Brookings: Topics - School Choice

How Important Are School Districts? Keynote Address by Michelle Rhee

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:30:00 -0400

Event Information

March 27, 2013
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Many popular education reforms focus on improving school districts whereas others, such as charter schools, are premised on school districts being the problem rather than the solution.

On March 27, Russ Whitehurst and Matthew Chingos from the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings presented findings from their new study examining the importance of school districts to student achievement. The study found that district effects on student achievement are smaller than the effects of schools and teachers but still large enough to be of practical and policy significance. For example, students in a district that is at the 70th percentile in district effectiveness will be more than 9 weeks ahead of similar students in a district at the 30th percentile of effectiveness on math and reading scores.

After Russ Whitehurst and Matthew Chingos presented their findings Michelle Rhee of Students First took to the podium to share anecdotes of her time as Chancellor of D.C.’s school district from 2007 to 2010.

Rhee and Whitehurst then went on to discuss her experiences as DCPS Chancellor, tackling questions about the role charter schools play in education reform, and what impacts poverty can have on student achievement. Rhee also reflected on how she would tackle her role as Chancellor differently if she were to do it again.

How important are school districts? … School districts occupy a really central place in the American educational system. They manage nearly all of the $500 billion a year of public funds…they are the recipients of federal funds, they are the recipients of state funds. If you follow the money, you’d certainly think that districts were terrifically important. - Grover "Russ" Whitehurst

Students in the best districts in North Carolina by the end of 4th and 5th grades have learned a whole year's worth more than students in the worst performing districts. - Matthew Chingos

The problem is not the kids. The problem is not the teachers. The problem is that the kids and teachers and principals are forced to operate in this incredibly antiquated bureaucracy that is driven by these rules that make absolutely no sense - Michelle Rhee

If you look at social mobility rates in this country, they are actually near the bottom internationally, which means that if you are a child born into poverty in this country, the likelihood that you will ever escape poverty is not good. That to me goes against every ideal we have as a country. That is so un-American.” - Michelle Rhee

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How Important Are School Districts?

Explaining the Education Choice and Competition Index

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Parents need to have a lot of information about schools—not just test scores—but information on a school’s athletic, music and other programs so they can make an informed choice on where to send their children to school, says Senior Fellow Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst.

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Explaining the Education Choice and Competition Index

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Educational Choice and Competition: A Live Web Chat with Russ Whitehurst

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:30:00 -0500

Event Information

December 12, 2012
12:30 PM - 1:00 PM EST

Online Only
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

In the ongoing effort to improve the American public school system, advocates of school choice argue that increasing options for students and parents encourages education innovation and continuous school improvement. When parents are provided with options—through charter schools, virtual education, and affordable private institutions—schools are held accountable and forced to compete to attract and retain students. What evidence is there that school choice increases student performance nationwide? What can we learn from school districts with demonstrated success in school choice programs? What role should school choice play in the larger effort of educational reform?

On December 7, Russ Whitehurst, Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy and author of the 2012 Education Choice and Competition Index, took your questions in a live web chat moderated by Andrea Drusch at POLITICO. Read a full transcript of the chat below.

12:30 Andrea Drusch: Welcome everyone, let's get started.

12:30 Comment from Jill: Is the choice initiative really about school quality, or is it about fairness?

12:31 Russ Whitehurst: Choice is about four things: school quality, fairness, parent desire to choose, and innovation. These are mutually supportive.

12:31 Comment from Anonymous: It seems like, at the root of the school choice issue, is the idea that putting schools into a market framework improves their overall quality (competition weeds out the lesser schools). But how do we know that the most popular schools in a district are still "the best?"

12:32 Russ Whitehurst: We can look at their performance according to objective criteria, such as student achievement gains, as well as their popularity.

12:32 Comment from Jennifer: What kinds of information do parents need in order to make well-informed choices about where to send their children to school?

12:33 Russ Whitehurst: Past student gains on academic tests; popularity of the school with parents; graduation and college-going rates for high schools; student and staff absentee rates; extra curricula and elective options; student ratings, among other types of info.

12:33 Comment from Mark: What role, if any, should the federal government play regarding choice and competition in local school districts?

12:33 Russ Whitehurst: The most important thing the federal government could do would be to let federal Title I and IDEA funds follow students to their school of choice rather than the current arrangement of providing funds to traditional school districts. The feds also have a very important role to play in generating valid information on school performance.

12:33 Comment from Jon: How, specifically, does school choice support fairness?

12:34 Russ Whitehurst: Currently, families who can afford to pay private school tuition or move to a neighborhood with good public schools have choice. Poor and immobile parents don't. Choice extends to all families the opportunity to choose. That is fair.

12:34 Comment From ky: How about transportation? Even if the choices are given, wouldn’t it still cause unfairness if the children in low income family who cannot attend another school out of their district (can’t afford a car, not a good public transportation - and even if there is, the cost could still add up)?

12:35 Russ Whitehurst: We give districts credit for supporting transportation expenses for parents that exercise choice.

12:35 Comment from Guest: I live in an urban neighborhood that according to the 2010 census is 50% white and 50% students of color. In this neighborhood are two public schools. One is a magnet school another is a community school. Your argument that choice and competition will improve schools rings hollow. What I see is the popular "choice" schools do not have things such as ELL services for large number of Hispanic students in the neighborhood, hence no Hispanic children. They don't have Special Ed, so no Special Ed students. Families are required to submit choice cards in January. Only 50% of families complete choice cards and the families that do are typically affluent, white families. So the "choice" school doesn't take poor families who register for school in the summer. The "choice" school has a long wait list so if anyone drops out or moves, they call up white families from the community school that are on the wait list to fill seats. The community school of course receives the homeless or highly mobile students the "choice school" keeps out with their wait list. One school has retreats to discuss their "Dreams," the other school works like crazy to bring immigrant, poor and highly mobile students to grade level proficiency. Choice was originally designed to provide opportunities for poor and students of color, now it is more a free for all. This is a typical situation in urban school districts. How does choice help the schools who are given the hardest to educate students?

