"why don't we just all agree that everything that has no negative effect should be on the table -- including vouchers and everything else that you mention."

I definitely agree with that sentiment, but I worry that vouchers could have a negative effect.  I'm concerned that they siphon $ from the public system, and that they lead toward privatization of this important public function.

It’s a nice windfall for the private schools, and a net loss to the public schools, and they had to raise real estate taxes in Milwaukee to cover that loss."

I believe there's some evidence for "adverse selection."  Those families who are most invested in their kids' education are most likely to respond, leaving the least engaged kids back in the public schools.

I'll look for links on these points.

Until we decide how to treat the issue of education in this country, we'll continue to have these piecemeal solutions to the problem of funding schools. We either make it a national concern or keep it a local concern.

If education becomes federally funded through a sales or income tax, then school equality in spending will no longer be an issue - all students will have an equal amount expended on them for eduation. All schools will have to meet federal regulations for infrastructure, administration costs, instruction and employee salaries. All schools will have to meet educational standards as well. The major drawback to this kind of funding is lack of citizen control of curriculum, administration costs, hiring, school schedules and parental discretion in choosing IEP plans for special needs children.

If local control of school districts is maintained, then the issue of educational equality will always be with us, especially if those local school districts are funded by property taxes. If the funding is based on property tax, then vouchers become inherently unfair - why should a child walk away from a school district with $8600. (based on my local school district) when the average property tax percentage is far less than that? And why should that home owner who is in actuality draining money from the school district benefit from a good school district which enhances his property value and increases his profitability when he sells that property? That's unfair to all those homeowners who financed a better school district through property tax levies and expect and deserve a reward for that sacrifice when they sell their property.

Some problems with the educational system can be addressed by changing the focus of teachers' colleges from "teaching school" to "teaching a subject". Most teachers' colleges are top heavy in education theory, while losing the focus on subject matter. Another problem with student retention of information can be solved by eliminating the ridiculous adherence to the agricultural clock - it's a silly ineffective way to impart the amount of information children need to function in the information age. Parents or guardians should also be required to contribute a few hours of service every year to the school district - this would indeed be controversial and unenforcable, but it would help in involving families in their school districts giving them a vested interest in its improvement while holding down some incidental costs to the district.

FINLAND

from the BBC
Excerpt:

EDUCATION IN FINLAND
Pre-school begins at age 6
Comprehensive school: age 7 to 16
Upper secondary school or vocational school: 16 to 19
Pupils in Finland, age 7 to 14, spend fewest hours in school
Higher education places for 65% young people
Second-highest public spending on higher education
Source: OECD

Common path

"We don't divide at an early stage between students who do well and those that don't manage so well in schools," she says, speaking at Finland's education ministry in Helskini.

"Studies show that it is dangerous to divide too early into different educational paths.

"We believe that if we invest in all children for nine years and give them the same education then we will reach the best results."

From the perspective of parents in the United Kingdom, this removes the recurrent questions about selection and the scramble for school places at the age of 11, when children change from primary to secondary.

In Finland, this divide comes at the age of 16, when pupils will decide whether to go to academic upper secondary schools or into vocational education - with very few youngsters entirely dropping out of education or training.

The emphasis on investing in education has created a system where as much as possible is delivered to students without charge.

School meals are free to all pupils, there are no university fees and students can stay in the upper secondary stage (loosely equivalent to sixth forms) for up to four years.

'Fair play'

There is a philosophy of inclusion underlying this system, she says - arguing that widening participation in education is the most effective way of finding the most talented students.

"It's like ice hockey. We let all the girls and boys play, not only the best ones. With this fair play, we can give everyone the same chance to practise their skills - and this also gives us the way to find the best ones."

Finland's education system, when compared to the UK, is also different in the later age at which pupils enter schools.

While pupils in the UK enter formal schooling at five, in Finland children enter school at seven - and then only for half days. They also have longer holidays than in the UK, including a 10-week break in the summer.

