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Measuring responsiveness to parents

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On January 9, 2012 in Demographic Research, General, Parental Choice, School Choice

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 http://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 right to choose which school their children will attend;
  • the right of appeal against certain decisions by school authorities;
  • and the right of information about the progress of their children and the organization and goals of the school and educational system

“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.

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Californians like charters

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On November 18, 2011 in Charter Schools, Demographic Research, Education and Public Policy, General

From the Los Angeles Times:

Charter schools have won over about half of California voters, but these independent, non-traditional public schools are not widely viewed as the solution to the state’s education problems, according to a new poll.

Among those surveyed in the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, 52% had a favorable opinion about charters; only 12% had an unfavorable impression.

Asked whether charter schools or traditional schools provided a better education, 48% gave superior marks to charters; 24% considered traditional schools more effective.

“As people learn more about what charter schools are, they tend to like the idea of choice,” said USC professor Priscilla Wohlstetter, who directs the university’s Center on Educational Governance.

But further in the story:

Far more people favored increasing funding for traditional schools over the strategy of creating more charters, by a 64%-21% tally. Nor are voters inclined to hand over low-performing public schools to outside operators, including those that run charters.

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Social justice vs. suburban protectionism

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On November 4, 2011 in Demographic Research, Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, appears to have hit upon a proposal that has equal support among voters who identify themselves as either Republican or Democrat in the Wolverine State.

Among several education reform measures Snyder has proposed recently — which include an expansion of charter schools — the governor has put faith into the idea that all public schools should be schools of choice.

While news reports generally have focused on Snyder’s controversial charter school ambitions, several wealthy districts bordering more impoverished urban school systems have lobbied aggressively against Senate Bill 624, which essentially orders schools to open their doors to students from other districts as long as they have seats. Most Michigan school systems already participate in the program, but the holdouts include affluent suburban districts, such as Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills, where school boards and city councils have openly declared that their quality of life and “premium housing stock” will suffer from this urban encroachment.

A new poll shows these attitudes are out of touch with the overwhelming majority of Michigan voters. The Republican polling and political consulting firm Marketing Resource Group surveyed a sample of 600 likely voters in Michigan early in October to determine support for the bill and found that 82 percent of respondents supported this option. And while MRG is a partisan research firm, it broke its results down by party. Republicans and Democrats responded the same way: 83 percent said they supported the measure. A third group, which MRG identified as ticket-splitters, backed the bill with 79 percent saying they supported it. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, and it was commissioned by the Michigan Catholic Conference, which supports Snyder’s school choice initiatives.

Before this is skewered as a favorable poll commissioned by a special-interest group who wanted to promote a favorable poll, the Catholic Conference can at least unequivocally show that the majority of Michigan voters shares its sense of social and economic justice in this matter. Most Michigan voters care more about equal educational opportunity than they do about Grosse Pointe’s premium housing stock.

“Regardless of the respondent’s location, race, gender, union membership or party affiliation, the results of this survey clearly indicate that Michigan families have grown lethargic of the status quo and want the ability to choose where and how their children receive the best education possible,” said Paul A. Long, the president of the Michigan Catholic Conference. “It is the hope of the Michigan Catholic Conference that these polling numbers will help members of the Michigan Legislature look past what is a very small yet vocal minority of special interests and listen to everyday parents and families who want better educational options for their children.”

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Continuing one researcher’s seminal work — a call to action

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On October 28, 2011 in Demographic Research, Education Research, General, Private Schools, School Choice

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?

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Affluent and minorities split on school choice

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On August 4, 2011 in Demographic Research, Education and Public Policy, Education Research, General, School Choice

The authors of the latest Education Next-PEPG Survey highlight the growing disconnect between the general public, the affluent and teachers when it comes to sweeping public policies in education. But, just as notably, the results show a wide range of attitudes between the affluent, Hispanics and African Americans when it comes to school choice.

Vouchers have gained more support nationally since the 2010 survey, but support slips when the results are broken down by the affluent and by teachers. In some cases, the difference is stark among minority groups and the affluent, but those differences disappear when the policies (and the questions) change.

Depending on how the question was asked, as much as 60 percent of Hispanic respondents and 53 percent of African Americans supported vouchers compared to 47 percent of affluent respondents.

However, when it comes to individual or corporate tax credit scholarships, support among the affluent increases to 57 percent, which is the same result among African Americans and closer to that of Hispanics, a group that showed no difference in support among tax credits or vouchers.

Adam Schaeffer at the Cato Institute has more on the differences in support of vouchers and tax credits here.

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