be the most promising of education reforms, have hit a wall. In 2002, after a decade of organizing by school choice activists, only two programs existed: one in Milwaukee, the other in Cleveland, allowing 17,000 poor students to attend private (mostly Catholic) schools. That year, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Supreme Court ruled that limited voucher programs involving religious schools were compatible with the First Amendments establishment clause. The 54 decision seemed like school choices Magna Carta. But the legal victory has led to few real gains. Today, fewer than 25,000 studentscompared with a nationwide public school enrollment of 50 millionreceive tax-funded vouchers, with a tiny Washington, D.C., program joining those of the other two cities.
Proposals for voucher programs have suffered five straight crushing defeats in state referendamost recently in Utah, by a margin of 62 percent to 38 percent. After each loss, school choice groups blamed the lobbying money poured into the states by teachers unions, the deceptive ads run by voucher foes, and sometimes even voters commitment to their children. When the Utah results came in, the principal funder of the pro-voucher side, businessman Patrick Byrne, opined that the voters failed a statewide IQ test and that they dont care enough about their kids. If vouchers cant pass voter scrutiny in conservative Utah, though, how probable is it that they will do so anywhere else? And denouncing voters doesnt seem like a smart way to revive the voucher cause.
Voucher prospects have also dimmed because of the Catholic schools deepening financial crisis. Without an abundant supply of good, low-cost urban Catholic schools to receive voucher students, voucher programs will have a hard time getting off the ground, let alone succeeding. But cash-strapped Catholic Church officials are closing the Churchs inner-city schools at an accelerating rate [see Save the Catholic Schools!, Spring 2007]. With just one Catholic high school left in all of Detroit, for instance, where would the citys disadvantaged students use vouchers even if they had them?
Even more discouraging, vouchers may not be enough to save the Catholic schools that are voucher students main destination. Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., recently announced plans to close seven of the districts 28 remaining Catholic schools, all of which are receiving aid from federally funded tuition vouchers, unless the D.C. public school system agreed to take them over and convert them into charter schools. In Milwaukee, several Catholic schools have also closed, or face the threat of closing, despite boosting enrollments with voucher kids.
During the 15 years since the first voucher program got under way in Milwaukee, university researchers have extensively scrutinized the dynamics of school choice and the effect of competition on public schools. The preponderance of studies have shown clear benefits, both academically and otherwise, for the voucher kids. Its gratifying that the research confirms the moral and civil rights argument for vouchers.
But sadlyand this is a second development that reformers must face up tothe evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is making public schools better. When I reported on the Milwaukee voucher experiment in 1999, some early indicators suggested that competition was having just that effect. Members of Milwaukees school board, for example, said that voucher schools had prompted new reforms in the public school system, including modifying the seniority provisions of the teachers contract and allowing principals more discretion in hiring. A few public schools began offering phonics-based reading instruction in the early grades, the method used in neighboring Catholic schools. Milwaukee public schools test scores also improvedand did so most dramatically in those schools under the greatest threat of losing students to vouchers, according to a study by Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby.
Unfortunately, the gains fizzled. Fifteen years into the most expansive school choice program tried in any urban school district in the country, Milwaukees public schools still suffer from low achievement and miserable graduation rates, with test scores flattening in recent years. Violence and disorder throughout the system seem as serious as ever. Most voucher students are still benefiting, true; but no Milwaukee miracle, no transformation of the public schools, has taken place. One of the Milwaukee voucher programs founders, African-American educator Howard Fuller, recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasnt been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools] that we would have thought. And the lead author of one of the Milwaukee voucher studies, Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson, told me: The research on school choice programs clearly shows that low-income students benefit academically. Its less clear that the presence of choice in a community motivates public schools to improve.
What should we do about these new realities? Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools. And we can still hope that some legislature, somewhere in America, will vote for another voucher plan, or generous tuition tax credits, before more Catholic schools close. But does the school choice movement have a realistic Plan B for the millions of urban students who will remain stuck in terrible public schools?
According to Hoxby and Peterson, perhaps the two most respected school choice scholars in the country, no such plan is necessary. In their view, the best hope for education improvement continues to be a maximum degree of parental choicevouchers if possible, but also charter schools and tuition tax creditsplus merit-pay schemes for teachers and accountability systems that distinguish productive from unproductive school principals.
