Some colorful language here….not sure about the numbers discussed….ummm….if anyone can find serious fault with the logic, let me know in the comment section. I’m struggling:

The New York Times published an overtly hostile front page story on tuition tax credits yesterday. Others will doubtlessly pick apart the story in terms of accuracy and there are a number of obvious distortions that I spotted in a single casual reading. It’s lazy journalism to quote a school choice opponent as suspecting malfeasance, for instance, when that same person could turn such an organization in to state authorities to face an organization death sentence. If that is of course if such person had any evidence rather than mere idle speculation.

But I digress. I find myself largely in agreement with John Kirtley’s reaction- which is to say that design features in a tax credit program are very important. I however wish to be a bit more direct than John. If school choice supporters don’t pay close attention to design features, especially regarding financial accountability and academic transparency, they leave enough dots lying around for someone to draw the following picture:

Whether this picture is “fair” or not (it certainly isn’t) is beside the point. The point is that parental choice supporters ought not to leave themselves open to such attack.

Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The RedefinED team asked me to write a response to my friends Howard Fuller and Andrew Coulson regarding the means-tested vs. universal choice debate.  Andrew and Howard, for different reasons, support a means-tested approach but I lay out my case as to why I think choice must be universal in scope and how we should approach equity and third-party payer concerns.

The issues raised by Howard and Andrew ultimately beg the question: just where is it that we are going with the parental choice movement? Success in passing some broad programs simply increases the stakes for being thoughtful about the details.

Check it out over at RedefinED.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Last year John Witte, Pat Wolf, Alicia Dean and Devin Carlson found evidence of significantly stronger academic gains for charter school students over district students in Milwaukee using the state data. This got me to wondering what the 2011 Trial Urban NAEP scores would look like between MPS and Milwaukee charter schools. Now, mind you that this chart doesn’t control for much, only comparing FRL eligible students in the charters and the districts. That’s okay with me, as Witte, Wolf, Dean and Carlson have admirably performed that task on three years of data with a promise of a fourth year in 2012 report. Also there is always at least a bit of sampling error with NAEP, yadda yadda ectera.

Do the NAEP tests tell the same broad story as the Witte et. al study? Judge for yourself:

 Those look like differences likely to survive the introduction of a whole bunch of control variables.

Being against greater national control over education policy is not the same as being for local school districts.  I appreciate Peter Meyer for giving me the opportunity in this space to explain what I am for when it comes to school governance.

Fundamentally, I am for parental control over the education of their children, so I guess that I am for as little governance over education as we can manage.  In my ideal world, which I’ve tried to explain and justify at greater length in this book chapter, parents would be given as much money as is minimally necessary to fulfill their obligation to educate their children and would choose the location, manner, and content of that education.  Since education is just a subset of all of the activities in which parents engage to raise their children to be productive adults, we should defer to parents as much in how they educate their children as how they raise those children more generally.  As long as parents do not neglect or abuse their children, the government should have as little role in education as is possible.

But we don’t live in my ideal world and I have no expectation that we will.  All that I can hope for is that we will inch closer to my ideal rather than further away from it.  With that in mind, I favor governance arrangements that facilitate greater parental choice and control over education over those that would reduce parental choice and control.

So, I have no particular love for local school districts.  They just more closely approximate parental choice and control than does granting more power over education to the state or national governments.  It would be even better in my view to abolish school districts and have every school be like a charter school – a publicly regulated school of choice that would choose its own method and content of education and would have to attract willing families to generate the revenue to pay for it.  But I understand the idea of abolishing school districts and having every school operate as a charter school is only slightly less unrealistic than a virtually unregulated world of parental choice and control.

As unrealistic as making every school a charter school may be, we have been inching in that direction.  A little more than two decades ago we had no charter schools.  Today charter schools constitute nearly 5% of all public schools and educate about 3% of all students.  And the expansion of parental choice and control has been even greater when one considers the fully array of choices that have been introduced over the last two decades, including vouchers, tax credit funded scholarships, virtual schools, inter-district choice, magnet schools, etc…  My ideal world may be an unattainable fantasy, but my vision of gradual progress toward that ideal has been a fairly accurate description of the trends over the last few decades.

But there are some people, primarily edupundits located within the DC beltway, who have very different fantasies about ideal governance arrangements.  Rather than shifting arrangements directly toward greater parental choice and control, they dream about measures granting greater control to state and national authorities.  They rightly point out the defects of local school districts, but they wrongly see the solution in greater centralization of power rather than in the expansion of parental choice and control.

Their justifications for increasing the power of state and national authorities over education are more like empty political slogans than actual intellectual arguments based on principle.  For example, we’ll hear some say that a decentralized system of education cannot meet our needs in the 21^st century: “The system of schooling we have today is the legacy of the 19th century — and hopelessly outmoded in the 21st.”  Of course, representative democracy is also a legacy of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but that doesn’t mean we need to dispense with it to meet the challenges of our brave new 21^st century world.  Saying that the 21^st century demands certain skills or governance arrangements is just sloganeering and manipulating people to submit to a proposal, not a real argument.

