Accountability in public education is comprised of customer choice and government regulations, but since consumer choice in K-12 has historically been rare, most accountability discussions today focus exclusively on regulations. These lines from a recent editorial in The New York Times about the proposed reauthorization of No Child Left Behind illustrate my point:
The revised No Child Left Behind Act that passed out of the Senate education committee last week goes too far in relaxing state accountability and federal oversight of student achievement ... Lawmakers are right that No Child Left Behind needs to be overhauled. But Congress needs to do this carefully, without retreating from core provisions that require states to do better by children in return for federal aid.
The core provisions the Times is referring to are all regulatory since the NCLB legislation assumes better government regulations are the key to improving student learning. A proper regulatory environment is necessary for a high-performing public education system, but regulations alone are insufficient. Empowered consumers are also necessary, which is why accountability in public education needs to include the proper balance of both.
Finding this healthy balance will be more challenging in public education than it’s been in areas such as food, housing, medicine, and finance because these other sectors have a history of consumer choice. Beginning in the mid-1800s, public education began phasing out consumer choice until by the early 1900s only the wealthy had choice. Had we decided to manage food in the mid-1800s the same way we decided to manage education, every local community today would have an elected food board that would assign each family to a neighborhood food center where they would eat their approved food each day. The only exception would be families wealthy enough to pay food taxes and still purchase food from private providers. Accountability in the food centers would be regulatory only since no choice would exist.
The parental choice movement is expanding rapidly across the country, which means the dialogue around what constitutes accountability in public education should increasingly include consumer choice. To help accelerate this transition, those of us who support full parental choice need to be more explicit and consistent about including consumer choice in our accountability discussions.
by Alan Bonsteel
One of the most devastating arguments made for the school choice wars has been the observation by researcher Denis Doyle that public school teachers have long sent their own children to private schools at higher rates than the general public. His analyses of the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Census Bureau data has shown that while about 11 percent of average U.S. families send their children to private schools, more than 14 percent of public school teachers do so. This is, of course, the moral equivalent of a doctor warning away his own family from the hospital in which he or she works.
Doyle retired this year, and the American Center for School Choice and California Parents for Educational Choice would like to see this project continued. That data is typically available about three years after the actual census, thus we need to be up and running by early 2013. Although either of us would be pleased to lead this research, we do not have the funding presently to do so. We would be glad to have another organization take this on, but most important is that the analysis is completed.
We are hoping to expand this study to include not just public school teachers, but also public school administrators, who, with their six-figure salaries, are highly likely to be sending their own kids to private schools at higher rates still.
Denis deserves some kind of medal for his brilliant and extremely important work, but we suspect that his greatest legacy will be simply that his friends and colleagues have seen the enormous value in what he did and will carry on the torch. Is there an organization out there that would either fund the project or take it on itself?
Among the newest contributors to redefinED is Boston University professor Charles Glenn, an expert on educational history and comparative policy who last summer served as a witness in the court challenge to Douglas County's school voucher pilot. His testimony showcased not only the 19th-century American history of providing public educations funds to religious schools and institutions, it notably shined a spotlight on the attacks Catholics faced when Colorado adopted its Blaine Amendment.
In direct examination and in a chapter from his forthcoming book introduced as evidence, Glenn points to the perceived "Catholic menace" in Colorado as the state convened its Constitutional Convention in 1875. The scaremongering of that time led some Catholic leaders to call not only for a Catholic voice in the convention, but a voice for reason and deliberation. And no one made that plea more eloquently than Bishop Joseph Projectus Machebeuf.
Machebeuf, who insisted that Catholics would remain loyal to the State of Colorado and that their rights as citizens should be respected, sent a message to convention delegates urging them to let future legislatures deal with the question of "separate schools and denominational education," not engrave the answer into a constitutional clause. His reason: emotions were running too hot:
... the question itself has never been fully and dispassionately discussed in this country, and can not be said to have been discussed at all in Colorado. We have had, so far as I am informed, nothing said on our side of the question in your honorable body ... So far, both in this country at large and in Colorado, the language of passion has been more often uttered than that of reason ... The present is no time for the exposition of the arguments in favor of denominational schools. But we look forward hopefully to the future. A day shall at last dawn – surely it shall – when the passions of this hour will have subsided; when the exigencies of partisan politics will no longer stand in the way of right and justice, and political and religious equality shall again seem the heritage of the American citizen.
