School Choice Researchers Unite in Ed Week

February 22, 2012

Pictured (L to R): Rick Hess, Jay Greene, Greg Forster, Mike Petrilli and Matt Ladner

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Today, Education Week carries a joint editorial signed by nine scholars and analysists. We came together to agree that Mom and apple pie are good, Nazis and Commies are bad, and the empirical research supports the expansion of school choice:

Choice’s track record so far is promising and provides support for continuing expansion of school choice policies…Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact. None of these studies has found a negative impact…Other research questions regarding voucher program participants have included student safety, parent satisfaction, racial integration, services for students with disabilities, and outcomes related to civic participation and values. Results from these studies are consistently positive…

In addition to effects on participating students, another major topic of research has been the impact of school choice on academic outcomes in the public school system…Among voucher programs, these studies consistently find that vouchers are associated with improved test scores in the affected public schools. The size of the effect in these studies varies from modest to large. No study has found a negative impact.

We have diverse viewpoints on many issues, but we share a common commitment to helping inform public decisions with such evidence as science is legitimately able to provide. We do not offer false certainty about a future none of us knows. But the early evidence is promising, and the grounds for concern have been shown to be largely baseless. The case for expanding our ongoing national experiment with school choice is strong.

This may well be the most important part:

The most important limitation on all of this evidence is that it only studies the programs we now have; it does not study the programs that we could have some day. Existing school choice programs are severely limited, providing educational options only to a targeted population of students, and those available options are highly constrained.

These limitations need to be taken seriously if policymakers wish to consider how these studies might inform their deliberations. The impact of current school choice programs does not exhaust the potential of school choice.

On the other hand, the goal of school choice should be not simply to move students from existing public schools into existing private schools, but to facilitate the emergence of new school entrants; i.e., entrepreneurs creating more effective solutions to educational challenges. This requires better-designed choice policies and the alignment of many other factors—such as human capital, private funding, and consumer-information sources—that extend beyond public policy. Public policy by itself will not fulfill the full potential of school choice.

Although I also feel particularly strongly about this:

Finally, we fear that political pressure is leading people on both sides of the issue to demand things from “science” that science is not, by its nature, able to provide. The temptation of technocracy—the idea that scientists can provide authoritative answers to public questions—is dangerous to democracy and science itself. Public debates should be based on norms, logic, and evidence drawn from beyond just the scientific sphere.

Signatories:

Kenneth Campbell is the president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, in Washington.

Paul Diperna is the research director for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, in Indianapolis.

Robert C. Enlow is the president and chief executive officer of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Jay P. Greene is the department head and holder of the 21st-century endowed chair in education reform at the University of Arkansas, at Fayetteville, and a fellow in education policy at the George W. Bush Institute, in Dallas.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, as well as a blogger for Education Week.

Matthew Ladner is a senior adviser for policy and research at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, in Tallahassee, Fla.

Michael J. Petrilli is the executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in Washington.

Patrick J. Wolf is a professor and holder of the 21st-century endowed chair in school choice at the University of Arkansas, at Fayetteville.

Our color-coordinated mechanical lion battle chariots that join together into a giant robot are still under construction.

Defender of the empirical research universe!

17 Comments | charter schools, research reports, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Duncan, the Bizarro Ed Secretary

February 14, 2012

We recently highlighted how the Gates Foundation has done the exact opposite of what their own research has shown by ditching a small schools reform strategy (that rigorous, random-assignment research showed to be effective) while embracing a strategy (unsupported by research) of discovering the “science” of effective teaching and then cramming it down our throat through a system of national standards, curriculum, and assessments.

