This is a project that should interest all readers of the blog as well as state and local school boards and elected officials at every level. It includes a book that reviews education issues around the globe and resources that you may access by clicking the link. The bottom line of a vast amount of research is that privatization is a failed policy, not an innovation. The most effective way to invest public dollars is in improving public schools.
Stanford Graduate School of Education Research Center Introduces Cross-National Study Central to Debates about Future of the U.S. Education System
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Ralph Rogers
Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education
650.725.8600
ralphr@stanford.edu
Stanford, CA – December 13, 2016 – In the midst of the ongoing debate and a potential shift in the U.S. approach to education, the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) is pleased to introduce new research-based evidence and analysis that supports investment in public schools as a better alternative than the privatization of education.
“This book shows how public investment in education outperforms privatization across three continents, addressing this critical question as President-elect Trump’s appointee, Betsy DeVos, considers shifting U.S. education to a voucher scheme,” said Frank Adamson, PhD, the primary editor, chapter author, and Senior Policy and Research Analyst at SCOPE. “This book offers reasoned evidence to policymakers, communities, and families about how investing in public schools produces better and more equitable outcomes than voucher programs.”
SCOPE’s work addresses the question of how results from public investment approaches compare with those from market-based reforms and provides a timely explanation of alternatives based on real evidence derived from policy analysis and actual outcomes in six different countries. In this project, SCOPE has designed and implemented a set of accessible information resources designed to inform the different constituencies involved in this important debate.
The book, Global Education Reform: How Privatization and Public Investment Influence Education Outcomes, with a set of supporting infographics, videos, and research briefs, provides hard evidence supporting investment in pubic schools. Researchers thoroughly investigated the results of experiments with education in Chile, Sweden, and the U.S. and compared their educational outcomes with those of nearby countries with similar economic and social conditions: Cuba, Finland, and Canada (Ontario). At the national levels in Sweden, the U.S., and Chile, market, charter, or voucher systems are associated with greater disparities and lower student outcomes on international tests.
SCOPE’s project combined in-depth analysis of the different ends of an ideological spectrum – from market-based experiments to strong state investments in public education. Written by education researchers, including Linda Darling-Hammond, Michael Fullan, Pasi Sahlberg, Martin Carnoy, and others, the authors present long-term policy analyses based on primary and secondary research on the implementation and results of these different approaches.
To best support an open debate on the issue of school reform, SCOPE has created the following set of free information resources:
Privatization or Public Investment in Education is a free SCOPE research and policy brief summarizing the findings in the book.
Six Countries. Two Educational Strategies. One Consistent Conclusion is a free infographic presenting an accessible and concise summary of the differences in approaches and outcomes – privatization versus public investment in education.
Our Kids, Our Future: Privatization and Public Investment in Education, a 3-minute video providing an overview of the differences between experimental privatization models and public investment in equitable education systems.
How Privatization and Public Investment Influence Education: A Look at the Research, a more detailed 12-minute video explaining the differences between experimental privatization models and public investment in equitable education systems.
Educational Inequities in the New Orleans Charter School System is a free infographic from SCOPE and the Schott Foundation that explains the impact on students and schools of New Orleans becoming a predominantly charter district after Hurricane Katrina.
The Editors
Frank Adamson, PhD, is a Senior Policy and Research Analyst at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.
Björn Åstrand, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer and Dean at Karlstad University in Sweden.
Linda Darling-Hammond, EdD, is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, the author of over 300 publications, and a former president of the American Educational Research Association.
About SCOPE
The Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) fosters research, policy, and practice to advance high-quality, equitable education systems in the United States and internationally.
These resources can be downloaded or viewed at the SCOPE Global Education Reform web page.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What I find most fascinating here is the presence of competing education “think tanks” at Stanford. On the reformy side we have the Walton-funded CREDO, which has published numerous (debunked) “studies” touting the superiority of charters (as exposed brilliantly here by Mother Crusader: http://mothercrusader.blogspot.com/2012/12/is-credo-part-of-bandwagon.html), and on the defenders of public ed side we have SCOPE, which put out the book described in this post.
Wouldn’t you just love to be a fly on the wall at the Stanford college of education holiday party?
If anyone familiar with the inner workings at Stanford can shed some light on the insider politics here that would be great…
I think the think tanks at Stanford never meet. CREDO and Hoover are not in school of education.
I recently spent some time with a Stanford ed school professor who confirmed my stereotype of the out-of-touch, PC orthodox, intellectually mediocre ed school professor. I asked her if she read Diane’s blog and she said rarely because she hasn’t quite forgiven Diane for supporting testing and accountability earlier in her career.
Ponderosa,
That is the definition of a closed mind. I lectured at Stanford Ed School in 2010 and the Cubberley auditorium was overflowing, with people lining the walls and standing in the balcony.
Any school is only as good as the skills/knowledge/experience of the teacher in front of your child combined with the variety of educational and extra-curricular activities offered.
Public schools trump charters on these two items – every time.
“At the national levels in Sweden, the U.S., and Chile, market, charter, or voucher systems are associated with greater disparities and lower student outcomes on international tests.”
Good news: Using the term “are associated with” and not “result in” or “cause”.
Bad news: Using “student outcomes on international tests” to buttress their argument. Hey at least they didn’t use “measure student achievement”.
Those international tests contain all the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings that render any results COMPLETELY INVALID as proven by Noel Wilson in his never refuted nor rebutted seminal work: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
🙂
Research does not matter. We are in an age of anti-intellectualism. We are poised to have the least educated presidential cabinet in history. The masses show contempt of the educated. University educated are laughed at by the rich that have gotten their money from ponzi schemes, fast food empires, hedge fund managers, football stars, and rap singers. Our culture values money above all else regardless of how it is gotten. The cabinet about to take the reins has more wealth combined than a third of the entire population of this country. This is a turning point in our history. We are entering the dark ages. Hold tight everyone; we’re in for a ride!
Research and evidence are being ignored by our policymakers because reality is being ignored. The whole “choice” movement is led by those that seek to benefit from subjecting education to the market. Many of the tech companies, testing companies, billionaires and the Christian right are rigging the system against public education by buying the decision makers. It is a corrupt, reckless, and radical band of deplorables that dictate our educational policies, not responsible, responsive leadership.
And the poorest of our masses — many of whom voted for Trump — the first to be fleeced.
Janet, I agree. But I blame the academy somewhat for going down the rabbit hole of deconstructionism and gender-race lollapalooza. This has created a cloud-cuckoo-land atmosphere at universities that is easy to hate and ridicule, and has poorly equipped our “best and brightest” to deal with reality, which, as we’re now seeing, is far more treacherous than was supposed.
Yes!!! Thank you for sharing this info!!
But… soon we’ll have accountability and transparency in charter schools and newly minted TFA “teachers” and excellent profit margins for charter school companies and PIGS WILL FLY. Our war cry will be BACON ON THE WING!
BTW does TFA recruit at Stanford or Cal Berkely or other prominent Universities in the West? They seem mainly to come from the Ivies in the eastern U.S.