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

The Future and Its Enemies-Utah Chapter

February 26, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Last year was one for the record books on education reform, and Utah’s digital learning bill was one of the nation’s most far-reaching changes. The Empire however is trying to strike back by overturning the new law before many students have had the chance to take advantage of it.

From our friends at Parents for Choice in Education:

HB147 will stop the education dollars that belong to the student from following them to the online course of their choice and place the power back into the hands of the system. It will prevent high school students from having access to high quality online learning options regardless of language, zip code, income levels or special needs. It will allow the districts to control and limit the student’s options.

To learn more, visit the PCE website.

2 Comments | Digital Learning | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Duncan and the Abuse of Research (As Well As Power)

February 24, 2012

Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s press statement on South Carolina was a bizarre display of the opposite of what it intended.  As Greg pointed out, the statement’s harsh and threatening tone did nothing to support the claim that  Common Core national standards and assessments are a purely voluntary consortium of the states.  Instead, the statement was a not so veiled threat that South Carolina would lose out on the opportunity for federal grants like Race to the Top and lose the opportunity to receive waivers from impossible to satisfy NCLB requirements if it followed through with a proposal to withdraw from Common Core.  If it is purely voluntary, why the need for threats and intimidation from the Education Secretary?

In addition to this abuse of power given the legal prohibitions on the US Department of Education from establishing national standards, testing, and curriculum, Duncan’s statement also displayed an abuse of research.  He distorted the findings of a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) analysis to suggest that South Carolina had particularly weak performance standards when the research had not shown that.  Duncan claimed:

[Prominent Republicans] have supported the Common Core standards because they realize states must stop dummying down academic standards and lying about the performance of children and schools. In fact, South Carolina lowered the bar for proficiency in English and mathematics faster than any state in the country from 2005 to 2009, according to research by the National Center for Education Statistics.

South Carolina did significantly lower its performance standards between 2005 and 2009. But they did so because they had earlier raised those performance standards to well-above the national average.  In the end, South Carolina had math and reading performance standards that were close to the national average and close to the NAEP standard for Basic.

One of the potential benefit of state control over performance standards is that they can raise or lower them so that they are not too easy so that everyone passes or so hard that everyone fails. You have to hit the sweet spot between these points to motivate students and educators to improve without crushing them. Each state may have a different sweet spot and needs the flexibility to adjust in case they miss the mark (as SC initially did) or in case achievement improves (as has occurred in FL).

We actually had Jack Buckley, the Commissioner of NCES, out to give a lecture in Arkansas during which he presented this analysis. You can see a summary and the slides here.

Compared to what we could have had as an education secretary, Duncan has been pretty good.  He’s shown some independence from the teachers unions and supported some promising reforms, like charter schools.  But he’s ignored his own department’s research in seeking (multiple times) to kill the DC voucher program.  And he seems oblivious to the limits of power that he and the federal government have over education policy.  When people abuse their power they may also be more likely to abuse research.

4 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

This Deal Is Getting Worse All the Time

February 23, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Shorter Arne Duncan: The U.S. Department of Education is not pressuring states to adopt Common Core. However, any state that takes action to resist Common Core will be immediately singled out by the Education Secretary for an extremely harsh public denunciation of its education system – which will obviously make it effectively impossible for the Department to look favorably upon that state when doling out grants and waivers for the foreseeable future.

19 Comments | National Standards, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

More Vegetarian Conspiracy Theories!

February 22, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Julie Underwood and Julie F. Mead go vegetarian conspiracy theory in the pages of Phi Delta Kappan.

To paraphrase David Cameron, I refer the gentle ladies to the reply I made some moments ago, with the only postscript being that the center-left also has an organization of state legislators that proposes model legislation.

ALEC does good work, but if the Julies are looking for someone to blame for the recent ALEC surge, they ought to put President Obama, Senator Reid and former Speaker Pelosi at the top of their list.

After all, no one forced them to ignore the obviously strongly held and revealed preferences of the American people on the health care bill, thus leading to the 2010 election results. They chose to incur the wrath of the American people of their own free will, leading to a down-ballot nightmare for Dems.

P.S….just to encourage a little more crypto-paranoia: who are these mysterious ALEC people?

3 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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

Lance Izumi on Nationalizing Education

February 21, 2012

Lance Izumi has a new mini-book coming out as part of the Encounter Broadsides series arguing against the effort to build a nationalized education system through centrally imposed Common Core standards, assessments, and curriculum.  Be sure to check out the cool video Encounter has made to promote the mini-book.

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

Common Core Chickens

February 20, 2012

Last week I put up a post praising a debate in Education Next over the quality and desirability of Common Core math standards.  I was pleased that after many months of trying the editors at Ed Next had finally found a supporter of Common Core to defend the math standards in a forum with established critic Ze-ev Wurman.

It turns out I was mistaken.  Stephen Wilson, who appeared to be taking the pro side of the debate, clarified in the comment section of last week’s post that he is not a Common Core supporter and has no general opinion about the desirability of imposing Common Core standards nationwide.

