What happens when we can’t give people choice?

October 1, 2012

(Guest Post by Mike McShane)

Over the weekend, Washington Post education writer Jay Matthews posed a great question on his Class Struggle blog.  He asks, in not so many words: why do education reformers fight so hard for test-based accountability systems that the charter schools they also support do not use?  If these systems are so great, the argument goes, why don’t charter schools use them?

The best way I can think to respond is to put it in terms of college football.

As a diehard Notre Dame fan I cheer for two teams every weekend, the Fighting Irish and whoever is playing Michigan.  I share the same view as an education reformer who most directly supports school choice as the means for reforming the system.  I like charters, vouchers, tuition tax credits and anything that works to dislodge the entrenched interests that prevent leaders from giving people choice.

As I have written elsewhere, the American education system has seen decades of middling performance at ever increasing cost because of the reform-resisting iron triangle formed between teachers unions, the state and local bureaucrats charged with their oversight, and the elected officials that are supposed to represent the interests of the community.  To meaningfully reform the system, we need to disrupt this power structure.

To borrow from Paul Manna’s insightful 2006 book School’s in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda, if you want to upset the power of an interest group, you can either decrease its license or its capacity.  A group’s license is its argument for action.   A group’s capacity is its ability to act.

Teachers have traditionally enjoyed substantial license.  In fact, in the recent Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll, 71% of Americans had “trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools”.

Why are teachers so popular?  There are many reasons, but it doesn’t hurt that when evaluated under current systems 99% of them are rated as satisfactory.  Informally, parents might have an understanding of whose classroom they would like their child in, but they lack any kind of systematic performance evidence to make their case.

When teachers are more accurately evaluated and parents are made aware that their children will be assigned to that school or classroom regardless of their wishes, it should encourage them, and the greater public, to demand more options for students.    To put a finer point on it, more accurate evaluation decreases the iron triangle’s license.  Does it decrease license as well as choice does?  Not at all.  Does the iron triangle have ample opportunity to water-down or co-opt it?  Absolutely.  But it is a step in the right direction.

Look, I’m no great fan of the one-size fits all accountability systems that many urban school reformers are implementing, but I’m not a fan of Ohio State either.  However, on that Saturday in November when the Buckeyes take on the Wolverines in the Horseshoe, you can believe that I’ll answer “–IO” to anyone that starts “OH-“, because cheering for the Buckeyes (like supporting evaluation systems) is better than the alternative.

4 Comments | charter schools, school accountability, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

School Choice Equals Higher Accountability

October 1, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Patricia Levesque, veteran of the school reform wars in Florida, cautions edu-reactionaries in Louisiana against making the same mistakes that their compatriots in Florida made (and continue to make) in the Shreveport Times.

Florida lawmakers instituted K-12 reform in 1999, and efforts were rewarded with strident opposition from a vocal minority. Die-hard skeptics grew increasingly isolated, however, as Florida’s childhood illiteracy rate plunged, high-school graduation rates improved and the number of black and Hispanic students passing advanced placement exams tripled. There is still much more to do in Florida, but the progress is undeniable.

Louisiana reform skeptics should take care not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Rather than resisting reform, Louisianans of all backgrounds should be working together to maximize opportunities and achievement for students. Louisiana’s public school system will enjoy much brighter days once parents routinely match the needs of their child with the strengths of their schools.

As the debate over reform continues in Louisiana, remember that a century from now the vast majority of Louisiana students will still be attending public schools. Nothing has been done that will change that basic fact. Students can and should attend their public school by choice rather than simply by zip code.

 

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Posted by matthewladner

In Chicago — Phony Merit Pay is Dead, Long Live True Merit Pay

September 19, 2012

The dust hasn’t yet settled from the resolution of the Chicago teacher strike, but it appears that the reforms the city were able to retain will result in a better “true” merit pay system than the “phony” merit pay plan they were forced to concede.

Let me explain the difference between true and phony merit pay.  True merit pay — the kind of compensation for job performance found in most industries — provides effective employees with continued employment and regular raises while ineffective workers lose their jobs.  If you do a good job you get to keep getting a pay check and if you don’t you have to look for work somewhere else.  That’s true payment for merit because un-meritorious workers stop getting paid altogether.

