A Mom Who Fought For School Choice

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.

School Choice from an Economics 101 Perspective

Unions Attack Charter Schools

It’s well known that unions have strongly opposed private voucher schools. But they have claimed, at least, to like charter schools.

But in reality they don’t like any kind of school choice. From the Wall Street Journal.

On education policy, appeasement is about as ineffective as it is in foreign affairs. Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.

But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. With voucher programs facing termination in Washington, D.C., and heavy regulation in Milwaukee, the teachers unions have now set their sights on charter schools. Despite their proclamations about supporting charters, the actions of unions and their allies in state and national politics belie their rhetoric.

The author, Jay Greene, then goes on to detail attacks on charter schools and continues.

Unions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. New York already has the “card check” unionization procedure for teachers that replaces secret ballots with public arm-twisting. And the teachers unions appear to have collected enough cards to unionize the teachers at two highly successful charter schools in New York City. If unions force charters to enter into collective bargaining, one can only imagine how those schools will be able to maintain the flexible work rules that allow them to succeed.

The highest quality studies have consistently shown that students learn more in charter schools. In New York City, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby found that students accepted by lottery to charter schools were significantly outpacing the academic progress of their peers who lost the lottery and were forced to return to district schools.

Florida State economist Tim Sass and colleagues found that middle-school students at charters in Florida and Chicago who continued into charter high schools were significantly more likely to graduate and go on to college than their peers who returned to district high schools because charter high schools were not available.

The most telling study is by Harvard economist Tom Kane about charter schools in Boston. It found that students accepted by lottery at independently operated charter schools significantly outperformed students who lost the lottery and returned to district schools. But students accepted by lottery at charters run by the school district with unionized teachers experienced no benefit.

When charter schools unionize, they become identical to traditional public schools in performance. Unions may say they support charter schools, but they only support charters after they have stripped them of everything that makes charters different from district schools.

Vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire. But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble. It’s time for reformers to increase pressure on politicians bending to the will of the unions and close the new education gap -- the one between what Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan say about education and what they do.

School choice is the issue that shows how little liberals really care about poor children.

They are “pro-poor” if in involves redistributing income from productive citizens to government. They are “pro-poor” if it involves the proliferation of social programs that employ their friends. They are “pro-poor” if it involves more government control of business.

But if helping poor people involves giving more power to parents, and reducing the power of their allies in the teacher’s union and their allies in the bureaucracy, liberals could care less.

Forthcoming at the Law School

From On the Issues with Mike Gousha, two programs that promise to be stimulating and informative:

Thursday, March 26 — Superintendent of Public Instruction Candidates Tony Evers and Rose Fernandez—Join us for what is sure to be a spirited and informative discussion as the candidates for superintendent address the challenges facing the Milwaukee Public Schools and districts across the state of Wisconsin. Tony Evers is currently Deputy State Superintendent. He has been a teacher, principal, and superintendent of the Verona and Oakfield school districts. Rose Fernandez has been a nurse, hospital administrator, businesswoman, and advocate for virtual schools. Learn more about their positions on key issues when the candidates visit the Law School just 10 days before the election. 12:15 to 1:15 p.m., Marquette Law School, Room 325

NEW Wednesday, April 8 — Educational reform advocate Dr. Howard Fuller—The former Superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, Dr. Fuller will visit the Law School to discuss what works in urban education, the future of the school voucher program, and his “no excuses” approach to educating our children. Dr. Fuller is an outspoken advocate for educational options for low-income families. Passionate and sometimes controversial, he is a Distinguished Professor of Education at Marquette University and Founder/Director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning. Noon to 1 p.m., Marquette Law School, Eisenberg Memorial Hall, 3rd floor.

The programs are open to all, but you must register to attend here.

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.

Wisconsin: Ahead of the Curve on School Choice

A press release from the pro-free market Heartland Institute.

(Chicago, Illinois - April 24, 2008) Parents hoping to wrest control of their children’s futures away from education bureaucrats and politicians should consider moving to Wisconsin, a new “report card” from The Heartland Institute suggests. They should avoid Montana or Washington State.

Choice & Education Across the States ranks state efforts to increase accountability and improve student achievement with four kinds of school choice: vouchers, charters, tax credits, and public school choice.

“School choice programs give parents the power to decide where their children are schooled,” notes author Michael Van Winkle. “School choice is accountability. When parents have the power to remove their children from a school that is failing them, without financial penalty, they and their children are better served.”

