A Mom Who Fought For School Choice

Public School Indoctrination

From a Minnesota think tank, a harrowing account of bullying, indoctrination and intimidation in an affluent public school in that state.

Is it really that bad? Anecdotal accounts from the battle over Act 10 in Wisconsin suggest it may be.

It is clear that schools of education explicitly teach students that leftist indoctrination is the proper role of teachers, something we have blogged about here and here and here and here.

While a lot of attention has been paid to the intolerant attitudes of college students, relatively little attention has been paid to the possibility that the come to college already indoctrinated into intolerant political correctness.

Steve Jobs Favored School Choice

From the Foundation for Economic Education:

Steve Jobs said in a 1995 interview, “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened in education.”

Jobs spoke with Computerworld’s Daniel Morrow in a 1995 interview, which covered a wide range of topics, but frequently delved into Jobs’s views on the American education system. As he said, “I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for making $100,000 a year.”

But Jobs blamed teachers unions for getting in the way of good teachers getting better pay. “It’s not a meritocracy,” said Jobs. “It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what’s happened. And teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.”

He noted that one solution is school choice: “I’ve been a very strong believer that what we need to do in education is go to the full voucher system.” Jobs explained that education in America had been taken over by a government monopoly, which was providing a poor quality education for children.

He referenced the government-created phone monopoly, broken up in 1982: “I remember seeing a bumper sticker with the Bell logo on it and it said, ‘We don’t care, we don’t have to.’ That’s certainly what the public school system is. They don’t have to care.”

Jobs said that the main complaint against school choice is that schools would cater only to rich kids, and the poor kids would be “left to wallow together.”

However, he said, “that’s like saying, well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody’s going to make a $10,000 car. Well, I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the $10,000 car.”

Of course, this ignores the fact that some voucher proposals require that voucher schools accept the voucher for the full price of tuition, and the vast majority of kids would get an education at that price level. And the value of the voucher would be set to buy an education easily as good (and likely much better) than the current public school system

In other words, Jobs said, all students would benefit from more school choice, as the monopoly in education was broken up.

“The market competition model seems to indicate that where there is a need, there is a lot of providers willing to tailor their products to fit that need, and a lot of competition which keeps forcing them to get better and better.”

Of course, being a billionaire tech genius does not make one an all purpose expert on everything. But it does mean one knows a lot about dynamic, radically innovative and creative markets, and how they serve consumers. That is to say, markets very unlike the current educational market.

Politically Correct Math Education Comes to Springfield

Race and School Discipline: The Leftist Fantasy

Now that Heather McDonald has received the honor of being shouted down and shut up by raving leftist campus bigots, it’s time to review another of her articles.

McDonald, one of our favorite scholars on criminal justice issues, is a “law and order” person. She believes that people who commit crimes should be punished. Since blacks commit proportionately many more crimes than whites, this makes her a racist in the eyes of the politically correct.

Remember, a key doctrine of the politically correct is that anything bad that happens to black people must be the result of white racism.

This past Christmas season, she noted the usual mall flash mobs, mostly consisting of black kids, and remarked on the connection to school discipline. Some key points from her essay:

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes.

Of course, while the media assiduously ignore the racial component of flash mob violence, they can’t resist showing the video. And that tells the story.

That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

. . .

The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students. Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls. It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls. School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students. Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.

. . .

Over the last year, a Seattle school district in the throes of “restorative justice” experienced an alleged gang rape and several student deaths. Criminal charges, including murder, were filed against a group of students not yet out of middle school, reports the Seattle Times. Teachers’ unions in Fresno, Des Moines, New York City, and Indianapolis have all lodged complaints about the anti-discipline philosophy, according to Education Week. The Fresno teachers signed a petition pointing out that students are returned to class after cursing at teachers and physically assaulting them, without suffering any consequences. Fresno’s teachers have been injured trying to stop fights; some are retiring because teaching where severely disruptive students cannot be dislodged has become impossible. In Des Moines, students now hit and scream at each other and their teachers, reports the Des Moines Register.

Read the entire article.

Of course, the real “school to prison pipeline” is what happens when schools teach kids they can engage in disruptive and even violent behavior with zero or trivial consequences. That is, unless it becomes the “school to getting yourself killed pipeline” for people like Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, who somehow thought they could attack an armed individual with impunity.

This whole business reveals the dirty little secret of the race hustlers and the social justice warriors. Deep down, they would rather articulate grievances than make things better for black kids. Of course, they won’t admit this (not even to themselves), but to face the issue squarely, they would have to admit that disorder in the black community creates these kinds of conditions in schools, and that white racism has virtually nothing to do with it.

And if they admit that, their whole world comes crashing down.

Called on the Carpet

GLENN MCCOY © Belleville News-Democrat. Dist. By UNIVERSAL UCLICK. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

“White Privilege” Conference In Madison

This has gotten a bit of play in conservative media, but these videos give a vivid and hair-raising look at a narrow, bigoted and intolerant little world of race hustling.

