Later Lessons and the Charter School Debate

I was reading this, about to comment, and then I reached the last couple of paragraphs. Charles Murray … being considered seriously. There’s really nothing that you can do to get kicked out of the respectable pundit club, is there?

Well, Charles Murray is well-funded and will continue to make arguments for racial segregation just as he always has. I can’t do anything about that. Since you’re lower on the food chain, though, I can at least refuse to take your article seriously and probably give you at least a moment of annoyance.

hix:
I think Canada is a person in this case. Am I right Harry?

“But the purposes of public intervention in education are multiple, and fairness of this kind between parents is subordinate to achieving fairness between children.”

But “fairness of this kind between parents” is casually related to “fairness between children.” Put it another way, if you can have fairness between people who are raising the children, and you can have, majority of the time, fairness between the children as long as the parents are reasonably attentive.

The two, for the most part, are the one and same thing. There is no distinction, at least no distinction that is worth making. Even the most effective public coercion cannot make inattentive parents diligent and dutiful.

Your argument for distinction will have very purchase among the American public.

many affluent opponents of choice are hypocritical, either sending their own children to expensive private schools, or using choice in the housing market to secure their children a place in a desired school

I’m not sure that this is hypocrisy. I am one of those knee-jerkers who has never voted against a school budget, who want to fund the Pentagon by bake sales, etc. Because that day had not yet arrived while my kids were of school age, it was my responsibility to make sure that they were attending a well functioning school, etc. Their first school was a majority black and poor school in a middle class district that worked quite well. I didn’t think that the district funded it adequately in light of its needs, and, along with other parents from around the district, frequently (if not regularly) attended school board meetings to press for better funding.

Since then, we’ve moved twice, following jobs, and on each move, chose housing that was in a school district that we thought suited our kids. Not hypocritical, but recognizing my responsibilities.

Now that they are grown, my wife and I still support more spending on the local schools because that is what we think is best for our country/future, though we can also rationalize it as supporting the value of our house.

But choice schools do seem to generate higher levels of parental satisfaction than regular schools.

Hey, I’ve done something, by getting my child out of that assumed-by-default-to-be-lousy regular school, and into a school that functions as a more positive social signifier. Why wouldn’t I experience more satisfaction?

In other words, I agree that one should be careful in speculating that making parents feel good about themselves is any better an aggregate marker of quality than test scores. Those who fled school districts that had too many minorities attending them almost certainly felt higher levels of satisfaction about their new lily-white educational institutions.

Freedom of choice??? We’re talking about public education, provided at the expense of the taxpayer. Shouldn’t we be very careful to make sure the taxpayer gets their money’s worth?

Usually, right wingers claim to be in favor of being very careful about how the public money is spent. The idea of giving the recipients free choice in how they use the money would be considered an unworkable liberal idea in most contexts.

“We spent a large part of our life in schools, and if that’s miserable, it takes a lot of benefits in later life to make up for it (and of course, if you’re miserable at school, those later-life benefits are less likely to come).”

Right. And I mean, by no means do I wish to generalize a personal anecdote, but I found that I was quite miserable in public school (a fairly common, middle-class one, what in Britain would be called a “comprehensive”, not one of those plush suburban ones serving municipalities with 20,000 residents) and much, much happier in private school. Partly it’s because the teachers saw themselves as batting for you personally rather than just you as another input into the educational system.

“Usually, right wingers claim to be in favor of being very careful about how the public money is spent. The idea of giving the recipients free choice in how they use the money would be considered an unworkable liberal idea in most contexts.”

Liberty is a much more important right-wing principle than fiscal rectitude. Fiscal rectitude is not an organizing principle; liberty is.

Harry, it didn’t sound much like you were disagreeing. Perhaps “not outlandish speculation” is fightin’ words in your neck of the woods.

“The idea of giving the recipients free choice in how they use the money would be considered an unworkable liberal idea in most contexts.”
I thought Charles Murray advocated giving poor people money (instead of targeted welfare benefits) and letting them spend it on whatever they choose. But I might just have him confused with Milton Friedman.

Murray is in the minority in arguing that choice is good because parents like it (rather than resulting in demonstrably better scores). We could also resolve ourselves to equal outputs and ask whether charters have an advantage when it comes to inputs (spending).

Adam Ozimek suspects that peculiarities of the Texas & Ohio charter programs are driving down the national average. But one man’s excluded outliers is another man’s special pleading.

Is there a lot of debate on what the “magical” element is that makes charter schools better than public schools? I didn’t think there was any debate (regardless of whether the consensus is right). What makes for a good education is apparently pretty well understood–high standards for behavior and hard work–and charter schools are believed to be able to pursue this more successfully. The right says, because the private sector is always more efficient than the public sector. The Obama administration and the center-left, because no unions, no municipal bureaucracy, and no teachers’ colleges.

Personally, I am doubtful that a military-academy like environment for the poor can make up for enough (academically) to bring up poor kids to the level of even mediocre public schools where their parents are able to understand their homework, provide enrichment, and make up for whatever deficiencies in teaching may happen to encounter, even at levels far below what would trigger complaints about “helicopter parents” among concerned affluent-suburb guidance counselors. It could not possibly work for more than a small percentage.

“What if a Republican candidate for something said something like this? ”

Yeah, I realize this is going on at too much length, but … I’d missed this the first time.

Before looking at this counterfactual, look at the actual case. How does Murray speak? Well, he’s funded by right-wingers who make sure that his message gets out in some media, somewhere. There is nothing anyone can do about that. He’s an opinion leader, so much as he is (which is not much) because money talks. How is he heard? Well, he’s heard by you as someone who needs to be addressed seriously, because he has an entree to serious people.

What else could you say? Well, your response could be something like “Ah, that’s Murray, the racist.” And here I get back to the counterfactual. Strangely enough, that’s how politics mostly works. Does, let’s say, Arizona pass a law requiring people to show their papers? Political opponents don’t set out a careful, serious explanation of exactly why the law would not work to improve security, as designed. They just say that god-damned racists are making Arizona look bad. Does a Republican politician say something like this? It’s either ignored, addressed seriously (e.g. ignored), or it becomes a misstep for that campaign. How does that happen? By people saying that the politician is a racist.

You can’t have it both ways. Engaging in politics? Then engage in it. Not engaging in politics? Then don’t dignify this person with an answer unless they deserve one, which they don’t.

Isn’t it striking that one of the authors of The Bell Curve would concede that test scores may not be the most useful metric?

Well, Myles, I think that you’re probably a concern troll. But on the slight chance that you aren’t, guess what’s the largest union in America? That’s right, the NEA. The AFT, the second largest teacher’s union, is something like the seventh largest overall. Did it work? Yes, in the short term, the medium term, and I daresay even the long term. Why? Because the bit about “even the liberals hate teachers’ unions” is just conservative agitprop. It’s what they say about any group that doesn’t give in.

Now, I’ve already explained why Murray “has purchase in mainstream discourse.” No one can get him off wingnut welfare. The only way to shut him up is for reasonable people to stop being so reasonable when confronted with someone whose whole career has been racism supported by shoddy pseudoscience.

Sebastian in #16: “They [parents] think it is better for their kids to go to a school that makes it less likely they will join a gang, or fall in with a bad element, or be distracted by gunfire, or whatever.” Don’t all parents think this? So isn’t school choice a zero-sum game, and all you are doing is further empowering articulate, pushy, affluent parents at the expense of inarticulate , deferential, poorer parents?
To anticipate two possible comebacks.
1. Some parents don’t care about bad schooling or gang membership. They are bad parents and their children need to be protected from them, parental rights be stuffed. The children’s rights and interests in education are prior to those of parents.
2. The flight of the children of articulate, pushy, afluent parents puts pressure on the bad schools to improve. How exactly is this supposed to work? The average class has just got harder to teach, parental pressure to improve has just declined, and funding has gone down with the head-count. Superficially it looks more like a death spiral than a goad. Ah, enlightened despotic administrators will ride to the rescue, change the demoralised leadership, fire bad teachers and hire better ones. But if you had such enlightened despots, why go through the rigmarole of parental choice and school flight first?

Rich Puchalsky 06.15.10 at 5:27 am

“Well, Myles, I think that you’re probably a concern troll. ”

He is. Over on Daniel Larison’s blog, he was ranting about how the Allies
should have invaded Russia in 1919 (more than they did), to make sure
that Stalin would never have gotten power. All attempts to point out
*why* the US and UK (whose leaders hated Bolshevism) didn’t immediately
conduct WWI 1/2 failed. All attempts to point out that invading Russia
was usually Not a Good Idea failed.

