Oh Chris, also, why are you calling charter schools “private”?

The likely effect (in the opinion of public school defenders) is to subsidize upper- and middle-class school choices, while leaving poor children trapped, along with the most learning-disabled and unruly students no private school wants, in crumbling public schools with even worse financial problems than they already have now (because the voucher funds are deducted from the public schools’ budgets).

Charter schools have little or nothing to do with this whole phenomenon, unless they charge tuition. Although they might provide evidence for the idea that some schools can produce better results without cherrypicking students or having more funding – if they indeed don’t have more funding, and if they don’t cheat on the lottery by excluding learning disabled, disciplinary problem or otherwise undesirable students – comparing one set of government schools to another will not produce evidence for the assertion that non-government-run schools are superior and that’s why funding should be siphoned to them in the process of aiding students’ “escape” from the “failing” public school system.

It might, however, provide evidence that the educational methods in use at the charter school are better than the methods used at the other schools, which could provide a genuine improvement in educational results, rather than voucher snake oil.

A fuller description of the research on DI is available at
http://www2.fhs.usyd.edu.au/bach/staff/kenny/Documents/Developmental%20Psych/Educational%20Psych/Educational%20Issues/5%20-%20Direct%20instruction%20-%20An%20overview%20of%20theory%20and%20practice.pdf

Another study is at http://www.ewu.edu/getset/Academic_Acceleration_G1_TR_2007-1.pdf
http://www.csrq.org/documents/CSRQCenterCombinedReport_Web11-03-06.pdf

A more detailed description of the DI curriculum is available at http://www.specialconnections.ku.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/specconn/main.php?cat=instruction&section=main&subsection=di/reading

Surely we have other things we wish to teach our children beyond elementary reading skills.

Well firstly, DI also does well at teaching elementary maths skills.

Secondly, for the academic subjects, reading skills are fundamental (and they’re very helpful for practical skills too). If we want to prepare kids to be responsible voters and otherwise participate in the political process, elementary reading skills are vital pre-requisites.

Thirdly, the Direct Instruction guys have published a rubric of what an authentic DI program should look like, available at http://zigsite.com/PDFs/rubric.pdf
This rubric looks like a good start for developing curriculum to teach more advanced skills than elementary reading and maths to students who are not well-reached by the traditional curriculum (eg students starting school with a limited vocabulary, students with low IQ, etc). Of course any new curriculum should be field-tested as part of the development process, but a good starting base is important. And it’s hard to see how you could have an effective programme for teaching anything to mentally-disabled students that didn’t follow such rubrics as:
“1 d. The presentation is truthful and not misleading.”
“2 j. If the presentation introduces new vocabulary, the task
should incorporate that vocabulary, or should require the
student to produce responses that incorporate that
vocabulary.”
“3 g. The examples in the set do not have spurious cues or
patterns (such as a pattern of correct responses, yes, no,
yes, no, yes, no).”

It does no good to spend more time qualifying an exception , however large, than to spotlighting the main point itself—especially when the exception still doesn’t negate the larger point. Do you think only people who live in Japan know whats going on there? You don’t have to fly to the surface of the sun to know that it’s hot, MT, so please spare me the lectures.

How much energy can it take to erase some text? You sure put a lot of energy into the next 200 words or so.

“Broad-brush take”? How about “abysmal ignorance”? I live in Japan. In Japan, when rightwing revisionists get their version of WW II into a Ministry-certified history textbook, and the book goes into any kind of circulation, somehow most of the copies get distributed to schools for the mentally retarded, where students struggle at Dick and Jane level of reading and thus never get exposed to the revisionism. And of course, both the controversy and the ultimate fate of the book gets widely reported, and people snicker at both the revisionists and at an Education Ministry that still coddles them too much.

You just don’t know what you’re talking about with this one. Stick to what you know. Make sure you actually know it.

I do think it’s important, though, to emphasize not only accountability but the measure of objective knowledge learned; I’m not referring to standardized testing, but rather appreciation for education basics over and above politically correct, ideological curricula. The leftist illuminati may value teaching kindergartners about tolerance for all sexual orientations, but somehow I think the five year olds just need to get their writing down.

The other day I spoke with a friend, and we both yearned for the return of a more localized teaching venue, rather than gargantuan, prison-facade central schools that bus kids in from all across a county. I think this, in itself, would help in maintaining accountability and redistributing the power to the parents in the community rather than the centralized educational bureaucracy.

LOL. As soon as I typed the bit about the Japanese minister I realized the WWII problem would be brought up, but didn’t have the mental energy to qualify my broad-brush take.