This places greater responsibility on families - and Ms Haatainen says that an important ingredient in Finland's high achievement in reading and writing is a strong culture of reading in the home.

Parents nurture a love of reading among children and this is supported by a network of public libraries, says the minister.

In the last international education league tables, produced by the OECD, Finland's 15 year olds were judged to have the highest standards of literacy in the world.

Ms Haatainen also says that the country has made a conscious effort to have highly-qualified teachers throughout the school system.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4031805.stm

The current movie Sicko hits on the state of health care in this country (a public service that's been thoroughly privatized) and just look at it, it's nauseating any way you slice it. Our education system is at least if not more important and it is in an equally precarious state. What is so difficult about taking those things that are vital to our nation growing in a healthy manner and treating them with proper care and foresight? Why do we entrust profitability and "the market" to dictate and drive our most important institutions? What can it be called but utter madness when we entrust something as impersonal and selfish as "the market" to manage these vital services?

Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic but I am struggling to think of one example where "the market" has done a public service much good. Health care and energy (student loans come to mind too) are bastions of criminality with those that need these services ending up on the very short end of the stick. And I am not the first to predict that water will soon be added to the growing list of vital services being run for profits and not for the nations welfare at all of our peril. With all of hollow talk of patriotism and scary talk of nationalism in our country these last few years it boggles my mind how very little we all seem to actually care about the collective US - about America. In the end we seem to be a nation of individuals all looking for the next get-rich-quick opportunity and in THAT, everything is on the table. I may be mistaken, or perhaps I'm overly romanticizing things, but I was under the impression that our nation was founded on a little bit more than a healthy profit or advantage for the select few. Profitability will be the death of us all (hyperbole intended).

Are most Americans unhappy with their schools? Keep in mind that at this point in 2007 a very low percentage of Americans live in old-fashioned urban school districts (whether working or failed); the vast majority live in suburbia or exurbia. And they overwhelmingly select their dwelling location based on perceived school district quality. Is there really some crisis whereby the same people who have made these decisions (and for the most part control their own school boards and districts) suddenly want out via vouchers? Where would they go?

sPh

Well I would hope so, but I think that would be open to all sorts of constitutional challenges.

Reading at home could be strengthened by curbing the advertisers hold on children's entertainment -- adult entertainment, too.

In short, more funding for non-commercial entertainment, i.e., the arts and adult education. Limit commercials.

Note: Finland and other European countries, such as Germany, have no problem giving state funds to religious and Waldorf educational and cultural efforts, so long as they are truly educational and cultural.

Stuart Buck: "But now you're saying that vouchers are suspect because it's a bad idea to spend any extra 'public revenues' on these poor inner-city families." We'll leave aside whether that cutoff point and the demographics sustain that description of the families. But what irks me here is  using a plea forgood old fashioned "welfare" to justify the conservative policy of vouchers and the conservative result of defunding education.

The problem isn't giving money to families (rich, poor, or otherwise). It's taking the limited education budget and handing it to people not to make new choices of schools that could (if you trust free market baloney) promote better schools or to fund better public schools. It's handing it to them to stuff in their pockets. I don't doubt some of them really need the money, for housing, food, or health care. But if that's your idea of education policy, you've been praying way too long at the free-market altar. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

You begin and end with an ideology of fundamentalist individualism and even try to twist studies of socialization into arguments based in assumptions of its obsolescence.

I tend to agree with Stuart that vouchers mean equity because "freedom of association" is important.

i.e. I think we're beginning to realize that some children are bright enough to choose their destiny. It's sort of like women getting the right to vote because society realized that, because it was the right thing to do, the logic of tradition was trumped.

While I expect many students to appreciate "default decisions," those made on their behalf, others should be given the right to freely associate with others and other groups in their efforts to grow.

To boldly go...

The kids who are behind are usually the ones with absentee parents. These kids are behind from birth. They show up to kindergarten not knowing their colors, letters or numbers and the deficit just multiplies from there.

No, my point is that teachers' colleges are top heavy in theory of education courses, instead of mastery of subject matter.

