(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed the expansion of the Education Savings Account program. The first year program provides students with 90% of the funds that would have gone to their public school into an account with multiple possible uses-including private school tuition, private tutoring, online program and saving for future college/university expenses, among other options.

The bill signed today expands eligibility to children attending D and F rated schools and school districts, the dependents of active duty military personnel and children that have been through the foster care system. The law also moves to a system of formula funding, making it one of the largest private choice laws in the nation with funded eligibility, behind only the new Indiana and Louisiana voucher laws on a percentage basis. The Arizona program now resembles an expanded combination of the Florida McKay and Opportunity Scholarship programs with the 21st Century twist of broadening the options of parents and requiring the consideration of opportunity costs (what you spend now cannot be saved for later).

I want to thank Rep. Debbie Lesko and Senator Rick Murphy for their steadfast and dedcated sponsorship of the bill and our in-state and national allies. Governor Brewer is building an impressive K-12 reform legacy that includes not only expanding parental choice, but also improving public school transparency, curbing social promotion and modernizing the teaching profession. In the not so distant future, we will be able to look at the trends in NAEP scores and identify Governor Brewer’s term and a half as a turning point for the better.

We have many miles to go in Arizona, but we are on our way!

(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.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Carpe Diem is moving into Indianapolis with their blended learning model that produced the biggest learning gains in Arizona. Result: teacher unions babble about the school not having enough teachers and a Tucson reactionary attempts to peddle already discredited criticisms.

Over at NEPC, Kevin Welner rather assuredly asserts that retention is bad for students based upon methodologically unsophisticated studies caried out on bad policies. The claim that retention increases dropout rates is approximately as well established as the belief that cancer drugs kill people with cancer and that rooster crowing causes the sun to rise. Or that Harry Potter books caused NAEP gains in Florida for that matter. Par for the course, Welner ignores the statistically sophisticated studies nearing a random assignment study from Florida and NYC that show significant benefits from those policies.

Over at Ed Week, Little Ramona is drinking the Vegetarian Conspiracy Theory kool-aid on ALEC.

Bless their little reactionary hearts, but at least all of this makes for good comic relief.

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.

It’s National Charter Schools Week, so here is the post I’ve written for the George W. Bush Institute Blog on the issue:

According to the Global Report Card, more than a third of the 30 school districts with the highest math achievement in the United States are actually charter schools.  This is particularly impressive considering that charters constitute about 5% of all schools and about 3% of all public school students.  And it is even more amazing considering that some of the highest performing charter schools, like Roxbury Prep in Boston or KIPP Infinity in New York City, serve very disadvantaged students.

As impressive and amazing as these results by charter schools may be, it would be wrong to conclude from this that charter schools improve student achievement.  The only way to know with confidence whether charters cause better outcomes is to look at randomized control trials (RCTs) in which students are assigned by lottery to attending a charter school or a traditional public school.  RCTs are like medical experiments where some subjects by chance get the treatment and others by chance do not.  Since the two groups are on average identical, any difference observed in later outcomes can be attributed to the “treatment,” and not to some pre-existing and uncontrolled difference.  We demand this type of evidence before we approve any drug, but the evidence used to justify how our children are educated is usually nowhere near as rigorous.

Happily, we have four RCTs on the effects of charter schools that allow us to know something about the effects of charter schools with high confidence.  Here is what we know:  students in urban areas do significantly better in school if they attend a charter schools than if they attend a traditional public school.  These academic benefits of urban charter schools are quite large.  In Boston, a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard, Duke, and the University of Michigan, conducted a RCT and found:  “The charter school effects reported here are therefore large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds.”

A RCT of charter schools in New York City by a Stanford researcher found an even larger effect: “On average, a student who attended a charter school for all of grades kindergarten through eight would close about 86 percent of the ‘Scarsdale-Harlem achievement gap’ in math and 66 percent of the achievement gap in English.”

The same Stanford researcher conducted an RCT of charter schools in Chicago and found:  “students in charter schools outperformed a comparable group of lotteried-out students who remained in regular Chicago public schools by 5 to 6 percentile points in math and about 5 percentile points in reading…. To put the gains in perspective, it may help to know that 5 to 6 percentile points is just under half of the gap between the average disadvantaged, minority student in Chicago public schools and the average middle-income, nonminority student in a suburban district.”

And the last RCT was a national study conducted by researchers at Mathematica for the US Department of Education.  It found significant gains for disadvantaged students in charter schools but the opposite for wealthy suburban students in charter schools.  They could not determine why the benefits of charters were found only in urban, disadvantaged settings, but their findings are consistent with the three other RCTs that found significant achievement gains for charter students in Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

When you have four RCTs – studies meeting the gold standard of research design – and all four of them agree that charters are of enormous benefit to urban students, you would think everyone would agree that charters should be expanded and supported, at least in urban areas.  If we found the equivalent of halving the black-white test score gap from RCTs from a new cancer drug, everyone would be jumping for joy – even if the benefits were found only for certain types of cancer.

Unfortunately, many people’s views on charter schools are heavily influenced by their political and financial interests rather than the most rigorous evidence.  They don’t want to believe the findings of the four RCTs, so they simply ignore them or cite studies with inferior research designs in which we should have much less confidence.

Progress will be made in our application of research to charter school policies by encouraging everyone to focus on the most rigorous studies, of which we have several.  To do that, supporters of charter schools also have to refrain from citing weaker evidence, which only serves to legitimize the use of inferior studies by charter opponents.  As exciting as the outstanding performance of charter schools is in my own Global Report Card research, that evidence shouldn’t be used to endorse charter schools.  Supporters don’t need to rely on the Global Report Card to make the case for charter schools because they have four gold-standard RCTs on their side.  Opponents of charter schools have no equally rigorous evidence on their side.  And that’s the point we should all be making.

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Now Harvard is in, teaming with MIT to create the EdX online learning platform. Money quote from the NY Times:

“Projects like this can impact lives around the world, for the next billion students from China and India,” said George Siemens, a MOOC pioneer who teaches at Athabasca University, a publicly supported online Canadian university. “But if I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course.”

No one has agreed to grant university credit for getting through one of these online courses…yet. Stay tuned…

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.