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Paul Bonner: The Magic Bullet in Education Is Not What You Think

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2023 //
41

Paul Bonner, retired career educator, debunks the “science of reading” prattle;

Then the New York Times published this…https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/science-of-reading-literacy-parents.html

Ignorance about the circumstances that hinder student learning is pervasive among the national media. They report again and again on failed “one size fits all” remedies without understanding that these fail because they do not address the root cause of public school challenges: Poverty.

Advocacy for “The science of reading”, Lucy Caulkins, or whole language all miss the point. Until we are willing to change the instructional delivery system that allows for K-12 class sizes of 20-30+ students per class, a teaching professional day that does not allow meaningful classroom preparation except beyond the school day, equal high quality resources and facilities for all students, and an understanding that this hyper focus on reading fluency actually demonstrates low expectations for our students.

Perhaps the greatest inaccuracy on the NYTimes report is that somehow schools have not been engaged in this “Science of reading” rabbit hole.

The two large districts I served in were all in with massive resources given to administrative and teacher professional development for the purpose of institutionalizing the practice. Yet, scores never moved despite efforts to show improvement through numerous changes in the standardized tests being implemented.

The confirmation bias so prevalent in this ongoing reporting has been troubling since the Clinton Administration introduced the “Standards Movement.” Any challenges to such bias continue to be ignored and often attacked.

The fact that Emily Hanford, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Margaret Spellings continue to act as “go to” interviews when their profession experience as practicing educators is woeful at best, demonstrates the little regard reporters have for the professionalism required to teach and administer instructional outcomes.

It is in fact these arbiters of “data” who use anecdotal reporting to misinform politicians and institutions such as the NAACP to continue this malpractice.

Perhaps the one method we have been reticent to use should be to support teaching, adequately resource school facilities everywhere, and get the hell out of the way for the educators who actually know their craft.

Categories Bias, Class size, Education Reform, Equity, Failure, Funding, Ignorance, Literacy, Research, Teachers

Ohio: New NEPC Report Faults Fordham Institute for Cherry-picking Data

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2023 //
43

Josh Cowen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University, reviewed a new Ohio voucher report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that has a very large influence over education policy in Ohio. People who already support vouchers will like it, but it won’t change minds, Cowen concludes. Fordham previously sponsored an independent review by David Figlio and colleagues that concluded that children who used vouchers in Ohio fell behind their peers in public schools.

Cowen’s summary:

A report considers the chief concerns associated with Ohio’s voucher program: the harm to public school student outcomes through competition, the affect on district financial resources, and increased racial segregation. Finding that Ohio vouchers have had few such harmful impacts, the report concludes that it has effectively dismissed the primary concerns of voucher critics. Yet, while the report is broadly methodologically sound for the narrow questions it poses, the questions it asks are out-of-date with respect to current issues raised by voucher critics, which focus on substantially decreased student achievement among students using vouchers. Thus, the report does little to assuage the primary concerns of those dedicated to serving children through community-based public education.

The overview:

BOULDER, CO (February 21, 2023)—A recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute considers the impacts of vouchers as related to competition in Ohio public schools, increased racial segregation, and local district financial resources. It presents these three issues as the chief concerns of voucher critics and finds few harmful impacts.

In Michigan State University professor Joshua Cowen’s review of The Ohio EdChoice Program’s Impact on School District Enrollments, Finances, and Academics, he finds that the questions it asks are far too limited. While the report is methodologically sound for the narrow questions it poses, Professor Cowen contends that they are outdated with respect to current concerns raised by voucher critics, which focus on substantially decreased student achievement among students using vouchers.

The report also relies on more permissive standards for statistical inference than peer-reviewed articles would typically allow. Moreover, the Foreword, written by Fordham staff, gives the clear impression that the report is merely an effort to provide new data for privatization advocates, rather than to respond to legitimate concerns raised by voucher critics. The Foreword dismisses criticisms as “Chicken Little” and “sky-is-falling” histrionics, and in doing so undermines the work of the authors it hired to write the study.

Ultimately, Professor Cowen concludes, those who are ideologically predisposed to embrace voucher policies will doubtless find much to appreciate in this report. It does little, however, to assuage the primary concerns of those dedicated to serving children through community-based public education, and thus has little value in the debate over the use of vouchers as a public policy tool to improve education.

Find the review, by Joshua Cowen, at:
https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/edchoice

Find The Ohio EdChoice Program’s Impact on School District Enrollments, Finances, and Academics, written by Stéphane Lavertu and John J. Gregg and published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, at:
https://fordhaminstitute.org/sites/default/files/publication/pdfs/edchoice-impact-report-12-14-22-web-final.pdf

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, National Education Policy Center, Ohio, Privatization, Research, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: What Divides the Two Parties: Looking to the Future or the Past

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2023 //
15

Historian Heather Cox Richardson describes the sharp contrast between the two parties: the Democrats are looking to the future, building platforms for innovation, new industries, and economic growth, while the Republicans are mired in stale culture war issues—campaigning for more restrictions on abortion, despite public opinion, and relitigating the 2020 election.