I didn't find either of these arguments convincing.

On the first point, my argument is very simple: don't throw good money after bad.  Granting that there are findings on both sides of this debate, my take--which comes largely from Rothstein's pathbreaking work--is that we can help disadvantaged students more by improving their early environment than through vouchers. 

You would surely agree that vouchers engender opportunity costs--money spent there can't be spent on more useful stuff.  Somehow, in your argument, such distinctions aren't allowed.  If I choose early childhood education, or health care, over vouchers, I'm against education spending.  But as I said in the post: "This argument does NOT mean we shouldn’t do whatever is possible, and more, to ensure great schooling for low-income and minority students."    (Pardon the double negatives!)

RE adverse selection, I never said parents shouldn't be allowed to seek out better schools.  I would do so, and so would many concerned parents.  But my read on vouchers is that they don't provide the right mechanism for this--nor do charters. 

What does work?  Beyond my scope here to elaborate, but school-ready children, quality teachers, and an array of supports for parents and kids, including remediation.  Again, see Rothstein, and I also think Rich Kahlenberg has some good ideas...google his stuff.

On the first point, my argument is very simple: don't throw good money after bad. Granting that there are findings on both sides of this debate, my take--which comes largely from Rothstein's pathbreaking work--is that we can help disadvantaged students more by improving their early environment than through vouchers.

Why is it an either-or? Why not both? I don't see how it's a case of throwing good money after "bad" -- no one thinks that vouchers literally harm students, and the only debate is whether they have no effect or a small positive effect. But it's also fairly clear that vouchers make parents happier, and there's even evidence (from Cleveland) that voucher recipients are more likely to attend integrated schools. Plus, voucher recipients typically receive an education at about half the cost that they would pose if they attended the public school.

So how is voucher money "bad" in any way? An education that may be better but at least is no worse, that costs less money, and that makes poor people happier? Why is any of that a bad thing?

I think that would be a fantastic start!

I mean can anything bad really come from having more intelligent people? I sometimes laugh because it really can't be that simple can it?

No, the only debate is not whether they have no effect or a small positive effect.  In this context, the only debate is whether student outcomes are better served by a dollar spent on vouchers or a dollar spent somewhere else. 

If we were doing everything else I think we should and we had money left over for vouchers and I didn't think (like Carnoy) that they led to revenue losses for public schools, than sure, I'm with you...

and the question remains, "can mastery of subject matter be taught?" the older I get, the more I believe that predisposition plays a role.

To boldly go...

Anything can be taught.

Other countries manage to do it, we can too.

A prerequisite for learning, however, is that both teacher and pupil have to believe that it is possible to learn.

Our countries outward focus on war, the Middle East, oil, the South American drug war, the threat of terrorism and free trade has distracted us...

to the contrary, it makes people believe that their schooling was worth it since wars are economically rewarding for many.

To boldly go...

Your post is right on. My 97 year old mother, she with a mind like a steel trap, in the course of a conversation said to me just the other day, "Felicity, there's the strong force, the weak force, the electro-magnetic force and the gravity force, and now there's the greed force. It is the driving force in DC; it is the driving force across this country."

At 97 she's been through WWI, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, assasinations, impeachment, and now, as she puts it George Bush "who merely represents the lay of the land."

I'm sure she would agree that when we admire, perhaps want to emulate an individual who by way of his education makes a contribution to the health and welfare of a society, we will have 'solved' the education problem. Children do not live in a vacuum.

Stuart, that's the coward's response.

I can think of reasons to spend that dollar on the public schools, if I were the civic gov. or taxpayer (I assume that's the point of view here). The striving parent will achieve more for their children already; the weak parent/student is the one society needs to boost. That is, if we don't wish to deal with grown-up failures.

A simplistic economic view asks how competition can work without losers (bad schools) to highlight the winners. I feel the exact opposite of competition is the right prescription for a sense of community. Vouchers not only alter the budget issues, they inherently make the public schools look bad. It's like saying "Don't buy our car model--we'll give you money to shop elsewhere."

