Rejoinder to Sol Stern

May 1, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

My rejoinder to Sol Stern’s erroneous claims about school choice is on Pajamas Media this morning. A sample:

And what about the claim that vouchers are a political loser? Stern writes that “voucher programs for poor children … have hit a wall.” (emphasis added) He observes that there haven’t been new “voucher programs for poor children” (emphasis added) since the Supreme Court gave its blessing to vouchers in 2002.

If you read Stern’s article without knowing the facts, you’d think there had been only one new voucher program since 2002 — he mentions only the DC program. What Stern doesn’t tell you is that there have been no other new voucher programs “for poor children” because vouchers are now so successful that the programs enacted since 2002 are no longer restricted to poor children. They’re broader in scope.

I go on to defend the claim I made last week here on Jay P. Greene’s Blog that “school choice is politically stronger than ever,” and run down the empirical research on the effects of choice.

Leave a Comment » | competitive effects, politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Anywhere But Here!

April 30, 2008

(Guest post by Matthew Ladner)

In the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, Captain John H. Miller (played by Tom Hanks) leads a group of American soldiers in storming the beach at Normandy. Pinned down behind inadequate cover and facing extremely heavy enemy fire, Miller orders his men to move out, prompting one of his soldiers to ask where they should go.

Miller bellows to his men: “ANYWHERE BUT HERE!”

Facing the task of reauthorizing No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Congress also faces an unsustainable status-quo. Although fashioned with the noblest intentions, NCLB created a perverse incentive for states to lower their academic standards — an incentive that will become increasingly powerful in coming years.

The law reflects contradictory urges regarding education policy. On the one hand, some want Congress to act to improve education, and on the other, some wish to preserve the tradition of state and local control of schools.

In NCLB, Congress attempted to finesse this contradiction, but failed to do so successfully. The law requires states to test almost all students, and to have an ever-increasing percentage of them reach proficiency in all tests by 2014. However, NCLB leaves the content and the passing thresholds of these tests to the states.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in game theory to see the problem with this, just a little common sense. As “proficiency” requirements have risen, states have begun to dummy down their tests to avoid federal sanctions.

Congress must now make an actual choice about which level of government should predominate in education policy — or the price will be very high.

Scholars have already noted the beginnings of a “race to the bottom,” as states lower passing thresholds and otherwise make the tests easier to pass.

Congress has set up a looming train-wreck in public schools. If allowed to play out, every child in America may “pass” state proficiency exams by signing their names to completely meaningless tests. American schools would return to the dark age in which no one has meaningful data concerning school outputs. Parents, teachers, administrators, policymakers and taxpayers will be flying blind on school reform. The racial achievement gap will be closed- but only as a complete fraud.

Congress can either become far more intrusive in the setting of state education policy, or let the states lead. Federal education policy must move in one direction or the other, but cannot remain stationary.

Senator Barry Goldwater opposed the first bill to provide federal funds to public schools, which was the antecedent of NCLB. Goldwater’s warning rings prophetic: “Federal aid to education invariably means federal control of education.”

Evidence regarding the effectiveness of federal aid to education has remained scant through the years. In 2004, Secretary of Education Rod Paige bluntly noted “We have spent $125 billion on Title I programs for disadvantaged students in the past 25 years, yet we have virtually nothing to show for it.”

Today, the total federal share of the K-12 education budget remains under 10 percent of the total K-12 budget, but serves as a vehicle for a huge number of federal mandates on schools. Fully 41 percent of the administrative costs for state education bureaucracies are spent on complying with federal mandates, the General Accounting Office estimates.

Despite this record, some see the race to the bottom as an opportunity to expand federal control over local schools. Some have begun to make the case for “national standards.” The logic is simple: states can’t lower standards that they don’t control.

We need to move precisely in the opposite direction. Above all else, first the federal government should do no harm in education policy. The mess of NCLB inspires no confidence in the ability of Congress to fashion standards, even if it were constitutionally appropriate, which it decidedly is not. With a good deal more modesty, the federal government might take on the role of maintaining transparency as a condition of federal funds, rather than undermining it.

