More DC Voucher Buzz

April 7, 2009

Patrick McIlheran at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asks, “And what happens to results showing school choice works?”  His answer: “Well, if it’s in the hands of a federal government hostile to the idea, it gets covered up… The students were tested in the spring, the results analyzed in the summer and the preliminary findings given to the team working with the Department of Education in November. Why, then, didn’t the department chime in when Congress was ending choice?”

Joanne Jacobs asks: “What did Education Secretary Arne Duncan know about the study’s findings and when did he know it? Duncan had to know during the voucher reauthorization debate that D.C.’s program is advancing students by nearly half a year, editorializes the Wall Street Journal. Why didn’t he speak up?”

Michelle Malkin writes: “It would have been helpful to know about a Department of Education study on D.C.’s school choice initiative before the Democrats — beholden to teachers unions allergic to competition — voted to starve the innovative program benefiting poor, minority children in the worst school district in the nation.  Somehow, the results of the study conducted last spring didn’t surface until now.”

As Matt has already noted, Whitney Tilson of Democrats for Education Reform has chimed in warning that charter supporters shouldn’t think they are safe if vouchers get squeezed.  As he put it: “First they came for the vouchers. I remained silent because I was not for vouchers….”

I’ve already noted, Neal McCluskey has an excellent post on the impotence of “tough talk” on education from the Obama administration when they won’t act to defend choice.

Lisa Snell argues: “Kids in the D.C. Opportunity scholarship program deserve the same chance to go to a higher quality school as President Obama’s own children. The taxpayers of the United States deserve at least one education program that actually gets results in exchange for the money.”

And this photo on “From the Pen” says it all.

“Democrats Block School Choice… Again”

Republicans made us do it! Honest!

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Credibility of the Obama Administration Is on the Line

April 7, 2009

The gap between the Obama administration’s rhetoric and action on education policy is growing larger each day.  I’ve written previously that Obama and Duncan talk a lot about charter schools, merit pay, and getting rid of bad teachers, but those rhetorical priorities are almost completely absent as legislative priorities. 

And, as Matt has pointed out in NRO this week, Obama declared that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.”  Again, those lofty words do not match their actions.  When the DC voucher program produced positive results, they failed to release them in time to inform the congressional debate over killing the program, they buried the release on a Friday afternoon, and they attempted to spin the results as somehow disappointing.  Their actions were not guided by their rhetoric about ignoring ideology and doing what works.

Neal McCluskey captured the remarkable impotence of Obama’s “tough talk” on education:

So the Obama Administration is hostile to school choice. What, then, is its plan for reform? Here’s what Secretary Duncan recently told the Washington Post after dismissing DC’s voucher program:

The way you help them [all kids] is by challenging the status quo where it’s not working and coming back with dramatically better schools and doing it systemically.

Oh, challenge the status quo and deliver “dramatically better schools”! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” I mean, that’s powerful stuff, along the lines of how do you get to Mars? You fly there! Obviously, the important thing is howyou challenge the status quo and provide better schools, and for decades we’ve been trying sound-bite-driven reform like Duncan offered the Post, and exhibited in his recent declaration that he will “come down like a ton of bricks” on any state that doesn’t use waste-rewarding “stimulus” money effectively. And how will we know when a use is ineffective? Why, we’ll make states report on test scores, teacher quality, and other things, and then threaten to withhold money if outcomes don’t get better. Of course, we know how well that’s worked before. Simply put, tough talk from politicians has delivered pretty much nothing good for kids or taxpayers.

Many of of the rhetorical points made by Obama and Duncan have been great.  But now it’s time to prove that those words can be matched by action.  The credibility of the Obama administration is on the line.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

DC Voucher Buzz

April 6, 2009

Here’s a summary (with my comments) of what people are saying about the new DC voucher study as well as the manipulation of its release:

Wall Street Journal — There is a great editorial this morning.  It condemns Duncan and the U.S. Dept. of Ed. for failing to release the positive voucher results in time for the congressional debate on killing the DC program last month: “Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.”

