Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by James Shuls)

Lately, I have had a number of people say to me, “School choice is not the answer.” For those that make this claim, I’m really not sure what question they are asking.

Opponents of school choice like to claim that choice just puts a Band-Aid on a problem or that it simply misdirects resources from struggling public schools. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how school choice works and the implications it has for the education system. Below, I highlight several questions and I show that school choice is the only answer to the most vexing problems in education. At least it is the only answer that solves issues without government compulsion and unintended negative consequences as a result of government action.

How do we get schools to have high learning standards for students without relying heavily on standardized tests? School Choice.

Most people agree that schools should be held accountable. That is, we established public schools to educate students; therefore, schools should educate students. Our current method of ensuring that schools have rigorous standards and that students are learning is through test based accountability. We set learning standards, mandate standardized tests, and impose penalties or sanctions for schools that fail to achieve.

There are concerns that this model has led to a narrowing of the curriculum and an overreliance on standardized tests. The strongest complaints against this system come from educators themselves.

School choice changes the dynamic. Rather than being accountable to perform on standardized tests, schools in a choice system are expected to meet the needs of their students and parents. Enabling parents with the power to choose empowers them to be the direct enforcers of accountability. If a school is not educating students, parents can choose to send their children somewhere else. Choice is accountability.

How do we improve the quality/respect of teachers in the classroom? School Choice.

Currently, the education system treats teachers like widgets with no respect for performance. In most schools, great teachers have no ability to be rewarded for their efforts. They are paid almost exclusively based on years of experience and their credentials. More importantly, there is little competition for a teacher’s labor. It is rare for schools to actively recruit excellent teachers from other schools and offer financial incentives for them to move. This is the exact opposite of nearly every other sector, including the professions with which teachers aspire to be considered.

When schools are held accountable to parents through school choice, they have an incentive to seek and reward excellent teachers. The end effect is that choice breaks up the monopsony of the public school system and creates a market for talented teachers.

Demand for good teachers is how you improve the quality and respect for professional educators. We have tried and have been unsuccessful in achieving as much through stringent licensing requirements, pensions, and a host of other measures.

How do we overcome problems of poverty in urban school districts? School Choice.

Throughout the country schools in urban settings are struggling. Many are considered drop out factories, where half of the students fail to graduate. Stalwarts of the traditional public education system like to say, “Teachers and schools aren’t the problem, poverty is the problem.”  They are right.

Poverty and all that it entails is the single biggest obstacle to students achieving excellence in education. Poverty is a problem everywhere, even in rural schools, but it is particularly pronounced when schools have a high-concentration of poverty. In many urban schools, nearly 90% of the students qualify for free or reduced price lunches – a common metric of poverty status.

School choice does not lift people out of poverty, but it does help ameliorate the effects.

First, it is important to recognize that schools with high concentrations of poverty are the product of residential zoning of traditional public schools. When we create artificial barriers around school districts, we lock housing values to the quality of schools. Over time, this results in wealthier families sorting into better school districts and pricing out the poor families. In many ways, good public schools are a lot like my private neighborhood swimming pool – you can get in if you can afford a house in the neighborhood.

Choice also gives low-income families the ability to advocate for their children – something many parents lack – and it gives schools the incentive to improve. If poverty is the problem, the answer is more choice, not less.

I could go on.

School choice is not a magical fix. It will not result in miraculous improvements tomorrow, but Chubb and Moe were right when they wrote:

…choice is not like the other reforms and should not be combined with them as part of a reformist strategy for improving America’s public schools. Choice is a self-contained reform with its own rationale and justification. It has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in a myriad of other ways.

If you are asking the right question, school choice is most definitely the answer.

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James Shuls is the Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute. Follow on Twitter @shulsie

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released today an amazing global survey measuring anti-Semitism.  Researchers interviewed 53,100 people in over 100 countries using an index that the ADL has been using for 50 years to track hatred of Jews.  A person is considered anti-Semitic if they said that at least 6 of the following 11 statements is “probably true”:

ANTI-SEMITIC STEREOTYPES

1) Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/the countries they live in].
2) Jews have too much power in the business world.
3) Jews have too much power in international financial markets.
4) Jews don’t care about what happens to anyone but their own kind.
5) Jews have too much control over global affairs.
6) People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.
7) Jews think they are better than other people.
8) Jews have too much control over the United States government.
9) Jews have too much control over the global media.
10) Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.
11) Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.

You really should read the Executive Summary to learn about what they found, but here are some of the highlights (or should I say lowlights):

• 26% of respondents globally thought that at least 6 of these 11 anti-Semitic statements is probably true.
• In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 74% met this threshold of anti-Semitism.
• Muslims reported the highest levels of anti-Semitism (49%), followed by Christians in Eastern Orthodox countries (36%), Catholics in majority Christian countries (25%), people with no religion (21%), Hindus (19%), Budhists (17%), and Protestants in majority Christian countries (15%).
• Region seemed to trump religion.  Christians in MENA had rates of anti-Semitism (64%) that were closer to the average in their region and very different from Christians elsewhere.  Conversely, Muslims in W. Europe and the Americas had lower rates of anti-Semitism (29%) than Muslims in MENA (75%).
• Only 54% globally were aware of the Holocaust.  Of those who were aware, 32% believed that the Holocaust was a “myth” or “exaggerated.”  These answers on the Holocaust are strongly related to rates of anti-Semitism

There were, however, some positive signs:

• Younger people (under 25) are less anti-Semitic (18%) than older people (34% for those over 65).  Perhaps more positive views will gain traction as the older generation of Jew-haters dies out.
• People living in countries with more Jews have lower rates (22%) than those in countries with few or no Jews (28%).  Of the 26% reported as anti-Semitic, 70% had never met a Jew.  Familiarity reduces hatred.
• In the Americas, W. Europe, and Oceania, higher education levels are associated with lower rates of anti-Semitism.  But in MENA the opposite is true.  Education can reduce hatred, but it depends on what is taught.

