I was a founding board member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (now, Institute). It is a pro-choice organization. I opposed the decision to sponsor charter schools in Ohio, because I thought it was outside the work of a think tank. My ideal think tank would exercise independence in reviewing government policy and gain respect for avoiding doctrinaire conclusions. On that issues, I was out voted, but was not surprised when most or all of the charters we sponsored were failing schools.
I left TBF in 2009 when I realized that I no longer shared its commitment to choice, testing, and accountability.
I appreciate the fact that TBF Is more willing to acknowledge its failings than other rightwing advocacy groups.
Last July, TBF released the results of a study of the Ohio voucher program, commissioned by TBF and conducted by Northwestern professor David Figlio. Here is the full study.
The study was not an endorsement of vouchers.
The students who won the vouchers were not the most disadvantaged:
“Student selection: The students participating in EdChoice are overwhelmingly low-income and minority children. But relative to pupils who are eligible for vouchers but choose not to use them, the participants in EdChoice are somewhat higher-achieving and less economically disadvantaged.”
Voucher schools can choose their students and did not accept the neediest
“Competitive effects: EdChoice modestly improved the achievement of the public-school students who were eligible for a voucher but did not use it. The competition associated with the introduction of EdChoice appears to have spurred these public-school improvements.” This strikes me as a gargantuan leap of logic. The students who did not use the vouchers improved their test scores. But nothing in this study ascertains that they improved because of competition with vouchers. It is just as reasonable to conclude that they had better teachers than those in the voucher schools.
“Participant effects: The students who used vouchers to attend private schools fared worse on state exams compared to their closely matched peers remaining in public schools. Only voucher students assigned to relatively high-performing EdChoice eligible public schools could be credibly studied.”
The spokesman for TBF called attention to the modest gains of students who didn’t use the voucher.
So here is the logic of Ohio’s voucher program:
If you use the voucher, your academic performance will go down.
If you don’t use the voucher, you academic performance will modestly improve.
This is a bizarre argument for vouchers. Take the medicine and you will get sicker. Don’t take the medicine and you will feel better.
Why is Ohio wasting millions on a program that doesn’t work? Unless you are not in it?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fordham has way too much influence in Ohio as far as I’m concerned.
I have no idea how an organization that promotes charters schools and private schools garnered so much clout in a state where 90% of the people who actually live here attend public schools.
I resent that ed reform uses children in public schools only as some sort of “control” for their experiments with charters and vouchers. Fordham does that here- the kids in public schools are a policy afterthought- a group of experimental subjects who may or may not be harmed. The voucher program is given top priority. Any “effects” on the unfashionable public schools are included only by accident.
Our schools have value APART from the political promotion of charters and vouchers. The children in our schools deserve adults who work FOR their schools, not use their schools as an argument for an ideological mission or to promote private schools.
Would charter leaders take advice from a group of people who lobby to eradicate charter schools? Of course not. Why should public schools?
And, Diane, you’ve said you like Lamar Alexander personally but if you can point me to one thing anyone in Congress has done this year or last to benefit any PUBLIC school in this country I would appreciate it.
These people don’t support US public schools. As ridiculous as that is it appears to be true. We have 500-some lawmakers and thousands of federal employees who don’t support public schools.
I don’t know how we got here but that’s where we are.
Chiara,
I have known and respected Lamar Alexander for many years. He is a zealous proponent of school choice. When I knew him best, in the early 1990s, he was not determined to weaken or harm public schools. I don’t know him now. This seems to be a sick Republican obsession.
The only member of Congress I have ever heard act as an actual ADVOCATE for public schools is Angus King.
The rest of them are can’t seem to decide if they support the public schools in their states or not. They’re ambivalent. Torn between supporting the public schools that exist and supporting some abstract vision they have of “portfolios” or something.
They’re useless.
Gillibrand voted against the privatizing King.
This is how ridiculous this has become. Congress and the Trump Administration are proposing still more cuts to public schools while increasing funding for charters and vouchers.
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that these people are NOT “agnostics”
The people we pay in DC have decided their JOB is to weaken public schools and replace them with the sector THEY prefer, although 90% of kids are currently attending public schools.
Just a complete and utter disregard for the consequences of their ideological experiments. The effect on public schools is not even discussed in ed reform! It’s as if the kids in those schools do not exist.
The worst part is, we’re paying a lot of these people for this! We’re paying them to conduct this political campaign against the schools our children attend.
