(Having surveyed the strings attached to school choice money in yesterday’s part 2, I now turn to the failures of school choice by their own standards.)
With any government program spending our hard-earned tax money, we, the citizens, deserve to know whether or not such a program accomplished anything worthwhile. For the most part we can all agree that educating children is a reasonable goal in general even if we might argue that it is not the government’s role Biblically. From there, we can all agree that if the government says that a school choice program funded by millions of dollars was implemented to improve educational outcomes, then we should be able to measure those outcomes and see a difference. The children who receive vouchers or educational savings accounts should fare better for having received the benefits.
At this point, things get a little murkier. Determining whether or not a child or the whole group of recipients fared better depends greatly on what measurements are chosen as criteria for success. A few hypothetical examples will demonstrate how the choice and methods of measurement can affect whether or not a program is deemed a success by anyone.
Let’s say 1,000 children receive the voucher or whatever it is ultimately called and attend a school of their parent’s choosing for 1 year. At the end of that 1 year, some measurement must be taken of the students who remained in the public schools and those who escaped. The chosen criteria must be applied to both groups in order to compare apples to apples. The simplest and most often chosen criteria is the standardized test already administered by the state to all its public-school students. This assumes that this test actually measures a child’s academic abilities. Even if it measures academic abilities at that point in time, one must then ask if it predicts with any accuracy a child’s future success in life. In other words, does it predict graduation rate from high school or college at the least or does it predict life success of future adults in terms of annual salaries or future career success?
While the debate over whether or not the current standardized tests actually provide a real prediction of student success could rage on for pages and hours, for the sake of this argument we will allow the proponents of school choice to have this criteria. By doing so, we can look at their chosen method of assessing the success of their own programs. At the very least, if they are going to spend millions of dollars, they should perform well by their own standard.
Before looking at their actual performance across a number of currently active school choice programs, we should recognize a couple of other criteria as well. For some parents, the academic opportunities may be important but getting their child out of a physically dangerous school may be foremost on their minds. In many urban schools, bullying, violence, even gangs may encourage parents to sign their children up for a school choice “run for your life” option. While it is terribly sad that some schools have reached this boiling point, it is a reality of the government run system which has lost its control over their students. The other reported criteria, even in the absence of physical dangers, has been simple parental satisfaction. Surveys have looked at the parents’ satisfaction in regards to their child’s educational experience based on which school they attend.
Giving the school choice proponents the opportunity to prove the program’s benefits by comparing test scores, we would hope to see a consistent and significant improvement in scores for participants. We could understand that such an improvement might need two or three years to manifest, but at some point in time, we should see an increase if the program was producing as the proponents claim. In reality, the statistics do not give the proponents much to boast about. In general, the students who do show the most consistent and significant score improvements are those in the lower economic classes. Before looking at more details statistics, this might seem a worthwhile result as the marketed goals of school choice often focus on helping those who don’t have the financial abilities to attend private schools. A problem arises when some state programs report participant numbers highly tilted away from these lower income students. In some states, a high percentage of program participants end up being students who are already attending private schools before the school choice program and thus not reaching as many actually still in those poorly performing schools. The left-leaning school choice opponents might have a point that much of the money is primarily benefitting those who already have the money to escape the public school system in the first place without the government assistance.
While I will include a bibliography of research reports for you to review at your discretion, a few further takeaways should be noted. First, the results of these studies can be skewed by bias as any study can be manipulated, especially when the measured outcomes do not demonstrate large differences between the groups (public school versus school choice recipients). Choice of outcomes can influence how report authors decide to publish their findings depending on their pre-existing opinions of school choice. Therefore, we should look at several data sources before coming to a conclusion on school choice’s efficacy.