That day has not yet come. Indeed, the hearing during which Glenn testified resulted in a permanent injunction against the Douglas County voucher effort. Glenn writes, "Were he alive today, Bishop Machebeuf would no doubt be surprised and disappointed to learn that (unlike every other Western democracy) the United States still maintains barriers against reasoned deliberation about the merits of schooling that responds to the choices of parents. It is striking how, whether in Massachusetts, or Colorado, or in federal court litigation, opponents of making faith-based schooling available to parents without financial penalty seek to remove this issue from the sphere of democratic decision-making."
From The Associated Press:
The state Senate could vote as early as Wednesday on a bill that is designed to meet Gov. Tom Corbett's desire to overhaul Pennsylvania's public schools by helping thousands more of those students afford private and parochial school tuition with taxpayer help and making it easier to open charter schools.
A rewritten version of legislation that had stalled in the Senate in the spring easily passed the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday, just a day after the committee chairman released the new draft.
The rewritten bill adds a chapter on charter schools, but also it substantially scales back the scope of Piccola's earlier voucher program that would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars more and been available to children of the state's poorest families.
Under the new bill, vouchers would be limited to children in the worst-performing school districts, but income limits would be higher.
Editor's note: This entry comes from Charles Glenn, professor of educational leadership at Boston University and the former director of urban education and equity efforts for the Massachusetts Department of Education. He is the author of nine books, including The Myth of the Common School, and of more than 100 articles on educational history and comparative policy. He is an associate with the American Center for School Choice, which recently joined an alliance with redefinED.
While allowing parents to choose the schools that their children attend is on the agenda of many education reformers, the rationales that we advance vary considerably, even at times seeming to cancel each other out. The appeal to contrasting reasons for supporting policies to allow school choice without financial penalty makes it hard to persuade the general public to ignore warnings from the educational establishment that such policies will fatally undermine public schools, with its corollary that only schools operated by government can create loyal citizens and social harmony.
The oldest and still the prevailing rationale in Continental Europe is simply that freedom of conscience requires it. Belgium is the only country whose independence, in 1830, was in large part the result of demands for educational freedom, a principle enshrined in its Constitution, and political mobilization over this issue continued over subsequent decades in a dozen countries. Today, every country in Western Europe has well-established policies providing public support to parental choice, including on the basis of religious preferences, and educational freedom was incorporated as a basic human right into international covenants after World War II.
A second rationale seldom mentioned in discussions of parental choice on the Continent, where it tends to be dismissed as typically “Anglo-Saxon,” is that associated with Milton Friedman, and with Chubb and Moe’s Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (1990). Competition among schools, it is argued, tends to make them more educationally effective. Strong empirical support has been provided recently by Ludger Woessmann and others in School Accountability, Autonomy and Choice around the World (2009), which uses data from more than a quarter of a million students in 37 countries to conclude that “rather than harming disadvantaged students, accountability, autonomy and choice appear to be tides that lift all boats ... In particular, the additional choice created by public funding for private schools is associated with a strong reduction in the dependence of student achievement on SES.”
This brings us to the third rationale, that of providing parents with limited resources the same opportunities to guide the education of their children that the rest of us take for granted. It was as a state official responsible for desegregation and equal opportunity that I came to support choice, after attempting to eliminate it through mandatory assignments in the 1974 Boston desegregation plan. The crisis we created in Boston led me and others to seek alternative ways of desegregating the schools in other Massachusetts cities, and eventually in Boston as well. Magnet schools and “controlled choice,” we found, also had the effect of creating better education and enhancing the professionalism of teachers as they designed schools intended to appeal to parents.
In general, the first two rationales have had only a modest effect on public policies in the United States: the concern to rescue students from unacceptable schools in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and elsewhere has provided the rationale for new arrangements. Thus when the school board of a suburban county near Denver took the highly unusual step of offering scholarships for five hundred of the pupils currently enrolled in its schools to attend private schools, mostly with a religious character, there was some ambivalence among choice advocates because the families involved were almost all middle class. How could this be reconciled with the priority of opportunity for poor children trapped in under-performing schools?
I agreed to serve as expert witness in support of the Douglas County scholarship program this summer because I was impressed that the plan had been developed in careful detail with appropriate safeguards, and because it seemed to me an opportunity to challenge a state constitutional provision discriminating on the basis of religion in making public funds available to schools. These state “Baby Blaines” are a major barrier to expanding parental choice, and it is important to the cause of educational freedom that they be challenged at the state level, as is occurring in Colorado.
