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In response to
"Thanks for the links, but they're both behind pay walls for me. -- nm"
by
Strongbad
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Article:
Posted by
Roger More (aka rogermore)
Jan 18 '17, 08:08
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IN 1983 the Reagan administration published “A Nation At Risk”, an apocalyptic report into the state of American schools. It ushered in 33 years of uneven yet enduring bipartisan support for presidents’ efforts to raise school standards. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), share more than quixotic names. Both were backed by majorities of both parties in Congress. Unfamiliar with such harmony, Barack Obama called ESSA, signed into law last December, a “Christmas miracle”.
That sort of collaboration could soon become a rarity. On November 23rd Donald Trump, the president-elect, nominated Betsy DeVos, a philanthropist, as the next secretary of education. For three decades Mrs DeVos has used her family foundation and her leadership of conservative groups to lobby for “school choice”, a broad term that can divide Republicans even from moderate Democrats.
For Mrs DeVos this has meant support for two causes. The first is the rapid expansion of charter schools, fee-free schools that are publicly subsidised but independently run. Her activism is one reason why charters in Michigan, her home state, have less oversight than almost any of the 43 states that allow them. And about 80% of Michigan’s charters are run for profit, compared with 13% nationwide. The second cause is school-voucher schemes, which typically give public funds to poor parents to pay for the cost of places at private schools. Though Michigan voted against adopting vouchers in 2000, Mrs DeVos has helped to elect more than 120 Republicans across the country who are in favour.
Education secretaries are among the least powerful cabinet members. The federal government spends only about ten cents of every dollar that goes toward public schools. States and the more than 13,500 school districts matter more, especially after ESSA, which loosened the regulations placed on local governments.
Since that law passed just last year, Congress will be reluctant to consider a new bill on education reform. Mr Trump’s proposal that $20bn in federal education funding should be diverted towards voucher schemes would struggle to win enough support in the Senate, says Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank. Most Democrats would oppose it, he notes. So too might Republicans sceptical of another big federal programme. They would prefer states to make their own decisions about vouchers.
But Mrs DeVos will still have clout. Her department can interpret federal rules in ways that make it easier for states to spend federal money as they like. She could also use the bully pulpit and her influence with conservative foundations to cajole governors to embrace vouchers.
Here she may find a receptive audience. Roughly half of states and Washington, DC, have some form of school-choice scheme. And though less than 1% of all pupils in America attend school on state-funded vouchers, this number is growing rapidly: from 61,700 in 2008-09 to more than 153,000 in 2015-16, according to the American Federation for Children, a school-choice group whose outgoing chairman is, as it happens, Mrs DeVos.
Would more vouchers help children? In theory they would, by more closely matching pupils to schools, encouraging new schools and fostering competition. But the evidence is mixed. A review last year led by Dennis Epple of Carnegie Mellon University concluded that vouchers are not “a systematically reliable way to improve their educational outcomes.” In cities such as Milwaukee, New York and Washington, pupils using vouchers tend to have higher graduation rates than peers at public schools. There is also evidence from these cities, and from Sweden and Chile, that the competition brought by vouchers makes other schools improve their performance.
However, once at private school, there is little evidence that pupils using vouchers perform better in exams than if they had stayed put. They may in fact do worse. Studies published this year into schemes in Ohio and Indianapolis suggested vouchers reduced achievement among pupils who used them. Research published last year into vouchers in Louisiana was even more troubling. A study led by Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke University found that pupils who used vouchers to attend eligible private schools were 50% more likely to have “failing” grades than peers who stayed in public school.
An “evidence-based policymaker” would conclude that there are more promising areas for reform, says Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University, who has studied the Milwaukee voucher programme. Charter schools, for example. He notes that charters in cities such as Boston, New Orleans and New York have brought more choice for poor parents, while pupils’ results are consistently higher than those of their peers in traditional schools.
These charters have done this by focusing on ends rather than means. The best succeed because they are well-managed organisations with skilful teachers, high standards and high expectations. Areas with successful charters also tend to strike the right balance between autonomy for schools and accountability, says Susan Dynarski of the University of Michigan. In Massachusetts, for example, the state decides who can set up charters, which can be shut down if their intakes do not keep up decent grades.
In contrast, partly as a result of Mrs DeVos’s lobbying, Michigan is the wild (Mid)west of charter schools. Dozens of different outfits, including public universities, can authorise charters in exchange for a cut of the revenue going to those schools. Operators can therefore shop around until someone lets them set up a school. There are few rigorous, transparent and standard measures that allow parents to play an easy part in this market. Some schools in Detroit compete for pupils by offering them raffle tickets for iPads, rather than impressing their parents with academic results. No one holds the authorisers accountable, though they oversee $1bn in taxpayers’ money every year.
Disruption is a feature of the Michigan system, not a bug, argues Mr Hess. Results at Michigan’s charter schools improved faster than at traditional public schools between 2005-06 and 2010-11. But many are still awful. Most of their results remain below the state average—and overall, Michigan’s schools are woeful. Michigan is one of just five states whose reading results among nine- and ten-year-olds were worse in 2015 than in 2003. The Urban Institute, a think-tank, has analysed the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a nationwide test of maths and reading. After accounting for demographics, Michigan is 47th out of all the states (see chart). Massachusetts is top—and is the only state with maths results near those of high-performing East Asian countries.
Sadly, in one of the less-noticed ballots on November 8th, Massachusetts voted against lifting its cap on charters—a victory for teachers’ unions and their sympathisers. After three decades of progress, pragmatic reformers are thus in a bind. Led by teaching unions, the left is out to curb some of the country’s best schools. Meanwhile, the risk of a Trump administration is that it is about to subsidise some of the worst. That would be some choice.
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