The states have begun to function as labs of reform on education. States like Florida and Massachusetts have made a good deal of progress in recent years, far beyond anything which can be attributed to NCLB. Ironically enough, NCLB threatens this progress by all but ordering states to dummy down their tests- or else.

10 Comments | NCLB | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Washington Post Supporting School Vouchers

April 30, 2008

(Guest post by Dan Lips)

 

On Wednesday, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty testified on Capitol Hill about President Bush’s budget proposal for the D.C. education system. The Bush administration has called for a significant boost in funding for D.C. schools, including $18 million to continue the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program.  This program currently helps more than 1,900 disadvantaged children attend private schools, thanks to federally-funded school vouchers.

 

The Washington Post editorialized in favor of continuing the voucher program—

 

Political ideology and partisan gamesmanship should not be allowed to blow apart the educational hopes of hundreds of D.C. children. Congress must respect the judgment of District leaders in giving parents a choice in one of the most crucial aspects of their children’s lives…

 

… There are 1,900 children enrolled — quite happily — in the program. What’s at stake is not a political point of honor but the opportunity for children to go to schools that work for them.

 

Columnist William McGurn also referenced the D.C. voucher program in his column in the Wall Street Journalurging Senator McCain to champion school choice policies. McGurn quoted D.C. parent leader Virginia Walden Ford talking about the importance of the program.  “Many of the parents I know in D.C. are looking for a safe place for their children,” says Walden-Ford…”Their children can’t afford to wait – they need a place now.”

 

As Members of Congress debate whether to continue the D.C. voucher program, they should take a look at the emerging research from the School Choice Demonstration Project.   This research covers important topics from families’ (generally positive) experiences in the program to the initial evidence from the federally-mandated academic evaluation.  

Update

On a related matter, Jay and Marcus have two new op-eds today on special ed vouchers.  One in the Washington Times and the other in the New York Post.

Leave a Comment » | journalism, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by danlips

State Regulation of Private Schools: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

April 30, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

 

Today, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice releases a report that evaluates how each of the 50 states regulates private schools. While all states regulate things like health and safety, most states go further and impose unreasonable and unnecessary burdens on private schools. This creates barriers to entry, hindering competition and thereby reducing the quality of both public and private schools; it also limits the freedom of parents to choose how their children will be educated. Friedman Foundation Senior Fellow Christopher Hammons graded each state based on how good a job it does of regulating private schools. Scroll down to see the grades.  

 

Accompanying the report, we have compiled lists of all the laws and regulations governing private schools in each of the 50 states. The lists are now available on our website.  

 

Our goal is to educate the public on two fronts. First, we often hear private schools described as “unregulated” by forces hostile to school choice. Private schools are in fact regulated and are accountable to the public for following a large body of laws and regulations. Second, there is wide variation from state to state in the quality of private school regulation. We hope to make the public aware of these disparities so that states with poor regulatory systems will themselves be accountable to the public.  

 

To help ensure the accuracy of our list of private school laws and regulations in each state, we contacted each of the 50 state departments of education, asking them to review our lists and let us know if we had anything missing or incorrect. Each state has an extremely large body of laws and regulations, so any effort to locate all the laws and regulations on a particular topic is very difficult, and we wanted to do everything possible to make sure we didn’t miss anything. As you will see below, some states were more helpful than others.

The Good

The Good #1: About one third of the states (18 ) earned a grade in the A or B range. Florida and New Jersey were tied for having the nation’s best regulatory systems for private schools, followed closely by Connecticut and Delaware.  

 

The Good #2: I will admit that I expected most of our e-mails to the state departments of education would be ignored. As it turned out, most of the states – 29 of them – not only got back to us but went over our lists and either said they were OK as is or offered corrections. In fact, publication of the report was delayed so that we would have time to process all the constructive input we were getting from state departments of education. So let me pour myself a big, delicious bowl of crow and apologize to the departments of education in Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. I’m sorry I doubted you, and we greatly appreciate your help.  

