School voucher critics generally approach their job reviewing the research on school choice with unfair assumptions, and otherwise insightful commentators risk recycling old canards. This is true with Thomas Toch’s critique of vouchers in the newest edition of Kappan, which concludes that voucher programs haven't shown enough impact to justify their position in a large-scale reform effort. Questions of scale can lead to legitimate debate, but we'll get nowhere until we acknowledge what's in the literature.
Toch grounds what he calls "the underwhelming record of voucher schools" first with an anecdotal report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which determined that America's first voucher program "is very much like a teenager: heart-warmingly good at times, disturbingly bad at others." The problem is that this newspaper report is nearly seven years old. We've learned so much since then, and at no time has the peer-reviewed science on the subject shown the back-and-forth swing from good to bad that the Journal Sentinel implied in 2005.
John Witte and Patrick Wolf, for instance, gave us a glimpse this year into their evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Among other findings, they conclude that the competitive pressure from the voucher program produced modest achievement gains in the school district, and that the gains of the low-income choice students were comparable to a low-income sample in the school district. Notably, they also found that high school students in the choice program enroll in four-year colleges at a higher rate than do students in Milwaukee Public Schools, a factor that Toch dispatches with a rhetorical afterthought.
And if "comparable" gains between voucher and public school students are insufficient to Toch, he need only turn to more recent evidence from Northwestern University's David Figlio, who annually studies the academic impact of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program and wrote last summer that scholarship students had modestly better gains in reading and math than similar low-income students in public schools. "The estimated effects of program participation on math performance are statistically significantly positive at conventional levels ... and the estimated effects on reading performance are significantly positive in the case of reading," Figlio said. "These differences, while not large in magnitude, are larger and more statistically significant than in the past year's results, suggesting that successive cohorts of participating students may be gaining ground over time."
Critiques like Toch's have been applied carelessly by others to charter schools and other choice initiatives as well, but Toch is correct to point out that public school choice has evolved to grow more accountable to taxpayers in a way that most voucher programs have not. But this, too, ignores more recent developments that would make private school options more transparent. Toch notes that Indiana has established a sweeping new program that will significantly increase the size of the nation's voucher population, but he doesn't mention that voucher students will be subject to the same state testing regimen as public school students. And next summer we'll see the learning gains of Florida Tax Credit Scholarship students according to each participating school in which there are 30 qualifying scholarship student test scores.
The picture is far from perfect, but the lessons we're learning year by year should help inform states to develop well-regulated private school options that help us find common ground on issues of accountability, quality and scale. Toch's commentary may have succeeded in shedding more light on the lingering political divide on parental choice, but it also seems more relevant with debates that took place years ago. Vouchers and tax credit scholarships in Florida, Milwaukee and elsewhere are now well established in systems of public education that defy traditional notions of "public" and "private." Enrollment in the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship has grown by nearly 61 percent in just the last three years, and 95 percent of all scholarship parents rate their school as "good" or "excellent." It's time to graduate to a new conversation about choice where we leave old fears behind.
I wrote recently about the Europe-wide study coordinated by OIDEL, called IPPE: Indicators for Parental Participation in Compulsory Education.
While the United States lags behind most of Europe in recognizing the right of parents to choose schools that reflect their religious convictions without thereby sacrificing the right to publicly funded education enjoyed by their fellow citizens, the IPPE study shows that we are ahead in some other ways. One way in which the U.S. is clearly ahead of most of the countries studied is in the transparency of information about the academic results of local systems, schools and even, in some cases, of individual teachers. While this is quite a new development in the U.S., it is still barely on the horizon in many countries in Europe and elsewhere, largely because of the resistance of the teacher unions.
The IPPE study found that in a number of countries there was little or no information available to parents on school results. In Belgium (a country which is outstanding in terms of parental choice), “assessment is largely communicated by word of mouth with all the errors and bias that this entails. In fact, this all naturally leads to comparative advertising, which the ban on publication of results wanted to avoid ... Sooner or later the matter of assessment will have to be addressed with a more critical and responsible approach.”
In Switzerland (where education is controlled at the canton level), “both the authorities and teachers consulted ... stressed their desire to prevent data regarding school assessments from appearing publicly.” Italy has a national organization assessing the quality of education (one of my former doctoral students works there), but “results on individual schools are not disclosed. In terms of internal assessment, although the idea of quality and school self-assessment was introduced in 1999, it has hardly been expanded on.”
Similar resistance in education circles to the provision of objective data on school results, even on a value-added basis, is found in many other countries, including outside Europe. Last weekend, in editing one of the country profiles from Latin America for the 2012 edition of Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, I learned that its new law on educational assessment, in a provision added at the last minute, states that “diffusion of this information will safeguard the identity of the students, the teachers, and the schools, in order to avoid any sort of stigmatization and discrimination.” As a result, the author concluded, “it seems likely that the process of accountability to parents and to citizens in general will be limited if information on results is provided only at a very general level. Perhaps this could be valid information for policy discussions at the macro level, but it will certainly inhibit discussion at the intermediate level and that of individual schools, which is where the processes of citizen participation and, as a result, accountability are more evident.”