The purely self-interested view, wanting total freedom of choice, is fine but becomes problematic when tax money is part of the question. I will not support vouchers as long as there is a public school system. If a school district's voters wanted to shut it down and go completely private, OK (I'd move elsewhere). I find the social glue of public schools essential to our form of community.

It's a bit of a cheat, but I will ask how a voucher system would work if if there were no public schools to take up the slack. I expect schools would separate out to the elite (expensive) the OK (affordable) and the one for difficult and badly-parented students. The arguments all center around this last population. Who will pay for it? If the difficult students have poor or single parents, they can't, so taxpayers will. If teh badly-parented students parents don't care, once again taxpayers hold the bill.

So going private can't change things in any way except to concentrate the difficult cases. City schoools suck up money, so what? So do military weapons programs and football stadiums. I hate the whining about schools--either pay up or don't complain about an uneducated population and crime.

Anything can be taught and one of the most worthwhile is music (and dance), both of which strengthen the memory, and integrated the whole brain -- intellect, emotion, and gesture.

Arguably this is not an expense but an act of maintenance and an investment in the future. In the current New Yorker there is an article on Sibelius -- because of whom:

"... classical music has retained a central role in Finnish culture. The country’s government invests enormous sums in orchestras, opera houses, new-music programs, and music schools. The annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly two hundred times per capita what the United States government spends through the National Endowment for the Arts."

The article, BTW, also makes a case for the "so-called 'regional' composers, who left a body of work, which is integral to the century as a whole: "Their music may lack the vanguard credentials of Schoenberg’s or Stravinsky’s, at least on the sonic surface, but Nielsen, in his 1925 book 'Living Music,' makes a good counter-argument: “The simplest is the hardest, the universal the most lasting, the straightest the strongest, like the pillars that support the dome.”

A letter writer to today's NYT has this to say:

"World culture has nothing to compare with the Western musical tradition for depth and variety. It stretches over 900 years from the Middle Ages to the present with an array of structural forms from art song to opera, solo violin to symphony.

Hundreds of composers have produced thousands of works. Dozens of instruments have been invented to produce sounds no one had heard before. A musical language of unparalleled power has been developed.

A culmination of this tradition is the modern symphony orchestra, one of the grand achievements of Western civilization.

There is no such thing as 'classical music,' but rather a sequence of different styles — Renaissance, Baroque, Classical (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven), Romantic and so on.

Popular music is less about music than about personalities, entertainment, commerce and solipsism. It is ephemeral and has never been about the expressive possibilities of music.

There will always be a discriminating audience for high musical art. The rest can have their musical popcorn"

I don't think it's at all crazy to advocate that vouchers proceed without siphoning $ from the public system.

Again, though, one of two things would have to happen for this to occur: Either (1) there would have to be exactly zero public school students who took advantage of a voucher; or (2) public school funding would have to be allotted on a lump sum basis, such that any given public school would retain its full funding no matter how many of its students departed. Number 1 is incredibly unlikely; Number 2 is unrealistic and suggests a misplaced set of priorities.

I think your DC analysis is misrepresented. Yes, the voucher amount is $7.5K, but the private schools are allowed to charge higher tuitions and they've done so. They've also been allowed to use their standard admission's criteria. Both of these factors have allowed them to pick off higher income, better prepared students.

I don't think that what you're saying is correct here.

1. The voucher program in DC doesn't have any mechanism for schools to "pick off higher income, better prepared students." Vouchers in DC are limited to students whose family income is below 185% of the poverty line. Vouchers in DC are also distributed by *lottery* if the number of applicants is more than the available vouchers (which occurs year after year -- see pages 1-3 of this study). Moreover, if you check out pages 13-14 of the study, you'll see that the students randomly selected to receive vouchers had slightly lower pre-existing test scores and lower family incomes than the control group, and that the average voucher family had three kids and an income of $17,356. Given that the median household income in D.C. is about $46,000, how does it even make sense to talk about "higher income, better prepared" students in this context?