The piece also condemns the hypocrsiy of the Obama administration declaring that they will make education policy based on evidence, not ideology, while hiding and spinning the positive DC results: “Opponents of school choice for poor children have long claimed they’d support vouchers if there was evidence that they work. While running for President last year, Mr. Obama told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that if he saw more proof that they were successful, he would “not allow my predisposition to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn . . . You do what works for the kids.” Except, apparently, when what works is opposed by unions.”

And the WSJ has a quote from yours truly about how the DC results are consistent with evaluations of other voucher programs, where students initially suffer from transition difficulties but benefits compound over time.

National Review Online — Our very own Matt Ladner has a piece this morning in NRO that contains many of the same themes as in the WSJ piece described above.  In addition, Matt emphasizes his Rawlsian argument about the justice of vouchers: “If you have any doubt as to whether this program should exist, ask yourself a simple question: Would you enroll your children in violence-ridden D.C. public schools with decades-long records of academic failure? Bill and Hillary Clinton didn’t. Barack and Michelle Obama didn’t. Members of Congress don’t.  What about you? Would you enroll your children in those schools?”  And Matt notes that vouchers in DC produced superior results for a fraction of what is spent on students in DC public schools.

Washington Post — The Post objected to Secretary of Ed Arne Duncan’s rush to shut down the DC voucher program in the face of positive results.  “We had hoped that Mr. Duncan, who prides himself in being a pragmatist interested in programs that work, would have a more open mind…. So it’s perplexing that Mr. Duncan, without any further discussion or analysis, would be so quick to kill a program that is supported by local officials and that has proven popular with parents. Unless, of course, politics enters the calculation in the form of Democratic allies in Congress who have been shameless in their efforts to kill vouchers.”

Cato— Andrew Coulson emphasized the positive results results at a fraction of the DC public school spending per pupil. 

Eduwonk— Andy maintains his beltway credentials by dismissing the importance of evidence in deciding the fate of vouchers.  So, is Andy saying that Obama lied when he declared that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works”?  Maybe I’m naive enough to believe that evidence makes a difference in public policy.  If it doesn’t at all, then let’s shut down the universities and think tanks and leave public policy to the brute force politics of organized interest groups, since that is apparently all that matters.

Andy does correctly identify how determined voucher opponents are to crush the DC program and suppress the evidence ir produces (by releasing it on a Friday afternoon and not having the study available in time for the congressional debate):  “For voucher opponents the program is like that scene in “Saving Private Ryan” where the Germans keep shooting the runner to make sure the message dies with him.  As long as the voucher program lives it carries a message, they must stop that.”

Flypaper has a few posts on the topic.  Mike Petrilli has some excellent comments: “Releasing bad news on a Friday afternoon is a time-honored tradition among governments of all political leanings. (The public is distracted by weekend plans; few people read the Saturday paper.) The Obama Administration is showing itself to be no different; it’s no coincidence that the latest (very positive) findings about the D.C. “Opportunity Scholarship Program” were released this afternoon. It creates a conundrum for Team Obama and its allies on Capitol Hill, all of whom want to kill the program (some sooner than later)… Keep in mind that, as Education Week just reported, almost every “gold-standard” study in education finds “null” results. So the fact that researchers could detect such dramatic impacts for reading is a very big deal. (And it’s not too surprising that the same can’t be said about math.)”  And he concludes: “President Obama has saidthat he will support vouchers if they are proven to work. Now’s his opportunity to show his commitment to pragmatism and post-partisanship, and go to the mat for this unusually effective experiment.”

Andy Smarick correctly notes that the Obama administration has failed in their attempt to bury the study results despite their best efforts of releasing them on a Friday afternoon.  He also comments on how odd it is that people are focusing all of this energy to kill a voucher program that costs a tiny fraction of what has been newly committed to education spending by the Obamites. 

But Andy also had an unpersuasive post suggesting that we should focus on shutting down the bad schools that can be found in both the public and private sectors rather than on allowing people to switch between sectors.  What’s strange about this argument is that it doesn’t describe the mechanism by which one identifies and replaces bad schools with better ones.  Isn’t that what choice does?  Saying that we should just get rid of the bad schools doesn’t explain how they get to be bad and how new ones are likely to be better.