Bilingual Education: A Liberal Social Experiment That Hurt Hispanic Kids

From Heather McDonald, writing in the City Journal, a deconstruction of the corrupt push for bilingual education, which was often imposed on Hispanic kids whose parents didn’t want it.

On the face of it, it’s pretty obvious that if you want a kid to learn a language, you immerse them in it.

That, after all, is what affluent white parents do when they want their kids to learn a language. They send them to foreign countries. They put them in an environment where they have to speak a foreign language to get along.

But if affluent white parents, including liberal yuppies, know what works best, that doesn’t help working class and poor Hispanic parents, who have to endure what the interests of educrats, the political agenda of activists, and the interests of the teachers’ union impose on them.

Luckily, the public can overturn entrenched interests in California, because they have referenda there.

New Education Research: Unions Hurt Children

In the current issue of the prestigious American Journal of Political Science, an article from Terry Moe, who is William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

Translation: heavyweight research from a heavyweight scholar. Peer reviewed. The abstract explains the results:

Students of American politics rarely study public sector unions and their impacts on government. The literature sees bureaucratic power as rooted in expertise, but largely ignores the fact that bureaucrats often join unions to promote their own interests, and that the power of their unions may affect government and its performance. This article focuses on the public schools, which are among the most numerous government agencies in the country, and investigates whether collective bargaining by teachers—the key bureaucrats—affects the schools’ capacity to educate children. Using California data, analysis shows that, in large school districts, restrictive labor contracts have a very negative impact on academic achievement, particularly for minority students. The evidence suggests, then, that public sector unions do indeed have important consequences for American public education.

Good scholars don’t just dump data into top journals without an explanation of the theory that led them to expect the results they got (or in rare cases, another result), and Moe lays out his expectations early in the article:

The unions use their power—their basic work-denial power, enhanced by their political power—to get restrictive rules written into collective bargaining contracts. And these restrictions ensure that the public schools are literally not organized to promote academic achievement. When contract rules make it difficult or impossible to weed out mediocre teachers, for example, they undermine the most important determinant of student learning: teacher quality (Sanders and Rivers 1996). And when contract rules guarantee teachers seniority-based transfer rights, they ensure that teachers cannot be allocated to their most productive uses (Levin, Mulhern, and Schunck 2005). Much the same can be said about a long list of standard contract provisions. This is to be expected. Except at the margins, contract rules are simply not intended to make the schools effective.

Moe’s “dependent variable” (what he is explaining) is something called the API, which is derived from student test scores. The higher the API, the higher the test scores.

There are always methodological issues with an analysis of this sort. We might wonder, for example, whether heavily black districts with a lot of Democratic voters elect liberal school boards that readily cave in to the teachers’ union. But those districts might have kids that perform poorly for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of schooling. Moe deals with these issues decisively -- controlling for minority population in each district, as well as a host of other variables.

Bottom line: both at the elementary and the secondary levels, restrictive union contracts harm student achievement.

When Moe breaks down his results, some complication enters. Restrictive union rules seem to hurt more in large school districts, and in districts with a large minority population.

But of course, these are the districts most at risk. Unionization, in other words, hurts most in the places where conditions are already worst.

This study, in a way, is a follow-up to a 1990 study (Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools) in which John Chubb and Moe showed that private schools are better organized to educate kids than public schools. In that study they stressed the role of unions doing the same things they have done to kill the auto industry — introducing rigidity in how things are organized and promoting a “then versus us” mentality among the workers.

Quite simply: your pro-union liberal friends ought to be ashamed of themselves. Don’t look for them to repent anytime soon, however. Unions — and particularly the teachers’ union — are their political allies.

The Black/White School Achievement Gap in Wisconsin

From the Journal-Sentinel:

The average reading ability for fourth- and eighth-grade black students in Wisconsin is the lowest of any state, and the reading achievement gap between black students and white students in Wisconsin continues to be the worst in the nation.

Those are among the facts found in a mass of testing results released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Education, the latest results from a long-standing federal program called the National Assessment of Education Progress. It is the closest thing to a nationwide standardized testing program for reading and math ability.

The gap between blacks and whites was worse in Wisconsin than, say, Louisiana? Yes.

The average score for black fourth-graders in reading was lower than, say, Washington, D.C., or Alabama? Yes.

“I find it very distressing to look at this,” said Elizabeth Burmaster, Wisconsin superintendent of public instruction. “There isn’t anything more important (in education). This is the civil rights issue of our country.”

It may very well be that, but is the traditional kind of civil rights thinking adequate to deal with it?

One refreshing and honest perspective came from a black leader.

Wendell Harris, chairman of the education committee of the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP, said, “I know we’ve got to do better in school, there’s no question about that.”

But, he said, “really, from my standpoint, (it’s) families. . . . We can’t keep making excuses for parents.”

Harris said many parents live amid difficult circumstances, but “we have to do our best to try to get our children educated whatever our own circumstances are.”

He added, “We have to become more willing to hold everyone accountable and not just the teachers.”