12:36 Russ Whitehurst: You need a much better designed choice system. The one you described would receive a very low rating in our ECCI because of the very issues you raise.

12:36 Comment from BA: I can see how this policy could improve school quality in densely populated areas, but how can we improve school quality in rural areas that can't support multiple schools?

12:37 Russ Whitehurst: Virtual education is the primary avenue of choice in rural areas. In Michigan, for example, the governor has proposed legislation that would allow any district in the state to offer virtual courses to any student in the state. This will open new opportunities for students in rural schools, and increase school competition throughout the state.

12:37 Comment from Dave: What made NOLA's Recovery District stand out? It was the only one to get an A??

12:38 Russ Whitehurst: The Recovery School District is the only one to receive an A. They were particularly strong in the availability of choice, their system for managing choice, and their support for transportation expenses. Check out the ECCI for the details.

12:38 Comment from Jessie: Beyond choice, what is the #1 thing schools need to ensure quality education for all?

12:39 Russ Whitehurst: There isn't just one thing, but teachers and curriculum stand out as very important.

12:39 Comment from Sandy: If competition drives our schools, won't they be less likely to share best practices and innovation ideas?

12:39 Russ Whitehurst: Schools can't copyright best practices and innovations. So just as is the case in the rest of our economy—if someone figures out how to do it better, others will emulate.

12:40 Comment from Andrew: School choice often comes in the form of charter schools, which brings up issues of privatization of public education. Should we be concerned by this trend?

12:40 Russ Whitehurst: Charter schools are PUBLIC schools. They simply operate out the control of the traditional public school district. So there is no issue of privatization.

12:41 Comment from BA: What is the best way for districts to introduce choice into their existing student assignment systems? Which features are most important for effective choice policy?

12:41 Russ Whitehurst: Adopting open enrollment for traditional public schools rather than residential assignment is low-hanging fruit for many districts. Having a “no default policy”, i.e., every parent/student must choose, is the place to start.

12:41 Comment from Daryl: When parents "choose" schools, what information do they have available to them?

12:43 Russ Whitehurst: It differs from location to location, but we are in favor of providing as much information as possible that is of interest to parents, served up in digestible forms. Ideally there would be independent providers of this information so that parents could shop for information as well as schools.

12:43 Comment from MK: Does the data from your latest report support the thesis that choice is improving student performance?

12:44 Russ Whitehurst: We haven't examined changes in school performance related to the particular index we've published. We're planning to do this down the road. There is good evidence elsewhere that schools that are subject to competition improve, and that many students can receive a better education if their parents avail themselves of choice.

12:44 Comment from Jeff: Much of this sounds good—open enrollment, etc.— but it basically means the few white kids in the systems you are talking about will leave.

12:45 Russ Whitehurst: Not true. Everyone can choose in the system we recommend. Those who can leave and are dissatisfied will already have departed.

12:45 Comment from Emily: How do you maintain democratic accountability if an education system is largely run by private organizations? Specifically, how do you ensure that publically funded private schools provide a quality education?

12:46 Russ Whitehurst: Accountability can come in two forms: First, parents can provide it if test results and other important outcomes are publicly available for students attending schools that are supported with tax dollars. Second states can shut off funding to schools that are not producing acceptable student outcomes.

12:46 Comment from Sandy: Seems like so much of school choice is designed for those students in low performing schools - yet those are the parents without the means and knowledge to make those choices - it's only the affluent parents, or parents of students with behaviour problems who take advantage of choice. And it all drags money away from underfunded public schools.

12:48 Russ Whitehurst: In the system we recommend, everyone has to choose. There are no default school assignments. Further, there are strong information supports for parents making choice so that more knowledgeable and affluent parents don't have an advantage. Finally, the principal avenue of choice we recommend is open enrollment in public schools—which by definition cannot divert money from public schools.

12:48 Comment from Mary: Can you speak to choice and how it is or isn't an implementation of privatization?

12:49 Russ Whitehurst: As per my answer to the previous question, the most promising and available avenue for choice is within the public sector -- open enrollment in traditional public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, state-run virtual schools. All of this is public. There is no privatization.

12:49 Comment from Jim: But how likely is it that districts will eliminate default assignment? Have any already done so?

12:51 Russ Whitehurst: Several of our high scoring districts have eliminated default assignments. The RSD in New Orleans is an example. NYC, Boston, and Denver have also moved to open enrollment systems. Most districts retain walking zone preferences for elementary school aged children, but even that isn't necessary.

12:51 Comment from Gail in Fairfax: The best-performing districts in the country: what are they doing right?

12:52 Russ Whitehurst: They have widely available choice, i.e., affordable private schools, charter schools, magnet schools, open enrollment regular public schools. Everyone has to choose. That are common school application and assignment processes. Information to support choice is clear and accessible. There are good schools among the schools that are available.

12:52 Comment from Guest: How would you assess teacher quality in public schools vs. teacher quality in private schools?

12:54 Russ Whitehurst: I have no basis for making that assessment. It is possible, however, to compare the effectiveness of different schools, which depends to a significant degree on teacher quality. But that comparison has to be school by school. Private vs. public or charter vs. regular doesn't tell you whether a school is of high quality.

12:54 Comment from Darcy: Does school choice improve cost-effectiveness for districts?

12:56 Russ Whitehurst: It depends of the type of choices that are available. When private schools are in the mix, supported by tax credits or tuition vouchers, tax payers typically save money. That would not necessarily be the case for an all public choice environment. However, if most money follows students to schools and schools can innovate, cost effectiveness can improve. The intro of blended learning into charter schools is an example.

12:56 Comment from Tay: Can you speak more to "virtual education?" I don't hear that mentioned much when discussing choice?

12:58 Russ Whitehurst: Virtual education is a key component of choice. The Florida Virtual School is an early and successful example of the introduction of virtual education into the environment of public education. It has a very large enrollment. As I've mentioned in response to a previous question, virtual ed has a critical role to play in serving students in rural areas and in providing specialized courses, such as AP, that would otherwise be unavailable. It is also a strong force for efficiency.