Now the Obama administration’s Education Secretary is playing out of the same Gates playbook by doing the exact opposite of what their own research has shown in eliminating funding for the D.C. voucher program in the proposed budget. (Saying that Obama and Duncan are playing out of the Gates playbook is actually unnecessary since as far as I can tell they are the same exact team.  Have you ever seen them both at the same time? : ) )

Obama and Duncan yanked funding from the DC voucher program despite the fact that the random-assignment evaluation sponsored by their own Department of Education found that the program increased high school graduation rates by 21 percentage points for students who used vouchers to attend a private school.  Duncan must be the Bizarro Secretary of Education because he is doing the exact opposite of what the evidence says.

Instead, Obama and Duncan are pursuing a reform strategy that could be best described as Evidence-Free Top-Down Righteousness.  Rick Hess did such an excellent job of articulating his disgust with this approach that it is worth quoting him at length:

First, setting aside my reservations about Sec. Duncan’s right to not merely grant selected waivers but to impose wholly new requirements that exist nowhere in federal law, I was struck by the sheer number and scope of conditions that Duncan cheerfully imposed. These new requirements included, according to the White House release: “States must adopt and have a plan to implement college and career-ready standards. They must also create comprehensive systems of teacher and principal development, evaluation and support that include factors beyond test scores, such as principal observation, peer review, student work, or parent and student feedback…they must set new performance targets for improving student achievement and closing achievement gaps. They also must have accountability systems that recognize and reward high-performing schools and those that are making significant gains.”

Second, maybe it’s just me, but I have trouble reconciling this list with the President’s proclamation yesterday that, “We want high standards, and we’ll give you flexibility in return…Because what might work in Minnesota may not work in Kentucky.” Indeed, one only had to read Duncan’s complicated, jargon-laden, finger-wagging letters to the ten approved states to see just how prescriptive the process is. In fact, I don’t think the extent of the new demands–and the limited flexibility granted–will be clear for weeks, at best. It’ll require patient observers to wade through the requests, letters, conditions, and so on. Just for starters, it would appear that the waiver “winners” just promised to adopt narrow, prescriptive teacher evaluation and school improvement policies that apply to charter schools as well as district schools–but not even charter authorities are entirely clear on how this will play out in reality or if these commitments should be taken any more seriously than so many empty promises in the Race to the Top applications.

Third, I found remarkably graceless the way in which the administration chest-thumpingly blamed the waivers on congressional inaction, while taking no responsibility for the slow pace of ESEA reauthorization (much less acknowledging that it dawdled for 14 months with a Democratic Congress before ever introducing its initial ESEA “blueprint.”) The White House gleefully declared, “The administration’s decision to provide waivers followed extensive efforts to work with Congress to rewrite NCLB.” This may come as news to those GOP edu-staff who complained persistently throughout 2009 and 2010 that they couldn’t get the Department to give them the time of day. The history added irony to the President declaring, with less respect for the U.S. Constitution than I might expect from a law professor, “After waiting far too long for Congress to act, I announced that my administration would take steps to reform No Child Left Behind on our own.”

Fourth, I was unimpressed by the way in which the administration–even as it criticized Congress for failing to act–went out of its way to steal attention from House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline’s long-scheduled introduction of two bills crucial to moving NCLB reauthorization. It’s hard to take seriously an administration that complains about congressional inaction and then counter-programs so as to minimize attention to congressional action. (If you want to hear more about what Kline has in mind, check out what he had to say when he previewed the bills at AEI. You can find the event here.)

Fifth, I was struck (and not favorably) by the “Stockholm Syndrome”-ness of it all. Watching governors and state chiefs go to the administration on bended knee and hustle to comply with its various demands, out of desperation to escape the more destructive elements of NCLB, doesn’t strike me as good for democratic government or school improvement. And I thought the celebratory press releases would’ve felt more authentic if they’d been read into a camera and recorded on grainy videotape. I’m sure it’s just my skeptical nature, but I couldn’t help flashing on those old Soviet show trials when the President opened by declaring, “I want to start by thanking all the chief state school officers who have made the trip from all over the country. Why don’t you all stand up just so we can see you all, right here.”

