Jeff Bryant is trying to figure out what the purpose of school choice is.
“Another week, another round of evidence that providing parents with more “school choice,” especially the kind that lets them opt out of public schools, is not a very effective vehicle for ensuring students improve academically or that taxpayer dollars are spent more wisely.
“The latest evidence comes from a study of the voucher program in Washington, DC that allows parents to transfer their children from public to private schools at taxpayer expense.
“The study found that students “who attended a private school through the program performed worse on standardized tests than their public school counterparts who did not use the vouchers,” reports the New York Times.
“This study adds to others – from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana – finding that school vouchers have negative impacts on students.
“Despite these results, many proponents of school choice contend the purpose of school choice was never about generating better results. It’s about choice.
“The latest evidence comes from a study of the voucher program in Washington, DC that allows parents to transfer their children from public to private schools at taxpayer expense.
“The study found that students “who attended a private school through the program performed worse on standardized tests than their public school counterparts who did not use the vouchers,” reports the New York Times.
“This study adds to others – from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana – finding that school vouchers have negative impacts on students.
“Despite these results, many proponents of school choice contend the purpose of school choice was never about generating better results. It’s about choice for choice’s sake.
“Results Don’t Matter?
“That seems to be what US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos argues in her reaction to the news about the apparent failure of the DC voucher program. As the Washington Post reports, the report prompted her to say, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”
So if choice doesn’t raise scores, what’s the point?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks Diane! Here’s the link if folks want to read the whole piece: http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/what-is-the-purpose-of-school-choice/
Gracias a ti, Jeff, for the well written piece!
From the article:
““If you can’t get cell phone service in your living room,” she says, “you should have the option to find a network that does work.””
Tell that to someone who can’t get any service from any carrier out here in the beautiful woods of Southern Warren County MO.
Providing service out here isn’t profitable, therefore no service.
Now extend out how a total privatization of education might play out: “Sorry but you live too far away and there are too few of you to provide a profitable school for your children.” Tough luck, eh!
As a guy looking for good, cheap Internet in rural Tennessee, I completely identify with your analogy. Rural education is ignored under the present system. Think how bad it would be if privatization further erodes state funding. We have been educating children who go off and pay taxes somewhere else for generations. Now we want to completely deny our responsibility to all children.
Jeff,
My error. I added the link.
I don’t know but I think it’s a shame that ed reformers have once again completely hijacked any debate or discussion about public schools and made it wholly about the “choice” schools they prefer.
What do public school kids and parents have to do to get an advocate in government?
The Obama Administration spent 8 years pushing charters and now the Trump Administration will spend the next four pushing vouchers.
Freaking ridiculous. Can ed reform allow someone who actually supports public schools to speak, even occasionally? Can we get ONE advocate who loves public schools the way these people love charters and vouchers?
There are many people in government, which support public schools, and oppose school choice. Keep in mind,that 90+% of the funding for public schools is borne by the taxpayers/citizens of the states and municipalities. If you make your wants and wishes known to your state/municipal officials, you are more likely to get a fair hearing, than you will ever get from the feds. (Trust me, I used to work for the federal government).
Fact is, both the Secretary of the Interior, and the Secretary of Defense run more schools than the Secretary of Education.
Charles, the US Department of Education doesn’t “run” any schools.
Agreed, the Defense Department runs schools on military bases. The Interior Department runs the schools on Indian reservations. The Department of Education runs no schools. If a person wants to have input on their local school, they should make their desires known to the state/municipality, and/or the local school board.
Another reason to abolish the Dept of Education.
Also, Diane, they know private schools pick and choose. That’s why the confidently assert public schools will continue to “exist”. They see our schools as a disfavored back-up for the “choice” system. That “government school” default that is necessary, but not desirable.
We’re supposed to be grateful they reluctantly grant public schools “existence”- these people who supposedly work “for all kids”.
They never mention how “choice” systems couldn’t work in a universal system without the much-maligned public schools.
Reed Hastings gives speeches on it. He sees “5%” public schools in his vision- to allow for churn, I guess. Public schools have so little value they’re mentioned ONLY in the context of charter and voucher schools and only to the extent that they’re useful for ed reform.
The outrageous part is how many of these people are paid as “consultants” for the public schools they disdain and hope to eradicate.
Results don’t matter?! Well then, why the heck did we ever feel the need for a public education system?
Standardized test score results don’t matter.
Would be the words I’d love to read and hear.
And then do away with that nefarious malpractice.
You will hear those words as soon as the privatizers take over a tipping point of public schools.
