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In any case, I wholly support private schooling and hope vouchers or some other solution can gain traction in the near future.
IMHO, it directly contradicts piffle's assertion above.
Modern public education in the US is already on a kind of voucher system. At least, where I am in California. Here, the state supplies teacher's salaries to all schools, and they provide janitors, garbage hauling, keep the lights on, etc. They recently rebuilt (funded by bond money) one wing of the place.
But at my daughter's school, the parents and citizens raise a lot of money ($200,000 annually, for a school of between 300 and 400 families). We use this money to pay for an extra day a week of library service, a music program, and an advanced science program; one full time music teacher, 2, half time science teachers, and related materials.
In addition, there's a lot of community involvement in the school; yard work, etc.
Not all schools in the district have this kind of active support community. Other schools don't have a music program, or choose to spend their money on a sport program. Call it a de facto voucher system, if you will.
Mark - why is that relevant? Even with vouchers, you're going to get the same kind of class discrimination. Voucher schools in wealthier areas will find it easier to top off their vouchers with parent's private money.
My point is that, regardless of what you call it, the US is incrementally moving to a blend of public/private education. If all the word "vouchers" means is "boo yarr suxx0r5 we get to fire teecherz!" then that's not really a serious response to the issue.
Generally, the idea of vouchers is to give people more choice in which school their child attends, not provide them with the option to voluntarily donate more to the government schools, on top of what they already pay in taxes, in order to (hopefully) improve them while continuing to protect them from meaningful competition. If a restaurant in my town is unsanitary, being allowed to bring in a cleaning crew at my own expense is not the same thing as being able to take my money and spend it dining elsewhere.
This is a basic distinction. Someone who chooses to characterize support for vouchers as "boo yarr suxx0r5 we get to fire teecherz!" is the last person to be in any sort of position to chastise someone else for their supposed failure to offer "a serious response to the issue."
Yet as with any endeavour, there are economies of scale in schools. Given that the voucher stipend is fixed per parent, and given that there are the same number of parents with or without a voucher system, all other things being equal, why would there be any more schools to choose from? If you want more schools, then you need to concede that these new smaller schools will all be worse choices--from a bang-for-buck point of view--than the original system provided. (Assuming the existing system is moderately efficient - but then, there's no reason to believe the replacement would bring any improvement. )
To put it another way, I don't see how changing the mechanism by which money moves from tax revenues to teacher's salaries can, by itself, create choice. This has always bothered me about "vouchers". It's seems just as likely that we would arrive at a false choice. By analogy, a dozen brands of gasoline or laundry soap, all the products of identical industrial processes.
OK. No fewer schools then. Perhaps more choice because existing schools try to differentiate in other ways. Different schools trying to attract students by emphasizing different programs. Art & Music, or Math & Science, or Sport, etc.
And what I am pointing out is that 'the system' is responding in precisely this way. It's evolutionary change; tentative and highly conservative. But it is responding. Public schools are specializing in the manner I described. Magnet schools, open school programs, athletics programs. Parents have access to more information about schools, and aren't (at least in my school district) compelled to make zone based choices. This seems to me to be improving school choice while at the same time getting the same bang-for-buck out of taxpayer dollars.
And no, John. Bringing in your own cleaning crew is not the same as simply choosing to eat somewhere else. But schools aren't restaurants.
Granted, the education system is not adapting fast enough. I've chosen my daughter's school (in part) because the state stipend is the same everywhere, but at least there I get to pool my money with other parents who've choosen what we wish to emphasize in our kid's education.
That's a common, and often unexamined assumption. I believe many of the proponents of vouchers, and indeed some in the education establishment itself actually think that smaller schools are better. I don't know myself, I went to a school that was large, but good, and I think you do need a certain critical mass in a high school to be able to provide its students with certain opportunities, but at the same time, it's important not to lose students in a bureaucracy. I think there's another factor too, that needs to be acknowledged, which is that in some cases, a troublesome student's presence in a class or school may be not just useless for him/her, but also have a negative influence on everyone else in the class.
Private schools overwhelmingly teach students with vast statistical advantages compared to their public counterparts. That is the beginning, middle and end of explaining the difference, and for that reason vouchers will not work.
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2008/08/vouchers.html
Selection bias is not some noise to be removed from the signal. It is the signal. Poor kids do badly in school, rich kids do well, private schools overwhelmingly teach rich kids. I'm sorry that this is true, but it is true; voucher proponents confuse cause for effect.
The best they can argue is that some IV-statistical dark arts can produce "including estimates from Colombia based on lottery selection of scholarships that could be used private schools", but that is incredibly limited is both scope and time and place. They certainly aren't actual controlled tests.