Charter leaders wrote an op ed asking Trump and DeVos not to cut public school budgets.
How ludicrous is it that the only people who are listened to in DC are the people who run 5% of schools? The people who run 95% of public schools, the public schools that will be harmed by the cuts? Utterly ignored. Not even consulted.
Is there a single advocate for public school kids in that entire city?
What do public schools have to do to get an audience with political leaders? Convert to a charter school? Become a private school? How could we entice these people we’re paying into supporting our schools?
Why are the ignoring the logic in the facts? Because this isn’t about a better education for children, this is about taking taxpayer money and giving it to religious organizations. Considering how much it bothers those religious organizations to have tax money used for abortions, even when it’s not their money, you’d think they’d understand other’s concerns about their tax dollars being used for religious purposes. But then we’re not talking about people with character, we’re talking about hypocrites.
Ohio is infamous for bad ideas. The Fordham mischief is not limited to Ohio. We just got a concentrated dose of nonsense, too many charters, and plenty of posturing about quality control.
The latest big idea is HB 102. It is designed to eliminate ALL local school governance and public investments in education, including school facilities.
All of that money, plus and federal funds, would flow into the coffers of appointed state officials.Officials would redistribute the state money for a 1% adminiatrative fee.
There would be a one size fits all voucher, per Trump/Devos–public, private, religious–online too and rigged to make online providers of education a winner in the money-ball game. Three “scholarships” for special education would be eliminated.
The proposed law also makes it legal for one district to transfer all school management to another district.
I could not find a prototye for this law at ALEC but this is the second Ohio bill with similar recommendations for state-controlled education and demolition of local control. The other was HB 628 All local “infrastructure” for schools would be demolished except perhaps, for a method of counting students.
So far, these bills are just sitting in the hopper with not a lot of co-sponsors. I hope they will go to the shredder. That could happen when there is sufficient publicity about the consequences for specific districts.
Cross posted at OpEd News: https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Ohio-Study-Sponsored-by-P-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Argument_Diane-Ravitch_Logic_Privatization-Of-Schools-170328-223.html#comment652034
with this comment
The Republicans are set to expand the D.C. Voucher program, even though no evaluation has shown better test scores for D.C. voucher students and a high attrition rate.
https://dianeravitch.net/2017/03/24/devos-wants-more-vouchers-in-dc-despite-lack-of-results/ Students who get a voucher will check their constitutional rights at the door. The voucher schools may exclude students with disabilities and LGBT students. DeVos doesn’t care.
Republicans have already started moving HR 1387, the SOAR Reauthorization Act. This bill would reauthorize the DC voucher program (the only federally funded voucher program in the country), and the group that administers the program has said they expect to provide “hundreds” of new vouchers to DC students with Republicans in charge.
The bill was passed out of committee earlier this month on a party line vote, and we expect the bill to hit the House floor soon. Just as telling as the final vote on the bill was how the committee voted on amendments, and this headline says it all: GOP lawmakers refuse to protect LGBT students and those with disabilities in school voucher bill.
This is the first voucher bill being moved this year — and while Betsy DeVos refused to say during her confirmation hearing that schools taking federal money should have to abide by IDEA and provide the same services and protections to students with disabilities as public schools, members of Congress may soon have a chance to go on record themselves about this very issue when the SOAR Reauthorization bill is voted on.
I’ve always considered Thomas B. Fordham a rightwing group, so I am interested to hear a former member say that out loud–and I also appreciate it….
I’m curious what responsibility a researcher and, those who commission the work, have, relative to a paper’s foreword. Substantive and inconvenient questions are provoked, if a funder writes a foreword, listing a finding that is not in the paper and, the media report the unsubstantiated claim, as though it was in the research.
There is a claim in the report that the competition from the vouchers led to improved public schools. The evidence for this claims seems weak – the school eligible for vouchers improved. It seems to me there could be many reasons for this change but Fordham starts with more of an a priori assumption that it must be due to competition.
Alice,
This is actually funny. They are saying that the children who went to the voucher school got no benefit but those who didn’t go, did. Imagine a drug that does no good for the patient but allegedly benefits those who did not take it.
A strange claim!
I love the analogy!
I wrote to Figlio and, a former Fordham board member, about a claim in the foreword, asking for the paper’s corroboration for the finding. You and others, should write, too. Figlio is at Northwestern.