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

U.S. Department of Ed Really is Breaking the Law

February 9, 2012

Last May I put up a post suggesting that the U.S. Department of Education was breaking the law by backing Common Core national standards, assessments, and curriculum.  Today the Pioneer Institute released an analysis by two former top lawyers from the U.S. Department of Education agreeing that the Common Core effort has crossed the line and violated the Department’s statutory authorization.

As stated in the press release:

“The Department has designed a system of discretionary grants and conditional waivers that effectively herds states into accepting specific standards and assessments favored by the Department,” said Robert S. Eitel, who co-authored the report with Kent D. Talbert….

‎”Our greatest concern arises from the Department’s decision to cement the use of the Common Core ‎State Standards and assessment consortia through conditional waivers,” said Eitel. “The waiver ‎authority granted by Congress in No Child Left Behind does not permit the Secretary to gut NCLB ‎wholesale and impose these conditions,” added Talbert. “As shown by the eleven states that have ‎already applied for waivers, most states will accept the Common Core State Standards and the ‎assessment conditions in order to get waivers,” Talbert stated.‎

States need not apply for waivers, the authors said, but most states are desperate enough to escape No ‎Child Left Behind to agree to the conditions. “And once a state receives a waiver, escapes NCLB’s strict ‎accountability requirements, and makes the heavy investments required by the standards, that state ‎will do whatever it takes to keep its coveted waiver,” said Eitel. In the view of the authors, these efforts ‎will necessarily result in a de facto national curriculum and instructional materials effectively ‎supervised, directed, or controlled by the Department through the NCLB waiver process.‎

And people who continue to insist that this is all a voluntary process must also think that handing over ‎your wallet is voluntary when a robber says, “Your money or your life.”  After all, you had a choice.

[UPDATE: The 1979 law by which the U.S. Department of Education is authorized in its current form clearly prohibits these activities.  It states (in section 103b): “No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law.” (emphasis added)]

8 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Dark Days of Educational Measurement in the Sunshine State Ended in 1999

February 8, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Over on the Shanker Blog of the American Federation for Teachers, Matthew DiCarlo writes a thoughtful but ultimately misguided post A Dark Day for Education Measurement in the Sunshine State.

DiCarlo is obviously very bright, but a few critical misinterpretations have led him astray. DiCarlo demonstrates that family income is highly correlated with student test scores in Florida. No surprise- the same is true everywhere.

Having demonstrated this, DiCarlo develops a critique of Florida’s school grading system. The Florida school grading system carefully balances overall performance on state exams with academic growth over time. Specifically, the formula weights student proficiency on state exams as 50% of a schools grade, 25% on the growth of all students, and the final 25% on the growth of students who scored in the bottom quartile on last year’s exam.

The last bit is the clever part of the formula. By double weighting the gains of students who are behind, they become the most important children in the building. Only the bottom quartile from last year’s test count in all three categories.

DiCarlo goes into the devilish details about how the state determines these gains, and concludes that some of the gains measures don’t actually measure academic growth but actually effectively measure academic proficiency. The use of proficiency levels in determining gains is critical because students are taking a higher grade level assessment with more rigorous content.  If a student achieves a proficient score on the eighth grade FCAT and then again on the ninth grade FCAT, the student is performing at a higher level because the content is more difficult.  Florida’s system does not provide credit for a learning gain for students performing Advanced in one year but Proficient the next year.

DiCarlo has failed to appreciate that the mastery of more challenging academic material from one grade to the next itself constitutes a form of academic growth.

The 9th grade student has now studied the mathematics curriculum of both 8th and 9th grade and has demonstrated  proficiency of the 8th grade material and  proficiency of the 9th grade material. Given the valid system of testing, we can feel assured that the 9th grader knows more about math than he or she knew as an 8th grader. The growth in this case is staying on track in a progressively more challenging sequential curriculum.

The Florida system, in essence, makes use of proficiency levels in order to give definition to gains and drops as meaningful. There of course is no “correct” way to structure such a system, and if 100 different people examined any given system they would likely have 500 different suggestions for improvement to match their preferences.

DiCarlo’s notion of “fairness” seems to have distracted him from a far larger and more important issue: the utility of the Florida grading system, seen best at the school grading level, has improved student achievement for all students.

If you go back as far as the FCAT data system will take you for results by Free and Reduced lunch eligibility for 3rd grade reading, you’ll find that in 2002 48% of Florida’s free and reduced lunch students scored FCAT 3 or better. In the most recent data available from 2010, 64% scored FCAT 3 or better. That is an enormous improvement in the percentage of students scoring at grade level or better.