Some attempt to justify greater centralization in education by saying that our current system is too uncoordinated, contradictory, duplicative, and confusing.  We need the greater coherence, planning, and order that more centralized control can offer.  Do you notice how the central authorities in these proposals are always imagined to be highly competent and benevolent?  They never entertain the very real possibility that the central authority might be coherent, well-planned, and orderly in pursuing something awful.  Those attracted to central planning in education may want to consider how well economic central planning has turned out.

Some attempt to justify granting more power to state and national authorities by looking overseas and claiming that the highest achieving countries have more centralized governance arrangements.  Let’s ignore for a moment that these are not accurate descriptions of how many high-achieving countries have structured their governance – Canada and Australia, for example, are high achieving and have decentralized governance arrangements.  The more fundamental problem is that the “best practices” movement of imitating some of the practices of others who are successful fails to consider what actually caused others to be successful.  Just imitating some of what they do is like the Cargo Cults found in Pacific Islands following WW II, where locals believed that if they built imitations of planes, runways, and control towers, the cargo and plentiful goods that had arrived during the war would return.  They didn’t understand that imitating the trappings of an airport doesn’t cause cargo to arrive any more than imitating the trappings of other countries’ governance arrangements will cause high achievement.

Lastly, some advocates of centralization argue that you actually need to centralize certain things in order to facilitate better decentralized control over other things.  They describe this approach as “tight-loose,” where the central authority assumes greater control over determining and regulating the goals of education and local authorities are then given greater flexibility over the means for meeting those goals.  Of course, ends and means are not so easily separated.  Ends often dictate or at least constrain the selection of means.  In addition, in what fantasy world would the central authority carefully limit its role to setting and regulating ends once it is given authority over an issue?  At least I recognize that my fantasy of parental choice and control is unrealistic.

The Arizona Republic put in a great story on A-F school grading on the front page above the fold today. Notice the role of double weighting the learning gains of the students in the bottom 25% in the formula. This year Arizona lawmakers closed loopholes to the 3rd grade retention law and provided new state funding for reading intervention. The expansion of the ESA program has been revised and again sits on Governor Brewer’s desk. With a signature, Arizona will have a major new choice program focusing on special needs students and children attending D/F graded districts and schools- a combination of Florida’s McKay and Opportunity Scholarship programs with some new 21st Century upgrades.

Arizona’s relative poverty is masked by a very large number of wealthy retirees who live here, often only part of the year. If we tried to spend like CT with its blessings of old money and hedge fund billionaires, we’d drive those retirees elsewhere and likely have little to show for it in terms of academic achievement. We also have a relatively challenging student demographic profile, with more low-income and ELL challenges than average. If we want to make progress, we are going to need to play Moneyball and embrace policies that increase the bang for our buck in the system.

Arizona embraced the parental choice strategy beginning in 1994 with a liberal charter school law, and followed that up with the tuition tax credit program. In the aggregate, these programs combined mostly to take the edge off of public school enrollment growth. For every child attending charter schools or using a tax credit scholarship, three new kids were pouring into the districts and the state continued to spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on new district schools- even in very poor performing districts.

The charter school law succeeded in providing a number of very high quality schools and the tax credit programs helped Arizona’s private schools survive the creation of 500+ charters. The parental choice programs were vitally important for tens of thousands of families, but they alone were not at a scale to move the needle much on public school improvement. This was especially the case as policymakers botched other major areas of K-12 policy.

Arizona’s K-12 testing system, for instance, is in recovery from having devolved into a cruel joke on kids. Arizona had the nation’s biggest dummy down vis-a-vis the NAEP on our state AIMS test. The state fielded a deeply flawed version of the Terra Nova exam that curiously found Arizona students to be above the national average in every grade and subject every year, when we as a state had never exceeded a national average on any NAEP exam. Our policymakers put a stop to it. Worse still, we literally still have schools with giant banners out front in 9000 point font boasting of being a “PERFORMING SCHOOL” when in reality “Performing” was the second lowest label possible. The legislature passed a law this session to forbid the use of these deceptive labels going forward.

Things have changed substantially during the downturn. A housing bust was tailor-made to humble Arizona’s economy, and enrollment growth has slowed to a trickle. One silver lining in this very dark cloud is that some of the most successful Arizona charter school networks have executed/are executing ambitious plans to open new schools- real estate is cheaper, they have earned access to capital, and they are making their moves. This is very much for the good. State policymakers have made far-reaching reforms on not only transparency and parental choice, but in teacher evaluation and the curtailment of social promotion.

We’ve still got miles to go and challenges ahead, but Arizona is on the way to improved learning.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Good column from the Hoover duo in today’s WSJ:

Hispanics attending school in California perform no better than the average student in Mexico, a level comparable to the typical student in Kazakhstan. An alarming 43% of Hispanic students in California did not complete high school between 2005 and 2009, and only 10% attained a college degree.

