Julian Vasquez Heilig analyzes a new poll about choice. Choice is alluring but what are people concerned about most?
Lack of parental involvement in the schools, class size, too much testing, budget cuts.
What do they think about charters? They don’t object to them so long as
they don’t take funding from their public school. They think charter board meetings should be open to the public. Most want to limit their expansion.
Choice seems to equal no choice. When your community school is closed and replaced with a charter that starts with 3 grades, and your kid is in 4th – where do you send your kid? Across town to another charter? Across town to another public school? Choice seems to displace a lot of students and families. Look at Newark’s One Newark choice program; its a nightmare.
MIT economics graduate, Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, who wrote an NBER paper extolling the value of paying teachers in advance and then asking them to give back the money if their students didn’t improve, started a philanthropy to study philanthropies-no kidding. The “Science of Philanthropy Initiative” (SPI), at the University of Chicago, is recruiting young people for the July 12, Summer Institute in Field Experiments.
The entry for Levitt at S.H.A.M.E. (Shame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics) provides a perspective about Levitt.
The surprise is that the University of Wisconsin would participate with him, in SPI.
The corporate reformers and their masters don’t care what the public thinks, but some, and hopefully many, elected officials do because they might want to win the next election.