Swedish Education Irony Alert!

April 4, 2012

Meet the two coolest things ever made in Sweden.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In the new issue of NR, the invaluable Kevin Williamson profiles Massachussetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. He writes that in a book they co-wrote, Warren and her daughter “offer an array of policy prescriptions ranging from the mild (decoupling public-school assignments from geography) to the Swedish (subsidizing stay-at-home parents)…”

Oops! It’s actually “decoupling public-school assignments from geography” that’s the Swedish idea here. Sweden has had a national system of universal school vouchers since 1993. They’ve even developed economically sustainable for-profit school companies. It’s so successful that about a year ago the Social Democratic Party, which I’m tempted to describe as Sweden’s socialist party but will instead describe as its more socialist party, decided not to try to kick the for-profit schools out of the system.

Williamson does have a number of good words for Warren, including this nugget, which ed reformers will particularly enjoy reading:

Warren taught public school briefly and then quit rather than go through the obligatory, despair-inducing credentialing rigmarole (a fact that speaks better of her than almost anything else you’ll learn).

7 Comments | politics, teacher quality, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Ed Week on Distorted Special Ed Counts

March 15, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Ed Week dives into details on the difficult issue of how special education counts get distorted by a variety of factors. The article gets into a lot of interesting issues that make it difficult to get a clear picture of how many disabled students are served by the program. See also here for the researchers’ take on the issue.

One factor not canvassed in the Ed Week story – unsurprisingly – is the role of financial incentives in public school special education programs. Public schools are incentivized to label studnets as disabled in order to access additional funding. Study after study after study after study has confirmed the empirical relationship between the presence and strength of these incentives and rising rates of special education diagnosis in public schools. Private schools have no such distorting incentive and will thus report lower numbers of disabled students. (All this is true regardless of whether you think the true rate of disabilities is higher, as in the public system, or somewhat lower, as in the private system.)

2 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Governor Jindal Leads from the Front in Louisiana K-12 Overhaul

March 15, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is all in for education reform, and his charter school/voucher bill cleared the first legislative hurdle last night.

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Posted by matthewladner

Here’s Why Victory Looks Like This

March 7, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay points to the way Democrats and progressives are now saying all the same things we’ve been saying for a decade, but acting like they thought of them, and remarks that this is What Victory Looks Like.

He’s right, and here’s why. To large extent, you have to let people “steal” your ideas in order to get victory. It’s not just a price we need to be willing to pay if necessary. It’s always necessary.

Major reform of a cultural system has to start with ideas and practices germinating outside the core institutions of that system. If major reform were welcome inside the core institutions, it wouldn’t be necessary in the first place. The incubators of reform can’t be seen as fringe groups – this is why organized libertarianism has had much less influence than its intellectual seriousness and devotion of financial resources might lead you to expect. But the reform incubators are never going to be inside the core, either. You need something that’s a happy medium between credibility and independence.

Now, for a long time in America, the Democratic party and the progressive ideological movement have been the “core” institutions governing education. When you ask the American people whom they trust to do the right thing about education, they overwhelmingly say Democrats and progressives. That makes them the core.

The key to victory is to get the core groups to adopt the ideas that incubated in institutions outside the core. The greatest challenge is that the core groups want to defend their “core” turf against outsiders. They want to keep control of the core, and they can’t do that if they admit that outsiders have superior ideas. The solution is to get the core groups to co-opt (i.e. steal) the ideas and pretend they thought of them.

So you’re never going to get (very many) Democrats and progressives saying, “Why, yes, as a matter of fact the conservatives were right about education all along!” Admitting that would require them to sacrifice their status as the cultural core institutions of American education. Instead they’re going to say, “What American schools need are good, liberal, progressive ideas like choice, competition, and accountability.”

That’s what victory looks like.