With 23 being the highest possible score on Van Winkle’s evaluation, the median score was just five points. West Virginia and five other states scored only two points each, while Washington and Montana racked up a mere single point.

Arizona and Florida achieved scores of 15 and 14, respectively--grades of A in Van Winkle’s curved grading system.

Arizona and Florida offer parents strong voucher, charter school, and scholarship tax credit programs. All of the other top-ranking states--Wisconsin, Ohio, Utah, Minnesota, and Georgia--offer vouchers and charters, but none offers scholarship tax credits as well.

The lowest-ranking states offer only public school choice, generally in the form of magnet schools or open enrollment across school districts. Of West Virginia and the other seven lowest-ranking states--Montana, Washington, Alabama, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota--only Oklahoma offers any form of choice other than public school choice. Oklahoma has a charter school program.

“Many states are experimenting with choice as a way to provide a quality public education,” Van Winkle added. “A few states, like Arizona and Florida, are innovating at an impressive pace, willing to try new and better ways to educate children. Other states are not keeping pace and seem committed to preserving the largely choice-free status quo.”

Choice & Education Across the States is available for free online.

School Choice in Georgia

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, an op-ed that debate on school choice is nation-wide, and that experiments (although limited) are spreading.

This one is written by Gerard Robinson who is president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

Among the points he makes is one particularly salient one:

Fallacy: Parents, particularly poor parents, are incapable of making good decisions in an educational marketplace.

This claim is unconvincing on two fronts. First, the same poor parent who is smart enough to use a Section 8 voucher to find a suitable place to live or is smart enough to use a food stamp voucher in a grocery store will not suddenly become stupid when it comes to shopping for his child’s education. Yes, choosing between schools is different from choosing between apples, but parents know a rotten school and a rotten apple when they see it. Parents whom I’ve met in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. —- two cities with scholarship programs —- are savvier than voucher opponents give them credit for. In fact, the role of parents in the Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Program that kicked off here last year represents one example of active parent participation in the education marketplace.

Interestingly, in pretty much any other context the notion that poor people, and especially black poor people are too dumb to make decent choices would be howlingly politically incorrect.

But the guardians of political correctness happen to be in bed with the teacher’s union, and to have a huge stake in a public school monopoly which they want to use to indoctrinate kids into their social agenda.

So if the notion “dumb poor blacks” is necessary to oppose vouchers, “dumb poor blacks” it is.

The Georgia Special Needs Scholarship Program, by the way, is yet another case of the slow, incremental but steady advance of school choice.

School Reform Speaker Coming to Marquette

A talk by an important educational reformer:

Dr. Ted Mitchell

The Problem in Public Education

Ted Mitchell heads the California governor’s commission on excellence in education, runs the New Schools Venture Fund, and was recently named president of the California State Board of Education. Previously, he served as a Stanford University Trustee and completed a very successful six-year term as twelfth president of Occidental College.

Monday, March 10, 2008
4:30 p.m.
Weasler Auditorium

You can find more on Mitchell here.

Voucher Foes Hurt Poor Kids

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Chicago is gearing up for another round of tumult from the closing of possibly more than a half dozen failing schools. Whatever the Chicago Public Schools administration does to solve this problem, the parents of students have no choice but to cope.

Middle-class families exercise school choice by loading up a moving van and relocating to a suburb with good schools. The rich can afford private schools. Only the poor -- often minorities in inner cities with under-performing schools -- are stuck with little or no choice.

President Bush tossed out an idea Monday to open up choice for poor kids but, as usual, it was rejected out of hand by Democrats and teacher unions. The $300 million Pell Grants for Kids proposed by the president in his State of the Union message is modeled on the popular Pell Grant program that helps poor kids go to college. Basically, the Bush plan would turn over tax dollars to parents to send their children to private schools.

In other words, vouchers.

Bush’s proposal was shouted down by Democratic lawmakers and unions with the usual complaint that vouchers pull resources away from urban schools.

This argument has been rebutted by studies, many of them compiled online by the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. No school district that has adopted choice has had its budget reduced, the foundation says. For example, it reports that in Milwaukee, per-pupil spending jumped from $6,316 in 1990-91, when its program began, to $10,375 by the 2003-04 school year. Other studies show vouchers improve student performance. Milwaukee recorded better graduation rates, and Harvard studies of privately funded voucher programs in New York and Dayton, Ohio, revealed better math and reading scores for African-American students. What’s more, research shows competition from vouchers improves public schools.

