By: Greg Forster

Greg Forster — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:10:47 +0000

For the record: Andy originally mixed up Jay and Matt; he’s made the appropriate correction over on his blog.

By: Eduwonk Unloads Toxic Assets! at More About Education

Eduwonk Unloads Toxic Assets! at More About Education — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:04:23 +0000

[...] Matt Ladner finds me insufficently enthused about school vouchers because of this post the other day. Fair enough, I am. But Matt raises three points that are worth fleshing out. First, I’ve made the point that the spread of school vouchers over the past two decades is pretty intresting and remarkable given both the organized opposition and what Terry Moe has called a “public school ideology.” But lumping various tax-credits and voucher plans together as Matt and other school choice advocates often do creates a false sense of scale for intentional choice plans. That matters here because my point was that it’s because vouchers have been limited to a few places and had a limited impact one way or the other that’s led to a subtle but significant shift in the attitude of some elites towards these programs. Second, Matt finds the systemic effects more robust than I do. Reasonable people can review the cumulative literature about choice plans and disagree on how substantively significant or transformative these effects are (or could be at scale) and what that means for vouchers as a policy. My take is that the political impact outstrips the substantive impact on how schools and school districts operate. For a smart take on this check out Revolution at the Margins by Rick Hess if you haven’t yet ( a review here). Third, Matt makes the point that the threat of vouchers has helped spread charter schools. That’s right, especially in the early days of charter schools. Bryan Hassel wrote a good book that looked at this and it’s a pretty widely acknowledged point by charter school advocates and various analysts. But, at some point charter schools will reach sufficient mass so that their diffusion will happen based on other factors than the threat vouchers. Over a million students in more than 4,000 charter schools is substantial and charter caps, for instance, have been raised absent a voucher threat and state financing for charter facilities has been expanded absent the voucher threat. It’s possible that Matt is right and that once they’ve dispatched vouchers school choice opponents will turn their guns on charters, but it’s also possible that in the end vouchers will end up being the stalking horse for charters rather than the other way around… [...]

Comments on: Beltway Confusion

By: Greg Forster

By: Eduwonk Unloads Toxic Assets! at More About Education