Local Control Only When You Agree with Me

July 28, 2009

Where are the advocates of DC local control now? 

Earlier this month a majority of DC City Council members wrote a letter to Arne Duncan urging the continuation and expansion of the DC voucher program.

And today a new poll of DC voters is being released showing that “74% have a favorable view of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program; and 79% of parents of schoolage children oppose ending the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.” (I’ll add a link to the entire survey as soon as I can find one.  UPDATE:  Here it is.)

Is the same program that Kevin “Too Cool for Private School” Carey called “the voucher program that was imposed on D.C. by Congress“?  Did he mean “imposed” like how Congress imposes millions and millions of dollars on the DC public schools that the new survey finds “76% [of DC voters] rate … as ‘fair’ or ‘poor.”?

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

DC Vouchers: One Step Up, Two Steps Back

July 13, 2009

Durbin

As Matt wrote on Friday, a majority of the DC City Council Members wrote a letter to Arne Duncan expressing their strong support of the DC voucher program, including expansion of the program beyond those currently using scholarships.  The WSJ has yet another great editorial on the topic.  It says, in part:

Earlier this year Illinois Senator Dick Durbin added language to a spending bill that phases out the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program after next year. The program provides 1,700 kids $7,500 per year to use toward tuition at a private school of their parents’ choosing. Mr. Durbin’s amendment says no federal money can be spent on the program beyond 2010 unless Congress reauthorizes it and the D.C. Council approves.

The D.C. Council’s letter shows that support for these vouchers is real at the local level and that the opposition exists mainly at the level of the national Democratic Party. Mr. Durbin has suggested that he included the D.C. Council provision in deference to local control. “The government of Washington, D.C., should decide whether they want it in their school district,” he said in March. Well now we know where D.C. stands. We will now see if the national party stands for putting union power and money above the future of poor children.

Will others who’ve offered DC local control as a reason for opposing the voucher program now come out in support of it?  (I’m looking at you, Kevin Carey.)

Unfortunately, even as vouchers benefited from the support of the DC City Council, Senator Durbin was busy introducing new, onerous regulations on the program in an appropriations bill last week.  In particular, his measures would require participating private schools to take the DC public school test rather than a nationally-normed standardized test, even though they may not have the same curriculum as DCPS.  His measures would also require the Secretary of Education to prohibit voucher students from attending any private school that was not deemed “superior” to DC public schools.  The language is unclear as to whether that means the average DC public schools, the best, the worst, or what. 

You know, this may not be such a bad idea.  Maybe no DC public school students should be forced to attend a public school that is worse than average.  How about if we offer them vouchers?

Wait, I’m sure that was not the intent of the new Durbin measures.  The clear purpose is to strangle the program with reasonable-sounding but truly crippling regulation while the entire program is eventually eliminated. 

Senator Feinstein attempted to remove the Durbin measures in the full committee and Senators Landreau and Byrd joined her in that effort.  But they failed on a tie vote.  It was particularly disappointing to see Senator Mark Pryor vote with Durbin.  Pryor has to be careful not to move further left than his Arkansas constituents as he follows the national leadership or he could finally face a serious challenger for re-election.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

DC Council: Continue Opportunity Scholarships

July 10, 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Yet another BOOOOOM! Now a majority of the DC City Council weighs in for DC Opportunity Scholarships!

Read the letter at the DC Children First website here.

Or read it below:DC letter 1 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DC letter 2 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Posted by matthewladner

WaPo: A Plea to Mr. Duncan

July 10, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Washington Post brings it again on behalf of the victims of Department of Education’s slavish decision to deny over 200 children access to the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.

Seven council members — including those who represent the poorest sections of the city — wrote to Mr. Duncan on June 22 challenging his decision not to admit new students to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The federally funded program provides vouchers of up to $7,500 so that low-income students can attend schools of their choice. Because the program’s future is uncertain, Mr. Duncan decided — disappointingly to our mind — to rescind scholarships awarded to 216 families for this upcoming school year.

Ooops, there goes the local control argument. Perhaps Mr. Duncan and company would like to stand up and confess “We’d like to help these kids, but sadly, we toil as the servile minions of teacher union thugs. Please don’t pay attention to what we do, but rather to what we say. Move along, nothing to see here…”

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Posted by matthewladner

Lieberman in WashPo

June 22, 2009

Sen. Lieberman has another great piece in the Washington Post on DC vouchers.  The issue just won’t go away as much as the cool crowd wishes it would.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

For Those Keeping Score

May 20, 2009

For those who are keeping score, 3 of the top 5 circulating newspapers in the United States have recently written editorials supporting the D.C. voucher program:  USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. 