Excellent post. A couple of points:

1. It’s plausible that test scores can be effective as a crude measure of success/failure even if they aren’t highly sensitive instruments. Thus, if 50% of 5th graders fail a basic language skills test, that’s informative about the instruction in a way that a kid moving from a score of 600 to 700 on the SAT may not be.

2. I’d be interested to hear Harry expand on what he means by the difference between ‘fairness between children’ and ‘fairness between parents.’ My first thought would have been that a) these types of fairness are not necessarily (or even likely) to be in conflict, and b) that there’s a fundamental issue of pluralism here as well.

3. To James Wemberly. I don’t want to attempt a recapitulation of ‘Exit, Voice, and Loyalty’ in a comment box, but I don’t think it’s a fair default assumption that enhancing the right of exit can only have zero-sum benefits. Right now in the US, right of exit exists but is tied to the real-estate market. Charters at least separate that link.

4. One hoped-for benefit of school choice (whether charters or just within a public school system) is that there may be true benefits to a good ‘match’ between school and student (in culture, focus, educational style, etc.) That’s a point that I think most of us accept intuitively at a college level, and it might be true in earlier grades as well.

Ray gave the obvious answer — but really, charter schools and the debate over them in America have nothing to do with racism? Your answer isn’t just arrogant and careless, it also shows what I suspected, that you also don’t really know much about the issue.

Ray 06.15.10 at 11:48 am

“Wouldn’t it be easier to not refer to Murray at all? If he is making an argument worth addressing, find someone else who is making the same argument and address them (or just address the argument itself without quoting anybody).”

I second this – Charle Murray is a sh*t, pure and simple. The *least* responsible people can do is to not use him as a source for one’s argument (except in the sense that CM being against something is a point in favor of that thing).

Well done Rich. You derailed the thread successfully. If you attempt this in future posts I’ll delete at will, and request my colleagues to do the same. (Now, indeed, I am irritated).

Murray is in the minority in arguing that choice is good because parents like it (rather than resulting in demonstrably better scores). We could also resolve ourselves to equal outputs and ask whether charters have an advantage when it comes to inputs (spending).

This might be a minority position, but I think it (arguing that school choice as a freedom-of-choice rather than school-performance issue, i.e. making a moral argument rather than a practical one) has a lot more purchase.

Even though it smacks a bit of moving the goalposts, Murray’s right that scores are the wrong metric (and also right to suggest that many affluent opponents of choice are hypocritical, either sending their own children to expensive private schools, or using choice in the housing market to secure their children a place in a desired school).

It is mostly likely moving the goalposts, but I have held the same position from the very beginning; if you are addressing the charters question in performance rather than in more fundamental terms, than the framework would be quite wrong. Murray has a particularly nasty case of goalpost-moving, but just because he does it doesn’t necessarily mean the new position for the goalposts was the originally wrong one.

Ray gave the obvious answer—but really, charter schools and the debate over them in America have nothing to do with racism?

I believe this is called a gaffe.

It’s silly to criticise bloggers for writing about what interests them, instead of what interests you. It’s equally silly to criticise commenters for commenting on the elements of a blog post that interest them, rather than the elements that you think were more interesting.
I can’t speak for Rich but I was interested enough in the post to click past the cut. Since I didn’t know at that point that it contained a reference to Charles Murray, why would I have done that if I was only interested in playing games with Murray? I didn’t feel moved to comment on the post immediately either – even on the Murray angle.

I think the issue has been discussed on here before – why is it that pundits can be completely wrong, in ways that should utterly discredit them, and yet still be treated as Very Serious People? By linking to and responding to Murray, you are treating him as a VSP.

“Back to Fryer, for a contrast that really struck me. In a well-controlled study he finds that the Promise Academy schools improve test scores (and math scores in particular) for the kind of student that tries to attend. In another study (sorry, I can’t find it online, you’ll just have to take my word, and I’m not saying anything critical of him) he finds that the SEED schools, inner city boarding schools which take children out of their neighbourhoods for 5 days a week, but lack the “rigorous” academic curriculum of the Promise Academy schools, do not raise scores. ”

Couple things. Very interesting details, and to me not all that surprising. And second, just getting through that stuff makes my head hurt. Which is not meant as an aspersion on the above graf, but rather to show how impossible and bizarre in a way the whole debate has gotten. When having a good discussion about education involves debating minutaie of the policies of individual school systems, I think we are casting the problem in the wrong way. Of course some approaches will be more effective than others. For example, you can probably make a very good case that early childhood education would have a very large impact on performance.

But I suspect it still moves the debate little. Why? Because there is a certain whiff of technocracy about it that is , on some level, universally unappealing (or at least so where I stand, in North America). When we think of education minutaie, we think of parent-teacher associations and stuff like that; i.e. the same level of agglomeration determines the policy as the level of agglomeration is determined by such policy. When and if we turn education minutaie into a national debate, then the whole thing seems lost. For example, when Paul Martin tried to push a national childcare plan in Canada (it’s supposed to be very technocratically sound), the main reaction I could detect was just sheer boredom and disinterest.

It is entirely plausible that, even if charters as a whole do not improve student outcomes, some particular kinds of charters do, and we could, presumably, find out which ones and promote them (and promote their magical qualities, perhaps, even among non-charter schools).

But why, really? If some charters work, then surely they would be noticed by more and more people, gain publicity, and become widely emulated? This is actually the natural market process. There really is not need for us to intervene and try to speed along the promotion, given how alert the education-reform brigade always is on the lookout for such schools with such magical qualities. The world, left to itself, sometimes rights itself. If we are going to be big on charters, it ought be one of those stick-it-there -and-forget-about-it sort of thing, rather than like some delicate flower over which we have to guard.

(Leaving aside the fact that charters and vouchers are unlikely to secure $20k (roughly the current tuition at the schools Murray’s children attended, I’m guessing) per child per year worth of choice for a disadvantaged parent of a non-disabled child).

A good private school in DC goes for around $25,000 to $33,000. It’s more or less double the official public for DC public schools, which are beyond abysmal and well into the realm of farce.

“For example, you couldn’t have any limits on how small a school could get, and there would be a continuity between home school parent groups that hire in tutors for specific lessons, and smaller schools that are run by parent and teacher co-operatives. And I am not sure if a standard voucher system could be designed to be that flexible. So in the meantime, I would be in favour of barring school level selection.”

That sounds like a very good idea, actually, but the school-size issue is rather weird. I believe most minimum sizes are around 30. All we have to do is to lower it to around 10, and create carve-outs for those between 4 and 10 under special permissions. That would, effectively, end all school size limits.

If some charters work, then surely they would be noticed by more and more people, gain publicity, and become widely emulated? This is actually the natural market process.

No, that’s the idealized market process. If professionals with reams of data and sophisticated statistical tools can’t agree on what teaching quality is or how to measure it, there’s no way a parent is going to be able to suss it out in a visit before deciding whether or not to send their child there. Once the child has been attending for a while, they might have a better idea, but they’ll be averse to changing schools because it would disrupt the child’s lesson plans and social networks, and on top of that, they won’t know the real quality of any of the *other* schools for the same reason.

If parents don’t know actual quality, then they can’t choose on actual quality, and schools aren’t competing on actual quality, but on something else, call it apparent quality. Nice facilities, for example, are going to make an impression on the parent during their visit, even if their impact on education is relatively slight. You can quote outcome stats at them — even if those outcomes come mostly from cherry-picking, the parents won’t know that. Some parents will assume a price-quality signal, so just raising your price could attract them — and to the extent that this acts as a class filter, it will actually kind of work in outcome terms, because class is such a strong outcome driver independent of the school itself. Etc.

Then competition leads the schools to start maximizing apparent quality and the invisible hand falls down. Most likely you get a class-stratified system where rich students go to expensive schools with spacious, high-quality facilities and get great outcomes, and poor students go to cheap schools (or stay in the public schools) with cramped, run-down facilities and get worse outcomes.

Everything following the link was supposed to be a blockquote from the RAND study.

No, that’s the idealized market process. If professionals with reams of data and sophisticated statistical tools can’t agree on what teaching quality is or how to measure it, there’s no way a parent is going to be able to suss it out in a visit before deciding whether or not to send their child there. Once the child has been attending for a while, they might have a better idea, but they’ll be averse to changing schools because it would disrupt the child’s lesson plans and social networks, and on top of that, they won’t know the real quality of any of the other schools for the same reason.

Yes, but how do you think private school selection works? People seem to do fine selecting decent private schools for their kids without such “performance” data. Mostly it’s word-of-mouth and reputational. If A hears B say that B’s child is enrolled in such-and-such school and see that B’s child is doing well academically, and A sees enough of B to get a rough idea of where all the schools in terms of outcomes. This worked for centuries. And this is the sort of stuff that comes up at every dinner party; whose child goes to which school, and how good such-and-such schools are.