That incentivist outlook remains dominant within school reform circles. But a challenge from what one could call instructioniststhose who believe that curriculum change and good teaching are essential to improving schoolsis growing, as a unique public debate sponsored by the Koret Task Force on K12 Education revealed. Founded in 1999, the Koret Task Force represents a national all-star team of education reform scholars. Permanent fellows include not only Hoxby and Peterson but also Chubb, Moe, education historian Diane Ravitch, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation president Chester Finn, Stanford University economics prof Eric Hanushek, and the guru of cultural literacy, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (recently retired). Almost from the start, the Koret scholars divided into incentivist and instructionist camps. We have had eight years and we havent been able to agree, says Hoxby. But in early 2007, members did agree to hold a debate at the groups home, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University: Resolved: True School Reform Demands More Attention to Curriculum and Instruction than to Markets and Choice. Hirsch and Ravitch argued the affirmative, Hoxby and Peterson the negative.
Hirsch and Ravitch opened by saying that while they had no opposition to charter schools or other forms of choice, charter schools had produced disappointing results. Try a thought experiment, urged Ravitch. Say that one school system features market incentives and unlimited choices for parents and students, but no standard curriculum. Then posit another system, with no choice allowed, but in which the educational leadership enforces a rich curriculum and favors effective instructional approaches. In the market system, Ravitch predicted, most schools will reflect the dominant ideas of the schools of education, where most teachers get their training, so most schools will adopt programs of whole language and fuzzy math. . . . Most students under a pure choice regime will know very little about history or literature or science. The system with the first-rate curriculum and effective pedagogy, Ravitch argued, would produce better education outcomes.
Responding, Peterson and Hoxby paid respects to good curricula and instructional methods. But the key question, in their view, was who would decide which curricula and instructional methods were best. Here, the pro-choice debaters made no bones about it: the markets invisible hand was the way to go. As Hoxby put it, educational choice would erect a bulwark against special-interest groups hijacking the curriculum.
I had supported the competition argument for school choice as a working hypothesis, but my doubts about it grew after recent results from the Milwaukee experiment, and nothing said in the Koret debate restored my confidence. And something else caught my attention: Ravitchs comment about the dominant ideas of the schools of education, where most teachers get their training. The statement slipped by, unchallenged by the incentivist side.
While the arguments about school choice and markets swirled during the past 15 years, both Ravitch and Hirsch wrote landmark books (Left Back and The Schools We Need and Why We Dont Have Them, respectively) on how the nations education schools have built an impregnable fortress (Hirschs words) of wrong ideas and ineffective classroom practices that teachers then carry into Americas schools, almost guaranteeing failure, especially for poor minority children. Hirschs book didnt just argue this; it proved it conclusively, to my mind, offering an extraordinary tour dhorizon of all the evidence about instructional methods that cognitive neuroscience had discovered.
If Hoxby and Peterson were right in asserting that markets were enough to fix our education woes, then the ed schools wouldnt be the disasters that Hirsch, Ravitch, and others have exposed. Unlike the government-run K12 schools, the countrys 1,500 ed schools represent an almost perfect system of choice, markets, and competition. Anyone interested in becoming a teacher is completely free to apply to any ed school that he or she wants. The ed schools, in turn, compete for students by offering competitive prices andtheoreticallyattractive educational products (curricula and courses). Yet the schools are uniformly awful, the products the same dreary progressive claptrap. A few years ago, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a mainstream public education advocacy group, surveyed the nations ed schools and found that almost all elementary education classes disdained phonics and scientific reading. If the invisible hand is a surefire way to improve curriculum and instruction, as the incentivists insist, why does almost every teacher-in-training have to read the works of leftists Paolo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and William Ayersbut usually nothing by, say, Hirsch or Ravitch?
For a good explanation, look to the concept of ideological hegemony, usually associated with the sociological Left. Instead of competition and diversity in the education schools, we confront what Hirsch calls the thoughtworld of teacher training, which operates like a Soviet-style regime suppressing alternative perspectives. Professors who dare to break with the ideological monopolywho look to reading science or, say, embrace a core knowledge approachwont get tenure, or get hired in the first place. The teachers they train thus wind up indoctrinated with the same pedagogical dogma whether they attend New York Universitys school of education or Humboldt States. Those who put their faith in the power of markets to improve schools must at least show how their theory can account for the stubborn persistence of the thoughtworld.