There’s more out there, and more will come, but this is some of the buzz so far.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Professional Judgment Un-Dead

March 25, 2009

It’s time we drive a stake through the heart of “professional judgment” methodologies in education.  Unfortunately, the method has come back from the grave in the most recent Fordham report on regulating vouchers in which an expert panel was asked about the best regulatory framework for voucher programs.

The methodology was previously known for its use in school funding adequacy lawsuits.  In those cases a group of educators and experts was gathered to determine the amount of spending that is required to produce an adequate education.  Not surprisingly, their professional judgment was always that we need to spend billions and billions (use Carl Sagan voice) more than we spend now.  In the most famous use of the professional judgment method, an expert panel convinced the state courts to order the addition of $15 billion to the New York City school system — that’s an extra $15,000 per student.

And advocates for school construction have relied on professional judgment methodologies to argue that we need $127 billion in additional spending to get school facilities in adequate shape.  And who could forget the JPGB professional judgment study that determined that this blog needs a spaceship, pony, martinis, cigars, and junkets to Vegas to do an adequate job?

Of course, the main problem with the professional judgment method is that it more closely resembles a political rather than a scientific process.  Asking involved parties to recommend solutions may inspire haggling, coalition-building, and grandstanding, but it doesn’t produce truth.  If we really wanted to know the best regulatory framework, shouldn’t we empirically examine the relationship between regulation and outcomes that we desire? 

Rather than engage in the hard work of collecting or examining empirical evidence, it seems to be popular among beltway organizations to gather panels of experts and ask them what they think.  Even worse, the answers depend heavily on which experts are asked and what the questions are. 

For example, do high stakes pressure schools to sacrifice the learning of certain academic subjects to improve results in others with high stakes attached?  The Center for Education Policy employed a variant of the professional judgment method by surveying school district officials to ask them if this was happening.  They found that 62% of districts reported an increase in high-stakes subjects and 44% reported a decrease in other subjects, so CEP concluded that high-stakes was narrowing the curriculum.  But the GAO surveyed teachers and found that 90% reported that there had not been a change in time spent on the low stakes subject of art.  About 4% reported an increase in focus on art and 7% reported a decrease.  So the GAO, also employing the professional judgment method, gets a very different answer than CEP.  Obviously, which experts you ask and what you ask them make an enormous difference.

Besides, if we really wanted to know about whether high stakes narrow the curriculum, shouldn’t we try to measure the outcome directly rather than ask people what they think?  Marcus Winters and I did this by studying whether high stakes in Florida negatively impinged on achievement in the low-stakes subject of science.  We found no negative effect on science achievement from raising the stakes on math and reading.  Schools that were under pressure to improve math and reading results also improved their science results.

Even if you aren’t convinced by our study, it is clear that this is a better way to get at policy questions than by using the professional judgment method.  Stop organizing committees of selected “experts” and start analyzing actual outcomes.

5 Comments | methodology, school accountability, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Obama Hearts Wall Street Fat Cats, TLF

March 24, 2009

We had spring break last week, so I’ve been a bit absent from the blog.  No fears, we’ll make up for it. 

I know much ink has already been spilled on the AIG bonuses, but let me add just one thought.  AIG had contracts with executives to pay them bonuses even though many of those executives made catastrophically bad decisions.  AIG also had derivative contracts with other financial companies, including Goldman Sachs, even though those companies never fully considered the risk that AIG would be unable to pay.  Of course, if AIG went bankrupt, then all of its contracts would be nullified and everyone would have to get in line to see if they would be paid anything.  But we didn’t want AIG to break its contracts with Goldman, et al for fear that it would spread a panic, so the public assumed AIG’s obligations and guaranteed Goldman, et al every penny. 

Why should Congress be any more outraged over AIG keeping its contracts with its own executives to pay bonuses than keeping its contracts with Goldman et al to pay for bad mortgage bets?  The bonuses only cost us $163 million while the Goldman et al contracts cost us tens of billions.  And the Goldman et al executives were as guilty of gross miscalculation in failing to properly consider counter-party risk as the AIG executives were guilty of writing bad derivative contracts.

As much as I hate to say it, I have to agree with Paul Krugman that the Obamaadministration appears to love Wall Street fat cats.  They love those fat cats at least as much as the Bush Administration. 