12:58 Comment from Guest: How does school choice affect the social fabric of the community?

12:59 Russ Whitehurst: No strong evidence on this. I live in Washington DC. The introduction of choice and the large charter school presence seems to have had a lot to do with reviving the city and creating a stronger social fabric. Families want to live where there are good schools and school choice.

1:00 Andrea Drusch: Thanks everyone for your questions, see you next week.

The Education Choice and Competition Index

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst and Sarah Whitfield — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:08:00 -0500

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Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst
Sarah Whitfield

Image Source: © Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

Improving Educational Choice and Competition; Keynote by Gov. Bobby Jindal

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:30:00 -0500

Event Information

December 11, 2012
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

On December 11, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings released an expanded version of its Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI), an interactive web application that ranks over 100 of the largest school districts in America on school choice and competition. At the event, Brookings Senior Fellow and Brown Center Director Russ Whitehurst announced that the Recovery School District in New Orleans ranked number one in the Index, and that Orleans Parish ranked number six—signaling the region’s success in expanding school choice. Whitehurst welcomed Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who delivered a keynote address on education reform in his state and the nation in the context of school choice and competition.

Jindal began his remarks with two assertions: that despite the original goal of public education, America is failing to provide equal opportunity in education; and that teachers unions are responsible for blocking critical progress in education by opposing school choice.

“Teachers’ unions exist for their own benefit, not the benefit of teachers,” said Jindal. “It’s time to bring American education out of the stone age and into the 21st century, a place where our choices are dramatically expanding, and a place where the old centralized government model is increasingly outdated and inefficient.”

Jindal described the process of education reform in Louisiana, beginning with the creation of the Recovery School District and the New Orleans Scholarship Program, which dramatically increased the availability of school choice in the city. In New Orleans, Jindal said, “no child is stuck in the school that happens to be in their zip code, no child is priced out of a better private option, and student achievement is on the rise.”

Jindal then detailed subsequent statewide education reforms in Louisiana to increase school choice, including removing caps on charter schools, creating new pathways to become a charter school, allowing quality, nontraditional providers to offer advanced, technical and virtual educational opportunities, and translating school performance into letter grades available to parents and students.

Jindal argued that providing every child with access to a great education can be achieved in three ways: paying only for high-quality education, whether in a public, charter, virtual school or beyond; opening the market to innovation; and implementing structural changes that increase choice and empower parents, not simply reforming traditional models and systems.

Jindal concluded his address by stressing that education should not be a partisan or ideological issue, but one that can promote consensus. “Equal opportunity in education should not be a conservative position, or a liberal position, it’s an American position,” said Jindal.

Following his address, Jindal and Whitehurst engaged in a conversation about ongoing national reform efforts. Whitehurst described a renewed focus on education reform that returns control to states and local school districts. Whitehurst explained that parents want school choice, but low-income parents are often left without options to choose higher-quality education for their children. He described how competition among schools improves performance, and stressed that the critical innovations needed in education only happen when schools and teachers are free of central governing bodies to innovate.

“Let’s free parents to shop for schools, and create an environment of innovation and reform in American education,” said Whitehurst.

This event was also webcast and live tweeted using hashtag #Choiceindex.

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The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City

Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

In the first study, using a randomized experiment to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment, Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, examine the college-going behavior through 2011 of students who participated in a voucher experiment as elementary school students in the late 1990s. They find no overall impacts on college enrollment but do find large, statistically significant positive impacts on the college going of African-American students who participated in the study.

Their estimates indicate that using a voucher to attend private school increased the overall college enrollment rate among African Americans by 24 percent. The original data for the analysis come from an experimental evaluation of the privately funded New York School Choice Scholarships Foundation Program, which in the spring of 1997 offered three-year scholarships worth up to a maximum of $1,400 annually to as many as 1,000 low-income families. Chingos and Peterson obtained student information that allowed them to identify over 99 percent of the students who participated in the original experiment so that their college enrollment status could be ascertained by means of the college enrollment database maintained by the National Student Clearinghouse for institutions of higher education that serve 96 percent of all students in the United States.

In addition to finding impacts on overall college-going for African Americans, the authors report significant increases in full-time college attendance, enrollment in private four-year colleges, and enrollment in selective four-year colleges for this group of students.

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The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment

Authors

Matthew M. Chingos
Paul E. Peterson

Image Source: Jason Reed / Reuters

Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

August 23, 2012
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

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Private school vouchers that enable students from low-income families to attend private schools have generated much controversy but little rigorous research. Most voucher studies examine immediate outcomes, such as students’ scores on standardized tests. Few studies are able to track longer-term outcomes, and even fewer are able to do so in the context of a randomized experiment. As a result, the voucher debate continues to generate more heat than light.

On August 23, the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University co-hosted an event examining evidence from an important new study on school vouchers. Report authors Matthew M. Chingos of Brookings and Paul E. Peterson of Harvard have carried out the first study that measures the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment in the context of a randomized experiment. A presentation of the results by the authors was followed by a panel discussion.

The event was live Tweeted at hashtag #BIVouchers.

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Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment

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Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

Compulsory School Attendance: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst and Sarah Whitfield — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

During his 2012 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama offered several recommendations on education policy, including one specifying that all states increase the age of compulsory school attendance to 18. Approximately 25 percent of public school students in the U.S. don’t obtain a regular high school diploma, a tragedy for them and a heavy burden for the nation and the communities and states in which they live. Certainly, America needs to address this problem, but is raising the compulsory school attendance (CSA) age a viable solution?

In a new paper, Russ Whitehurst and Sarah Whitfield perform original analysis to investigate if CSA ages actually affect graduation rates. Their data show that states with higher CSA ages do not have higher high school graduation rates than states with lower CSA ages.