In phony merit pay — the kind that hardly exists in any industry — there is a mechanistic calculation of performance that determines the size of a small bonus that is provided in addition to a base salary that is essentially guaranteed regardless of performance.  You can stink and still keep your job and pay.  The worst that can happen is you miss out on some or all of a modest bonus.  To make it even more phony, in the few cases where this kind of phony merit pay has been tried, the game is often rigged so that virtually all employees are deemed meritorious and get at least some of the bonus.

According to the initial reports, the city of Chicago abandoned its efforts to institute this latter, phony merit pay.  As the Chicago Teachers Union put it: “The Board agreed to move away from ‘Differentiated Compensation,’ which would have allowed them to pay one set of teachers (based on unknown criteria) one set of pay versus another set of pay for others.”

But the city preserved key provisions that result in at least some amount of true merit pay.  Specifically, the city preserved the ability to continue opening new, non-unionized charter schools at a rapid clip.  It is already the case that almost 50,000 of the 400,000 students in Chicago’s public schools attend charter schools.  As students migrate from traditional to charter schools, enrollment in the unionized sector has plummeted, causing 86 traditional public school closures over the last decade.  Enrollment is so low in many existing traditional public schools that 120 additional schools are eligible for closure next year.  As long as the city can continue to open charter schools and as long as there is demand by students to leave for charters, traditional public schools will continue to be closed in large numbers.

When Chicago closes a traditional public school for low enrollment the teachers are laid off.  The new contract appears to place some limits on this, but the practice has generally been preserved.  In addition, unlike in some other big cities, principals in Chicago are free to hire teachers as they see fit and are not forced to take teachers laid off from school closures.  The new contract does require that half of all newly hired teachers come from those laid off and guarantees re-hiring only for the highest rated teachers, but according to the city’s summary of the agreement: “Principals maintain full authority to hire whichever teacher they deem best.”

The net effect of growing charter schools, closing under-enrolled traditional public schools, and only hiring back the best and most desired teachers from those schools is a true merit pay system.  Bad teachers are let go.  Good teachers not only get their job back, but they also get an extremely generous pay raise over the next four years for staying and being good.  That’s real merit pay.

The Gates Foundation, Michelle Rhee, and various other reform groups have pressed ahead with efforts to build a machinery to rate teachers and provide bonuses to the ones that have higher ratings.  They’ve pulled out the stops, devoted millions of dollars, and even twisted the truth to advance these merit pay systems because they are convinced that this is the most politically feasible and effective way forward.  Choice, especially vouchers, holds little appeal to them because they see it as a political dead-end.

As I think the events in Chicago help demonstrate and as I had feared in the Ed Next piece I wrote with Stuart Buck, the political calculations of these reformers are entirely mistaken.  Building reform around a top-down system of teacher evaluations and merit pay is too easily blocked, diluted, or co-opted.  But expanding choice continues to be a political winner and will result in real merit pay… and I believe real progress in student learning.

9 Comments | charter schools, teacher pay, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Diane Ravitch, Super-Villain…. And Related News

September 10, 2012

I’ve avoided writing about Diane Ravitch recently because I think it’s now clear to all sensible people that she has gone completely nuts, lacks credibility, and was probably never much of a scholar.  But I just couldn’t resist noting that in addition to all of her previous vices, Ravitch is now seeking to play the part of a super-villain.  She always had the megalomaniac dimension of a super-villain, but has now added the dimension of making threats if her demands are not met.  In a recent post [UPDATED], she declared:

The election, I hear, will be decided in Ohio and Michigan.  As it happens, I have a very large following of teachers and principals in both states.  My decision could swing several thousand votes in both of these key states.  I hold the election in my hands.  Bwahahahaha! And if my demands are not met within 24 hours I will reverse the Earth’s gravitational pull and everything will go flying into space. Bwahahaha!

Actually she didn’t say the last bit, but she did say that President Obama should “read this and heed my advice… while you still can, puny Earthling.”  Again, she didn’t actually say the last bit, but I think you get the picture.

And in related news… The Chicago Teachers Union has decided to go on strike.  In their own effort to play the part of a super-villain, they are demanding that virtually bankrupt Chicago and its Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel transform all matter in the universe into currency to pay for increased teacher salaries,  gold-plated pension and health benefits, and a hot tub for each teacher filled with KFC gravy.

And in related news… the Chicago Tribune has reacted to the demands of these super-villains by calling for vouchers for Chicago students.