Finally, and maybe it’s just me, but I found it patronizing when the President mused yesterday, “So Massachusetts, for example, has set a goal to cut the number of underperforming students in half over the next six years. I like that goal!” Or, “Florida has set a goal to have their test scores rank among the top five states in the country, and the top 10 countries in the world. I like that ambition!” I’m sure it makes me old-school, but I prefer it when the President doesn’t treat governors or respected state chiefs as so many ruddy-cheeked toddlers competing for his approval.

2 Comments | National Standards, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

At Last, a Good Failing-Schools Voucher

February 1, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is pushing a very ambitious education reform plan that includes a big failing-schools voucher. In general, I’m a skeptic of failing schools vouchers. This one, though, really has the potential to be transformative. It would still fall short of a universal voucher in important ways, of course, but it would fall a lot less short than previous failing schools vouchers.

The first failing schools voucher was Florida’s A+ program. It was a good program that created a lot of improvement in public schools in its first yeras. But few people appreciate what a nightmare it was on the administrative side, partly as an inevitable result of its failing-schools design, and partly because the state DOE took advantage of the opportunities that design created for mischief. That almost certainly contributed to the fall-off in its impact on public schools in later years.

I discussed these issues at length in my last study of the Florida program:

There were a number of unusual obstacles, not present in most voucher programs, that kept participation rates for A+ vouchers unusually low. A certain amount of this kind of diffi culty is inherent in the “failing schools” model of vouchers, where students’ eligibility for vouchers is determined by the academic performance of their public schools. Every year, a new set of parents need to be reached with the message of what vouchers are and that they are eligible for them; there can be no gradual building up of information about the program among a fi xed population that is always eligible. However, in the A+ program the worst obstacles were not inherent in the program design, but were imposed by the Florida Department of Education as part of its implementation…

School grades were (and still are) announced in the summer. The timing of the announcement does not follow a set schedule every year and thus is unpredictable. Once the state announced school grades, determining which schools were eligible for vouchers, parents had only two weeks to apply for the program. If they missed this fleeting application window, they could not apply later.

The extremely short two-week eligibility window was a major obstacle to participation. This difficulty was greatly compounded because parents did not know whether they were eligible until school grades came out, at which point the two-week clock began ticking. Moreover, parents did not even know when the announcement of the grades might be coming.

This combination of factors made it extremely difficult to keep parents informed. Nobody knew in advance of the application window which parents would be eligible, and nobody knew in advance when the announcement would come. And once the announcement came, there were only two weeks to get from a starting point of zero information to an ending point of parents submitting their applications for vouchers. Many—possibly even most—parents probably would not even have known that their children were eligible for the program until it was too late to apply.

Another disadvantage is the dynamic of media coverage, which is where most parents get their information about programs of this type, especially when there is no opportunity for a long-term building of knowledge in a fi xed population by word of mouth. When two schools were designated as eligible for vouchers in 1999-2000, naturally media attention focused on those two schools. This would have helped parents in those neighborhoods find out about the program. Or again, in 2002-03, when a substantial number of schools became eligible for vouchers after two straight years with no schools eligible, that was a big news story.

These two years are both instances of how a failing schools voucher program can create “shock value,” but thing about shock value is that it doesn’t stay shocking forever. In years after 2002-03, A+ vouchers were no longer the news story they were in that year. This would have made it less likely that parents would hear that they were eligible for vouchers…

These obstacles help explain why, as a previous analysis has found, the A+ voucher program is the only voucher program ever to see long-term declines in its participation rate…Since the A+ program is the only voucher program ever to see a long-term decline in participation rates, it is reasonable to attribute this decline to the unique obstacles to participation that were imposed on the program by the Florida Department of Education.

Then there’s the Ohio EdChoice program, which, like Florida’s A+, only serves a small population of schools and has a positive impact on public school performance but a modest one.