Other key findings include:

The costs of raising the CSA age for additional teachers and classrooms are likely to be minimal because compliance with a higher CSA age will be low.
Raising the CSA age does little to address the root causes of high dropout rates and is unlikely to produce increases in high school graduation rates that will be noticeable to state policymakers and taxpayers.
There is no consistent relationship between the leniency in the laws governing the CSA age and rates of school attendance.
Raising the CSA age may induce some portion of the population of eventual school dropouts to stay in school a few weeks or months longer in order to reach the legal age at which they can leave school. They may benefit as a result but not nearly so much as they would if they persisted until graduation.
There are a number of interventions and policies that target students and schools that experience high dropout rates that have been shown to be effective in increasing persistence and high school completion. Any effort to meaningfully reduce dropout rates needs to include such interventions.

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Compulsory School Attendance: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst
Sarah Whitfield

Image Source: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

A New Approach to K-12 Education Reform

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Washington is at a crossroads on K–12 education policy. Policymakers can 1) continue down the path of top-down accountability; 2) devolve power to states and districts, thereby returning to the status quo of the mid-1990s; or 3) rethink the fundamentals, do something different, and empower parental choice.

The federal government’s involvement in K–12 education has accelerated through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. The best evidence indicates that this substantially heightened federal role has had only modest impact on student achievement, far short of what had been hoped. It might be that further centralization would yield more benefits, but it is doubtful that more federal control is politically possible, and, in any case, any additional yield is uncertain.

The second option—devolving recently accumulated federal power to the states—underlies recent reauthorization proposals for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that allow each state to establish its own accountability system and that require teeth only for the very lowest-performing schools. It is unclear to us how releasing states and school districts from federal accountability and granting them maximum flexibility is anything more than a return to the status quo. It is the regrettable consequence of that approach that motivated increased federal involvement in the first place.

The Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, of which I am a member, believes that an evolved form of the ESEA that retains rigorous accountability is preferable to returning control of public schooling to local public-school monopolies and states, which will fall into old habits all too quickly. But we believe that the best interests of the nation require something other than either a return to the happy days of local school governance or evolutionary improvements to the type of top-down accountability found in No Child Left Behind.

We need a fundamentally new approach.

Read the rest of Whitehurst's piece at Education Next »

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Publication: Education Next

Image Source: © Mike Segar / Reuters

The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Editor’s Note: Exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform, Grover (Russ) Whitehurst introduces the Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI), an interactive web application that scores large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice. The intent of the ECCI is to create public awareness of the differences among districts in their support of school choice, provide a framework for efforts to improve choice and competition, and recognize leaders among school districts in the design and implementation of choice and competition systems.

Access the interactive web application »

INTRODUCTION

Within the last 15 years, there have been notable increases in avenues for school choice, including the ability of parents to choose a regular public school other than their assigned school, charter schools, virtual schools, and private schools via voucher or scholarship programs funded through tax credits.

As noted in a previous report by the Brown Center, Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education, education choice exercises a powerful pull on parents of school children: a quarter of parents of school-aged children report that they moved to their current neighborhood for the school. Another 11 percent of families choose to pay for their children to attend private schools. Charter schools and homeschooling account together for another 6 percent. Fifteen percent of school-aged children attend parent-selected public schools (i.e., schools to which the parents apply for their child’s enrollment). Thus more than 50 percent of parents of school-aged children have engaged in some form of school choice, albeit primarily in the form of residential choice and private school tuition: two socially inequitable means of determining where a child attends school. There is little doubt based on the long waiting lists for popular public schools of choice that many more parents wish to exercise choice than are currently able to do so, and schools of choice consistently generate more positive evaluations from parents than assigned schools.

Further, a number of studies indicate that public schools tend to improve when they are exposed to choice and competition. That poor families are least likely to be able to exercise choice means that the school districts that serve those families are least subject to competitive pressure and least likely to change.

Barriers to choice are typically imposed bureaucratically and legislatively, e.g., through charter school caps, restricting public school enrollment to the immediate neighborhood of a family’s residence, and allowing school districts to determine whether virtual education courses should be funded. But these same bureaucratic and legislation mechanisms can also be levers for expanding choice, e.g., having school funding follow children, allowing district-wide open enrollment in public schools, permitting charter expansion, funding virtual courses.

Expanding school choice and competition is desirable not only because parents want to exercise choice and schools respond to competitive pressure, although those are compelling reasons. It also provides an alternative to top-down efforts to improve schools through regulation. Often education reform is seen as selecting between two opposing paths, centralizing control in Washington though efforts such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top or devolving recently accumulated federal power to states and local school districts. Both courses of action have drawbacks.

Top-down federal control imposes significant regulatory burdens on schools, is inflexible and far removed from the consumers and providers of education services, and has to date had only relatively small effects on raising student achievement. Local and state control, in contrast, is often undermined by special interests that control school bureaucracies. The ability of taxpaying parents of school-aged children to leave school districts with which they are dissatisfied is severely constrained for the low-income and otherwise immobile populations that are most likely to find themselves served by low-performing schools. Introducing substantial school choice and competition within the boundaries of public school districts provides an alternative to both increasing top-down control from Washington and a return to the status quo of the past century in which local and state school bureaucracies carried out their missions with little accountability either to the federal government or taxpayers and parents.

We believe that progress in expanding choice can come from exposing differences among school districts in the degree to which they provide parents with choice and generate competition among schools. Accordingly we have developed an Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) that provides an informative and consumer-relevant measure of the degree of choice and competition within the geographical boundaries of large school districts. Information from the ECCI is conveyed through a public website.

Past measures of K-12 choice and competition have been designed as research instruments and focused on the quantity of competition experienced by individual schools as measured by their geographical proximity to schools that compete for the same population of students (e.g., Belfield & Levin, 2002; Figlio & Hart, 2010). The measures have not attempted to gauge the quality of competition on dimensions such as the availability of choice, the degree to which parental choices are satisfied, the financial consequences for traditional public schools of loss of enrollment, the quality of information provided to parents, or the availability of transportation options. Nor have the measures attempted to index quality of choice and competition at the district level. Finally, they have neither been designed for public use nor motivated by the goal of increasing public demand for more choice and competition within school districts. The ECCI fills these gaps.

