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Ask Me Anything About School Choice
It’s National School Choice Week, which means there’s lots of buzz about expanding educational options — 2017 presents some great opportunities for doing so — but also a lot of “alternative facts” about choice policies being peddled by groups interested in protecting their bread and butter the district schooling status quo.
That’s why, in the tradition of previous reddit-style #AskMeAnything forums on Ricochet, I will be available until about 5:00pm EST today to (hopefully) answer any question you have related to school choice policies, such as charter schools, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts. (I’ll come back Sunday if there are some remaining questions.)
As a bit of background, I’m a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, and I will soon be joining EdChoice as their National Policy Director. I have a master’s degree in public policy with a focus on education policy, and I’ve been working to advance educational choice for more than a decade. If I can’t answer your question, there’s a good chance I can at least point you to something written by someone smarter and more eloquent.
So go ahead: Ask away!
Published in Education
Wonderful! I’ve got a few:
Thanks for getting us started, Tom! I can stop clicking “refresh” every ten seconds now. To your Qs:
QUESTION-BOMB!
Other than the obvious, what are the fundamental differences between a for-profit Charter School and a non-profit?
What, if any, are the differences in performances and results between the two?
How long have Charter Schools nationwide been around, anyways?
How often do Charter Schools have catastrophic failures (i.e. closing mid-school year)?
What are the reasons for such failures?
What are the remedies for the same?
My question kind of follows Tom’s #2. Following the recent hearings for Secretary of Education. Several of the parents from my kids school were concerned. These are politically moderate or un involved people (not hard core Progressives). They felt that this push for school choice was going to damage our school system and hurt the children.
What is the best way to persuade people who are open to the argument, that school choice and Charter schools are good?
Are there any good resources to point these people toward that show positive results from school choice?
2. We too often use the language of markets in a way that other right-of-center folk understand but that can turn off independents. Many people think of “markets” and “competition” as being zero-sum, so what they hear is “every family for themselves” and “your kid wins at the expense of my kid.” But that’s closer to the opposite of reality. Choice policies empower parents to select the learning environment that works best for their kid without having to fight with other parents for political control over their local district school.
School choice isn’t just about being more efficient or raising test scores. It’s about empowering parents to choose the learning environments work best for their kids and that align with their values. (Continued in next comment.)
As my friend Greg Forster has explained:
In other words, we need to make the communitarian case for choice, not just the libertarian one.
Why do the same people who proudly scream “I am Pro Choice!” in the streets are also the most vociferously Anti-Choice when it comes to Schools?
3. Yes. There are a bunch of red states that lack robust choice options (Texas, Utah, Missouri, etc.), although that could change this year. There are also some purple or blue states that have some decent choice options, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. But the true stars (IMHO) are Arizona, Florida, and Indiana, which top EdChoice’s “educational choice share” ranking this year..
How familiar are you with the Texas school choice model, specifically with charter schools?
Why can’t this model be duplicated across the rest of the country?
Great Qs!
The greatest differences among charters are in their general approach to teaching as opposed to whether they earn a profit or not.
I’d suggest reading this take by Ian Lindquist of AEI.
Minnesota enacted the first charter school law in 1991.
That would vary by state and I’m not familiar with a good data source to answer that Q. That said, one of the advantages of the charter sector over the traditional district sector is that bad schools close. Ideally, it would be parents who do the closing. (Continued in next comment.)
Somewhat related to the questions asked above, how do you answer veteran teachers (who should know better) who claim that charter schools hurt public schools by taking away a) public funds and b) high performing students? I mean, how do you answer without your head exploding?
I’m speaking from my experience as a parent with students attending charter schools in Colorado, but here’s how I understand how it works. Yes, charter schools operate on public funds, but it’s per pupil, just like public schools. Each school receives funding based on the pupils in attendance on Count Day. If public schools aren’t serving the students attending charters, why in the bleepity bleep bleep should they be receiving those funds??? And, besides that, public schools get waaaay more funding by serving special needs kids. How much more space do they want at the public trough?? Answer: all of it.
Sometimes charter authorizers close the schools, but often they close because they fail to attract parents. See Matt Ladner’s discussion of this. The reasons vary and therefore the remedies vary. Why do restaurants close? Depends entirely on the restaurant. Some couldn’t make food customers liked, others made great food but had bad service or couldn’t handle the finances or inventory management.
The key is that in a system of choice, there is gradual evolution as parents self-select toward better performing schools. Lower-performing schools therefore have a strong incentive to improve.
The concern is that the more motivated parents will leave the district school, taking their energy and funding with them. That means the school is left with less-motivated parents, harder-to-teach kids, and less money.
It’s a valid concern, but the consensus of the research literature reaches the opposite conclusion: increased choice and competition improves student outcomes at district schools. You can see a more detailed treatment here. If you want a more neutral source, see this Harvard study starting on page 12 (particularly the table on pages 13-14).
Note: district schools keep all the local funding and only a portion of the state funding follows a kid out the door. See here for more on the fiscal impact.
Most states do have charter schools at this point, but I’m not terribly enthusiastic about them. Charters are subject to less regulation than traditional district schools, but still considerably more than private schools. I would prefer a system in which the funding follows the child to whatever type of learning environment parents want for their children, including religious schools and new sorts of arrangements beyond schooling. Education savings accounts can be used to purchase private school tuition, but also tutoring, homeschool curricula, online courses, and more. We don’t know how education will develop over the coming decades, so we shouldn’t have a funding model that limits education to the schooling status quo.