Vouchers remain an appealing idea with the public. A just-released poll done for the Friedman Foundation, the Illinois Policy Institute and seven other groups finds 51 percent of people in Illinois favor vouchers and the number was 73 percent when the aid is limited to low-income families or kids in failing schools.

So why doesn’t the voucher movement find traction?

For one thing, there’s opposition from unions supported by their allies in the Democratic Party and civil rights movement. Conservatives believe in the sovereignty of the individual and trust in his or her ability to make the right decisions. Liberals believe individuals need help from government in confronting big challenges or, especially, big interests like business. There’s some truth in that. But in this case, liberals are aligned with the big interests -- teacher unions and the education monopoly. Yes, teachers and school administrators are committed to educating children. Still, their position is complicated by self interest, i.e. unions putting job security first.

The author goes on to explain that most middle class parents, happy with their own kids’ education, view real choice for poor kids as a source of possible trouble. Thus voucher initiatives (at least broad based ones) fail.

And poor kids are denied choice.

More: Media Bias on School Choice

An e-mail, sent to a variety interested observers by George Mitchell, an expert on and strong supporter of school choice:

On page 5 of the WPRI [Wisconsin Policy Research Institute] report the following appears:

“A story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel recently noted that ‘parents might have more choices in publicly funded education in Milwaukee than anywhere else in the United States.’”

The referenced story discusses a study on how low-income parents choose schools in Milwaukee, Denver, and Washington DC. That study’s findings pertain directly to the issues raised by WPRI. Namely, to what extent do parents in Milwaukee make discerning decisions?

I have attached a copy of the study. Its findings and methodology differ starkly from those of the WPRI study.

Unless I am too numbed by this whole affair, I find no discussion in the WPRI report that addresses these differences. That is perplexing. With a recent study (from a highly credible source) having addressed essentially the same issues as WPRI, one would expect WPRI to examine that study and comment on similarities and differences. Questions that arise include:

1. How do the studies differ in terms of gathering information about Milwaukee parents?
2. How does the studies differ in terms of conclusions about how those parents choose schools?
3. Given those differences, what suggests that more confidence should be placed in the WPRI method and findings?

I encourage you to skim the attached study. It differs in so many ways from the WPRI report that I feel a summary from me would not do it justice. WPRI must disagree with its findings, but WPRI’s report is silent on that matter. If I have missed something in the WPRI report, it means that the reference is very brief and thus does not address the obvious questions raised above.

A separate question is why the Journal Sentinel did not raise these questions in reporting on the WPRI study.

Setting aside the paper’s demonstrated failure in connection with this story, the failure of WPRI to pursue the questions raised above stands out as yet another glaring inadequacy in its report. I thank Mike Ford for bringing this to my attention.

George

This, of course, is a follow-up on an issue we have covered here, in which the Journal-Sentinel enthusiastically jumped on and covered prominently reported a study from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute casting doubt on the ability of school choice to improve the quality of Milwaukee’s public schools.

We critiqued the study, and commented on the failure of the Journal-Sentinel to report better studies showing positive gains from school choice in Milwaukee.

Mitchell followed up with his own critique posted here.

The study sends mixed messages about the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. First, it shows considerable integrity when an organization that strongly favors school choice publishes a study that goes against school choice. Honest policy analysis says to go where the data take you.

But on the other hand, it simply wasn’t a very good study.

But how about the local media? The Journal-Sentinel gave high visibility to the WPRI study, but didn’t even bother to report a study from a New York Federal Reserve Bank economist who found that choice has indeed improved Milwaukee’s schools. This latter study has been accepted for publication by a top ranked peer-reviewed economics journal.

Likewise, as yet there is nothing in the paper about the study Mitchell references above. The conclusion, based on extensive research into parential decision-making, including a sample of parently in Milwaukee:

On balance, the research indicates that while there are some differences related to income, race and ethnicity, parental education, and the kind of school the family selects, overall these low- to moderate-income parents seem fully capable of making the decision. They feel well informed; they appear satisfied with their choices; and they go about the process in very much the same way as middle- and upper-income families choosing schools—or other consumer goods.

Are we soon going to see this in the local paper (or on local radio and TV)?

And if not, why not?

WPRI School Choice Study: Clarification or Recantation?

We’ve blogged on a recent study from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which has been interpreted by the local media and liberal bloggers as showing that school choice can’t be expected to improve education.