You can see all of this and much more in the Executive Summary and on the cool web site.  I was particularly struck by some of the results for individual countries.  Residents of the West Bank and Gaza top the list of countries with a 93% anti-Semitism rate.  Greece tops the list among countries outside of MENA at 69%.  South Korea, which has a grand total of about 100 Jews, has the highest rate in Asia (53%).  The US has one of the lowest rates (9%), which is down from 29% in 1964.

We’ve been offering much strategic advice to ed reformers on this blog lately.  I’ve warned about the dangers of over-reach, recommending instead an incremental and decentralized approach.  Greg has warned that a national system of standards without control over implementation provides license to every quack, crackpot and anti-Semite to un-accountably pursue their own agendas while claiming that national standards made them do it.  Matt has nicely documented how heavy regulation of private choice programs, especially requiring private schools to administer the state test, defeats the very purpose of  expanding choice by driving 2/3 of private schools out of the program while forcing the remaining 1/3 to teach the state curriculum.  You can choose any McDonalds franchise you like and they will compete to make the best burger — too bad if you are a vegetarian.  And Matt has balanced my call for incrementalism with a warning that reforming too slowly fails to land a winning blow.

All of this is, I think, very sound advice.  But these may all be smaller pieces of what I believe is the big advice ed reformers need to hear — there is political virtue in pursuing choice as a reform strategy over top-down reforms, including standards, accountability, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Choice does not depend on policymakers being brilliant or benevolent.  With top-down reforms the people selecting the standards, designing the tests, setting the cut-scores, devising consequences for performance, writing the curriculum, and picking the instructional methods have to get it just right.  They also have to be right for many different kinds of kids who may need different approaches.  And they have to be right over and over again as circumstances and information change.  Oh — and they have to somehow ignore their own interests and pressure from other interested groups of adults that may pull them away from making the right decisions for kids.

People will also make mistakes in choice systems.  But when they do, those mistakes do not affect thousands or millions of kids.  They are also less likely to make those mistakes because the people choosing, usually parents, are closer to the children and more likely to know what those children need.  Parents have interests that are also more likely to be aligned with those of their own children and interested groups are incapable of capturing all of them to influence decisions.

More importantly, from a political perspective, choice has the virtue of creating its own constituency.  As families get the ability to choose, they develop an interest in keeping that ability.  So, they will fight efforts to roll-back or restrict choice.  As more people get to choose, the constituency for choice grows and the ability to protect and expand those programs gets stronger.

Top-down reforms, on the other hand, are the most popular on the day they are adopted and steadily lose their constituency over time.  To get adopted, top-down reforms usually have to maintain some level of ambiguity about what they will do to attract a winning coalition.  As they get implemented they have to make more clear what will and won’t be taught, who will and won’t experience consequences, etc….  The losers discover who they are and begin to organize against top-down reforms once they are implemented.

Elites outside of the education system may support accountability testing, merit pay, or mandated curriculum, when they are abstractions being considered for adoption.  But once they are put into place and opposition grows stronger, who remains as the champions of these top-down reforms?  This is why top-down reforms are so easily blocked, diluted, and co-opted.  They have no natural constituencies and gain none as they are implemented over time.

Choice does, however, have three major political vulnerabilities.  First, choice program may be easier to protect once they are adopted, but they are harder to adopt in the beginning.  Their opponents are fully mobilized against them when they are proposed and their potential beneficiaries do not yet know who they are.  This is why the expansion of choice has been relatively gradual.  But each new victory gets easier as the constituency of choosers grows.  And setbacks are very rare because only un-elected judges have repealed programs — politicians won’t cross the swelling ranks of empowered parents.

Second, even if choice tends to be a one-way ratchet where victories are permanent and defeats are temporary, the programs are vulnerable to slow-motion strangulation by regulation.  Rick Hess and Mike McShane had an excellent piece in USA Today recently warning about this.  But again, the natural and growing constituency of choice parents and schools can provide a useful check on excessive regulation.  This is not perfect — sometimes people are too willing to trade away their liberty for the promise of security — but freedom is very attractive and people tend to fight to keep it once they have it.

The third vulnerability is that when people get to choose, some of them will make mistakes and some providers will be bad actors.  Opponents will seize upon these bad outcomes, even if they are rare, and use them to argue for strangling regulation or even repeal.  Of course, top-down systems contain plenty of mistakes and bad actors — in fact they are more likely to have them for the reasons discussed above.  Because choice grows its own constituency, it can generally hold back calls for strangling regulation or repeal stemming from individual cases of bad decisions or bad actors.

The central political virtue of choice over top-down reforms is that choice gains more supporters as it grows while top-down reform lose supporters as they grow.