Let’s take a look at the new Geithner plan to count the ways.  The plan creates as many as 5 entities in which the Treasury and private investors put in an equal amount of capital, totalling about $150-$200 billion.  Those entities can then borrow as much as 6 times that amount, or a total of  about $1 trillion, from the FDIC (another branch of the government).  Those would be non-recourse loans, meaning that private investors would have no more than $75 to $100 billion on the line and could not lose more.  Meanwhile they get to buy $1 trillion of assets with highly subsidized loans and almost no down-side.    No wonder the stock market loved this.  It’s a great big smooch from the Obama administration.

One of the supposed benefits of this plan is that it will create a “market price” for the currently illiquid “toxic assets.”  But of course the price that this will establish will be a phony one from a market with five selected bidders playing with the government’s money at highly subsidized rates.  This mechanism sets market prices about as well as handing my kids ten bucks and letting them loose at a flea market. 

And if this whole deal is fair, how about if they let me and other individual investors buy shares in these 5 joint ventures.  I’d like to own a piece of a game where I gamble with the government’s money and can experience 1/12 of the losses.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Get Lost — The Pause that Refreshes

March 21, 2009

In the most recent episode, Namaste, Jack comes to Sawyer to figure out what they are supposed to do next.  Sawyer, who is reading a book, says that he is going to think.  The problem, he says, with Jack’s previous leadership was that he was always reacting and not really thinking about what to do.  Sawyer was going to read his book and think.

It almost felt as if this was a discussion among the writers.  One asks, “What are we supposed to do with the plot now?”  The other replies, “I have no idea how to unravel this mess.  The writers have just been reacting, making stuff up as they go.  But I’m going to have a pause in the plot so we can think about where to go with it next.”

So, not too much happened in this episode but perhaps the writers are pausing to figure out how to make sense of everything.  Don’t get me wrong.  I still really enjoy Lost.  The characters are well-written and engaging.  The drama within each episode is exciting.  And the overall mystery cries out for resolution.  I just hope that the writers take some time to read a good book and think about where to go next.

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Charter/Voucher Extended Dance Remix

March 16, 2009

My post last week on why supporters of charter schools don’t also support vouchers generated a large amount of discussion.  Here are some tidbits on the same topic:

First, Doug Tuthill, the former teacher union leader and now head of Florida’s choice advocacy group, Step Up For Students, emailed me to say:

In Florida we have adopted the same approach to charters and vouchers you advocated in your recent exchange with Andy Rotherham.  Given the idealized status of “public education” in our culture, getting into a public versus private school debate is a losing proposition.  Therefore we argue that  publicly-funded private schools are part of our public education system and the real issue is how best to regulate all publicly-funded education.   Our approach is aided by the reality that public education in Florida is expanding to incorporate a variety of publicly-funded private providers.  Many of the state’s best secondary magnet programs are run by private providers (my favorites are two aeronautic magnet programs run by Embry-Riddle University in Okaloosa County), the K-5 portion of our state online school, the Florida Virtual School, is run by a private provider, the overwhelming majority of our charter schools are run by private providers, and of course all the schools providing services through the McKay and Corporate Tax Credit Scholarships are private providers.  To arbitrarily label some of these public-private partnerships as “voucher” programs and therefore suggest they are bad is nonsensical.  The goodness or badness of any publicly-funded education program should be determined by its effectiveness and efficiency, not by how it is labeled.

 

Andy and President Obama, among others, are caught in the old “public-versus-private-school” paradigm, which is why they support “charters” but not “vouchers.”    But as you pointed out in your exchange with Andy, this is an illogical distinction unless one is stuck in the “public is good, private is bad” mindset and possesses a myopic view of what constitutes public and private. 

 

And here is an interesting item about how Orthodox Jewish groups have come out against secular charter schools as a substitute for a Jewish education.  The Ben Gamla Hebrew Charter School in Florida focuses on Hebrew language and Jewish history but has no religious instruction.  And it is drawing students away from Jewish private schools in part because the charter is free to students while the private schools have to charge tuition.  The huge expansion in charter schools may be posing an even greater competitive threat to established private schools than to traditional public schools.