Not only did we critique the assumptions and methodology of the study, we published a penetrating dissection of the study by George Mitchell.

Now George Lightbourn, a fellow at WPRI, jumps in with comments strongly supportive of school choice.

Key quote:

Unfortunately, the headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel read, “Choice May Not Improve Schools.” That headline not only misrepresented the study, it energized those who are dying to go back to the days when parents were forced to send their children to whichever MPS school the educrats thought best.

So that there is no misunderstanding, WPRI is unhesitant in supporting school choice. School choice is working and should be improved and expanded. School choice is good for Milwaukee’s children.

Unfortunately, the tone of the original study is pretty much accurately reflected in the Journal-Sentinel article.

Give the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute credit for having the integrity to publish a study that ran contrary to its long-established support for school choice.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very good study.

[Full Disclosure]

We have written three articles for The Wisconsin Interest, a publication of WPRI, and been paid for the articles. But of course, if that had corrupted our journalistic judgment, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute School Choice Study: More

The following was left as a comment to an earlier post of ours, and we feel it deserves the prominence of a full-fledged post. It’s from George Mitchell, policy wonk and activist who has been a stalwart supporter of school choice.

George Mitchell said...
The following was sent to the study’s author:

October 26, 2007

Dave,

WPRI’s sponsorship of your recent study, combined with the Journal Sentinel’s misleading article, has generated wide interest in the findings. You can anticipate many questions regarding the methodology you employed and whether it was appropriate for the Milwaukee situation.

For reasons summarized below, I am interested in knowing if you or WPRI submitted your methodology to others for independent review. If so, can you share the responses you received? If the methodology was not reviewed by others, I think it would be advisable for you or WPRI to seek such a review.

You estimate “the extent and nature of public school choice and parental involvement” in Milwaukee by applying “a variety of demographic variables…correlated with…parental choice and parent involvement...” The variables, derived from a “national data set,” were:

• educational attainment of parents
• race and ethnicity of students
• household composition (single-parent vs. two-parent), and
• mother’s employment status.

The “national data set” consisted of answers to an NHES survey. These answers apparently show, for example, that high educational attainment is correlated positively with parental involvement and more engagement in school choice. Similarly, I assume that two-parent, non-minority families also were positively correlated with parent involvement and engagement in school choice. And so on.

You assume (or “extrapolate”) that MPS parents will behave in the same manner as those who answered the NHES survey. By constructing a demographic profile of MPS parents, you thus believe you can estimate the “extent and nature of public school choice and parental involvement within the Milwaukee Public Schools district.” In the specific case of school choice, you conclude that only 10 percent of MPS parents are discerning choosers.

George Lightbourn’s introduction to your report says, “The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find.” However, given your methodology, the results were completely predictable — even pre-ordained. Specifically, rather than gathering information about the actual behavior of MPS parents, the study simply assumes that they behave in a manner similar to respondents to a national survey. Given the demographic profile of MPS parents, you knew from the start that you would estimate relatively low levels of school choice and parent involvement. To quote one scholar who has read your report, “[WPRI] simply assumes that parents of a certain demographic profile behave the same way no matter what. In this way, the WPRI study assumes the very thing it claims to prove. The study finds that [parents] are not effective choosers based on data from environments where they have few choices.”

The key question, then, is whether the methodology is appropriate for Milwaukee’s unique situation.

Consider some actual numbers, beginning with your ten percent conclusion. Applied only to MPS enrollment, that yields a group of 9,000 discerning choosers. Applied to all Milwaukee students in tax-supported K-12 education, the total would be 12,000. So, you find that between 9,000 and 12,000 students have discerning parents. Yet:

• There are more than 17,000 students who attend schools in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.
• More than 5,000 other students attend independent public charters authorized by the City of Milwaukee and UW-Milwaukee. That’s more than 22,000 students.
• There are thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of MPS students with parents who have chosen neighborhood schools. Indeed, a specific focus of MPS school selection in recent years has emphasized neighborhood schools. Your report appears to discount all those choices by labeling neighborhood schools as a “default” option.
• Roughly 10,000 other parents use the open enrollment process and the Chapter 220 program to make clear choices about where their students attend school.
• Thousands more parents enroll their children in so-called specialty MPS schools. These parents make clear choices. Many of those schools have waiting lists, yet another measure of choice.

