Vouchers in Milwaukee

On the one hand, Caroline Hoxby is an exceptionally talented and thoughtful economist. On the other, it will be a cold day in hell before she publishes anything that makes voucher choice look bad. Not saying I distrust her…not exactly…but she definitely has her beliefs on these issues and they are strong. She’d never consciously fabricate in any way, but econometrics is actually a rather subjective field, as anyone who has practiced it knows.

I would trust the Mathematica random assignment study on New York City voucher students before hers. These findings were actually not incompatible with hers, but were more mixed.

Also good to remember that the systemic effects of a large scale voucher program can be expected to differ greatly from the local effects of a more limited program. A great deal depends on how funding for the vouchers are designed and how voucher schools are policed. The various hidden agendas behind vouchers makes me believe that the system would not be designed very progressively or regulated very well.

Even if administrative gains are spurred by voucher competition, why would you assume that such a result could be duplicated in a non-competitive environment?

“Lefties often say that the solution to bad schools is to de-couple school funding from local property taxes.”

Yes it is an excellent idea. It is also the way it has been in most of the larger states for more than a decade. It hasn’t helped California much (to speak of the state in which I have the most experience.)

In the UK, one effect of vastly improved school choice is that tax-payers are funding schools that teach creationism.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,668840,00.html

Ray wrote:

“In the UK, one effect of vastly improved school choice is that tax-payers are funding schools that teach creationism.”

Thanks for the link. This sentence caught my eye:

“The trouble for critics of Emmanuel College is that it is one of the highest-performing state schools in the country, consistently coming near the top of GCSE and A-level league tables (in science subjects as well as others) despite the relative poverty of many of its pupils.”

Comments?

sd, you misinterpret completely the thrust of my post (or I misinterpret completely the thrust of your comment). Saying that argument A is the best argument for position P is not the same as endorsing it. The compromise you offer isn’t even a compromise to me — if I thought it would have the right outcomes and that there were no better feasible alternatives I’d support it without feeling that I was compromising on anything. I’m pretty close to thinking that, in fact, and have no problems in principle with state funding of religious schools. What you propose is many times better (from an egalitarian perspective) than what the US has currently. This is why, as Laura says, choice is not a neat left/right issue, and why wealthy conservative voters, especially if they use suburban public schools, oppose choice. (They don’t completely oppose choice of course, because they strongly support neighbourhood schooling, which gives them choice, but denies it to the least advantaged). Over the past 15 years Gallup shows consitently that in the US black, low income, voters support choice and vouchers, and white, wealthy, voters oppose them. Similarly with choice in general.

BUT, mq is absolutely right that ‘A great deal depends on how funding for the vouchers are designed and how voucher schools are policed’. Not, in fact, a great deal, but everything. And Daniel is right, because of what mq says, that choice in Britain has not made much difference. The UK choice scheme is not designed to benefit the least advantaged — the benefits to the least advantaged within the system are a hold-over from the previous regime and not associated with choice. Some people (me, and people not distantly related to me) argue that schools should no longer be allowed to select students and/or that low income children should bring with them 3 times the funding that middle-high income children bring, at least in places like London where the admissions regime is highly inegalitarian.

I think the jury is out on mq’s conjecture that
bq. The various hidden agendas behind vouchers makes me believe that the system would not be designed very progressively or regulated very well.

In fact I think there’s a tendency for vouchers to be more progressively designed, at least, than other, less controversial, choice mechanisms. Inter-district choice (so called ‘open enrollment’) is often highly inegalitarian because it usually gives preferecne to in-district students, and is only used by already-advantaged out-of-district students. Charters are extremely variable in how inegalitarian their effects are. Because vouchers are so obviously threatening to the principle of public schooling as we know it and the agendas of interested parties, it is easier for liberal legislators to amend them in an egalitarian direction. And because they are being used by Republicans as a wedge issue to attract black voters, the Republicans who trumpet them have an incentive to design them for the benefit of low-income and especially blac children. I think, though, this is something on which reasonable leftists disagree. But I would say that, wouldn’t I, as I have the dissenting view.
One more thing: no-one, but no-one should expect any school reform idea to be the solution to all the problems in the schools (including the dramatically increased funding that liberals like to call for). Even the best school reform is tinkering at the margins. Eliminating child-poverty, now that would make a big difference.