And all you say in your 2nd para. about dealing with the present generation as it is with all the attendant problems, is absolutely true. What I was trying to do, I guess, is say that in a society which already has all the philosophical divides you mention in that same 2nd para, why should we (or any other country) additionally burden ourselves by allowing unfettered immigration of people whose background is so anthetical to everything our culture believes in? (in grosso mondo) And in numbers that mitigate against the necessity of assimilation? And these problems of immigration as they impinge of education are indeed in the here and now—and increasing in intensity with each passing day. And these problems really speak to what the very essence of our cultural/historical identity should be, and thus to what is taught in the schools. Which is why I am also so disturbed that someone like William Ayers has such a position of influence at the national level over school curriculum content and approach through his membership as head of a key committee that oversees such things in one of the more influencial national educational institutions.

As for the better arguments for charter vouchers, Caroline Hoxby has done a lot of work on them, a report written by her and Sonali Murarka is available at http://www.nber.org/~schools/charterschoolseval/. The New York school system uses random lotteries to assign children to charter schools, thus getting around the concerns about selection that you quote. This sort of research is why I am so skeptical about your claims that there are people out there ignoring selection effects in their arguments for vouchers – why do so when there is research that takes this into account and still shows a positive benefit from charters?

Personally I find the evidence on charter schools disappointing, while there many have been gains, they are not substantial. (Also, evidence that private schools offer a better education on average than state schools, once you control for student effects, is rather minimal). It’s possible that more gains will occur in the future, but at the moment I’m skeptical. I still favour school choice, but mostly on the basis that the ability to get a kid away from a school that is bad for that kid is very valuable in and of itself – kids have committed suicide over bullying.

I have cited evidence that Direct Instruction is effective with a wide range of low-income students from a large study utilising control groups, and a variety of other curriculum interventions, at teaching reading, writing and mathematics. Can you please cite similar research for Montessori, Waldorf? If there is no such similar evidence then they are not comparable.

And as for the wrong things being addressed – how is it wrong to teach kids how to read and write English, and to do basic maths? Yes, there are different schools of thought about what schools should teach, but reading, writing, and arithmetic strike me as fundamentals that everyone favours. (Leaving aside a lot of debate in some places about what languages kids should be taught to read and write in, eg the Welsh language movement).

Finally, the debate between stuffing kids heads with key facts and producing adults who can think for themselves is a false dichotomy. You produce adults who can think for themselves by stuffing students with key facts about whatever you want the adults to be thinking critically about – it’s hard to think for yourself if you don’t have anything to actually think about. See http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/summer07/Crit_Thinking.pdf

If even the objectives of education can’t be agreed upon how do you expect there to be progress in the areas of social engineering that many favor?

I don’t expect there to be such progress. I already have a hope that we can get education systems to adopt the existing proven methods of teaching kids to read and write and do basic maths. I don’t actually expect that this will happen, in the mathematical sense of “expect”, I only hope.

The Minister of Education in Japan may have many things to worry about when he rolls out of bed each morning, but massaging the system to get the correct racial “balance” in each school isn’t one of them—nor is deciding “which” or “whose” history to teach

The Ainu would beg to differ, I think. Nobody’s history is that simple. Although there certainly is a difference, it’s one of degree. (And what are you going to teach about WWII? How much do you discuss Japanese actions – which some call atrocities – in China? What about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and its effects on the overall progress of the war? The U.S. use of nuclear weapons: do you condemn it, knowing that the U.S. is a present ally of Japan? Etc… Furthermore, class issues don’t go away in Japan just because they’re not mixed with race issues, although they might at least not have the unfortunate tradition of local funding for schools that makes schools in poor areas poor.)

In any case, if you happen to be a country with high diversity and a more-than-usually speckled past, it’s no good sighing for the simplicity of homogeneity; you might get it in a few centuries of mixing, but in the meantime you have to address the education issues of the present generation. And that may include the fact that a significant fraction of parents and the community are actively hostile to accurate biology curricula, a culture that values athletics highly and is strongly anti-intellectual, periodic attempts to defund the system in the name of lower taxes, or even all three.

@Tracy W: AFAIK, the main “argument” for school vouchers is that private schools are Just Better (usually because of the lack of government “interference”). This is “proven” by the fact that their (carefully selected) students perform better on standardized tests. Failure to control for socioeconomic class and selection bias on the incoming students is handwaved away by pro-voucher advocates and it’s difficult to explain to non-statistician voters in 30 second soundbites. You can probably tell by the scare quotes what I think of such arguments.

If there’s a better argument for vouchers, I haven’t seen it yet.