This, by the way, is better than any and all quantitative data, which are always imperfect and incomplete, by definition. If you look at Eton’s (or Groton’s, or Geelong Grammar’s) statistics, it would seem they are actually not that academically impressive compared to some others, but of course the true academic instruction at such schools are superlative.

This word-of-mouth and anecdotal approach would work for poor parents as well as rich ones. I really don’t see the need for it. The reputational and parent-gossip approach to school selection worked for centuries, and perfectly well; if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

Plus, the reason there is real-estate based stratification of the educational system is because parents are able to determine school quality independent of quantitative data. And that’s a contemporary example. Given that all education, or all non-elite education, is local, there is simply no need for aggregation and detailed statistical approach to this matter. The choice of schools seldom exceed like 15 locally, even in a voucher scenario, so it’s hardly like parents can’t balance it in their heads.

And on an ideological level, this would be a strike for localism, and more localism is always good in a classically liberal sense.

Considerably less than the nominal sum. Not denying at all that there are lots of inefficiencies, rent-seeking, etc, just pointing out that there are genuine costs these schools face that are included in the per-pupil amount, but slightly deceivingly

Fair enough. I am just saying that there is really no significant deficiency of funding, at least to provide decent education. The level of resources for elite and non-elite education will always be different, sometimes vastly so. That’s just human nature and there’s nothing we can do about it. If I have enough money and have children, I would send them to the most resource-intensive school too. But given a fixed funding framework, I think we can do a lot. I don’t actually particularly care, because I think education is an incredibly parochial issue, but if pressed I would say that what works very well for good, small suburbs (well-funded public catchment schools with tenured teachers) cannot be duplicated for inner-city schools. The best local publics in the U.S. exceed most private schools in terms of quality. Bronx Science does too, but that’s selection bias rather than inherent quality.

(I have actually spent a short period of time in a crappy-inner-suburb public, a mostly minorities one, so I am not talking out of my ass.)

“No, that’s the idealized market process. If professionals with reams of data and sophisticated statistical tools can’t agree on what teaching quality is or how to measure it, there’s no way a parent is going to be able to suss it out in a visit before deciding whether or not to send their child there.”

You are assuming that just because something can’t be quantified successfully by a social scientist, that it can’t be done by ordinary people. In fact, people use tacit knowledge gleaned from the experience of actually being in a particular situation. Formal knowledge actually plays a relatively small role in people’s everyday decision making. How to teach kids to read, for example, wasn’t really formalised knowledge until recently (even now its contentious). People just did it with the methods that they saw worked. And given a choice, that is the sort of judgement that any reasonably switched-on parent will base their decision on.

Whether this particular sort of tacit knowledge is best passed on in a market system (or charter schools in particular) is a more difficult question. There might be a need for other mechanisms as well. But Stuart’s link is interesting on that front.

And I am actually not that bothered about inefficiencies or rent-seeking. Again, the private school I went to had teachers who were paid six figures. Does that increase costs? Of course it does. But for a school with tuition levels that are incredibly cheap compared to similar-quality private schools elsewhere, the outcomes were astoundingly good.

Will a normal public need teachers with PhD’s, paid six figures? No. Will they need to achieve the same level of outcomes? No as well.

I think this is roughly true, but I want to reinforce that it is indeed very likely that the parent can figure out if things have improved once the child has attended and it is at least somewhat likely that they might be able to figure it out even beforehand.

The parent may know whether or not improvement has occurred in a given time period, but I doubt their intuitive assessment of why or why not. The causation issues involved are deep and opaque and the parents have a self-interested perspective.

How are the parents, even after experience, expected to distinguish between, for example, a good school, and a school with good students? Peer effects may be quite important, but competition can’t lead all schools to improve their peer pools at the same time, because their peer pools are a partition of the whole student population, so peer selection is inherently zero-sum. (Then the parents with the most power select their children’s peers most effectively and we’re back to the class-stratified outcome.)

It doesn’t fix everything, but isn’t helping good-but-not-rich parents help their kids get better education a good thing worth working for?

Depends on the side effects. The children of good parents (regardless of wealth level) already have pretty good outcomes, and school quality is only a minor factor. IMO the school system should be judged by how it performs for students who *don’t* have a highly capable, highly involved parent behind them — because those are the ones who most need the system to step in. A system that pays the most attention to the students with the least need for it is a failure.

“So, how should we evaluate schools? By reference to their ability to improve a quite narrow range of tests scores? Or by reference to a much richer array of life-course outcomes to the production of which the skills measured by those tests make a small contribution? Once we have evidence that schools, or school-like interventions (like Perry Pre-School), can make a difference to that richer array, it seems to me we should be concerned with that. ”

It seems to me that one obvious outcome of increased attention to children in the preschool years that might result in the child’s success in life, but one not necessarily measured by IQ, is an increase in confidence, in a belief in one’s self.

Has anyone read Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education ?

And yes, I would politely ask the OP, if it is at all expedient, to try to hash out how we can fit the parent-child equity distinction. I personally remain skeptical.

I was quite unimpressed with Ravitch — most of the book bashes test scores as a means of judging schools, but her main gripe with charter schools and vouchers is that they don’t produce high enough test scores.

“Unrefined intuition about causality is what brought us sacrifices to the volcano gods.”

Unrefined intuition combined with arbitrary authority is what makes people sacrifice to volcanoe. Intuition combined with crowd sourcing and respect for different opinions allows those intuitions to be refined, and is what leads to progress.

@Myles SG: Could you please clarify your position for me regarding the inviolable nature of students as individuals and their rights to be free of aggregation in your most recent post, and your position in a preceeding post, that we can reasonably expect to save a certain percentage of these individuals, but perhaps should let the worst of the “inner-city” schools” fail. I believe that you believe the two concepts are reconcilable and would like to see the explanation.

Happy to oblige. Are student individuals with inviolable agencies (as exercised by their guardians)? Yes. Must they be free to aggregate and separate as they like? Yes. (That, by the way, doesn’t mean they always get to pick their own group partners, which can be sometimes whimsical and arbitrary, just that they should be free to leave an aggregate environment which is pernicious to them).

How does one reconcile with letting a minority of the kids fail? You reconcile it by offering even the kids who fail equal resources and hope for the best, but knowing nonetheless that majority of that minority will still fail. If the kids who fail (or their parents) are attentive enough to want to go to a better school, then it’s a victory for freedom of choice and individual agency. I am proposing to let them exercise their free agency, but of course not everyone who has free agency exercises it.

In fact, it is perfectly consistent with student-as-individuals to let them choose failure if that is what they truly don’t mind doing. But the point is to give them a fair choice out of failure, and if they don’t take it, then there’s nothing we can do. But the majority, I suspect and hope, will take the choice out of failure, and then we have done right by them. And for the failing kids, it’s not like their individual choice of staying in a school with other failing kids could have much potential to adversely impact their performance anyways, given the low existing standard. Not that would even be a relevant question, because again, individual agency and free choice.

It’s not like I am proposing to pack off the failing kids to some failing-kids camp or something. Now that would be paternalist and authoritarian (although military schools do wonder for those kids, I am not about to propose them).

Intuition combined with crowd sourcing and respect for different opinions allows those intuitions to be refined

That’s just bland market panglossianism.
There are several reasons, identified in this thread, why parents might pick a particular school and feel good about their choice –
– the school is actually very good
– their kids are benefiting from the presence of other motivated kids
– as motivated parents, their kids tend to have good outcomes anyway
– the school looks expensive, therefore it must be good
– the school is expensive, therefore the kids are mixing with the right crowd
(subset – mixing with the right colour)
-and so on

It’s obvious why all of these count as ‘wins’ given a certain political persuasion, but they don’t really speak to educational quality

Are student individuals with inviolable agencies (as exercised by their guardians)? Yes

The point of minimum standards of public education is that some kids have incompetent guardians. It’s not good enough to say, “okay, those kids failed, but that’s because their parents chose failure. Look how clean our hands are”

“the school looks expensive, therefore it must be good – the school is expensive, therefore the kids are mixing with the right crowd…It’s obvious why all of these count as ‘wins’ given a certain political persuasion, but they don’t really speak to educational quality”

I once asked a teacher in a very expensive and exclusive school if her own daughter was able to attend it ( thru a scholarship or some arrangement), and she was quick to assure me that she wouldn’t think of having her child in that school, because of the low morals she would encounter in the other students there.

