Josh Cowan of Michigan State University has been studying vouchers for two decades. He started his studies believing that vouchers might help kids. He now believes they are a terrible mistake. He has not yet given up on charter schools, but that’s probably a matter of time. Michigan charters have a very poor track record. A very large proportion are run by for-profit organizations. Their results are poor. Michigan should rebuild its public schools and make them excellent for all students instead of funding escape hatches that lead nowhere.
He writes:
In recent years, nearly half of all states have created publicly funded private K-12 tuition plans, collectively known as school vouchers.
This summer, advocates of these plans are pushing to expand their reach, boosted by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carson v. Makinthat states permitting vouchers may not exclude religious schools.
Arizona just expanded its already large voucher program; in Michigan, former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and allies have proposed a voucher scheme modeled on plans elsewhere. In June, GOP supporters in Congress reintroduced legislation to create federal funding for voucher programs.
Vouchers are dangerous to American education. They promise an all-too-simple solution to tough problems like unequal access to high-quality schools, segregation and even school safety. In small doses, years ago, vouchers seemed like they might work, but as more states have created more and larger voucher programs, experts like me have learned enough to say that these programs on balance can severely hinder academic growth — especially for vulnerable kids.
I am an education policy professor who has spent almost two decades studying programs like these, and trying to follow the data where it leads. I started this research cautiously optimistic that vouchers could help.
But in 2022 the evidence is just too stark to justify the use of public money to fund private tuition. Particularly when other choice options like charter schools and inter-district enrollment are available to families and have a better track record.
There’s also a moral case to be made against voucher programs. They promise low-income families solutions to academic inequality, but what they deliver is often little more than religious indoctrination to go alongside academic outcomes that are worse than before…
Vouchers fail to deliver for the kids who are often most in need.
The end of the Milwaukee evaluation coincided almost exactly with the circulation of a report showing shockingly bad early test score results for students in the Louisiana voucher program in the years following Hurricane Katrina.
Over time, those poor test score results for vouchers held up, and were replicated by other studies.
Too coincidently, a group of advocatesknown previously for supporting test scores in standards and accountability started pushing parental satisfaction, school safety, character and “grit” — seemingly anything to move the goalposts away from academic outcomes, which had had been disastrous under the voucher program in Louisiana.
Now, it’s true that as parents we want more for our kids than the reading, math and science skills we can measure on tests. And those of us who teach for a living want to give our students more, too. But not at a cost of catastrophic academic results. Especially not for kids struggling in school to begin with.
Today we know that those bad Louisiana academic outcomes were no fluke, and indeed were beginning to appear in places like Indiana and Ohio.
All of these results have a straightforward explanation: vouchers do not work on the large scale pushed for by advocates today. While small, early pilot voucher programsshowed at least modest positive results, expansions statewide have been awful for students. That’s because there aren’t enough decent private schools to serve at-risk kids.
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Voucher programs do not work because the premise that supports them is false. A person may know their child, and should be involved in that child’s education, but the teachers know their subjects (given that they are competent). The ability of teacher to weigh in on whether a child is learning is an indespensible element of an education. Teachers communication with students is called education.
Vouchers fail because they never fund their program at a level that can succeed, and there is no way for any consumer of education to know what is going on in school. So any charlatan can start a school and claim success, fooling even the most discerning of parents.
There are many reasons voucher programs fail. First, they are built on the lie that poor kids with a $7,000 voucher can get the same education that rich kids get at the elite schools where their parents pay $30,000-$50,000.
Second, the elite schools don’t want the kids with vouchers and don’t have empty seats.
Third, voucher schools that do want the state money typically have uncertified staff and meager facilities.
Fourth, religious voucher schools are set up to indoctrinate students, not to educate them.
Fifth, while there may be some “good” voucher schools, the overwhelming majority are not good schools, are not as good as the public schools the children left. Many of the kids who accept vouchers return to their maligned public schools, which lost funding to the lousy voucher school.
“Fourth, religious voucher schools are set up to indoctrinate students, not to educate them.”
I can’t agree with that statement. Having been both indoctrinated and educated in Catholic K-12 schools, there is no doubt that both educating and indoctrinating can occur at the same time. The danger for those who do the indoctrinating is that providing an education ultimately will, for some, give the students the ability to see through that indoctrination. See me as an example-LOL!
