Jay P. Greene's Blog

In my last piece in this series against the high-regulation approach to school choice, I observed that accountability to the government does not automatically follow from receiving government funds.  In fact, most government programs, including Food Stamps, Social Security, Pell Grants, and the Day Care Tuition Tax Credit, have no requirements for performance accountability to the state.

Even if government accountability is not the norm for government programs, some people may still favor requiring choice schools to take the state test and comply with other components of the high-regulation approach to school choice, such as mandating that schools accept voucher amounts as payment in full, prohibiting schools from applying their own admissions requirements, and focusing programs on low-income students in low-performing schools.  Some people, including many of the most powerful backers of school choice, seem to believe that these regulations help protect kids and improve outcomes.

Let’s leave aside for now discussion of whether this set of heavy regulation negatively affects the quality of participating schools.  And let’s also leave aside whether these regulations are even effective in promoting equity of access to participating schools for disadvantaged students.  The real problem is that heavy regulation dramatically reduces the number of participating schools.  Arizona’s choice programs have light regulation and near-universal participation among private schools.  Florida’s tax credit program has more regulation, although it does not require taking the state test.  It has almost two-thirds of private schools willing to take students.  But in Indiana’s heavy-regulation program the private school participation rate drops to around 50%.  At least in Indiana, many private schools were accustomed to administering the state test as a requirement for participating in inter-scholastic athletics.  In Louisiana, where the heavy regulation and state-testing requirement were new, only about 1/3 of private schools are willing to participate in the voucher program.  Survey research by Brian Kisida, Pat Wolf, and Evan Rhinesmith confirms that heavy regulation is driving private schools away from these programs.

The only equity of access that is promoted by the heavy-regulation approach is that everyone is equally unable to access schools that refuse to participate in the programs.  In their desire to protect disadvantaged students, the backers of this heavy-regulation approach have ironically done serious harm to these students by driving away most of the supply.  And the minority of private schools that are willing to participate are likely to include many of the lower quality schools.  Who is most likely to be willing to abandon control over their admissions, accept tiny voucher amounts as payment in full for serving the lowest achieving students, and is willing to take the state achievement tests?  Financially desperate private schools with a lot of empty seats are likely to be first in line to accept these terms.  High-quality private schools may at most make a token number of seats available.  Rather than protecting access and ensuring quality, heavy regulation is having the opposite effect.  Heavy regulations are eliminating the bulk of options and especially driving away the highest-quality private schools.

It should come as no surprise to anyone if we see some very disappointing academic outcomes in Louisiana’s voucher program.  A heavy regulation program that some major backers of school choice believe represents the “ideal” approach is actually designed to give us the worst outcomes.  If we do see bad results, the first impulse of the backers of heavy regulation will be to double-down on regulation.  They’ll wonder who the bad schools are and call for regulators to remove them from the program.

If education reform could be accomplished simply by identifying and closing bad schools while expanding good ones, everything could be fixed already without any need for school choice.  We would just issue regulations to forbid bad schools and to mandate good ones.  See?  Problem solved.  But real education reform requires using the power of choice and competition to provide incentives to create more good and to reduce bad.  The whole problem with the high-regulation approach is that it falsely believes regulators can define, identify, and require good outcomes.  If that were in fact possible, we would have already solved the problem and we could have done so without any school choice.  The enduring troubles of the traditional public system tell me that is not possible.

Yesterday I promised to rebut the case for high-regulation of school choice programs over a series of posts.  In this first post of that series I address the argument that state funding of programs requires accountability to the state for performance.  It’s the taxpayers’ money, the argument goes, so the public deserves to know if students are doing well.  That’s the price — if you take the government’s money, you are accountable to the government.

Unfortunately, the people who make this argument are just repeating a political slogan.  If they bothered to think about it, even for a few minutes, they would quickly realize that the vast majority of government programs do not require accountability to the government for performance.  When the government provides food stamps it does not require recipients to submit BMI measurements or other indicators of adequate nutrition.  Yes, food stamps have some restriction on the items that may be purchased, but the program does not require accountability for performance.  Social Security was developed to ensure that senior citizens would be able to buy necessities, like housing and food.  But we do not demand an accounting from seniors of the use of those funds.  If they want to blow it at the casino and not pay their rent or buy groceries, they are free to do so.