It doesn’t seem like enough attention is being paid to selection bias: the students in a given class aren’t randomly selected. An average teacher with 33 students who all struggle with math will have middling-to-low math scores. The same teacher with 31 students who struggle with math, and 2 who are naturally very good at math, will have two off-the-charts scores that year in addition to the usual distribution. This is part of why teachers jockey to get “good” classes and “good” school assignments (which of course means white, middle class neighborhoods with little crime where the parents make sure the kids do their homework). (Which has little to do with unions, and which isn’t going to be fixed by giving principals more power, it seems to me.) The “new” system seems largely to perpetuate that.

Not to ignore the first half of what bianca said, but the second half is very significant, and occurs i) between districts (so that quite small spending differentials between geographically close districts can result in quite large differences in teacher quality, assuming that district officials know how to select (which is a big assumptions), ii) between schools within heterogeneous districts (because you can transfer without loss of seniority — this assumes that principals can work the system, of course, but better principals, who are more likely to be in schools with lower need populations, are better at that) and iii) within schools.
Depressing.
Toddler problem still present, hence no discussion from me of the big issues.

Subdoxatic – -thanks, that’s very kind of you.

Let me try again:

You’re making a good argument, but the premise is wrong. We DO have evidence on how charter schools improve life prospects apart from test scores: graduation rates. A top-notch evaluation from RAND (controlling for selection bias by looking only at students who started out at a charter school in grade 8) four that charter schools increase graduation rates and college entry:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG869/

The estimated impact of charter–high school attendance on the probability of obtaining a high-school diploma is positive in both Florida and Chicago. In Chicago, students who switched from a charter middle school to a charter high school were 7 percentage points more likely to earn a regular high-school diploma than their counterparts with similar observable characteristics who attended a traditional public

I’ve downloaded and read this, or rather skimmed it looking for one pertinent piece of information. And I don’t see it: how do they control for parental involvement? I know for a fact that in Milwaukee voucher experiment, selection of who and who did not go into a charter school was not random; ditto for one or two others. For the rest, I admit I don’t know how students were selected to attend a charter school, but if it’s not random, and no attempt is made to control for this, this study is just so much junk.

As Biddle and Berlinger famously observed decades ago, it’s certainly possible that private schools get better results when measured by a variety of criteria. But do they do better because they are private? So far, the answer is no, and this study is no exception.

SoV: “not random”: There was a story in the Boston Globe not long ago that some students were being encouraged to transfer from one charter school to a regular school, by the charter school’s administration. It’s tough to know whether that was reasonable, but it’s certainly not random.

“And just to add to my response to bianca, the phenomenon confounds attempts to figure out whether improvements are reproduceable elsewhere or scaleable. My guess is that lots of high performing schools just have principals who have attracted teachers who would do well elsewhere, and their effects are concentrated in one place—but they are of limited supply.”

This looks a bit like a potential lump of good teaching fallacy. It might just as easily be that principals that are capable of producing good working environments for teachers draw more good potential teachers into the sector.

And I don’t see it: how do they control for parental involvement?

As I already discussed, the method by which they control for selection effects is by looking only at students who began 8th grade already in a charter school. So the typical argument (that anyone in a charter school somehow has more involved parents) is invalid. True, there could be a difference in parental involvement between 1) those students who were in charter schools in 8th grade but in traditional public schools after that, vs. 2) those students who were in charter schools in 8th grade and who went on to charter high schools. But that objection would seem rather speculative and agenda-driven.

I know for a fact that in Milwaukee voucher experiment, selection of who and who did not go into a charter school was not random; ditto for one or two others.

Charter schools wouldn’t have been studied in a voucher experiment.

Nick — yes, it might be that. The upshot is the same. I confess that this worries me a lot partly because I watched as my dad turned a large metropolitan district from a very low performer to a very high performer. I’m sure he did a lot to elicit better performance form the people he already had under him, but for sure teachers and principals flocked from round the country to work under him: he was systematically stealing talent from elsewhere.

Barry — maybe. But you’d better not tell Henry that… I doubt he considers himself a Brit, whatever my imperialist tendencies!

parents have more direct control over funding for their kids’ education, and those kids whose parents make bad choices were probably going to fail anyway

But you just refuted your own point. If there was some compensatory gains for the bottom academic decile or quintile by keeping the more “normal” kids in inner-city schools, maybe we can have a debate about whether the whole same-public-school-for-all schtick is worth.

But that’s not the case at all. The majority of kids in inner-city schools, whom I presume can do better in more hospitable settings (let’s presume for a moment that you know, the majority of inner-city, African-American parents are not negligent, which seems to me a wholly reasonable and valid presumption), should get the choice to get out to present educational hell. The rest, whom I am not sure even benefit academically or socially from having the other, more normal kids in the classroom to brag to about their gang memberships, will do no worse.

It’s essentially a win-win. Some kids do better, and other kids do no worse. And all of them live in the inner-city.

I quite honestly don’t see you can argue against that. Unless you are arguing for pulling all the inner-city kids down to the lowest level.

And yeah, frankly, I am not sure anybody who’s actually seen an inner-city school could possibly be debating whether higher inner-city achievements in the charter-school studies depend solely on involved parents.

Yeah, not having some guy in your class who’s in the gangs and carries guns around and engages in frequent and casual black-on-black violence doesn’t have an effect on your educational attainment at all. No, not at all.

I suppose there’s no use asking people to distinguish between inner-city school in the sense of low-income and largely minority urban schools, and inner-city schools meaning schools characterized by students who openly carry guns and act out violently. They’re not actually identical sets—there are lots of schools in the first category that aren’t in the second.

As I have said, I have actually spent some time in a crappy-inner-suburb school that is in the former category and not the latter. No one that I am aware of carrying guns openly to school. But plenty of people who did especially pernicious and cheap drugs (much more pernicious than the suburban pot-and-shrooms variety), plenty that enjoyed bullying what would considered normal kids in suburban schools and generally make their lives unmitigated hells, and frankly, plenty of teachers who couldn’t teach to their pedagogical potential because the kids were too busy working the above activities. And plenty of people, who although no gun-owners, thought nothing of bringing switchblades to school, albeit covertly.

So yeah, different degree, but an inherent problem nonetheless.

I actually don’t really have a dog in this fight. I tend to think public education, outside the really superlative suburban publics in those 20,000-person commuter towns in Virginia and Maryland and western Connecticut and Long Island and Westchester and Bergen counties and the like, is pretty much a joke. But it is nonetheless irritating to hear people who probably went to those very schools, with superlative faculty and students that don’t consider switchblades a school supply, bloviating about how there are no such thing as bad schools, just inattentive parents.

SoV: “not random”: There was a story in the Boston Globe not long ago that some students were being encouraged to transfer from one charter school to a regular school, by the charter school’s administration. It’s tough to know whether that was reasonable, but it’s certainly not random.

I believe you. For all this talk about “letting the market sort it out” or variations thereof, what strikes me as the most salient fact is that nothing specific is ever offered up – and I mean ever – that would be something concrete that TPS don’t or can’t do. Other than weed out the bad ‘uns, that is.

I suppose there’s no use asking people to distinguish between inner-city school in the sense of low-income and largely minority urban schools, and inner-city schools meaning schools characterized by students who openly carry guns and act out violently. They’re not actually identical sets—there are lots of schools in the first category that aren’t in the second.

Very true. And to that, let me add to failing rural schools, which are also a huge problem. I don’t know why they don’t get as much attention (except for the obvious one), but there is a pathology distinct from the two you mention above. Call it the “They Don’t Want Them to Leave” disease.

In fact, they were quite open about the methodological failings all the way through. I’m surprised you didn’t see this, especially given you think they’ve adequately addressed the problem by only looking at students previously enrolled in a charter school and who have subsequently left.

You’re mixing apples and oranges—the section you quote on the fixed-effects method comes on page 25, in the paper’s discussion of charter school achievement. The section on graduation and college entry begins much later. The methodology is different there. (Notice that they used fixed-effects for achievement on page 25, but on page 54, they expressly say that they can’t use fixed-effects for attainment, because there aren’t repeated observations on individuals).

I’m having a hard time finding anything that relates to your claim that “As I already discussed, the method by which they control for selection effects is by looking only at students who began 8th grade already in a charter school.” and that this is supposed to lead to an unbiased estimate. Would you please specifically quote the part of the paper that you think supports you? You seem to want people to accept that one scenario is “farfetched”, and from what I seen – and why I quoted it (please read it again) – was to show that’s Just Not So. In fact, let’s quote from the section you want us to:

We employ three methods to deal with the selection-bias problem.
The first strategy is to . . . (snipped for brevity)

The second strategy for dealing with selection bias is to focus
on students who attended a charter school in grade 8, just prior to
beginning high school. If there are unmeasured student or family
characteristics that lead to the selection of charter high schools, these
unmeasured characteristics ought to also lead to the choice of a charter
school at the middle-school level. Thus, comparisons of TPS eighth
graders and charter-school eighth graders would likely be biased due
to self-selection.