9 Comments | teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Another School Choice Random Assignment Study

August 23, 2012

A student just brought to my attention another random-assignment experiment on school choice that was recently released.  The results are, again, positive.  The study was conducted by Justine Hastings, Christopher Neilson, and Seth Zimmerman of Brown and Yale Universities and was released by NBER.  I’ll let their abstract explain the findings:

Using data on student outcomes and school choice lotteries from a low-income urban school district,
we examine how school choice can affect student outcomes through increased motivation and personal
effort as well as through improved school and peer inputs. First we use unique daily data on individual-level
student absences and suspensions to show that lottery winners have significantly lower truancies after
they learn about lottery outcomes but before they enroll in their new schools. The effects are largest
for male students entering high school, whose truancy rates decline by 21% in the months after winning
the lottery. We then examine the impact attending a chosen school has on student test score outcomes.
We find substantial test score gains from attending a charter school and some evidence that choosing
and attending a high value-added magnet school improves test scores as well. Our results contribute
to current evidence that school choice programs can effectively raise test scores of participants. Our
findings suggest that this may occur both through an immediate effect on student behavior and through
the benefit of attending a higher-performing school.

School choice has to be the most rigorously studied education policy and has a relatively consistent set of positive findings.

2 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New Study on Vouchers and College Enrollment

August 23, 2012

Matt Chingos and Paul Peterson have a new study based on a random-assignment experiment of the effects of privately funded vouchers on college enrollment.  They followed the students who had received a private school scholarship in New York City.  Earlier research found significant achievement benefits from that program for African American students but there was some controversy over whether those findings were robust to reasonable alternative specifications.

Now the students are old enough for college and Chingos and Peterson went back to see if achievement gains translated into higher college enrollment.  They did.  African American students who received a private school scholarship were 24% more likely to enroll in college.  The improvement was more dramatic in the chances that African American students would attend private 4 year colleges and even selective private colleges.

No significant effects were observed for Latino students nor for the very few white students in the sample.  It appears that choice has the biggest effect on those whose options would have been the worse in the absence of a choice program. It is also worth remembering that the scholarship was good for only half of private school tuition, so it is possible that a more generous program would have a broader effect.

You can read Chingos and Peterson’s summary of their findings in the Wall Street Journal.

9 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

School Choice and Religious Freedom

August 8, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

An “interfaith” group has send a hyperventilating letter to Bobby Jindal calling Louisiana’s new school voucher program “a blatant attack on the religious freedom clauses in the United States Constitution.” And that’s one of the less painfully overwrought passages. There’s no hope of getting sound legal, moral, theological or sociological reasoning from such people, but I thought I’d take the occasion to revisit some of the reasons why school choice is a vital step forward, not backward, for religious freedom.

1) Fair play, the rule of law and equal treatment. Religious freedom requires that religious people and institutions be treated the same way everyone else is treated. I would think this would be so obvious as to be axiomatic. Yet everywhere you turn around, people think that if religious schools participate in the American education system on the same terms as other schools – which is really all school choice does – that is somehow a threat to religious freedom. What if we applied this reasoning to other sectors? If the church is burning down, don’t call the fire department! If someone sprays swastikas on the synagogue, don’t call the police! Don’t hook up the mosque to the municipal water lines! That would be a taxpayer subsidy for religion, you know.

2) Childrearing, formation and faith communities. As many people know, one of the most important Supreme Court decisions on religious freedom upheld the right of the Amish to raise their children according to Amish tradition against compulsory attendance laws. The details of the reasoning that the court used to reach that conclusion are problematic, but we don’t need to be detained by that here; the result was clearly right. A religion is not just a set of intellectual propositions one assents to. It is a total way of life, one that may be expressed differently in different individuals, but also coheres in important ways across individuals, and subsists in relationships and institutions as well as in individuals. In other words, a religion consists not only of individual belief but of a faith community. The formation and rearing of children is a necessary part of that; deny people the ability to raise their children according to the dictates of their conscience and you stamp out religious freedom. You can like this fact or hate it, but it remains a fact. As the court noted, society has a legitimate mandate to see to it that children are educated in some way, but this must not become an occasion for stamping out religious minorities whose mode of education is different. Requiring the Amish to raise their children the same way others do is not just tantamount to outlawing the Amish religion; it actually is outlawing the Amish religion. School choice extends this principle further by making American society a place where every family, not just families who prefer secular schools, has equal access to childrearing according to conscience.