Even in the area of education, government funds do not typically require accountability for performance.  We do not require recipients of Pell Grants to take a state test.  Beneficiaries of the Day Care Tuition Tax Credit similarly do not have to demonstrate progress toward school readiness in exchange for the government subsidy.  Repeating that government funds require accountability to the government is just mindless sloganeering, not an accurate description of how government programs typically operate.

Why do most government programs not require accountability for performance?  The simple answer is that in most cases we trust that the private interests of program participants are aligned with the public interest in providing them with the benefit.  We trust that food stamp recipients want to avoid being malnourished, which is why we provide them with this assistance.  We trust that seniors don’t want to be homeless or go hungry, so are unlikely to blow their money at the casino if a rent payment is due.  We trust that college students want an education.  And we trust that families with children in pre-school want them to be prepared for later schooling.

We don’t demand performance accountability in any of these programs because we believe that people are likely to use funds in ways that are consistent with the public purpose in providing them with assistance.  Of course, that is not always true.  Some people would rather trade food stamps for drugs and go hungry.  Some people will spend their Social Security checks foolishly and fail to pay the rent.  Some college students would rather embark on an alcohol-fueled journey of self-discovery than receive an education.  And some families just want their pre-schoolers to be warehoused conveniently somewhere while they go to work rather than improve their children’s school-readiness.

While we are fully aware that some people will abuse these programs and fail to use the funds efficiently in a way that is aligned with the public interest, we recognize that demanding performance measures would undermine the public purpose of these programs even more.  Requiring performance measures distorts and narrows the behavior of program participants.  It is also costly, burdensome, and highly intrusive.

The same is true for school choice programs.  As long as we believe that most program participants have interests that are aligned with those of the taxpayer, let’s design school choice programs like we design most government programs — without performance accountability requirements.

Many of the most powerful backers of school choice are embracing a high-regulation approach.  Their interests have shifted from promoting choice as the goal to using choice as a mechanism for obtaining more quality schools.  They don’t trust that choice produces quality.  They want a fairly heavy dose of regulation to prevent bad schools from being included among the options available to families.  They want to control key aspects of school operations to prevent schools from becoming bad.  And they want a powerful regulator — a portfolio manager or harbor master — who will identify and remove bad schools from choice programs.

I think this approach is deeply flawed.  I understand that political reality requires some amount of reasonable regulation.  But the view that regulation, not choice itself, is the main driver of quality improvement is completely wrong.  My fear is that just when school choice is achieving escape velocity as a self-sustaining and expanding policy, the love for high-regulation may do serious harm to these programs and the children they intend to help.

Over a series of blog posts I intend to describe the arguments folks have for high-regulation and why I think those arguments are mistaken.  First let me describe the high-regulation approach to school choice.  Their ideal model has the following central features:

1. Choice programs should not allow private schools to use their regular admissions standards and procedures.  Instead, they should be requires to accept all applicants or use a lottery if over-subscribed.
2. Participating schools should be required to accept the voucher amount as payment in full even though that amount is almost always less than their regular tuition, less than their cost to educate each student, and far less than what is provided to students in traditional public schools.
3. Choice programs should focus on low-income students in low-performing public schools.
4. Participating private schools should be required to administer and report results from the state achievement tests.

This model is not a program that powerful backers of school choice would be willing to accept.  It is their ideal.  It is the starting point for their political negotiations, not what they would be willing to accept after compromises to win political support.

Why do they favor all of these regulations?  I think they have four main arguments:

1. State funds require accountability to the state for performance.
2. Regulation protects kids and improves outcomes from choice.
3. Regulation improves the political prospects for choice.
4. Achievement tests are a reasonable proxy for school quality that a regulator could use to decide which schools should be included or excluded from the set of options available to parents.

I think all four of these arguments are mistaken.  In subsequent posts I’ll consider and rebut each of them.

Education Next is out with a set of great new poll results.  They ask a representative sample of the general public, parents, and teachers about a variety of salient education policy issues.  You can see the results in detail on this fantastic interactive site.

There are many interesting results to discuss, but the one that caught my eye is a question about how much schools do and should emphasize different topics.  The general public, parents, and teachers were asked to rate on a scale from 1 to 7 (with 1 being “a little” and 7 being “a lot”) how much they thought schools were emphasizing reading, math, the arts, history, science, character, creativity, global warming, athletics, and bullying.  Respondents also described how much schools should be emphasizing those topics.  I calculated the difference between how much parents said schools should and do cover different topics to see where parents think schools are currently most falling short of their priorities.