And also:

We believe that this restriction is critical for internal validity, but we
acknowledge that it involves an external validity trade-off: Charter–
high school students who did not attend charter middle schools are
not included in the analysis, and it is possible that charter schools have
different effects on those students.

So, since even in this section which you want us to be the determinative one, I can’t find anything that supports your claim. Quote what you think does.

If you’re going to rely upon a study to make your case, don’t you think you should quote the good along with the bad? Instead of only the parts that you think will help you?

The topic of discussion is whether there are benefits to charter schools OTHER THAN test scores. A study showing benefits to high school graduation rates and college entry is clearly relevant, while that same study’s finding as to test scores is not as relevant.

Well, no, there’s a difference between inconclusive test scores, and ones which just show that these schools perform “substantially” worse than average.

If it wasn’t for public schools, he’d most likely have no schooling at all, because private schools don’t want kids who are as much trouble as he is, who require as much expensive supports as he does (special ed teachers, speech/language therapy, occupational therapy, consults with behavioral therapists, etc.).

I don’t know how to respond to this except to say, when a blind student entered my ($17,000-a-year, not $35,000) private school, the school installed Braille, bought a whole bunch of expensive electronic stuff and blind-specific digital equipment, and everything everywhere for him. And of course he enjoyed tutoring with and all-school-hours access to a special-needs teacher, who would have helped him at least every other day with his schoolwork. And all the parents and students applauded the school for doing so, because the entire school community knew that if he was intellectually qualified for the school, and his parents willing to pay the regular tuition, then he deserved to have the excellent education at the school no matter what disability he had. All at not a penny of extra cost to his parents. And I am rightly proud that my school had done the right thing.

I am not sure if every private school is as principled as this, but surely there must be good, local privates who were willing to stomach the extra cost for principle. I just don’t think the private-schools-won’t-take-expensive-kids is something of a fallacy.

But now I am the mother of a child on the autism spectrum. If it wasn’t for public schools, he’d most likely have no schooling at all, because private schools don’t want kids who are as much trouble as he is, who require as much expensive supports as he does (special ed teachers, speech/language therapy, occupational therapy, consults with behavioral therapists, etc.).

I don’t know about your specific situation, but there are many disabled and autistic kids who do go to private schools of some kind. In 2007, there were 67,729 special ed students nationwide who were placed in private schools at public expense under the IDEA law. There are another 20,500 Florida special ed students receiving vouchers to attend private schools, and another 1,390 autistic students in Ohio receiving vouchers to attend private schools.

Scent:
I’m having a hard time finding anything that relates to your claim that “As I already discussed, the method by which they control for selection effects is by looking only at students who began 8th grade already in a charter school.”

All I’ve done is paraphrase what is found on page 54. The authors did their best to account for selection effects by limiting the analysis to students who went to charter schools in 8th grade. As you point out, they then (in the spirit of honesty) forthrightly admit that accounting for selection effects limits the scope of the ATE that they’re finding. Such are the tradeoffs of applied econometric research. (Do note that when the authors say that “comparisons of TPS eighth graders and charter-school eighth graders would likely be biased due to self-selection,” they’re explaining why they chose NOT to make such a comparison, and why they’re looking only at TPS high schoolers who had been in a charter school in 8th grade.)

#108: Why would you expect Government-providers to be intrinsically better at providing education for those with special needs?

Because they aren’t motivated to profit (literally) by excluding them. This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

#93: I quite honestly don’t see you can argue against that.

Given all the empirical assumptions you pulled out of your ass, then yes, your conclusion becomes difficult to argue with. Some people would like to see proof that “some do better and the rest do no worse” before fencing off “the rest” to rot because there’s nothing that can be done for them anyway. (Hmm, where have I heard that attitude toward the poor and minorities before…)

Leaving some children behind in order to possibly provide better educations to the rest may seem attractive, but ISTM that you’re just creating a lifelong underclass or even criminal class.

P.S. It’s no use saying that they show up to high school “already” in gangs and carrying guns — they didn’t show up to kindergarten that way. Somewhere in between there, something turned them toward that lifestyle (in greater numbers than kids in other surroundings), and it’s possible that a different educational system could have prevented that outcome. It’s also possible that it couldn’t, and schools are being scapegoated for society-wide problems. Again. But if that’s the problem, charters can’t be the solution.

Leaving some children behind in order to possibly provide better educations to the rest may seem attractive, but ISTM that you’re just creating a lifelong underclass or even criminal class.

P.S. It’s no use saying that they show up to high school “already” in gangs and carrying guns—they didn’t show up to kindergarten that way. Somewhere in between there, something turned them toward that lifestyle (in greater numbers than kids in other surroundings), and it’s possible that a different educational system could have prevented that outcome. It’s also possible that it couldn’t, and schools are being scapegoated for society-wide problems. Again. But if that’s the problem, charters can’t be the solution.

I get your point, but your point is logically contradictory. Par exemple:

“it’s possible that a different educational system could have prevented that outcome. ”

i.e. a different system other than the status quo could have helped the worst quintile or decile of the inner-city kids. Such system doesn’t necessarily have to be charters or non-charters (I actually don’t really care about charters, I just think the current system is idiotic). At least I think you are referring to the ones carrying guns in high school, not the ones getting bullied around by the gun-carriers and prevented from studying and learning.

Now, the other part:

“but ISTM that you’re just creating a lifelong underclass or even criminal class.”

What? The current system already ensures that this particular minority of kids in inner-city schools become a lifelong underclass. Already ensures. What I meant to say is not that they already show up to high school in guns, but rather the system in the status quo ensures that they’ll become gangsters.

Note you are comparing apples and oranges. What I meant to say is not that gangster-by-high-school crowd necessarily benefits from charters. After all, if you find firearms to be school supply, I am not sure having the world’s best school open to you is going to entice. For the most part school is simply not a very important concern. But they might, in some numbers. Which is great for everyone. But there is no way on earth that someone who’s bringing guns to school could possibly do worse academically without more non-gangsters to intimidate and lord over. Socially, perhaps. Note: not debating your alternative proposals, but simply that the status quo of large urban publics with tenured and desperate teachers is an utter joke. Not sure how you can even uphold the principle of public, local education in such areas when well, no education is effectively being given.

What I meant to say is that the ones who are currently completely prevented from having any resemblance of a real education by the intimidation and sheer danger of gangsters-in-school will benefit. And they deserve to have that fair shot. They don’t even necessarily need better teachers or better facilities, they just need a place where they are not planning out how not to get knifed at recess and be able to focus (somewhat, partially, given the sometimes strenuous situation at home) on some sort of academic work.

Basically, for the charter (or whatever non-traditional, urban public) idea to not work, the gangsters-in-high-school have to do actively worse within the residual public schools, under that hypothetical system. Because you can see as clear as the light of day that if you take away the gangs and guns from a school setting for the majority of those kids, academic focus will improve. That doesn’t even need empirical proof. That is tautology.

Stuart Black, Yes, there are children on IEPs in private schools at public expense. They are almost always very involved and the public school is not able to serve them adequately. Sometimes the school wants the child to be placed in the therapeutic setting, and the parents agree, sometimes the parents disagree and fight it.

Sometimes the parents want the child in the therapeutic setting and the school agrees, sometimes the school disagrees and fights it. I said the children are “almost always very involved” because occasionally there are families whose children are not that involved but who are able to game the system and get a private education paid for by the public school system.

At any rate, these are the exceptional cases. I suspect that if more districts were better funded and as a result, their staffs were larger and better trained, many of these children could have stayed in their district schools. These situations really don’t have much bearing on the idea that children with special needs have the right to equal treatment, that is, if their typically developing peers are entitled to a free, appropriate public education, so are they, or on the idea that children with disabilities do better when they experience inclusion. There’s also an argument to be made that’s it’s better for the typically-developing children, too.

I can’t speak to what’s going on in Florida but I have an inkling about Ohio, obviously. Ohio Representive Peterson — a Republican — sponsored the bill that established the Autism Scholarship, which pays IIRC, $20,000 for the child to go to a special ed program other than the one provided by the child’s school district.

Very soon after, special autism schools sprung up everywhere, because there was money to be made, and boy, some of these schools are doing quite well. I’m not aware of any research on these schools effectiveness but I’ve been in a couple of them and was extremely underwhelmed, though some of them are no doubt better. Again, if more local districts were better funded so that they could afford the trained staff, most if not all of these children could have done as well if not better in their local school. But Rep. Peterson did not sponsor legislation to allow that to happen.