 

Leaders of the Orthodox movement recognize this threat to their efforts to focus on religious instruction.  A spokesman for the Orthodox group Agudath Israel of America, Rabbi Avi Shafran, commented: “We are not pro-charter schools. They are not replacements for a yeshiva education, and anyone who can imagine they could be are fooling themselves… There is no end around the fact that Jewish education is a Jewish education and that can only happen in a Jewish institution with a Jewish curriculum. And because our nation does not permit religious instruction in public schools, there is no way to avoid the need that Jewish parents have for yeshivas.” 

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Pay No Attention To My Legislative Agenda

March 11, 2009

President Obama gave a great speech yesterday in which he strongly endorsed charter schools and merit pay.  He also emphasized the need to remove ineffective teachers from classrooms and to expand access to pre-school.

The problem is that these words bear almost no resemblance to the education priorities contained in Obama’s legislative agenda.  This is really strange.  I’m accustomed to presidents exaggerating the attractiveness of their proposed policies.  But Obama is the first president that I can think of who pushes the attractiveness of policies that he is hardly pursuing in legislation while concealing the bulk of his actual efforts.

I’ve previously written about how the bulk of Obama’s increased education spending goes to status quo programs, such as Title I, special ed, Pell Grants, school construction, and generally holding localities harmless against losses in tax revenue.  Almost no money has been devoted to charter schools, merit pay, efforts to remove ineffective teachers, and even pre-school (which received only $4 billion of the $800 billion stimulus package, and most of that was for propping up status quo Head Start programs).  All of the great (and not so great) education policies that Obama talks about are almost completely absent in legislation that he has backed.  And he hardly says a peep about all of the education policies that he does throw money at. 

Obama just distracts us from his actual efforts with pretty words about things that he is hardly doing.  Of course, the most obvious thing he was distracting us from with his speech yesterday was the Senate vote to begin the execution of the DC voucher program.  He didn’t say a word about yesterday’s actions, knowing that all of the headlines would be about the reforms he did endorse (but has done almost nothing to actually enact).

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

But I Won’t Do That

March 10, 2009

There’s an awful Meatloaf song where he declares that he would do anything for love… but he won’t do that.  It’s isn’t entirely clear what Mr. Loaf (as the New York Times calls him) won’t do for love.  But it is clear that there is something he will not do even though he has just declared that he would do anything. 

This incoherent, cheesy awfulness reminds me of the argument that we should support charters but oppose vouchers.  I’m sure that’s what you were thinking as well.  It’s like they would do anything for choice… but they won’t do that.

If one supports the view that expanding choice and competition help students who choose and either helps or does no harm to traditional public schools, why limit that support to charter schools?  I know people say that at least charters are still public schools, but why exactly does that matter?  There is no magic pixie dust in the word “public” that makes things good or serve the public interest.  If we add the word “public” to vouchers so that we now call them “public vouchers” does that make them acceptable to pro-charter/anti-voucher folks?

I know that some suggest the important part of charters being “public” is that they can be regulated so as to assure public goals.  But whatever regulations are really necessary for public goals can be attached as a condition to vouchers as easily as to charters.  If we think teachers need to have certain credentials or students have to take certain tests, that can be (and has been) required of voucher-receiving private schools.  It’s not clear what about the publicness of charter schools, or even traditional public schools, make them better suited to serving the public good or being regulated for that purpose.

I suspect that some of the real rationale behind supporting charters but opposing vouchers is an unstated uneasiness with vouchers supporting students in religious schools.  But the U.S. Supreme Court has settled this issue as a matter of constitutional law.  And if the objection is one of desirable public policy, why is there near universal support for vouchers (Pell Grants) to attend BYU or Baylor but not St. Thomas Aquinas High School? 

This leads me to suspect that the real REAL reason for folks supporting charters but opposing vouchers is the political desire to appear moderate regardless of how incoherent and irrational it is.  Today President Obama is going to tout his support for charter schools.  And he’s going to tout his support for Pell Grants.  But he will not support vouchers.  Holding all of these positions make no logical sense, but they are thought to have some political appeal. 

I guess I understand why politicians take these incoherent positions, but why do people in academia, think tanks, and the blogoshpere do this?  Unlike politicians we don’t have to lie or make false distinctions for a living.  So I challenge anyone to explain exactly why, other than for the political advantage of triangulation, people should support charters but oppose vouchers.