We can be grateful that, as a result of state initiatives and NCLB, American parents and education reformers now have access to information that can help to guide both reforms and school choice. This is a recent accomplishment, and we have not figured out yet how best to use this information. We have a long way to go before the results available address a broad-enough range of outcomes and take appropriate account of differences among pupils and schools. There have been blunders along the way, and there will no doubt be more.
If you doubt, however, that the current focus on measurement of and accountability for outcomes is a necessary means toward the fundamental reforms that American education (and I include higher education, where the process has barely started) needs, I invite you to consider the fervent opposition expressed by the vested interests of the status quo.
One of the recent projects of OIDEL, the Geneva-based NGO mentioned in my last post, has been to coordinate researchers from across Europe in a project to identify and then apply indicators for how national education systems respond to the concerns of parents, including but not limited to their desire to choose the schools that their children attend. It’s called IPPE: Indicators for Parental Participation in Compulsory Education.
I will just summarize IPPE’s conclusions; you can review the whole study and interact with it here. There is also a book with detail on methodology and results country-by-country, published in French in April and in English in September; look for it on https://www.amazon.fr/ in both languages by searching for the first author, Felice Rizzi.
The study makes a distinction between individual and collective rights of parents. In the first category are:
“The category of ‘collective’ parental rights largely refers to parents’ rights to participate in formal structures organised [sic] by the education system.”
Through working closely with the European Parents’ Association and other official and unofficial sources of information, the study was able to draw detailed – though inevitably preliminary – comparative conclusions about the situation with respect to these rights in seven countries of the EU, and then collected less detailed information from eight others.
I’ll focus just on the first of the rights identified. The survey asked two questions: Are there varied educational projects? And are there financial resources in place allowing parents to choose schools "other than those established by the public authorities?" The phrase in quotes is from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
For each of the countries studied, an answer is offered to both questions, as to the others, and a (rather clumsy) numerical score assigned; thus Belgium receives a score of 100 on the right to choose, Spain a 75, and Italy and Portugal each a 60. I would myself rate Italy considerably lower, based on my work there.
The conclusions of the study call for funding of non-public schools and for measures to protect their autonomy from over-regulation.
The study does not compare the EU countries with the United States, and such a comparison would require a refinement of the questions: There is now extensive variety among schools in the US, more so than in some EU countries, because of the spread of charter schools and – less happily – because of the quality differences which are more marked in the US than in most of the EU. Choice among charter and district schools is essentially free of cost. On the other hand, unlike most EU countries, the US does not provide cost-free choice of schools with a religious character, which millions of parents desire so strongly that they pay for it themselves.
For this and other reasons, the narrative portion of the IPPE report seems to me more useful than the attempt to attain precision by assigning numerical values to the different countries on the various questions. Perhaps the greatest value, however, is simply the effort to reach agreement on indicators derived from commonly-recognized parental rights. As these indicators are used by other and more detailed studies, they will make it possible to advance the discussion of parental rights in useful ways.
From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia plans to close four Catholic high schools and 44 elementary schools will be closed or partnered with other schools, officials told school administrators and priests at a close-door meeting at Neumann University this morning.
West Catholic, St. Hubert, Monsignor Bonner-Archbishop Prendergast in Drexel Hill and Conwell-Egan in Fairless Hills will be shuttered in June, according to Rita Schwartz, president of the union that represents the high school teachers and attended the session.
"It was a very sad meeting," Schwartz said.
While officials from the archdiocese attempted to be upbeat and talk about how the changes would strengthen Catholic education in the region, she said that the school administrators and others need time to grieve.
The news came as members of a 16-member commission presented the recommendations from their yearlong study of Catholic education.
Similar to food, medicine, and housing, accountability in public education is a balance of government regulations and customer choice, and finding the proper balance is increasingly important as parental choice becomes more prevalent. Generally regulations and choice are inversely related such that as one increases the other decreases.
When I was growing up we had only one choice for phone service, which meant our phone company was highly regulated. Government regulators determined the services we were provided and their costs, and even prohibited consumers from owning phones. This began to change in 1984 when the government broke up AT&T’s monopoly and allowed more companies to enter telecommunications. More providers led to consumers having more choices and the telecommunications industry being less regulated. Today consumers may own phones and may pick from a plethora of service and cost plans.
A similar rebalancing of regulations and consumer choice is occurring in public education. School district dominance is slowly eroding as public education expands and incorporates new providers such as charter schools, virtual schools, dual enrollment programs and private schools accepting publicly funded vouchers and scholarships.
