But only in the public sector, it seems. Does that strike you as plausible?

“Consider the biology curriculum, for example. Should their children be captive to their parents’ decision to value religious indoctrination above science education.”

I doubt that this would be a serious concern (it doesn’t seem to be in the sector where parents currently get to choose) , but there is no reason that voucher schools should not be required to teach a basic curriculum to avoid this sort of problem.

One answer may be to free the schools and let parents and pupils be the arbiters of quality, as they ar efor the private sector.

Potentially self-interested and fallible professionals vs. potentially ideological and fallible amateurs – pick your poison.

I meant radically or dramatically improve education.

Vouchers won’t radically improve eductaion.

Vouchers will deliver happier families and slightly better or maybe the same results for less cost.

So they can make sure their kids don’t go to school with Those People, which is why you’re hoping they’ll vote for vouchers. Silly rabbit!

Absent massive cultural shift there is no magic bullet that will improve education.

Well, that’s your brilliant monocausal voucher idea fucked then isn’t it?

Anyway, part of the reason I am such an enthusiast for DI is that even rich, well-educated parents who breastfed and serve fruit and veges religiously sometimes have kids who are, to be blunt, dumb, be this by genetic bad luck, or by an accident causing brain damage, or etc. And, while society may be able to eliminate poverty, I think it’s very unlikely to ever be able to eliminate the chance of kids slipping on a rock and bashing their heads, causing brain damage. The research on DI indicates that low-IQ kids can be taught effectively by DI, not just low-SES kids (though there is often overlap between the two categories). So, since it seems likely that we will always have some kids with mental problems, DI or similarly-effective programmes strike me as the way to go, independently of any societal interventions.

The results on SAT scores are interesting, and perhaps this means that in the USA the elite schools are worth their parents’ money in more ways than the two I listed. Though I am now curious as to how the kids from those elite schools managed at the college relative to kids from other types of schools. I vaguely recall a NZ study that found that, controlling for students’ bursary grades, private school students did worse at university than public school students, though sadly this was published before the WWW was commonly used and I can’t find it online. I did find a similar result for UK schools, or at least that the higher the school fee, the worse the students on average did at university (I’m not sure if in the UK the connection is the more expensive the school, the more elite it is).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2552523.stm

I think we actually agree. Merely plopping poor kids from a low performing school into a rich-kid, better-performing school will not change much. Put differently, the kids are in poor schools because they are poor. I was saying: make them rich. If they were wealthier, the school would be better, because if they were wealthier it would probably mean that their parents were better educated, more engaged in the school, and had more time to help with homework (or encourage doing it). For example, one feature an ex-neighbor sought in his new home was an office for a large desk so his children could do their home-work next to him while he worked on legal briefs. In the MPS voucher study, parents who were more involved were more likely to apply for the voucher program slots.

The 2007 CEP study found that, in predicting subject-matter achievement tests, socio-economic status and parental involvement were the driving factors, and only Catholic schools run by holy orders (e.g., a Jesuit school) had any statistically significant effect on improving scores. Other Catholic, other religious, public of all stripes, and secular private schools did no better or worse in student achievement measures.

But secular private schools —the expensive, exclusive ones—did have a strong independent effect on boosting SAT scores (this was controlling for other factors). So these students were better able to get access to better (more prestigious) colleges, and this is how most parents judge the value of a school.

Re: why voucher programs will not proliferate:
Starting and maintaining a small school with low tuition is very hard work. Teachers will not continue to work for low pay and reduced benefits forever. This is essentially the model used by Catholic schools, but they had the advantage of starting with unpaid labor of nuns and priests. Many of those same urban Catholic schools are in dire straits now that they have to rely on paid teachers. The failure rate for both small start-up private schools and charter schools is very high. Even if voucher programs create a big enough demand, the supply size is finite. This is why I have no worries that voucher programs will ever replace public schools, and why I think it’s fine to leave them in place if it makes the parents happy.

“Policy empty calories. A conservative who talks vouchers is someone who hasn’t thought the problem through.”

Really? In what way?

As a conservative I think that –
Absent massive cultural shift there is no magic bullet that will improve education.

I would think that would be a classic conservtiave assumption.

As a conservative I am dubious that the government can bring about any massive cultural shift.
I am actually a pretty weak conservative since I am merely very skeptical but I don’t rule it out.

Again I think that is a classic conservative assumption.

Vouchers slightly improve performance and increase happiness at a lower cost.

Pretty much what any conservative with any faith in markets would expect the increased choice and competition would have some positive impact on performance.

I would think conservatives would feel we spend too much on eductaion and get very little or no improvement for all that extra money. Since parents and not teachers are what really matters in educational outcome.

Based on all that I would think that a conservative thinking the issue thru would feel that vouchers providing slightly better performance and increases happiness at a lower cost are about as good as we can get.

Please tell me where I went wrong.

I’d probably agree that these are the only voucher programs that are currently politically feasible; in my view, though, the president’s powers on education have much more to do with changing what is feasible than with directly changing what happens.