9 Comments | charter schools, politics, school accountability, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Enlow the Barbarian Teams with Reason to Talk Milton Friedman

March 7, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The Kung Fu Panda of the School Choice Movement talks Friedman, 2011 and more in this Reason TV video:

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Posted by matthewladner

More on Milwaukee School Choice Research Results

March 5, 2012

I wrote last week about the release of the final research results from Milwaukee’s school choice program.  On Sunday the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel devoted its entire editorial page to a discussion of those results.  Check out the succinct summary of the findings by Patrick Wolf and John Witte.

Also be sure to check out the response from the head of the teachers union, Bob Peterson.  His rebuttal consists of noting that many students switch sectors, moving from choice to traditional public schools as well as in the opposite direction.  He thinks that this undermines the validity of Wolf and Witte’s graduation rate analysis, but he fails to understand that the researchers used an intention to treat approach that attributes outcomes to students’ original selection of sector regardless of their switching.  And on the special education claim he simply reiterates the Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) faulty effort to equate the percentage of students who are entitled to accommodations on the state test with the percentage of students who have disabilities.

For more on how DPI under-stated the rate of disabilities in the Milwaukee choice program by between 400% and 900%, check out the new article Wolf, Fleming, and Witte just published in Education Next.  It’s not only an excellent piece of research detective work on how DPI arrived at such an erroneous claim, but it is also a useful warning to anyone who thinks that government issued claims provide the authoritative answer on research questions.  Government agencies, like DPI, can lie and distort as much or more than any special interest group.  They just do it with your tax dollars and in your name.

3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New Milwaukee Choice Results

February 27, 2012

My colleague at the University of Arkansas, Patrick Wolf, along with John Witte at the University of Wisconsin and a team of researchers have released their final round of reports on the Milwaukee school choice program.  You can read the press release here and find the full set of reports here.

They find that access to a private school with a voucher in Milwaukee significantly increases the probability that students will graduate from high school:

“Our clearest positive finding is that the Choice Program boosts the rates at which students graduate from high school, enroll in a four-year college, and persist in college,” said John Witte, professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Since educational attainment is linked to positive life outcomes such as higher lifetime earnings and lower rates of incarceration, this is a very encouraging result of the program.”

They also find that “when similar students in the voucher program and in Milwaukee Public Schools were compared, the achievement growth of students in the voucher program was higher in reading but similar in math.”  Unfortunately, the testing conditions changed during the study because the private school testing went from being low stakes to high stakes, making it difficult to draw strong conclusions about the effects of the program on test scores.

In addition, it should be remembered that the design of the Milwaukee study is a matched comparison, which is less rigorous than random-assignment.  The more convincing random-assignment analyses are significant and positive in 9 of the 10 that have been conducted, with the tenth having null effects.  You can find a summary and links to all of them here.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the new Milwaukee results is the report on special education rates in the choice program.  As it turns out, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction grossly under-stated the percentage of students in the choice program who have disabilities.  Some reporters and policymakers act as if the Department of Public Instruction’s reports are reliable and insightful because they are a government agency, while the reports of university professors are distorted and misleading.  Read this report on special education rates and I think you’ll learn a lot about how politically biased government agencies like the Department of Public Instruction can be.

6 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

School Choice Researchers Unite in Ed Week

February 22, 2012

Pictured (L to R): Rick Hess, Jay Greene, Greg Forster, Mike Petrilli and Matt Ladner

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Today, Education Week carries a joint editorial signed by nine scholars and analysists. We came together to agree that Mom and apple pie are good, Nazis and Commies are bad, and the empirical research supports the expansion of school choice:

Choice’s track record so far is promising and provides support for continuing expansion of school choice policies…Among voucher programs, random-assignment studies generally find modest improvements in reading or math scores, or both. Achievement gains are typically small in each year, but cumulative over time. Graduation rates have been studied less often, but the available evidence indicates a substantial positive impact. None of these studies has found a negative impact…Other research questions regarding voucher program participants have included student safety, parent satisfaction, racial integration, services for students with disabilities, and outcomes related to civic participation and values. Results from these studies are consistently positive…

In addition to effects on participating students, another major topic of research has been the impact of school choice on academic outcomes in the public school system…Among voucher programs, these studies consistently find that vouchers are associated with improved test scores in the affected public schools. The size of the effect in these studies varies from modest to large. No study has found a negative impact.