 

In addition, Arkansas and Arizona deserve recognition for getting back to us and letting us know that they were unable to help us with our request.

The Bad 

The Bad #1: Almost half the states (22) receive D or F grades for the unnecessary burdens imposed on private schools by their laws and regulations. North Dakota ranked the worst in the nation by a large margin, followed by South Dakota, Alabama, Maryland, New York and Tennessee.  

 

The Bad #2: The departments of education in 17 states did not respond to our attempts to contact them. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri Mississippi, [oops – apologies to the DOE of Missouri and the schoolchildren of Mississippi] Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah, please check whether you still have a department of education.  

 

Mysteriously, Alaska responded to our initial inquiry, but then didn’t respond to our follow-up communications. 

The Ugly 

Alabama’s department of education deserves special recognition for its efforts to help us. Our request was considered so important that it was ultimately handled by no less than the department’s general counsel.  

 

The department’s first response was to ask where we had gotten our list of Alabama’s private school laws and regulations, and how we were planning to publish it.  

 

I did not ask why they wanted to know, or whom they were planning to pass the information on to once I told them. Instead, I replied that we had compiled our list from the state’s publicly available laws and regulations, and that we were going to post the list on our website and publish a report looking at the laws and regulations in all 50 states.  

 

Their response to that was: “After continued review by appropriate persons and because of the depth of information that you have forwarded to us, it has been determined that this request needs to be reviewed by our SDE Legal Department.” They also asked for more time, which we were happy to give them, as we did for every department that asked for it.  

 

The next and final communication we received was this, which I reprint in its entirety:

I am the General Counsel for the State Department of Education. I have been asked by the Deputy Superintendent of Education, Dr. Eddie Johnson, to review and respond to your request. There are numerous errors contained in the four page document titled ALABAMA. I submit that a further review of our laws and regulations might be helpful. You can access our statutes at www.legislature.state.al.us. The Administrative Code for the Alabama Department of Education can be found at our website, www.alsde.edu/html/home.asp. Thank you for your interest in Alabama.

 

The message was signed “Larry Craven.” Really.  

 

I offer no speculation as to why Mr. Craven would tell us that our document contained numerous errors, but decline to specify any of them.  

 

If at any time he or any other party will be so kind as to specify anything in our list of laws and regulations for Alabama or any other state that’s wrong or missing, we will gladly make any necessary corrections. In a project of this size, combing through countless thousands of laws and regulations to find the ones relevant to private schools, there would be no shame in having missed some. We make a point of saying so both in the report itself and in a disclaimer that appears on each of the 50 state lists we compiled and put on our website.  

 

That said, this also should be said: we wouldn’t have to comb through countless thousands of laws and regulations, a process inherently subject to this kind of difficulty, if the 50 state departments of education provided this information to the public in an easily accessible format. (Some do, but most don’t.) Our only goal here is to get public-domain information actually delivered to the public. We wish we could say that goal was shared by everyone in charge of running the nation’s education system. 

Grades for State Laws and Regulations Governing Private Schools

Alabama F
Alaska B
Arizona A-
Arkansas A-
California B
Colorado B
Connecticut A
Delaware A
Florida A
Georgia A-
Hawaii C+
Idaho C+
Illinois C+
Indiana D-
Iowa D
Kansas F
Kentucky B
Louisiana D
Maine D+
Maryland F
Massachusetts C-
Michigan C-
Minnesota B+
Mississippi F
Missouri A-
Montana F
Nebraska F
Nevada F
New Hampshire C+
New Jersey A
New Mexico C+
New York F
North Carolina D
North Dakota F
Ohio C-
Oklahoma B
Oregon C+
Pennsylvania D
Rhode Island D
South Carolina F
South Dakota F
Tennessee F
Texas B-
Utah A-
Vermont D
Virginia B
Washington F
West Virginia C-
Wisconsin A-
Wyoming F

 Edited for typos

21 Comments | politics, research reports | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

It’s Only a Flesh Wound

April 29, 2008

(Guest post by Ryan Marsh)

Many reform strategies are predicated on the belief that teachers have the largest impact on student achievement and that we can measures the teacher’s contribution with reasonable accuracy. Policies, such as performance pay or other efforts to recruit and retain effective teachers require reasonably accurate identification of which teachers are the most effective and which are the least at adding to their students’  achievement.