Parents would like to see schools increase their emphasis on every topic except athletics.  But the two topics they wanted to see increased the most were character and creativity.  Parents rated the emphasis that schools give to character as a 4.10 on the 7 point scale.  When asked how much schools should emphasize character, parents gave an answer of 5.41 — an increase of 1.31.  For creativity parents rated schools’ current efforts as 4.25 but would like to see 5.63 — an increase of 1.38.

Parent demand for increased focus on character and creativity is almost double their desired increase for reading or math.  Parents say schools are emphasizing reading at 5.62 and math at 5.66 but would like to see that at 6.28 and 6.31, respectively.  They want more focus on math and reading but only an increase of .65 or .66 compared to an increase of 1.31 and 1.38 for character and creativity.

Why do parents think schools are falling much further short in their emphasis on character and creativity?  Part of the problem is that character and creativity involve questions of values on which there is much less consensus than on technical skills in math and reading.  If we assign students to public schools, we are often forcing people with diverse sets of values into the same schools.  If they try to teach character, they invite fights over what the content of that character should be.  Public school districts can’t even agree amicably on what to name their schools let alone what kinds of values to teach.  The Cato Institute has put together a useful web site documenting the endless conflicts produced by forcing everyone into the same school system.

If we really want schools to give a much greater emphasis to teaching character, we will need to expand school choice.  Choice allows families with similar values and priorities to send their children to schools that will then be free to teach those values.  Schools won’t be deterred by struggles over values since parents seeking a different type of character education can choose a different school rather than fight.

Schools also fall short of parent expectations for teaching character and creativity because those concepts are ill-defined and even more poorly measured.  What do we mean by character and creativity?  How would we know if schools are doing it?  To address these difficulties, the Department of Education Reform has launched the Character Assessment Initiative, or Charassein (sounds like kerosene), under the direction of my colleague, Gema Zamarro. I’ve written before about some of the path-breaking research coming out of Charassein, but be sure to stay tuned as more is on the way.

With better understanding of what we mean by character, better ways of measuring those outcomes, and more choice so that schools and families are free to teach desired character traits, we may see a closing of the gap between what parents want and what schools do in teaching character.

(Guest post by James V. Shuls)

If you’ve been in the education business or around a teacher for any significant amount of time, you have undoubtedly heard someone say something like, “Imagine if teachers were treated like professional athletes.” Well thanks to comedians Key and Peele, we no longer have to imagine. In a new segment, “Teaching Center,” the two spoof the popular ESPN show Sports Center to bring us the “top stories from the exiting world of teaching.”

The video has been a hit with teachers and is receiving a significant amount of attention on social media. Within 24 hours of being posted, it had more than a million views.  The response of most is, “Oh yeah, what if instead of paying LeBron James hundreds of millions of dollars, we did that with Mrs. Smith, the rock-star high school chemistry teacher?!?” Putting aside the economics of the supply and demand disparities for the LeBron’s and Mrs. Smith’s of the world (LeBron plays in front of millions of fans each year, while Mrs. Smith fights for class sizes with fewer than 20 students), there is one serious problem – most of the things being celebrated in Teaching Center are often opposed by teachers themselves.

For starters, Teaching Center continually focuses on test scores from standardized assessments. The ticker at the bottom of the screen shows ACT, SAT, and other test scores for schools. The number one teacher taken in the high school draft is chosen by the school with the “worst test scores last semester.” This hyper-focus on test scores (and competition in general) is anathema to most teachers. Indeed, teachers routinely oppose standardized testing.

This past year, for example, teachers’ unions led efforts to curtail the use of test scores in Florida and encouraged parents to opt-out in New York. The official position statement of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, says “Testing takes time from learning. NEA supports less federally-mandated testing to free up time and resources, diminish “teaching to the test,” and allow educators to focus on what is most important: instilling a love of learning in their students.”

Now, opposing a hyper-focus on testing is not all-together bad. Indeed, we do want teachers to instill a love of learning in students. The problem is that teachers’ unions resist almost any effort to differentiate between good and bad teachers. The fact is some teachers are better than others, whether we measure that by a test score or by some other metric. If we cannot differentiate between these teachers, then the Ruby Ruhf’s of the world will never get their $40 million in bonus pay.

