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.
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.
“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.
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.
Last month Sean Cavanaugh interviewed Michelle Rhee about vouchers over at Ed Week. Overall I’m happy to have Rhee and other “Cool Kids” support parental choice, even if it is on a limited basis. I hope they think deeper on the subject however, as many Cool Kids are far more misguided on vouchers than Rhee. It is easy however to detect shoot-from-the-hip attitudes in the interview. Rhee told Cavanaugh:
“When people talk about universal vouchers, first of all, I’ve never seen an economic model that actually made sense and laid that out in way that’s sustainable,” Rhee said. I haven’t seen any kind of model that makes economic sense. … My support for vouchers is around a specific group of kids.”
“There are a lot of people out there who sort of believe, the free market, let the free market reign, the market will correct itself—give every kid a backpack with their money in it and let them choose wherever they want to go,” she added. “I don’t believe in that model at all.”
I’m still waiting for the day when supporters of means-tested vouchers come out and explain why they don’t support means testing public schools. Bill Gates could move to Milwaukee right now and enroll his children in public schools that cost taxpayers $13,000 per year. No one blinks. If he were to move to Milwaukee and get $6,400 vouchers however some of us want are inclined to view it as a grave injustice. I’ve yet to hear anyone propose that we should have economic cleansing of charter schools either-out with you middle and high-income children and don’t come back!
Don’t get me wrong- I have fought for a number of means-tested programs and continue to support them. I also strongly support an advantage for the poor, but not means-testing. Rhee is discussing the ideal however, and as an ideal, limited programs have some unresolvable problems.
Rhee also seems to be influenced by straw-man arguments. Very few people advocate a complete free market in education, and those that do don’t support vouchers. From Milton Friedman’s original formulation of the voucher concept he argued for public financing of K-12 education rather than financing and provision. Friedman also recognized the need for some level of regulation. The appropriate level of course remains an issue for debate.
As an aside, Rhee goes on to specifically distance herself from Florida governor Rick Scott’s proposal for universal education savings accounts during his transition, on which Rhee served. National Review Online rightly described this as “the most significant, transformative idea ever advanced by an actual elected official with any real power.” Sadly Scott’s proposal activated the hyperbolic anti-choice antibodies of Florida’s newspapers, and Governor Scott stopped pushing the proposal. Testing new ideas with pilot programs can be a agonizingly slow process, but that process has begun in Arizona. Florida’s private choice program continues to expand incrementally through the Step Up for Students program. I remain hopeful that something between Governor Scott’s initial ambition and the current slow pace of bringing funded private choice eligibility to Florida children will be enacted. Zero to sixty to two seconds sometimes wraps a Ferrari around a telephone pole, the price of being aggressive, but it isn’t an argument in favor of indefinite gradualism.
But I digress. Rhee went on:
“It has to be a heavily regulated industry,” she said. “I believe in accountability across the board. If you’re going to be having a publicly funded voucher program, then kids have to be taking standardized tests. We have to be measuring whether kids are academically better off in this private school with this voucher than they would be going to their failing neighborhood school. If they’re not, they shouldn’t get the voucher. … I’m about choice only if it results in better outcomes and opportunities for kids.”
Rhee’s faith in regulation is odd. The public school system is super-heavily regulated with laws and policies streaming down from the federal, state and local levels. Despite all of that, much of the system performs at a tragically poor level. That of course is not to say that vouchers should have no regulation, but the right level of regulation is not “heavy.”
Rhee also places far too much weight on the results of standardized test and gives far too little deference to the judgment of parents. Parents make decisions about schools for a large variety of reasons- including things like school safety, peer groups and the availability of specialized programs. In addition to missing the whole point about school choices being multifaceted with parents best able to judge all the factors, individual test scores bounce around from year to year, they often take a temporary hit when a child transfers and adjusts to a new school.
The notion of having program administrators looking at the math and reading tests and deciding to cast children back to their ‘failing neighborhood school’ is very problematic. Pity the poor voucher program apparatchiks who have to drag children back to a public school where they had been continually bullied because they had the flu on testing day. Pity the children more. The subject of what to do about poorly performing private schools in a choice system is a complex topic and opinions vary widely. Rhee’s proposed solution however does not begin to capture this complexity.
Rhee wraps up:
The ideal public school system, Rhee argued, will include high-quality traditional public schools and a charter sector, as well as some vouchers.
“But the vast majority of kids are going to be in a high-performing public school environment,” she said, adding: “I’m a believer in public schools. I’m a public school parent. I ran a public school district.”
Public schools will continue to serve as the primary conduits for education regardless of what we do on the choice side of things.We are a long, long way from having high-quality public schools for all children, and choice can play a role in moving us in that direction. Choice improves public schools and we can hardly will the ends without the means.
If however we embrace only tiny choice programs targeted at limited student populations, that positive role will likewise remain limited. In the end, catastrophically under-performing schools do so because they can get away with it. I’m all for efforts to improve the laughably ineffectual quality of our regulation in an effort to curtail this, but choice is the only decentralized system of accountability that allow parents to hold schools accountable for individual results.
Brittany Schramm of Mesa Arizona was paralyzed in a mountain biking accident Easter weekend. Brittany is a dear friend of a friend of mine and an amazing person and wonderful mom to two small kids.
Once Brittany makes it out of the hospital, she and her family will have to move from their 2-story home to a 1-story (and modify it to make it accessible for her), and purchase a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. They expect out-of-pocket medical expenses to pass $100,000.
You can read more about Brittany by clicking here. Also, please consider making a donation, no matter how small, to help this family get through this terrible trial.
