In Which I Outsource to Prof. Martin Carnoy
Folks: I didn’t want to let last week’s interesting discussion about vouchers and their implications for public education drop, so I asked Stanford professor Martin Carnoy to add his two cents. Carnoy is a professor of economics and education and has done much important work on education vouchers, including some revealing international comparisons.
Here are his thoughts…enjoy:
We need to go back to basics on educational vouchers and see whether what was claimed for them was ever realized in practice. In the 1950s, Milton Friedman introduced the concept, arguing that if private schools could compete with public schools by having access to public funding (vouchers), the cost of education would fall and parents would feel better off because they would be able to choose their child’s school. Friedman advocated a voucher plan that included all families, regardless of income. That was precisely the plan he inspired to be implemented in Chile in 1981, and to be placed on the ballot twice in California, in 1993 and in 2001.
Later proponents of vouchers, such as John Chubb, Terry Moe, and Paul Peterson (and finally Friedman himself), played down the cost saving part of the argument, kept the consumer welfare argument (parents feeling better off because they had a choice), and introduced the idea that targeted vouchers aimed at low-income students would increase their learning. This would happen in two ways: (1) by allowing students to attend private schools, where they would get a better education than in public schools; and (2) by introducing competition between public and private schools, which would force public schools catering to low-income students to do a better job. The result of these two voucher-induced effects, they claimed, would be to increase greatly the academic performance of low-income students.
These ideas tap into a widely held view that markets do a better job than the public sector in just about every economic activity. So a lot of people want to believe that sending poor children to private school and increasing competition among schools should make a big difference in places where public school students are not doing well. Yet, there is only very sporadic evidence of any real educational improvement due to vouchers or to any other form of market competition in education.Studies in Colombia have shown positive effects for low income voucher students attending private Catholic secondary schools, but Chile, which has the most extensive voucher program in the world, has had no significant increase in average test scores since bi-annual national tests were made comparable starting in 1994, and a number of careful studies in that country have shown no or only very small differences in test scores between private and public schools when students family background is taken into account.
A number of high profile targeted voucher experiments organized by Paul Peterson in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Dayton, Ohio, claimed to show positive effects for black students in New York, but Princeton economist Alan Krueger successfully challenged the validity of these results. Vouchers schools in Cleveland did no better than public schools, and, in the first phase of Milwaukee’s voucher program when test scores were available for private voucher schools, students in voucher schools did only slightly better than public school students, and then only in math.
The evidence for vouchers’ positive competition effects on public schools is just as weak. This goes both for Chile, where, after 26 years of vouchers, 47 percent of students now attend private schools, and for the United States. Belfield and Levin review a whole series of studies in the U.S. and come to the conclusion that if there is a competition effect on public schools, it is very small. Carolyn Hoxby estimates sizable gains in public school test scores in Milwaukee after the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision of 1998 opened the doors to using vouchers in religious schools. But as I show in an upcoming study, this was a one-time only effect, and may or may not have been due to increased competition from private voucher schools. Milwaukee is an interesting case because traditional public schools face competition not just from lots of private voucher schools, but from charters, public magnet schools, suburban schools, and, with open enrollment, from other public neighborhood schools. After an initial jump in test scores, Milwaukee’s public school students did not make further gains in their academic performance over the next seven years even as competition increased.
The same can be said for charter schools as a “solution” for the low academic performance of low-income students. As many studies have shown, including our Charter School Dust-Up, on average, socio-economically similar students in public and charter schools achieve similar scores on national and state tests, and studies of charter school competition on public school student performance show, in the best cases, only small positive effects.
As one commentator asked on this blog, “Why don’t we just all agree that everything that has no negative effect should be on the table?” If a policy that claims to be a cure for low average academic performance of low-income children is consistently shown not to produce the claimed results, it should be moved off the table—that goes for both conservative and liberal proposals. If we believe that the problem of low academic achievement is worth solving, we need to turn to solutions that show consistently positive results and drop the ones that don’t work. That doesn’t mean we should close down existing voucher plans; we just shouldn’t support starting new ones.
Comments (127)
Having been given a nourishing main course, one hates to be greedy and ask for dessert, as well. But it would be very helpful to some of us with an interest in this sort of thing to have, if possible,
That having been said, many thanks for the clarity of this presentation, and thanks to Jared Bernstein for persuading you to share your thoughts with us. It was a good read, and quoting Mrs. Slocumbe, I am unanimous in that.
aMike
July 8, 2007 8:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you very much for the well written post! While I would generally agree with sentiment in the last paragraph--that all effective options ought to be open--that is not the end of the discussion. When the various methods of education produce equal results in test scores, we should evaluate the systems on other factors. Which is more expensive? Which is easier to administer? etc.
July 8, 2007 9:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great article, but we may be ignoring the primary issue. In the same way that "personal/private" accounts are merely a way of abolishing Social Security, aren't vouchers simply a stepping stone to abolishing public (government funded) education?
Am I crazy here, or is debating this issue counter-productive.
July 8, 2007 9:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Amike,
I am delighted to report my own decade-long, indepth study of public and private institutions of lower learning. Over 12 years I attended a one-room school and a mega-institution where you could remain as anonymous as the average House Republican.
I am happy to report:
A. Bigger is worser
AND
B. Teachers make the difference.
Nothing else matters.
Best, Terry
July 9, 2007 2:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Staleync:
The way I see it, it's precisely because of the apt analogy you raise that we should debate the issue. Our system of public education of course needs attention, repair, creative thought, more good people, resources, etc., but it is a national treasure.
July 9, 2007 3:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
From my experience as a parent, I have noticed that the same teachers circulate among private, public, charter, and religious schools, since an experienced and credentialed teacher is a desirable hire anywhere. The difference is in the working conditions and benefits, which can vary from one school to another. Private schools often offer free tuition for the teachers' children, a big draw, especially if the teacher has more than one child.
