Just to be clear, and to head off the accusations of partisanship that the previous post invites, I am usually about as willing to think well of sensible Republicans as of sensible Democrats on education policy. Nor do I mean to criticise McCain for supporting choice. The reason I say it indicates he has no ideas is that everyone is pro-choice now (“we are all pro-choice Georgians!” could be Senator McCain’s slogan); the issue is just what kinds of choice. Choice through the housing market, choice within public school districts, magnets, charters, etc… And, as Laura says:
Vouchers aren’t going any where. Anybody who talks about them really has no clue about the realities of the politics of education.
Vouchers are a very small part of the picture and the only people who doubt this are leftists who see vouchers as some sort of cunning plan to privatise the whole of public schooling. In the next decade, even if McCain were to become President, we might possibly see the emergence of 5 new voucher programs (but I doubt it would be that many, frankly). For readers who care about my own views, not only am I an unenthusiastic supporter of several voucher programs, I’ve even written a whole book expressing my support for school choice (despite the complaint of one prominent academic reviewer I shan’t name, who presumably didn’t bother to beyond the first couple of pages, that I oppose it). Vouchers are a band aid, and I don’t mean that as an insult; I use band aids myself, they’re handy when you have a small cut, and are better than nothing when you have something more serious. But they are only a band aid, and that is the sensible thing to say about them. In policy environments where more comprehensive interventions are not going to happen (Milwaukee in the early 90s, DC in the mid 2000s), sure, go ahead, give vouchers a try (and design the programs so that we can actually study them and figure out what the effects are). But understand that vouchers are at the margins of urban schooling, let alone of the larger policy environment, and talking about them as if they were something else displayed McCain’s lack of interest in education.
Still, I can’t resist correcting McCain on two points.
The first, which he may well not know is false is “I’ve got to tell you that vouchers, where they are requested and where they are agreed to, are a good and workable system. And it’s been proven”. The evidence on existing voucher programs is disputed by reasonable people. However the claim that they are proven to work really gets traction only if you have very low expectations. From the evidence, at best, vouchers have had small achievement benefits for the kids who get to use them; at worst no benefits at all. (See my colleague John Witte’s excellent book, The Market Approach to Education: An Analysis of America’s First Voucher Program.
The second claim he made (in almost the same words as Bob Dole made a similar claim in one of the 1996 debates) is that vouchers in DC give parents the “the same choice that you (Obama) and I and Cindy and your wife have had”.
Um, I doubt it. Schools like Xavier College Preparatory and Brophy College do not participate in the voucher programs that DC and Milwaukee set up, because they charge more than the cost of the voucher, and are unwilling to abide by rules like Milwaukee’s rule that they select by lottery. (An interesting article here, about the McCains’ generous charitable giving). I don’t know where Obama sends his kids to school, but if they are in private schools I would bet that their schools, too, charge much higher tuition than most voucher programs are set at, and would reject the limitations on their ability to select and reject students that usually accompany participation in voucher schemes. Senators McCain and Obama enjoy choices that are never going to be extended to the poorest 25% of Americans, and no amount of saying otherwise will change that.
{ 29 comments }
Thomas 10.21.08 at 5:03 pm
McCain’s rhetoric obviously overstates things, but I think the purpose is to point out that Obama, like Clinton and Gore and Kerry, chooses to send his children to private schools instead of public schools. Obama’s kids go to the UofC’s Lab School. Tuition (for those who have to pay) is close to $20,000. (The Lab School shouldn’t be confused with the charter schools the UofC sponsors in the area, which are open to all. )
Harry 10.21.08 at 5:10 pm
Yes, I realise there is that rhetorical purpose, but to be honest I felt that he fluffed that line rather (Dole did it better in 96). Jesse Jackson jr went to St Albans, I think. Makes me wonder — who was the last Democratic nominee whose children attended public schools?
Harry 10.21.08 at 5:11 pm
Oh, and does Obama have to pay? (not that it makes any difference fundamentally).
Chris S 10.21.08 at 5:54 pm
Amy Cater, daughter of Jimmy, went to public school (at least while he was President). I think she was the first child of a President to go to public school (from either party) since Teddy Roosevelt’s son back in early 20th c.
Dirty Davey 10.21.08 at 6:11 pm
Jenna Bush went to UT-Austin.
SamChevre 10.21.08 at 7:56 pm
Schools like Xavier College Preparatory and Brophy College do not participate in the voucher programs that DC and Milwaukee set up, because they charge more than the cost of the voucher, and are unwilling to abide by rules like Milwaukee’s rule that they select by lottery.
Which means that in my perspective, those “voucher programs” mostly miss the point of vouchers.
Harry 10.21.08 at 8:09 pm
But Sam, those are the only kinds of voucher program that are politically feasible: we can’t force private schools to participate, especially at a loss, and suburban voters and their representatives (Rep and Dem) are not going to support voucher programs that pay $2ok per annum to send urban children to better schools than their own children attend. The (non-Black) Dems are ideologically opposed to vouchers and want them to fail; the non-ideological Republicans are practically opposed to spending decent amounts of money on schooling urban kids. Black heterodox urban Dems and Friedmanite Reps are just too small a coalition to win.
someguy 10.21.08 at 8:20 pm
In Milwaukee for a significantly less money private school kids performed as well as public school kids and their parents where happier.