INDEX FRAMEWORK

The framework for the ECCI is derived from our previous report, Expanding Choice, in which a key recommendation from our expert panel is that:

“Whatever the education delivery design the public has chosen to put in place in a particular school jurisdiction, parents should be afforded the maximum degree of choice, provided with valid information on the performance of the education programs that are available, and have their preferences for education programs reflected in the funding of those programs.”

The ECCI takes this foundational recommendation and translates it into a scoring rubric for school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice that our Task Group has identified as important to the availability and quality of choice and to the extent to which choice creates competition among providers of education services. The data on which districts are scored are derived from best available sources. Federal statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics are preferred. For categories for which no federal data are available information is derived from school district websites or interviews with district staff. The following sections briefly describe these categories and why they are important. A detailed scoring guide is also available.

Availability of Alternative Schools

A desirable component of school competition is the presence of options in addition to traditional public schools. In our framework, alternative schools can be of several types, including charter schools, magnet schools, denominational schools, and affordable private schools. While the availability of choice among traditional public schools within a school district can be a positive influence on competition in and of itself, school district bureaucracies often have, by intent, a homogenizing influence on schools within their purview. Curriculum, the teacher workforce, levels of parent involvement, length of school day and year, school autonomy, quality of facilities, and per pupil budgets are similar across regular public schools within most school districts. In contrast, alternative schools vary considerably on these dimensions. In economic theory, competition produces efficient markets. Competition on the features of schooling can only occur to the extent that there is both choice of schools and variation in features – thus our inclusion of the availability of alternative schools as a major category[1] in our index since such schools create variation in features.

Policies on Virtual Education

Whereas most forms of school choice are geographically bound and thus carry significant time and transportation burdens if families do not wish to send their child to their neighborhood school, virtual education (schooling delivered through the web) has the advantage of being able to expand choice for everyone and the potential to lower costs and increase effectiveness to boot. But under current K-12 models of virtual education, a state or, more typically, the local school district is able to determine whether the virtual schooling meets its standards and is acceptable as a credit towards graduation. At the local district level, this places the bureaucracy that may be most disrupted by the introduction of virtual education in the position of gatekeeper. These same local self-interests can easily manifest themselves at the state level through routine political processes. In this context, we think it is particularly important for the expansion of choice and competition that school districts have policies that allow students to enroll in virtual courses that count towards graduation or matriculation without extra costs to families, and that they have followed through on these policies as indicated by reasonable levels of student participation.

Funding Follows Students

In our framework, a primary driver of competition among schools is the loss or gain of funding that comes from changes in enrollment. A school that is unpopular with students and losing enrollment should lose funding. Likewise, a popular school should gain funding as it attracts more students. But in many school districts a school with declining enrollment may actually gain resources in the form of smaller class sizes and fewer administrative burdens whereas a popular school may be bursting at the seams and under-resourced. The competitive effects of school choice cannot be realized in a system in which schools that lose students win and schools that gain students lose. Yet, that is the situation in many school districts that nominally provide some degree of choice. Accordingly, we score districts on whether they have an explicit student-based funding formula and the proportion of their total budget that is allocated to schools based on that formula.

Restructuring or Closing Unpopular Schools

The prospect of closure or restructuring of an unpopular school is, along with student-based funding, an anchor of choice-based competition. Changes in student-based funding may not be immediately obvious or consequential to staff, whereas the prospect that the school will be closed or restructured if it continues to decline in popularity is hard to ignore. We score districts on whether they have a published policy citing low or declining enrollment due to parental choice as a reason for closing or restructuring schools and whether they have a history of actually closing schools on that basis.

Assignment Mechanism

Our framework places considerable emphasis on the processes by which students are assigned to schools, treating it as a major category for evaluating choice and competition. The antithesis of choice is an assignment mechanism based on residence, with little or no chance of parents being able to enroll their child in a school other than the one in their neighborhood. In contrast, the paragon of assignment systems is one in which students are assigned to schools through an application process in which parents express their preferences and those preferences are maximized. We score districts based on where they stand with respect to these two poles.

Application

Among school districts in which parents can choose among regular public schools and/or charter schools, some have different applications for different schools, including in some cases different timetables. In contrast, the ideal process has a common application for all public schools within a district’s boundaries, including charter schools. There are variations between these extremes that are captured in our scoring rules. It is difficult for the parent to choose the school she really prefers for her child, and impossible for a district to implement an assignment mechanism that maximizes parental preference, if individual schools have their own application processes and timetables. In such situations, which bear a resemblance to applying to colleges under early-decision rules, only the most committed and informed parents can navigate the system, create multiple applications for their child, and deal with possible bird-in-the-hand conflicts in accepting an admission offer that has a timetable for a decision in advance of other admission offers being due. We consider a unified application process to be a major category for evaluating choice and competition.

Comparable Standards and Assessments

Another feature of an ideal choice system is that all schools supported with public funds are subject to comparable standards and assessment regimens. Common standards and assessments provide transparency for choice and allow schools to be compared on a common metric. Public schools have to comply with this prescription at least in regard to the requirements for standardized testing under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But private and denominational schools that receive public funds through voucher and tax-deductible scholarships do not. In our framework, parents should be able to shop for schools based at least in part on student outcomes. They cannot comparison-shop across the public and private sectors unless there are comparable assessments and public reporting of results. Of course, public school districts cannot impose reporting requirements on private and denominational schools within their geographical borders. However, states could as a condition of receiving taxpayer funding to support student tuition.

Gain Scores

Ideally, parents will choose schools based on their performance in raising student achievement not just the absolute outcomes that students achieve. If parental choice of schools is based primarily on the latter, then schools that serve populations of advantaged parents are nearly always going to look better and be preferred. That is why we believe the information presented to parents as a basis for judging school performance should include student achievement gains based on longitudinal data on academic growth of individual students. This measure will make it more probable that parents will choose schools that are more likely to boost the achievement of their children, and will provide a basis for competition among schools on the dimension of the quality of teaching and learning.