In other words, by any reasonable estimate the number of actual choices made by Milwaukee parents substantially exceeds 9,000-12,000. Even allowing for a subjective definition of what a well-informed choice is, the number is simply much greater than your 10 percent estimate.

This raises the possibility that your methodology is highly inappropriate when it comes to the Milwaukee situation, one that is unique among American cities. Given that Milwaukee parents have so many options — a condition that has existed for more than a decade — it is questionable to assume that their behavior will not differ from other urban parents who don’t have such options.

While there are other assertions in your study that I find debatable, those are overshadowed by the methodology question. As part of the continuing discussion your report will engender, I reiterate that an independent assessment of that methodology is in order. This is all the more so given the existence of peer-reviewed scholarship (such as by Hoxby and Chakrabarti) that is at odds with your conclusions; it is unclear why your report does not acknowledge and discuss their work.

George

Media Bias on School Choice

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has rather gleefully jumped on a study from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute that supposedly shows that school choice doesn’t improve education.

A study being released today suggests that school choice isn’t a powerful tool for driving educational improvement in Milwaukee Public Schools.

But more surprising than the conclusion is the organization issuing the study: the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank that has supported school choice for almost two decades, when Milwaukee became the nation’s premier center for trying the idea. The institute is funded in large part by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an advocate of school choice.

“The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find,” George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper’s first sentence.

“We had expected to find a wellspring of hope that increased parental involvement in the Milwaukee Public Schools would be the key ingredient in improving student performance,” Lightbourn wrote. But “there are realistic limits on the degree to which parental involvement can drive market-based reform in Milwaukee.”

Rick Esenberg has beat us to the punch in critiquing the methodology of this particular study. As he points out, it’s not a study of private school choice, only a study of choice within the public sector.

And further:

First, the study doesn’t really measure what parents in Milwaukee actually do. As the authors say, “the basic approach was to identify the determinants and frequency of parental choice and parental involvement using a national data set, and extrapolate those results to Milwaukee, relying on the particular demographics of the MPS district.” In other words, they take national data on how households with particular demographic characteristics act with respect to choosing schools and becoming involved with the schools and then assume that people with those characteristics in Milwaukee would act the same way. They then look at the characteristics of families in MPS and run the numbers.

That’s a respectable approach, although it would not catch the effects of any local efforts to improve decision-making or increase parental involvement.

Second, it seems less plausible to extrapolate from these data to families who choose voucher schools. The demographics of that group may be different. In addition, opting out of the public schools may itself reflect a higher degree of involvement with a child’s education (it presumably takes more effort) and a population that does that may differ from others with same socioeconomic characteristics.

If social scientists know anything, it is that contextual effects matter, and they often matter a lot. Put people on one social context, and they act one way. Put them in another social context, and (although they may have the same characteristics) they act in an entirely different way.

Thus it is highly questionable to generalize from school districts across the nation that have fewer choices -- and a much shorter history of giving parents a choice -- to Milwaukee.

Then there is the fact that the study insists that parents have to be, essentially, model consumers before choice can work.

Taken together, these three estimates allow one to perform calculations regarding a hypothetical “ideal consumer” in a public school choice system. This consumer would maximize the marketplace pressures on schools, thereby creating the greatest prospects for school reform and student achievement. Such a consumer would:

• exercise choice, rather than simply enrolling his or her child in the local neighborhood school;
• consider at least two schools in the choice process, rather than simply choosing a school without assessing the potential costs and benefits of alternatives; and
• bring performance-based/academic criteria to bear in the choice process.

The estimate of MPS parents meeting all three criteria is just 10 percent. Given this number, it seems unlikely that MPS schools are feeling the pressure of a genuine educational marketplace.

In the first place, loss of ten percent of your students is not trivial. In most industries, a loss of ten percent of market share would set off huge alarm bells in the executive suites.

In the second place, who says that simply putting your kid in the neighborhood school is not an exercise of “choice?” The criterion for “choice” is not that you send your child off to another part of the city to school, rather, it’s that you would if the opportunities there outweighed the advantages of a neighborhood school.

Further, who says you have to consider two or more schools? Rational consumers will often decide to “stand pat” with their current choices if those choices are considered “good enough.” Imagine a parent whose child seems satisfied with his or her current school. The parent sees that the child is doing an appropriate amount of homework, getting decent grades, and doing as well as he or she should be doing on standardized tests.

This parent is perfectly rational to simply “stand pat.”