This is the real crux of the problem; teachers espouse differentiation in the classroom, but resist it wholeheartedly when it comes to pay. Rather than pay a teacher for their teaching ability or their unique set of skills, schools use a single salary schedule to pay teachers. In this system, all teachers with the same amount of experience and the same level of degree (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.) receive the same amount of money, regardless of quality or teaching expertise. The best teacher gets paid the same as the worst and the mathematics teacher gets paid the same as the P.E. teacher. Imagine if Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers was paid the same amount as Cincinnati Bengal’s star kicker Mike Nugent. After all, they were drafted in the same year.

Million dollar contracts are impossible in education because there is no market for great teachers and there is no market for great teachers because schools fail to recognize differences in teacher quality.

I understand that Teaching Center is just a spoof and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, especially the part where the French teacher is traded for a head librarian and two lunch ladies to be named later. Still, even this segment highlights why teachers cannot be treated like professional athletes –they oppose giving administrators authority over staffing decisions.  Once a teacher reaches tenure, they have what most states recognize as an “indefinite contract,” making it incredibly difficult to get rid of bad teachers. Moreover, most collective bargaining agreements give preferential treatment for jobs based on seniority. This severely limits a school leaders ability to staff his school with what he believes would be the best team.

Let’s be honest, we will never treat teachers like professional athletes and teachers themselves are partly to blame for this. Teachers’ unions have fought to prevent differentiation between teachers and they have resisted efforts to focus on teacher performance. So, we most likely won’t see teachers on Wheaties boxes anytime soon.  It would be nice, however, if we could put policies in place that would allow us to treat them like professionals. They may not get million dollar contracts, but the best ones – the ones that significantly improve student achievement and make a lasting impact on students – could easily garner six figure salaries. Now, we just need to get teachers on board with this.

—————————————————————————————————————

James V. Shuls, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Missouri – St. Louis and a distinguished fellow of education policy at the Show-Me Institute. Follow on Twitter at @Shulsie

With all of the discussion over the anti-testing backlash to Common Core over-reach on JPGB lately, I thought I would just take a moment to note how perfectly predictable this all was.

I can’t even keep track of how long I’ve been warning about this, but this post from nearly a year ago nicely captures the point I’ve been making:

Even if you are a standards and test-based accountability person, you are better off not seeking total victory as the Common Core people have.  Yes, some states had lousy standards.  And yes, some tests were poorly designed or had low thresholds for passing.  But trying to fix all standards and tests, everywhere, all at once is the wrong approach.  Seeking this total victory has more fully mobilized the opponents of all standards and testing.  In response to a more heavy-handed and top-down national effort, more previously un-involved people have flocked to the anti-testing side.  Not only will these folks undermine effective implementation of Common Core, but in their counter-effort to roll back national standards, they will destroy much of what was good about state standards and tests.  The whole idea of standards and test-based accountability is being undermined by the imprudent over-reach of Common Core.

And this:

But in the rush to a clear and total victory, supporters of Common Core failed to consider how the more than 10,000 school districts, more than 3 million teachers, and the parents of almost 50 million students would react.  For standards to actually change practice, you need a lot of these folks on board.  Otherwise Common Core, like most past standards, will just be a bunch of empty words in a document.

These millions of local officials, educators, and parents often have reasons for holding educational preferences that are different than those dictated by Common Core.  Common Core may call for things like more focus on “informational texts”  and delaying Algebra until 9th grade, but there are reasons why that is not already universal practice.  It’s not as if local officials, educators, and parents are unaware of the existence of informational texts or just waiting to be told by national elites about when they should start teaching Algebra.  They have interests and values that drove them to the arrangements that were in place prior to Common Core.

Having the Secretary of Education, state boards, and a bunch of DC advocacy groups declare a particular approach to be best and cram it into place in the middle of a financial crisis with virtually no public debate or input from educators or parents did not convince local officials, educators, and parents to change their minds.  These are the folks who need to be on board to make the implementation of Common Core real.  And these are the folks who are organizing a political backlash that will undo or neuter Common Core.  A direct path to victory by Common Core supporters sowed the seeds of  its own defeat.