Accessible Online Information

The quality of information to support school choice is as much a function of how it is presented to parents as its substance. Information that is difficult to obtain, confusingly presented, or that doesn’t permit easy comparisons among schools interferes with the choice process and promotes choices that do not accurately reflect the parents’ intent. We believe that information about the choice process and school performance data should be easily accessible on a district website, presented clearly, permit side-by-side comparisons of schools, and be sufficiently complete that there isn’t a population of “in the know” parents with a clear advantage in making an informed choice of schools.

Additional Performance Data

Currently the data on school performance that most school districts make available to the public is limited to what fulfills the federal reporting requirements under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is essentially the proportion of children meeting achievement targets at each grade, disaggregated by student demographic characteristics such as race. This information is useful but falls far short of what parents need and would like to know about schools before they make a choice. Best practice for districts includes the provision of additional information on such things as student and teacher absentee rates, measures of parental satisfaction, and course offerings. Also important in a system of open enrollment is information on school popularity as revealed through the ratio of applications to slots. Publishing popularity scores on schools in districts that have open enrollment plans could, we believe, have a significant influence on school leaders at both the building and district levels. Who wants to be the principal of the least popular school in the district? Who wants to be the district superintendent who continues to fund schools that are manifestly unpopular with parents? And of course it can be a significant boon to parents who are trying to determine what is frequently only available by word of mouth.

Understandable Performance Data

Performance data is only useful to parents if it is understandable. Ideally, performance data should be available with text explanations providing parents enough information to interpret the data. The data should also allow for side-by-side comparisons of schools. Performance data that is presented in graphical or tabular form with minimal or confusing text explanations is hardly better for parents than no performance data at all.

Transportation

If a student is physically unable to get to a school of choice there is no meaningful choice except through the vehicle of virtual education. An ideal choice system is one in which students are provided transportation to any school of their choosing within district borders on the same terms as for the neighborhood school. Otherwise stated, if students qualify for busing if they live more than one mile from a traditional public school, they should qualify for busing to a school of choice that is more than one mile from their residence.

School Quality

School choice is a sham if all schools are low performing. In that scenario little competition is likely to result. Why would a parent want to get up early to get her child to a more distant school if that school is no better than the neighborhood school? Thus the ECCI captures information of the average school quality within districts.

FIRST YEAR RESULTS

The 2011 version of the ECCI includes overall and category scores for the 25 largest school districts in the U.S. We assign letter grades to districts based on their overall scores to provide an easily graspable sense of the degree to which districts meet the ideals on which the scoring framework is based. Subsequent versions of the ECCI will expand to include at least the largest 100 school districts. All the results from the ECCI are available online. The ECCI website allows sorting of districts on their overall scores as well as on each of the 13 categories that contribute to the summary assessment. It provides detailed results in each category. And it allows side by side comparisons of districts. Here we describe some highlights.

The high score overall goes to New York City, with Chicago in second place. Both received letter grades of B. The low score goes to Orange County, Florida, which received a grade of D. New York performed particularly well in its assignment mechanism, its provision of relevant performance data, and its policies and practices for restructuring or closing unpopular schools. Chicago, in contrast to New York, has more alternative schools, a greater proportion of school funding that is student-based, and superior web-based information and displays to support school choice. If the best characteristics of Chicago were transferred to New York and vice versa, both would receive letter grades of A.

Low performers, including Orange County, are distinguished from higher performers, including New York and Chicago, by the absence of choice. In other words students receive an assignment to a school by the district based on their place of residence and there is little or nothing the parents can do about it. Under our scoring rules and the conceptual model on which they are based, everything pivots off choice. Thus a district that doesn’t support choice cannot score well even if it does a good job within some categories of the scoring system. Orange County, for instance, has better treatment of virtual education than either New York or Chicago by virtue of the state of Florida’s establishment of the Florida Virtual School (which is open to all public school students in the state). Further, we find its school information website to be easier to understand and navigate than New York’s. But in the absence of parental choice among its regular public schools, these attributes are merely bells and whistles.

The side by side comparison of district practices and characteristics is a critical design feature of the ECCI website. It allows districts and those who wish to influence district policies to benchmark the districts and to see what has and can be accomplished in districts that are performing well.

CONCLUSION

The ECCI provides a snapshot of the quality of education choice and competition within large school districts and allows for comparisons of choice and competition policies and practices across districts. The ECCI identifies areas in which school districts can change policies to expand choice such as adopting an assignment mechanism that maximizes the chance that parents will be able to enroll their child in the school they really prefer and enhancing the quality of information on school performance to support parents in making school choice. A fundamental rationale for school choice is its effects in creating a vibrant marketplace for better schools. There is evidence that it presently does so, but its effects are muted by administrative and legislative requirements that reduce choice and buffer schools from the effects of competition. With a quarter of America’s youth not graduating with a regular high school degree, with those students who remain in school performing at mediocre academic levels compared with students in many of the nations with which we compete, and with the costs of our public education system among the highest in the world, we believe that reform requires something other than more of the same. The wide availability of school choice based on valid information on school performance and with consequences for schools based on their popularity is, we believe, a foundation for progress. The intent of the ECCI is to create public awareness of the differences among districts in their support of school choice, provide a framework for efforts to improve choice and competition, and recognize leaders among school districts in the design and implementation of choice and competition systems.

[1] Major categories are double weighted in our scoring process. The three major categories are Alternatively Available Schools, Assignment Mechanism, and Application Process.

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Expanding Choice in Education

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Image Source: Gary John Norman

School Choice and Education Reform

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:30:00 -0500

Event Information

November 30, 2011
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Large numbers of parents choose where their children are educated by moving to a school district or neighborhood that gives them access to good public schools, but school selection through residential choice is not an option for parents who are poor or unable to relocate. These parents are forced to take whatever is available to them through their local school district, and the schools that serve them do not have to worry about competition. While some districts are satisfied with this status quo, others have embraced policies that make school choice widely available and expose schools to the consequences of their popularity.

