The strange death of education reform Part IV

The right abandons reform in favor of privatization

I guest lectured at a 9 a.m. University of Chicago class recently, and before it started I joked with the professor that the students must hate him. He said he actually liked to schedule the class early because it let him leverage selection effects to ensure he was teaching motivated students.

He was sort of joking, but I think this gets at a fundamental truth of education at all levels, which is that selection effects and peer effects are very important.

Students like to have good peers, and they like to have good teachers. But teachers also like to have good students. When people say they’re moving somewhere “for the good schools,” they don’t usually mean that they have assessed the local school system with a state-of-the-art model that compares student learning to expected learning based on the demographics of the community. They mean something like “this school is full of kids whose parents had the means and inclination to pay a premium to live in the good school district.” But critically, they don’t just mean that — since most teachers prefer to teach in a school full of motivated kids and supportive families, it’s genuinely true that it will be easier for that kind of school to fill vacancies and retain staff. The selection effects build on top of each other. And of course as the school gets better, the real estate gets pricier, which further screens out families with fewer resources and less motivation.

The significance of selection effects in education is fundamentally why I describe the current conservative push for unregulated school choice as the abandonment of education reform rather than an escalation.

Words are just words, and everyone is entitled to call whatever policy change they are pushing for “reform.” But there was an education reform movement that was motivated by a particular set of ideas and aspirations exemplified by the slogan No Child Left Behind and a focus on the achievement gap. Education reform defined the problem to be solved as the low end of the American educational system — the concern that students were being “left behind” by a system that overemphasized localism. What conservatives call “universal” school choice or ESAs, and what I’m calling unregulated choice, is not an alternative theory of how to achieve that goal; it’s a theory that it was a bad goal and we should just stop worrying about kids being left behind.

And while I think this is a bad idea, I also think it’s an idea that the left is going to have a hard time combatting unless it re-engages with those reform goals. A funny thing about Freddie deBoer’s strain of hardcore education skepticism is he perceives himself (and is often perceived by others) as an ally of America’s unionized public school teachers against the depredations of neoliberal reformers. But if his claim that schools don’t really matter is true, then the conservative solution of dismantling the whole public education system makes a lot more sense than maintaining it as a make-work jobs program.

Universal choice versus charter schools

As I explained in my post on charter schools, charters are not publicly managed, but they are subject to a lot of public accountability.

They have to be granted a charter to operate in order to open, and their charter can be revoked by the authorizing agency if the school is deemed wanting. Actual practice varies a lot from state to state, but every state has some regulations in place. And critically, the charters are never allowed to explicitly engage in the kind of student selection that is a driving force in both public and private schools. The fact that charters aren’t allowed to pick their students is so centrally important to the nature of the charter school that a big issue in the charter debate is the allegation that these schools implicitly engage in selective admission, either by expelling or counseling out low-performers or through other means. It seems likely to me that some of that probably is happening. In D.C., for example, the public middle schools start in sixth grade, but the charter middle schools often start in fifth grade. If you want your child to attend a charter middle school, you need to pull them out of public elementary school one year early. That essentially guarantees that the families who enter the middle school charter lottery are better-informed, more organized, and more committed to education than the average DCPS family.

This is an annoying quirk of the D.C. system, and I think the Council or the charter board should make them stop. That said, all things considered, the selection effects in the charter system seem less egregious than those in the public schools (access to which is auctioned via the real estate market) and are obviously less so than in the private schools, which explicitly decide which students to let in.

By contrast, here’s how universal school choice works in Arizona:

What is an ESA?  An Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) is an account administered by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) and funded by state tax dollars to provide education options for qualified Arizona students.

An ESA consists of 90% of the state funding that would have otherwise been allocated to the school district or charter school for the qualified student (does not include federal or local funding). By accepting an ESA, the student's parent or guardian is signing a contract agreeing to provide an education that includes at least the following subjects: reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science.  ESA funding can be used to pay private school tuition, for curriculum, home education, tutoring and more.

It’s basically money with almost no strings attached — you just need to spend it on something broadly education-related, including private school tuition.

And while this is, technically, a reform of education policy, I see it as the abandonment of the goals of education reform. We already have a system of unconstrained choice in place for higher education and know exactly how it works. Colleges compete with each other to attract the best applicants. When people say Princeton is a good college, they don’t mean Princeton students demonstrate large learning gains based on a value-added model. And they don’t mean that randomized controlled trials show that kids who attend Princeton do better in life than identical students who don’t attend Princeton. Princeton being a good college means that Princeton’s incoming first-year students have high SAT scores and perform well on other academic measures.