The Jindal plan, by contrast, would give a voucher to all students below a certain income in schools that get a C, D or F. That adds up to almost 400,000 eligible students, over half the state population. While changing eligibility from year to year would still be present, it would be greatly mitigated both by the lower performance bar for school eligibility (schools that change grades within the A-B range or C-F range won’t change eligibility) and also by the large amount of attention generated by such a large eligibility pool. When more than half the state’s students are eligible for choice, people will know that choice exists!

I continue to think that only universal choice will really get education out of the rut it’s in. But this would be a huge step in that direction.

3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Archbishop Charles Chaput Calls for Action to Expand PA Parental Choice

January 31, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput released the following statement last Friday and published in today’s Philadelphia Archdiocesan publications, including every parish bulletin being distributed at Mass and published online.

Archbishop’s weekly column: Catholic Schools Week – How you and I can help

Monday, January 29, begins Catholic Schools Week. It’s a time to honor the unique value of Catholic education. Here in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, we have a long record of dedicated service by the women and men who teach in our classrooms and run the “business” of Catholic schools. That record includes the legacy of thousands of women and men religious and diocesan clergy. In the single academic year of 1963-64, more than 4,100 religious and 1,600 laypersons taught more than 263,000 students enrolled in our schools. Today, scores of our pastors make extraordinary commitments of parish funds to keep our schools open and excellent.

Unfortunately, schools run on resources, not simply good will and heroic service. Our schools can no longer count on unlimited Church support. The resources simply don’t exist. Many of our parishes are financially strained. The archdiocese itself faces serious financial and organizational challenges that have been developing for many years and cannot be ignored.

So where does that leave us? We can honor Catholic Schools Week this year by actually doing something about the fiscal problems hurting our schools. We need to press our lawmakers, respectfully but vigorously, to pass school choice.

First, we need some clarity: School vouchers do not mean “government support for religious schools.” That argument is flatly false. No vouchers go to any school, religious or otherwise. Vouchers do, however, return the power of educational choice to parents, where it belongs. In doing so, vouchers make all schools more accountable for the quality of education they deliver. Parents get the voucher. Parents choose the school. This makes perfect sense. And if a school offers a poor education for young people, parents will rightly vote with their feet — and their vouchers. Of course, most Catholic schools do the opposite: They offer a strong education, in a safe environment, with a focus on developing good moral character. That’s why parents are so upset when they close.

Some people argue that school choice legislation only helps families in poor areas. Helping the poor is obviously vital, and vouchers would accomplish that. But vouchers would also assist many more families than the poor. If vouchers are approved, they will free up what’s known as EITC funds — Educational Improvement Tax Credit funds — along with other grant and scholarship monies for many thousands of other school families. In effect, the positive impact of vouchers translates to millions of dollars of additional educational resources potentially available to a wide range of school families each year — including Catholic school families.

Now here’s an unhappy fact: In 2011, the bishops of Pennsylvania made the passage of vouchers one of their priority legislative issues. People like Bob O’Hara in our statewide Catholic bishops’ conference and Jason Budd in our archdiocesan Office of Catholic Education worked hard to mobilize Catholic support. Their efforts failed — and not because they didn’t try, but because too few people in the pews listened. Very few Catholics called or wrote their state senators and representatives. Even fewer visited their offices to lobby as citizens. Despite this, vouchers passed in the state senate, before stalling in the house. One non-Catholic school choice activist — who has poured years of his time and millions of dollars of his own resources into fighting for vouchers as a social justice issue — was baffled at the inability of Catholics to mobilize around an issue so obviously vital to the public interest and so clearly helpful to the survival of their own schools.

In the coming week I’ll be writing every state senator and representative in the territory of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to press them to support school vouchers. And I’ll continue doing it until vouchers pass. I hope my brother bishops and pastors across the state will do the same. More importantly: Our Catholic people need to do the same. Elected officials do listen, and they act when the noise gets loud enough. If nothing else, the crisis of Philadelphia’s Catholic schools is an unpleasant but finally very healthy wake up call. The bill for our failure to pass school choice over the past decade has come due. Now we’re paying for it.