She writes:

At Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service today, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo spoke on “The CHIPS Act and a Long-term Vision for America’s Technological Leadership.” She outlined what she sees as a historic opportunity to solidify the nation’s global leadership in technology and innovation and at the same time rebuild the country’s manufacturing sector and protect national security.

Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022 by a bipartisan vote, directing more than $52 billion into research and manufacturing of semiconductor chips as well as additional scientific research. Scientists in the U.S. developed chips, and they are now in cars, appliances, and so on. But they are now manufactured primarily in East Asia. The U.S. produces only about 10% of the world’s supply and makes none of the most advanced chips.

That dependence on overseas production hit supply chains hard during the pandemic while also weakening our national security. The hope behind the CHIPS and Science Act was that a significant government investment in the industry would jump-start private investment in bringing chip manufacturing back to the U.S., enabling the U.S. to compete more effectively with China. In the short term, at least, the plan has worked: by the end of 2022, private investors had pledged at least $200 billion to build U.S. chip manufacturing facilities.

Today, Raimondo framed the CHIPS and Science Act as an “incredible opportunity” to enable the U.S. to lead the world in technology, “securing our economic and national security future for the coming decades.” In the modern technological world, “it’s the countries who invest in research, innovation, and their workforces that will lead in the 21st century,” she said.

Raimondo described the major investment in semiconductor technology and its manufacture as a public investment in the economy that rivals some of the great investments in our history. She talked of Abraham Lincoln’s investment in agriculture in the 1860s to cement the position of the U.S. as a leader in world grain production, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman’s investment in scientific innovation to develop nuclear technology, and John F. Kennedy’s investment in putting a man on the moon.

Each of those massive investments sparked scientific innovation and economic growth. Raimondo suggested that “the CHIPS and Science Act presents us with an opportunity to make investments that are similarly consequential for our nation’s future.”

The vision Raimondo advanced was not one of top-down creativity. Instead, she described the extraordinary innovation of the silicon industry in the 1960s as a product of collaboration between university scientists, government purchasing power, and manufacturing. Rather than dismissing manufacturing as a repetitive mechanical task, she put it at the heart of innovation as the rapid production of millions and millions of chips prompted engineers to tweak manufacturing processes a little at a time, constantly making improvements.

“This relentless pace of lab-to-fab[rication] and fab-to-lab innovation became synonymous with America’s tech leadership,” she said, “doubling our computing capacity every two years.” As the U.S. shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, it lost this creative system. At the same time, inability to get chips during the pandemic hamstrung the U.S. economy and left our national security dependent for chips on other countries, especially China.

Reestablishing manufacturing in the U.S. will spark innovation and protect national security. It will also create new well-paying jobs for people without a college degree both in construction and in the operations of the new factories. With labor scarce, Raimondo called for hiring and training a million women in construction over the next decade, as well as bringing people from underserved communities into the skilled workforce to create “the most diverse, productive, and talented workers in the world.”

Raimondo warned that the vision she laid out would be hard to accomplish, but “if we—as a nation—unite behind a shared objective…and think boldly,” we can create a new generation of innovators and engineers, develop the manufacturing sector and the jobs that go with it, rebuild our economy, and protect our national security.

Just “think about what’s possible 10 years from now if we are bold,” she said.

Later, Raimondo told David Ignatius of the Washington Post: “This is more than just an investment to subsidize a few new chip factories…. We need to unite America around a common goal of enhancing America’s global competitiveness and leading in this incredibly crucial technology.… Money isn’t enough. We all need to get in the same boat as a nation.”

Part of the impetus for the bipartisan drive to jump-start the semiconductor industry is lawmakers’ determination to counter the rise of China, which has invested heavily in its own economy. As the U.S. seeks to swing the Indo-Pacific away from its orientation toward China, Raimondo will travel to India next month to talk about closer economic ties between the U.S. and India, including collaboration in chip manufacturing as India, Japan, and Australia are launching their own joint semiconductor initiative.

For the Biden administration, the investment in chips and all the growth and innovation it promises to spark, especially among those without college degrees, is also an attempt to unite the nation to move forward. Theirs is a heady vision of a nation that works together in a shared task, as Lincoln’s United States did, or FDR’s, or JFK’s.

Their orientation toward the future, growth, and prosperity is a striking contrast to the vision of today’s Republicans, who look backward resolutely and angrily to an imagined past. In the short term, many of them continue to relitigate the 2020 presidential election, long after the Big Lie that Trump won has been debunked and the rest of the country has moved on.

In the New York Times yesterday, Luke Broadwater and Jonathan Swan reported that one of the reasons House speaker Kevin McCarthy handed access to more than 40,000 hours of video from the U.S. Capitol from January 6, 2021, to Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson was that McCarthy had promised the far right that he would revisit that event but did not want to have the Republican Congress tied to the effort. His political advisors say swing voters want to move forward.

