Milwaukee has had vouchers since 1990. The program was expanded to include religious schools in 1998. Voucher advocates, led by former superintendent Howard Fuller, insisted that school choice was the best way to raise the woeful academic performance of black students. Fuller, a social worker and one-time advocate for black nationalism, is now head of the pro-choice Black Alliance for Educational Options. Fuller, the one-time radical, has long been subsidized by rightwing foundations, including the Bradley Foundation and the Walton Foundation (and the Gates Foundation). None of the whites who run these foundations have any credibility in black communities, but Fuller is an effective salesman for their segregationist ideas.
In the early days of vouchers and charters, advocates promised that school choice would cause schools to get better by competing for students. School choice would bring about a rising tide that would lift all boats. Public schools would improve, they said, adopting new programs and higher standards to retain their students and beat the competition. John Chubb and Terry Moe published a seminal work in 1990 called “Politics, Markets, and Schools” in which they argued that all reforms of the existing system were doomed to fail because of its democratic governance and the power of the unions; they boldly claimed that school choice is a “panacea.”
That was the same year that Milwaukee first offered vouchers.
For several years, the Milwaukee voucher program was evaluated by opposing groups. Some said it helped students, others said it didn’t. Over time, critics and supporters reached a consensus view. The voucher program overall had no impact on student performance but parents were happier. Although students were not better prepared academically, they had a higher graduation rate, but they had such high attrition rates that the students least likely to graduate had already dropped out or returned to public schools.
Meanwhile, the public schools enrolled far higher proportions of students with disabilities because the voucher schools and charter schools said they could not meet their needs. The choice schools were also able to eliminate students who were disciplinary problems or academically unable and send them back to public schools.
This article portrays the situation in Milwaukee to mark the 25th anniversary of vouchers, in 2014. Nothing has changed since then. The evaluation industry has moved on. The consensus holds: students in voucher schools do not make greater test score gains than those in public schools. Public schools do not improve as a result of competition. Public schools lose funding to voucher schools and charter schools, which makes them less able to compete. Public schools get the students that the private voucher schools don’t want.
Pro-choice evaluators have reached the same conclusions in D.C. and Cleveland. No rising tide.
And this is the failed program that Betsy DeVos wants to spread across the nation. We now know that vouchers do not save poor kids from failing schools. Vouchers have no purpose other than to undermine public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I know it’s all just marketing but the “scholarship” framing ed reformers use is terrible.
It’s so biased against public schools. They offer a “scholarship” to “escape” the disfavored public schools. I mean, come on. How is that “agnostic”? It’s an implied quality judgment.
That public employees are pushing people towards private schools with this marketing is outrageous. How is this their job? The public hire and pay them to promote private schools? I don’t think so.
“Escaping” has become be a repeated message from Trump; the state of reality as he promotes it — from inner city to rural pastures — is “catastrophic.”
I’d also like to know how all these Republicans who call themselves “federalists” and are always complaining about federal over-reach justify federal charter and voucher programs.
The federal government promotes and funds opening charter schools in states. That’s fact. Why don’t they object to that?
DeVos goes further. She doesn’t even mention public schools except to label them “failing”. She’s a federal employee and so are the other 4200 people who work at the US Department of Education. Where’s the “states rights” crowd on this? The feds pushing charters and vouchers and bashing public schools is the feds interfering in state and local decisions.
The charter program at the US Department of Education blatantly pushed (more) charters into Youngstown Ohio. I didn’t hear a peep out of the federalists in ed reform. The federal government administering federal lunch programs is an intrusion but the federal government shaping WHICH SCHOOLS open in Youngstown is A-OK?
Ed reform is incoherent. None of it makes sense.
“. . . students in voucher schools do not make greater test score gains than those in public schools.”
Who gives a damn about those test score “gains”? The fool’s gold coin of the realm. To use COMPLETELY INVALID standardized test scores for anything is absurd, insane, irrational, etc. . . resulting in an utter nonsensical educational malpractice that harms many students.
WHY? Why do some insist on using blatant falsehoods as a guide to inform our instructional practices, falsehoods which defile the teaching and learning process???
HOW? How insane is that???
WHEN? When will the harms, the violations, the absurdities stop???
By understanding all the foundational conceptual (onto-epistemological) errors and falsehoods and psychometric fudgings identified 20 years ago by Noel Wilson that render any and all results COMPLETELY INVALID will we begin to destroy the standards and testing regime. To understand please read Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted “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.
Duane,
Your thorough debunking of the practice of assigning high stakes to standardized tests was entirely correct. DeVious Rheeformers have shown time and again, however, they do not change their minds when the facts show they are wrong. The only way to get rid of annual testing is to use it against them, to address it as it suggests that “choice” does not improve options. Toward that end, I will be happy to have many of my students take the NAEP on Thursday.
Duane E Swacker and LeftCoastTeacher: I think both approaches can be used in tandem.