In the Simpson’s episode Duffless Lisa decides to conduct an experiment to determine whether her brother Bart is smarter than a hamster:
Is the Obama administration smarter than a hamster? The Washington Post editorial board leaves some room for doubt as it pertains to the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. The administration seems willing to not only play games with the lives of students, but also to raise questions regarding their trustworthiness in budget negotiations with Congress.
Those of us who have the pleasure of knowing Cory will not feel any surprise that he reacted this way-I’m just glad he still has some of those quicks he had back in the day at Stanford!
I remember a few years ago Dan Lips asked me if I would ever consider blogging. My reaction was something along the lines of “Naaaah, why would I want to do that?”
Four years in now, it is hard to imagine doing policy work without blogging. Blogging is a great way to test-drive ideas, get feedback, and have fun doing it. Nothing else moves with the speed of the modern conversation.
The story of this blog can be told using images as guideposts. Some images are associated not with a single post but rather a series of posts, starting with this one:
Blogs of course are the media equivalent of a pea-shooter, but with a careful aim you can put out an eye here and there.
The finest hour of the JPGB, in my opinion, came when Senator Durbin accepted marching orders from the NEA and attempted to pillow smother the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. The strategy was to not reauthorize the law, and not to allow new students to enter the program, killing it by attrition. Similar to the British strategy to give arms to bloodthirsty loyalist hillbillies in the American South during the Revolutionary War, this strategy seemed shrewd at the time but backfired badly.
Once the dirty work was (temporarily) done, the Department of Education made a clumsy attempt to deep six the Congressionally mandated program evaluation by releasing it on a Friday with a spin doctored press release. That probably seemed like a great idea at the time as well.
One problem- the study itself was written in English and available online, and Jay reads English and blogs. Jay read the study and leapt into the fray, dubbing the incident “the Friday Night Massacre.” The Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post made inquiries regarding the handling of the study and let’s just say that the administration’s reaction subtracted from their already waning credibility on the matter.
From there, things just kind of got better and better. The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages administered regular beat-downs from both the left and the right. NRO’s Jim Geraghty summed up the Obama’s new position on D.C. vouchers:
“We know our stance is indefensible; please make this issue go away.”
Eventually President Obama made the issue go away by reauthorizing the program in a budget deal, the best strategic course after bumbling into a sideshow that is costing more than it was worth. Many people deserve credit for saving the program, and Jay is one of them.
In the end, the underdogs won the debate in resounding fashion, kind of like this:
Greg bet Mathews dinner that ten legislative chambers would pass either expansions or new choice programs in 2011.
Being a good sport, Greg raised the bar for himself to 7 enactments rather than legislative chambers when he blasted past 10 chambers in 3.6 seconds or so.
Greg ran up the score like John Heisman in 2011. I’m not sure whether he tripled up on Mathews in the end or not. He probably narrowly missed doing so, but the momentum carried over to 2012. So far we have a new tax credit program in Virginia, a tax-credit expansion in Arizona, a tax-credit expansion in Florida, and a major new voucher program in Louisiana. Greg’s original 2011 bet has already been exceeded in 2012, and even his higher bar bet of 7 enactments isn’t inconceivable this year. I now think of Greg’s original bet as the over/under for a good/bad year for the parental choice movement.
No word yet on where Mathews took Greg for dinner nor how much effort it took not to gloat.
My favorite Jay Big Thinker came when Goldstein-Gone-Wild asked Jay what he would do if he ran the Gates Foundation in the comments section. Jay replied: build new, don’t reform old. If someone appointed me King, I’d make that post required reading for philanthropists as my first official act.
My second official act would probably involve a redirected asteroid and College Station Texas. If they promised to stop the belly aching about the Longhorn Network, I could be persuaded to allow an evacuation.
A friend of mine once asked me if I had ever noticed that people tend to think of people just to the left of them as communists, and people just to the right of them as fascists. Only the self stands in exactly the correct spot of thoughtful perfection.
I’ve always kept this jest in mind as a pretty powerful argument in favor of being broad-minded and open to the possibility of needing to perform an occassional mental update.
Nevertheless, the opportunity to unleash a good parody now and then certainly can liven up an otherwise dry discussion.
For instance, the desirable degree of state oversight of a private school choice program is an important topic, but usually a bit on the dry side. Okay, more than a bit.
Despite the fact that I have more than a little sympathy for the point of view parodied, I never laughed so hard at a blog post as I did with with Greg’s AWWWW FREAKOUT!!! post regarding attacks from the Cato Institute on the new Indiana voucher program.
No, I take it back-Greg’s post on the UFT Card Check, while not a parody itself (more like the documentary of the UFT performing an unintentional self-parody) was the inspiration of so many lampoons that it has to stand as the funniest post of the first four years. Jay’s Fordham Drinking is up there as well.
Facing a cannon barrage from a gigantic Turkish army, Baron Munchausen declared to his bedraggled henchmen “They are inviting us to defeat them! We must oblige them!”
No one knows what will happen around the next bend, but my advice is to grab your pea-shooter and take aim. It’s been a blast for us so far, and it isn’t like the bad guys show any sign of slowing the rate of demonstrably false claims.
Those look like differences likely to survive the introduction of a whole bunch of control variables.
Posted by matthewladner 
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
(Guest Post)
Greg’s 
A friend of mine once asked me if I had ever noticed that people tend to think of people just to the left of them as communists, and people just to the right of them as fascists. Only the self stands in exactly the correct spot of thoughtful perfection.
Facing a cannon barrage from a gigantic Turkish army, 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 