2. Schools that accept vouchers are forbidden by law to charge anything more than regular tuition for voucher recipients. (See Section 307(a)(1) of the DC School Choice Incentive Act of 2003. Moreover, here's a list of eligible voucher schools in D.C. Which ones supposedly have raised all tuition above the $7,500 mark? Sure, the Montessori school and Georgetown Day and Sidwell Friends are expensive; but at the same time, there are many schools that aren't even charging a full $7,500. Annunciation School charges $6,500 for grades 1-8 (no high school). Cornerstone's tuition is also $6,500 a year. Holy Redeemer charges $4,560. Nannie Helen Burroughs charges $4,820. (I'm sure the same is true for many if not all of the rest of the Catholic schools on the list.)

I think the fruits will keep falling close to the trees. Given that ticket concerts cost between $50 to $100 a seat, even with subsidies, it's hardly a family thing.

I was lucky to have heard the russian orchastra in Moscow before the USSR fell. Ever since, American orchastras have put me to sleep since the fruit doesn't taste the same.

i.e. When I was at Lincoln Center a few years ago, the players were perfect but unfortunately amplified alot. In russia, there were so many players that the building seemed to shake and it was obvious that you weren't listening to a CD.

To boldly go...

Why is it an either-or? Why not both? I don't see how it's a case of throwing good money after "bad" -- no one thinks that vouchers literally harm students, and the only debate is whether they have no effect or a small positive effect.

I'll go there. Yes, I think that there's a good chance that vouchers could literally "harm" students. Difficult language here, since to me "harm" implies deliberate injury rather than a lower quality education. But yes, having attended both public and private schools growing up, and having looked at the data for outcomes between public and private schools, I'll say that at least in North Carolina, moving "at risk" kids from public to private schools will lower the quality of their education.

Plenty of electrons and ink have already been spilled to discuss how the "private school effect" can essentially be entirely be attributed to socioeconomic status of the parents, and how similar students perform as well or better in public vs. private schools. To that, I'll add that one of the main advantages of private schools, which comes out qualitatively when you speak with teachers and students there: homogeneity. At most private schools, you can put a smaller boundary around the kinds of problems that kids are going to be facing, and the teachers can manage instruction and tutoring that way. The simple fact that you don't have to worry about kids not getting to school because their dad was arrested for dealing and hence don't have a ride anymore simply doesn't come up.

If you suddenly move kids with unstable home situations into a private school who's been catering almost exclusively to wealthier kids from stable families, you've done that kid a great disservice. The public school, on the other hand, has been forced to address those issues over and over again, and is better equipped to deal with them.

So yes, as a matter of fact, I do say that vouchers could harm kids. And quite possibly in more than a small way.

I think you're right about some of this, but I also think that we in the US spend way too much time chasing after this nebulous concept of "intelligence."

My great aunt barely made it through high school and never went to college, as she struggled mightily with all things academic. However, without any training beyond high school home ec courses, she designed and drew the plans for the house my father grew up in, which still stands today. I, on the other hand, went to a selective public magnet high school, an elite private college, and am working on a Ph.D., but if school had only consisted of foreign language, time management, handwriting, and long division, I guarantee you I would have dropped out at the earliest possible point.

I happen to fit the right model of "intelligent" for our current system, and I'm lucky that way. My great aunt didn't. Is it that we don't value intelligence, or that we want a Charles Murray, one-size-fits-all definition for it?

If you suddenly move kids with unstable home situations into a private school who's been catering almost exclusively to wealthier kids from stable families, you've done that kid a great disservice.

Even granting the assumption that private schools cater "exclusively" to wealthier kids from stable families (absolutely not true for many inner-city Catholic schools, which are highly relevant to voucher programs in DC, New York, etc.), it is very odd to conclude that giving a troubled kid a better peer group is necessarily a "great disservice."