When vouchers stalled, yet again, in the Pennsylvania house last fall, a frustrated Catholic school teacher friend of mine said “Catholics are suckers.” I don’t believe that. But then, I’m new in town. If we Philadelphia Catholics love our Catholic schools, and we obviously do, then the time to get active and focused is now. We need to begin pressing our state lawmakers to pass the school choice legislation — including vouchers and expanded EITC credits — that’s currently pending in Harrisburg. And we need to do it this week, today, right now. I plan to do that. I hope you’ll join me.

For more information on school choice, and to contact your legislator, please visit:  http://tinyurl.com/PASchoolChoice

3 Comments | tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Kevin Carey Gets the Facts Wrong

January 30, 2012

(Guest post by Patrick J. Wolf)

In The Atlantic Online resident cool-kid Kevin Carey sings the “vouchers-are-all-bad-but-charters-are-all-good” song that is the official anthem of the beltway crowd of education reform hipsters.  Carey repeats some points from my own research that school choice results would be even better if parents had more extensive information about schools (but see here for how the mere availability of choice improves parent knowledge about schools) and the supply of choice schools was of consistently higher quality.  Fine.  Carey also claims that private school administrators are rapacious (tell that to the nuns that still run many Catholic schools) and politicians who support school vouchers do so for “obviously partisan reasons” while Mr. Carey only cares about the children.

Unlike Kevin Carey I don’t purport to possess the ability to look inside of people’s souls and conclusively discern their true motives.  Still, his broad-brush claim that all voucher backers are merely trying to “club Democrats” (his words) seems demonstrably inconsistent with the behaviors of voucher supporters such as retiring Independent Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator Diane Feinstein (yeah, she loves to club Democrats), former Democratic Mayor Anthony Williams, Wisconsin State Representative Jason Fields (yet another African-American Democrat who supports vouchers), etc.  I really could go on and present a much longer list, but Kevin Carey only uses single examples to make sweeping generalizations so I’ll simply outperform him by using multiple counter-examples to disprove his universal and unqualified claims.

What disturbs me more than Carey’s reckless accusations is his lack of knowledge of the basic facts surrounding school vouchers.  For example, he states casually that, “To this day, vouchers are only available to small handful (sic) of students.”  The facts are that 27 different voucher or tax-credit funded voucher-like programs serve over 210,000 students.  Even Paul Bunyan’s hands couldn’t hold that many kids.

Carey goes on to state boldly that, “Unlike private schools that pick and choose their pupil (sic), charters are open to all students and allocate scarce openings via lotteries.”  The facts are that many voucher programs do not allow private schools to discriminate in admissions.  In Milwaukee, for example, private schools participating in the voucher program must admit students by lottery but public charter schools in the city can pick and choose their pupils — the exact opposite of what Carey claims.

The D.C. voucher program is “a small, benign, and not particularly effective effort that at its core is nothing more than its name suggests: a program that awards scholarship (sic) to a small group of poor families to partially offset the cost of attending private school”, according to Kevin Carey.  Ignore the fact that this is yet another grammatically incorrect sentence from Mr. Carey.  Is it true?  Well, I know a few things about the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, having served as the U.S. Department of Education’s independent evaluator of the program and having written six detailed reports on our nation’s only federally-funded school voucher initiative.

Did the D.C. voucher only “partially offset the cost of attending private school” for families, as Carey claims?  In over 99 percent of cases, the D.C. voucher of up to $7,500 was accepted by schools as full payment from the family.  The private schools accepted less than half the per-pupil government resources allocated to D.C. public schools and either provided a highly efficient education to voucher students or, in many cases, covered the extra costs themselves.  Wait a second, I thought Kevin Carey said that private school operators are greedy and avaricious?