Finally, who says that parents must “bring performance-based/academic criteria to bear in the choice process?” Choosing a school on the basis of the values taught there (relevant when parents choose a religious school) or extracurricular activities (relevant if a child has a lot of potential in, say, football or swimming or drama) might be the best way to go. Especially if there is no reason, a priori, to suspect you are giving up academic quality in the process.

The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute study can be contrasted with the best academic study on this issue, one that appeared in the American Journal of Political Science.

(In the interests of full disclosure, we have published both in The Wisconsin Interest, published by WPRI, and in the AJPS.)

The scholars who published in the AJPS note that in spite of limited information, parents tend to select schools that match their preferences:

The results in the three analyses presented in Table 3 all point in the same direction-even though levels of objective information held by parents are low, their actual choice of schools reflects their preferences in education. For example, parents who say that high scores are important enroll their children in schools that are more than a quarter of a standard deviation above the district mean in reading scores. Similarly, parents who value safety and those who value diversity also enroll their children in schools that are significantly higher than the average schools in their district on these dimensions. (p. 780)

In short, school choice works, even in the absence of highly informed parents.

The authors of this article further point out:

We demonstrate that the same puzzle we have just documented in school choice-that of matching preferences in the face of low levels of information-has been posed in the study of many private goods markets. Most research into this phenomenon has demonstrated that the solution to the puzzle lies in a small group of consumers who actually gather information about products. Thus, while on average, information about products is low, a small group of buyers in markets tend to be more informed. More importantly, these studies also show that this small percentage of buyers can effectively drive a market toward a competitive outcome. (p. 782)

At least in New York City, were this study was conducted, the informed parents are numerous enough to drive a choice system effectively.

But do we need to look at data from elsewhere? Is there a good analysis of Milwaukee data?

Indeed there is. A study from Rajashri Chakrabarti, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, looks specifically at Milwaukee, and reaches the following conclusions:

The Milwaukee voucher program, as implemented in 1990, allowed only non-sectarian private schools to participate in the program. Following a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, the program saw a major shift and entered into its second phase, when religious private schools were allowed to participate for the first time in 1998. This led to more than a three-fold increase in the number of private schools and almost a four-fold increase in the number of choice students. Moreover, due to some changes in funding provisions, the revenue loss per student from vouchers increased in the second phase of the program. This paper analyzes the impacts of increase in competition brought about by these changes on public school performance in Milwaukee. Using data from 1987 to 2002, and a difference-in-differences estimation strategy in trends, the paper finds that these changes have led to an improvement of the public schools in the second phase of the program as compared to the first phase. The results are robust to alternative samples and specifications, and survive several sensitivity checks including correcting for mean reversion. The findings imply that voucher design matters and choice of parameters in a voucher program is crucial as far as impacts on public school incentives and performance are concerned.

The article has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Public Economics.

This, of course, makes excellent intuitive sense. Where options for parents are tightly constrained, and where public schools have little to fear, fiscally, from parents “opting out,” there is little reason to expect them to improve their performance.

But when competition becomes a real threat, it also becomes a real prod.

Now, a question.

How much attention did the Milwaukee media pay to the Chakrabarti study?

Searching the archive of the Journal-Sentinel, there is only one mention. It’s a blot entry from Patrick McIlheran pointing how that the study has gotten no attention!

A Tolerant Atheist

Via Heart, Mind & Strength, an account of an atheist who gave a major contribution to Catholic education.

According to the New York Daily News:

The wealthy philanthropist who gave $22.5 million to help Catholic schools doesn’t think much of theology - in fact, he’s an atheist.

But even though Robert Wilson doesn’t believe in God, he does believe in giving poor kids a chance at a quality education.

“I am an atheist, [but] it’s far more than about religion,” said Robert Wilson, who was raised as an Episcopalian. “It’s about getting an education. The donation has nothing to do with religion.”

The statement didn’t exactly sit well with Edward Cardinal Egan, who joked that Wilson might need a bit of an education himself about what goes on in Catholic schools.

“Mr. Wilson and I are going to [be] spending a lot of time together,” Egan quipped.

The donation - the biggest in Archdiocese of New York history - will help 3,000 kids from poor families pay for Catholic schools in New York City during the next five years.

Wilson, 80, suggested he would have considered supporting public education, but wanted to sink his money into what he considers a higher-quality school system.

The former Wall Street investor, who is listed among BusinessWeek’s “50 Most Generous Philanthropists,” blamed the teachers union for crippling public schools with what he termed selfish and greedy demands.