To be sure, research on the "Big-Fish-Little-Pond" effect does suggest that some children will suffer a drop in academic self-concept when placed alongside academically superior classmates (see, e.g., Herbert W. Marsh and Kit-Tai Hau, “Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect on Academic Self-Concept: A Cross-Cultural (26-Country) Test of the Negative Effects of Academically Selective Schools,” American Psychologist 58 No. 5 (2003): 364-76).

But at the same time, there is quite a bit of research suggesting that children do better when they have a more academically successful peer group. This finding goes back to the Coleman Report, and is echoed in more recent research. See, for example, Jane Cooley, “Desegregation and the Achievement Gap: Do Diverse Peers Help?,” (Oct. 21, 2006), working paper available at http://www.econ.vt.edu/Seminars/Seminarpapers/cooley-jane-jmp.pdf; Weili Ding and Steven F. Lehrer, “Do Peers Affect Student Achievement in China’s Secondary Schools?,” NBER Working Paper 12305 (June 2006); Kathryn R. Wentzel and Kathryn Caldwell, “Friendships, Peer Acceptance, and Group Membership: Relations to Academic Achievement in Middle School,” Child Development 68 no. 6 (1997): 1198-1209; Allison Ryan, “The Peer Group as a Context for the Development of Young Adolescent Motivation and Achievement,” Child Development 72 no. 4 (2001): 1135-1150; Donald Robertson and James Symons, “Do Peer Groups Matter? Peer Group versus Schooling Effect on Academic Achievement,” Economica 70 (2003): 31-53; Caroline Hoxby, “Peer Effects in the Classroom: Learning from Gender and Race Variation,” NBER Working Paper 7867 (2000), available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7867; David J. Zimmerman, “Peer Effects in Academic Outcomes: Evidence From a Natural Experiment,” Review of Economics and Statistics 85 no. 1 (2003): 15-23; Bruce Sacerdote, “Peer Effects With Random Assignment: Results for Dartmouth Roommates,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116 no. 2 (2001): 681-704.

I especially like this paper on peer effects, using randomized assignment at the Air Force Academy: Scott E. Carrell, Richard L. Fullerton, Robert N. Gilchrist, and James E. West, “Peer and Leadership Effects in Academic and Athletic Performance,” working paper (Oct. 5, 2006), available at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~economic/seminar%20papers/Carrell%20-%20peer%2006.pdf.

I don't understand why this argument is even continuing. Stuart Buck is opposed to government run education programs on principle. His argument begins with that assumption, not with data. Extending his logic I could argue against mandatory accreditation procedures for any educational institutions, since the government obviously has no business telling us what we should and should not learn.

Education is a function of the social, as government is. Education can and has been well run as a state sponsored entity, just as health systems can and have been. Both these are simple observations of fact (though observations and facts in which Mr Buck has no interest). Facts being what they are however, and ignoring Mr Buck's ideological fixations, the questions should revolve first around how to construct well run systems in this country. After that basic level has been reached and held stable, then we can discuss experimantation.
---

The problem with liberals in this country is that they don't even have the guts to call themselves Social Democrats; arguing meekly for small "i" individualism is the most you're allowed in politie company. That's not enough, especially when you're arguing with right wing anarchists who will lie through their fucking teeth in the name of "starving the beast" and "freedom."

Charter schools are not just a ticket out of failing urban schools for the middle class.

the problem is, the research just hasn't shown any difference; I student taught in a public school and saw kids who were nearly asleep because, after school, they'd have to work and try to support their families.

I think Bloomberg, in NYC, is being smart by rewarding familie, with extra $$$$ when their children do well in school as well as meet certain goals, like attendance.

i.e... I think it's a really good idea to pay students and treat school like a job and the money could go into individual accounts that could be spent on things like extra-curricular activities in the summer, rent, food and other things, etc...