Is the D.C. voucher program “not particularly effective”?  Our gold-standard experimental evaluation concluded that the voucher program increased the high school graduation rate of students by 12 percentage points from the mere offer of the voucher and 21 percentage points if a student actually used it.  That makes the D.C. voucher initiative the most effective drop-put prevention program ever evaluated by the U.S. Department of Education.  The same Milwaukee evaluation that Carey references as showing no net achievement benefits for voucher students also reports that Milwaukee voucher students are graduating from high school and enrolling in college at higher rates due to access to private schools through the program.

President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address that teenagers be compelled to remain in school until they turn 18 or graduate.  Who needs such Big-Brother-like compulsion?  When the government provides more students with access to private schools through vouchers the kids stay in school willingly.

Does Kevin Carey ignore the clear and large graduation rate benefits of the D.C. and Milwaukee voucher programs because he thinks it isn’t desirable for low-income minority children to graduate from high school?  If so, then human compassion and a wealth of research proves him wrong.  More likely, Carey ignores the compelling evidence that school vouchers help disadvantaged students go further in school because it is an inconvenient fact that undermines his argument.  He doesn’t want to admit that voucher programs are effective at promoting the most important student educational outcome there is, and he certainly doesn’t want to share that uncomfortable information with his readers.  Move along, nothing to see here.

After lauding school choice only through public charter schools, Carey states that, ”…the market will still require strong oversight from public officials to grant the ‘approved’ status Friedman envisioned over a half-century ago–and the willingness to revoke that approval when performance is sub-par,” which is exactly how the Milwaukee voucher program is designed and operates.

Doesn’t Carey read anything?  A report released last year documented that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the government agency that oversees the Milwaukee voucher program, has kicked 35 schools out of the program since 2006.  The average student performance in those schools was dramatically lower than the achievement numbers for the schools allowed to remain in the program.  Voucher programs in the U.S. have exactly the kinds of government accountability mechanisms that Carey falsely claims are missing from them, plus market accountability to boot.

After Kevin Carey’s litany of factual errors, he grandly proclaims the path forward for people, like himself, who actually care about the children.  “We can start by purging the worst rhetoric from the school choice conversation.”  Well, Mr. Carey, before you criticize the splinter in your brother’s eye you might want to work on removing the log from your own.  Meanwhile, readers who want accurate information about school vouchers should, like the Titanic, steer clear of The Atlantic.

11 Comments | charter schools, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Friedman Foundation Releases 2012 ABCs

January 24, 2012

HT Brandon Peat Design

The Friedman Foundation has just released the 2012 edition of its annual publication ABCs of School Choice. It’s a busy week for releases!

There’s much to celebrate this year:

Milton and Rose D. Friedman envisioned a true revolution in American education. Their ideal was simple but powerful: give every parent the power and freedom to choose their children’s education. Unquestionably, 2011 was a breakthrough year in the quest to see that vision achieved in the United States. Thirteen states enacted school choice programs (this includes Washington, D.C., and Douglas County, Colorado). A total of 19 programs were enacted or improved—including the creation of eight new programs and the expansion of 11 existing ones.

Appropriately, this year’s report is subtitled Rising Tide. Check it out!

That’s a pretty big improvement over the plain text and little silhouettes of states it used to consist of when I edited it. Kudos!

Leave a Comment » | tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

School Choice on Learning Matters TV

January 19, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

And now, for a change of pace, JPGB is proud to present a post that doesn’t need to be shipped in a plain brown wrapper.

Learning Matters TV just posted an online forum on school choice, building on a segment they did for PBS NewsHour back in November. Eight experts got to lay down 300 words each on school choice. Your humble servant makes an appearance, as well as perennial school choice faves Andrew and Clint, plus Jay’s U.Ark. colleague Mike McShane.

I feel cleaner already.

Our new sponsor!

Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Why Do Reporters Get it Wrong?