In 2002, 60% of all Florida students scored Level 3 or above, and in 2010, 72% scored Level 3 or above. Free and reduced lunch eligible kids in 2010 outperformed ALL kids in 2002 by 4 percentage points. That’s real progress.  And the free and reduced lunch eligible children overtake the 2002 general population averages in a large majority of grades tested.

The same pattern can be found in Florida’s NAEP data. For instance, in 1998, 48% of Florida’s free and reduced lunch eligible students scored “Below Basic” on the NAEP 8th grade reading test. In 2011, that number had fallen to 35%. If an “unfair” system helps to produce a 27% decline in the illiteracy rate among low-income students, I’d like to order up a grave injustice.

The “Dark Days of Education Measurement in Florida” in my view were before school grades. Academic failure lied concealed behind a fog of fuzzy labels, and Florida wallowed near the bottom of the NAEP exams. Back when there was little transparency and even less accountability, far more students failed to acquire the basic academic skills needed to succeed in life. While perhaps a lost golden age for educators and administrators wishing to avoid any responsibility for academic outcomes, it was a Dark Age for students, parents and taxpayers.

Ironically, DiCarlo has decried a system which has weakened the link between family income and academic outcomes demonstrated in his post. Yes it is still strong in Florida, but it used to be much, much stronger.

Finally, can one truly complain about the “fairness” of a system providing more than ten times as many A/B grades as D/F grades? If anything, the Florida school grading system has grown too soft in my view (see chart above).

I’ve read enough of DiCarlo’s work to know that he is a thoughtful person, so I hope he will examine the evidence for himself and reconsider his stance. I don’t have any reason to think that the Florida system is perfect. I don’t think a perfect system exists, and I suspect that there are some changes to the Florida system that DiCarlo and I might actually agree on.

It seems however difficult to argue that the Florida system hasn’t been useful if one gives appropriate weight to the interests of students, parents and taxpayers to balance those of school staff.

4 Comments | school accountability | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

“How Do You Sleep at Night?”

February 7, 2012

Just fine, thank you.

But some teachers seem determined to disturb the sleep of people who do research they dislike.  When Heritage’s Jason Richwine co-authored a study on teacher pay, he received a message from his child’s second grade teacher asking him, “How do you sleep at night?”

Note that the teacher did not ask him to describe the source of the data analyzed or defend the interpretation of results.  The teacher was just engaged in bullying, a practice that schools say they are trying to discourage.  And part of the bullying is the not so subtle reminder that the teacher has Richwine’s children all day.  Parents are (at least partially) compelled to send their children to the care of adults who may threaten you if you say things they dislike.

Imagine a doctor similarly bullying a patient who advocated for reductions in Medicare reimbursement rates.  I imagine the doctor could face disciplinary action from licensing authorities for unethical conduct.  If teachers want to be treated as professionals, then they have to abide by professional norms of behavior, including separating one’s personal feelings from one’s job.

Most teachers do behave professionally, but these outbursts are not as rare as they should be.  Unfortunately, the teacher unions and their advocates, like Diane Ravitch and Valerie Strauss, encourage strident views and confrontational tactics that make unprofessional behavior far more likely.

Long run, it’s a bad strategy for teachers to get their way in policy disputes by threatening and intimidating parents.  It takes a couple hundred ads about teachers buying school supplies with their own funds to counter one such incident.

4 Comments | bullying, teacher pay, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Captain Hammer’s National Standards Will Save Us!

February 6, 2012

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Michael Winerip had a doozy of a column over the weekend, exposing what look like some really seriously dumbed down state standards in New York. But don’t worry! Just like Captain Hammer, national standards are here to save us.

There’s no doubt Winerip has what looks like a pretty damning indictment of the NY English Regents exam. Here are some actual student responses that the state grading guide says should get middling or even higher scores:

  • These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create Art.
  • In the poem, the poets use of language was very depth into it.
  • Even though their is no physical conflict withen each other. Their are jealousy problems between each other that each one wish could have.
  • In life, “no two people regard the world in exactly the same way,” as J. W. von Goethe says. Everyone sees and reacts to things in different ways. Even though they may see the world in similar ways, no two people’s views will ever be exactly the same. This statement is true since everyone sees things through different viewpoints.