Anyone worried about income disparity in America should be deeply disturbed. The failure of the K-12 education system for so many students means that issues associated with income distribution—including higher taxes and less freedom in labor and capital markets—will be an ever-present and distressing aspect of our future.

Examples abound of the ability to make sharp improvements in our K-12 system. By not insisting on immediate and widespread reform we are forgoing substantial growth in our standard of living. The problem is obvious. The stakes are enormous. The solutions are within our reach.

(Guest Post by Mike McShane and Gary Ritter)

That’s it, you heard it here first folks, packs of wild dogs have seized control of America’s major cities.

As crazy as that sounds, a study has been circulating the AERA-/Blogo-/twittersphere that’s states that urban Texas school districts have a black male graduation rate of over 80%.  We all know how much some folks here on the Jay P Greene Blog love Texas, but that is just a bit too hard to swallow.

Let’s back up a minute.  Over the past few days, the press (or actually, Diane Ravitch’s twitter page, and then the press, obediently) picked up a story about a “new” study.  OK, it actually isn’t “new” (it first came out in the Berkeley Review of Education in the Fall of 2011) nor is it really a “study”, but more on that later.   The purpose of this study was clear (to attack KIPP) but in the authors’ zeal, they ended up reporting something too good to be true.

Very quickly, using some rough data from schools in Texas, the authors claim to find that charter schools in Texas, and KIPP schools in particular, have higher attrition rates than comparable public schools, even though KIPP schools allegedly spend more money per pupil.

It appears that the authors, in their haste to smear KIPP schools and disprove the strawman idea that choice (as envisioned today) is a “panacea” (using a 20 year old quote) for all of the ills of the American education system, made some pretty shocking errors and omissions that call into question nearly all of their conclusions.

First of all, several of the alleged “findings” were not “found” in this “study”.  Rather, the authors fill their abstract and conclusions with rehashed claims from an earlier, widely discredited study (see this and this and this and this criticism of the flawed Gary Miron paper).

As for the errors in this paper, there are several.  We’ll just highlight a few of the most glaring:

1.  First, we derive the 80% graduation number from tables 7 and 8 (pg. 169), which report an annual dropout rate from black students of 3% for grades 6-12 in the “comparable urban districts” of Austin, Dallas, and Houston.  Before we dive into the glaring problems of tables 7 and 8, we must first draw attention to the author’s violation of the denominator law.  We don’t know, in the context of this report, what 3% even means.  That is, what is the numerator and what is the denominator that created that rate?  Is that a yearly figure?  Is that a cohort figure?  The authors are absolutely unclear.  Our best guess is that this is a yearly figure, which if compounded, would put the dropout rate for those districts at about 20% for that time period.  As a point of comparison, the dropout rate nationwide for Black males is 53%; if the authors are right, we should all move to the Lone Star State!

 2.  If that is too hard to believe, the tables also report that this 3% figure is lower than the 4% of black dropouts in the rest of the state.  So, if the Texas miracle didn’t do enough to impress you, you can find Texas to be probably the only state where suburban and rural areas have higher dropout rates than cities.

 3.  In addition to farcically large results, tables 7 and 8 (on pg. 169) also appear to have either basic arithmetic mistakes and/or are missing many of their observations when calculating their graduation rates.  The first two columns “Majority black” and “not majority black” should be comprehensive; that is, all of the observations should fall into one of those two categories.  The same is true with the third and fourth column “>100 (Black Students)” and “<100 (Black Students)”. Thus, both of the numbers in the N’s of these columns should sum to the same number.  However, they don’t. In table 7, the first two columns sum to 167 total charter schools, while the second two columns sum to 245 (incidentally the same number as the “All Charters” N).  The same holds true in Table 8, where the first two columns sum to 243, while the second two sum to 373 (again the same number as the “All Charters”).  So where did the other schools go?

Beyond these problems with the author’s primary analyses, this article eschews higher quality studies of the question at hand to focus on clearly flawed research on the topic.  Mathematica already looked into this question in rigorous studies that found positive impacts on achievement, and “did not find levels of attrition among these KIPP middle schools systematically higher (or lower) than those of other “ schools within their districts (they were also clear about the descriptions and sources of the numbers used in the analysis).

In short, any reasonable person who actually read the content of this “new study” would immediately see so many red flags as to take some serious pause before disseminating the findings unqualified to the universe of education news followers.  (We wonder how closely Ms. Ravitch reviewed the study?  She may well have tweeted first and asked questions later!)  Unfortunately, we live in a world populated by many, many, many unreasonable people.

On the bright side, good research continues to show that KIPP schools are effective for underserved students, most serious people disregard “new studies” that are neither “new” nor “studies”, and hard-working KIPP students, teachers, and school leaders keep going about their work each day.

By the way, if you want to see KIPP’s response to this study, it is here.