Instead, we increasingly find the theory of educational competition detaching itself from its original school choice moorings and taking a new form. Vouchers may have stalled, but its possibleor so many school reformers and education officials now assure usto create the conditions for vigorous market competition within public school systems, with the same beneficent effects that were supposed to flow from a pure choice program.
Nowhere has this new philosophy of reform been more enthusiastically embraced than in the New York City school district under the control of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein. Gothams schools are surging ahead with a host of market incentives, including models derived from the business world. Many of the countrys major education foundations and philanthropies have boosted New York as the flagship school system for such market innovations, helping to spread the incentivist gospel nationally. Disciples of Klein have taken over the school systems in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and Bloombergs fellow billionaires Eli Broad and Bill Gates are about to launch a $60 million ad campaign to push the market approach during the presidential election season.
Dont get me wrong: market-style reforms are sometimes just whats necessary in the public schools. Over the past decade, for instance, I often called attention in City Journal to the destructively restrictive provisions in the New York City teachers contract, which forced principals to hire teachers based solely on seniority, and I felt vindicated when negotiations between the Bloomberg administration and the United Federation of Teachers eliminated the seniority clause and created an open-market hiring system. Similarly, the teachers lockstep salary schedule, based on seniority and accumulating useless additional education credits, is a counterproductive way to compensate the systems most important employees. The schools need a flexible salary structure that realistically reflects supply and demand in the teacher labor market.
Unfortunately, the Bloomberg administration and its supporters are pushing markets and competition in the public schools far beyond where the evidence leads. Everything in the system now has a price. Principals can get cash bonuses of as much as $50,000 by raising their schools test scores; teachers in a few hundred schools now (and hundreds more later) can take home an extra $3,000 if the student scores in their schools improve; parents get money for showing up at parent-teacher conferences; their kids get money orjust what they needcell phones for passing tests.
Much of this scaffolding of cash incentives (and career-ending penalties) rests on a rather shaky base: the states highly unreliable reading and math tests in grades three through eight, plus the even more unreliable high school Regents exams, which have been dumbed down so that schools will avoid federal sanctions under the No Child Left Behind act. In the past, the tests have also been prone to cheating scandals. Expect more cheating as the stakes for success and failure rise.
While confidently putting their seal of approval on this market system, the mayor and chancellor appear to be agnostic on what actually works in the classroom. Theyve shown no interest, for example, in two decades worth of scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that proves that teaching phonics and phonemic awareness is crucial to getting kids to read in the early grades. They have blithely retained a fuzzy math program, Everyday Math, despite a consensus of university math professors judging it inadequate. Indeed, Bloomberg and Klein have abjured all responsibility for curriculum and instruction and placed their bets entirely on choice, markets, and accountability.
But the new reliance on markets hasnt prevented special interests from hijacking the curriculum. One such interest is the Teachers College Reading and Writing Projectled by Lucy Calkins, the doyenne of the whole-language reading approach, which postulates that all children can learn to read and write naturally, with just some guidance from teachers, and that direct phonics instruction is a form of child abuse. Calkinss enterprise has more than $10 million in Department of Education contracts to guide reading and writing instruction in most of the citys elementary schools, even though no solid evidence supports her methodology. This may explain why, on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testswidely regarded as a gold standard for educational assessmentGotham students showed no improvement in fourth- and eighth-grade reading from 2003 to 2007, while the city of Atlanta, which hasnt staked everything on market incentives, has shown significant reading improvement.
One wonders why so many in the school reform movement and in the business community celebrate New York Citys recent record on education. Is it merely because they hear the words choice, markets, and competition and think that all is well? If so, theyre mistaken. The primal scene of all education reform is the classroom. If the teacher isnt doing the right thing, all the cash incentives in the world wont make a difference.
Those in the school reform movement seeking a case of truly spectacular academic improvement should look to Massachusetts, where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The states average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.
The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom. Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the states board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky sums up: The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong contentbased curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students academic achievement.
The Massachusetts miracle doesnt prove that a standard curriculum and a focus on effective instruction will always produce academic progress. Nor does the flawed New York City experiment in competition mean that we should cast aside all market incentives in education. But what has transpired in these two places provides an important lesson: education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that dont produce verifiable results in the classroom. After all, childrens lives are at stake.
Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.