To boldly go...

i'd say your posting was cliche and based on slogans too. you're arguing for a specific way of spending education dollars... vouchers would let people vote with their money and hopefully liberals would love it because learning would be about going to the place where your potential could be unlocked and fulfilled.

many teachers think they can be everything to everybody and I just don't believe that and think it's a fatal flaw in the current system.

at the very least, under a voucher system, if someone is unhappy with their circumstances, they are empowered to change them and learn from their past mistakes! no student wants to wait 5 or 10 years for the school they're in to fix itself!

To boldly go...

Since this whole debate arose out of your post on "bias," I'd suggest that one should have on hand an enormous grain of salt before reading reports from PFAW. The outcome of a PFAW report on vouchers is just as pre-determined as a Heritage report on whether it would be wise to raise taxes to pay for universal health care. Thus, for instance, PFAW has lots of innuendo about Catholic schools raising tuition, but every single Catholic school in D.C. whose website I checked still has tuition that is under $7,500. (Which may explain why PFAW didn't mention anything about actual tuition rates . . . .)

Note also its point that 15% of the subsidized students were already in pvt school! Even you have to grant that this is not what the program intended.

I don't grant this at all. Take the typical voucher recipient, who has a household income of about $17,000. If that family has nonetheless been scraping together the money to go to a private school, why would I want to keep them from being eligible for a voucher?

Both experimental and control groups in that study (I believe) applied for vouchers. That makes them the right groups for the study--which found no effect, btw--but not for the comparison I want to make. That comparison should be between those who applied for vouchers (whether they got them or not) and those who didn't.

Spot on. But those who didn't apply for vouchers would be the rest of the D.C. population, right? Thus, I already addressed that point -- i.e., by noting that the average voucher recipient has quite a bit less than half the household income as the median D.C. household. If you want to define a different comparison group than the median D.C. household, go ahead, but voucher recipients in D.C. certainly seem to be well below the average income -- which means that you'll have to do quite a bit more work to convince me that any cream-skimming is even conceptually possible here.

To my mind the relevant comparison group are the classmates of the voucher applicants who did not apply.

I take your point re PFAW report.

I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, but from my own personal experience, there was very little "academically superior" about the private school I attended. It was largely a place where wealthy parents could donate large amounts of money and ensure that their child always received good grades, didn't get busted for the drugs they were doing, and got impelled along academically just enough that they'd be able to make it into an okay college. Invariably, the end of year honors went to the parents of big donors, as they were tied to a nomination process and selection for the "complete student," rather than on any sensible metric. (They had to at least have decent grades, but in the end, money trumped performance.)

In retrospect, the public high school I attended (and I'm referring to the non-magnet school I attended first) has produced more luminaries and community leaders than the private school. The private school kids are largely doing make-work in their parents' companies.

All this is to say, I appreciate the presence of peer effects, but demonstrating peer effects doesn't necessarily show a benefit of private schools. You have to then show that the peers at private schools are actually more academically accomplished, rather than just riding parental effects.

OK, so maybe there's evidence (I've heard of none) that while voucher recipients had an average income of $17,000, their immediate classmates back in the public school had incomes of $12,000 -- or something like that. Is that what you're saying? But then, if you say that the voucher program in DC didn't show improvement (in the latest study, which looked only at one year), THAT is based on a comparison between voucher students and a control group that had a slightly higher income.

So you can't have it both ways -- you can't accuse the voucher program in DC both of cream-skimming and of being ineffective. If the voucher program is indeed cream-skimming, then we have no idea whether it's effective or not (i.e., we have no idea whether the $17,000-income voucher recipients did better or worse or the same as their hypothetical prior classmates with a $12,000 income). Conversely, if you want to emphasize the latest study's finding of ineffectiveness, you'll have to drop the cream-skimming point (because the voucher recipients had lower pre-existing test scores and lower incomes than the control group).

As an aside I doubt your sister in-law goes to the Quaker schools. You have to pass a battery of tests just to get in most of them.
But maybe things have changed.

If they do have special-ed classes they're a fine condidate for unfunded mandates. Their endowment (I looked it up) is at $27 million.