The New York Times along with their teacher union readership have remained quiet on the issue, hoping the dirty deed can be done as silently as possible. 

And the Chicago Tribune, which is a top 10 circulating newspaper as well as the hometown paper for voucher-killers Obama, Duncan, and Durbin, also endorsed DC vouchers.

Somebody needs to reach Kevin Carey in his hermetically-sealed DC bubble to let him know that at least some people who “are serious about education policy” seem to care about vouchers — that is, unless we want to believe that the editorial boards of the country’s largest newspapers with total circulation in excess of 5 million readers shouldn’t be considered as serious as policy analysts at tiny DC think tanks.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Would You Want This Man As Your Chief Advocate?

May 19, 2009

Rocket scientist and wholly-owned subsidiary of the teacher union, Sen. Dick Durbin, makes his best attempt to write a negative op-ed on D.C. vouchers in USA Today this morning.  The unsigned main editorial in the paper endorses D.C. vouchers and Durbin was given the opportunity to articulate the opposing view.

Durbin writes:

“Now, after three years of study, the results of that evaluation are in, and the U.S. Department of Education found: no statistically significant improvement in math scores for any voucher students (boys or girls); no statistically significant improvement in scores for male voucher students; no statistically significant improvement in scores for students transferring from failing schools (the targets of the voucher program), and only a slight improvement in reading scores for female voucher students (equivalent to three months of additional reading proficiency).”

The program also did not produce statistically significant gains for space aliens and did not make voucher students more handsome or grant them super-powers (HT to Matt).  There are many things that the D.C. voucher program did not do or that the rigorous study could not detect with high confidence for small sub-groups of students.

But one thing that the program did do that Durbin somehow fails to mention is raise reading scores significantly in the analysis of all students offered vouchers.  That is, he mentioned almost every tiny sub-group analysis lacking the statistical power to detect significant effects but leaves out the overall effect of the program. 

This selective and misleading reporting of results is obviously disingenuous.  I’m beginning to lean toward the lying end of stupid or lying.

Why would the union’s water-boy make such an obviously misleading and weak argument?  Can’t they find anyone better to do their bidding? 

Unfortunately, the teacher unions may feel like they don’t have to do any better than this.  As long as they offer their supporters some fig leaf for killing a program proven to work, they are going to press forward.  They don’t have to defend their ideas; they just have to have enough brute force to win.  And unfortunately it seems that they believe they have enough brute force.  That’s why they didn’t even bother to show up to the Senate hearings to defend their position.  They don’t care about being right — only about getting what they want.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

I Want A New Civics Teacher

May 18, 2009

Kevin Carey offers a Civics 101 lesson on his blog.  All I can say is that I want a new civics teacher because this one doesn’t even have basic facts right. 

For example, Kevin writes that DC is ”the one place in America without representation in Congress.”  The people of Guam, Samoa, the Marshall Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico will be thrilled to learn that they’re not part of America or that Kevin has decided to give them representatives. 

But this is a bit of a distraction from the main issue, which is whether charters are good because they are allegedly accountable while vouchers are bad because they allegedly are not.  And here Kevin makes yet another bold, false assertion saying that vouchers schools are “currently unaccountable.” 

In what meaningful sense are DC charters more accountable than vouchers?  Both are subject to market accountability so that if they fail to perform to parental satisfaction they can lose students and the revenue those students generate.  In this sense both charters and vouchers are far more accountable than D.C. district public schools, which receive ever more revenue even as they perform miserably and lose students.  The only “currently unaccountable” schools are the district public schools, not the voucher schools.

But I imagine that Kevin only understands accountability to mean directly accountable to a public authority.  Even with that narrow meaning of accountability vouchers are accountable because they are subject to Congressional regulation and oversight.  Just watch the excellent hearings on DC vouchers held last week if you want to see what accountability looks like.