To me, the key feature of vouchers is selection and sorting; if schools can’t select their student population, the program is missing the point. I’d rather strongly prefer a voucher that can be topped up, but that is not as critical to me as student selection. (If there is no income limit, and the voucher can be topped up, then it becomes a straight subsidy at the high end; all the current programs, if I remember correctly, have income limits.)

This is interesting – can you provide some links to the relevant studies?

but the question is how to do this?

Ah, now you have triggered my obsession. :) There are some curriculae that have been shown to substantially improve the educational performance of kids from low-SES background (and indeed every background). The most validated one I know of is called Direct Instruction, and basically consists of a curriculum that presents material in ways designed to minimise the possibilities for kids to learn misrules, and to maximise the probability of mastery for every stage, by the inclusion of lots of distributed practice of what has been taught. Kids are tested on entering the school for background knowledge, and placed in small groups for maths and reading lessons based on that knowledge. So a kid who starts school already knowing their alphabet is placed in a later lesson than the kid who starts school not knowing anything. A kid can be placed at one point in the lesson sequence for maths and a completely different one for reading based on prior knowledge. Kids’ placements are often reviewed, so the kid who has never encountered the alphabet before may wind up surpassing the kid who already knew it if the first kid is a faster learner. Kids who miss a significant chunk of school, say due to illness, are not expected to have magically acquired the knowledge of the students in the group they were a part of, but are placed back to the lesson from wherever they left the lesson sequence. The teacher spends the time devoted to the DI lessons working in turn with the kids in small groups who are at the same lesson in the sequence while an aide surpervises the rest of the class doing independent work, though in one school it was implemented in there was no money for aides so every adult in the school was roped in to do the reading lessons first thing in the morning. Direct Instruction was part of a big educational experiment in the USA - Project Followthrough – designed to figure out how to effectively teach kids from poor backgrounds. The research results are summarised here:
http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm

If you ask a teacher who is actually teaching (rather than one who has moved out and into a policy or academic role) he or she will almost always tell you that the first thing that they need is greater autonomy, freedom from the endless stream of ineffective government policy initiatives.

This theory has been tried, and found not to work as part of Project Followthrough. There were 15 self-sponsered sites, they did badly. Of course there are some teachers who do do great things if given the freedom to teach, but the evidence is that most teachers don’t know how to teach effectively more than administrators do so giving those teachers more autonomy wouldn’t improve matters. It looks like effectively teaching kids from low-SES backgrounds is very hard, it’s not surprising that teachers don’t magically know how to do it. http://d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/2007/02/teacher-autonomy.html

One answer may be to free the schools and let parents and pupils be the arbiters of quality, as they ar efor the private sector.

I think the ability to get your kid out of a given school is very valuable, especially given the misery caused by bullying. Perhaps voucher programmes will lead to greater improvements over time too, as schools and parents get better at figuring out what works. Just the evidence for them at the moment doesn’t strike me as massively impressive.

But they should allow for a lot of experimentation and the release of teachers’ energies into teaching rather than serving successive governments’ social agendas,

What’s the point of public funding of education, if not to serve a social agenda? It’s the goverment that’s democratically-elected, not the teachers.

You must mean for the United States, becaue this is evidently not true elsewhere. I don’t know wnough about the US to coment, but I would be interested to find out. Presumably education policy is a state rather than a federal matter, isn’t it? What is to prevent a state instituting a comprehensive voucher policy? Why is it so unserious?

I would be interested in seeing much more adventurous versions of the scheme., or at least hearing some debate about them. Why should the voucher be held by the parent, at least after the age of, say 15?

In the UK elite schools outscore state schools (even selective ones) on just about every criteria on which they are assessed (including added value), but I can’t see how you can completely acount for the social effect of being among the rich.

As for the second point, I would agree that improving the quality of education in ‘ordinary’ school should be the priority (who wouldn’t?), but the question is how to do this? If you ask a teacher who is actually teaching (rather than one who has moved out and into a policy or academic role) he or she will almost always tell you that the first thing that they need is greater autonomy, freedom from the endless stream of ineffective government policy initiatives. But government is too anxious about quality control and the poitical blowback of failing schools.

One answer may be to free the schools and let parents and pupils be the arbiters of quality, as they ar efor the private sector. That is the theory anyway. Vouchers are the suggested mechanism. They won’t get rid of every bad school, of course, and there will be losers as well as winners. But they should allow for a lot of experimentation and the release of teachers’ energies into teaching rather than serving successive governments’ social agendas, if they are not hamstrung from the start by excessive restrictions on curricula etc.

But, Harry, doesn’t this leave out the important gains in parental and pupil happiness or satisfaction? I don’t know about Milwaukee but this was a significant gain in Sweden, especially among immigrant communities, and there is ample evidence that more happiness and less stress can have a significant effect on life chances.

Were there similar gains in Milwaukee? If so, it would seem to support voucher schemes even if only as a ‘band aid’ policy, that they marginally improve performance and significantly increase happiness.