Ray wrote:

In the UK, one effect of vastly improved school choice is that tax-payers are funding schools that teach creationism.

Personally, I think that creationism is a lot of rot but no more so than most of the environmentalist, multi-cultural, and feminist nonsense that has been introduced into the government schools by many of the people who get apoplectic over creationism and school prayers. IMNHO the solution is to leave as much of the decision making about these issues to parents and local school authorities as possible rather than risking a one-size fits all system imposed by a central/national authority. Better that some schools experiment and risk getting it wrong (or getting it right and improve things) at the behest of the people most interested in their children’s welfare (parents) then some educrat try to experiment with the whole system and screw it up for everyone.

Sadly, too many parents aren’t that interested in their children’s welfare. And some aren’t very good judges of what’s best for their children – they want their children to be taught ‘the truth’, but they don’t know what the truth is.
The purpose of public education is to protect children from the ignorance or negligence of their parents.

rv.agnos, Do I not count as a liberal? (I’m willing not to — I think of myself as a left-wing social-democrat, but always thought that in America liberal was just a term that covered everyone to the left of center).

To repeat, all school systems involve choice. They differ in who they give it to, and how much they give. The US neighbourhood schooling system gives it to the wealthy. That’s why they like it. It doesn’t give it to the poor. My view is that everyone should have it (my view is also that we should get rid of poverty, so I’d be happy to restrict it to the non-poor if there were no poor). In such a system the rich would have less choice than they currently have. I see no problem with this, as long as regulations are in place to prevent schools from exercising choice, and to ensure that the advantaged do not crowd the disadvantaged out of desirable schools. And I regard the existing system of savagely unequally funded neighbourhood schooling as one that guarantees to the advantaged the abaility to crowd the disadvantaged out of desirable schools.

harry, you certainly qualify as a “liberal,” although you don’t have a vote in Congress. The implication I got from your comment, though, especially, “‘A great deal depends on how funding for the vouchers are designed and how voucher schools are policed’. Not, in fact, a great deal, but everything.” was that vouchers may be supported when imposed under ideal conditions, if they are not done perfectly they are worthless, so we should take this study with a grain of salt. My approach is that vouchers/choice are intuitively valuable, and would want to see evidence against it.

A few months ago, Congress approved a school choice program in Washington, D.C. It was a small pilot program, and used new appropriations (not money taken from the public schools), and was aimed only at children attending failing schools.

It passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 205-203 with only 4 Democrats voting for it — Harold E. Ford Jr. of Tennessee, Ralph M. Hall of Texas, William O. Lipinski of Illinois and Gene Taylor of Mississippi (and 11 Republicans voting against it).

After it passed, Eleanor Holmes Norton (non-voting Rep. from D.C.) offered an amendment to reduce appropriations to D.C. by enough money to leave the program unfunded. It failed to pass following a tie vote. (203-203).

The hatred of vouchers by Democrats is visceral (Holmes Norton thinks it is better her District have no money, than it have money that will be used to take poor kids out of failing public schools!) and there is less dissent among elected leaders than you imply, although there is certainly dissent among the electorate.

rv: Yes, I realise that liberal legislators are more unified on this than I suggested (though, as I said above, much more lax about other, more inegalitarian, versions of choice). Though Laura’s example is good, and the same was, of course, true in Wisconsin when the Milwaukee scheme was passed. What you failed to add was that numerous of the people who voted against the DC program send or sent their own children to very expensive elite private schools. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My point was that voters are not with them on this, as the Republican advocates of choice know.