One of the principal texts in teachers' colleges is "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," by B.F. Skinner. Says a lot, especially since his kids were a disaster.
The author of this says that school choice is a failure,
but it really hasn’t been tried yet (and this is not leftist socialist logic).
A full, free market choice of schools will inherently increase the quality and lower the cost, as it does with any other product.
The problem (and I enjoyed reading this article; it had a lot of facts in it) is that the people in charge of writing the curriculmn or setting the standards have a vested interest in the system as it is, in the most point. Down near the end the article talked about some woman who believes phonics is abuse and so dictates policy for all of New York as far as reading! But if there were to be a comprehensive restructing of NYC’s teaching plans, I bet you she would be on the panel in charge of the plans...
The benefits of school choice are unquestionable. The reason public schools don’t benefit is because they are not a part of the choice program. Students are still required to attend within their school districts. The competition needs to be not just between private alternatives and public schools but between other schools in other districts. Even then the biggest problem is the teachers unions and the liberal policies and of course indifferent parents who are driven more by issues of convenience than their children’s welfare.
Too many people want simple easy solutions with other people taking responsibility for them. Those other people who they are handing off responsibility to are liberals who are more concerned with the sex lives of children than making real performance gains in education.
And administration is a joke. At our local highschool, I went to an award assembly. It took them 10 minutes to introduce all the assistant principals. My high school was as big as this high school. It had one assistant principal. And I got a better education than our local high school provides.
The one true advantage to school choice is that is would then expand NCLB into ALL schools in the US, not just public schools. Making private schools provide the only true measure of a students success - Standardized Testing.
Everyone, including the advocates of choice, are all for competent teachers and a good curriculum. Clearly, the US system which, as a practical matter, prohibits choice for substantially all students is not providing quality competence or curriculum.
Choice is not the total solution, but it is a very important component toward getting the others. Parents will tend not to choose incompetent teachers or bad curriculum.
Check out the long term studies of Woessman.
Wrong.
That's exactly the point of market competition. If the teacher isn't doing the right thing, he gets fired and replaced by one who does.
If the incentives reward the best teachers, the rest will take care of itself.
Get rid of the Union.
Until that’s done nothing will ever change.
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“Among the reasons for this superiority: most Catholic educators still believed in a coherent, content-based curriculum, and they enforced order in the classroom.”
“Catholic schools deepening financial crisis. Without an abundant supply of good, low-cost urban Catholic schools to receive voucher students, voucher programs will have a hard time getting off the ground, let alone succeeding.”
That is a "qualified" licensed teacher graduating from one of these colleges, which have rather low standards to begin with, will have a smattering of pseudo-psychological training in learning theory (without reading any of the actual authors), but no, or almost no subject matter knowledge.
IMHcurmudgeonlyO, a graduate of these institutions is about on the same intellectual level as a 7th-grader of 1952. Good, dedicated even some of them, well-meaning but painfully ignorant people. And is they who are the "Teachers!"
Of course, it goes without saying that as they loaf through four years at Teachers College, reading commentaries on learning theory,they are simultaneously spoon-fed the most outrageous leftist bullshiite imaginable.
The Catholic schools around here are suffering now, too. There are no more nuns who working for peanuts, kept the schools going, so they too use these "Teachers," who quite literally are apt to know nothing.
Subject matter knowledge for a prospective teacher nowadays is actually a hindrance to licensure.
good article. school reform has to include teaching colleges.
Get rid if the union would make so many other things better not just schools.
Imagine how much cars would cost without the union?
Imagine hom much cheaper a major construction project would be without the union?
Imagine how many more TV shows we would have had this year without the union?
Life would be so much better if we just outlawed unions all together.
The only problem with Stern’s analsis is his veneration of Chancellor Joel Klein. As a teacher of 22 years in NYC public schools and 13 years in NYC Catholic schools I can tell you that Klein would fire most evry teacher in Catholic schools. Because of incompetence? No they are very competent. But because they seek to instruct and teach their students not simply raise test scores and accumulate reams of irrelevant data. Thge time I spend on aasessing, correlating, assembling, and displaying whether my kids can read a timeline or identify a cause and effect is time better spent on actully teaching. The good teacher in the Catholic school does not need reams of data to know where each of her/his kids are. They know because they are good teachers. I used to be a good teacher. Now I am just a statistician.
OK, I will defer to your expertise :-)
bttt
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