(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Detroit Free Press Columnist Rochelle Riley is as mad as hell, and she’s not going to take it anymore regarding the Detroit Public Schools. Money quote:
My question — where is the outrage? — wasn’t meant to ask literally why people aren’t outraged, dear readers. It was meant to spur outrage. It was meant to say: Get up! Stand up! These are children, for God’s sake! How can anyone who is an advocate for children in Michigan just watch? If these children were puppies, there would be lines of cars and trucks from across the state to take them to safety.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
This column called out a lot of the usual suspects–blaming the Mayor, the voters, the parents in Detroit. All of these really miss the point. Most of American education operates under a strong preference for “local control.” While responsibility, in most states, is vested at the State level, the state operates primarily as a revenue sources, with some minimal kinds of enforcements (teacher licensing, textbook approval, minimum seat time, etc). The local aspect works to ensure that parents with resources can move away from concentrations of parents with fewer resources and pool their increased lucre to the benefit of their children. This accelerated during court-ordered desegregation. Most states were helpless to do anything to de-incentivize the shift because each urban, suburban and rural district functioned as its own entity.
In many states, various activists (and underfunded districts) have brought suit to end the dollar disparity, with mixed results. While most state constitutions have some definition of state responsibility to ensure a system of public education, when it comes to defining equity in terms of dollars things fall apart. Basically, there are two ways to go. One is to use state dollars to raise all ships to the level of the best funded in the state. This is very expensive. The other is to redistribute the dollars in some way to raise the bottom at the expense of the top. This makes some very influential people nervous. Or there are middle ground methods, such as building new buildings for the poorer districts, or defining some minimum level of education to be fully funded by the state (and this has run into all kinds of definitional difficulties), allowing richer districts to add on and ensure that they get to maintain an advantage.
What it all comes down to is that our commitment to education tends to begin and end with our own kids. Those with power and influence are able to get a better deal for their kids. Yes–the people in the suburbs CAN vote for change–but it is not at the local level. They have to demonstrate to their legislature that they believe strongly enough that ALL the children should be educated that the state should rebuild the system to reflect that.
Margo/Mom,
Are you suggesting that Detroit performs poorly because it is an “underfunded district” because residents of its suburbs have “pool[ed] their increased lucre to the benefit of their children?” Are you aware that Detroit spends far more per pupil than does the average district in Michigan or the nation?
I wholeheartedly agree with Margo/Mom that, at least for most people, “our commitment to education tends to begin and end with our own kids.” That’s why parental choice is by far the most promising education reform!
Greg:
The problem with parental choice is that again tends to pool kids with resourced parents (having the social capital to engage profitably in the choice process), leaving behind a cess-pool somewhere.
Jay:
No–it is not solely about the bucks, but also people with bucks, and jobs and education and varying kinds of connections. The bucks matter, but that isn’t what drove the abandonment of city school districts when they had to desegregate. Yet, no one has ever argued that economic parity was ever achieved (or a goal) under “separate but equal.” I don’t live in Michigan, so I am not totally up on all of the data (economic or otherwise), but I will wager that attached to Detroit like leeches are a number of suburban districts with more modern facilities, more experienced and better educated teachers and more successful students whose parents don’t care a fig what is happening to the Detoit Public Schools.
There is no evidence to support the claim that vouchers stratify. In fact, the best empirical investigation on this that I’m aware of (the one Howell and Peterson did for thier book The Education Gap) compared the characteristics of voucher applicants in three cities to those of the popluation of students who were eligible to apply, and found no important differences. So the facts are against this theory.
Greg:
Depends on what they were looking at. The assumption is that those who make the move as opposed to staying have distinguished themselves by having the motivation/ability to choose. This is why many of the studies of the effects of vouchers/charters use those who applied but didn’t get in (as opposed to the overall population) as a control. It’s not as simple as looking at demographics.
Oh, well if it’s performance and not demographics that you’re interested in, then there’s a large body of research on that. There are a total of 15 empirical studies that measure the impact of vouchers on the performance of students in public schools. 14 show that vouchers improve performance in public schools and one (in DC) shows no visible change. So that’s a much larger, much higher-quality body of evidence against you on that question. (Note that the key word in your comment is “assumption.” )
Margo/Mom wrote:
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This is precisely what has happened in the public school system- where everyone who can get their kids out of DPS has already done so. The question is whether you are willing to give choice to those in Detroit who can’t afford a home in Grosse Pointe or Ann Arbor.
If you would like to do so, then open enrollment, charter schools and private school choice are the way to go.
“The question is whether you are willing to give choice to those in Detroit who can’t afford a home in Grosse Pointe or Ann Arbor.”
I suppose that in the public interest one could simply close down the Detroit schools then and bus all the kids to Grosse Pointe–or build low-income housing there. But I rather suspect that those foxy suburbanites will just buy up land in the city and build new mansions (and school systems) there.
No, I rather suspect that public education requires a more global–and public–response.
Rather more mundane solutions are available, like eliminating the cap on university sponsored charter schools.