In the longer term, today’s Republicans are out of step with the majority of Americans on issues like LGBTQ rights, climate change, gun safety, and abortion. Although Republicans are pushing draconian laws to end all abortion access, today Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, released a report showing that 64% of Americans say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 25% say it should be illegal in most cases and only 9% say it should be illegal in all cases. Less than half the residents in every state and in Washington, D.C., supported overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, as the Supreme Court did with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision of last June.

In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, yesterday, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) echoed Trump’s “American Carnage” inaugural address with his description of today’s America as one full of misery and hopelessness. Florida governor Ron DeSantis traveled this week to New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago to insist those Democratic-led cities were crime-ridden, although as human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid pointed out, Florida has a 19% higher rape rate, 66% higher murder rate, and 280% higher burglary rate than New York.

Another study released yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League, which specializes in civil rights law, noted that domestic extremist mass killings have increased “greatly” in the past 12 years. But while murders by Islamic extremists, for example, have been falling, all the extremist killings in 2022 were committed by right-wing adherents, with 21 of 25 murders linked to white supremacists.

President Biden’s poll numbers are up to 46% in general and 49% with registered voters. Perhaps more to the point is that in Tuesday’s four special elections, Democrats outperformed expectations by significant margins.

There are many reasons for these Democratic gains—abortion rights key among them—but it is possible that voters like the Democrats’ vision of a hopeful future and a realistic means to get there rather than Republicans’ condemnation of the present and vow to claw back a mythological past.

To read her footnotes, open the link.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Economy, Elections, Innovation, Republicans, Research

Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Vouchers in Texas

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2023 //
9

This article by Dominick Anthony Walsh in Houston Public Media is an excellent, even-handed description of the voucher debate in Texas. The issues and arguments could apply to any other state. He interviewed Josh Cowen, who spent close to 20 years as a voucher researcher but has since become a voucher critic. He also interviewed several voucher researchers who continue to support them.

Joshua Cowen is a Professor of Education Policy with Michigan State University. He’s spent years studying vouchers, and eventually announced that he opposes the policies.

“They were small programs — a couple thousand kids at the most,” he said. “Those studies did tend to show some small benefit to kids academically.”

As vouchers expanded, research results began to expose problems.

“Once you got to the real ballgame and created the fully scaled up voucher programs, the results were really catastrophic,” Cowen said.

Researchers found that voucher programs in some states led to worse test score results than natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and even the COVID-19 pandemic.

To sum it up: early voucher studies with small sample sizes showed mostly positive results, while the past decade or so of statewide results have largely shown poor outcomes, especially around test scores.

School choice research can be difficult to parse because there’s a lot of money and ideology involved.

Cowen worked on some of the early studies with Patrick Wolf, Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

The former collaborators disagree about how to interpret findings.

Wolf has found some positive results around high school graduation and college completion. He also pointed to the effects of competition in Florida, where he said public schools’ test scores improved after they were forced to compete for students. But he has also observed negative impacts on test scores, including in Louisiana.

It’s worth noting that Patrick Wolf’s department and chair are funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the biggest private funder of school choice programs. when he cites high school graduation rates, he fails to mention the very high attrition rates in voucher schools. If 100 students enter a voucher program but only remain to 55 graduate from high school and 45 go to college, is the graduation rate 45/55 or 45/100?

Governor Greg Abbott’s voucher proposal would cost the state hundreds of millions, perhaps billions. And most of the money will fund students already enrolled in private and religious schools, as it does in every other state that has a voucher/ESA program.

Towards the end of the month, Governor Greg Abbott clarified for the first time what he means by school choice.

He spoke in Corpus Christi at a “parent empowerment night” hosted by Annapolis Christian Academy, where the high school tuition is almost $11,000 per year.

“Schools are for education, not indoctrination,” he said, to a round of applause.

“Now is the time to expand ESAs to every child in the state of Texas,” he continued.

He put his stamp of approval on a specific form of vouchers — education savings accounts, where families who pull students out of public education receive money. One bill in the legislature would give families about $10,000 a year that they can spend or hold on to.

The policy would mean that the Annapolis Christian Academy parents Abbott was speaking to could use taxpayer dollars for their kids’ religious private school tuition.

Now, where do you think students are more likely to be indoctrinated? At the Annapolis Christian Academy or the local public school?

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Research, Rural Schools, Texas, Vouchers

Here is the AP African-American Studies Course That Florida Wants to Ban

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2023 //
28

The College Board has not released the syllabus for the AP African-American Studies course that the state of Florida wants to ban because, they say, it has “no educational value” and violates state law by invoking “critical race theory.”

But the syllabus was released by NBC News and is easily found on the internet.

And here is the syllabus.

I suggest that you read it for yourself.

Stanley Kurtz, a conservative academic, wrote a scathing critique in National Review, where he blasted the AP course as “Neo-Marxist” and intent on propagating a socialist-Marxist-Communist mindset. Google and you will find follow-up articles by Kurtz.

I taught the history of American education, and I wrote books that specifically included the history of the education of Black Americans. To write about the history, I read many of the authors cited in the AP course. None of those authors, like Frederick Douglass or Carter Woodson or W.E.B. DuBois or Booker T. Washington, should be excluded from a course like this.