She is herself a very religious Methodist, but to my surprise, didn't think much of the religious schools she worked at (outside, in a state-sponsored trailer -- at least it used to be). She told me that the best run ones in her opinion were not the Quaker, but the Catholic schools.

Her son attends public school BTW.

I mis-spoke if I said she is my sister-in-law. She is my cousin-in-law, actually. We see her mainly at funerals.

I remember seeing these arguments about the D.C. voucher program before and what I remember is that the true facts are not on the table. What I remember is that the reason D.C. appears to spend so much per pupil is because of the high additional cost of mandated special ed programs, including those for the most very severely handicapped who need one-on-one or even several-people-on-one care at all times.

A Washington Post story last year claimed that special ed spending in D.C. is 15% of the overall budget. Take 15% away from $13,000, and the per-pupil spending in D.C. for everyone else is still about $11,000 -- which is still in the realm of the top ten states nationwide, or maybe even the top five (see Table 5 here).

The result is, whatever the budget averages indicate, normal, non-special ed inner-city pupils in D.C. are getting substantially less money spent on them than pupils in wealthier suburban schools, to say the least.

What you're saying is partially true, as best as I can tell. According to this study -- which is a few years old -- a comparison of DC school spending to the DC suburbs (EXCLUDING special education) shows that DC was spending less than Arlington and Alexandria, but more than Fairfax, Montgomery County, and about $3,500 more per-pupil than Prince George's County. Make of that what you will. It's still a lot of money; and much of it is still being wasted by a staggeringly incompetent system in D.C.

Well, who knows what her criteria of judgment are? I myself was really surprised that she preferred the Catholic school to the Quakers -- she didn't say why (though I know the Jesuit schools were the best in the world at one time -- in the 18th century). It is possible that her criteria are very different from yours or mine, but I found it interesting in any case.

There are good and bad schools of all types, I guess. Catholic schools no longer have a lot of nuns, I understand. Here in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, which was predominantly Irish and Italian until very recently, former Parochial School teachers are preferred (or were 10 or fifteen years ago) as teachers in the public schools. Many of them are very experienced and organized, which counts for a lot in the early grades. The kids really like them, because they know how to control the class and they make their expectations crystal clear.

I sent my own kids to both public and private schools. I certainly never found an ideal situation and the expensive private schools didn't seem much better than the public ones, to tell the truth, though they seemed to think they were.

I ended up sending my younger kid to a Waldorf school and we liked it a lot, though it was not perfect, of course. The public school curriculum was very ad hoc and there was no art, foreign language, music, or outdoor play. The Public School teachers were very dedicated, however, and I think the public schools do offer more than the Parochial ones, including a better paid and trained staff. That is my impression, at least.

The free market theories of education do a bad job with the actual economics of education supply.

Ordinarily, to add one student, a school only needs to add a few books and some added photocopies: the marginal cost is tiny. But somewhere between the twentieth and thirtieth added student, they need to spend $30,000 to $50,000 to add a teacher. Somewhere between the 100th and the 30th added student, they'll need a new building, for $1,000,000 or more.

The incentives are obvious: take every child who doesn't require you to add a teacher, and then stop. Or, if you are confident of your long-term market, add a teacher and the students to match, and then stop. But never take the bricks-and-mortar step relying on current or future tuition payments.

You can see that logic at work in the existing private education sector. When private schools and colleges add buildings, they do it with a capital campaign. That money comes from donors, not customers. You can also see it in preschools: drive around any town and you'll see that they're in borrowed church facilities, the basements of homes people already own, or cast-off facilities like abandoned storefronts. No one in this part of the economy can get enough money from tuition-paying parents to break ground.

If we offer tax dollars for each student in a private setting, it will work the same way: Schools will fill the seats they have and then stop. Schools will not pop up like Starbucks on every corner, because their production costs are different.

Similarly, watch the most heralded school choice experiments. They happen in places that have already lost enrollment, so they can add students without having to build. In places that are already at capacity, they don't try the choice idea because they don't have room.

The free-market theorists are really bad at understanding the education MARKET.