But it is also important that the constituency in support of school choice be expanded to include as many parents and voters as possible. Surveys have shown repeatedly that this support is much stronger among urban black and Latino respondents than among white suburbanites, as one might expect given that the latter have exercised school choice through residential decisions and beyond that have little opportunity to do so. Programs like that in Douglas Country can bring the educational freedom rationale – and the interest of influential parents -- to the support of the equity rationale upon which previous initiatives have relied.
The Huffington Post got a copy of Walter Isaacson's forthcoming biography of Steve Jobs, focusing particularly on a revealing conversation between Jobs and President Obama. In his meeting with the president, during which he said Obama was "headed for a one-term presidency," Jobs criticized America's education system, saying "it was crippled by union work rules," Isaacson reports. "Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform."
Lest this be a surprise to the center-left, Jobs embraced education reform generally and school vouchers specifically with even more vigor during a 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institution:
I've been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system ... One of the things I feel is that, right now, if you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents ...
... in schools people don't feel that they're spending their own money. They feel like it's free, right? No one does any comparison shopping. A matter of fact if you want to put your kid in a private school, you can't take the forty-four hundred dollars a year out of the public school and use it, you have to come up with five or six thousand of your own money. I believe very strongly that if the country gave each parent a voucher for forty-four hundred dollars that they could only spend at any accredited school several things would happen. Number one schools would start marketing themselves like crazy to get students. Secondly, I think you'd see a lot of new schools starting. I've suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they'd start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you'd see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There's no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years.
Is it fair to classify as "dopes" those parents who choose schools that report poor test performance? Not if we only focus on test performance, which may be a muddy measure of how kids are benefitting, Rick Hess writes. Hess directs readers to a recent paper by several economists who examined the open-enrollment initiative at Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools and found substantive long-term gains. The enrollment plan launched in 2001, yielding, according to the study, higher graduation rates with no cream skimming.
"Among applicants with low-quality neighborhood schools, lottery winners are more likely than lottery losers to graduate from high school, attend a four-year college, and earn a bachelor's degree," authors David Deming, Justine Hastings, Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger conclude. "They are twice as likely to earn a degree from an elite university. The results suggest that school choice can improve students' longer-term life chances when they gain access to schools that are better on observed dimensions of quality."
Earlier today on this page, Alan Bonsteel, the president of California Parents for Educational Choice, urged school choice groups to embrace the argument that enhanced levels of school choice can yield higher graduation rates. Similarly, Hess writes:
Maybe parents aren't dopes. Maybe reading and math scores, at least on today's assessments, are actually muddy measures of how much kids are benefiting. Maybe parents who express high levels of satisfaction with choice see that their kids are better behaved and more focused, disciplined, and academically engaged. Maybe they judge that this gives their kids a much better shot at a bright future, even if their short-term reading and math scores aren't moving a lot ...
... Now, let's be clear. I don't know that any of this is true. But it seems as viable as the "parents are dopes" hypothesis. Yet school choice researchers have been so focused for two decades on examining whether choice lifts test scores that they've not yet spent much time exploring just why it is that parental satisfaction seems to so dramatically exceed the test score evidence. On the bright side that just means there are huge opportunities ahead. So, guys, how about it?
Editor's note: This post comes from Dr. Alan Bonsteel, the president of California Parents for Educational Choice and an associate with the American Center for School Choice, which recently joined an alliance with redefinED.
The nation’s staggeringly high dropout rates are perhaps the strongest argument for school choice, and state-level school choice organizations can have enormous leverage in wielding this weapon. At one time it seemed that test scores might be that argument, but the public school establishment has been largely successful in dodging that concern, both by using non-secure tests in which the teachers can teach to actual test questions, and by churning out phony studies that falsely claim that the test score improvements seen with school choice disappear once the results are adjusted for the poverty levels of the students.
Graduation rates, however, are far harder to spin, and the public intuitively accepts the observation that when families can choose the school right for them, the investment that is made and the sense of community that results has profound benefits in getting kids safely to graduation day.
Our organization, California Parents for Educational Choice, launched the first salvo in this war in 1999, when we got newspapers across the state to report on their front pages the reality that we were losing a third of our kids to dropping out. In 2002, Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute took the issue to the national stage. In 2004, George Bush and John Kerry both used the correct figure of one-third of our kids dropping out of high school in the presidential debates, and the war for public opinion was largely won.
Almost all state departments of education, however, are still reporting falsely low dropout rates. It is here that local school choice groups can use their leverage, as it turns out that, while Democratic politicians still usually oppose school choice, most will at least favour accurate dropout rates being made available to the public.