I will say without hesitation that the course is not, as Florida officials claim, “leftwing indoctrination.” Very few Americans know anything about African history, so my guess is that 99% of that history will be new to every reader. I am not sure why DeSantis is upset by “intersectionality.” A reporter should ask him to define it. I saw no problem in the mention of the Black Lives Matter movement or the reparations movement, because they are part of history; they exist. Why ban them? The DeSantis team wants the AP course of study to be upbeat; to show the celebratory rightwing view of American history; to exclude authentic African American thinkers, like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Michelle Alexander.

True there is a topic on “Black Queer Studies” that must drive Ron DeSantis and his allies crazy. I doubt that any students will be turned gay by learning about the topic. But this topic alone will be sufficient to get the course banned in DeSantis’ state and probably other red states. It might get axed by the College Board, which is alert to its bottom line. If the pushback hurts revenue, the College Board is likely to beat a hasty retreat.

Kurtz is right on one count. He wrote that “A stunningly large portion of the APAAS curriculum is devoted to the history of black studies.” This is true. Students will learn a lot about the leading scholars of the field and their contributions. Much of the scholarship is about the scholarship. And much, rightly, is about the brutal exploitation and degradation of African peoples.

In discussions with students about their expectations for the course, students said there should be an “unflinching look at history and culture.” Of course. They don’t want a sanitized history. They also said “Emphasis should be placed on joy and accomplishments rather than trauma.” They felt that they had learned about slavery every year, and “students feel they have been inundated with trauma.” In this course, it’s hard to find the “joy and accomplishments” that students are hoping to learn about. It is unlikely that they will learn much about barrier-breaking individuals like Dr. Charles Drew; LBJ’s Housing Secretary Robert Weaver; Guy Bluford (the first Black astronaut) or Mae Jamison (the first Black female astronaut); Ralph Bunche (the first African American to win a Nobel Prize for his diplomacy); Leontyne Price, the great international opera star, born in Laurel, Mississippi, or the newest international opera star Michelle Bradley, born in Versailles, Kentucky; or even the first Black President, Barack Obama. Of the hundreds and thousands of African Americans who have achieved their dreams, not much is said. The students say they know a lot about Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks; they want more. And they should have the pleasure of learning the inspiring stories of African-Americans who shattered stereotypes and made history.

The College Board says this is a preliminary version of the ultimate AP exam. It’s a good start. Let’s see if it can survive the political maelstrom.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Curriculum, DeSantis, Extremism, Race, Racism, Research, Testing

I Interview Josh Cowen about the Hoax and Failure of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2023 //
5

Periodically, the Network for Public Education sponsors a conversation with an important voice in education policy. On January 11, I interviewed Josh Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University.

Josh has been an insider in voucher research for almost 20 years. It’s a small club, and he knows the research and the researchers. Josh came to the conclusion that vouchers have been a disaster for the students who leave public schools, supposedly to be “saved” by them.

But he points out that 70-80% of the students who use vouchers were never enrolled in public schools. Many return to the public schools. The political pressure for vouchers comes from politicians and parents seeking a subsidy for students already attending private and religious schools. The claim that they will help “save kids from failing schools” is a hoax to cover up the real purpose of vouchers: to transfer funds to private and religious schools.

The discussion was oversubscribed. Many people who wanted to watch the zoom were turned away. You can watch the recording here. The link is at the bottom of the page.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Lies, Privatization, Research, Vouchers

Josh Cowen: The False Promise That Vouchers Improve Public Schools by Competing with Them

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2023 //
12

Josh Cowen of Michigan State University is among the most experienced voucher researchers in the nation. He is a member of the inner circle of voucher researchers and has been for nearly two decades. He began the work believing that vouchers were promising. As the research accumulated over the years and converged, he realized that vouchers harm the students they are meant to help. I have invited Josh to contribute to this blog whenever he wishes.

He writes here about the claim that the offer of vouchers causes public schools to do better, known as “competitive effects.” Nonsense, he writes.

Over the last few months, as I’ve written here in this blog and elsewhere about how recent data and research show incredibly harmful school voucher impacts for kids, one question that some readers have asked me to address has been the issue of so-called “competitive effects” of vouchers and school choice.

The idea comes from economics, and basically holds that competition between two or more providers of a good or service lowers costs and ultimately provides greater value to consumers. In the economics of education world, the idea that school choice policy forces competition onto public schools to improve the “product” of education is summarized as “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Before I give you the details, here’s the take-home point: academic research does show that the threat of school choice pressures do prompt upticks in public school test score achievements. That’s particularly true for schools that stand to lose financially from voucher enrollment.

Those tend to be the vulnerable schools with respect to both longstanding historical marginalization, and economic health.

So here’s what you should ask yourself: is that really the way we want to spend public dollars to improve academic outcomes?

Here’s what I mean.

Participant vs. Competitive Effects

First, some definitions. If you’re not in the weeds of school choice research or advocacy, it’s important to clarify the difference between participant and competitive effects because researchers and advocates point to both.

