Mark Weber, who blogs as Jersey Jazzman, was interested in a part of the DeVos’ 60 Minutes interview that most reviewers overlooked. She made the claim, based on “studies show” that competition with private schools improves public schools. He devotes this post to debunking that claim. 

The effects of competition are tiny. They are “not modest,” he writes. They are “tiny.”

He asks, is choice a reasonable substitute for equitable funding, and not surprisingly, concludes that it is not.

If “choice” is introduced as a substitute for things like adequate and equitable funding, the overall progress of the system will be impeded. The sad fact is that the “Florida Miracle” has been grossly oversold; the state is a relatively poor performer compared to other states that make more of an investment in public education. Can that all be attributed to policy? No, of course not… but Florida is a state that makes little effort to fund its schools.

In any case, DeVos’s contention that public, district schools see improvement when there is competitive pressure is just not held up in any practical sense by research like this. As I said in my last post, the effects sizes of things like this are almost always small. In this case, the effect is exceptionally small; in practical terms, it’s next to nothing.

The idea that we’re going to make substantial educational progress by injecting competition into our public education system just doesn’t have much evidence to support it. I wish I could say that conservatives like DeVos were the only ones who believe in this fallacy; unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Too many people who really should know better have put their faith in “choice,” rather than admitting that chronic childhood poverty, endemic racism, and inequitable and inadequate school funding are at the root of the problem.