Wow!

We can’t imagine Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson saying that.

But we’ll make progress on the issue only to the extent that people are willing to tell the truth.

School Choice an International Movement

We are used to thinking of Milwaukee as the center of the universe where school choice is concerned.

And there is no gainsaying that the city has been a pioneer. But the movement has moved far beyond the Brew City, and indeed far beyond the borders of the United States.

From The Economist.

FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers—letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer’s expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.

Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable—and often fatal—opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.

But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence. Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.

Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the “pill-placebo” studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines. The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, scored a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.

The Colombian programme did not even set out to offer better schooling than was available in the state sector; the aim was simply to raise enrolment rates as quickly and cheaply as possible.

These results are important because they strip out other influences. Home, neighbourhood and natural ability all affect results more than which school a child attends. If the pupils who received vouchers differ from those who don’t — perhaps simply by coming from the sort of go-getting family that elbows its way to the front of every queue—any effect might simply be the result of any number of other factors. But assigning the vouchers randomly guarded against this risk.

Opponents still argue that those who exercise choice will be the most able and committed, and by clustering themselves together in better schools they will abandon the weak and voiceless to languish in rotten ones. Some cite the example of Chile, where a universal voucher scheme that allows schools to charge top-up fees seems to have improved the education of the best-off most.

The strongest evidence against this criticism comes from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children. Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in the state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit. The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admissions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees (most American voucher schemes impose similar conditions).

The result has been burgeoning variety and a breakneck expansion of the private sector. At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now 10% are, and growth in private schooling continues unabated.

Anders Hultin of Kunskapsskolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served rule—the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place. So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).

More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.

The Swedish case is highly ironic.

About three generations of left-leaning Americans during the middle to late 20th century saw Sweden was the model Welfare State after which America should model itself. Indeed, people like that are still around, especially in that museum of outdated ideologies, academia.

But in seems in this case that the Swedes are following the advice of a free market American economist.

As choice makes slow (if steady progress) here, they are ahead of us.

But not in the way that generations of liberals and leftists would want.

Research Continues to Favor School Choice

As is typical with social innovations, school choice has now been the subject of literally scores of evaluation studies.

The first, and most obvious, thing to test is whether achievement test scores improve for students whose parents are allowed to opt out of the government monopoly and choose schools.

The answer: the studies are not entirely consistent, but the range of outcomes is “no effect” to “substantial positive effects.”

But there are other dimensions to the issue.

Proponents of the public school monopoly sometimes claim it is necessary for civic cohesion. All kids, they say, need to be taught to be good American citizens. It’s quite doubtful that public schools have that agenda any more. More typically, they engage in politically correct indoctrination.

But it seems that choice schools in fact promote the values that public schools were traditionally supposed to.

A recent study reviews the literature.

For this review, I examine the results of 21 quantitative studies regarding the effects of school choice on seven civic values that relate to the capacity of individuals to perform as effective citizens in our representative democracy. The values, in order from the most studied to the least studied, are political tolerance, voluntarism, political knowledge, political participation, social capital, civic skills, and patriotism.

The studies are divided into two categories, based on the statistical rigor with which the investigation was conducted. To qualify for inclusion in this review, a study had to be a quantitative analysis that controlled for observed differences in the backgrounds of the students attending different schools. To be classified as rigorous, the study also had to attempt to correct for the tendency of students and families to sort themselves into different schools and school sectors based on unobserved factors, a research challenge commonly referred to as selection bias.

[T]he 59 findings from existing studies suggest that the effect of private schooling or school choice on civic values is most often neutral or positive. Among the group of more-rigorous studies, 12 findings indicate statistically significant positive effects of school choice or private schooling on civic values and 10 suggest neutral results. . . . Only one finding from the rigorous evaluations indicates that traditional public schooling arrangements enhance a civic value.

With one exception, the findings regarding the effect of school choice on political tolerance are confined to the neutral-to-positive range. Eleven findings—five of them from the more-rigorous studies—indicate that school choice increases political tolerance. For example, one experimental voucher study in Washington, D.C., found that nearly one-half of the students who switched to a private school said they would permit a member of their disliked group to live in their neighborhood, compared with just over one-quarter of the students in the public school control group.

If choice schools are at minimum as good as public schools (and a lot of studies say they are better), that would seem to be plenty of reason to let people use them.

But there is another reason: cost.

A recent study by the pro-choice Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation found that taxpayers save money when choice schools are encouraged, since the typical voucher at a choice school costs less than the taxpayer subsidy to public schools.

The study estimated that since 1990 taxpayers have saved $443,848,581 due to the operation of twelve choice programs. $22,296,189 of this represents the impact on state budgets, and $421,552,391 the effect on school district budgets.

There is a whole congeries of interests, of course, who would like for education to cost more: school administrators who would rather head large bureaucracies than small lean ones, political activists who specialize in influencing public school systems but would have little power over private schools, and a teachers’ union that profits from the involuntary unionization imposed on public school teachers.

But taxpayers are a different matter.