July 9, 2007 5:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
and studies concerning lowered class-room size, and higher quality teachers and increased numbers of teachers have I believe consistently showed positive results. but they require an actual investment.
July 9, 2007 5:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not coincidentallly, a way of abolishing teachers' unions, no?
I wish Professor Carnoy would share some information with us that he might have about policies that have been proved effective and which should be on the table.
July 9, 2007 5:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
The implicit assumption in all of this is that the choice of school is the primary factor on how well a child does. We all know from personal observation that this is not true. There are under performing children who come from upper class backgrounds and go to elite schools (GWB?) and there are self-made men from the ghettos.
The biggest factor in determining how a child will progress is their family socio-economic background. Expecting schools to be able to rectify the injustices of society is either naive or a deliberate distortion meant to discredit public education.
Various schemes like integration have also been proxies for solving the real problem. This is that poor children go to underfunded schools. There is an article in the NY Times today about Justice Thomas thinking that integration is demeaning to blacks since it implies that they can't make it without the assistance of whites. As usual with him this is a misreading of the situation.
The reason for integration is to force local governments to equalize school funding. If more white students attend an underfunded school the parents will apply pressure to have it upgraded. This is not because white parents care more about education, but because they have more political clout.
As the Brown decision showed separate but equal was big on the separate but not very good at the "equal".
Kids attend school for about six hours per day 180 days out of the year. This is about 1/6 of their time. Where is the discussion of what they are learning or doing the other 5/6 of their lives. It is an oversimplification to think that schools can solves society's problems.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
July 9, 2007 6:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree I'd like to see some of his suggestions. I don't know if I would automatically rule out voucher programs in general; I just don't think they should be marketed as a solution to educational problems.
If a community wants to go to vouchers because such a program would be philosophically consistent with free market ideology, I guess they should have the right. But vouchers, at least in their current versions, can't be marketed as a cure for low reading scores or high drop-out rates.
July 9, 2007 6:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
It would seem that one would also have to prove that a voucher system improves performance in public schools, even while decreasing their funding and resources, not just that public schools lag (as no doubt they did even before the vouchers)? It was part of Friedman's jutification, and I don't see how vouchers can be defended without it. Or that private schools would use the extra money to enhance educational programs substantially and improve their performance, even with their increasing class sizes as more students could afford them? Otherwise, we're at most helping a small fraction of students enabled and choosing to transfer while damaging the majority.
And I see little reason to expect this. The idea of being "forced" to improve sounds ludicrous. (1) Teachers are working incredible hours for far lower pay than they'd receive with comparable education in other lines of work, so their motivation seems fine. (2) Teacher salaries and resoruces are dependent on things ilke those funding cuts I mention, not on attracting more students, so they're not responsive to the market forces alleged here anyhow. (3) As the conservative education researcher Diane Ravitch keeps insisting, educational approaches (New Math, rote) keep coming and going without making a difference, so the idea of experiment producting results is not at all self-evident. (4) And again, we're setting schools up to fail that are already failing by having poor kids and no resources by giving them even poorer kids (the ones that can't afford to escape even with vouchers) and no resources.
It's all the free-market cult. Classical economics has the virtue of pointing out that failure weeds out losers, leaving room for creative growth. (Not that we want to set up a good fraction of our students for failure so that others will win.) It's only the cult that prefers Lamarck to Darwin and thinks we'll win by trying harder. Go team!
Last, I stated the fractional shift, and I should back that up. (1) Some students are already going to private school. Education gain from voucher? Surely nil, and that money effectively leaves education funding never to return. Net gain to students: negative. Net gain to society: very negative, as it amounts to income redistribution upward. (2) Many students can't afford private tuitions, which in a big city can be many, many times the cost of vouchers. They stay put. Education gain from vouchers? Barring severe Lamarckian victories, disastrous. The ghetto grows needier. (3) Some parents could make the shift with a little marginal assistance. Net gain to these students? Possibly positive, although Jared's post suggests the evidence is lacking.
Overall outcome: kids everywhere are screwed.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
July 9, 2007 7:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would still like to see some solid evidence that a majority, or even any substantial percentage (say 20%) of American parents are unhappy with their local school district and schools. And by "unhappy" I don't mean the usual third-glass-of-wine "all those bureaucrats are incompetent" talk; I mean unhappy enough to either move or use a voucher to send their children to a private school.
School district choice became the primary driver of house purchases around 1980 which is almost a full generation ago; presumably most parents are satisfied with their local schools. A very, very small percentage of US children attend large urban districts in the oughts and not all of those districts are failed, so the percentage who have this horror of disfunctional urban schools forced upon them is even smaller.
sPh
July 9, 2007 7:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
.> (4) And again, we're setting schools up to
> fail that are already failing by having poor
> kids and no resources by giving them even poorer
> kids (the ones that can't afford to escape even
> with vouchers) and no resources.
In fact there is a live experiment (of the type that is now banned in medical research due to moral considerations) available in Kansas City's voluntary desegregation program: the kids with the most motivated parents transferred to the suburban schools leaving the public district in even worse shape.
sPh
July 9, 2007 7:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you're right about this. It reminds me of another instance of the same phenomenon. Americans have a very low impression of Congress...what is it now, about 75% disapproval? But, most Americans make an exception for their Congressman. Congress is terrible. My Representative is the exception.
aMike
July 9, 2007 7:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am aware of studies suggesting that small classroom size is beneficial in the eariest grades, but with the benefit dissipating as children become older. One of the difficulties, of course, is how you define "small classroom size". I suspect that you would find vastly improved performance at all grade levels if the student-teacher ratio is 5:1 or lower, but it's harder to pinpoint a threshold at which a change can be expected to occur. (Is it 15:1? 20:1? 25:1? 30:1?) It's reasonable to assume that the ratio would be affected by factors including student age, subject matter, and teacher quality, as well as by how well prepared the students are for the classroom setting and the subject(s) being taught.