Catt, D., & et, al. (2021, November 4). 25 Years: 25 Most Significant School Choice Research Findings. EdChoice. https://www.edchoice.org/engage/25-years-25-most-significant-school-choice-research-findings/
DeAngelis, C. A. (2018, Winter). What Leads to Successful School Choice Programs? A Review of the Theories and Evidence. Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/winter-2018/what-leads-successful-school-choice-programs-review-theories-evidence
Dynarski, M., & et, al. (2018, May). Evaluation of the DC opportunity scholarship program. Institute of Education Sciences. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20184010/pdf/20184010.pdf
Figlio, D., & Karbownik, K. (2016, July). Evaluation of Ohio’s Edchoice Scholarship Program. Fordham Institute. https://edex.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/publication/pdfs/FORDHAM%20Ed%20Choice%20Evaluation%20Report_online%20edition.pdf
Gleason, P., & et, al. (2010, June). The evaluation of Charter School Impacts – Executive Summary. Institute of Education Sciences. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104029/pdf/20104030.pdf
Mills, Jonathan and Wolf, Patrick, The Effects of the Louisiana Scholarship Program on Student Achievement after Four Years (May 10, 2019). EDRE Working Paper No. 2019-10, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3376230 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3376230
Raymond, M. E., & et, al. (2023, June 19). As a matter of fact: The National Charter School Study III 2023. CREDO. https://ncss3.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Credo-NCSS3-Report.pdf
Waddington, R.J. and Berends, M. (2018), Impact of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program: Achievement Effects for Students in Upper Elementary and Middle School. J. Pol. Anal. Manage., 37: 783-808. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22086
Second, regardless of inherent biases, we should all agree that the measured changes in children’s school performance has generally not been very large. Even where there are clear and significant improvements in reading, math, or science scores, drilling down into the data often reveals that only a portion of the overall group in the study experienced that benefit while high percentages demonstrated either no benefit or a negative benefit. In other words, only a percentage of the participating children benefit and only a portion of the participating schools demonstrate positive changes. In fact, some show a decline in test scores versus the norm.
Third, after reading several research reports, we should all acknowledge that school choice comes in a wide variety of forms. The multitude of factors such as how the money is transferred from government to parent (vouchers, tax credits, educational savings accounts) and the educational entities doing the education (charter schools, private schools, homeschools, or magnet schools) means that school choice cannot be considered as a single method of reform. Therefore, basing the projections of a Tennessee program’s success off of other states’ records is like saying the Philadelphia Phillies will win their baseball game because the New York Yankees won their game the day before. Simply implementing a statewide school choice program and expecting it to work like a panacea is simplistic and naïve.
Fourth, while the listed article “School Choice Primarily Benefits Students Who Weren’t Already in Private Schools” by the Heritage Foundation attempts to refute allegations that school choice primarily helps those already in private schools, they do not completely remove this concern (Greene 2023). Their statistical analysis does correct some other reports’ overestimations of how many school choice recipients in Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin had already been in non-public schools. However, two facts remain. On one hand, in those states and in Florida (they do not address Florida statistics), a sizable number of program recipients were already outside of public schools even if it is not a majority as the original statistics were claimed. Florida reports indicate that 69 percent of those newly receiving school vouchers had already been in private schools before vouchers were available. On the other hand, other studies indicate that only a portion of the schools evaluated in studies show a statistically significant improvement in reading or math or other scores used for comparison. In other words, becoming a school choice recipient does not somehow magically guarantee a child’s future success in school or life.
In summary of evaluating whether or not school choice serves as a panacea for our national educational decline, I have to agree with the National Affairs article by Franklin Hess in 2010. Mr. Hess describes how school choice (also called “Educational Choice” or EdChoice) advocates have overpromised from the early days when President Reagan and contemporaries promoted this as a primary solution. Such examples of overpromising while underdelivering in reality continue today. While we can identify some studies that show some benefits for some students in some schools, ultimately school choice does not solve all our problems for all our students in all situations. We need more proof of success before throwing more and more money after such hyped up schemes or else we just sound like public school advocates who keep lobbying for more and more money to fix their broken system. We see how far that has gotten us so far as educational spending soars while scores plummet.
Tomorrow we finish with Part 4, “Unintended Consequences” with a conclusion to the whole series.
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