Value-added models, or VAMs, are the statistical models commonly used for this purpose. VAMs attempt to estimate teacher effectiveness by controlling for prior achievement and other student characteristics.

Two recent working papers have started a very important debate about the use of VAMs, a debate which will greatly influence future education policy and research. Economist Jesse Rothstein has a working paper in which he performed a critical analysis of these VAMs and their ability to estimate teacher effectiveness. His analysis focuses on the question of whether students are randomly assigned to teachers.  If they are not, then the results of a VAMs should not necessarily be interpreted as causal estimates of teacher effectiveness.  That is, if some teachers are non-randomly assigned students who will learn at a faster rate than others, then our estimates of who is an effective teacher could be biased.

Without getting too technical, Rothstein checks to see if a future teacher can predict past or present scores. If the teacher can predict growth in achievement for students before he or she becomes their teacher, then we have evidence of non-random assignment of students to teachers.  After all, teachers could not have caused things that happened in the past. 

But even if we have bias in VAMs from non-random assignment of students to teachers, the question is how seriously distorted are our assessments of who is an effective teacher.  Many measures have biases and imperfections, but we still rely on them because the distortions are relatively minor.  Rothstein recognizes this when he suggests on p. 32 a way of assessing the magnitude of the bias:

“An obvious first step is to compare non-experimental estimates of individual teachers’ effects in random assignment experiments with those based on pre- or post- experimental data (as in Cantrell, Fullerton, et. al 2007).”

The working paper he cites—by Steven Cantrell, Jon Fullerton, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger—uses data from an experimental analysis of National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) certification. In the paper, the authors use a random assignment process where NBPTS applicant teachers are paired with non-applicant comparison teachers in their school and principals set up two classrooms which they would be willing to assign to the NBPTS teacher. Classes are randomly chosen for each teacher and compared with the class not chosen. The paper also uses VAMs to assess teacher effectiveness before the experiment was run. The prior effectiveness was used to predict how well a teacher’s students during the experiment performed above students in the comparison classrooms. This allows the researchers to test how well the VAM estimates compare with a random assignment experiment.

That is, teacher effectiveness was measured using VAMs before students were randomly assigned to teachers and then teacher effectiveness was measured after students were randomly assigned, when no bias would be present.  The two correlate well, suggesting little distortion from the non-random assignment.  As the authors conclude, the VAM estimates have “considerable predictive power in predicting student achievement during the experiment.”

In short, Rothstein raises a potentially lethal concern for policies based on value-added models, but another paper by Cantrell, et al suggests that the concerns may be little more than a flesh wound.

1 Comment | methodology, research reports | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

New Special Ed Voucher Study

April 29, 2008

Marcus Winters and I have a new study out today on the effects of special education vouchers in Florida on the academic achievement of disabled students who remain in public schools.  As we write in an op-ed in this morning’s Washington Times: “we found that those students with relatively mild disabilities —the vast majority of special-education students in the state and across the nation — made larger academic gains when the number of private options nearby increased. Students with more severe disabilities were neither helped not harmed by the addition of McKay scholarship-receiving private schools near their public school.” The findings are based on an analysis of individual student data using a fixed effects model.

The results of this analysis of Florida’s special education voucher program have important implications for the four other states (Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Utah) that have similar programs.  It also suggests ways that federal legislation governing special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), could be reformed.  We have two more op-eds coming out this week in the The Wash Times that will explore these issues.

Lastly, this new study speaks to the general question of whether expanded choice and competition improve achievement in public schools.  Like the bulk of previous research, including Belfield and Levin, Chakrabarti,  Greene and Forster, Hoxby, Rouse, et al , and West and Peterson (as a partial list), the new study finds that student achievement in public schools improves as vouchers expand the set of private options.