3) The death of character in the common school. Pat Wolf has shown that the empirical evidence consistently finds private schools are better at teaching the civic values on which democracy rests. Charles Glenn, James Davison Hunter and others have shown why. The “common school” model, coralling families of all faiths into one school and requiring that school not to violate the religious beliefs of any of those families, compels schools to become morally neutered. Even where they try to teach moral character, they fail (Hunter has extensive data on this). The reason is simple: the inculcation of moral character requires more than scolding children to be honest, be diligent, etc. Telling edifying stories also fails. Not in every case, but in general, the reliable formation of moral character requires (Hunter again) attachment to something higher and greater than oneself, and the absorbtion at an early age of an intrinsic motivation to prioritize that higher something over the gratification of one’s own desires.

There’s much more to be said, of course, but I didn’t want to let the moment pass without at least this much of a statement of the case.

4 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

McShane on Louisiana Teacher Union Thuggery

August 1, 2012

One of our super best friends, AEI’s new hotshot, Michael McShane, has a piece in National Review Online on teacher union efforts in Louisiana to intimidate private schools from participating in the state’s voucher program with a letter to each  threatening that those schools will individually be sued if they participate.  This despite the unions losing the first round in courts to stop the program.  If they can’t win in court, the unions hope to at least scare schools away from offering opportunities to kids the threat of legal harassment.

Here’s a taste of McShane’s piece:

While the union’s behavior is disgusting, it certainly isn’t shocking.

Unfortunately, this is just another example of unions choosing to harass educators when they have lost a political or legal battle. It was just about a year ago that the pro-union protesters who were attempting to recall Scott Walker put on a shameful display in Wisconsin. At Messmer Prep, a private non-union school in Milwaukee, protesters super-glued doors shut, creating a fire hazard that endangered children; they berated Brother Bob Smith, the school’s leader and an anchor to Milwaukee’s black community; and they denigrated the school’s teachers who had done nothing more than show up to work that day.

If unions do not like vouchers, there are plenty of outlets for them to voice their distaste. If they wish to change the law, they should lobby their legislators. If they don’t like the governor, they should try and vote him out in the next election. If they don’t like the way the court rules, they should camp outside in protest. Any of these remedies are well within both their rights and the scope of appropriateness and decency.

What they shouldn’t do is badger, demean, or harass people that are working hard every day to educate children. When they do that, they look less like an organization with the best interests of children in mind and more like a power-hungry interest group that will stop at nothing to maintain its hegemony.

I’ll pre-empt Ladner…  BOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!!

8 Comments | teacher union, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Double Standards on Special Ed Placements v. Vouchers

July 25, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In today’s Examiner, AEI’s Michael McShane (an official JPGB super best friend) wants to know why none of the people fighting to kill the DC voucher program seem to have any objections to DC’s high rate of outplacement for special education students. Could it be because there are a lot more rich white special ed parents? McShane is here to chew gum and kick the cans of edu-hypocrites, and he’s all out of gum.

McShane doesn’t make the mistakes others have made in characterizing DC’s high rate of outplacement. Still, the stats are eye-popping, and will no doubt have many readers asking questions. McShane really doesn’t have the opportunity in a short piece like this to provide the necessary background. Thankfully, Jay wrote this a while back to bring people up to speed.

1 Comment | politics, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Anrig’s Premature Epitaph Four Years Later

June 27, 2012

 (Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Some of you will recall Greg Anrig’s Washington Monthly article combining a teacher union talking point reading of the evidence on school choice with some grousing in the school choice ranks to declare school vouchers as “An Idea Whose Time Has Gone.”

Having trouble remembering? Fortunately the Century Foundation. Mr. Anrig’s employer, has quite helpfully preserved a record on youtube. You can be the 125th or so person to watch the video:

Hmmm….”grinding to a halt…” But wait, there is more-part deux!

There’s even more video on youtube, but these two constitute plenty of rope. I’ve never met Anrig, but I’d be willing to bet that he’s a decent chap who loves his mother, his country and his alma mater. He isn’t the first person nor will he be the last to make a bold but utterly mistaken prediction. I almost feel bad about writing this post.

Almost but not quite…

After all, Andrew Rotherham sagely predicted at the time that Anrig would regret writing the article. So here is a map of the states with private choice programs on the date of Anrig’s Washington Monthly piece:

After the win in New Hampshire yesterday, the map looks something like the one below. Mind you, this underestimates the progress of the parental choice movement, as several states created multiple programs.

4 Comments | tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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