You already have Jeb Bush leading the way.
http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/05/24/school-choice-supporters-downplay-new-voucher-research-saying-schools-are-more-than-a-test-score/
The wholesale dishonesty by the education “reformers” reminds me of Donald Trump.
I agree. Amazingly enough I wasn’t even thinking of test scores.
Privatized “choice” is about undermining public education to create segregated schools full of “haves” and “have nots.” Privatized choice is a way to move vast amounts of public dollars into private pockets. It is another form of corporate welfare. Another goal is to bust unions that have worked for fair wages, benefits and due process rights for teachers. Corporate schools prefer to hire cheap temps with few rights. For some “choice” is about sending young people off to a lot of religious schools of dubious academic value. For others “choice” is about destroying poor communities in order for developers to move in and reinvent gentrified neighborhoods that generate profits.
Ed reform has ONE idea for public schools- they plan on selling us ed tech:
“This vision was clear throughout the American Federation for Children summit: that schools need to be reinvented with an emphasis on technology. And throughout the gathering, exclusively online schools were a key part of that vision — even though some supporters acknowledge existing virtual schools have not produced strong academic outcomes to date.
Advocates say that online schools have the potential to harness “personalized learning,” a term that generally means using technology to provide an education tailored to each student’s needs.”
“This belief in personalized learning dovetails with the focus at another recent conference of education reformers, the New Schools Venture Fund summit. ”
That hard sell you’re seeing to push this product into public schools? The reason ed reformers who barely mention kids in public schools all of a sudden discover our schools when it’s time to pitch ed tech product?
That’s because this industry knows that 90% of kids attend public schools – that’s where the money is. They can’t sustain and grow a 9 billion dollar industry with a couple of Rocketship franchises.
Don’t buy from people who ignore your schools until it’s time to sell you something. Demand more.
The cheaper, the better, for those that no longer count widens the profit margins for Gates, Bush, Milken and other tech investors. Tech is another way to use our young people to pay for private profit, despite there is no evidence to support its use to supplant traditional public education.
Choice allows the racists (mostly whites but not all whites) to segregate their children from the rest of the population, and the taxpayers, even those elements of the population the racists don’t want to have their children associated with, pay for this blatant segregation.
That is the only reason for school choice – to allows racist parents to move their children to autocratic, private-sector, for-profit, often fraudulent and inferior corporate charter schools to escape the children they don’t want their children to be exposed to.
And many of these racist parents refuse to admit they are racists.
This is the continued Balkanization of the United States and if not stopped this will lead to a bloody Civil War that will tear the United States apart until there is no United States. Instead, there will be several different countries where today there is one. I see the Western United States, the Republic of Texas, the Republic of Alaska, Bible-Belt America from Montana to Florida and the North-East Coast United States. These five or six countries might have different names after the collapse of the current U.S. but they will fall apart by these regions. Hawaii might be part of the Western U.S. or its own country.
The point of school choice is to further divert resources from public schools so as to create a reality where more and more public schools can be labeled as “failing.” This further creates a more perfect environment for corporate saviors to do their saving.
Obviously.
Just a sincere question about a point I don’t understand:
“The study found that students ‘who attended a private school through the program performed worse on standardized tests than their public school counterparts who did not use the vouchers,’ reports the New York Times.”
How can we claim simultaneously that lower performance on standardized tests is evidence that vouchers don’t work, AND that standardized tests are not a valid measure of student competence?
Thank you. It is definitely fun to play “gotcha” and hoist the rephormers on their own petard, but we have to stop giving any credence to test scores, even when they come out in our favor.
Again, dienne77 you beat me to the punch! LOL! Quite correct you are once again!
It can be a useful rhetorical weapon against the so-called reformers, as in, “Test scores are the wrong way to measure students and teachers, but even by your own invalid metric, you people are failures!”
We shouldn’t use those scores for anything. Hell we shouldn’t even be wasting the student’s time, our precious tax monies on such a hobgoblin of malpractice.
Diane refers to those scores as the “coin of the realm” and that is somewhat true. But it doesn’t make those scores coins of gold or silver, more like cocoa beans or cattle, certainly not all having the same value. And in the case of test scores, since they are onto-epistmologically invalid, using the results for anything is fool’s gold, “vain and illusory”. Standardized test scores are a classic case of “Garbage in Garbage out”.
Worse than that, I contend that the sorting, separating and ranking of students, rewarding some and punishing others as standardized tests results are used is state sponsored discrimination. Discrimination against students via their natural mental abilities, in which some students stand no chance whatsoever to ever receive those rewards is wrong. We cannot discriminate against students via other natural conditions such as skin pigmentation levels (race), gender, or disability (even if acquired). Why shouldn’t discrimination against a student via connatural innate mental capabilities not be considered state discrimination and be adjudicated as such and banned???