We have diverse viewpoints on many issues, but we share a common commitment to helping inform public decisions with such evidence as science is legitimately able to provide. We do not offer false certainty about a future none of us knows. But the early evidence is promising, and the grounds for concern have been shown to be largely baseless. The case for expanding our ongoing national experiment with school choice is strong.

This may well be the most important part:

The most important limitation on all of this evidence is that it only studies the programs we now have; it does not study the programs that we could have some day. Existing school choice programs are severely limited, providing educational options only to a targeted population of students, and those available options are highly constrained.

These limitations need to be taken seriously if policymakers wish to consider how these studies might inform their deliberations. The impact of current school choice programs does not exhaust the potential of school choice.

On the other hand, the goal of school choice should be not simply to move students from existing public schools into existing private schools, but to facilitate the emergence of new school entrants; i.e., entrepreneurs creating more effective solutions to educational challenges. This requires better-designed choice policies and the alignment of many other factors—such as human capital, private funding, and consumer-information sources—that extend beyond public policy. Public policy by itself will not fulfill the full potential of school choice.

Although I also feel particularly strongly about this:

Finally, we fear that political pressure is leading people on both sides of the issue to demand things from “science” that science is not, by its nature, able to provide. The temptation of technocracy—the idea that scientists can provide authoritative answers to public questions—is dangerous to democracy and science itself. Public debates should be based on norms, logic, and evidence drawn from beyond just the scientific sphere.

Signatories:

Kenneth Campbell is the president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, in Washington.

Paul Diperna is the research director for the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, in Indianapolis.

Robert C. Enlow is the president and chief executive officer of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Greg Forster is a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.

Jay P. Greene is the department head and holder of the 21st-century endowed chair in education reform at the University of Arkansas, at Fayetteville, and a fellow in education policy at the George W. Bush Institute, in Dallas.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, as well as a blogger for Education Week.

Matthew Ladner is a senior adviser for policy and research at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, in Tallahassee, Fla.

Michael J. Petrilli is the executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in Washington.

Patrick J. Wolf is a professor and holder of the 21st-century endowed chair in school choice at the University of Arkansas, at Fayetteville.

Our color-coordinated mechanical lion battle chariots that join together into a giant robot are still under construction.

Defender of the empirical research universe!

19 Comments | charter schools, research reports, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Duncan, the Bizarro Ed Secretary

February 14, 2012

We recently highlighted how the Gates Foundation has done the exact opposite of what their own research has shown by ditching a small schools reform strategy (that rigorous, random-assignment research showed to be effective) while embracing a strategy (unsupported by research) of discovering the “science” of effective teaching and then cramming it down our throat through a system of national standards, curriculum, and assessments.

Now the Obama administration’s Education Secretary is playing out of the same Gates playbook by doing the exact opposite of what their own research has shown in eliminating funding for the D.C. voucher program in the proposed budget. (Saying that Obama and Duncan are playing out of the Gates playbook is actually unnecessary since as far as I can tell they are the same exact team.  Have you ever seen them both at the same time? : ) )

Obama and Duncan yanked funding from the DC voucher program despite the fact that the random-assignment evaluation sponsored by their own Department of Education found that the program increased high school graduation rates by 21 percentage points for students who used vouchers to attend a private school.  Duncan must be the Bizarro Secretary of Education because he is doing the exact opposite of what the evidence says.