Last I read the results on overall performance increases do to competition were pending.
Most studies show no or small gains in private vs public student performance and overall performance gains.
So for less money you get slightly better performance and happier families.
Pretty good results.
I am really baffled why you don’t think we could see a significant increase in voucher programs?
Maybe you mean McCain doesn’t plan to do much? Ok. I will take your word.
But Federal education dollars make up what about 8% of education funding? There should be a progressive slant in that aid.
That would pay for a lot of voucher programs. You could target the 10 0r 15 % poorest/worst schools and districts and cap vouchers at 7 or 8% of the student body. That would be a very big program and politically feasible.
Harry 10.21.08 at 8:30 pm
See my response to SamChevre on why we won’t get more. Its a mistake to see Federal dollars as 8% as if that whole 8% could be committed to vouchers. A whole lot of that money is committed to programs that McCain would not, if he won, have the will, the concentration, or the imagination to close down. The choice movement has moved on; no-one is talking about vouchers.
You’re right that the Milwaukee program seems to cost less and get similar results. Since 1998 we have not been able directly to observe performance, though, and that includes just about all the high school years. There is an issue, too, about how much of the infrastructure the private schools depend on that is counted in the cost of the public schools.
Thomas 10.21.08 at 8:50 pm
Does Obama have to pay? I don’t know. My understanding is that children of faculty attend for free, but I’m not sure whether the position that Obama is on leave from qualifies. Also not sure whether Ms. Obama’s position with the university would provide such a benefit–I tend to doubt it, since what makes the Lab School desirable is precisely that the children of professors are overrepresented, and children of staff aren’t helpful.
On the politics: Non-ideological Republicans are typically very much in favor of spending loads of money on education, including on inner city education. What they don’t want to do is do anything that upsets the current arrangement, which benefits their constituents.
someguy 10.21.08 at 9:32 pm
I trust you about McCain.
I also now see that I was wrong. I thought a very big chunk of that aid was direct aid.
But it looks like for starters 11.1 billion is directed to disabled children.
But I see 13.3 billion in Title I aid and I am guessing there is more that could be used.
I still think that with a relatively small outlay of new dollars and some cannibalization of existing aid you could get a very big voucher program.
26.6 billion would be pretty big voucher program. Right?
c.l. ball 10.21.08 at 9:35 pm
As someone who attend private schools from 5th grade (age 10) onward, I am always amazed at the cognitive dissonance of people who claim to be believers in free markets and are enamored of universal voucher systems. Vouchers are a subsidy. If we gave out subsidies for the purchase any other product or service, what would be the effect? Increased consumption. But if the supply cannot be increased in lock-step with the increased consumption demand, then there are shortages. But in the magical voucher world, come autumn, new schools sprout from the ground and new classrooms grow from existing schools like Viagrafied mushrooms. And there all staffed by top-notch teachers who materialize from the ether.
The problem is not just that parents cannot afford better schools; the problem is there are too few better schools. Want to help a poor kid from Newark, NJ get a better education — buy his family a home in Summit, NJ (only about $1 million for the median) and he can go to the public school there. Of course, doing that for even only half of Newark’s kids, would mean relocating 23,000 families to Summit, which would quintuple the population.
The idea that voucher plans will make elite education affordable for poor students is absurd. The Milwaukee voucher caps out at about $6,500 per year. University School of Milwaukee, the elite prep school, charges $16,800 for middle-school students. That’s cheap. Tuition at my wife’s alma mater, Brearley, is $32,550… for kindergarten.
vivian 10.22.08 at 1:08 am
The line about Milwaukee made me curious: What has happened in the (other) places where vouchers were tried early on? Have they done nothing, moved on to other policies? Have parents fled the district? Exogenous factors brought influx of cash? Are the people who tried them satisfied?
(Also if we get to request topics for part 3, I suggest other kinds of choice within public school systems. Without the national election hook if that’s less constraining.)
Tracy W 10.22.08 at 8:38 am
Want to help a poor kid from Newark, NJ get a better education— buy his family a home in Summit, NJ (only about $1 million for the median) and he can go to the public school there.
Will, however, he get a better education? Does the public school in Summit, NJ, do any better at educating the poor kids it does have than the public schools in Newark, NJ? The evidence I am aware of is that poor kids attending schools full of rich students has a very minor impact on the poor kids’ performance. See http://d-edreckoning.blogspot.com/2008/03/theory-iv-do-poor-students-perform.html for an analysis of this.
It is entirely plausible that the schools in Summit, NJ, look good because they have good students, not because the school is any better at teaching than the schools in Newark, NJ. Indeed, it’s possible that the schools in Newark, NJ, are better at educating kids from low-SES backgrounds because they have more practice at it.