On November 30, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings hosted a discussion exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform. Senior Fellow and Brown Center Director Russ Whitehurst previewed the Education Choice and Competition Index – an interactive web application that will score large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice – and announced the Index’s initial rankings of the 25 largest school districts in America.

Following his remarks, Joel Klein, the executive vice president of News Corporation and the former New York City Schools chancellor, delivered a keynote address offering his reflections on the successes and challenges surrounding the expansion of public school choice in New York City.

After the program, speakers took audience questions.

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School Choice and Education Reform

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Panelists

Joel Klein

Executive Vice President, CEO, Education Division, News Corporation
Former New York City Schools Chancellor

Is Education on the Wrong Track?

Diane Ravitch and Ben Wildavsky — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0400

Editor's Note: In a March 2010 education symposium held by The New Republic, Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Diane Ravitch and Guest Scholar Ben Wildavsky present the merits and pitfalls of market-based education reform.

From: Diane Ravitch
To: Ben Wildavsky
Subject: The education reform "consensus" ignores teachers, the very people needed to carry out change in classrooms.

Ten years ago, I would have written the same things that you wrote for this symposium. I too would have been hopeful that the business model of schooling would inject new dynamism into American education. I too would have been impressed by the lingo and data-talk of the corporate suits. I too would have imagined that deregulation was the answer to our problems and that the market would produce competition and improvement. The point of my book is to explain that these strategies don’t work and to supply the evidence for my conclusions.

Ben, I am no critic of the market economy. I love having choices about where I shop. But, as I point out in the book, going to school is not the same as shopping. Most parents want a stable school that is within a reasonable distance of their home, so that they can drop off their child in the morning and pick her up at the end of day or get to school quickly if she gets sick in the middle of the day. Schools operate differently from, say, shoe stores, which open and close in response to consumer demand. Schools are essential community institutions, like firehouses. They are cooperative enterprises, where the adults are expected to work closely with one another towards common goals. Teachers should not compete with each other for extra dollars (Edward Deming says that this kind of competition doesn't even work in business, that it demoralizes the workplace). Teachers should share what they know, not hoard their trade secrets for their private benefit.

Ben, you ignore the evidence that charter schools, on average, do not outperform regular public schools. Charter students have been tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, and they have never done better than regular public schools. Charters have the supposed advantage of deregulation, non-union teachers, longer hours, longer years—and, in some cases, the extra money contributed by generous philanthropists, yet they have not outscored regular public school students on NAEP, which is the gold standard of educational testing. One sector or the other may get a blip one year, but there has been no sustained advantage for students in charters, be they black, Hispanic, low-income, or residents of urban districts, compared to their peers in regular public schools.

Nor has test-based accountability produced genuine improvement in education. The era of NCLB has been marked by lowered state standards, cheating, and widespread gaming of the system. While the states claim big leaps forward, NAEP shows very little improvement. In math, the gains were larger before NCLB than after it was implemented. On eighth grade reading, there have been no gains at all since 1998, even though these are the students who grew up with NCLB.

Read Diane Ravitch's full letter here »

From: Ben Wildavsky
To: Diane Ravitch, Richard Rothstein, and Kevin Carey
Subject: Ravitch misunderstands the roles of charter schools, teacher professionalism, and bipartisanship in education.

Diane, I appreciate your spirited rebuttal to my essay. I’m not surprised to hear you repeat what you say in your book--that you have no objection to the market economy per se (although you somewhat undermine your case when you toss around silly phrases like “corporate suits”). It is the entry of market principles into public education that bothers you. Schools, you say, are like firehouses and police stations, not shoe stores. To give teachers extra compensation based on effective job performance undermines the fundamentally cooperative nature of schools. And so on.

You are quite right that markets are no panacea, contrary to what John Chubb and Terry Moe once wrote. I did not claim that markets have such magical powers. It seems to me that we should regard markets as an enabling condition for the changes that public education badly needs. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has made this case eloquently, arguing last week that both choice and accountability “provide invaluable opportunities to rethink schools and systems that are too often hobbled by anachronistic policies, practices, stifling contracts, and cultures.” Accountability and choice, then, are simply means to an end.

You chide me for allegedly ignoring evidence that charter schools, on average, don’t perform any better than conventional public schools on the NAEP. I never said they did. It’s widely acknowledged that, so far, charter schools have been highly uneven in quality. But that doesn’t mean the charter principle is a failure. For one thing, charters can be closed down for poor performance (although this hasn’t happened often enough). For another, the quality and motivations of charter authorizers matter a lot to charter success. As charter laws were enacted, political pressures—notably union pressures—put many of the entities opposed to charter schools in charge of them. Washington, D.C., is a great example. Two charter authorizers were initially established. One was the regular school board, which had no love of competition and permitted a number of terrible charter school to operate with little or no oversight. The other, an independent board established just to authorize charters, came to be highly regarded and now oversees all of the city’s charters.

Overall, charters seem to have done no harm, and, in a number of high-profile cases, they have done a lot of good. As you know, there are many efforts underway to study and replicate the very best charter chains--just what one might expect in, well, a market. We’re still in a period of experimentation. But the flexibility of the charter philosophy—and the availability of comparable achievement data across schools—permits educators to try new things and to measure whether they’re working.

Even as you disparage the performance of charters, you complain (echoing a longstanding claim of Richard’s) that they cream the most motivated parents and students, leaving the neediest kids in regular public schools. Isn’t this a contradiction? If your assertion is true, wouldn’t we expect charters to outperform regular public schools? The allegation of creaming also raises an important philosophical question—in fact, a moral one—that Mark Schneider of the American Institutes for Research touched on at the AEI forum where you spoke last week. Isn’t it preferable for some kids to have superior alternatives than for all kids to remain in underperforming schools? If you could wave a magic wand and get rid of charter schools, including the KIPPs and Achievement Firsts, would you really be doing kids in those schools a favor by sending them back to the crummy institutions they escaped? It seems to me that we can simultaneously provide appealing charter options that will cause some students to exit while doing much more to meet the educational needs of the kids who remain in regular public schools.