Instead, Obama and Duncan are pursuing a reform strategy that could be best described as Evidence-Free Top-Down Righteousness.  Rick Hess did such an excellent job of articulating his disgust with this approach that it is worth quoting him at length:

First, setting aside my reservations about Sec. Duncan’s right to not merely grant selected waivers but to impose wholly new requirements that exist nowhere in federal law, I was struck by the sheer number and scope of conditions that Duncan cheerfully imposed. These new requirements included, according to the White House release: “States must adopt and have a plan to implement college and career-ready standards. They must also create comprehensive systems of teacher and principal development, evaluation and support that include factors beyond test scores, such as principal observation, peer review, student work, or parent and student feedback…they must set new performance targets for improving student achievement and closing achievement gaps. They also must have accountability systems that recognize and reward high-performing schools and those that are making significant gains.”

Second, maybe it’s just me, but I have trouble reconciling this list with the President’s proclamation yesterday that, “We want high standards, and we’ll give you flexibility in return…Because what might work in Minnesota may not work in Kentucky.” Indeed, one only had to read Duncan’s complicated, jargon-laden, finger-wagging letters to the ten approved states to see just how prescriptive the process is. In fact, I don’t think the extent of the new demands–and the limited flexibility granted–will be clear for weeks, at best. It’ll require patient observers to wade through the requests, letters, conditions, and so on. Just for starters, it would appear that the waiver “winners” just promised to adopt narrow, prescriptive teacher evaluation and school improvement policies that apply to charter schools as well as district schools–but not even charter authorities are entirely clear on how this will play out in reality or if these commitments should be taken any more seriously than so many empty promises in the Race to the Top applications.

Third, I found remarkably graceless the way in which the administration chest-thumpingly blamed the waivers on congressional inaction, while taking no responsibility for the slow pace of ESEA reauthorization (much less acknowledging that it dawdled for 14 months with a Democratic Congress before ever introducing its initial ESEA “blueprint.”) The White House gleefully declared, “The administration’s decision to provide waivers followed extensive efforts to work with Congress to rewrite NCLB.” This may come as news to those GOP edu-staff who complained persistently throughout 2009 and 2010 that they couldn’t get the Department to give them the time of day. The history added irony to the President declaring, with less respect for the U.S. Constitution than I might expect from a law professor, “After waiting far too long for Congress to act, I announced that my administration would take steps to reform No Child Left Behind on our own.”

Fourth, I was unimpressed by the way in which the administration–even as it criticized Congress for failing to act–went out of its way to steal attention from House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline’s long-scheduled introduction of two bills crucial to moving NCLB reauthorization. It’s hard to take seriously an administration that complains about congressional inaction and then counter-programs so as to minimize attention to congressional action. (If you want to hear more about what Kline has in mind, check out what he had to say when he previewed the bills at AEI. You can find the event here.)

Fifth, I was struck (and not favorably) by the “Stockholm Syndrome”-ness of it all. Watching governors and state chiefs go to the administration on bended knee and hustle to comply with its various demands, out of desperation to escape the more destructive elements of NCLB, doesn’t strike me as good for democratic government or school improvement. And I thought the celebratory press releases would’ve felt more authentic if they’d been read into a camera and recorded on grainy videotape. I’m sure it’s just my skeptical nature, but I couldn’t help flashing on those old Soviet show trials when the President opened by declaring, “I want to start by thanking all the chief state school officers who have made the trip from all over the country. Why don’t you all stand up just so we can see you all, right here.”

Finally, and maybe it’s just me, but I found it patronizing when the President mused yesterday, “So Massachusetts, for example, has set a goal to cut the number of underperforming students in half over the next six years. I like that goal!” Or, “Florida has set a goal to have their test scores rank among the top five states in the country, and the top 10 countries in the world. I like that ambition!” I’m sure it makes me old-school, but I prefer it when the President doesn’t treat governors or respected state chiefs as so many ruddy-cheeked toddlers competing for his approval.