The idea that voucher plans will make elite education affordable for poor students is absurd. The Milwaukee voucher caps out at about $6,500 per year. University School of Milwaukee, the elite prep school, charges $16,800 for middle-school students. That’s cheap. Tuition at my wife’s alma mater, Brearley, is $32,550… for kindergarten.
As far as I can tell, elite education offers two major advantages over cheaper schools, be they public or Catholic or some other cheap form of private. 1) your kid goes to a school with a lot of the kids of rich people. 2) You have a signal that you can afford to spend a ridiculous amount of money on your kids’ education. (Depending on your family size, this may well be a cheaper status signal than the latest-model fancy sports car). Both advantages of elite education are dependent on most of the population *not* having access to it. It is statistically impossible for every kid in the country to attend a school where most of the student body is the offspring of the relatively-very-rich, and status signals only work if they can’t be cheaply copied. If my suspicisions are right, the price of an elite education will be such that only the rich can afford it, independently of whatever the “true” cost of education is. (With some scholarships offered to satisfy the altruistic impulses of the school’s administration).
I have never seen any convincing evidence that the average elite private school offers significant academic advantages separate from the effect of its student body, and I am inclined to think that if there was such evidence elite schools would be shouting it from the rooftops. (I went to a state single-sex girls high school in NZ, and never saw any evidence at university that the people who had gone to the elite private schools got a better education in terms of the fundamentals than me. I also have a number of anecdotes of failures of elite private schools in teaching students in NZ, but of course the plural of anecdote is not data.)
Unless someone does have some evidence that “elite education” improves educational outcomes independently of the student-body effect, I think the focus of education policy should be on improving the quality of education in ordinary schools.
John Meredith 10.22.08 at 9:07 am
“However the claim that they are proven to work really gets traction only if you have very low expectations. From the evidence, at best, vouchers have had small achievement benefits for the kids who get to use them; at worst no benefits at all. 2
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.
John Meredith 10.22.08 at 9:21 am
“Unless someone does have some evidence that “elite education†improves educational outcomes independently of the student-body effect, I think the focus of education policy should be on improving the quality of education in ordinary schools.”
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.
Alex 10.22.08 at 9:30 am
But then, “vouchers” are an infallible mark of unseriousness. It’s like saying that we could give everyone a pony if we didn’t spend as much on arms, or that of course a citizens’ basic income would fix that, or that really a flat tax is ideal, or that if we could just get rid of our unnatural materialist whatever our environmental problems would be solved, or that we just need this really big database. Policy empty calories. A conservative who talks vouchers is someone who hasn’t thought the problem through.
John Meredith 10.22.08 at 9:53 am
“A conservative who talks vouchers is someone who hasn’t thought the problem through.2
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?
Tracy W 10.22.08 at 10:02 am
John Meredith: 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.
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.
William 10.22.08 at 11:12 am
Its remarkably easy to “achieve” high results if your school screens its students and reserves the right to refuse low-achieving or difficult to educate students.
SamChevre 10.22.08 at 1:07 pm
But Sam, those are the only kinds of voucher program that are politically feasible: we can’t force private schools to participate, especially at a loss, and suburban voters and their representatives (Rep and Dem) are not going to support voucher programs that pay $2ok per annum to send urban children to better schools than their own children attend.
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.)
someguy 10.22.08 at 3:04 pm
Alex,
“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.
kajey 10.22.08 at 3:55 pm
About the Univeristy of Chicago Lab School:
Professors (although probably not part-time adjunct professors) do get a discount to send their kids there, and staff does too (so yes, Michelle’s job would get the discount for them. I suspect it was part of why she started working there in the 1990’s) . It was a decision made by the school in order to increase the diversity of the student body. They gave staff discounts and allowed higher class sizes (in the low 20’s) than are typical of other private schools of that size and selectivity (in the high teens) . Given the location, a huge proporation of the staff at the University of Chicago are African-American. And a quick glance in a Lab School classroom reflects this diversity. It’s one of the few private schools where I would be willing to send my child for this reason (and I’ve worked at Lab and several other comparable schools in Chicago and elsewhere).
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.
c.l. ball 10.22.08 at 9:24 pm
Re Tracey W’s #14
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.
Tracy W 10.23.08 at 8:57 am
c.l. ball – have any studies been done on the effects of making parents wealthier as to whether their kids did better at school, as a result of that wealth? (As opposed to being born to well-educated parents who are engaged in education, situations that in our society tend to result in better incomes anyway.)
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
Alex 10.23.08 at 2:38 pm
Why should the voucher be held by the parent, at least after the age of, say 15?
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?
someguy 10.23.08 at 3:29 pm
Alex,
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.
Chris 10.23.08 at 6:54 pm
Many parents are incompetent or even perverse arbiters of school quality. Consider the biology curriculum, for example. Should their children be captive to their parents’ decision to value religious indoctrination above science education?
Potentially self-interested and fallible professionals vs. potentially ideological and fallible amateurs – pick your poison.
John Meredith 10.24.08 at 10:08 am
“Many parents are incompetent or even perverse arbiters of school quality. ”
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.
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