Participant effects are the impact of school vouchers on kids who use them to attend private school. Competitive effects are the impact of school vouchers on kids who stay behind in public classrooms.

It’s inarguable that school vouchers have devasting participant effects. Over the last decade, as voucher programs have gotten larger, we’ve seen impacts as high as twice the academic damage that the pandemic caused to test scores.

But as I wrote above, it’s also true that research shows modest, positive competitive impacts. That is to say: vouchers appear to genuinely pressure public schools to drive up test scores. But voucher advocates who point to that outcome rarely talk about academic drops for kids who use vouchers themselves. When they do, they use industry-funded positive research from groups like the Heritage Foundation or the Goldwater Institute to mask what independent analysts have found.

And as I’ve written both for this page and elsewhere, kids who leave public schools for vouchers tend to do so only temporarily. Their parents are what you might call “voucher curious.” They try a private school out, tend to have average academic declines that are as large as anything we’ve seen in the history of education policy research, and then go back to public schools. Thankfully their outcomes do improve after returning to public education. Studying those kids in Milwaukee, my co-authors and I called that return to academic progress “life after vouchers.”But because these are some of the most at-risk kids in our classrooms, these disruptions can cause long-term if not permanent damage.

So I never want to dismiss the children who temporarily move to voucher schools. They’re not lost to us and they need our help too. Which means it’s important not to talk about competitive effects on public schools without always remembering the horrible outcomes for kids who do leave for vouchers.

It’s “Settled:” Direct Investment in Public Education Works

But what if, despite all of that collateral damage vouchers cause, you’re still wondering about competitive impacts? Just as few voucher activists will cite harmful participant effects when advertising competition, most competition studies do not include analysis of which policy alternatives might be better.

Here’s the obvious alternative: simply spending more money on public schools in the first place.

When I was in graduate school in the early 00’s, the prevailing truism on public school spending was that additional increases in funding had limited value. This thinking was driven almost entirely by the remarkable influence of one man, the economist Eric Hanushek, who compared it to simply “throwing money” at a problem—a phrased used more recently by Betsy DeVos, among others.

Just like the research on voucher participant effects has been entirely upended by more recent evidence, that old work on school spending has been retired by more technically sophisticated statistical approaches and more finely grained data. When it comes to education, money matters—how much, and how it’s spent.

Northwestern economist and National Academy of Education member Kirabo Jackson, one of today’s leading authorities on the subject of school spending, describes the debate as “essentially settled:” direct investment in public education has had consistently large impacts on outcomes ranging from test scores, to graduation rates, to adult earnings later in life. Just a few months ago here in Michigan where I write, University of Michigan scholars released a study showing school finance improvements through our state’s equalization reforms even reduced local crime rates.

Remember that every time you see a conservative scholar point to competition as a policy lever to impact public schools. There may be some small short-term benefit on test scores, but it’s not a substitute for direct and sustained investments directly in schools, teachers and kids.

Just Because We Can, Doesn’t Mean We Should

So yes, research does tend to show that if states threaten public schools with the loss of revenue by implementing private school vouchers, public school test scores may improve somewhat.

Does that mean public schools are better off with vouchers? No. It simply means that so long as standardized tests are the coin of the realm for accountability and revenue, reasonable school leaders will have no choice but to react accordingly. It’s almost tautological: public schools need funding, and threatening to reduce their funding with vouchers is going to have some response—whether desirable or not. In states that have bans on reproductive rights for example in a post Roe v. Wade world, I’m sure we’re going to see the number of abortions drop drastically.

Does that mean eliminating Roe was good public health?

As a researcher who’s become a strong advocate for public schools by following the data and following simply the right thing to do, I put little stock in conservative arguments centered around competitive school voucher impacts simply because the same outcome—test scores—shows massive academic declines for kids who actually go to voucher schools. To me it’s the same argument as saying something like “sure this vaccine kills sick people to whom we administer it, but it doesn’t harm a perfectly healthy patient.”

That’s not public health. And it’s not public education either.

Finally a simple comment on identity and policy. I identify as a white male who is married to a woman. The vast majority of school voucher research comes from white men like me. Vouchers originated with a while male economist. I decline to accept the idea implied by school competition that there is something moral about setting low-income children and communities of color—as public schools threatened with voucher-induced funding loss often are serving—against each other to improve outcomes.

Research might show it can work, but just because we can does not mean we should.

Let’s just take the other research-supported route and spend more money on public education, period. One way or another, I don’t think a person needs to be a public school advocate to realize that threatening schools is hardly an optimal role for public policy. Not when there’s a more supportive way available simply by investing in schools as if our children’s lives and futures matter.

My thought: it’s possible to think of many policies that would lead to improved competitive effects, but would be horrible policies. As Josh says, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Suppose your school or district threatened to horse whip children who misbehave; that would lead to better behavior, but only by inflicting inhumane punishments. Similarly, you could cut truancy by administering harsh punishments on those who are truant. There are all sorts of ways to induce competitive effects.

In the case of vouchers, it involves encouraging students to leave their public school to attend a voucher school where they will get an inferior schooling and likely return to their underfunded public school.