Diane,
Thank you for the list. Each of your 5 points may not have been evident to some but, they should have been to those making hypotheses about the conditions and outcomes of privatization. It appears that economists who favor certain policies
have their parallel to university faculty in other departments, and venture philanthropic money may have impact. Academicians who find themselves newly opposed to vouchers in 2022, citing “a moral case”, could it be that the clear and present danger of Christo-fascism ….
We have known for some time that vouchers are a ticket to nowhere. In the deal students give up professionally prepared teachers and civil rights protections. In reality voucher schools are a separate and unequal schools that often discriminate against marginalized groups including LGBTQ and black and brown students. In addition, religious voucher schools teach creationism instead of science. It is unsurprising that most of the articles extolling vouchers come from astroturf groups backed by billionaires.
key words: what kids “give up”
Vouchers are a scheme for imposing market dynamics on the public sector. Schemes like that always fail to serve the public equally and they always will. Market dynamics are driven on principle by the maintenance of inequalities. They are designed to do the very opposite of providing equal citizens with equal rights to equal quality education.
The Bradley Foundation Dr. Cowan mentions alongside the Waltons, with its false and misleading voucher advocacy, is a mockery of philanthropy and, for that matter, a mockery of sense. Its website says its education mission is to “Work with state policy groups to promote public policies that reduce government dependency and mitigate the family breakdown which frequently results from and contributes to such dependency.” That’s a good one. They’re saying that public schools cause divorce and vice versa. Seriously? Maybe stick to board games. Hungry Hungry Hippos is cool.
And of course vouchers drain funds and resources from the real public schools. The actual public schools which accept all the kids all the times throughout the school year. No quotas, no entrance exams, no preconditions (other than you actually live in the particular school district). You want to go to a private school? Then use your own money, not public funds which are for the public schools. I don’t count charter schools as public schools because they don’t always accept all the kids throughout the school year, they have sneaky ways of being selective and can counsel out the problem kids.
Must be a real bummer when you finally realize (after virtually all of your colleagues in the field) that what you have been pushing for twenty years is a sham.
His conscience’s slow, very slow, awakening- not buying it.
The Dept of Ed under DeVos gave a lot of money to explore charter schools, among the places that got millions was Michigan State.
How much consequence does Cowan have to see- evidently an inordinate amount.
ECOT in the neighboring state.
I’ll give him a pass on this. Much research doesn’t turn out the way anyone expects. Even proving something doesn’t work can be quite important.
Greg-
If you’d written to him years ago about PUBLIC university faculty/ K-12 privatization and received a reply about his perspective…
Offering an analogy- Fauci supposedly was waiting for research that showed masks work. His Asian colleagues rightfully questioned his reasoning and his delay in advising their use. Later, we learned a possible explanation other than efficacy.
Professionals who act to influence public policy have a duty to use good judgement. When privacy’s advocates promote a view that contradicts an education historian of Diane’s stature and financial independence, the public has a right to expect public employees to stand firm for the common good.
All good points.
privatization’s not privacy’s
Assuming at the start that an effect is real and then looking for evidence to support it is a very unscientific approach (exactly backwards), which can go on as long as one wishes to pursue it. If one has the bias (or even hope) that an effect is real, one is more likely to keep waiting for evidence that it is real after one should have concluded that it is likely NOT real.
The scientific method as correctly pursued involves trying to falsify/disprove the null hypothesis (the idea that an effect is NOT real)
And as Linda correctly points out, supporting a policy like vouchers before there is evidence that they improve educational outcomes is simply not justifiable.
The latter is actually a problem with a lot of so called educational “reforms”. They are implemented — essentially forced on the public — before there is any significant evidence that they have the claimed positive effects.
The public should not have to wait around twenty years to find out that “oh, by the way. Those claims we made about the advantages of vouchers? There is no evidence that they are true. So sorry”
The way this stuff is done is actually absurd.
Not incidentally, the “assume an effect is real and then go hunting for evidence for it ,– as long as that might gake” is the typical approach of think tank wankers and is decidedly UNscientific.