“They oppose any effort to help private schools,” said Wilson, who usually shuns the limelight. “They’ve opposed any kind of help to the Roman Catholic system.”

According to Bloomberg, Wilson said:

“Let’s face it, without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no Western civilization,” Wilson said. “Shunning religious organizations would be abhorrent.”

As the culture war has heated up, expressions of venomous hostility toward Christianity on the part of atheists have been front and center in the media, and even in the local leftist blogosphere.

But people who simply don’t believe in God are not necessarily bigots, nor necessarily enemies of Christians.

As for people like Wilson: Christians are going to pray that they will find Jesus. But regardless of that, he’s a good guy, and deserving of love as a generous and compassionate fellow.

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.

Supreme Court Race: Future of School Choice on the Line

George Mitchell is a long-time Wisconsin political activist and policy wonk who has been a strong supporter of school choice. In a circular e-mail, sent Tuesday and reprinted here with permission, he lays out the danger to school choice that the election of Linda Clifford to the state Supreme Court would entail:

Take Note

Unreported in today’s article on the Supreme Court debate is a comment by candidate Linda Clifford, who responded to a question saying that the law regarding “school choice” needs “clarification.”

It does? What does that mean?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1998 upheld the constitutionality of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. On a 4-2 vote, with Justice Ann Walsh Bradley recusing, the court rejected each and every point raised by lawyers for teacher unions.

In 2002 the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Cleveland voucher program.

There is no benign way to interpret Clifford’s comment. “Clarifying” the 1998 court decision can only suggest an adverse impact on Milwaukee’s program. This would affect not only Milwaukee but parents and families statewide, as some candidates for public office and some sitting officials favor an expansion beyond Milwaukee. While that likely would not occur while Jim Doyle is governor, he won’t be governor forever. However, Linda Clifford, his candidate for the Supreme Court, easily could serve for decades if elected April 3.

After April 3, three of seven Supreme Court justices on the court in 1998 will remain. They are Chief Justice Abrahamson, Justice Patrick Crooks, and Justice Ann Walsh Bradley.

Justice Abrahamson dissented in the 1998 decision. Justice Crooks voted with the majority. For reasons not publicly explained, Justice Bradley recused herself.

New to the court are Justice Butler, a Doyle appointee; Justice Pat Roggensack; and Justice David Prosser.

As an appellate judge, Justice Roggensack authored a lengthy dissent in support of the Milwaukee program’s constitutionality when the case was heard in 1997. Her dissent became the spine of Justice Steinmetz’s 4-2 majority opinion in 1998. So, she clearly is on record, as is Justice Crooks.

Justice Prosser was a member of the Legislature and strong supporter of school choice in the 1990s. He, too, presumably believes the law is constitutional.

So, that is three apparent votes to sustain the principles established in the 1998 Wisconsin and 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case.

Chief Justice Abrahamson is on record that the program is unconstitutional. When I asked Louis Butler his opinion during his candidacy against Diane Sykes, he pointedly declined to answer.

Justice Bradley’s reasons for recusing in 1998 are not known, as is whether she would recuse herself if another case came before the court. Justice Bradley often agrees with Chief Justice Abrahamson.

So, the math is clear. Three apparent votes to sustain prior rulings on choice. Three potential votes not to sustain.

Linda Clifford is seeking the fill the seat of Justice Wilcox, who voted with the majority in 1998. She could provide a fourth vote to “clarify” the school choice law.

I am unaware of Judge Ziegler’s position, though the presumption must be that she would vote to sustain the precedent set by the 1998 and 2002 decisions.

Linda Clifford’s comment is significant beyond the very ominous implications for school choice. If anything has seemed clear in the school choice debate, it is that the law is settled. Yet Clifford is saying otherwise, notwithstanding two court rulings (that happen to reflect the thinking first set down by Justice Roggensack).

What other established precedents does Linda Clifford think need “clarification”?

Does Clifford’s opinion on choice explain the Greater Wisconsin Committee’s issue ad in her behalf? Did WEAC fund that?

These and many related questions now are at the center of this race.

This is what happens when judges adopt an activist posture. Constitutions cease to matter. Precedents cease to matter. All that comes to matter are the policy preferences of the judges. And Clifford is a liberal, endorsed by all the usual liberal suspects. They must feel -- and they are probably right -- that she will give them the policies they want.