Even worse than that is that through the process of internalization the student comes to believe that they are “not proficient” or “failures” as that is what the supposed authorities, the adults in their life tell them. Standardized testing is a damn near perfect system of control of the minds of our young citizens and is anathema to the ideals of this country.
Schools use all sorts of measures to rank and sort students. Standardized testing certainly has flaws but so does every other method (i.e. how much a teacher likes you)
In fact, standardized testing would work better if it really WAS standardized. Like the SAT or ACT where students from private and public schools had to take the same exam. Colleges don’t use those scores as the gold standard, but they are one part out of many.
In fact, the biggest problem with standardized tests is that they are used to rank and sort TEACHERS! That’s why they have become so high-stakes! I took Iowa tests back in the 1960s and no one cared very much how their child scored as far as I can tell. I suppose they were used for some ranking and sorting but probably in conjunction with the student’s classroom performance.
Careful, NYCpsp, you’re gonna show your age (which is probably close to mine).
But the Iowa test suffers all the same onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods that all standardized tests have which result in COMPLETELY INVALID results so that any conclusions drawn from them are “vain and illusory”. I’ve probably advised you to read Wilson’s work before, but here is the link again so that you may understand why: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Duane,
I get that you don’t like standardized tests and I certainly agree with you that they are flawed. Just like every grading is flawed.
I still don’t understand how YOU would rank and sort your students. Did you teach in a school with no honors or advanced classes? Are you claiming your own tests are flawless as are the tests of every classroom teacher and therefore all standardized testing should be tossed out as a measure in which to grade your student’s performance?
I didn’t rank and sort my students, ever. That’s an education malpractice as far as I am concerned.
I taught all levels of high school Spanish 1-5, yes 5, because the students took level 1 in middle school. The best class I had was 19 students in level 5. No need to rank and sort them-or in any of my level 1 classes over the years.
Nope, never claimed my tests were flawless and they weren’t. My tests were used so that the students could learn where they were in the process of learning Spanish, not as some kind of false indicator of “where a student ranked in relation to others”. Again that ranking is a malpractice.
And, finally, yes all standardized tests should be terminated (except those used as a diagnostic tool where there are no “correct” answers but the answers given help to show where a disability may lie) as they are a false “measure” to begin with.
I dislike the phrase “rank and sort” as much as you do, but I hope you realize I was demonstrating that every report card grade “ranks” a student. And having a school where you have a regular, honor and AP math class “sorts” students.
I was wondering how your school functioned without any grades (“ranks”) and how it worked when students were not “sorted” but randomly assigned to math classes regardless of whether they were kids who were learning algebra on their own in middle school for fun or were kid who still struggled with basic math despite having wonderful teachers and extra help. Since you seem to be saying that every student needs to be in the same classroom with the teacher bending over backward to make sure he isn’t somehow “sorting” the kids by giving any student more advanced work than any other.
I like the way you describe as teaching Spanish and I wish my kid had a foreign language teacher like you. Nonetheless, I still don’t understand how this works in Math since you oppose sorting so strongly.
And why do tests have to be about where a student ranks compared to other students? Why can’t they just be about whether a student mastered the material?
“And why do tests have to be about where a student ranks compared to other students? Why can’t they just be about whether a student mastered the material?”
That’s basically the point. Classroom tests written by teachers aren’t meant to sort the students but to give an indication of where they are in their understanding of the material. Naturally, other factors may play a role in how a student does beyond understanding the material, but if a teacher is not overwhelmed by too many students in too large classes, s/he can monitor performance on a more personal level than just looking at scores. Is a student’s doing poorly because s/he didn’t understand, has not totally mastered the material, didn’t sleep last night or eat this morning, doesn’t study or doesn’t know how to study effectively, just plain freaks out on certain kinds of tests, or a combination of factors. This is the kind of stuff that I loved about special ed; I got to figure out what was driving a student’s problems and help them learn how to deal with them. It is getting harder and harder for special ed teachers to find the time for such engagement. It has got to be close to impossible for many general ed teachers to even dream of the same degree of attention to individual students.
I think it’s fair to say that you’re using a bad metric, but even using your bad metric doesn’t support your conclusion.
A recent study by Julian Vasquez Heilig also showed that public school students outperformed those in charters on most measures of the NAEP. The problem is evidence does not matter in a hostile takeover when the goal is to raid public assets. Reform is mostly about the money, not the children.