The unraveling of Common Core makes this flop the most obviously ill-conceived and doomed-to-fail reform effort since the Annenberg Foundation threw $500 million away in the 1990s.  I assure you that while the money was flowing from Annenberg that effort had plenty of defenders, just as Common Core does today.  After Common Core fails, everyone will say how they knew it was flawed, just as they currently do with Annenberg.  Victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan.

The unraveling of the bipartisan coalition supporting the informational benefits of standardized testing became inevitable as soon as a a new crop of reformers arose afflicted with PLDD who were determined to use those tests to identify the right ways of teaching, the right ways to hire/fire/compensate teachers, and the right ways to authorize and close schools of choice.  This over-reach wasn’t a bridge too far; it was a thousand bridges too far.  And in a perfectly predictable fashion it has failed and begun to take down the reasonable use of tests along with it.

Complaining about the destruction of reasonable uses of testing is like complaining about the heat in Phoenix in July.  The problem isn’t that it’s a hot day.  The problem is having decided to move to Phoenix in the first place.  At this point there is nothing really to do about it except learn from this error to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.

(Guest Post by Eric A. Hanushek)

Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom. Given that skepticism, new studies that purport to find a systematic relationship between school spending and student performance get disproportionate attention.

There is in fact great demand for results linking funding with favorable outcomes.  Knowing that a strong relationship existed would mean that policy makers outside of the schools – legislatures, governors, and courts – only have to concern themselves with how much money was provided to schools and not with how money was used.  And, meeting our education challenges by providing more money appears from history to be easier than pursuing more fundamental changes in schools.

Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson, and Claudia Persico offer a new study suggesting that a clear money-performance relationship exists if you just look in the right place. Their overarching conclusion is that “methods matter.” Their discovery of a money-performance relationship is attributed to analyzing the effects of spending that emanates from court decisions (exogenous variation in spending), tracing the effect of this spending to long run outcomes (completed schooling and wages), and focusing on the right subgroup (disadvantaged students).

From a methodological viewpoint, details are important here. How court decisions are dated given long and repeated legal involvement in many states; how the spending reaction to court decisions is measured; whether the court decisions are unrelated to the character of schools before court involvement; and how court-mandated spending differs from other increased spending are a few of the details.  Nevertheless, while these are important methodological issues, it is more useful to focus on the substance of their findings.

Jackson, Johnson, and Persico reach the following conclusions about the impact of a 10 percent increase in spending for all 12 years of schooling:  1) It would increase years of schooling by 0.44 years for poor children and by an insignificant 0.075 years for non-poor children, implying that a spending increase of 22.7 percent would eliminate the average education gap; 2) It would increase high school graduation rates by 11.6 percentage points for poor children and 6 percentage points for non-poor children; 3) It would increase subsequent family incomes by 16.4 percent for poor children and zero for non-poor children; 4) It would reduce subsequent adult poverty rates by 6.8 percentage points for poor children and zero for non-poor children.

Their analysis covers schooling experiences for the period 1970-2010.  Thus, it is useful to connect these estimates to actual funding patterns over the period.  Between 1970 and 1990, real expenditure per pupil increased not by 10 percent but by over 84 percent.  By 2000, this comparison with 1970 topped 100 percent, and it reached almost 150 percent by 2010.  No amount of adjustment for special education, LEP, or what have you will make these extraordinary increases in school funding go away.

If a ten percent increase yields the results calculated by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico, shouldn’t we have found all gaps gone (and even reversed) by now due to the actual funding increases?  And, even with small effects on the non-poor, shouldn’t we have seen fairly dramatic improvements in overall educational and labor market outcomes? In reality, in the face of dramatic past increases in school funding, the gaps in attainment, high school graduation, and family poverty have remained significant, largely resisting any major improvement.  And, the stagnating labor market performance for broad swaths of the population has captured considerable recent public and scholarly attention.

What could reconcile these apparent inconsistencies?  Here are some possibilities:

• There might be sharply diminishing returns to spending so that their estimates apply most clearly in 1970 when spending (in 2011-12 $’s) was just $4,500 as opposed to 2010 when spending was $11,000. Thus, by implication, spending today might be expected to have a much smaller impact than they estimate.

• Only spending induced by the courts might have the large impacts they identify, with spending not related to judicial rulings having a negligible impact. The likelihood of this is a little questionable since, with a few exceptions such as NJ and WY, the courts have done little to look into how any legislature responds in terms of specific spending programs.  But, if true, normal spending increases by state legislatures and by local taxpayers would not be expected to have any impact on outcomes.