Again, if more local districts were better funded so that they could afford the trained staff, most if not all of these children could have done as well if not better in their local school. But Rep. Peterson did not sponsor legislation to allow that to happen.

The Ohio Autism Scholarship program pays only for those services that have been listed by the public school district in the student’s IEP. What makes you think that the public school districts aren’t already getting funding for providing those services? The special education weighting for autistic students in Ohio seems to be 4.7342 (see here), which basically means that the public school district is given 4.7342 times the usual amount of per-pupil money when a student is autistic.

Let’s see if I can be more coherent without a lap dog in my lap and a cat who insists upon sprawling across the keyboard when her spot is taken:

I’m having a hard time finding anything that relates to your claim that “As I already discussed, the method by which they control for selection effects is by looking only at students who began 8th grade already in a charter school.”

All I’ve done is paraphrase what is found on page 54. The authors did their best to account for selection effects by limiting the analysis to students who went to charter schools in 8th grade. As you point out, they then (in the spirit of honesty) forthrightly admit that accounting for selection effects limits the scope of the ATE that they’re finding. Such are the tradeoffs of applied econometric research.

Well, no, that’s not a paraphrase. In fact you originally said that:

As I already discussed, the method by which they control for selection effects is by looking only at students who began 8th grade already in a charter school. So the typical argument (that anyone in a charter school somehow has more involved parents) is invalid. True, there could be a difference in parental involvement between 1) those students who were in charter schools in 8th grade but in traditional public schools after that, vs. 2) those students who were in charter schools in 8th grade and who went on to charter high schools. But that objection would seem rather speculative and agenda-driven.

None of this is a paraphrase from the report you cite, particularly the portion I bolded. Bottom line, this study doesn’t show what you say it does. Also note that saying something is “the best study” as if that implies it can actually be used to support your point is fallacious reasoning. The best source of light at night may be a street lamp, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where a drunk looking for his car keys should search.

Ohio Mom, your child already gets special funding. The public school doesn’t have any particularly large desire for special needs children either, and the special care your child gets come from grants that provide a lot more money per pupil to help teach such a child. There isn’t any obvious reason why those grants must be limited to public schools.

Nick, Yes, perhaps “there is nothing to stop vouchers/charter school funding being topped up in return for accepting students with particular needs.” Please show me the big push anywhere in the United States to make this happen. I don’t know anything about Sweden but in this country, in our current circumstances, most private schools do not want children with disabilities, or, if they do take children with disabilities, they cherry-pick (which isn’t that much different than what many of them do with typically-developing children, google for example how many children the KIPP schools push out).

That goes to the heart of those various claims about public education being so “wasteful”. The proponents of alternative education schemes like to cite what is spent per pupil in a public school to get some absurd amount like $15 k/year, instead of what it costs to educate a typical student. If you go with the latter statistic, the putative figure drops by some rather drastic fraction[1].

Of course, to get the costs down, you have to get rid of a lot of those “special” programs, which – again – makes alternative schooling a rather different proposition from what public schools offer.

[1]In fact, you’ll often see this sort of malicious innumeracy wherein people who have children that it costs perhaps $3,000 to educate over the whole year at a good school want four or five or six thousand dollars in vouchers or some other rebate scheme because “that is what the school is spending per pupil”. Not going to happen, especially when they themselves aren’t spending this amount on their kids. I’ve noticed that they are also strangely reluctant to accept instead what is the marginal costs of educating their child, which falls into the hundreds of dollars or maybe around $1,000. No, when they have to fork over extra money out of their own pockets, their enthusiasm cools off considerably.

No, but the point is that public schools will avoid expensive children if they can (and often they can). There’s a lot of mischief around special ed, a lot of it to do with class. School districts with substantial upper middle class clientele (who know the rules and can exert pressure) are pressured to provide well for special education (which is NOT fully funded by the state in most states) and this sets up a “shopping dynamic”. Providing poorly for special education kids is a smart strategy, if you can get away with it, because if you provide well you end up being a magnet for families who want to make use of services that are underfunded. No criticism here of those families: just of the structure of funding that gives rise to this.

This is my long-winded way of saying that whatever else, wanting teachers to be subjected “market forces” and “merit pay” as determined by test scores, and insisting that charter schools are better, despite test scores that say that otherwise are inconsistent positions. One or the other, but not both.

People who are pushing the testing-scores argument are generally liberals, like Matt Yglesias, Arne Duncan, Rhee of DC, and the like. Classical liberals (libertarians, modern right-wingers, freedom-of-choice fetishists, take your pick) like me do not weigh the testing-scores argument heavily, if at all. Right-wingers who are making the testing-scores argument are just being disingenuous, perhaps in a politically savvy way.

Bottom line: I don’t think Chas Murray etc. (let’s please, please, pleased not have a Murray argument again) don’t really for a moment’s notice care whether test scores are better or not in charters. The libertarian position, and I think it’s the right now, is that freedom of education choice should be the natural condition and is more in tune with how human societies function, and will lead to overall better outcomes, in the long run; thus, vouchers.

I understand why you might feel the need to address this, but really, we are trying to answer the wrong question. The right question isn’t whether charter schools deliver better scores, but rather whether as a matter of principle we should allow for more parental choice in educational environment.

The current system already ensures that this particular minority of kids in inner-city schools become a lifelong underclass.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the one suggesting leaving the current system in place, but allowing more students to escape it if their parents are motivated enough? What does that plan do to the ones who don’t escape it?

That’s the whole point of the critique of vouchers as being an *alternative* to improving the troubled schools we already have — only some students, *at best*, will benefit from fleeing the troubled schools. Creating an alternative is no substitute for improving the baseline, and conversely, if you *do* improve the baseline, there’s less or no need for the alternative. So focusing attention on the alternative is misguided and unproductive, and focusing *money* on the alternative can actually be counterproductive (since all the schools, including the left-behind publics, are scrabbling for the same sub-shoestring budget left after a zillion rounds of tax demagoguery).

I don’t think your approach is as Rawlsian as you seem to think it is. From a Rawlsian perspective you could just as well be one of the students that’s left behind and doesn’t get into a charter/voucher school, and how much has the program helped you then?

The right question isn’t whether charter schools deliver better scores, but rather whether as a matter of principle we should allow for more parental choice in educational environment.

ISTM that this is a bit of a subject change, but even accepting it, clearly we should allow that only within limits. Parents shouldn’t be free to have their children taught creation science, or a flat Earth, or various forms of revisionist history, or militant Islamism — at least, not on the taxpayer’s tab. (They can open a Sunday school or equivalent to teach any of those things, and AFAIK even the provable lies aren’t legally child abuse, but remember that “school choice” as a political issue is about redirecting *taxpayer* dollars to the school chosen by the parents.)

Children have a right, independent of their parents’ wishes, to an education that is as close to the actual truth about the world (on subjects where there is a reasonably ascertainable actual truth) as society can provide, without regard to their parents’ preferred ideologies.

Delivering that without turning the curriculum into an ideological football can be rather tricky, but just leaving it all in the hands of parents is clearly not an acceptable solution because the interests of children and parents can diverge.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with charters or vouchers in theory — but in practice it does. Vouchers are promoted in the U.S. South under the tacit understanding that they will be a way of defunding the secular public schools while funneling tax dollars to religious schools, and opposed based on the same understanding.

I’m beginning to suspect that most people on this thread don’t understand how under-funded special ed is. The Feds have never fully funded this mandate, they pay for something like 17%, states and local districts make up the rest. It is a strain.

There’s an infrastructure that is needed in a school to support children with disabilities, and I apologize for not having the time right now to explain this in detail. Just claiming you could send a child to a school with $x and everything will be just fine strikes me as a tad naive.

I think it would also help a lot of people on this thread if they thought of special ed in terms of the civil rights law that integrated schools. Separate is not equal, white children benefit as much as minority children by being in an integrated environment, and so on. It is widely predicted that if the number of charters grows substantially, the remaining public schools will become a dumping ground for all the children that are hard to educate. So there would be in essence, a separate, unequal system put into place.

This is my long-winded way of saying that whatever else, wanting teachers to be subjected “market forces” and “merit pay” as determined by test scores, and insisting that charter schools are better, despite test scores that say that otherwise are inconsistent positions. One or the other, but not both.

People who are pushing the testing-scores argument are generally liberals, like Matt Yglesias, Arne Duncan, Rhee of DC, and the like. Classical liberals (libertarians, modern right-wingers, freedom-of-choice fetishists, take your pick) like me do not weigh the testing-scores argument heavily, if at all. Right-wingers who are making the testing-scores argument are just being disingenuous, perhaps in a politically savvy way.