Jason,
I’m curious about charter authorizers. There seems to be substantial disagreement amongst the right-of-center education wonks that I talk to over whether it’s better to (1) have low barriers to entry to the charter market, in which you make it easy for them to start up but also easy to sunset them if they don’t perform or (2) create higher barriers to entry so that you’ve got more quality control on the front end and don’t have to go through the disruptions associated with shut-downs. Some of the people who favor the latter also tell me that they think it’s more politically astute because it can stave off the “charter schools don’t deliver” narrative. Wondering if you have thoughts on that.
Also, more broadly, are there any consensus best practices around charter authorization? Seems to me that implementation is an underdeveloped area of focus in the school choice world.
As to charters attracting high performing students, well that’s what we call “competition.” Get used to it. Instead, public school advocates would have us reach for the lowest common denominator in education. Rubbish.
In my experience, high performing students in high performing charters also happen to come in all colors and ethnicities. Some of them are even immigrants!! You would think educators would appreciate the all-important “diversity.”
I think my answer in comment #13 addressed this, but let me know if you’re looking for more.
Neat. I do have some questions.
As I noted above, I’m not particularly keen on charters. Again, they’re an improvement over the status quo, but they’re subject to a slew of regulations that limit their ability to truly innovate (and they can’t teach religion, which is very important to many parents).
But if we’re doing charters, I’d prefer (1) over (2) because technocrats have not demonstrated that they’re able to predict quality. I trust parents to do a better job of weeding out poor performers.
Charter schools have considerably more regulation than homeschool. I have an uncle who’s kids were homeschooled, and at 21 still aren’t educated properly because my aunt was to lazy to teach half the time. They are a pathetic mess.
Socialization is also a very important component of education, which a homeschooler has to be very intentional about providing. However, too many homeschoolers only socialize within their homeschool bubble, leaving kids who lack the social skills to function in a very diverse environment, i.e the real world.
I’m not anti-homeschool, but I’m not sure that it should be encouraged either. It takes a very special set of parents with the necessary discipline and rigor to insure the children receive a well-rounded education.
See comment 13.
In short: not well. We should prefer a system that makes schools directly accountable to parents who are empowered to leave when a school isn’t meeting their kids’ needs. Instead, schools are accountable to political school boards and distant bureaucrats. As Thomas Sowell has written, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
The teaching of religion is the responsibility of churches and parents, not schools.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer. I can say that there are all sorts of alternative STEM, arts, and vocational schools and in an environment with more robust choice policies, I expect that these would expand and flourish because parents want them.
I’m not sure I totally understand the question. The good is that people can choose to send their children to schools that align with their values. The “bad” is that other people will choose differently. Some call that “freedom.”
More than I can keep track of. That’s one of the great things about choice. No one knows what the ” one right way” of teaching is (or if it even exists, which it probably doesn’t). Instead, we have a Hayekian system of experimentation, evaluation, and evolution.
Why should this be the case? Certainly I don’t think government-run schools should be in the business of teaching religion, but I don’t see why we should object to parents *choosing* to send their child to a school that has a religious affiliation. For many families, religion is a fundamental part of a child’s education — indeed, when this country was founded, schooling was almost entirely provided by religious institutions.
Important Question: What about school books? For instance, with my children’s school books, there were a few things that angered me – especially concerning the Founding Fathers – but for the most part, their books contained excellent, valuable information. Of course, I live in Texas and we don’t put up with that garbage you read about on the East and West coasts, but anyway, how do we ensure the voucher schools meet high schoolbook standards?
Schooling was provided by religious institutions because no other institution existed, and reading and writing are fundamental for understanding the Scriptures, Torah, etc.
The theory of religion being taught in school is great – I sent my boys to a Christian school for several years.
Are you okay with your tax dollars, through the form of a education spending account or other mechanism, going to pay for kids to attend a “school” at the local mosque who’s leader is known to be hard-liner. I’m certainly not, even if that means tax dollars aren’t available to send a kid to the Baptist school down the street.
1/2
Is there any hope for abolishing compulsory schooling?
2/2
As soon as our tax dollars get involved in the discussion, the state gets involved. And with the state comes regulation, like it or not. We see the corrupting influence of the state in everything they touch.
This is why I’m a fan of charter schools; they provide a balance between freedom of curriculum and innovation and regulation. I’m hesitant to add the qualifier when done right, because that’s pretty universal.
As I mentioned above, my kids attended a private Christian school all through elementary. They have since attended charter schools. The first charter school was a classical curriculum, formed through a partnership with Hillsdale College. It was a wonderful curriculum and unlike anything I had ever seen. My oldest transferred last year to a STEM school, and they have tremendous flexibility on how they deliver an education.
Once the regulation goes away, we can end up with kids like my cousins in Virginia: uneducated through no fault of their own, ill-equipped to understand and interact with the world around them, and set up for a life of poverty.
In our current system, what appears in textbooks is subject to political control. In a system of choice, so long as the government doesn’t impose its will on private schools, those schools can select the textbooks they think are the highest quality. And they will tend to avoid textbooks that upset parents.
There’s no perfect system in which all schools or states or Ed Secretaries are going to make the “right” decisions. It’s all about trade-offs. The question is where you want the locus of control. If the state is in charge, then those decisions are subject to politics, which fosters social conflict. If schools and parents decide, some will choose differently than you’d like, but at least no one can force their views on your kids.
In the short term, probably not. But in the long term, as educational choice programs expand, I think society might come to recognize that not all education is schooling.