Bear in mind that these are not just examples pulled from student exams that actually got middling or higher scores. These are examples held up in the state scoring guide as examples of answers that should get middling or higher scores. In effect, the state is mandating low standards from the top.

But don’t worry!

They are also counting on a new set of national learning standards, known as the common core, which are currently being developed in more than 40 states. The hope is that more sophisticated standards detailing what children should know, coupled with more sophisticated curriculums and exams, will result in a more rigorous public education system.

“The D.O.E./Board of Regents position on the passing score for this exam, with attention to college and career readiness, will be re-examined in conjunction with administering a revised exam in this subject area aligned to the Common Core State Standards,” a spokesman for [New York State education commissioner] Dr. [John] King wrote.

Thank heaven! The exact same people who produced the current mandatory dumbing down are now going to produce a new set of standards. Surely that will result in a lifting of standards!

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

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

Gates, the Bizarro Foundation

January 31, 2012

Comic book geeks are familiar with Bizarro World, a place where everything is the opposite of what it is in the normal world.  In Bizarro World, people would abandon a policy strongly supported by rigorous evidence while embracing an alternative policy for which the evidence showed little promise.

I was thinking about Bizarro World and then it struck me — Perhaps the Gates Foundation has somehow fallen into the Bizarro World.  It’s just about the only thing that makes sense of their Bizarro choices with respect to education reform strategies.

The dominant education reform strategy of the Gates Foundation before 2006 was to break large high schools into smaller ones, often using school choice and charter schools.  As a Business Week profile put it:

The foundation embraced what many social scientists had concluded was the prime solution: Instead of losing kids in large schools like Manual, the new thinking was to divide them into smaller programs with 200 to 600 students each. Doing so, numerous studies showed, would help prevent even hard-to-reach students from falling through the cracks. The foundation didn’t set out to design schools or run them. Its goal was to back some creative experiments and replicate them nationally.

But the Gates Foundation wasn’t patient enough to let the experiments produce results.  Instead, they hired SRI and AIR to do a very weakly-designed non-experimental evaluation that produced disappointing results.  Gates had also commissioned a rigorous random-assignment evaluation by MDRC, but it would take a few more years to see if students graduated and went on to college at higher rates if they were assigned by lottery to a smaller school.

Gates couldn’t wait.  They were convinced that small schools were a flop, so they began to ditch the small school strategy and look for a new Big Idea.  Tom Vander Ark, the education chief who had championed small schools, was out the door and replaced with Vicki Phillips, a superintendent whose claim to fame, such as it was, came from serving as Portland’s superintendent where she consolidated schools (not breaking them into smaller ones) and centralized control over curriculum and instruction.  As one local observer put it:

In her time in the famously progressive, consensus-driven city, she closed six schools, merged nearly two dozen others through K-8 conversions, pushed to standardize the district’s curriculum, and championed new and controversial measures for testing the district’s 46,000 children-all mostly without stopping for long enough to adequately address the concerns her changes generated in the neighborhoods and schools where they played out.  During her three years in Portland, Phillips’ name became synonymous with top-down management, corporate-style reforms, and a my-way-or-the-highway attitude.

Under Phillips and deputy education director, Harvard professor Tom Kane, the Gates Foundation has pursued a very different strategy: attempting to identify the best standards, curriculum, and pedagogy and then imposing those best practices through a national system of standards and testing.

And here is where we see that Gates must be the Bizarro Foundation.  The previous strategy of backing small schools has now been vindicated by the rigorous random-assignment study Gates couldn’t wait for.  According to the New York Times:

The latest findings show that 67.9 percent of the students who entered small high schools in 2005 and 2006 graduated four years later, compared with 59.3 percent of the students who were not admitted and instead went to larger schools. The higher graduation rate at small schools held across the board for all students, regardless of race, family income or scores on the state’s eighth-grade math and reading tests, according to the data.

This increase was almost entirely accounted for by a rise in Regents diplomas, which are considered more rigorous than a local diploma; 41.5 percent of the students at small schools received one, compared with 34.9 percent of students at other schools. There was little difference between the two groups in the percentage of students who earned a local diploma or the still more rigorous Advanced Regents diploma.

Small-school students also showed more evidence of college readiness, with 37.3 percent of the students earning a score of 75 or higher on the English Regents, compared with 29.7 percent of students at other schools. There was no significant difference, however, in scores on the math Regents.