What does this have to do with what I said? I’m pointing out that simultaneously holding the propositions is contradictory, period. It doesn’t become any more or less so because of the politics or the ideology of the person expressing them.

Why would you think that it does? Am I missing something?

I understand why you might feel the need to address this, but really, we are trying to answer the wrong question. The right question isn’t whether charter schools deliver better scores, but rather whether as a matter of principle we should allow for more parental choice in educational environment.

Well, except for the fact that you’re piggy-backing on the work of what a lot of other people have said and done to the contrary.

Be honest – do you think vouchers or other alternatives would have gotten the attention and funding they did if the case to be made was only whether or not parents should have more “choice” as opposed to the supposed quality of public school education? There’s only one answer possible, you know, and it would behoove you to come clean on this one.

No. That is your supposition. The study does not say this.

Yes it does. From page 54, which I’ve cited several times: “The unobserved student and family characteristics should be relatively constant within the subgroup of charter eighth graders, however.” Read: That’s why we’re only looking at the subgroup of charter eighth graders, so as to help get rid of that selection bias.

Is this statement about ‘the usual objections about parental involvement are invalid’ something you said, or did it come from the paper?

It’s a perfectly obvious conclusion from what was said in the paper. If you can read page 53, the authors begin the whole analysis of selection effects by pointing out that they’re worried about the “parental involvement” objection:

The fact that the charter students and their parents actively sought out an alternative
to TPSs suggests that the students may be more motivated or their parents may be more involved in their child’s education than are the families of TPS attendees. Since these traits are not readily observable, they could be falsely attributed to the charter schools and thus bias the estimate of the impact of charter schools.

Then they explain on page 54 how they intend to address the selection effect problem. One of their strategies is to look only at students who were all in charter schools as of the 8th grade but who went to different high schools thereafter. The authors explain that this strategy should make the parental motivation issue “relatively constant within” both groups of students (charter high schoolers and TPS high schoolers). The authors make the same point at the top of page 64.

I’d suggest reading the study in its entirety to help address any more points of confusion.

It’s not clear what you are asking about the study’s conclusion. Here’s what the study found:

In this chapter, we found that charter–high school attendance is associated with a higher probability of successful high-school completion and an increased likelihood of attending a two- or four-year college in two disparate jurisdictions, Florida and Chicago. These results are based exclusively on the examination of students who were enrolled in charter schools prior to high school . . . .the results suggest that charter high schools in these two locations are producing substantial attainment benefits for many of their students. The reasons for these effects are not clear. We show that they are not driven by the smaller size of charter schools and are only partially explained by achievement differences between charters and TPSs. These results—and their similarity to results in the Catholic-school literature—suggest the possible value of seeking to replicate characteristics that charter and Catholic high schools have in common, which include not only small size but also (perhaps) a clear sense of educational mission—i.e., the kinds of features that have long been identified as characteristic of effective high schools.

I interpret this to mean what it says: that charter schools are likely “producing substantial attainment benefits for many of their students,” and that this may be because charter schools have traits that have also made Catholic high schools more successful.

Is this statement about ‘the usual objections about parental involvement are invalid’ something you said, or did it come from the paper?

It’s a perfectly obvious conclusion from what was said in the paper. If you can read page 53, the authors begin the whole analysis of selection effects by pointing out that they’re worried about the “parental involvement” objection:

Translation: no, the paper does not say that.

The way you argue is really weird. Let me check something. Googles.

Oh. My. God. I thought your schtick sounded familiar. If anybody doesn’t know who Stuart Buck is, I suggest you check out his blog. The first item up that I saw was a bit where he’s appearing on Dennis Prager’s show, as if that gave him – God forbid – credibility.

I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m going to get the same dance routine, no matter what, the same pretend misunderstandings, the concessions that aren’t really concessions, etc, so I think I’m done with this one unless anyone else wants to use this report to claim that charter schools cause better graduation outcomes.

“I’m beginning to suspect that most people on this thread don’t understand how under-funded special ed is. The Feds have never fully funded this mandate, they pay for something like 17%, states and local districts make up the rest. It is a strain.”

That doesn’t matter in principle. Wherever the money comes from right now, you simply allow it to follow the child with special needs if the parent chooses to move. If there are particular infrastructure problems then it is up to private organisations to work out how to implement them. If they fail, the public system will provide with the funding thats made available. But I think you would be pleasently surprised at how adaptable private education providers could be given the right incentives.

“I think it would also help a lot of people on this thread if they thought of special ed in terms of the civil rights law that integrated schools. Separate is not equal, white children benefit as much as minority children by being in an integrated environment, and so on.”

That is one way of thinking about it. The other way of thinking about it is to acknowledge that most school systems are already heavily segregated (by district, and often by race), and that by providing vouchers or tax credits or allowing charter schools to compete, you simply give poor students the same right to pursue educational alternatives as are already available to the rich.

While I was out, this thread seems to have evolved into a debate about one research study, as if one study could answer all the questions raised by charters.

Meanwhile, the big questions get ignored. Here’s one: how come almost all the charter experimentation happens in the inner-city, and not in prosperous suburbs like mine? It’s almost not hysterical to say there’s something Tuskagee-like to that.

Oh, it’s because inner-city schools rate poorly on every measure? Hmm, do you think it could be because we have an awful lot of poor children, and if we reduced poverty, we might increase school performance, and in the mean time, we are blaming schools for circumstances they didn’t cause and can’t control?

Why would we blame schools like that? Um, because there are people who stand to make a lot of money by privatizing schools — a good number of people already have, and there’s lots more gold in them thar hills. How to get the momentum going? I know, for one, let’s have lots of high stakes tests so we can prove the schools stink. And along the way, there’ll also be fortunes to be made publishing all those tests and accompanying study materials!

Here’s another question: Let’s say Stuart’s and Myles’ fondest dreams are realized, and all schools are privatized. All of a sudden, a whole form of democratic local government, the school board, ceases to exist and is replaced by private corporations. Isn’t there a name for that? It’s on the tip of my tongue, I think it starts with an F…

The original post is about an intelligently designed, well-funded project that had good results. I should certainly hope that’s so. If the combination of smart design and adequate support doesn’t work, the tool box is empty and all that’s left is despair. But using that as evidence that it would be best to dismantle public schooling is ridiculous. Like Violet, I’m outta here.

That is one way of thinking about it. The other way of thinking about it is to acknowledge that most school systems are already heavily segregated (by district, and often by race), and that by providing vouchers or tax credits or allowing charter schools to compete, you simply give poor students the same right to pursue educational alternatives as are already available to the rich.

To be blunt, vouchers don’t give poor students this “right” to pursue educational alternatives that are already available to the rich.

Remember when Al Gore was confronted by an “angry parent” who asked him if why he thought public schools were so good his kids didn’t attend one? He fumbled this one badly trying to be just one of the guys, and should have just told her straight up that his kids’ education was costing $30,000 a year. Each. And that there was no way that any voucher scheme was going to give someone like her access to that sort of deal.

Haven’t we done this 1,001 times already?

Here’s one: how come almost all the charter experimentation happens in the inner-city, and not in prosperous suburbs like mine?

Because people are trying to help others who need help. Like it or not, that’s usually the motivation. If more people opened up charter schools in prosperous suburbs, they’d be accused of just cherry-picking the easy locations and of giving more benefits to the already-privileged.

Here’s another question: Let’s say Stuart’s and Myles’ fondest dreams are realized, and all schools are privatized.

This is a caricature.

Ohio Mom,

thanks, from me too, for your contributions.

Now, as brief as I can be. I completely agree that the fundamental causes both of low academic achievement (defined in any sensible way, and even some not sensible ways) are economic and social (broadly speaking). No country has much of a record of getting high acheivement from children growing up in high concentrations of relative poverty.

The problem is this. There is no political force at all for doing much about this. If you like, Myles is right to treat poverty (understood broadly) as a given, at least for the next generation or two, because there is a tacit political consensus that seems to be unshakeable, that having 25% of kids raised in poverty is just fine.