Jumping to the third world doesn't preclude Freddie's point - It is true in non-first world the services the government provides in education are terrible, but the same is true of sewage. One would expect the marginal effect of peer-selection (Freddie's point) to be significantly great in global-poverty areas.
Apparently, however, it is great way to educate children.
Actually, clearly it is not. The problem is not merely public provision in a monopoly/dominant provider sense (though that is a problem). The real problem is the profound conflict of interest involved in the main provider setting and enforcing the rules.
That is a problem if you want high quality outcomes. If, however, you want to control the socialisation of children, then the "conflict of interest" is no conflict at all: it is precisely what you want. Haven't read the paper yet, but it seems likely to be spot on to me.
"First, to all other disciplines, as well as common sense, it is obvious that education, of which schooling is one element, is a process of the socialization of youth and their preparation for their economic but also their social and political roles as adults.
[and from earlier]
"But this bias against choice is not an actual mystery, just an unnecessary disciplinary puzzle created by the economists’ narrow framing of the outputs of education."
The rest is of interest to economists, but those focused on schooling would probably get more out of history. In particular, historical accounts of the clashes between coercive assimilationist public-schooling forces and immigrants / periphery-dwellers / religious dissenters / etc. Not my area, but I hear Eugene Weber's Peasants Into Frenchmen is one classic text in this area.
Or, have a statewide exam and publish all the students' results in the newspaper. There will be considerable pressure on students not to screw up. It would be incredibly embarrassing if the whole state knew of you as the dumbest guy in the state.
One problem voucher plans will have to deal with is parents trying to avoid schools with poor kids. We saw this problem earlier with integration, white flight and bussing and even today with many zoning laws.
On a final unrelated note: whenever I try to use the search bar for this blog, it brings me to Will's twitter page. I don't care about twitter, I just want to search.
The third paper on Google
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_resea...
was interesting because they found that independent but publicly funded schools (I read that as charter schools) beat standard public schools.
In the anecdotal evidence department: There's a private high school across the street, and the kids I've talked to don't seem to like it much. Quote: "The teachers are bitches."
Stuart Buck (unregistered) wrote:
any remotely satisfying causal argument for why schooling systems with near-identical pedagogical techniques would have different results outside of that selection bias.
Freddie and I have discussed this point several times before, but nothing I say ever seems to sink in:
A. There is lots of evidence of perverse selection bias as to private schools as a whole. For example, Derek Neal and Jeffrey Grogger recently found [http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/brookings-wharton_papers_on_urban_affairs/v2000/2000.1grogger.pdf] that “there is evidence of NEGATIVE SELECTION into Catholic schools. Relative to their public-school counterparts, urban whites who attend these schools appear to possess unmeasured traits that inhibit attainment.” They add this footnote: “Evidence of negative selection is common in this literature. Coleman and Hoffer (1987), Evans and Schwab (1995), and Neal (1997) all report evidence of negative selection into Catholic schools. A common hypothesis concerning this result is that some parents send their children to Catholic schools seeking a remedy for existing problems with discipline and motivation.”
B. No remotely satisfying reason that private schools might do a better job? Here are several possibilities:
1. Potential for stricter discipline.
2. Potential to hire better teachers and/or not to get stuck with bad teachers who have tenure thanks to a union contract. (See, e.g., http://www.tntp.org/files/TNTPPressRelease.pdf ).
3. Potential to be more responsive to parents.
4. Because of 3, potential to inspire more parental involvement, both on an individual and community level. This is a factor that Coleman and Hoffer identified in their famous book on why urban Catholic schools were superior, at least as of the 1980s.
5. Potential to be able to use a more effective and rigorous curriculum (e.g., Singapore math) without being quashed by state bureaucrats who haven't approved the purchase of that curriculum, or by the many interest groups that get involved in the curriculum selection process.
6. Potential to impose increased academic demands more generally. In looking at the famous HSB data, Coleman and Hoffer (pp. 44-45) found that the "most striking difference between public and private school curricula is the much greater likelihood of academic program placement in the private schools." (Nearly 50% of Catholic students were in specialized "academic" programs, while only 3.3% of public school students were in such programs; most public school students were in "comprehensive" or more general programs.)
7. Potential to drastically reduce dropout rates. See, e.g., Sander 2001, p. 23. Similarly, Coleman and Hoffer found that the black dropout rate in public high schools was 17.2%, while the black dropout rate in Catholic high schools was a mere 4.6%. (p. 127). They also point out that this is not what you would expect, given that Catholic high schools also had substantially higher achievement gains for black students. Normally, you would think that a more academically demanding high school could easily have a higher dropout rate, not a rate that is nearly 4 times lower. (Coleman and Hoffer have a very lengthy passage in which they try to test for selection effects here.)
CHECK IT OUT!!!!
http://www.strike-the-root.com/91/shaw/shaw1.html