Meanwhile, as part of their newly embraced top-down strategy, the Gates effort to identify the secret formula for effective teaching has failed to bear fruit.  The Gates -operated Measuring Effective Teachers Project failed to identify any rubric of observing teachers or any components of those rubrics that were strongly predictive of gains in student learning.  And the Gates-backed “research” supporting the federally-orchestrated Common Core push for national standards and testing has been strikingly lacking in scientific rigor and candor.

In short, the Gates Foundation has ditched what rigorous evidence shows worked and is pushing a new strategy completely unsupported by rigorous evidence.  They must be in Bizarro World.  Somebody please get me some blue kryptonite.

16 Comments | instructional reform, research reports | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Archbishop Charles Chaput Calls for Action to Expand PA Parental Choice

January 31, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput released the following statement last Friday and published in today’s Philadelphia Archdiocesan publications, including every parish bulletin being distributed at Mass and published online.

Archbishop’s weekly column: Catholic Schools Week – How you and I can help

Monday, January 29, begins Catholic Schools Week. It’s a time to honor the unique value of Catholic education. Here in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, we have a long record of dedicated service by the women and men who teach in our classrooms and run the “business” of Catholic schools. That record includes the legacy of thousands of women and men religious and diocesan clergy. In the single academic year of 1963-64, more than 4,100 religious and 1,600 laypersons taught more than 263,000 students enrolled in our schools. Today, scores of our pastors make extraordinary commitments of parish funds to keep our schools open and excellent.

Unfortunately, schools run on resources, not simply good will and heroic service. Our schools can no longer count on unlimited Church support. The resources simply don’t exist. Many of our parishes are financially strained. The archdiocese itself faces serious financial and organizational challenges that have been developing for many years and cannot be ignored.

So where does that leave us? We can honor Catholic Schools Week this year by actually doing something about the fiscal problems hurting our schools. We need to press our lawmakers, respectfully but vigorously, to pass school choice.

First, we need some clarity: School vouchers do not mean “government support for religious schools.” That argument is flatly false. No vouchers go to any school, religious or otherwise. Vouchers do, however, return the power of educational choice to parents, where it belongs. In doing so, vouchers make all schools more accountable for the quality of education they deliver. Parents get the voucher. Parents choose the school. This makes perfect sense. And if a school offers a poor education for young people, parents will rightly vote with their feet — and their vouchers. Of course, most Catholic schools do the opposite: They offer a strong education, in a safe environment, with a focus on developing good moral character. That’s why parents are so upset when they close.

Some people argue that school choice legislation only helps families in poor areas. Helping the poor is obviously vital, and vouchers would accomplish that. But vouchers would also assist many more families than the poor. If vouchers are approved, they will free up what’s known as EITC funds — Educational Improvement Tax Credit funds — along with other grant and scholarship monies for many thousands of other school families. In effect, the positive impact of vouchers translates to millions of dollars of additional educational resources potentially available to a wide range of school families each year — including Catholic school families.

Now here’s an unhappy fact: In 2011, the bishops of Pennsylvania made the passage of vouchers one of their priority legislative issues. People like Bob O’Hara in our statewide Catholic bishops’ conference and Jason Budd in our archdiocesan Office of Catholic Education worked hard to mobilize Catholic support. Their efforts failed — and not because they didn’t try, but because too few people in the pews listened. Very few Catholics called or wrote their state senators and representatives. Even fewer visited their offices to lobby as citizens. Despite this, vouchers passed in the state senate, before stalling in the house. One non-Catholic school choice activist — who has poured years of his time and millions of dollars of his own resources into fighting for vouchers as a social justice issue — was baffled at the inability of Catholics to mobilize around an issue so obviously vital to the public interest and so clearly helpful to the survival of their own schools.

In the coming week I’ll be writing every state senator and representative in the territory of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to press them to support school vouchers. And I’ll continue doing it until vouchers pass. I hope my brother bishops and pastors across the state will do the same. More importantly: Our Catholic people need to do the same. Elected officials do listen, and they act when the noise gets loud enough. If nothing else, the crisis of Philadelphia’s Catholic schools is an unpleasant but finally very healthy wake up call. The bill for our failure to pass school choice over the past decade has come due. Now we’re paying for it.

When vouchers stalled, yet again, in the Pennsylvania house last fall, a frustrated Catholic school teacher friend of mine said “Catholics are suckers.” I don’t believe that. But then, I’m new in town. If we Philadelphia Catholics love our Catholic schools, and we obviously do, then the time to get active and focused is now. We need to begin pressing our state lawmakers to pass the school choice legislation — including vouchers and expanded EITC credits — that’s currently pending in Harrisburg. And we need to do it this week, today, right now. I plan to do that. I hope you’ll join me.