I’m sorry you interpreted my comment as meaning that ‘vouchers may be supported when imposed under ideal conditions, if they are not done perfectly they are worthless’. I don’t think that. What I should have added is that the specific design of voucher schemes and alternatives to them, including the status quo, matter. So, a badly designed voucher scheme is worse than a well-designed status quo. A flawed voucher scheme is better than a very flawed status quo. Etc. My point was directed at a certain kind of voucher supporter who just thinks they are always good, and is not interested in the details. I spend most of my time discussing this issue with people who, equally wrongly, think they are always bad, no matter the details. But in the UK (where I direct a gfair bit of my attention) there is a growing band of ‘voucher’ supporters who invoke the Milwaukee scheme in support of what would, in effect, be a subsidy for wealthy people to send their kids to the elite schools they already afford. No sensivity at all to details.

I agree with Laura about the disappointing nature of the evaluation debate (though would speak up for John Witte’s excellent and non-partisan book on Milwaukee). But, trained as a philospher not a social-scientist, I love reading these detailed evaluations despite that… I hadn’t noticed the withdrawal from vouchers, Laura, but now you mention it it kind of hits me in the eye. Interesting.

Harry,

“Some people (me, and people not distantly related to me) argue that schools should no longer be allowed to select students”

All schools, or just taxpayer funded ones? What about criminal students?

“The US neighbourhood schooling system gives it to the wealthy.”

I can’t make out what you are saying here; does the “neighborhood schooling system” just mean that particular neighborhoods go to particular schools, so the wealthy can just buy their way into any neighborhood and school they want? Do you mean that the funding for a school comes from the neighborhood, so wealthy neighborhoods have better schools?Or do you mean something different?

you comments about the research’s author is interesting. I live in DC which is going though its own voucher debate, and I interviewed for an apartment with someone close to the issues, both locally and nationally. She said that she was hoping that DC’s program would go through so she could produce the study on it with a colleague of her’ s at some NY university (I can’t remember which one). I remember her saying that she and her colleague was firmly anti voucher and I asked her if she thought that would compromise her research and she said no, but the would never put something out that be considered favorable to vouchers…

I understand Carol Propper at Bristol has a paper coming out on the effects of school choice on performance which show that there has been no attributable difference.

The issue of whether, if vouchers had no inequitable effects they should be supported by the left divides me.
If I thought choice was simply about equal but diverse schools that would be fine. But choice through vouchers is not that.

Educational attainment is dependent not just on school but upon other factors, family and community-related that joined up local services could address. Enhancing pupil mobility would make that more difficult.

Secondly, it’s my old fashioned belief that the service ethos of teachers and heads lends itself much more to collaboration than competition.

Iink here to the Funding Gap 2003 report. It’s pretty scary differentials
http://www2.edtrust.org/edtrust/Product+Catalog/sheets+tools

and P.S. — yes, one should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. Perhaps an only somewhat liberal voucher program could improve on our current system in the worst inner city districts (important point). But could it be held to those districts? And I believe that voucher proponents often overestimate how bad the schools are even in the bad districts — or to be more exact, how much of the poor quality of those schools can be attributed to the very difficult student body that they have to work with, which would be a challenge for any school. Also, a voucher program where the quality of private contract providers was not well policed could very easily be worse than our current system. See some of the charter school scandals if you don’t believe me.

We now have a fair amount of worldwide experience with voucher-type systems. Hard to tell whether they have improved things or not, but it’s difficult to argue that they have produced transformative positive results.

I live in Connecticut, where there are vast divides between schools in the suburbs and schools in the city, in academic achievement, test scores, graduation/drop-out rates, etc.

There are so many social problems (divorce/single parent homes, drug/alcohol abuse, poverty/hunger, crime rates, etc.) that feed into these divides that I doubt simply moving children from the city schools to the much better performing suburban schools will really help these kids achieve more.

Still, something has to be done. Maybe vouchers will help, but I would like to see a well designed plan before I would vote for throwing money into vouchers.