Researchers Christopher Lubienski and Joel Malin note that a growing number of states have adopted voucher plans on the assumption that vouchers will “help poor kids escape failing public schools,” but the reality is that a substantial body of evidence finds that vouchers actually harm student academic performance.
After two decades of choice advocates arguing that school vouchers in particular improve academic achievement for poor children, Trump elevated Betsy DeVos, one of the leading voucher proponents, as his secretary of Education. State policymakers have also massively scaled-up school vouchers and voucher-like programs such as education savings account programs across the country. However, over the last four years, researchers have consistently found insignificant or, more often, substantially negative impacts on learning for the children whose parents have enrolled them in these programs. Such negative impacts are largely unprecedented in evaluations of educational interventions, raising questions about the ethics of experimenting on children through these programs.
When plans to use taxpayer funds for private schooling were first introduced into American education in the early 1990s, they were pitched as a way to give poor and urban children a chance to leave failing public schools for better learning opportunities in what were thought to be more effective private schools.
Indeed, there are reasons to expect school vouchers would work, such as the facts that choosing a school might allow for better matching between a child’s preferred learning style and a school’s educational program, or that private schools tend to have smaller classes.
But it has never been clear that using vouchers to choose private schools leads to better educational outcomes for students.
When vouchers were first studied, researchers fought vicious battles over relatively minor differences in academic achievement. Voucher advocates like DeVos embraced any evidence of learning gains for students using vouchers to switch to private schools, and a number of think tanks and large philanthropies like the Walton Family Foundation also lined up to support this education reform. Some even saw vouchers as the key for reducing achievement gaps between white and minority students. But while most researchers found that any gains were rather negligible overall, advocates argued that vouchers were at least not harming students’ academic achievement.
Recently though, there has been a sea-change in the results.
As city-based pilot programs in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee were eclipsed by statewide programs in Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, and elsewhere, researchers are consistently seeing large, significant, negative impacts — outcomes almost unheard of in evaluations of education interventions.
Studies have converged on the failure of vouchers. Parents may be satisfied, but their children are not learning more.
For instance, research on Louisiana’s program indicates that when some children performing squarely in the average range use a voucher to enroll in a private school, their scores fall almost to the lowest performing quartile of students overall. And initial hopes that those losses were temporary have not panned out.
Stated simply, students using vouchers to attend private schools are falling behind their peers in learning. That is, DeVos and her allies are promoting programs that hurt children.
Do no harm might be a good guideline for school interventions. If it were, all the voucher programs enacted in the past 30 years would be canceled.
VOUCHERS like Charters divide up communities … BAD for America and BAD for the students.
“Such negative impacts are largely unprecedented in evaluations of educational interventions, raising questions about the ethics of experimenting on children through these programs.”
When seven of the nine legitimate studies show significant loss in academics, we should stop putting money into vouchers. Vouchers are largely a political invention to transfer public money into private pockets. There is NO evidence that this practice improves education for poor students. Vouchers have been reckless, politically driven detour. In fact, there is mounting evidence that we are harming the education of poor students through vouchers. Evidence should be a guiding principle that guides academic programs. We need to stop corporations and the 1% from toying with the education of our young people. They simply want to move public money out of a public institution to destroy it. We should put education policy back in the hands of educators.
@retired teacher. You make some interesting points. But I must disagree with this one:
“We should put education policy back in the hands of educators.”
NO way. never. The public schools are a democratic institution. (Which almost everyone on this blog will agree).
Education policy must be in the hands of the people and their elected representatives.
Anything less is tyranny. As far as I am concerned, turning over education policy to educators, is a blueprint for disaster.
I thought teachers were people. Did I miss something?
Teachers are “people”. But they are not “the people”. Public institutions are answerable to ALL of “the people”, else they cease to be public institutions.
William, what planet are you from … Russia or Venezuela, maybe?
Are you aware of the ed code in each state? I do not think so.
The ed code lays out a map of what teachers should teach, but the teachers must be allowed to do their job and decide how they teach the curriculum spelled out in that ed code that came from decisions and votes from those elected leaders.
The teachers plan and write the lesson plans, not some elected school board member or elected rep at the state level.
Finland, for instance, has its own Ed-Code that came about through the democratic process in Finland, but Finland’s leaders are smart enough to leave the teachers alone because they know the teachers went to universities to learn how to implement the ed code through their teaching and the lessons they plan and prep.