School boards and teacher unions are resisting this transformation and arguing that overregulated district schools are unfairly having to compete with less regulated choice schools. But their solution -- to require that all publicly funded schools adhere to the same regulations -- ignores the consumer choice component of accountability. Choice schools should be less regulated than non-choice schools, just as telecommunications companies today are less regulated that AT&T was in 1980. If school districts want to reduce the regulatory burdens on their schools and level the regulatory playing field, they should convert them to charter schools.
The macro forces driving change throughout our society are also transforming public education. Inevitably the future of public education will include more customer choice, more diverse providers and less regulation. Therefore, public education needs a well balanced accountability system that reflects these new realities.
Today, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. John Neumann, a Philadelphia bishop who is credited with establishing the first unified system of Catholic schools under a diocesan board. Neumann himself increased the number of Catholic schools from two to 100 in his diocese. By tomorrow, a blue ribbon committee in Philadelphia is expected to release its final report on the future of Catholic schooling in the city. And as a columnist noted in today's Philadelphia Inquirer, the plan will likely recommend closing and merging many elementary and high schools.
St. Joseph University's Robert H. Palestini explores what this portends:
Like other schools, Catholic schools benefit not just those who attend them, but all the region's residents, by producing responsible, productive citizens. When the late William Fishman, a cofounder of the company that became Aramark, was asked why a Jewish man would devote so much of his time to the Catholic schools, he said it was a matter of "enlightened self-interest": The products of these schools would be the employees of his and other Philadelphia companies.
We are all familiar by now with the plight of Catholic schools in Philadelphia and other large cities. For a variety of reasons, the Delaware Valley's Catholic school enrollment has declined from more than 200,000 to about 60,000, and the future of the remaining schools is in doubt.
Providing for the continued effectiveness of these schools, especially the urban ones, was the charge given to the archdiocesan commission. Its task should also concern everyone who cares about maintaining the high quality of life in our region, reducing educational inequality, ending the cycle of poverty, and turning around America's inner cities. There is much evidence that Catholic schools can play an important role in doing that.
In the early decades of the 19th century, American education reformers followed eagerly the developments in European countries that were building systems of popular schooling; Horace Mann even spent his honeymoon touring Prussian schools! More recently, however, there has been a marked disinclination to learn from what – for good or ill – is happening in the schools of other countries. Now and again, it is true, there will be a flurry of interest in why measured performance is better in Taiwan or in Finland than in the United States, but the reports we receive commonly lack the context that would allow us to make sense of national differences.
Of course, there are increasingly rich data on performance outcomes, and studies that correlate these outcomes with different characteristics of national education systems. An especially powerful study, for those concerned with education reforms that include both accountability for results and the empowerment of parents and teachers through school autonomy and choice, was published a couple of years ago as School Accountability, Autonomy and Choice around the World, by Ludger Woessmann and others, including Martin West of Harvard.
Those who want more details on how different educational systems – at least those in Europe – function can turn to Eurydice.org or, for a broader but less detailed view, to OECD’s invaluable annual Education at a Glance and to the reports of the World Bank and of UNESCO on a range of education issues. The new edition of our Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, with chapters on more than 50 countries, will be out in four volumes in 2012.
But how to make sense of all this information and, especially, how to think about it in a systematic way that can serve as the basis for structural and governance reforms? It is not enough, surely, simply to assert that reading and math scores will go up if this or that change is made; efficiency in producing such measurable outcomes (while essential) is not the only result that a society expects from its educational system.
Americans often turn to decisions of our Supreme Court, such as Pierce, Meyer, Barnette, Brown, Yoder, Lau, and others, to articulate fundamental principles that should guide decisions about education, and we do so in ways that often go beyond the particular circumstances of the decision or its actual legal implications. We do this because we lack more general formulations of the right to education and rights in education, apart from the varied provisions of state constitutions. This makes it difficult to think and to discuss in a principled way and causes us to fall back on arguments about test scores as though they were the only issue in education. (more…)
I first became aware of the plethora of private schools serving India’s poor through James Tooley’s extraordinary book, The Beautiful Tree. Apparently India’s government schools are so corrupt and incompetent that education entrepreneurs in India’s urban slums and rural areas have created private schools for the poor that are thriving. Amazingly, parents in living in squalor and supporting their families on pennies per day are paying up to half their yearly income so their children can get educated.
According to this recent New York Times article, India’s government has decided to increase the regulations on these private schools and put more money into the government schools in an attempt to reverse the flow of poor children into private schools. Private school operators say the primary effect of these new regulations will be to give local government officials more opportunities for extracting bribes.
The sacrifices India’s low-income parents are making on behalf of their children are inspiring. The Indian government should embrace these parents’ efforts instead of trying to thwart them. Providing publicly funded education vouchers for India’s poor would increase the number of parents able to educate their children, and increase the supply and quality of private schools serving the poor. One small-scale effort shows promise, but the demand, obviously, is much greater.
India should leverage its expanding private school infrastructure to more effectively and efficiently serve more children, and not let corruption and incompetence usurp these children’s needs.
