Without school choice, high standards and good instruction aren’t enough to improve education for disadvantaged students, argues Lisa Snell in Reason. She’s responding to Sol Stern’s City Journal article, Choice Is Not Enough, which has stirred up a lively debate. Snell writes:
The bottom line is that content-based reform has not been a panacea in California or Indiana or even Massachusetts. Students with wealthier and higher-educated parents are thriving under a strong standards-based regiment. But content standards have had little impact on one of the most intractable of education dilemmas. It has not closed the achievement gap between lower and higher income students, where not even 50 percent of these students score proficient in reading or math.
That’s the major reason why school reformers shouldn’t place too many eggs in the “instructionist” basket. Families still need school choice. Public schools, especially in low-performing urban districts, still need competition, which gives students a right of exit to higher performing schools and gives public schools an incentive to improve in order to keep students enrolled.
Snell also discusses choice, weighted funding and principal autonomy with UCLA Professor Bill Ouchi.
We’ve looked at eight districts, all of which are implementing weighted student formula, school choice, and school autonomy: Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City, Oakland, San Francisco, Seattle and St. Paul.
There is extreme variability in the percentage of resources that principals are allowed to control under weighted student formula. The amount of resources the principal controls makes a difference.
In 2000, Ouchi analyzed the budgets at 66 schools, finding principals controlled 6.1 percent of spending on average.
Today, these data show that 85 percent of the budget was controlled by the New York City principals who were part of 42 schools in the autonomy zone in 2003 and 2004.
Principals often try to reduce the number of students each teacher works with to personalize instruction.
I sometimes wonder if we can ever get education truly great for all sectors of society , standards are needed and I think some form of testing is also important ( not the way it is currently which can define a child as stupid much to easily ) and lead them and parents to give up.
I agree that the hardest part of getting education right is in the inner city schools which have trouble attracting the best teachers, often with less funding than suburban schools causing larger classes, but the worst part is with all that stacking up against the kids a larger percentage of parents are not fully involved with children’s education and discipline .
It seems to be a viscous circle that becomes self perpetuating with each new generation
steve
Could we please, oh please, get past the pat solutions. Thank goodness Mr. Stern is talking about instruction and standards, but those are not enough. I’ve expressed my appreciation for his movement in this direction, but we need more than those two features.
Sorry that Ms. Snell thinks giving consumers choice will make them any more likely to select a valuable educational approach than a bogus one. Does she favor the selection of–oh, let’s see–facilitated communication or chelation over relatively-more-proven-even-if-not-absolutely-100%-true therapies for autism?
Mr. Stern is right in noting that competent instruction is critical, but competent instruction to what end? Competent instruction is a technical matter (and, at the risk of irritating some readers, S. Engelmann has shown how to approximate competent instruction). As a community, parents and educators need to discuss goals and establish objectives. Then we can develop outcome measures that represent those goals and objectives. then we can can employ scientifically based instructional practices to achieve those goals.
Mr. Lloyd –
You say that you’re sorry Ms. Snell thinks giving consumers choice will make them more likely to choose a good education over a bogus one. If I may frame the question differently for a moment, would you also be sorry for Ms. Snell if she believed that giving consumers choice would make them more likely to choose a good car over a bogus one? Or how about a good house? Most likely, you wouldn’t, since these transactions happen successfully thousands of times every day.
Since free markets allow people to make wise choices in everything from automobiles to homes to computers to food to vacations and a thousand other things, none of which they are experts on, it’s logical to conclude they could do the same with education were they given the opportunity. The reason the free market allows someone who doesn’t understand the inner workings of a fuel injection system to buy a car or the superiority of an on die memory controller to a discrete northbridge when buying a computer is that the free market allows people to make decisions based on value received instead of expertise. I don’t have to know the theory or workings of a good or a service, I just need to know that it suits my needs.
Most parents today send their kids to school believing those kids will learn. Were they given direct control over what school their kids attended and how much money were spent on their kids’ education, they would very likely make sure that their kids were learning, just as they would buy a car that could stop and go safely. Since these parents, who aren’t particularly involved with their kids lives but do want them educated, are now making decisions for themselves instead of shuffling their kids off to the nearest government school, they will have an interest in making sure that the school they choose will teach their children.
In this kind of climate, schools pushing garbage and calling it education would not last long as parents paid attention and realized their kids weren’t learning. Eventually, a critical mass of flight would be achieved, forcing even the parents who were using the school as a babysitting service to find another.
What’s not realized about the modern education system and all its worthless fads is the necessity of government schools to its survival. When it’s a monopolistic bureaucracy instead of a market making decisions about how to run anything, effectiveness immediately drops. This is a constant phenomena across any and all civilizations large enough to support such bureaucracies.
Edu-frauds such as racist diversity training, whole language, and new math all flourish because the bureaucrats running the monopoly are cut from the same cloth as the fraudsters themselves. Like any bureaucrat, their interest is in protecting their own kind, not carrying out their mission. When was the last time you ever saw a school administrator miss a pay raise, even in the worst of budgetary crises?
My point? Choice, full-bodied, free market choice, is our best bet at shutting down the snake oil peddlers who call themselves educators. The highly controlled and regulated establishment that controls education has been rotted out from the inside by these very fraudsters, as any sufficiently large bureaucracy would be.
> As a community, parents and educators need to discuss goals and establish objectives.
Umm, what do you think choice consists of other then a conversation between the various interested parties?
Educators say “this is the best we can do with your TV-watching, MySpace-involved kids” and parents say “nuh uh”.
Choice means the mono-syllabic response of parents can’t be ignored as it currently is.
It’s not much of a conversation if one side doesn’t have to listen.
[The bottom line is that content-based reform has not been a panacea in California or Indiana or even Massachusetts. Students with wealthier and higher-educated parents are thriving under a strong standards-based regiment. But content standards have had little impact on one of the most intractable of education dilemmas. It has not closed the achievement gap between lower and higher income students, where not even 50 percent of these students score proficient in reading or math.
That’s the major reason why school reformers shouldn’t place too many eggs in the “instructionist†basket. Families still need school choice.]
Maybe instead of the “instructionist†approach, they should try the instructivist aproach.
Snell’s arguments are confusing. What approaches are available to “choice” schools? They will either also have to use an “instructionist†approach or something else. If neither the “instructionist†approach nor the “something-else” approach works with the disadvantaged either in regular schools or “choice” schools, then maybe the problem is with the disadvantaged. Plan A is a failure. Plan B is a failure. Maybe Plan C is the answer: Reform the disadvantaged.
Snell also bemoans the widening achievement gap. It’s a curious thing about this gap: it widens or narrows when you change either end. If the advantaged pull ahead with the “instructionist†approach, the gap widens. Apparently a bad thing in the eyes of Snell. If the disadvantaged cannot be brought up under Plan A and B, and Plan C is too challenging, then the only way to narrow the gap is to pull back the advantaged.
In conclusion, Snell’s arguments are illogical.