Categories Education Reform, Privatization, Research, School Choice, Vouchers

Join Me in Conversation with Josh Cowen to Learn the Facts About Vouchers

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2023 //
3

Josh Cowen is a researcher at Michigan State University who has studied vouchers for many years.

Recently he began writing about the failure of vouchers. They don’t “save children,” in fact, children fall behind when they use vouchers.

Join us on January 11 for a video conference with NPE President Diane Ravitch. Diane’s guest will be Josh Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University. Diane and Josh’s conversation will be titled School Privatization and the Education Culture Wars: The Year in Review and the Year Ahead.

Dr. Cowen has been studying school choice, teacher labor markets, and other policies for nearly two decades, and works directly with policymakers, stakeholders and media professionals to understand the consequences of various education reforms.

“Josh has drawn connections to the school culture wars, privatization, voting rights denial, and other hot-button issues,” Diane said.

RSVP NOW

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Research, Vouchers

Josh Cowen: What about the Kids Who Give Up Their Vouchers?

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2022 //
11

Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University, has been a voucher researcher for two decades. The more he studied vouchers, the more he realized that they harm children. In this post, he looks at the students who use a voucher, but change their minds and return to public schools.

Cowen writes:

Author: Josh Cowen

We don’t talk enough about children who give up their school vouchers.

One of the many problems with the “Education Freedom” marketing campaign for school privatization—and it’s a problem with the market approach to education more generally—is that schools are anything but products to sample.

Betsy DeVos likes to say that schools shouldn’t be “one size fits all.” She’s conceding more than she knows with that analogy because unlike clothing, or a car you can test drive down at the Ford dealer, there’s a real cost to trying a school on and having it fail to fit.

Study after study has shown how harmful school mobility is for kids, both those who actually move between schools and those whose classrooms are full of peers coming in and out.

As Russell Rumberger, an expert in this area has succinctly summarized:

“The research literature suggests that changing schools can harm normal child and adolescent development by disrupting relationships with peers and teachers as well as altering a student’s educational program.”

And in the general population of public school children, we know who’s likely to be more mobile. They’re students of color, students from families with lower levels of income, students with special academic needs, and students with housing insecurity.

No one’s saying student mobility isn’t an issue for public schools, but public educators don’t see student churn as a feature instead of a bug. For example, a key element of the federal McKinney-Vento Act designed to help homeless kids is a set of best practices to help kids stay in one single public school even if they can’t remain in one stable home environment.

States with large-scale voucher programs are beginning to report out statistics for how many users come from public or private schools each year. And by the way these statistics put a lie to the claim from activists that vouchers are needed for families to choose, because we know from states like Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin that more than 75% of voucher kids were already in private school without taxpayer support.

But now we need more statistics reported on the mirror image: how many new students give up their vouchers each year. Recent numbers from Florida indicate roughly 60% of new voucher users give the voucher up after just a couple of years.

Think about that number as the voucher equivalent of a public school mobility or drop-out rate—both statistics used by critics to help indict public educational quality.

When I was working on an official evaluation of Milwaukee’s voucher program more than a decade ago, I led two reports on exactly these sorts of children. We found that around 15% of kids gave up their vouchers every year. Meaning that, as in Florida, more than half the kids we were studying left private schools over a short period of time!

Who were those kids? They were more likely to be Black, lower scoring on the state exam, and more likely to be enrolled in schools that had lots of other voucher-using kids (i.e. newer schools that popped up to take tax dollars once the program was created, rather than more established private institutions).

What happened when they left? Well actually that was a bit of good news. In still the only study to track kids over time after giving up their vouchers, we found that they enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools and then improved substantially after arriving. The shame of it was they had to lose some academic growth in the voucher program before their parents realized it was a poor fit and fixed the problem.

Sometimes though, kids may even want to stay in their private school but the school itself shuts down and they have to move anyway. Voucher activists pushing an entrepreneurial approach to education don’t talk enough about the consequences of failure. For example, in Milwaukee, 41% of private schools that ever took tax dollars eventually shut down.

Imagine what critics of public schools would be saying right now if public schools had a 41 percent failure rate!

We’re not talking about a local Burger King that shuts down and a family has to drive a few extra blocks to get that Whopper they crave from the next closest franchise. Or has to go to Taco Bell or Arby’s instead. We’re talking about potentially major academic and social setbacks for kids.

Finally, there’s one more reason voucher leavers matter—and it’s a bit technical so bear with me. Social scientists prioritize randomized control designs to estimate impacts of policy interventions. And when randomization isn’t possible, we try to find approaches that come close.

The problem that student exits from voucher programs causes for researchers is they create additional hurdles to estimating accurate impacts of those programs. All of the randomized studies of voucher programs have showed similar exit rates to our study in Wisconsin.

And in at least one study of Louisiana vouchers, the authors had to acknowledge that those exits—precisely the students who as in Wisconsin were not doing well in the program—probably caused any positive estimates of the program to be overstated. There are techniques researchers can use to adjust for that error, but no one agrees on exactly the right approach, so it continues to be a problem.