• The estimates of Jackson, Johnson, and Persico might simply be very wrong.

Maybe there are other ways to reconcile the Jackson, Johnson, and Persico estimates with the aggregate data on spending and outcomes.  But in the end they themselves state what is now commonly accepted: How money is spent matters.  Indeed, by simple consideration of their evidence, how money is spent is more important than how much is spent.

Of course, it is always important to recognize that none of this discussion suggests that money never matters.  Or that money cannot matter.  It just says that the outcomes observed over the past half century – no matter how massaged – do not suggest that just throwing money at schools is likely to be a policy that solves the significant U.S. schooling problems seen in the levels and distribution of outcomes.  We really cannot get around the necessity of focusing on how money is spent on schools.

Over the last week I’ve seen some nice recognition of two projects with which I’ve been involved: school name research and the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  Robert Pondiscio has a column in US News in which he reiterates our recommendation that school names are an important opportunity for communities to articulate and learn about their values:

There are nearly 200 K-12 schools in America named after Confederate leaders or places named after them. There have been calls to strip the names from those buildings too.

I don’t have the standing to tell people in schools I will never see or set foot in whose names their institution are fit to bear. But as a teacher of civics and history, I know a good teachable moment when I see one. So here’s a challenge for every school in this country named after a president, military figure, athlete, civic leader or any prominent person: Commit the coming school year to a close examination of the life and work of your school’s namesake. For starters, there’s no excuse for ignorance. And your students might learn something – good, bad or ugly – that will create a sense of pride or discomfort. At the very least, it will provide a first-rate lesson in history, civics and democratic processes to an education system where both are in short supply.

Amen, brother Robert.

And in the Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler has a column that nicely captures the spirit of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  He argues that capitalists are often the ones who do the most to improve the human condition, not the philanthropies and foundations named after them.  He writes:

Everyone should stop focusing on an entrepreneur’s wealth and instead focus on the value the customers gained from his products. I can’t dig for oil, let alone frack, but I am happy to pay Exxon a premium for my high-test gas. Collectively, we are richer because of Exxon. So inequality is not a bug of capitalism; it’s a feature.

The Ford Foundation plans to focus on six areas of inequality: civic engagement and government; creativity and free expression; gender, ethnic and racial justice; inclusive economics; Internet freedom; and youth opportunity and learning. Hard to argue against all that namby pamby. But none are productive, none drive profits, and none will achieve the huge leaps in public welfare that Henry Ford pulled off so long ago.

At the end of the day, there are only four things you can do with your money: You can spend it, pay it to the IRS, give it away or reinvest it. Consumption is on the receiving end of productivity—furthering personal instead of public welfare. Government spending is by definition not productive, as you realize every time you step into a DMV. Same goes for charitable giving—no profit means no measure of value or productivity.

And so the most productive thing someone can do with his money—the only thing that will increase living standards—is invest. If the Ford or Clinton foundations really wanted to help society, they’d work on lowering barriers to business formation and cutting the regulatory chains that inhibit productive hiring in the U.S. and globally. But what fun is that? Better to boast about reducing inequality, public welfare be damned.

The Al Copeland Humanitarian Award selection committee could not have said it better.

(Guest Post by Patrick J. Wolf)

Charter schools remain controversial in the world of education.  Charters are public schools granted independence from some of the regulations that constrain traditional, district-run, public schools.  In exchange, charters promise to meet specific performance goals or close.  About 2.5 million students were enrolled in public charter schools in 2014-15, representing over 5 percent of the school-age population.

Charter schools not only are operated differently from district-run public schools, they also are funded differently.  They tend to receive little or no local property tax dollars, and often have to finance their buildings through operating funds, while district-run schools have access to capital funds to fund their facilities.

Today my crack school finance research team released Buckets of Water into the Ocean: Non-Public Revenue in Public Charter and Traditional Public Schools. Across the 15 states with both a sizable charter school population and detailed 2011-12 data about school funding from both public and non-public sources, we were able to determine that traditional public schools (TPS) received $13,628 per pupil in public revenue while charters received only $10,922, a funding gap of $2,706 per student or 20 percent.

Some commentators claim that the gap in public funding of charters and TPS is not a concern because public charter schools receive large donations from philanthropies to make up the gap.  (I’m talking about you Gary Miron and Bruce Baker.)  We set off to determine if that was true by conducting the first detailed study of the non-public revenues received by district-run public schools and charters across multiple states.