Wilson did praise the fact that “Common Core is vastly superior—not just a little bit better, but vastly superior—to the standards in more than 30 states.”  But he also acknowledged “There is much to criticize about them, and there are several sets of standards, including those in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Indiana, and Washington, that are clearly better.”  He also acknowledged that Common Core math standards are “certainly not up there with the best of countries…”

I thought Wilson was trying to argue that being better than 30 states represented a good first step and that Common Core would be improved over time.  That was me inferring something that he did not actually say and that he explicitly objected to having attributed to him.

Rather than being the Common Core supporter, it appears more like Wilson was damning the Common Core movement with faint praise.  In the forum Wilson emphasized that even if Common Core were comparable to the best state and international standards, it may have little effect on math instruction or achievement:

So, let’s just pretend for a moment that Common Core is just as good as the very best. Who, in education circles, will agree with that enough to put it all in practice? The standard algorithm deniers will teach multiple ways to multiply numbers and mention the standard algorithm one day in passing. Korea will say “no calculators” in K–12, a little extreme perhaps, but some in the U.S. will say “appropriate tools” means calculators in 4th grade. We, in this country, are still not on the same page about what content is most important, even if everyone says they’ll take Common Core. Without a unified, concerted effort to teach real mathematics, there isn’t much chance of catching up.

In other countries, if you say “learn to multiply whole numbers,” no one questions how this should be done; students should learn and understand the standard algorithm. In the U.S., even if you say “learn to multiply whole numbers with the standard algorithm,” some people will declare wiggle room and try to avoid the standard algorithm.

This echoes Tom Loveless’ conclusion from the annual Brookings report released last week:

The Common Core will have little to no effect on student achievement. The quality or rigor of state standards has been unrelated to state NAEP scores, Loveless finds. Moreover, most of the variation in NAEP scores lies within states, not between them.  Whatever impact standards alone can have on reducing within-state differences should have already been felt by the standards that all states have had since 2003.

So, let’s review where things stand.  Despite a withering public scolding from Rick Hess, Common Core still can’t produce anyone to strongly defend national adoption of those standards based on their quality.  Common Core supporters are either too chicken to engage in the debate over the quality of the standards or too arrogant to think they have to defend the standards intellectually before they cram them down all of our throats.

18 Comments | National Standards | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Common Core Quality Debated

February 16, 2012

Last fall Rick Hess complained about his inability to find anyone to participate in an Education Next debate about the quality of Common Core standards who would argue in their favor.  As Rick put it:

Rather, I think the reluctance to contribute [to a debate in support of Common Core] is due to hubris, impatience to focus on implementation, political naivete, and disdain for what they see as mean-spirited carping….

There are long rows of argument and persuasion still to be hoed. And, if you’re eager to overhaul what gets taught in forty-odd states serving forty million or more students, that’s probably as it should be. If Common Core-ites don’t have the patience or stomach for that task, they should let us know now–and save everyone a whole lot of grief.

The notion that Common Core proponents needn’t make their case is an affront to democratic values.

Well, Ed Next managed to find someone to argue for and against the quality of Common Core standards, producing a really excellent and illuminating exchange.  W. Stephen Wilson took the pro side and Ze’ev Wurman was on the con side.  I would encourage you to read the entire debate yourself, but here is my takeaway:  They were mostly in agreement about the quality of Common Core.  Both seemed to agree that Common Core was better than the standards previously in place in most states but worse than in a non-trivial number of other states.  They also agreed that Common Core standards are significantly weaker than the ones in most high-achieving countries.

So if they agree that Common Core is sort of mediocre, why does Wilson support them while Wurman oppose them?  Wilson sees the improvement on the standards of 30 or more states to be substantial progress.  He sees this as a first step toward developing stronger national standards that would be comparable to those of our overseas competitors and better than all previously existing state standards.

Wurman sees Common Core as significantly lowering the bar relative to several previously existing state standards, including very large states like California.  More importantly, he sees Common Core as the end of progress in improving standards rather than the beginning.  Once put in place, he sees no incentive for anyone to toughen national standards since no state will be competing to offer a more rigorous education in order to attract residents and businesses.  He also sees national standards as more easily captured and dummied-down by teachers unions and other entrenched interests who would prefer to have their members (and students) jump over a lower bar.

19 Comments | National Standards | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Desperate Need for Market Forces in Education

February 15, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Mark J. Perry provides a fantastic illustration of the tremendous power of market forces to improve the human condition. If a picture is worth a thousand words, here is three thousand for you:

So adjusted for inflation, a now obsolete piece of furniture television set that could bring in all of 12 channels and had no remote control and a terrible picture quality was going to set you back more than $5,000. What could you buy for the same amount of money today in constant dollars? Perry is glad you asked. Try this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND:

 

 

 

 

 

Now, as a good skeptic, you quickly recovered from your shock and asked yourself if this was a phenomenon restricted to electronics. Perry, as it turns out, has anticipated your question:

We live, in short, in an age wonders, except of course for areas of the economy heavily managed and financed by the government. In those areas, instead of radically improving products provided at continually lower costs, we tend to see expanded costs for no, little or ambiguous improvements. Take for instance, American K-12 education in the era of unionized workforces (HT Andrew Coulson):

We need to be far more thoughtful about incentives in the K-12 system if we want to serve the best interests of children and taxpayers.

34 Comments | school funding | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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