When the first Milwaukee voucher study came out, it downplayed the lack of any academic improvement but made a big deal of high school graduation rates. Same with DC study. I looked for data about attrition, and it was buried in the reports. It was staggeringly high, about 50%. If you don’t point out that 50% of the kids returned to their public schools, what does the graduation rate mean?
The bassackwards way that things work with educational (forcing policies on the public before there is evidence of their positive effect) is actually completely counter to the way things normally work in engineering and medicine .
In the latter two areas, one has to not only demonstrate that some change or addition (eg, to a building code or drug regimen) not only had a significant positive effect, but also that it does not have significant negative effects.
Not coincidentally, it is primarily in areas of politics and economics that the “implement policy first and then look for evidence” approach is standard practice. The oft disastrous outcomes are not unpredictable.
I
“That’s because there aren’t enough decent private schools to serve at-risk kids.” And there never will be, either. The biggest scam of market-based education.
The private schools don’t want too many at-risk kids because that would diminish the schools’ status.
Strange that those at this blog and elsewhere didn’t need to draw money from rich people’s philanthropies for years and years to figure it out.
I firmly think that if the US loses its more than 13,000 public school districts, divided among 50 states and a few territories, with their locally elected school boards, we will also lose the United States to the fascist nationalists. Those public schools are the foundation that supports this country as a Constitutional republic and democracy. Because of state and local control, every public school district reflects the community it serves, even in RED states.
Because, then local control, will shift to an unelected CEO (mostly Ivy educated, white and older and probably narcistic too) in a boardroom somewhere else, mostly located in a New York City corporate boardroom.
Cowan omitted that MSU’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative got $1.9 mil. from John Arnold.
Will Cowan have an epiphany about charter schools when he retires?
I have to be careful what I write about J. Arnold. Several years ago, he objected to something I wrote, and his office called to threaten me. Either delete what I wrote or you will be sued. Who wants to be sued by a billionaire?
“Now, it’s true that as parents we want more for our kids than the reading, math and science skills we can measure on tests.
Ay ay ay ay effin ay!
Those test scores are not any sort of measurement at all. They are assessments, very poor and invalid ones at that, but the don’t measure anything.
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
Thase supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
Curious George- a literary endeavor based on bemusement at a cartoon character’s inability to anticipate consequences.
How about a new cartoon in which a well-dressed sloth is perpetually surprised by the unfolding of each new negative consequence from privatization?
There’s no shortage of money at MSU’s EPIC which is partnered with Arnold Ventures and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, if its staffing levels are an indicator – two directors, 5 staff, 3 post-doctoral researchers and 14 affiliated faculty.
If PUBLIC university faculty want to explore school privatization, they should get jobs in the private sector.
kind of what I said over 10 years ago and in my 5 books. Letter grades are a lie. Grade levels are a lie. The system of failure drives kids out of school when they reach 9th grade and realize they will graduate when they are 20. They won’t
The list goes on. No longer may students be forced to chase the standardized test. The system of education is designed to push kids out of school. It’s about winning when it should be about learning. and they blame teachers for what the system does.
HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH? What gains have public schools made over the last 10 + years?
WHEN SLAVERY WAS ABOLISHED, A NEW WAY OF MAINTAINING THE SUBCLASS WAS DEVELOPED, THEY CALLED IT THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM. AND TEACHERS ARE BLAMED FOR WHAT THE SYSTEM DOES TO KIDS
68
That’s total BS. The fact that colonialists are spending billions to destroy public schools shows the stupidity of your comment.
That indeed is one weird comment.
Go back in the time machine to June 7-9, 2007- the Alliance for School Choice Strategy Retreat. The following were featured, Kellyanne Conway (rumored to be a member of CNP, a religious organization in D.C.), the auxiliary bishop of Newark, Howard Fuller of Marquette University (Catholic), Dr. Patrick Wolf who was subsequently the subject an article in Arkansas Catholic,”A Catholic You Should Know”, someone from St. Benedict’s school, a guy described as a “leading supporter of K-12 Catholic education”, a guy who had worked for the California Catholic Conference, etc.
Moving on from the religious, others included were those from Fordham Institute/ Manhattan Institute (Koch) and ALEC (Koch), Club for Growth, Carrie Penner of the Walton Family Foundation, etc.