First, standardized tests are—just going by the self-serving standards of the, er, standardized testing industry professionals that design, produce and score them—inherently imprecise, cover very little, are poorly understand by the general public, and misused by those that pay for them. And that’s not even bringing up whether they should be used at all.
Second, given that the numbers & stats generated by standardized tests are not just the preferred, but the gold, standard for those pushing corporate education reform, it is astounding how poorly rheephorm schemes perform in practice as gauged by their own preferred metrics. A critical part of the lack of transparency and honesty involved in corporate education reform is the marked tendency to not just downplay their numerical failures but to engage in the most clumsy and dishonest attempts to juke the stats, torture the numbers, fix the figures so they come out with the “right” results aka whatever increases $tudent $ucce$$.*
*They just love tying the profit motive to worthy social causes like education because, you know, everybody “profits” although to riff off of ANIMAL FARM, a few profit a lot lot lot more than the vast majority.
So we can put them on the spot by making them defend the use of a most dubious type of “measurement” and then point out that they are failing by their won fiercely defended [if pathetic] “measurement.”
Of course, rheephormistas across the political/philosophical spectrum will retort that we are being mean-spirited because we can’t possibly know “what’s in their hearts” and that we take accountability via standards too “literally” and we never understood that legal mandates like NCLB’s 2014 100% proficiency were really meant to be taken “symbolically” and that when all is said and done, they have plenty of “alternative facts” to present because “studies show” how wonderful in theory their “truthful hyperbole” has been, is, and will be.
If y’all wonder whether the “deep thinking” I outline in the above paragraph makes any sense, not to worry. Like all committed Marxists—and they come in all flavors, from Arne Duncan to Betsy DeVos—they have a ready answer when they find themselves unable to clearly and logically explain their arguments:
“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
¿? That’s Groucho, and don’t you forget it. Although even amongst the faithful there are differences of opinion. The latest is Marxist Dominionism…
But that’s a story for another time.
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So the only reason Milwaukee can claim success is “parents were happier” not having to send their kids to the same classrooms as the Others?!? That explains why rheeform is always accompanied by customer satisfaction surveys. And I thought they were just collecting data for corporate use. How little I know! I never knew my job as a teacher was not to educate effectively, but to make parents happy by getting rid of students with differences. Now I know. I’ll just stop teaching, and start referring all the Latino students to the dean of discipline so the African American students can have my classroom to themselves. Great.
LeftCoastTeacher: well put.
This goes along with the second paragraph of the posting. I am thinking here of the misleading and misused numbers & stats generated by standardized tests. When those leading the charge for corporate education reform find these all-important (according to their own metrics) figures insufficient to support their self-serving claims—or as is frequently the case, damaging to it—their fallback more often than not is the “customer satisfaction survey.”
Think about it. If you go into a fast food joint and only interview people that appear to be enjoying themselves immensely and only those that have been frequenting the place for three or four years (think charter HS claims)—i.e., select those most likely to give the most favorable responses because in ed terms you’ve gotten rid of test-suppressors and laggards and behavior problems and “expensive” students and their parents and the rest of the riffraff—you will come up with an astoundingly high “positive satisfaction index.”
The folks that tried the food a few times and are pleasantly munching away at a competitor’s establishment a few doors away, or those that only come because they can’t afford the prices of the venues they would prefer, etc., somehow someway rarely make even a token appearance in those kinds of surveys.
Wonder why? It doesn’t make sense if you want to be accurate and truthful and transparent…
But if you’re all in for $tudent $ucce$$, it makes a whole lotta ₵ent¢…
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Fuller, like Kevin Chavous, is just a sad Uncle Tom. — Edd Doerr
So the public schools get all the “rejects” from the voucher and charter schools as well as dealing with special needs and ELL populations and have their funding reduced by charter and voucher programs and yet the private programs still do not do any better than the public schools? Sounds to me like the public schools are actually doing a better job. They make sure that all their students have the opportunity to excel rather than just a select few.
It is less important how schools are organized than the quality of instruction. Struggling students need ALTERNATIVE forms of instruction that enliven and enable their brains for learning, such as is being provided by the nonprofit The Rock ‘n’ Read Project this fall with a $100,000 grant from the MN Legislature. Struggling readers in 2nd-5th grades (in 4 public district and public charter schools where 70-80% not reading at grade level) who are singing with a software intervention have made nearly half a year of reading gain and nearly double the reading gain of those not singing in 7.5-24 hours over 10-14 weeks. See http://www.rocknreadproject.org See TV news story: http://kstp.com/news/rock-n-read-project-singing-college-prep-elementary-school-st-paul/4309602/
So it doesn’t seem to hurt STUDENTS (at least not the ones stuck in the public schools).
Who benefits? Who loses?
My guess is that the investor class benefits somehow, teachers and their unions lose, and those unfortunate kids stuck in the “holding tank” public schools because the choice schools can take a hard pass on them lose most of all.
That about right?
I meant, of course, “not the ones WHO AREN’T stuck in the public schools.”