My bet is that any argument will resemble the “look at the silly monkey” argument.  It’s even more powerful than the Chewbacca defense because it makes your head explode.

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

Andy’s Just Plain Wrong

March 5, 2009

Andy Rotherham is a great guy.  And he’s often right.  But I’m afraid that on vouchers he’s just plain wrong.

Andy responded to my post, which was a response to an earlier post he wrote on vouchers.  Let me just run through his arguments:

First, Andy wants to argue that vouchers have stalled politically.  I pointed out that there are now 24 voucher or tax-credit programs in 15 states serving more than 100,000 students.  And two new programs were adopted last year and a third significantly expanded. 

No fair, Andy cries, including tax-credit programs “creates a false sense of scale for intentional choice plans.”  What’s false about counting tax credit programs, like the one in Florida which functions as the largest voucher program in the country?  The program gives vouchers — excuse me — “scholarships” to students from organizations that are funded with dollar for dollar tax credit donations from corporations.  This is virtually identical in financing and effect as the state simply giving vouchers to students.  The only difference is that the tax credit is treated better by the courts (don’t ask why) because the money never enters the state treasury before going right back out the door as a voucher.

But let’s say we grant Andy his odd position that tax-credit programs don’t count.  We still have 13 voucher programs in 10 states serving about 50,000 students.  And the two new programs adopted last year were both voucher programs.  Wish as he might, Andy still can’t show that vouchers have stalled politically.

Second, Andy rightly says, “Reasonable people can review the cumulative literature about choice plans and disagree on how substantively significant or transformative these effects are (or could be at scale) and what that means for vouchers as a policy. ”  While reasonable folks could disagree about the magnitude of the effect of expanded school choice on public school performance, no reasonable person could disagree with the observation that the research literature supports at least some positive impact.  Given how hard it is to find any policy intervention that raises student achievement, consistently finding a positive impact from the systemic effect of vouchers should be treated as a big deal.  It isn’t to Andy. 

Third, Andy concedes that the more frightening prospect of vouchers helped spread charters, at least in the early stages of the charter movement.  But now that charters have reached critical mass, they may well do just fine without the viable threat of new and expanded voucher programs.  Folks who are really sincere about charters shouldn’t get so comfortable.  Just look at the unionization of the KIPP charter in NY or the constant effort to regulate charters to death in many states.  Dropping vouchers from your arsenal would be like confronting a resurgent Russia after dismantling all of your nuclear weapons.  You may think your conventional forces are up to the task, but ask the Poles how they would feel about it.

I’ve never understood why people would support charters but oppose vouchers.  The theory that expanded choice is good for the participating student and helps spur improvement in traditional public schools is required for both reforms.  Yes, charters are more easily subject to regulation than private schools receiving vouchers, but healthy charter programs require light regulation and states have not been shy about applying similar light regulation to voucher programs. 

The only reason I can imagine that folks would support charters but oppose vouchers is for political gain since the theory and evidence for both are essentially the same.  And I understand why politicians invent these false distinctions to prove their moderation and good sense by opposing the one they artificially dub as radical.  But we aren’t politicians.  We don’t have to lie or invent false distinctions to please constituencies.  Universities, think tanks, and the blogosphere should be refuges for reasoned inquiry and dispute, not rhetoric for political advantage.  As it says on the great seal — Veritas.

UPDATE — Andy’s a nice guy.  I tried to make my post as hyperbolic as possible and he responds kindly and reasonably.  Damn, he’s good.

UPDATE TO UPDATE — Just to be clear, I still think Andy is just plain wrong.  The fig leaf that Andy uses to be pro-charter while anti-voucher is the concern that vouchers sever “the connection between avenues of democratic input into schooling decisions and those decisions.   In other words, for some people the issue isn’t choice, rather it’s accountability in a broad sense.”  The reality is that there is as much opportunity for democrat input in the  design and operation of voucher programs as charter schools or traditional public schools for that matter.  The public can place whatever regulations it deems necessary on voucher schools as a condition of receiving those funds, just as it does with charter and traditional public schools.  Of course, all of these systems would operate best with minimal regulation.  If regulation were the answer to school effectiveness our public schools would already be fantastic.

10 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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