July 9, 2007 7:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
.> I suspect that you would find vastly
> improved performance at all grade levels
> if the student-teacher ratio is 5:1
Perhaps my viewpoint is affected by having grown up in one of those horrible, evil urban districts where average class size was 38 (42 in my 4th grade class) and the rooms were set up with six rows of ten desks bolted to the floor, but IMHO there is a point where classes are too small. At 5:1 not only would you lose diversity of children but there would be no way/place for a child to "hide", zone out for a while, or just think a bit. and I don't think that would be positive. UK university students don't meet with their tutors 30 hours/week after all.
sPh
July 9, 2007 8:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
And then there are bigger teachers. :-) At 6'7", I'm one of those, I guess.
I have to say it is heartening for someone who is heading into his 35th year in the classroom in another six weeks to see so many nice things said about teachers in this thread. It doesn't happen all that often.
aMike
July 9, 2007 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Corvid
I wonder whether performance in schools is somehow connected with globalization.
I've read that in Germany, high schools have absolutely superb programs for kids who don't plan to go to college--the majority of kids, just as here in the States. The students and teachers, therefore, can see a direct connection between a rigorous education at the high school level and what type of work the kids will be doing when they graduate.
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Here, we treat non-college-bound kids as, basically, losers. And this all the moreso because so many of the jobs they might have taken up after high school are being outsourced or offshored under globalization. The prevailing attitude is that these kids (and it's not some weird, tiny minority--70 percent of Americans don't end up with a 4-year college degree) will just have to somehow fend for themselves.
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Our economy, in the space of about 3 decades, has gone from one where a majority of our wealth was generated by manufacturing to one in which U.S.-based manufacturing is a niche item, an afterthought at 9 percent of GDP. This pretty much tracks with our collective (and accurate) estimation of the worth of a high-school diploma.
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What made us an economic powerhouse after WWII had a lot to do with the fact that American capital was invested here. An American ditch digger could accomplish far more in a day than an Elbonian ditch digger because the American had a backhoe while the Elbonian had a shovel.
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Now, I can't draw any direct connection between our lousy public education system and globalization (which I wish we could all agree to label more truthfully as disinvestment). But I get the strong sense that we adults aren't really doing very much to look out for our kids in any kind of broad-spectrum way. And by that I mean way beyond shelling out megabucks for a college education for the lucky 30 percent (which may well be far too many, by the way) to an urgent sense of responsibility and an eagerness to invest in and employ the 70 percent who don't get those degrees.
July 9, 2007 8:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
What is the purpose of public education? I think it is two-fold.
The first, of course, is to provide the three R's.
The second, is to train future citizens. This is especially important in a democracy where citizens are expected to help guide the direction of their government. So creating informed citizens means exposing children to a variety of viewpoints and other socio-economic and ethnic groups. This type of exposure has been shown to increase tolerance and diminish prejudice.
Now what is the purpose of private schools? It is to restrict contact with other groups and to limit ideas to those favored by those running the schools. In the extreme cases you end up with the Amish or the Hasidim who not only restrict their children in school but in their communities as well.
What sort of person favors restricting information to their children - those who believe they are an elite and if they can't run the country can at least control their communities. It is by its very nature anti-democratic.
Personally I think every child should have to go to public school. Any special instruction that parents want their children to receive should take place after school, on weekends or in the summer. We are all in this together and should learn to get along with each other.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
July 9, 2007 8:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree citations would be helpful to those of us who continue the effort to provide accurate information to a public that has been fed anti-public school information for political, racial, economic and religious reasons for decades and especially since A Nation at Risk. The comments were helpfully concise. One issue that is not addressed in the vouchers debate is the basic economics of a system, which duplicates educational bureaucracies in “private” and charter schools instead of using the resources in truly effective ways in public schools. Nobody denies that public schools can be better managed. Why is it assumed that other institutions are? I can site from personal experience well and efficiently run public school districts and wasteful private and charter schools.
July 9, 2007 8:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
According to one report I found 80.8% of the US population is considered living in an urban setting. I don't think this squares with your remarks. Of course what "large urban districts" means is somewhat vague. But in my area of suburban NYC the number of children in all the suburbs together doesn't even come close to the number of children in the in the NYC, Yonkers, and Newark systems.
I imagine that this is true in many other areas as well. Because of the small state rural bias to the way congress is apportioned these areas have a much greater influence on social spending than their numbers would indicate. In fact 18% of the population controls 50% of the seats in the senate. Only two of these 25 states can be considered urban (MD and RI) and they are only in the list because they are so small.
The result has been a continual underfunding of urban schools and other urban social programs. The fancy educational philosophy discussions avoid looking at the reality of American apartheid. Katrina should have demonstrated to everyone once and for all that inequality is rampant in this country.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
July 9, 2007 8:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
(I just have to say how impressive it is to read the comments on this and many other TPMCafe threads. I am heartened by the thoughtful intelligent discussion where ideas are considered for their merit, veracity is valued, and even the occasional silly neocon trope is given a brief moment before it is mercifully snuffed out. It's precious because it is so rare.)
As for education, for all the ostensible (paltry) merits of vouchers, I think they function as a Trojan Horse for conservatives hoping to strike a blow to government-run social welfare programs, including public education. The performance of voucher programs is a minor concern to voucher supporters. It makes them happy to see a program that weakens the state's monopoly on education.
So, no matter the effectiveness of vouchers, the government-haters support them. And it seems that policymaking and governance across the board has now been brought to this level of argument (which is why it's so heartening to read this thread).
I would argue that given the sad state of the entire public education infrastructure all this hair-splitting on how to ration out limited resources is a waste of time. What we really need is a national campaign that highlights the principles of good husbandry of our children, and redirects generous government resources toward that priority.
1) Public education is an expression of our national commitment to all our children. Our public schools need to demonstrate to our children that they are of primary importance to us as a nation as they are to us as parents. A country that spends nearly half its budget on military adventure but whines when it's time to pony up for schools needs to learn a lesson.
2) Teachers need to be affirmed as some of the most important members of society. They need to be paid well and they need to be supported in their Herculean efforts on our children's behalf.
3) The idea that schools can do anything to better a child's performance without the full support of parents is ludicrous. One of the most despicable ways that government-haters undermine parents' faith in public schools is to insist that the schools should cure what are societal ills that afflict the entire family. No child will thrive in school without adequate food, shelter, security, without a parent or two cultivating love of learning at home. Parents must be involved in their children's education. The greatest policy challenge for educators is to find a way to engage parental assistance in the noble endeavor of their children's education. Without parents school becomes a babysitter, with no possible hope of education, and that's what we have now. We as a nation need to decide between babysitting and education.
4) Make television, video games, and other mind numbing (and thus infinitely popular, addictive) activities contingent on, or subservient to, education. I know this sounds proto-fascist or prohibitionary, but while study after study tries to establish a link between violence, bad morals, etc. and TV, the real problem is how spending so much time in video-land diminishes children's appetite and aptitude for learning. TV is the equivalent of prenatal alcohol syndrome for the postnatal set. It quashes childhood development and displaces educational (and relational) experience.
Nuff said.
July 9, 2007 8:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Most European systems do something like this, and it seems to work fairly well. EXCEPT...in the case of Bavaria (and maybe other German states, I only know that one because my nephew was raised over there while my brother was singing opera), the tracking begins at the fourth grade level and at that point one is placed on a track to prepare for gymnasium (which leads to college) or hochschule, which doesn't. I'd be uncomfortable with a system which decided whether or not one was college material at the age of 10.
aMike
July 9, 2007 8:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
.> According to one report I found 80.8% of
> the US population is considered living in an
> urban setting.
"Urban" now includes suburbs and exurbs out to a certain density.
New York City, bless its collective heart, is utterly atypical of the rest of the United States. But even so the 2005 Census Bureau estimates are 8.2 million for NYC and 18.8 million for the New York Metropolitan Statistical area so the core city is not even a majority of its own region.
sPh
July 9, 2007 8:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Personally I am uncomfortable with a system that irrevocably decides that a person is college material at 17 much less 10. I have worked with too many people (esp. in factory settings) who have decided at 30 or so to retool their lives and either gone back to school at night or just taken the risk and started full-time college at that age , and then gone on to be very successful in professional or semi-professional careers, to think that the results of an SAT at 17 can determine one's fate.
That said, Germany has also taken great pains to try to keep substantial numbers of jobs available for people who like to work with their hands, have no desire to go to college, etc. Those types of perfectly decent and honorable jobs (well, decent when unionized anyway) are as noted being driven out of the US economy.
sPh
July 9, 2007 8:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is it too late to point out that Friedman was wrong? If private schools are being subsidized by public funds, then they are not "competing" with community schools. The only way to make the schools competitive is for private schools to offer free education or public schools charge tuition.
What voucher proponents want and what they've always wanted is subsidation for private schools and the opening of a back door to make tuition costs tax deductable or a tax credit.
One argument used by proponents of vouchers is that private schools spend more on instruction than they do on administration - which in Ohio is perfectly correct. The reason for that is lower salaries for teachers, free transportation for students, free psychological testing and counseling, free special needs therapy and therapists, (not to mention matching federal funding, church contributions and private fund raising) at the expense of the local public schools. If private schools had to fund transportation, special needs and therapy for students they could not afford to operate.
Perhaps the answer isn't more subsidation in the form of vouchers, but no subsidation in the form of public monies - then we can see how well they "compete."
As an aside, one major contribution to public schools would be a national ban on property tax abatements for companies and corporations who depend on community goodwill to promote their businesses, yet fail to contribute to public education - the source from which they claim to draw their employees whom they complain are abysmally ill-educated.
July 9, 2007 9:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're so right about this. What I also admire is that there seems to be less loss of status in choosing a profession which involves working with one's hands. My sample is pretty small, and no doubt there are hoity-toity Germans hanging around placed I didn't hang around in my years of visiting there...but I don't think parents would mumble under their breaths when asked what their children did if they had to reply mechanic or plumber.
One year when I was on sabbatical I camped out on my brother's couch in Passau, where he was in the Opera. While I was there I sang with the Community Choir, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Passau. It was community in every sense of the word. The membership ran the gamut from Bavarian farmers in lederhosen to college professors (not just this college professor). After rehearsal groups went out for beer and munchies without regard to profession or status. We could learn something from that.
aMike
July 9, 2007 9:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Much as I argued for putting our community efforts and community moneys into the public schools that truly serve the community, I'm not totally of the "we're all in this together and let's all go private" mode. For one thing, why speculate? We'll never abolish private schools. But anyhow, I think every kid deserves to be challenged. If some can't get challenged in public school and can afford to go elsewhere, as I could, I'm cool with that.
I'd have preferred to go to a competitive public junior high, but there wasn't one. (Bronx Science started at 9th grade, and Hunter was then girls only.) But whether I or another could have competed for those few slots in the present, we still deserved the challenge we got. I suppose I was still mostly self-educated, from what I read. But anything helps. I know how much I envy the kids from Stuyvesant High who got exposed to abstract math (not just calculus) at an age when it made a huge impression on how their mathematical reasoning developed, as my supposedly superb private school didn't supply. And as this note about mental development suggests, no, sphealey, you do have to start changing young minds by age 17.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
July 9, 2007 10:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Another thought. Most private schools do not require that teachers are certified by the state, at least initially. That makes a difference in teacher salary and recruiting, I think.
July 9, 2007 11:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Conservatives have been attacking the public schools with great success since 1964, with the Coleman report on the public schools. Their attacks have contributed to the diminished respect in the US for teachers, and have led to great danger for teachers and other school personnel. We did not have the problems of public schools until the conservative attacks began, but today, after 40 years of continual assault, conservatives have greatly damaged the schools and the respect that teachers are held in.
July 9, 2007 12:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Corvid
And it's your second point I was trying to get at. I, too, oppose tracking. Self-selection by students probably works better. In my small-town high school here in the States, we didn't have tracking but did have a modest assortment of electives beginning around 9th grade, so students pretty much decided on their own what they could handle academically.
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But, as you say, the key thing is having the work available, and that would require investment to provide the kind of US-based industries and jobs that would make it possible for many more high school graduates to build a decent, fairly stable life with just that much education or a bit more in the trades. If that prospect were on the horizon, I think the schooling might follow.
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But it sounds like a pipe dream, doesn't it? Oh, if only we could suddenly reverse the entire economic and political thrust of the past 30 years and, just on the side, completely overhaul the entire ethic of education as it has developed in that time, we'd be just fine. I wouldn't know where to start.
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So I guess my point was a despairing one.
July 9, 2007 2:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yep. There is one thing interesting about that and I think the negatives and positives about it probably breaks even in the long run. Many college students don't know this, and I'm not sure that Departments (and Schools) of Education broadcast it very much. BUT there at least are two kinds of students for whom this knowledge is really useful.
It is useful for those who aren't really sure they want to each, and hesitate to make a commitment to a program which obligates so much of their undergraduate curriculum. Students who major education at my institution must take a major in a discipline as well, and wind up with two or three free electives in four years.
It is also useful for those who decide they really really want to teach but make that decision to late to complete the undergraduate education program. MA. Ed. programs usually are available on a part time basis, and I counsel students in both these categories that one option for them is to compete their B. A. or B. S., taking whatever else tickles their fancy, then seek work in the private school sphere. Two or three years of part-time study will qualify them for the M. Ed., and through it, certification. To boot, they'll have an advanced degree, which means their starting salary in public schools will be higher.
aMike
July 9, 2007 4:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't despair! The change begins with a vision like yours. Now we just have to get down to work and actualize it. The old saying, "Without a vision the people perish." is true, in my book. I remember when George Sr. admitted being short on what he called "the vision thing"...but he never realized how handicapped he really was. So pipe dreams are as good a place to start as any.
aMike
July 9, 2007 4:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
The success of vouchers has already been proven effective in providing students flexibility in obtaining an appropriate education. The GI Bill and Pell grants, established years ago, have provided college students with public monies to attend the school of their choosing, whether it is public or private.
Whether we use vouchers, tax credits, or scholarships, we need to provide needy students a vehicle to get out of failing public schools and give them a real choice. For more information, visit www.paths2choice.com.
July 9, 2007 4:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting that you mention anti-public school information. I found a good article a couple months ago talking about the quality of private vs public schools, "Why Johnny Can Read: Simpson’s Paradox and the Greatly Exaggerated Death of American Public Education".
The article explains a report produced by the National Assessment of Educational Progress which states, "the average private school mean reading score was 14.7 points higher than the average public school reading score... After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was near zero and not significant."
Basically, if you compare equivalent public and private school students, you end up with similar test results between the two. Private schools look like they're doing better than public schools because they have a higher percentage of the students from better backgrounds, students who do well regardless of their environment. Private schools don't actually teach any better than public schools.
Interestingly enough, these poor statistical methods also explain why American schools appear to perform poorly in the international arena. The US places all of its students in public high schools where attendance is compulsory, a fairly rare setup internationally. Other countries do things differently, such as splitting their students into separate tracks and pushing only their top students toward high school. When the US compares all of its high school students against the top 50% of other countries, then of course we don't compare and of course our education system looks bad. That is the result of comparing apples to oranges.
July 9, 2007 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are right that we must emphasize the importance of good parenting, but at the same time we must give parents greater control over their own children's education. School choice programs offer a good way to do just this. For example, GI Bills and Pell grants have offered college students public monies to attend the school of their choosing, whether it is public or private. These kinds of programs have been successful since their inception and should be expanded to include K-12 students. For more information, visit www.paths2choice.com.
July 9, 2007 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
The stature of our public schools, and in turn the stature of our teachers, have been diminished primarily due to the politics of teachers' unions. It has been clear for many years that the unions do not put children first, although it is children who are the primary consumers of our public schools. For a great read on the effect of unions on public schools, try "The War Against Hope: How Teachers' Unions Hurt Children, Hinder Teachers, and Endanger Public Education." Notice how teachers are acknowledged separately from the unions - teachers are not harmful, unions are.
July 9, 2007 5:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just what we need another undocumented smear against teacher's unions. I find that most people who have bad things to say about unions have had no direct experience with them and get their opinions from the right wing noise machine.
If unions are so bad then why do the police, fire, teachers, sports figures and even entertainment industry figures belong to them? Who gets shafted by lack of union protection? The poorest workers like those at Walmart.
Every teacher I've ever had dealings with has gone out of their way to help their students and has also pressured their unions to demand better facilities and resources. Teachers don't like working in underfunded schools. Put the blame where it belongs on our society for discriminating against those areas with the highest needs and the lowest economic base upon which to draw.
If you want to see better schools adopt a national or at least state-wide funding plan which is not subject to the whims of the local real estate market.
Perhaps you should also do a little research as to how much teachers get paid. In many parts of the country it's under $30K per year. Remember this means a college education and usually extra course work in education or a master's degree.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
July 9, 2007 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
at the same time we must give parents greater control over their own children's education.
I don't see this as an imperative. Having choice is a choice itself. From another standpoint, we might say that it is the duty and right of communities to determine how children will be educated. In any case, with the way most school districts work, people have a lot of choice on which school to attend since they can often buy a house in the district of their choice. Anyway.
Tell me why you think individual parents should be able to choose their particular school.
July 9, 2007 5:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with Mr. Bernstein here as well, you do bring up a very important analogy. And even though you likely did not intend it too, I think it highlights the importance of discussing this issue!
July 9, 2007 5:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, MY Congressman (Adrian Smith, NE-03) is far worse than Congress. And I don't think all that much of Congress.
July 9, 2007 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
I still do not understand why we can not take something that is so obviously vital to our nation's future and remove profitability from it. We as a nation can spend $12 billion a month on our two Global Wars (to promote) Terror and we can not find it in our infinite wisdom to supply our children across this land with up-to-date text books or enough reasonably paid teachers? Astounding...
It reminds me of a line from the Quiet Man in an argument between John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in which he says to her "money, I'm sick of the talk of it..." That's just how I feel these days because it seems that nothing else matters in this entire country BUT money. It takes center stage in every single discussion or argument and it seems at this point to be more nationally defining than the words liberty, justice or democracy ever were.
July 9, 2007 5:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
BTW Jared -
ZOMG! You are OUTSOURCING your own job! Be careful or you may soon get a pink slip and miss out on all those luxurious exotic fluid filled hot tubs I've been reading about on this site lately!
July 9, 2007 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't want to abet the hijacking of this thread into a pro/anti union battle, but this simply can't be left unchallenged. That "Great Read" as Ms. Smith calls it, is by none other than Rod Paige, George W. Bush's Secretary of Education in his first term. Paige, who once called the National Education Association a "Terrorist Organization".
Paige, like that other pillar of virtue, Alberto Gonzales, came with Bush from Texas. There, he burnished his credentials as an educational miracle worker by fudging the figures in Houston, where he was Superintendent of Education.
But as I said I don't want to help hijack this thread, and I apologize for answering Ms. Smith at all. I'll close with a link to a teacher's take on Mr. Paige and his book. Mine is probably a little more severe, if not as eloquent.
aMike
July 9, 2007 6:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I could be wrong, but one (usually unstated) goal of school privatization that is seldom mentioned -- and from which it derives a great deal of its support from the right -- is that it often works out to be a clever way to subvert integration. Wonder what the numbers are on that?
July 9, 2007 6:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
yeah, human behavior doesn't change much...
To boldly go...
July 9, 2007 6:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
it is for this reason that I support vouchers: let the kids and their parents decide what they want do after 8th grade.
To boldly go...
July 9, 2007 6:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tell me why you think individual parents should be able to choose their particular school.
because many-- but not all parents, want what's best for their child.
To boldly go...
July 9, 2007 7:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
That makes a difference in teacher salary and recruiting, I think.
not really. in Rochester, MN-- where the Mayo Clinic is, the school district wanted nurses to come into the schools and teach nursing.
because of the union, the nurses decided to stay in nursing because of the pay differential.
private schools, w/o union rules, can experiment with who they hire and decide salaries on an individual basis.
To boldly go...
July 9, 2007 7:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sure they do. It'd be nice to not have to send our children to school with the blacks, the wops, and the Jews, wouldn't it?
I'm sorry, but school choice is often a cover for racism. Some one else said that conservatives have been fighting against public schools since 1964. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't 1954.
The overarching point of this post and the general discussion on vouchers is that providing choice does not improve performance among school children. If you can't prove it's better to have choice, then why do you want choice?
July 9, 2007 7:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is a great conversation!
Re teachers unions, my pal Ezra Klein has an interesting post up today on this very point: http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/elites-and-teac.html
Thanks for the warning, mcboo, but I'm as vulnerable to globalization as the next guy. And, heck, they can't lower my TPM paycheck...
I appreciated all the questions for Prof Carnoy and will nudge him again to step up.
July 9, 2007 8:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
You don't appear to have read what I wrote. Private schools aren't better than public schools. Students don't get a better education there despite paying through the nose for the privilege. Private schools in general as well as vouchers are a waste of money that would be better spent improving public schools.
July 9, 2007 10:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let them choose away, but don't penalize the public schools to do it.
July 9, 2007 10:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know what kind of school Debbie Smith attended, but vouchers have pretty much been shown to be ineffective at improving education. That is what the article above says. Perhaps she didn't major in reading.
(They may have been successful at promoting racial segregation).
Improving education is a legitimate taxpayer-government concern. (Promoting segregation is not.)
July 9, 2007 10:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not the first to mention this, but when Bush came into office there was supposedly no room in the budget for extra spending. However, we found money to pay for increased security after 9/11. We found money to pay for a war in Afghanistan. We found money to pay for a war in Iraq. We found money to pay for a lot of things that weren't around in 2001, despite that budget and every budget since then being "airtight".
If we value something enough, we can find money for it. If a politician says there isn't enough, then they're lying. What they're saying is what you care about isn't important enough for them to find you the money.
July 9, 2007 11:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Haha, no problem and I can understand, globalization is indeed an temptress.
For a question to pass on, why not throw a wrench in the economic conversation and suggest that we simply remove economics from the conversation? Has that been tried here? Has that even seen the tabletop? I'm going to guess no.
If we can not remove it, then there has to be a valid argument within the "economic circles" that suggests the concept of treating education like we do drug research or any other corporate R&D that the taxpayers subsidize with our taxes every year and then get charged for when something is finally discovered. Why can't we simply treat educating our youth as a similar sort of business "investment"?
July 9, 2007 11:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
RE: Various postings by "Debbie Smith"
This issue really angries up the blood, so to speak.
I am rather proud of my public education--all the way from Kindergarten through law school. It's mind blowing to me that people fall for the right wing tropes on education--that public schools are failing; that competition will build better schools. The one that gets me the most, however, is this bullshit and often unstated assumption that private education is inherently better than public education. As if having pretentious WASPs running a class room makes it better.
Debbie is brand spanking new here, but I can't tell what to make of her. She signed up today. So, it's entirely possible that she's a wingnut just here for the fun of it. I took a look at her website, though, and it doesn't contain any obvious craziness.
There is a limit to what education can do and there comes a point where education is not worthwhile. That applies to everyone regardless of intelligence or background. It may sound cruel, but a lot of children in our schools systems need to be prepared to work in factories, to work as car mechanics, and to build houses. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
For a lot of other people, education in itself isn't valuable because its not necessary. I'm sure we all remember the good old days of high school. Can anyone honestly say they learned anything in high school? I didn't learn much. I read some crappy books in English class. I mangled a little German. I studied a lot of math, a little chemistry, and a very little physics. A lot of the history was stuff that I had already learned or would have picked up anyway.
The reality is that for the "best and brightest" children, primary and secondary education does not exist to provide them with a set of information that they can draw on. Rather, it is designed to exercise their talents, provide them opportunities to succeed, and most crucially to socialize them properly.
We need to start realizing that the same education cannot be forced on the populations of children who may not benefit from it in the same way, particularly in secondary education.
To put it another way, we do need to create educational choices, but it should be no surprise that we can create good kinds of choices and bad kinds of choices. It seems the Debbie Smith and a lot of people on the right want there to be a single type of education and assume that some schools are just better at that type of education. In that case, it would make sense to have a sort of lateral choice. Parents would have several high schools set out before them, they could check the stats, and then choose to send their children to the best schools.
But what we see here in the post of Prof. Carnoy is the bankruptcy of that conception. I recognize the limitation of this qualification, but in the aggregate, there are not large differences between schools. Thus, having a market for better schools doesn't make a difference in the educational outcomes of the children in the school.
Instead of this horizontal choice, we need to create a system with vertical choice. We need high schools that provide vocational training. We need high schools that intensely focus on academics. We need high schools for talented artists and musicians. In short, we need to provide a choice to students. That choice should operate to serve all students in the way that traditional education serves the "best and brightest." Namely, it should exercise their talents, provide them opportunities to succeed, socialize them, and importantly, prepare them to get by in our world.
It's not enough to provide choices between different schools doing the same thing, we need to provide choices between schools that do different things. And the choice should be the student's so that they may freely move as their interests change and develop. Horizontal choice by parents is open to abuse in a lot of ways, especially as I and others have pointed out, it can be used to sort out people of different backgrounds based on prejudice rather than on quality of the school.
Finally, we need to realize that a lot of problems in our educational system are rural problems. There is a vast space between the East Coast and the West Coast where millions of people live. It's called the country. In many rural communities, no conception of choice is really viable. If you live in a town of 50,000 people, there is going to be at the most two high schools. I grew up in a town of 150,000. We had five public high schools, one Catholic high school (with a very low enrollment), one Catholic elementary school, and one private but secular school.
In these situations, there is no effective choice. All the public high schools were essentially the same though two were definitely richer. The Catholic high school had maybe 60 kids per class, and was often used by parents as the school of last resort for children who kept getting thrown out of the public schools. If you gave us vouchers, it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference.
So, as it turns out, in a lot of places throughout the country, what we really need is greater investment in education itself. To that end, we need to design funding systems that ensure an equitable distribution of money among schools. Property taxes just don't cut it.
It's late and I'm tired. So, I'm just going to end this rant here.
July 10, 2007 12:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
It seems the average American who hasn't spent an adult day in a classroom assumes teachers are the problem with underperforming low income schools.
I've spent some time doing a bit of subbing and in the midst of getting a teaching credential currently, and I believe that students are the problem.
There is a saying among the teaching profession that in low income schools, students are the problem. In high income schools, parents are the problem. From a teachers' perspective, in terms of the students and parents "behavior."
I'm not saying that I don't believe all people are created equal. I'm saying that how we are raised after we are created is an issue. Some is nature for sure, but then some is nurture for sure, through no fault of the child's - children can't pick their parents.
The solution in my opinion is to throw money at the low income schools. Not to beef up teacher salaries to attract "better" teachers. To pay for after school tutors and/or to lower classroom size in low income schools.
These tutors can be retired teachers who want to supplement their pensions, or teachers in training who are working on their credential. Or credentialed teachers who only want to work part time - or who perhaps can do enough tutoring to be additional full time teachers.
Teaching low income students is three times harder than teaching middle and high income students from what I've experienced. That is why smaller classroom size (more teachers) also makes sense in low income schools. Money from Uncle Sam I would think.
After school tutoring would also help to keep urban kids out of trouble. I would imagine someone could do a cost analysis and conclude that the money saved in reduced crime would pay for the tutors.
Since I've moved to the boonies, chances are I'll end up teaching low income students, so I'll know more from direct experience over the coming years.
I would also say that I think competition is a good idea, but competition between students, not competition between teachers. The students should have an incentive for winning test score competitions, not the school and not the teachers. Ideally this could be done intrinsically - just wanting to win. But maybe there could be some trips to theme parks and what not for the winning school students. I think the teachers are already doing as much as they can, with the possible exception of not donating extra time after school to tutor - which is probably asking a lot of already stressed professionals who have their own familes to deal with after work.
July 10, 2007 12:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'd just like to point out that the U.S.
already has school choice. People can choose
which school to send their kids to by choosing
where to live (much easier for middle class
parents). Of course it's not much of a choice
since just about all publics schools follow
the philosophy of all students in the same grade
going at pretty much the same pace. Also all
public schools have to deal with "No child left
behind". So if a parent wants anything more
exotic such as Waldorf, or Montessori, etc
they either have to find a charter school,
voucher school or pay for private school.
Also, for over a hundred years Belgium
has supported school choice, and as far as
I know they haven't turned into a right-wing
hell-hole.
http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=44&story_id=1430
For what it's worth, I don't believe that the
problems with the U.S. school system is the
fault of the public schools. Instead the problem
is that kids are watching (on average) over
four hours of TV per day. Of course they
are going to find school and studying *boring*.
Also since TV has usurped reading as a main
form of entertainment in the home, reading
skills are quite naturally deteriorating.
Just imagine if we had a real national push
to reducing TV watching by kids. There would no
longer be a need to turn kids into little homework machines, and teachers could actually concentrate on teaching instead of just trying to survive
the day.
For a comparison of TV versus reading see:
http://www.tvsmarter.com/
July 10, 2007 5:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Indeed, "choice" is often a cover for racism, as well as for general distaste for government run programs, which tend to try to pull diverse (racial) communities together on principle. Conservatives have been sowing the seeds of mistrust since the '50s certainly, demanding that "choice" to not send kids to public school and not pay for it is a public right.
America has been arguing about choice for decades when what we should be discussing is how to make our public schools an embarrassment of riches. Imagine if we had the attitude toward schools and the kids who attend them that we have toward our defense budget. Every hare-brained 25-billion school program would get funded, then we'd say nothing as the costs balloon toward a hundred billion, we'd just be happy we were throwing our money away into the education industry.
What do you prefer, a bloated defense industry that uses tax monies to build weapons no one in their right mind would ever want to use, or which are so poorly designed no one would ever risk using them, or a bloated education industry, where schools are overstuffed with hardware, books, food, lovely facilities, well-paid staff, gardens and support programs?
I mean really, let's talk about choosing between weapons and education, not between underfunded public schools and private schools.
July 10, 2007 7:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've been living in Germany for a while, and the schools seem quite good to me, but you have to know that at the age of eleven, the children are sorted. The academically gifted, I think that is around a quarter of them, go to gymnasium and then almost free university. What determines if they are academically gifted is, apparently, social class. Germany was recently assessed as having the least socially mobile school system in Europe. The second level goes to an advanced trade school which trains engineers and other practical professions, and the the bottom level is reserved for Turks and other immigrants. Germans are shocked that America has so many "do-overs."
July 10, 2007 8:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's great that my brief summary generated so many comments. Some of you asked for further material on this debate, especially material available on line. A lot of articles get posted at the National Center for the Study of the Privatization of Education: http://www.ncspe.org. This is not an advocacy group, so you can see all kinds of articles there, such as Belfield and Levin's review of competition research.
To get Friedman's original argument, which is really worth reading, you have to get his 1960s book, Free to Choose, where it was reproduced.
A lot of the papers supporting vouchers can be found at Paul Peterson's site at Harvard's Kennedy School:.” http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/.
You can find Alan Krueger's devastating critique of Peterson's New York City voucher experiment analysis by going to Google Scholar and scrolling down to about page 3 of his vast production.
And, if you are so inclined, you can order a little book I did for EPI in 2001 that reviews the evidence on U.S. vouchers to that point. It is at www.epinet.org under education publications.
A number of you wrote about the fundamental importance of good teaching to higher student performance. You are right, and even conservative economists agree now that we cannot improve student learning without somehow recruiting a lot more good teachers. But there is a lot of disagreement as how to do that. The bottom line is that it's probably going to cost more money and a new kind of commitment to education for low-income students. This includes the kind of commitment outlined by Rothstein in Class and Schools, as well as more and better public pre-school education.
In many states such as California we have the makings of an education/social crisis because right now about half of the students in K-12 are Hispanics, mostly of Mexican origin, and their four-year college going rate is very low. Sure, we can try to fill the high level jobs by importing our skilled labor, but the result will be a totally polarized society. Potentially big problems down the road, and not much is being done about it.
MCarnoy
July 10, 2007 8:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sure that all the intelligent people in NE- 03 agree with you. (Of course that tells us something about the need to import a few more intelligent people into NE - 03) <grin></grin>
aMike
July 10, 2007 9:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
We can't afford to reinvent the wheel with every new generation. Continuity in the flow of information has to be assured not only horizontally across society but vertically down the generations from older to younger.
In a system as complex as ours it is essential to have redundancy. Thus we don't need just a few engineers, we must have high-level experts in reserve to step in in case of need. We also need a high degree of scientific, literary, artistic and historical understanding among those who may not be directly employed in these fields, but who serve as policy makers and/or support for policy makers.
Thus, as Reece has said, education is a matter of community (government) concern, not simply of individual preference.
July 10, 2007 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I read what you wrote but why not let the people decide what's worth it or not? If parents want to spend more than they get from vouchers, I say: "let them borrow it and take the risk!"
To boldly go...
July 10, 2007 12:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wonder how many of us have ever talked with our parents or our grandparents about their school days? I don't mean the parent-generated kind of thing used for moral lessons: "When I was your way I walked to school, barefoot, in the snow, uphill, both ways." I mean a walk down memory lane. I'm hypothesizing that many, if not most individual parents, given the choice, would choose the kind of school they remembered their own school to be. If they went to public school, they'd choose public school, parochial school--parochial school.
Our society is so much more mobile now than it was sixty years ago when I started first grade--at the same elementary school my father attended. I even had one of the same teachers he did. He taught me the poem his generation used in 5th grade: "Miss Stickel is a pickle and she ain't worth a nickel". Several of my peers knew the poem from their fathers and mothers. WE were allowed to chant this on the school playground, but heaven help anyone in Mrs. Green's fifth grade class who dared badmouth OUR teacher. I can remember something about every teacher from kindergarten up, and 90% of the memories are pleasant. I wonder if I'm excessively strange in that? It probably explains why I decided I wanted to teach, oh, sometime around 2nd grade, when I had Miss McLaughlin.
aMike
July 10, 2007 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
the thing I haven't seen mentioned is the daily student to teacher ratio.
if a teacher has 5 classes of 40 students, then he/she has to deal with the problems and issues of 200 students.
universities have larger classes because they hire assistants. and over 50% of those who go to college, drop out without a degree.
I didn't go into teaching because I found it silly to believe that I could honestly guide, direct and teach 180 to 200 students a day.
To boldly go...
July 10, 2007 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think your strange in this at all. And I think the point you bring up about mobility is a dynamic aspect to our nations education system today that should be considered more.
You see I also have mostly fond memories of my very small and rural education. There was no Kindergarten when I was of age, they had a summer Head Start program (which I also have fond memories of). My grade school was very small and I and about 6 other students in my classes were in what they called the "Blue Group". We were advanced and worked on daily assignments pulled from - you guessed it - a blue box. The teacher taught the rest of the class around us as we worked away individually (thought we could always ask the teacher for assistance if needed). Not ideal certainly but we were small school district and that's all we had. And I too had several teachers throughout gr