Henry Levin, the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied school choice and privatization around the world. Levin says there is no evidence for the efficacy of these strategies.
Levin writes:
“Some have argued that competitive incentives induced by school choice will lead to better educational outcomes. However, there is little evidence to support this claim.
“Sweden has had an educational voucher system since 1992, but its achievement levels on international tests have been falling for two decades. Chile has had such a system since 1980, and there is little evidence of improvement in achievement relative to countries at similar levels of income. Cleveland, Milwaukee, and the District of Columbia have issued vouchers to low-income families, but sophisticated evaluations find no difference between achievement in private voucher schools and public schools with similar student populations. Students from low-income families in Louisiana who have used vouchers to shift from public to private schools have experienced striking reductions in achievement gains relative to similar students in public schools…..
“In England there has been a dramatic shift from schools governed by public councils to academies run by private groups with great autonomy and the ability to select their own students. The results on student achievement show no distinct advantage, and there are similar results for U.S. charter schools based upon careful statistical comparisons.
“Where school choice has shown powerful effects around the world is the systematic separation of students by ethnicity, social class and religion.
“Sweden’s vouchers have increased segregation by social class and immigrant status. Chile’s voucher system has produced one of the most segregated system of schools in the world by family income. In the Netherlands, studies of the school choice system have pointed to school separation of students by ethnicity, immigrant status and family income. A Brookings Institution study found that U.S. charter schools are more segregated racially and socio-economically than public schools in surrounding areas. The Program for International Student Assessment, an important triennial study of international student performance, finds school segregation by social class is associated with school choice.
“Although even public schools have segregation challenges typically caused by residential location, school choice tends to streamline the racial, social class and ethnic isolation of students, as well as separate them by political ideology and religion.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Coincidentally, I was in touch with a friend in Sweden yesterday and asked about the Swedish experience. Here’s a compilation of two messages I got back:
The deregulation of content teaching and the focus on selling school profiles using business buzzwords is a crucial part in the catastrophe, as well as the pressure teachers feel to “cater” to stakeholders of all kinds.
No consequences of any kind can be given to students for lack of academic commitment or poor behaviour, as the parents are customers. If they take their children out of the school, the public funding for the child is lost = less money for the school.
As this has been going on slowly, steadily since the 1970s, there are generations of people who don’t even have an idea where to start to find back to quality and content (brutally missing in science and social studies, for example, as teachers have to teach to the national tests in Swedish and maths and English to attract customers with measurable results).
Other countries have hailed Swedish education without insight into the reality of it. Now we see an ever growing trend to put children into international schools to give them an educational foundation. These schools, however, are often affected by the similar trend in America. A vicious circle.”
The major study on the collapse is Per Kornhall’s “Barnexperimentet: svensk skola i fritt fall,” showing the development from the 1990s onwards, but the deterioration started in the 1970s under Olof Palme, with the undermining of academic knowledge and skills in all subjects. The PISA results in the past decade speak for themselves as well.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/201…
http://www.oecd.org/sweden/sweden-sho…
The “distant utopia” of Sweden (as stated naively by British outsiders in the Guardian) is a “near dystopia” in reality.
Greater segregation and students whose program has been stripped of content are the outcomes of privatization. A preoccupation with testing robs young people of rich, content driven instruction. How will this make young people better citizens?
Ah, but it WILL make more of them complacent, pliable pawns for the Technology Barons.
I have seen amazing results from working in an excellent diverse public school. We have had many poor students that have entered the middle class as a result of attending a good public school system and college. Last week I was surprised to see one of my former ESL students on Jeopardy. While he lost to a doctor, he made a good showing, I looked him up and discovered he had attended NYU. A bigger surprise came when I looked up his profile and saw he works for Amplify.
Public school parents should read DeVos’ written responses to Senator Murray.
Click to access betsy-devos-questions-for-the-record-to-sen-murray.pdf
DeVos offers absolutely nothing to public schools other than “online learning” which she seems to be believe is “new” in public schools when in fact ed reformers in Ohio and her home state of Michigan have been pushing online classes into public schools for a decade now.
Read DeVos on public schools. You can’t. She simply omits public schools. Ed reform is now officially irrelevant to the 90% of students who DON’T attend charter and private schools.
Public school students, teachers and parents will have no voice in DC. She doesn’t even value public schools enough to mention our kids or our schools other than pushing ed tech product on them. We’re a “market”. That’s our only value to this “movement”.
I hope people are filing FOIA requests. Since public schools are once again being “reformed” without anyone from a public school at the table parents and students will need information.
I’m sure the plans are already drawn up. Once again public schools will get the shaft from DC, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. We have no advocates. We’re not even included in this “debate” which is being conducted exclusively within the ed reform echo chamber.
Remember folks! It is your DUTY to turn your kids over for testing this spring! The only time anyone in DC will bother with the unfashionable public school sector is if they don’t get the “data” they need. Just think of your child’s school as a data collection center for ed reform. That’s the extent of their interest in your kids.
.@SenAlexander: Does anyone really expect @realDonaldTrump to appoint someone from the education establishment? #DeVos
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Could the ed reform lobby in Congress take a break from bashing public schools to score political points? Public school employees live and work in our communities. They’re not “the establishment”. They’re us. We elected the boards. The people we hired hire the teachers. The teachers are our friends and neighbors and relatives.
If Senator Alexander has contempt for the people who work in and attend public schools then he has contempt FOR US.
He doesn’t speak for me and since I actually use public schools and none of these people do maybe they should just address charter and private school parents. That’s what they know.
The Wall Street Journal portrays all teachers as greedy and trapped in unions. Teachers exisit only as members of teacher unions, and the unions are ruining education. Education = scores on tests of reading and reading and statistical fictions about more days of learning produced by charter schools. Ideology will not allow any contrary views. Now the big target is higher education.
The entire “education reform/choice/charter school” movement has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement, of which charter schools are the profit-making part, has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda. Reports from the NAACP and ACLU have revealed the facts about just how charter schools are resegregating our nation’s schools, as well as discriminating racially and socioeconomically against American children, and last year the NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion and for the strengthening of oversight in governance and practice. Moreover, a very detailed nationwide research by The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA shows in clear terms that private charter schools suspend extraordinary numbers of black students.
The first outcry for resegregation “reform” in the guise of vouchers arose immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that separate but equal was inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents free “choice.”
But the 1950’s voucher reform faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would never become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing.” With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Courts, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO FEDERAL MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.