For more information on school choice, and to contact your legislator, please visit:  http://tinyurl.com/PASchoolChoice

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

Kevin Carey Gets the Facts Wrong

January 30, 2012

(Guest post by Patrick J. Wolf)

In The Atlantic Online resident cool-kid Kevin Carey sings the “vouchers-are-all-bad-but-charters-are-all-good” song that is the official anthem of the beltway crowd of education reform hipsters.  Carey repeats some points from my own research that school choice results would be even better if parents had more extensive information about schools (but see here for how the mere availability of choice improves parent knowledge about schools) and the supply of choice schools was of consistently higher quality.  Fine.  Carey also claims that private school administrators are rapacious (tell that to the nuns that still run many Catholic schools) and politicians who support school vouchers do so for “obviously partisan reasons” while Mr. Carey only cares about the children.

Unlike Kevin Carey I don’t purport to possess the ability to look inside of people’s souls and conclusively discern their true motives.  Still, his broad-brush claim that all voucher backers are merely trying to “club Democrats” (his words) seems demonstrably inconsistent with the behaviors of voucher supporters such as retiring Independent Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator Diane Feinstein (yeah, she loves to club Democrats), former Democratic Mayor Anthony Williams, Wisconsin State Representative Jason Fields (yet another African-American Democrat who supports vouchers), etc.  I really could go on and present a much longer list, but Kevin Carey only uses single examples to make sweeping generalizations so I’ll simply outperform him by using multiple counter-examples to disprove his universal and unqualified claims.

What disturbs me more than Carey’s reckless accusations is his lack of knowledge of the basic facts surrounding school vouchers.  For example, he states casually that, “To this day, vouchers are only available to small handful (sic) of students.”  The facts are that 27 different voucher or tax-credit funded voucher-like programs serve over 210,000 students.  Even Paul Bunyan’s hands couldn’t hold that many kids.

Carey goes on to state boldly that, “Unlike private schools that pick and choose their pupil (sic), charters are open to all students and allocate scarce openings via lotteries.”  The facts are that many voucher programs do not allow private schools to discriminate in admissions.  In Milwaukee, for example, private schools participating in the voucher program must admit students by lottery but public charter schools in the city can pick and choose their pupils — the exact opposite of what Carey claims.

The D.C. voucher program is “a small, benign, and not particularly effective effort that at its core is nothing more than its name suggests: a program that awards scholarship (sic) to a small group of poor families to partially offset the cost of attending private school”, according to Kevin Carey.  Ignore the fact that this is yet another grammatically incorrect sentence from Mr. Carey.  Is it true?  Well, I know a few things about the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, having served as the U.S. Department of Education’s independent evaluator of the program and having written six detailed reports on our nation’s only federally-funded school voucher initiative.

Did the D.C. voucher only “partially offset the cost of attending private school” for families, as Carey claims?  In over 99 percent of cases, the D.C. voucher of up to $7,500 was accepted by schools as full payment from the family.  The private schools accepted less than half the per-pupil government resources allocated to D.C. public schools and either provided a highly efficient education to voucher students or, in many cases, covered the extra costs themselves.  Wait a second, I thought Kevin Carey said that private school operators are greedy and avaricious?

Is the D.C. voucher program “not particularly effective”?  Our gold-standard experimental evaluation concluded that the voucher program increased the high school graduation rate of students by 12 percentage points from the mere offer of the voucher and 21 percentage points if a student actually used it.  That makes the D.C. voucher initiative the most effective drop-put prevention program ever evaluated by the U.S. Department of Education.  The same Milwaukee evaluation that Carey references as showing no net achievement benefits for voucher students also reports that Milwaukee voucher students are graduating from high school and enrolling in college at higher rates due to access to private schools through the program.

President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address that teenagers be compelled to remain in school until they turn 18 or graduate.  Who needs such Big-Brother-like compulsion?  When the government provides more students with access to private schools through vouchers the kids stay in school willingly.

Does Kevin Carey ignore the clear and large graduation rate benefits of the D.C. and Milwaukee voucher programs because he thinks it isn’t desirable for low-income minority children to graduate from high school?  If so, then human compassion and a wealth of research proves him wrong.  More likely, Carey ignores the compelling evidence that school vouchers help disadvantaged students go further in school because it is an inconvenient fact that undermines his argument.  He doesn’t want to admit that voucher programs are effective at promoting the most important student educational outcome there is, and he certainly doesn’t want to share that uncomfortable information with his readers.  Move along, nothing to see here.