Perhaps Kevin has an even more narrow understanding of accountability, meaningful compliance with a particular set of rules regarding testing and reporting of results.  But even then DC vouchers are truly more accountable.  DC voucher students are required to take a standardized test and an independent evaluator is assessing whether students are benefiting from having access to the voucher program.  It’s true that DC charters must report test results by school, but that doesn’t make them any more accountable.  Knowing raw test results does not tell parents or public authorities whether those students would have done better had they not gone to that school or had access to the charter program.  The only way to know that with high confidence would be with a random-assignment evaluation, which many voucher programs have had and charter programs almost never have.

By accountability maybe Kevin means checking boxes on some regulatory check-list regardless of benefit to parents or the public.  Kevin would be right about that one.  Charters do have more meaningless and even counter-productive regulation with which they have to comply in the false pursuit of accountability.  The net effect of those mindless regulations is to undermine charter effectiveness and help preserve the unionized traditional district stranglehold.  That’s the kind of false accountability that I’m glad vouchers don’t have.

(edited for typos)

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Negative De-Sarcasticizer

May 14, 2009

Kevin Carey ran my post from yesterday through a “negative de-sarcasticizer”  and wants to take issue with the suggestion that D.C. vouchers were adopted democratically. 

First, I should warn Kevin that a negative de-sarcasticizer actually makes things more sarcastic.  I know because I bought one on Ebay and I use it to help make my posts as sarcastic as they are.  The negative de-sarcasticizer comes with a large, yellow label warning about the hazards of double negatives.

Second, the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers.  All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard.  This would include NCLB and other federal education legislation that Kevin praises charter schools for more strictly obeying.

Third, I am glad that Kevin believes that “giving parents educational choices and opening up public education to competition and innovation will improve outcomes for students.”  And I agree with him that charters would be one way of expanding choices and competition.  But I continue to be puzzled by the argument that vouchers are bad because they are less accountable than charters.  Whatever regulation you believe is desirable for schools could be applied to vouchers as well as to charters.

Finally, I continue to be troubled by Kevin’s need to dismiss vouchers by labeling the idea as “unworkable” or “not serious.”  This is just argumentation by name-calling rather than addressing the substance of the issue.  When I hear this kind of argument it makes me want to turn my negative de-sarcasticizer up to full power.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

More WaPo Gold

May 14, 2009

The Washington Post has yet another excellent editorial today on D.C. vouchers.  This time they discuss yesterday’s Senate hearings on the program featuring our very own Patrick Wolf.

It’s all money quote, so here’s the whole thing:

“WE HOPE that President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and others who have questioned the effectiveness of school vouchers were tuned in to yesterday’s Senate hearing on the District’s program. They would have heard moving testimonials from students whose lives have been changed by their ability to get an appropriate education, as well as a plea from a mother desperate that her young daughter have that same opportunity for a better future. Even more critically, they would have heard the judgment of an objective researcher that — contrary to the claims of some critics — vouchers are indeed working.

“In my opinion, by demonstrating statistically significant impacts overall in reading in an experimental evaluation, the D.C. [Opportunity Scholarship Program] has met a tough standard for efficacy in serving low-income inner-city students,” Patrick J. Wolf told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Operations. Mr. Wolf is the principal investigator on the team conducting a congressionally mandated study of the program and, as a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas, has spent more than a decade evaluating school choice programs. Particularly striking was Mr. Wolf’s testimony that of the 11 other federal education programs evaluated, only three produced statistically significant improvements akin to what the voucher program has produced. Consider also his calculation that a typical student who entered the program in kindergarten would, by the time of graduation from high school, be reading 2 1/2 years ahead of peers who didn’t receive scholarships. There were no discernible impacts in math, although scores show some promise.

The hearing, convened by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), was part of a last-ditch effort to save the federally funded program that gives D.C. low-income students vouchers of up to $7,500 to attend private schools. Congressional Democrats, backed by the powerful teachers unions, included language in the recent omnibus budget bill that would end the program in 2010. Mr. Obama has proposed letting the 1,700 students now in the program continue their schooling while admitting no new students and letting the program die by attrition. We are glad that Mr. Obama is protecting the interests of participating students, but, as Mr. Lieberman argued, if the program is working, why not continue it so more children can benefit?”

Also check out the news coverage of the hearing in the Washington Post.  In particular, I found this bit interesting:

“Lieberman said the committee invited “no less than six witnesses” who oppose the vouchers but got no takers.

Among them were the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the nation’s two major teachers unions.”

Apparently the unions and their fellow travelers are unable to defend their actions and feel no need to do so as long they can bully their way to victory behind the scenes.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

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