Parry

Does the school make an effort to keep you informed? Are questioned answered in a timely fashion with due regard to the importance of the situation, i.e. it’s your kid that’s under discussion. Are you, as a parent, made to feel welcome and made to feel that your concerns are important?

There are other proxies I’m sure which, while not necessarily as accurate and objective as a well-constructed testing regimen, would tend to indicate that your child isn’t seen as nothing more then a money-teat on the government cow.

You said: “All a mommy or daddy need to know is where their kids stands, educationally, in relation to other kids that are comparable. To make that determination they need accessible, timely, credible information that’s good enough.”

That is one of the key points that I struggle with when it comes to the topic of school choice. I have found that most parents do not have access to that kind of information.

educ8m made the comparison to restaurants: if you don’t like a restaurant, you don’t go back. But figuring out whether or not you like a restaurant is a pretty quick and efficient process with immediate data and feedback. Taste, decor, price, service: it only takes an hour or two to figure all of those things out. In other words, just about anybody eating at a restaurant gets accessible, timely, and credible information.

But what types of accessible, timely, and credible information are currently available to parents about the quality of their children’s education, and how that quality compares to the education of other children?

Parry

Besides, the argument that education quality is a function of student quality is transparently self-serving. If the quality of the student body is determinative then the professionals are, by definition, not accountable for results. Nice work if you can get and for way to many teachers, they can since professional accountability’s a relatively recent phenomenon which still isn’t anywhere near fully-established.

But let’s not drift too far from the topic.

Dan’s working pretty hard to make a case for lousy decision-making by parents as the rule not the exception. But from a parental standpoint it’s really not that tough a problem.

All a mommy or daddy need to know is where their kids stands, educationally, in relation to other kids that are comparable. To make that determination they need accessible, timely, credible information that’s good enough.

My premise was not that different schools or teachers cannot create different results with the same students. My premise is that students’ own characteristics influence the quality of the school, independent of the school’s staff, materials, and curriculum.

My beliefs arise in part from my years teaching in a large school district in California. I taught, tutored, and substituted in numerous middle and high schools throughout the district. The schools all had the same or similar funding, textbooks, buildings, and student-teacher ratios. Yet the school quality varied widely depending on the characteristics of the students attending each school.

My point: I think many people believe that schools are good or bad independent of their students. They blame teachers or principals or funding for students’ problems, neglecting to look at the students’ own effort, motivation, family attributes, culture, etc. In my experience, the MAJOR factor impacting school quality is the students themselves. Of course, once you have X group of students, things like curriculum and structure can be changed to positively or negatively impact these students’ learning.

Here is evidence on how expanding school choice afftects the achievement of kids who are “left behind”: http://jaypgreene.com/2009/04/27/systemic-effects-of-vouchers-updated-42709/

Also, I disagree (and considerable evidence contradicts) your suggestion that school quality is simply a function of the student and family composition of that school. We know that different schools with different approaches and different staff are able to produce significantly different outcomes for the same type of students. If you really believed that schools themselves couldn’t make any difference, we should drastically cut school funding since the schools and what they do makes no difference. I don’t think you really believe that.

Then you haven’t been looking.

Based on this premise, I believe that school choice has pros and cons. It allows those kids who are motivated and want to apply themselves to attend school with other students like themselves. However, the students who are left behind in the public schools will continue to struggle. Contrary to the assertion of this post, I haven’t seen any data that shows that school choice raises the academic achievement of the kids who are “left behind.”

On occasion, one might choose a bad restaurant. You don’t go back. We are supposed to be free to make bad choices sometimes. We learn from the mistake.