UPDATE

There is also an editorial endorsing continuation of the voucher program in DC in the Washington Post and another embracing vouchers in the Wall Street Journal. 

Leave a Comment » | competitive effects, research reports, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

“Residential School Choice” and the Mortgage Crisis

April 28, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

What do you guys think of this op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post linking the mortgage crisis to parents’ desire to buy homes that will get their children into better schools? I don’t know enough about the mortgage crisis to really know, but Mike Antonnuci suggests the link is overblown (see item #2 here) and I’m inclined to think that’s likely.

Still, have you noticed that in just the past few years, schools are figuring much more prominently in residential real estate marketing? MLS listings now prominetnly display not only which school district a home is located in, but the indivdiual schools it’s assigned to. Real estate advertisements and flyers are prominently listing this information as well.

Of course, I’m just speaking from my own individual observations, which as you know is a highly scientific representative sample. 🙂

Larry, you’re the financial guy around here. Any thoughts?

2 Comments | residential school choice | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Dr. Winters, I Presume

April 28, 2008

Marcus A. Winters, the first graduate student supported by the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, has completed the requirements to receive a doctorate in economics. 

His dissertation consists of three pieces, as is standard in economics.  One of those pieces is on the effects of test-based grade retention (limiting social promotion) on subsequent student achievement in Florida.  A version of that research has been published in the journal Education Finance and Policy. 

Next time you see Dr. Winters, be sure to congratulate him.  You’ll probably find him on the streets of New York, as he is currently a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Speaking of which, Marcus — I mean — Dr. Winters and I will be releasing tomorrow a new study on the effects of special education vouchers in Florida on the academic achievement of disabled students who remain in public schools.  You can tune in here tomorrow to find the study and other commentary.

Leave a Comment » | competitive effects, social promotion, special ed, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Get Lost

April 26, 2008

Eduwonk may have his Friday Fish Porn for end of week entertainment.  This blog has “Get Lost” — an end of week comment on the latest developments in the TV show Lost.

If you haven’t been following the show, just forget about it.  There are too many details to catch up on unless you are willing to sit there and watch past episodes online or scan Lostpedia.

For the rest of you fellow nerds… The main questions raised in the most recent episode, “The Shape of Things to Come,” are 1) What are the Rules and how did the murder of Alex represent a change in those rules? 2) Why can’t Ben kill Widmore? and 3) Why did the Morse code communication from the freighter say the doctor was fine when he was found dead?

Here are my best guesses.  The Rules could either be an informal understanding, like that they won’t go after each other and family members, or a more formal restraint, like Michael being unable to die because he still has work to do.  I’m inclined to believe that it is an informal understanding, not a hard constraint.  The competition between Widmore and Ben is long-standing and they may have developed understandings of the boundaries of that competition.  If it were a hard constraint, it is not clear how it would be possible to break it.

Second, Ben probably can’t kill Widmore (or vice-versa) because they are each other’s constant.  Killing the other would destroy oneself. 

Third, the mystery of why the freighter reports that the doctor is fine is probably not a time travel issue, since the only time travel we’ve seen with the freighter is of one’s consciousness, not body.  My guess is that it is Sayid controlling the radio and who is falsely saying that the doctor is fine.  We know that he is the only one who was able to get the radio on the freighter working again.  He may have been lying to cover that he attacked the doctor.

Tune in next week.

8 Comments | Lost | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

School Violence Declining

April 25, 2008

At least according to a post by Eduwonkette it is.  Citing data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey on trends over the last 15 years in Chicago, she reports that carrying a weapon in school has declined, engaging in fights has declined, and feeling unsafe at school has declined.  She concludes: “the long-term trends are generally positive, but the overall levels of violence are astoundingly high.”  This helps put the bullying issue in some perspective.

And Eduwonkette may need some more tutoring with Photoshop.  My head is tiny relative to the body she pasted me on.  But I look kind of like David Byrne in his big suit (if his big suit was a blue vest).  Pretty cool.

2 Comments | bullying | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »