Tag Archive for 'school choice'

The End of Education Reform

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 21, 2009 in No category. 11 Comments

A remarkable speech by Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute is all the more remarkable for the lack of chatter it has generated in the edusphere.  Titled “Is It Time to Throw in the Towel on Education Reform?” the September 9 speech at Rice University notes a broad consensus on education reform that has existed for better than two decades is coming apart at the seams.  “The overriding goal of that consensus was to boost America’s academic achievement at the K-12 level,” Finn notes, and it gave rise to “a tsunami of standards-based reform.”

He cites several major developments contributing to the fraying of that consensus.  Among them: unhappiness with NCLB and a palpable backlash against testing that “goes to the heart of standards-based reform.”  On school choice, he points out, far too many charters and schools of choice have been “disappointingly mediocre.”  Then there are the results of the reform era:

Despite all the reforming, U.S. scores have remained essentially flat, graduation rates have remained essentially flat, and our international rankings have remained essentially flat. You can find some upward blips but you can also find downward blips. Big picture, over 25 years, is flat, flat, flat. In other words, all the reforming has yielded little or nothing by way of stronger outcomes.

Finn also cites “principled critiques by serious people” as another crack in the ed reform wall:

E.D. Hirsch’s new book may be its most cogent example, at least until Diane Ravitch’s next book emerges—of both standards-based reform and school choice on grounds that these structural changes neglect crucial issues of content and pedagogy—neglect what actually goes on in classrooms between teacher and learner—while narrowing the curriculum and weakening the common culture. 

 Has the reform consensus “outlived its usefulness?”  Finn compares American education to the situation the nation found itself in when the Articles of Confederation proved insufficient to the needs of the new nation.  “We may be at a similar stage with regard to our public-education system,” he notes. “Further tugging and kicking at it from the banks of the Potomac is not going to modernize it.”

I’m suggesting to you that American education today resembles America itself in 1785. The old arrangement isn’t working well enough and probably cannot be made to. A new constitution is needed. It’s in that sense that we should throw in the towel on education reform and think instead about reinvention.

 Checker briefly lists his ideas for “essential ingredients” of this new constitution including national standards and measures; portable statewide “weighted-student” financing; and the replacement of traditional school districts “with an array of virtual systems and regional or national operators (some of them technology-based).”

Close Only Counts in Horseshoes…and School Choice?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 14, 2009 in Education Theory, Parents and Research and Reports. 12 Comments

Why do parents enroll children in underperforming schools when there appear to be better choices nearby?   For some, transportation may be a dealbreaker,  according to a new survey by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education posted by EdWeek’s Debra Viadero:

The results suggest that transportation is especially challenging for low-income families, 45 percent of whom do not own cars, or who own vehicles that are unreliable. According to the survey, one third of those families said they did not enroll their child in the school they preferred due to transportation difficulties.

Dan Willingham recently unpacked one of the paradoxes surrounding school choice over at Britannica Blog with his patented cog sci spin.  In particular, he takes issue with the argument that choice will improve the overall quality of education, since parents would not knowingly send their kids to “bad” schools.   Yet they do it all the time.   “Why should we expect people to make rational decisions about their child’s schooling,” Willingham notes, “when they don’t make rational decisions in other complex arenas?”

I can imagine an advocate saying ‘But the real point is that it’s the parent’s choice. If they want to send their kid to a mediocre school because it’s close to the home, that’s their business.’ Fair enough, but that is a different argument. We are no longer debating whether choice will improve schools but about philosophy of governance. What happens if parents do not make sensible educational choices for their children?  We don’t let parents choose not to educate their children—there are truancy laws. Should society intervene if parents send their child to a school that the parents ought to know is terrible? And are we, as a society, going to allow people to make poor choices for which there is a collective cost? Perhaps this is the educational equivalent of letting people choose to drive without wearing a seatbelt.

When I taught in the South Bronx, I routinely (and quietly) encouraged dozens of families to enter their children in the lottery for the KIPP school less than a half a mile away, but few ever did.  Meanwhile, the massive and dangerous middle school across the street was the top choice of students leaving my school.   Granted, there were three basic flavors of middle school in the neighborhood : bad, worse, and abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here   Still, to Willingham’s point, a disproportionate number made what I perceived to be the worst possible choice.  The one thing it had going for it was proximity.

Update: Jay Greene wanders into the fray at his blog and in the comments below.

Good For Me, But Not For Thee

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 20, 2009 in Educational Policy. 7 Comments

A new survey by the conservative Heritage Foundation reveals 44 percent of Senators and 36 percent of Representatives sent their children to private school.  In addition, 20 percent of all House and Senate members attended private school themselves.  And it’s a bipartisan practice.

Private-school choice is a popular among both congressional Republicans and Democrats. Thirty-eight percent of House Republicans and 34 percent of House Democrats have ever sent their children to private school. In the Senate, 53 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of Democrats have exercised private-school choice for their children. Thirty five percent of Congressional Black Caucus Members have sent a child to private school. Only 6 percent of black students overall attend private school.

 In case you’ve forgotten why this matters, the editorial page editors of the Washington Post remind you.

First Vouchers, Then Charters?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 16, 2009 in Educational Policy. 16 Comments

Jay Greene invokes Neville Chamberlain in a WSJ op-ed this morning, calling out school choice proponents who in his view, have tried to appease teachers unions by supporting charter schools but not vouchers.  “On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs,” Jay writes.  “They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.”

But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. With voucher programs facing termination in Washington, D.C., and heavy regulation in Milwaukee, the teachers unions have now set their sights on charter schools. Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.

“Vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire,” Greene concludes. “But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble.”

Stealing Education

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 19, 2009 in Education News. 1 Comment

Yolanda Hill, a mother in Rochester, NY has been jailed on felony larceny charges for lying about where she lived in order to “steal education” for her five children, according to the local paper.

Hill, 33 — known to the Greece Central School District as Yolanda Miranda — was charged earlier this week with two felonies after a months-long investigation by the Greece Central School District into where her children live.  The school investigator determined her children were being dropped off each morning at their grandmother’s house on Harmony Drive solely for the purpose of having them attend Greece schools, then returning each night to Hill’s home on Morrill Street in Rochester. The case was then turned over to Greece police.

Eduwonk suggests Hill is a potential poster child for school choice; DFER’s Joe Williams is already there.

The nerve! People like Hill are ruining public education. Instead of finding good schools for her kids, she should send them to bad Rochester schools and then run for a community education council or something, where over the course of the next 50-years she can fight to improve them in time for her great grandkids.

“It would be interesting if someone asked Gov. David Paterson how he feels about the issue of throwing parents into jail for sending their kids to the wrong public schools,” Williams writes. 

Interesting case.  The legal issues as well as the resource issues for the complaining school district are clear and obvious.  The moral question is stickier.  How many of us in Hill’s shoes wouldn’t do the same for our kids?

Update:  Kevin Carey, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog, looks at this through the lens of parental involvement.  “If you’re a single parent who didn’t get a very good education when you were in school…the best way to be parentally involved isn’t to spend three hours a night helping with homework or bake cupcakes for the PTA but to get your children into a good school, a school that has the resources and staff to give your children what you can’t,” he writes, adding he’s ”baffled by how many self-identified “progressives” are indifferent or outright hostile to charter schools, most of which are specifically built to give parents like Yolanda Smith more choices within their districts so they don’t end up with a private investigator hiding in the bushes outside their house. ”

A commenter say Carey doesn’t get it.  “Smith was taking advantage of a public service for which she was paying absolutely no taxes. Maybe if she cared deeply for the quality of Greece’s school system, she could have lived with her mother and chosen an above-board means to enroll her kids in its schools—one that didn’t involve fraud. Maybe the best way to be ‘parentally involved’ in your children’s education is not to teach them that jacking the system and lying is okay.”

Election Winners and Losers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 26, 2008 in Educational Policy. 2 Comments

If you favor school choice and charters, then Kentucky, Oklahoma and Tennessee get the highest marks for “improvements shown” based on the results of this month’s state and federal elections, according to the Washington, DC-based Center for Education Reform.  In Ohio and Wisconsin, things have taken the biggest turn for the worse, based on a state-by-state analysis on CER’s website. 

While it’s still too early to assess completely how recent election results will affect the rise (or fall) of a broad array of school choice programs,” notes CER founder and president Jeanne Allen. “A few states did have significant changes that might provide a glimpse of what is to come.”

In Kentucky, one of ten states without a charter school law, “a bi-partisan coalition of reformers with strong support from minority communities stands ready to propose educational choice,” says Allen.  Oklahoma, meanwhile, has a “weak and ineffective charter law” that has actually been under attack.  “But with the legislature now squarely in the hands of reform-friendly Republicans and a new superintendent race in two years, which may be won by the parent activist who first brought charters to the Sooner State, we anticipate much activity to grow opportunity for kids,” she writes. 

Finally, we are so thrilled that the planets seem to have aligned in Tennessee where the leadership knows and appreciates the need for in-depth changes to that state’s charter law, stymied by onerous requirements that prevent most kids from being able to avail themselves of better schools outside of a few pockets of hope.

In Ohio and Wisconsin, on the other hand, CER thinks shifts to Democratic rule in state Houses of Representatives “will send the champions of choice in these two states into the minority.  These two states have Governors who have pushed to obliterate the path-breaking choices that children in those states enjoy – and are the only two that offer both charters and more ecumenical choices through vouchers.”

Obama Girls to Attend Sidwell Friends

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 21, 2008 in Education News. 1 Comment

A spokesperson for the family confirms future First Daughters Sasha and Malia Obama will enroll at Sidwell Friends School, the Washington, DC private school where Chelsea Clinton also matriculated.  So this means President-elect Obama will back school choice initiatives in Washington, right?

Other People’s Children

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 1, 2008 in Education Leadership. 3 Comments

“From liberals like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to conservatives like George H.W. Bush and John McCain, our political landscape is full of people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk,” notes the WorldWide Education Blog.  “They oversee budgets, funding, and legislation, but they don’t deem public schools suitable for their own children…just yours.”

Earl Butz, the Nixon-Ford era cabinet member remembered mostly for his mouth, famously got himself in hot water with his quip about the Pope’s stance on contraception, “He no play-a da game. He no make-a da rules.”  I’ll just say it might inspire more confidence if more of our top elected officials played the game.  Or had the courage of their convictions.

Obama Trumps McCain Among Ed Voters

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 21, 2008 in Education News. 1 Comment

Democratic standard-bearer Barack Obama is widely perceived to be stronger than GOP nominee John McCain on education issues, according to a new poll.  Asked which candidate they would support “if you were voting solely on the basis of a desire to strengthen public schools,” 46% chose Obama to 29% for McCain.  Obama also leads on “promoting parental choice, an issue often perceived to favor Republicans. 

More poll results here.