It’s a system that not only leaves some children behind but also leaves them behind deliberately, as a matter of policy design.

If you fully privatized the education system in a city like D.C. that already has a lot of de facto selection due to the real estate market, you would end up with an even more aggressive sorting system. The kids who are most advantaged by the overlapping factors of parental income, culturally-transmitted commitment to education, and genetic aptitude would all cluster in schools that refuse to even try to educate any of the harder cases. Meanwhile, the kids with the most disorganized parents and highest needs would languish in schools that find it practically impossible to recruit teachers with any options at all. It seems like a horrifying vision to me, though it’s perhaps compelling to some. Either way, though, it’s the opposite of the Bush/Obama goal of reconfiguring the school system to better serve the neediest families.

ESAs in practice

Note that under the current Arizona rules, you can only use state money, not local or federal education funding.

That means for a typical parent, an ESA isn’t nearly enough to actually pay for private school tuition. So the real impact of the system isn’t so much to afford more kids the opportunity to go to private school as it is to generate a small financial windfall for people who are homeschooling or sending their kids to private school anyway.

Sometimes people push bad policy ideas with an appeal that just baffles me, but in this case, I think the appeal to conservatives is very clear and rational. The right likes the idea of regressive tax cuts, and the right is very into helping religious people. And an Arizona-style ESA system drains a modest amount of money out of traditional public schools and cuts checks to a group of people who are mostly rich and mostly religious. It’s a very straightforward form of interest group politics that has nothing to do with trying to improve educational performance. When a state like Massachusetts with a high-performing charter sector refuses to allow expansion of even the best-performing charter networks, that’s pure interest group politics at work. And the current ESA push is the same thing. In equilibrium, the private schools probably just end up charging slightly higher tuition anyway.

Market mechanisms are really good at meeting consumer demands, but the issue in education is that the main thing consumers demand is to get their kid into a school with other smart kids. So in a heavily marketized sector like American higher education, you get a lot of sorting and see schools investing in non-educational programming to try to attract applicants. Charter school performance is incredibly variable from state to state because in the states that regulate them laxly, quality winds up being bad. And in states that have existing private school vouchers programs, the results, similarly, are bad:

In the last few years, a spate of studies have shown that voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Washington D.C. hurt student achievement — often causing moderate to large declines.

Advocates have pushed back, saying the programs were new and results might improve over time. In three of the four places, that hasn’t happened, at least in math.

“While the early research was somewhat mixed … it is striking how consistent these recent results are,” said Joe Waddington, a University of Kentucky professor who has studied Indiana’s voucher program. “We’ve started to see persistent negative effects of receiving a voucher on student math achievement.”

This is a challenging topic to discuss because, in the current climate, nobody wants to be paternalistic about anything. But we see across the board that the sovereign consumer does not deliver on the promise of a school system that generates a high average level of instructional quality.

You need to care about normal people too

Of course, a “Strange Death of Education Reform” column wouldn’t be complete without a little punching left.

And if the problem with privatizing schools is you end up with too much selection and cream-skimming, a big problem with the current fads in left-wing thinking about education is they totally ignore the needs and sentiments of normal people. Denver had been an education reform city for a long time, but the union-aligned progressive faction took control of the school board and, post-Floyd, implemented a bunch of changes to school discipline that were supposed to serve equity needs. They took police officers out of schools, which left civilian administrators in charge of doing a daily “pat down” of a student with a very troubled record, right up until the point where he shot two of them. You had the school board saying that attempted murder isn’t a good reason to suspend someone from school as long as the shooting happened off school grounds. And more broadly, you had principals saying that they are being pushed to accommodate egregious discipline cases in ways that compromise school safety.

I don’t know that I have the full answer to exactly where the safety/inclusion line needs to be drawn, but the general point here is that while the strength of public schools as a concept is to serve high-need families, for the concept to work, you need to make public schools that people want to attend.

That means an environment that is safe for students, and it also means that you need to think about how your discipline policies impact your ability to recruit and retain good teachers and administrators. If you sacrifice everything on the altar of maximum inclusiveness, middle-class families will flee the school district and/or demand privatization initiatives. Inclusiveness is a good goal, but the conceptual anchor needs to be high-quality public services that most people want to use — then you can include people in that.