So to summarize: we need to know a lot more about kids who give up their vouchers. Most importantly because the evidence we do have tells us that school mobility is on balance a setback for kids, and we know kids exiting voucher programs are already more likely to be at some form of risk than those who stay.

But we also need to know because as a practical matter, voucher exits can cause analytical hurdles to studies estimating voucher impacts on learning or on educational attainment.

And what that means is that in the future, if voucher supporters trumpet a new study—credible or otherwise—that purports to show positive impacts over time, the very first question we need to ask is: how many kids left the program because it wasn’t working for them?

Based on the data already available, the answer will be another indictment for voucher programs.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, Research, School Choice, Vouchers

Josh Cowen: A Citizen’s Guide to the Researchers and Funders Behind Vouchers

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2022 //
22

Josh Cowen is a veteran voucher researcher, having worked in the field for more than 20 years. He is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. After two decades as a researcher, he concluded that vouchers are a disaster for the children who use them.

Today, he writes an inside guide to voucher research. All pro-voucher research is actually disguised advocacy for vouchers, especially if it funded or produced by the organizations listed here.

I hope you will share this post with your friends on social media, post blogs about it, and get it into the hands of journalists. The public deserves transparency.

Josh Cowen writes:


The entire base of evidence to support school vouchers comes from a small, interconnected and insular group of research-activists with direct ties to Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, the Waltons and other privatization financers.

If you stopped reading this post right now, that’s the take-home message right there: the case for vouchers relies entirely on data and evidence contributed by what amounts to industry-funded research and advocacy on behalf of the cause.

But if you’re a journalist, an educator, or just a committed public school supporter (thank you!) and you want the links and the details, read on.

WHO’S WHO IN THE VOUCHER RESEARCH/ADVOCACY WORLD?

If you’re a professional journalist either in the education space or a broader policy/politics issue, you’ve probably heard of some of these people and certainly their institutions before. But you’re busy, you’ve got deadlines to meet and editors to approve your copy, and it’s not always easy to connect some of the important dots in this area.

But they need to be connected. The single most difficult task I’ve found in my writing on school vouchers has been to explain to journalists how the question of whether vouchers “work” for kids is not some obscure academic ivory-tower debate in which both sides have a nuanced, complicated and reasonably well-founded point.

There is credible research on one side—that vouchers are largely a negative force for student outcomes—and politically oriented reports on the other. That’s it.

So the next time you see a press release, or are given a quote, or talk off record to a voucher supporter saying that vouchers work, try this little exercise and see what you find for yourself:

STEP 1: DOES THE RESEARCH COME FROM ONE OF THE FOLLOWING ORGANIZATIONS?

• American Federation for Children: the 501(c)(4) advocacy organization co-founded by Betsy DeVos to lobby for vouchers. DeVos was so close to this group she had to recuse herself as Secretary of Education from contact with the group in her first year in government.

• Cato Institute: A Right-wing advocacy think tank co-founded by Charles Koch (although Koch later sued for lack of direct control of the group).

• EdChoice: Formerly the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, named for conservative economist who first proposed vouchers. Enough said.

• ExcelInEd: The advocacy group founded by Jeb Bush to expand vouchers and other conservative education priorities from the model Bush developed while he was governor of Florida.

• Goldwater Institute: A self-described libertarian think tank in Arizona that is chiefly oriented toward litigation on behalf of a number of different conservative policy priorities—most recently school vouchers.

• Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG): A research center at Harvard run by Professor Paul Peterson, also of the Hoover Institution, and the father of modern-day pro-voucher research.

• Heritage Foundation: the most influential Right-wingthink tank in the country, devoted in part to privatizing schools and exploiting culture wars. Also directly tied to voter suppression efforts, per deep reporting by The New Yorker.

• University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform: A university-based doctoral training department responsible for producing nearly all of the currently active voucher research-advocates working at the institutions above today. This department was founded by a $10 million gift from the Walton Family Foundation in the early 2000s.

STEP 2: IS THE AUTHOR, CO-AUTHOR OR SOURCE FOR BACKGROUND OR ATTRIBUTION ONE OF THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE?

The Original Voucher Research-Advocates

• Jay P. Greene Currently Senior Fellow at Heritage, former founding head of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, received his PhD under Paul E. Peterson.

• Paul E. Peterson Currently Professor at both Harvard and the conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and the primary intellectual force behind the original positive voucher studies of the late 1990s.

Their Students, Colleagues and Acolytes

• Lindsay Burke Currently at the Heritage Foundation and a member of GOP Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transition team.

• Corey DeAngelis Currently Research Director for DeVos’s American Federation for Children group. But so much more: a regular Fox News contributor and active campaigner with far-Right governors like Kari Lake in Arizona and Kim Reynolds in Iowa.

• Greg Forster Currently at EdChoice and a co-blogger with Jay Greene.

• Matthew Ladner Currently at ALEC, EdChoice, Goldwater, and the Charles Koch Institute.

• Martin Lueken Currently a research director at EdChoiceand former PhD student of Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf at University of Arkansas.