Do you know where Finland is?
Do you know what kind of government Finland has?
William, do you support corporate charter schools and voucher programs that allow children to attend those horribly failing virtual schools and never enter a brick and mortar classroom?
If you said yes, you should know that corporate charter schools are being allowed to operate outside of the democratically developed ed codes that are the basic guides all teachers must follow.
Corporate charter school operate from the top down with the decisions being made by a CEO and not democratically elected school board members of state reps.
Corporate charter schools don’t allow teachers to make decisions or plan. Instead, the cheapest method possible (to boost profits) is forced on those teachers through scripted lessons they must follow like they are trained circus monkeys.
Decisions regarding curriculum and instruction should be in the hands of professional educators, and decisions should be evidence based. On a rare occasion a parent may have recommended a program change, Of course, anything teachers implement is subject to approval of the board of education. That is the democratic process in public education. Where I taught we accepted change, but we had a reasoned approach to change. All new programs had to be studied, visited, piloted, adopted or rejected and evaluated. We did not treat our young people like guinea pigs. We ensured that what we were doing made evidence based sense, not like the reckless whims of billionaires and their bought politicians. That is what so-called reform is.
William can clarify for readers if he makes money from education remodel. Does he think those seeking profits from community education should be denied a voice in policy? Does he think groups like Fordham, funded by out-of-state billionaires should influence community public education?
William, my response was tongue-in-cheek. I wasn’t quite sure how you made the giant leap from teachers making education policies to tyranny.
Wow, and I thought I was into direct democracy. But I can’t even fathom what it would look like for “The People” to decide education policy. Is there a room that holds 10 million people? Does every curricular decision have to come to a vote? I hope you’re not looking for consensus.
Or are you saying elected officials should be in charge of education policy? Which, incidentally, is what we have most places and it’s not working out very well. Elected officials are rarely education experts.
I think William has hit on a dilemma for many of the posters here. On the one hand, a core value of many here is public control over education. Privatization of education is presented as a great evil. On the other hand, public control over education is also a great evil. As poster dienne77 states, having elected officials in control of education “..is not working out very well.”
Which horn do people want to grasp?
TE – you do realize that teachers are public officials and that schools are public institutions, answerable to their communities, no? Most districts have a superintendent, who is an elected official. Teachers and building principals have always worked with this individual to develop educational policies that fit the needs of the community. This individual is local and aware of the needs of his/her community. Why do you feel the need to remove that control for state control? Or put that public control in the hands of private individuals? I thought conservatives favored local control.
Dienne77, This is the first that I’ve heard that public school district superintendents are elected officials.
Maybe all the school districts in California I’m familiar with do not fit the norm where elected school boards “HIRE” the administrators that manage the schools and the district and that included the superintendent.
That way if an administrator like a superintendent isn’t doing his or her job or breaks the law, the elected school board had the power to FIRE them.
Lloyd – you’re right – many districts have elected school boards which select the superintendent. In any case, the elected officials are local, typically members of that community. As opposed to TE’s idea that state officials or private entities are somehow more democratic than the local control systems that have been in place for decades.
I think local communities tend to show us true democracies at work. Not so much at the state and federal level where elected officials are so far removed from the people, they lose sight of why they were elected by the people.
No matter how much money the richest give a candidate, it was still the people that elected the rep.
@TeachingEconomist, thanks for the comment. Public schools are a public institution, operated and financed by the public. Education effects every aspect of our society and our lives.
As long as the public is operating public education, the public must be in control. Here is the model:
CITIZENS
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Government
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State/county/municipal education departments
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Schools
The public puts up the “bucks”. The “buck” starts and stops with the public.
I believe that the wide majority of the American people do not want education to be run by private industry. That being the case, the educational systems of this nation will be run by the state governments (and the school boards).
The citizens elect the state governments and in many cases, the school boards.
Most of the participants here, including myself, are in favor of the democratic process.
Why must I be vilified, because I support public control of our public institutions?
Dienne77,
You ask “This individual is local and aware of the needs of his/her community. Why do you feel the need to remove that control for state control?” Because these many of these individuals did not believe that the community needed to educate children of color, children with special educational needs, or offer equal opportunity to girls.
William,
When a person owns up to making money from education remodel it’s called honesty and personal integrity.