So we are left with a menu of interventions which, understood properly, promise at best very small improvements (this echoes Myles’s comment about not being able to save everyone — I think we could in one sense, but not through school policy, and not through the kinds of social and economic policies that actual American politicians are likely to support). This menu has a lot of things on it, and we don’t have a great deal of knowledge about which items are most promising. School-based interventions (charters, vouchers, instructional strategies, etc) have a lot of political traction because people naturally turn to schools to deal with educational outcomes, because it is clear that many inner city schools are underperforming and inefficient even given their resource levels, and because there is an energetic campaign in favour of seeing charters in particular as the main solution. Some people behind this campaign are well-willed and sincere, seeing what they believe to be amazing results in difficult circumstances and being, I think, rather naive about the replicatability through policy of such successes (and, I think, being naive about the character and extent of those successes themselves). Others I suspect are less honest. For example, Richard Rothstein’s arguments against some of the wild claims about schools that beat the odds in Class and Schools are ignored, rather than answered. Ravitch — well, we’ll see how her arguments get responded to, but I bet it won’t be with lots of careful consideration of the evidence. I do think (as Rothstein argues) that there are items on the reform menu that are relatively inexpensive and likely to have considerable impact, which fall far short of full scale economic reform, and are not really about schools. I also think there may be genuinely school-based reforms that will have small impacts, and are worth pursuing: and that nobody knows with the confidence they like to appear to have what these are.

Not wanting to give you more reading, but I discuss some of these issues here:

https://crookedtimber.org/2009/12/09/schools-that-beat-the-odds/
https://crookedtimber.org/2008/05/13/rothstein-and-hess-on-fixing-schools/
https://crookedtimber.org/2008/04/23/the-deficit-model-of-poverty-and-nclb/
https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/22/class-schools-and-research-literacy/
https://crookedtimber.org/2008/05/13/rothstein-and-hess-on-fixing-schools/
https://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/05/more-on-equity-and-equality-in-education/

What exactly is the causal mechanism that associates material poverty with poor education? I would have thought the cause is probably the other way round. Low education level in a household leads to poverty, seems to make more sense.

How could the low educational level of the child lead to the material poverty in which she resides, Nick?

The child has no education level at all, but nor does she have any income, regardless of circumstances. Every child, as an individual, lives in income poverty and will remain so unless the state starts mandating pocket money. So This is a household variable, and I’m suggesting that it is poor education level in a household that accounts for their poverty, rather than the other way round.

I knew what you were saying, but that it seemed like an irrelevant observation (which is why I was a bit sarky, sorry): the point is the household poverty (understood not just in material terms, but substantially in material terms), whatever its ultimate causes, affects the child’s educational achievement levels. I HOPE that I was telling the truth about the Rothstein quote being in that link, I’m pretty sure it is, but didn’t check. Its neat.

“What, you’re claiming that public schools don’t have to educate special needs kids if they don’t want to??! That’s the first I’ve heard of this. Could you provide a cite?”

You’re projecting. Public schools, and in fact lots of private institutions do all sorts of things that they don’t want to do.

And public schools don’t *have to* educate special needs kids particularly well, and in fact they often don’t.

“I’m beginning to suspect that most people on this thread don’t understand how under-funded special ed is. The Feds have never fully funded this mandate, they pay for something like 17%, states and local districts make up the rest. It is a strain.”

Of course it is a strain. But the underfunding of special ed is yet another issue entirely. Given whatever funding level we are talking about in practical reality, there isn’t a particularly strong reason to think that can *only* be dealt with in the public system. If the Feds+states+localities are making up a large contribution (and they are) it can be designed to be child oriented for most special needs. For other more specialized needs we typically hit a density problem with infrastructure, but this means that for those special needs we aren’t providing care at every public school either.

And you admit that you are seeing these challenges from the suburban good schools. Have you seen them from the inner city school point of view? It isn’t pretty at all.

Barry
that’s not exactly right about the affluent suburbs. Most kids in most of those places attend very well funded public schools (private schools on the public dollar). Most who attend private schools attend low-cost and low-price schools, usually for religious reasons. This is a misapprehension about the character of the private system — it is, on average, much less expensive than the public system. Elite expensive privates are a very small part of the system, and thrive where the publics are not well funded. But, of course, like the charter schools, inexpensive private schools can and do dregs-sift, which the regular public system cannot do (and bears the costs of others doing). I should write a post about this probably.

Harry — what’s the evidence that inexpensive private schools do that? The evidence I’ve seen goes exactly the other way. Derek Neal and Jeffrey Grogger found that “there is evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. Relative to their public-school counterparts, urban whites who attend these schools appear to possess unmeasured traits that inhibit attainment.” They add this footnote: “Evidence of negative selection is common in this literature. Coleman and Hoffer (1987), Evans and Schwab (1995), and Neal (1997) all report evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. A common hypothesis concerning this result is that some parents send their children to Catholic schools seeking a remedy for existing problems with discipline and motivation.”

“Low educational attainment of the parent leads to poverty, both of which lead to low educational attainment of the child, which leads to poverty in the next generation. It’s called the “cycle of poverty” and it’s a fairly basic concept of class in society, to the extent that I’m surprised to find someone unfamiliar with it. (Low education is not the only vector, so to speak, of poverty perpetuation, but it’s the one most relevant to this thread.)”

I have heard of it. I just don’t buy it as a very explanatory theory. Societies begin with everyone in poverty. Poverty is just what you have when nothing much else is going on. So if the cycle were all that determinant, being rich would be rare, and poverty would be normal. You need other factors besides the mere fact of poverty existing currently to explain why it seems set to continue. Because a lot of people, even when in material poverty, are on an upward trajectory.

“The public schools don’t have any particularly large desire to educate special needs children either, so they don’t? What is the point of this statement, other than some sort of rhetorical obfuscation?”

Actually, you are being ridiculously obtuse. His point was that though compelled by law, public schools aren’t necessarily that eager to teach special ed (I am sure some are and some aren’t). So they will certainly provide it, but it won’t necessarily be all that good. On the other hand, if you introduce competition and choice to the sector, then they will either get better or the special ed pupils will go elsewhere.

Most who attend private schools attend low-cost and low-price schools, usually for religious reasons. This is a misapprehension about the character of the private system—it is, on average, much less expensive than the public system.

Careful there! This is a common point of misapprehension that is frequently exploited by the pro-voucher crowd.

You have to be very careful to distinguish between what is spent per pupil – the statistic voucher advocates use for public schools – with what it costs to educate the typical child – which is the statistic voucher advocates use for private schools. Obviously, an apples-and-oranges comparison. Guess who using these differential statistics favor ;-) If you do an apples-to-apples comparison of the costs of educating a typical student, these figures for public vs private converge a great deal.

Further, another accounting trick that (primarily religious) private schools use is discounting the physical plant costs by folding them into the general church operating expenses. And it makes the payroll expenses look good when you get to use nuns as teachers.

The bottom line is that, vague mutterings about efficiency to the contrary, there aren’t any good reasons to expect private schools to be that much less expensive than public ones without a concomitant loss in either services or quality.

So if the cycle were all that determinant, being rich would be rare, and poverty would be normal.

Yes, that is true. Poverty *is* normal. The rich are always rare even within their own societies, and historically and globally, the existence of middle classes is rare.

The societies that do have middle classes generally acquired them gradually over generations, if not centuries. I’m not saying class mobility is *impossible*. But guessing that a child of rich parents will do better in school than a child of poor parents is a better bet than the opposite. The statistical correlation between parental wealth and child educational outcomes is *very* strong.

“The societies that do have middle classes generally acquired them gradually over generations, if not centuries. I’m not saying class mobility is impossible. But guessing that a child of rich parents will do better in school than a child of poor parents is a better bet than the opposite. The statistical correlation between parental wealth and child educational outcomes is very strong.”

Not always. It didn’t take South Korea that long at all. And whatever the statistical correlation, it can’t mean equivalent wealth. People are getting substantially richer from one generation to the next. Nearly everyone is part of that pattern.

Probably pointlessly late here, but I really do think people should shun avowed racists like Murray and never bring him into the argument, unless it’s specifically about how racism gets coded into school choice rhetoric.

School choice makes sense because different kids have different needs. Some kids might need a lot of structure, some kids might need less. Some might need whole language, some phonics. Some may need lots of technology to do well, other kids aren’t able to handle it. The point of having school choice, from my POV, is to kill off one size fits all schools that at best are going to cookie cutter to 50% or so of the student population and create distinctive schools that can educate kids in particular, specific ways that make sense to that kid and his/her family.

Yes, yes, yes. And this is why the focus on test scores is misleading. If Family A decides that their child would do better in the environment of a different school while Family B sees that their child is fine in the public school, Family A’s child may not do any “better” in terms of test scores than Family B’s child. But maybe Family A’s child found a better fit and was thereby prevented from declining in future years — and that’s something that will be hard to measure empirically. Family A and Family B will keep looking the same in terms of test scores, or Family A may even look worse, but the outsider won’t be able to tell that Family A’s child could have done even worse than that.

Families are often able to see what trajectory their child is on, what sorts of teachers and curriculum are likely to be helpful, etc. That’s probably one reason why charter high schoolers, even if they don’t show dramatic test score gains, are more likely to graduate and go to college, as the RAND study found in two locations.