• Mike McShane Currently a research director at EdChoiceand former PhD student of Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf at University of Arkansas.

• Neil McCluskey Currently “Director of Education Freedom” at the Cato Institute and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of School Choice—a publication edited by Robert Maranto of the University of Arkansas.

• Patrick Wolf Currently interim-head of the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform, former colleague of Jay Greene and a former PhD student of Paul Peterson.

Not all of these organizations or individuals occupy the same problematic position. For example, I happen to make a point of reading everything McShane publishes, for example, because I respect his writing and the way he talks about the world even though I fundamentally disagree with his conclusions.

And the University of Arkansas group also includes a robust and insightful group of researchers examining the needs of teachers in the Ozarks and other high-poverty areas. I’m a great admirer of Professor Gema Zamarro and her students, who are doing some very important work on the role that the COVID0-19 pandemic played in teacher workforce conditions.

For that matter, some of what we know about the devasting effects of vouchers in Louisiana actually comes from Patrick Wolf’s reports. I’ve written with him myself on studies like one showing how critical strong oversight is to voucher program performance. Wolf is in fact the only person on the list abovewith a long and commendable history of publishing negative voucher impacts in top academic journals. The point here is not to disparage the individuals but to judge the insular and self-citing base of research that supports vouchers.

The point here is to be critical consumers of this line of research. Think of it this way: no news editor would release a story on an explosive topic going on the say so of a single source. At minimum that editor would require two and usually more sources. The problem for voucher advocacy research is that it is usually the only source for positive voucher impacts available. And it’s been that way for a decade or more.

What’s the take home point? It’s this: not all voucher advocates publish exclusively pro-voucher studies, but all pro-voucher studies come almost exclusively from pro-voucher advocates.

STEP 3: WHO FUNDED THE WORK YOU’RE READING OR THE SOURCE YOU’RE CITING?

One or more of the following funders—the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Kern Family Foundation, the Koch Family Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—funded the original studies supporting school vouchers.

The Bradley and Koch Foundations—along with Heritage—are directly involved in Big Lie, election denialism, and voter-suppression funding, as reported by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker in painstaking detail last summer.

The next time you read a report, or talk to a source for attribution, ask first about their funding sources. If they decline to provide those sources, consider declining to report their results or their viewpoint. It is common for philanthropists to request non-disclosure of their donations—that is their right. But it is your right as a reporter, and certainly the right of your readers, to decline to print their material.

Transparency is just the name of the game for credible research. You can see my own research funding right here. You can see that I once upon a time also received grant funding from the Walton Foundation. And from Bloomberg, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. My only current active funding comes from the U.S. Department of Education Institute for Education Sciences—awarded to my research team while Betsy DeVos was education secretary!

Do I believe those organizations swayed my earlier research? Of course not. And the advocates above would say the same thing. But I don’t get to decide what to think and neither do they. That’s for the reader to judge, and that can’t happen without full transparency.

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?

This all may seem like inside baseball. A bunch of current and former voucher researchers arguing about who’s who and what’s what. A bunch of annoying and self-centered PhDs.

But in some sense that’s the entire point.

Whether an educator, reporter, researcher, policymaker or just avid reader of Diane’s blog here, you would be hard-pressed—if not find it absolutely impossible—to find a single study of voucher participant effects (how vouchers impact outcomes) that did not come from one of the few organizations or few individuals listed above, or a handful of others with direct ties to Greene, Peterson, or Arkansas.

That’s a problem, because what that means is that hundreds of millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of school children are being affected every day by the advocacy of a small group of people. In many cases advocacy disguised as objective and credible research.

As a counter point, consider this humble list of studies showing far more nuance and at times outright negative results from voucher programs. To create that list, I made a simple rule: no studies from organizations listed in Step 1 above. Notice the variety of names and the diversity of venues and outlets. That’s what a credible research base looks like.

A LITMUS TEST: IS THE PRO-VOUCHER EVIDENCE I’M READING POLITICAL/IDEOLOGICAL?

If at this point you’re still not convinced that the entire structure of pro-voucher research amounts to industry-funded research—think the Sacklers funding research on oxycontin’s addictive properties, or ExxonMobil funding research on fossil fuel environmental effects—there is also this:

Many of the organizations and individuals noted above also contribute to other areas of politically engaged conservative education reform.

Consider that Greene alone has published in the last 12 months studies arguing against the provision of gender-affirming care, against “wokeness”, and against Diversity, Equity and Inclusionoffices in both K12 and higher education.

Greene even put right in print for you to see that these culture war issues are useful to Right wing activists pushing the privatization of schooling.

In other words, pro-voucher research exists right alongside—and is often published by—the same people and organizations pushing other far-Right education outcomes. You need to know that to have a full picture of what voucher research truly says.

Pro-voucher research is pro-voucher advocacy, and pro-voucher advocacy is part of the larger effort to undermine public education, undermine a more humane approach to tolerating difference and diversity in our schools, and in many cases undermine free embrace of democracy itself.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bias, Bush, Jeb, Dark Money, Data, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Research, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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