2 Comments | National Standards, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

At Last, a Good Failing-Schools Voucher

February 1, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is pushing a very ambitious education reform plan that includes a big failing-schools voucher. In general, I’m a skeptic of failing schools vouchers. This one, though, really has the potential to be transformative. It would still fall short of a universal voucher in important ways, of course, but it would fall a lot less short than previous failing schools vouchers.

The first failing schools voucher was Florida’s A+ program. It was a good program that created a lot of improvement in public schools in its first yeras. But few people appreciate what a nightmare it was on the administrative side, partly as an inevitable result of its failing-schools design, and partly because the state DOE took advantage of the opportunities that design created for mischief. That almost certainly contributed to the fall-off in its impact on public schools in later years.

I discussed these issues at length in my last study of the Florida program:

There were a number of unusual obstacles, not present in most voucher programs, that kept participation rates for A+ vouchers unusually low. A certain amount of this kind of diffi culty is inherent in the “failing schools” model of vouchers, where students’ eligibility for vouchers is determined by the academic performance of their public schools. Every year, a new set of parents need to be reached with the message of what vouchers are and that they are eligible for them; there can be no gradual building up of information about the program among a fi xed population that is always eligible. However, in the A+ program the worst obstacles were not inherent in the program design, but were imposed by the Florida Department of Education as part of its implementation…

School grades were (and still are) announced in the summer. The timing of the announcement does not follow a set schedule every year and thus is unpredictable. Once the state announced school grades, determining which schools were eligible for vouchers, parents had only two weeks to apply for the program. If they missed this fleeting application window, they could not apply later.

The extremely short two-week eligibility window was a major obstacle to participation. This difficulty was greatly compounded because parents did not know whether they were eligible until school grades came out, at which point the two-week clock began ticking. Moreover, parents did not even know when the announcement of the grades might be coming.

This combination of factors made it extremely difficult to keep parents informed. Nobody knew in advance of the application window which parents would be eligible, and nobody knew in advance when the announcement would come. And once the announcement came, there were only two weeks to get from a starting point of zero information to an ending point of parents submitting their applications for vouchers. Many—possibly even most—parents probably would not even have known that their children were eligible for the program until it was too late to apply.

Another disadvantage is the dynamic of media coverage, which is where most parents get their information about programs of this type, especially when there is no opportunity for a long-term building of knowledge in a fi xed population by word of mouth. When two schools were designated as eligible for vouchers in 1999-2000, naturally media attention focused on those two schools. This would have helped parents in those neighborhoods find out about the program. Or again, in 2002-03, when a substantial number of schools became eligible for vouchers after two straight years with no schools eligible, that was a big news story.

These two years are both instances of how a failing schools voucher program can create “shock value,” but thing about shock value is that it doesn’t stay shocking forever. In years after 2002-03, A+ vouchers were no longer the news story they were in that year. This would have made it less likely that parents would hear that they were eligible for vouchers…

These obstacles help explain why, as a previous analysis has found, the A+ voucher program is the only voucher program ever to see long-term declines in its participation rate…Since the A+ program is the only voucher program ever to see a long-term decline in participation rates, it is reasonable to attribute this decline to the unique obstacles to participation that were imposed on the program by the Florida Department of Education.

Then there’s the Ohio EdChoice program, which, like Florida’s A+, only serves a small population of schools and has a positive impact on public school performance but a modest one.

The Jindal plan, by contrast, would give a voucher to all students below a certain income in schools that get a C, D or F. That adds up to almost 400,000 eligible students, over half the state population. While changing eligibility from year to year would still be present, it would be greatly mitigated both by the lower performance bar for school eligibility (schools that change grades within the A-B range or C-F range won’t change eligibility) and also by the large amount of attention generated by such a large eligibility pool. When more than half the state’s students are eligible for choice, people will know that choice exists!

I continue to think that only universal choice will really get education out of the rut it’s in. But this would be a huge step in that direction.

3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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