Should billionaires fund networks of minions to steer PUBLIC education toward privatization or public-private partnerships? Should out-of-state billionaires spend lavishly to elect their school board candidates or does it undercut American democracy?
Having taught for thirty years in one Southern California school district in four of those allegedly failing public schools that teach poor kids, it simply is NOT the schools.
There is NO such thing as a public school that fails to teach children, poor, middle class or wealthy.
The test scores used to label public schools as failures are caused by the poverty the children live in and not the public schools.
Nothing, Nothing, the corporate education reform movement has done helps children escape the poverty many of them are trapped in.
Teachers teach.
Children learn.
Parents are supposed to support the teachers by making sure the children do what they are supposed to do to learn.
But when it comes to living in poverty, that formula breaks down. The teachers still teach but many of the poor children are crippled by the poverty they live in and it is a mightly struggle to learn and remember what they are taught.
And many of the poor parents are not home to be a parent because they are working more than one poverty wage-paying job as they struggle to survive.
So essentially expressed: “There is NO such thing as a public school that fails to teach children, poor, middle class or wealthy. The test scores used to label public schools as failures are caused by the poverty the children live in and not the public schools.”
The first casualty of religion is the ability to think rationally.
“Vouchers harm”. In Ohio most vouchers go to Catholic schools. Today, ABC reported that a Nashville, Tennessee Catholic school banned Harry Potter books because the curses and spells in it are real, determined after a priest consulted exorcists.
(A world-wide banning of pervert priests would have been more beneficial to children!)
Do churches deserve the description, “oppressors of science, free thinking and creativity”? Over the past century, has society prodded Catholic, Mormon and evangelical churches and orthodox Jewish synagogues to open up, NOT the opposite?
No tax money should go to religious schools, despite how desperate the Koch network is to control the 99%.
The American Psychological Association provided a summary of research showing that the reading of Harry Potter, which introduces a reader to a group with which one doesn’t identify (an out-group), improved attitudes toward stigmatized groups, “improved tolerance across a range of demographics”.
In contrast to textbooks, which mimic TV and are 40% graphics, Harry Potter books have no graphics, and young people love them. Great narrative!
My daughter and her buddies at school all consume Rowling like there was no tomorrow. None of them are believing in spells or curses, and most of them are in church every Sunday, this being the south. Moreover, they read Rick Riordian’s retelling of the Greek myths (this too has proven harmless). This summer we went to a writer’s camp at Meridith College in Raleigh, NC. All the girls there were voracious consumers of this type of literature, and she mentioned how easy they all were to relate to.
There are NO Mormon private schools. Keep the Mormons out of this one. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the preferred name of the Mormons, BTW) does not want to get involved in the business of private education. There are a few older Mormon church-owned schools and three private universities, but not American k-12 private schools.
For the record: those older Mormon schools are all outside of the U.S., and most of them have closed.
Thank you for the added info. Where can blog readers go to learn about the reasons the Mormon church opposes school privatization?
Is homeschooling rejected by Mormons?
A perspective on LDS homeschooling, “I was an LDS homeschooler: Tirzah’s story” (2015)
Vouchers and merit pay: the things that will not die. No matter how much history and research invalidates these tired riffs, privatizers thrive on them as a way to render public school funding unpredictable. They are also meant to sow division amongst teachers.
Vouchers and charters sow divisions among neighbors and destroy communities.
Merit pay sows divisions among teachers and has failed whenever tried.
Imagine if Bill Gates had a soul, valued the ideals of the United States and, had applied his money to ending campaign finance abuses. America could be leading the world for the purpose of doing good.
The percentage of white Catholics dispensing with Christ’s teachings- 60%.
The church leaders who speak for them say a person can’t be a liberal Catholic. They say, forget climate change. They, similar to their leaders, succumbed to the entitlement that aligns them with the tenets of unbridled capitalism- the same entitlement that the British imposed when they caused 1,000,000 Irish to die of starvation. They tout commonality with the 80% of evangelicals who supported Trump. They justify their universities taking strings-attached money from the Koch’s. (American Prospect 10-14-2016) They demonstrate their beliefs by opposing policies like minimum wage and universal health care. Speculating, they orchestrated the decades long cover-up of pedophile priests.
It’s not surprising that the same leaders of the 60% manipulate to achieve Betsy DeVos’ agenda. And, it’s not surprising that they want to avoid the visibility of their scheming.
The only question is what the 40% do about it.