January 13, 2012

It’s really frustrating, but some reporters continue to mis-represent the scholarly literature on the effects of private school choice programs.  We devoted an entire chapter in Education Myths to debunking “The Inconclusive Research Myth.”  But like an un-dead vampire that won’t die even after you’ve driven a stake through it’s heart, reporters keep repeating as fact things like the following:

Studies have generally found no clear advantage in academic achievement for students attending private
schools with vouchers.

That statement was the conclusion of the famously unreliable and partisan Center on Education Policy.  And reporter Tom Toch embraced it as an accurate summary of voucher research in his recent article in the Kappan.  What do we have to do to stop reporters from repeating this falsehood?

This blog post from Adam Emerson at the newly launched Fordham blog, Choice Words, is a great start.  Here’s a taste:

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.

And Adam doesn’t even reference all of the gold standard (random assignment) research showing positive effects for students who participate in voucher programs, not to mention all of the rigorous studies finding that entire school systems improve in response to vouchers.

So why do people like Tom Toch, who’s not stupid or mean, fail to acknowledge this wealth of evidence showing benefits from voucher programs and just focus on crappy and mistaken summaries from hacks at CEP?

4 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Value-Add Map Is Not the Teaching Territory, But You’ll Still Get Lost without It

January 11, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Since we’re so deep into the subject of value-added testing and the political pressures surrounding it, I thought I’d point out this recently published study tracking two and a half million students from a major urban district all the way to adulthood. (HT Whitney Tilson)

They compare teacher-specific value added on math and English scores with eventual life outcomes, and apply tests to determine whether the results are biased either by student sorting on observable variables (the life outcomes of their parents, obtained from the same life-outcome data) or unobserved variables (they use teacher switches to create a quasi-experimental approach).

Finding?

Students assigned to high-VA teachers [i.e. teachers who produce high "value added" on test scores] are more likely to attend college, attend higher- ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher SES neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers. Teachers have large impacts in all grades from 4 to 8.

Let’s bring that down to reality:

Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase students’ lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample.

But here’s what I want to pay the most attention to. Note the careful wording of the conclusion:

We conclude that good teachers create substantial economic value and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers.

Note what they don’t say. They don’t say that increasing math and English test scores by itself leads to improved life outcomes. They say good teachers lead to improved life outcomes, and value-add is one relatively good way to identify good teachers.

You’ve heard the saying that the map is not the territory? (If not, that means you haven’t seen Ronin, in which case shame on you.) Well, it’s true. What raises life outcomes is good teaching, and good teaching can’t be reduced to test scores. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)

But if you want to find your way around the territory, you need a map. If you want to help those kids stuck with lousy teachers who are out a quarter million, you’re going to need a tool that identifies them. Value added analysis is the best tool we’ve come up with yet – other than parental choice, of course.

And where the tests are freely selected and voluntarily adopted by schools, the tests provide helpful data for parents, so parent choice is strengthened by voluntary testing. That’s why over 90% of private schools use testing in some form. On the other hand, forcing teachers to use a test they don’t believe in is a self-defeating proposal.

But how do you get schools to want to use a test? Parent choice, of course! Choice is what creates the external standard of performance that makes assessment tools seem legitimate rather than illegitimate. So testing and choice are like chocholate and peanut butter – they’re two great tastes that taste great together.

4 Comments | instructional reform, research reports, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

PA lawmakers fail to expand school choice

December 16, 2011

 (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

As predicted, Big-10 country led the nation in expanding school choice this year. Just to recap, Indiana created the what will become the nation’s largest voucher program and expanded their tax credit. Wisconsin expaned the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and created a new program for Racine. Ohio expanded their failing school voucher and created a new voucher program for special needs students. Michigan removed the cap on university sponsored charter schools after a decade plus long struggle.

Pennsylvania had proposed vouchers, a large expansion of their tax credit program and an expansion of their charter school law. It appears however that the PA legislature will choose to do nothing to expand parental options.

17 Comments | tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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