In fact, of the $504 million in charitable funds received by the schools in our study, $331 million or two-thirds was given to district-run schools while only $171 million or one-third was given to charter schools.  On a per-pupil basis, district-run schools received $18 from philanthropy while charters received $264, because district schools serve far more students than charters.

Importantly, the average amount of charitable funding per-pupil in the charter school sector masks the reality that a small number of charters receive the bulk of philanthropy.  Over 95% of all charter school philanthropy was directed at schools that enrolled just one-third of the charter students in our 15-state sample.  Over one-third of the charter schools received no philanthropic dollars at all.

Philanthropy isn’t the only source of non-public funds to schools, however.  Schools also receive non-public revenue from food service and investment income, among other things.  The district-run public schools in our study received $112 per pupil in food service revenue while the public charter schools received just $30.  The district-run schools also earned more investment income than the charters, $46 per pupil compared to $32.

When we add it all up, district-run public schools received $6.4 billion in non-public revenue in 2011-12 compared to $379 million for public charter schools.  On a per-pupil basis, district-run schools netted $353 in non-public funds compared to $579 for charters.  All sources of non-public funds together only shrunk the yawning per-pupil district-charter funding gap by $226, from $2,932 to $2,706 less in revenues for each charter school student.

Philanthropy simply can’t be expected to eliminate the gap in the public funding of district-run and charter schools.  The gap is too large and philanthropy too small for that to happen, a point already made with great eloquence by the namesake of this blog.  Almost 98 percent of all funding for district-run and charter schools comes from public sources.  Only 0.2 percent specifically comes from philanthropy.  If students in public charter schools are to receive funding on a par with students in traditional, district-run, public schools, it will have to come from more equitable public school funding laws.  Saying that charitable donations can make up the funding gap between district-run and charter schools is like saying that throwing buckets of water into the ocean will change the tide.

Under the direction of my colleague, Gema Zamarro, the Department of Education Reform is launching the Character Assessment Initiative, or Charassein.  Charassein (χαράσσειν) means to engrave, scratch, or etch and is the Greek root for the word character.  The idea of the initiative is to define, develop, and validate measures of what have often been called non-cognitive skills, but we think are more accurately described as character traits.  Once we have improved our understanding and ability to measure these traits, we will also be interested in evaluating potential interventions for shaping or altering them.  You should check out the Charassein web site to learn more about what we have and will be doing.

In some previous posts I’ve mentioned the incredibly innovative paper by Collin Hitt, Julie Trivitt, and Albert Cheng that looks at student non-response on surveys (leaving answers blank or saying “don’t know”) as a proxy for conscientiousness or effort.  They find that non-response is predictive in six different national longitudinal data sets of later life outcomes for students, including attainment, employment, and earnings, even after controlling for other relevant factors including cognitive ability.  That paper is part of our Character Assessment Initiative and I am pleased to report that it is moving closer to publication.  It received a positive R&R from a leading journal and, after the necessary revisions, is back under review.  You can find the updated paper here.

If you like that paper, you’ll love a new paper by Albert Cheng in which he looks at how teachers may affect student conscientiousness and later life outcomes.  Albert examines how teacher non-response on surveys influences student non-response.  Albert uses the Longitudinal Study of American Youth and confirms that student non-response on surveys is predictive of later life outcomes.  In fact, he shows that student non-response on surveys in grades 7-9 is more strongly predictive of graduating high school and completing a bachelors degree than math and science standardized test results. Albert then goes on to show that non-response on surveys administered to teachers is predictive of the non-response of their students.  Using a student fixed-effects model, he shows that student non-response tends to go up when they have a teacher who is more non-responsive on his/her surveys and tends to go down when students have teachers who are more responsive on surveys.  If we understand non-response as a proxy for conscientiousness or effort, then Albert has found that students become more conscientious when they have teachers who are more conscientious and less conscientious when they have teachers who are less conscientious.

This is an amazing breakthrough in character (or non-cog) research.  Albert demonstrates that teacher character influences student character and that student character is predictive of later life outcomes.  Check out his new paper and the updated version of the Hitt, Trivitt, and Cheng paper.  And for folks who think this is as cool as I do, keep in mind that both Collin and Albert will be hitting the job market in a year or two.