In 2008, for example, California passed SB 651 by Democratic State Sen. Gloria Romero, which reformed dropout rate reporting in our state. As a result, we now have the nation’s strongest dropout reporting system, although still one that needs much work. The more accurate dropout rates generated by that law were key in 2010 and again this year in passing our Parent Trigger law, a concept that is now sweeping across the nation.
Passing a new law may seem daunting to members of a state school choice organization, but it turns out to be easier than it seems to persuade even the old guard that supports the status quo that the public is entitled to the truth on this crucial issue.
The dropout issue has turned out to be the school choice movement’s secret weapon -- the equivalent from World War II of the bazooka, the cracking of the Nazi enigma code, and the Flying Fortress bomber all rolled into one. Let’s not hesitate to keep using this breakthrough weapon to free our children.
The stunning success of Khan Academy, an online learning experiment that has now delivered more than 80-million free lessons worldwide, is well documented at this point. But to listen to MIT and Harvard whiz kid Salman Khan describe his journey is to appreciate the extent to which he has only scratched the surface. For those who are not convinced that digital learning will play a significant role in modern education, Khan shows us four math classrooms in Los Altos, California, public schools that he has flipped upside down.
In those classrooms, teaching is first introduced at home. As homework, students sign in to the online collection of 2,600 videos and interactive software. They proceed at their own pace and, with the benefit of pause and repeat, can dwell on a difficult concept without worrying what a teacher or classmate might think. The next day, the students begin to work through problems in class, as the classroom teacher then becomes a roving mentor who is able to expand upon the lessons from the previous night and work at a deeper level with students at their own pace. In just one year, the number of students in remedial math classes that were deemed to be proficient or advanced nearly doubled and the number of students deemed to be far below basic disappeared.
Khan also showed the progress of one student, a student who moved so haltingly in the beginning weeks that he might have been demoted a level. That student, after finally mastering the topics that did not come easily, excelled so quickly that he finished the semester at the top of his class.
“So the paradigm here,” Khan said, “is that instead of holding fixed the amount of time you have to learn something and then the variable being how well you know it, we’re saying let’s make the variable how long it takes you to master a concept, and let’s make the fixed thing that you’ve really mastered the concept. ... In classrooms today, you can fail an exam, and you’re still expected to move on to the next concept."
Khan, a former Boston hedge fund analyst, wowed a crowd of 800 educators, advocates and elected officials with a speech at the National Summit on Education Reform in San Francisco that is available online at the Foundation for Excellence in Education.
The Fordham Institute's enterprise in Ohio weighed in over the weekend on the prospects of additional school options in the Buckeye State, and it did so with characteristic balance. Neither Terry Ryan nor Mike Petrilli are ever bashful to highlight the mixed results of many school options, and they're smart to embrace "accountability done right" in a way that many advocates for choice do not. But just as importantly, they're deft at bringing clarity to debates that too quickly rage out of control.
"The genie of school choice is out of the bottle," Ryan wrote in the The Columbus Dispatch in response to the coming political storm in Ohio over the proposed Parental Choice and Taxpayer Saving Scholarship Program. In other words, though one more private option may feel like "piling on to some," Ryan says, private and public options have thrived in Ohio since the 1990s, and it's time we had a new conversation where we leave old fears behind.
More than 75,000 students are enrolled in some 350 charter schools. The EdChoice Scholarship Program provides vouchers to students in failing schools, and it is set to expand from 14,000 to 30,000 students next year. The Autism Scholarship Program now serves more than 1,300 youngsters. More than 7,200 students participate in the Cleveland scholarship program, Ohio’s oldest. In June, Ohio added a special-needs voucher program that will provide support of up to $20,000 to eligible students to attend private schools.
Ohio’s school districts also have a number of choice programs: magnet schools and alternative programs, STEM high schools and Early College Academies. And 429 districts allow students from anywhere in the state to attend their schools via open enrollment. (Another 90 allow students from adjacent districts to enroll.) And thousands of families have moved in pursuit of better educational options for their children.
The challenge, Ryan adds, "is to ensure that quality keeps pace with quantity and availability." Regulation is a four-letter word to many voucher proponents, but Ryan makes the case that "accountability is the partner of choice":
The latter creates space for innovation and new options, while the former drives change and pushes for continuous improvement. Accountability exposes poor performers and charlatans, while also highlighting successful schools.
The challenge facing policymakers is that, while many voices clamor for widened choice and the opportunities that go with it, far fewer demand accountability for performance. Getting the balance right will determine whether school choice in Ohio succeeds or fails to improve student outcomes. It also could serve as the basis for political détente around school-choice issues.