After lauding school choice only through public charter schools, Carey states that, “…the market will still require strong oversight from public officials to grant the ‘approved’ status Friedman envisioned over a half-century ago–and the willingness to revoke that approval when performance is sub-par,” which is exactly how the Milwaukee voucher program is designed and operates.

Doesn’t Carey read anything?  A report released last year documented that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the government agency that oversees the Milwaukee voucher program, has kicked 35 schools out of the program since 2006.  The average student performance in those schools was dramatically lower than the achievement numbers for the schools allowed to remain in the program.  Voucher programs in the U.S. have exactly the kinds of government accountability mechanisms that Carey falsely claims are missing from them, plus market accountability to boot.

After Kevin Carey’s litany of factual errors, he grandly proclaims the path forward for people, like himself, who actually care about the children.  “We can start by purging the worst rhetoric from the school choice conversation.”  Well, Mr. Carey, before you criticize the splinter in your brother’s eye you might want to work on removing the log from your own.  Meanwhile, readers who want accurate information about school vouchers should, like the Titanic, steer clear of The Atlantic.

11 Comments | charter schools, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Ladner Begins Campaign for a Second Bunkum

January 28, 2012

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Valerie Strauss put up a post from Anthony Cody denouncing the new ALEC Report Card on American Education, coauthored by your humble blogger. As unhinged screeds that any fair-minded reformer is happy to bank in their trophy case go, this one is pretty funny, so go check it out. Cody writes:

Under NCLB, it was schools that were declared failures. In states being granted waivers from the most onerous requirements of NCLB, it is teachers who will be subjected to this ignominy. Of course we will still be required to label the bottom 5% of our schools as failures, but if the Department of Education has its way, soon every single teacher in the profession will be at risk for the label.

This revelation came to me as I read the 17th edition of the Score Card on Education prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), authored by Matthew Ladner and Dan Lips. This is a remarkable document. It explains where each state stands on the education “reform” initiatives that have become the hallmark of corporate philanthropies, the Obama administration and governors across the nation.

As revelations go, this one reads like a fever-dream. First there is a weak attempt to misconstrue a quote from Winston Churchill. For the record I graduated from public schools, my mother worked in a school district, and Dan and I both view the improvement of the public school system as vital to the success of the nation, which will be clear to any sensible person who reads the book.

Next there is a good bit of conspiracy theory babble concerning the American Legislative Exchange Council. This has become fashionable in Occupy Wall Street circles, but they seemed to have failed to notice that if ALEC really were a Shadow Conspiracy Illumanati-Trilateral Commission pulling the strings behind “like everything man!” why would they be publishing their agenda in public on a regular basis? When did conspiracies start operating out in the open? They’ll have to mull that over in the fever swamp and get back to us.

Finally, apparently everyone from Barack Obama on the left to Mitch Daniels on the right is a “corporate reformer” these days. I’m happy to place myself in that spectrum. In the previous edition of the report card, we put forward the position that the nation’s schools needed to view the process of adopting student test score gains thoughtfully and with the understanding that we have a lot to learn.

The fact that we have much to learn however does not mean that we should stick with the status-quo, which is utterly indefensible. The author however is obviously mourning the loss of the dark-ages practice of making no consideration of student learning gains at all. If so, he has much bigger problems than little ole me- perhaps he should be firing his diatribes at President Obama, who merely called for the end of unconditional tenure in the 2012 State of the Union address.

After wading through a fog of ideology, the author starts to level complaints about specific district policies. If these complaints have any merit, a very large if indeed, then Cody should take them up with the districts and states that formulated them.

These policies are not, after all, being secretly dictated from the ALEC Central Command Star Chamber but rather have been adopted by legislatures and school boards.  Reactionaries do not lack for representation in such forums. The NEA for instance enjoys a budget dozens of times larger than ALEC. If they were to actually match a sensible stance that could be squared with the best interest of students to go along with their political muscle, they would surely prevail.

Instead, we see them losing these debates, even in some deep blue states. Watching reactionaries cry in their beer about those losses while implicitly adopting a “we’ll start winning if we go completely unhinged” strategy is a satisfying, even delicious, bonus. I’m hoping that stuff like this will serve as a Golden Globe win as I campaign to receive another Bunkum from the NEPC ubber-reactionaries.

 

 

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

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