Thank you all for your responses – that does clarify it for me. It seems the general consensus answer to my question, from people whose opinions I respect, is, “We can’t,” with a nod to Ohio Algebra’s point that it’s an observation they’re not even conforming to their own standards.
I’d suggest we find some other indicators, as many as possible, to illustrate the point that vouchers don’t lead to superior education. As a layperson outside of the professional education field, that’s beyond my personal knowledge, but I’m sure many here know where to look. If we have other indicators to illustrate the deficiency in the voucher concept, it then gives more power to Ohio Algebra’s argument, that they don’t even win according to their own rules.
Vouchers given anyone permission to plunder public school budgets in the name of “choice,” even if the choice is a worse education. It allows private schools to use public funds like a personal ATM while it depletes the capacity of the public schools to do its job.
Absolutely agree. We just have to find some irrefutable (or at least difficult to refute) arguments beyond standardized test score results. Yes, we can say, “You’re not even following your own standards,” but then they can say, “Yeah, but you’re not following your own standards if you point to these tests as an indicator,” & then we can yeahbut each other into oblivion, as it becomes a battle of, “I know you are, but what am I?” while completely losing the point. 🙂
I can’t help myself Lenny:
Actually, LR, I’m not sure there’s much traction to be gained in finding better ways to show voucher systems lead to negative ed-achievement. Those who promote vouchers have other agendas than ed-achievement, however measured (as our Secy of Ed has brazenly admitted– for all her flaws, she is at least direct.) I think the points to be pushed are (a) the democratic argument, i.e., no taxation w/o representation (b) the constitutional argument (separation of church & state), and (c) the pragmatic argument, which is that pooling taxpayer revenue into one wholly public system buys you far more educational services than supporting a multi-tiered system of publics & quasi-public/ privates.
Let’s not forget to note that these alternative schools are only faring worse (using the Reform analysis) in comparison to the public schools, because the public schools are now being forced to compete. (Meant to be sarcastic in case that’s not clear)
What’s the point of “school choice?”
Why, it’s to get those honey pots of school budgets down the gullets of the Overclass as efficiently as possible.
The deceptive call for “choice” and vouchers was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are 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 a “choice.” Charter schools are the profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings has been rooted in racism. The movement 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 1950’s voucher crusade 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. These aren’t onerous burdens on charter schools; these are only common sense requirements to assure taxpayers that their money is being properly and effectively spent to educate children and isn’t simply ending up in private pockets or on the bottom line of hedge funds.
These aren’t “burdensome” requirements for charter schools — they are simply common sense safeguards that public tax money is actually being used to maximum effect to teach our nation’s children.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
The “point” of school choice is the one that’s buried in the backs of everyone who believes in the American Dream. The American public has been stabbed in the back for the past 40 years (at least). We’re only just now feeling the pain.
Grim, but true. The ‘American Dream’ depends on public goods backed by public consensus, delivered by public institutions supported by public taxes. Ever since Reagan, conservatives & neoliberals have been chipping away at the public goods consensus, reframing it in a venal commercial narrative prompted by globalism’s shrinking pie as overhead which we can ill afford if we wish to compete w/developing economies– meantime, all the while, cynically tinkering w/the financial mechanics to ensure that an ever-increasing proportion of the GDP flows to the top, thus the self-fulfilling prophecy.
When it comes to judging the performance of public schools, we need evidence from Big Data.
When it comes to judging the performance of charter and private schools, it’s just a matter of whether parents are choosing to send their kids to those schools. In other words, feelings…
“School choice” is for parents – not the kids. After all, raising children is an obscure, frustrating (also exhilarating) endeavor where it’s nearly impossible to know that we’re doing the right things.
And parents love it because we DON’T LIKE to accept that our kids’ success depends more on THEM discovering their strengths than on US choosing the perfect school.
Enter “school choice”. Now, rather than the murky work of spending time TO HELP kids, parents can “make a choice for their kids” then pat themselves on the back for having done something right.
And it’s far easier (even if additional driving is required) to do that than to dedicate time to being with the kids and learning who your child is in order to find the best ways for them to thrive.
Nothing like offering parents something they “can do” that appears dramatic and clear, while signifying nothing.
This, also, is the tremendous appeal to investors with educational services. Parents are the perfect target for that very compelling “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” sales pitch. That’s how tutoring services are sold. How SAT prep is sold. How so many ed services are sold.
But the pitch only works because we don’t know today what our kids will be like in 20 years. Oh, that,
Can we discuss behavior? Perhaps the choice for parents is about finding safer alternatives for their children. When there are disruptions in the classroom, and teachers hands are tied, what other recourse do parents have immediately? I am talking from experience, as a former PS teacher.