Read Ben Wildavsky's full letter here »

Authors

Diane Ravitch
Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The New Republic

The 2009 Brown Center Report on American Education

Tom Loveless — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

This year’s Brown Center Report contains studies taking a long view. Part I examines national test data going back to 1971 from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The study in Part II compares the 1989 test scores of more than 1,000 schools to the same schools’ scores in 2009. Part III compares the test scores of conversion charter schools from 1986, when they operated as traditional public schools, to those from 2008, when they operated as charter schools. The studies tackle perennial questions that, as often happens in education, manifest themselves as controversial topics on the contemporary scene: how to interpret trends in test scores, the distribution of achievement, school turnarounds, and charter schools.

Part I rejects the conventional reaction to the 2009 NAEP scores. Scores in fourth-grade math were unchanged from 2007 to 2009. Eighth-grade scores were up a little. Press articles featured expressions of disappointment and concern, primarily from protagonists who used the flat scores to support policy arguments. Part I places the 2009 scores in the context of the 19-year history of the main NAEP, and after comparing the latest scores with results from other equally trustworthy tests of U.S. math achievement, concludes that the hand-wringing is unwarranted.

So when is a purported NAEP trend really a trend? Part I continues by examining achievement gaps, not between two racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups, but between the nation’s highest- and lowest-achieving students. It focuses on the distribution of academic achievement instead of the direction of average achievement. The study is a follow-up to a 2009 Fordham Institute paper documenting that the gap between high- and low-achieving students has been shrinking in recent years. The data in Part I show that the trend, which began sometime around 1998 or 1999, is historically unprecedented and extends across subjects (reading and math), grades (fourth and eighth), and tests (long-term trend and main NAEP). It is also more pronounced in public schools than in private schools. The two analyses in Part I highlight the contrast between a trend indicated by data collected from several independent sources over an extended period of time and speculative assertions arising from “instant analysis” of a single set of test scores.

Part II asks a simple question: do schools ever change? The sample consists of 1,156 schools in California that offered an eighth grade in 1989 and 2009. Test scores from 1989 are compared to scores from 2009. The scores are remarkably stable. Of schools in the bottom quartile in 1989—the state’s lowest performers—nearly two-thirds (63.4 percent) scored in the bottom quartile again in 2009. The odds of a bottom quartile school’s rising to the top quartile were about one in seventy (1.4 percent). The reverse was true as well, with similar percentages of top quartile schools staying among the top performers (63.0 percent) or falling to the bottom quartile (2.4 percent). Changes in a school’s socioeconomic status had only a marginal statistical relationship with test score changes.

The persistence of test scores has major implications for today’s push to turn around failing schools. It can be done, but the odds are daunting. California certainly cannot be accused of inactivity in education reform from 1989 to 2009. Few states tried as many diverse, ambitious reforms that targeted every aspect of the school system—finance, governance, curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Not only have these efforts failed to elevate California from its low national ranking on key performance measures, but they have also had little effect on the relative ranking of schools within the state.

The study suggests that people who say we know how to make failing schools into successful ones but merely lack the will to do so are selling snake oil. In fact, successful turnaround stories are marked by idiosyncratic circumstances. The science of turnarounds is weak and devoid of practical, effective strategies for educators to employ. Examples of largescale, system-wide turnarounds are nonexistent. A lot of work needs to be done before the odds of turning around failing schools begin to tip in a favorable direction.

Part III looks at charter schools. Conversion charters are favored by the Obama administration as a restructuring strategy. Most charter schools are start-ups, begun from scratch by their founders. Conversion charters are schools that are traditional public schools and convert to charter school status. They typically continue to rely on their home districts for several functions (e.g., maintenance of buildings, managing pension obligations, transportation services) but are freed from regulations pertaining to curriculum and instruction. The idea is that schools can be more productive if they are allowed to tailor core educational operations to the needs of their students.

California has the largest number of conversions, and the study was able to collect data on two cohorts: 49 schools from 2004 and 60 schools from 2008. For both cohorts, test score data were also available from 1986, allowing a comparison of scores before and after the schools converted. The analysis is exploratory and mainly descriptive. No causal conclusions can be derived from the data.

What do we know about conversions? Test scores look similar before and after conversion. The 2004 cohort evidences a 2 to 3 percentile point advantage as charters, but the 2008 cohort’s scores declined slightly, less than 2 points, from 1986 to 2008. On several key characteristics, conversions look more like traditional public schools than start-up charters. Compared with start-ups, conversions are more concentrated in urban areas, have larger student enrollments, and serve greater numbers of Hispanic and black students. Teachers at conversions are more experienced and more likely to hold teaching certificates, particularly in bilingual education. It is clear that future evaluations of charter schools must differentiate between start-ups and conversions because of the significant institutional differences between the two types of charters.

To sum up, the studies in this year’s Brown Center Report focus on long-term changes. Part I analyzes NAEP data. Parts II and III examine California test scores from the 1980s and compare them to scores from recent years. Because of its long history of testing, California is currently one of the few states able to provide assessment data for such long-term comparisons. That will change as other states continue to test students annually. Creating rich archives of student performance data bodes well for school reform. Improving schools requires patience and persistence, what education professors Richard Elmore and Milbrey McLaughlin1 call “steady work.” It also requires good information to verify whether reforms have paid off, or, like many efforts in education, produced hopeful signs that soon vanish. The future looks bright if analysts’ capacity to peer into the past continues to improve.

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Tom Loveless

Image Source: Daniel Hurst

Education's Tea Partier

Ben Wildavsky — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0400

Almost 20 years ago, as a young editor at The Public Interest, I wrote an admiring review of The American Reader, an anthology compiled by Diane Ravitch. At the time, a battle was raging over multicultural education, and Ravitch joined the fray with a wonderful collection of speeches, songs, essays, and poems spanning the nation’s history. She had a philosophical goal--setting forth a positive version of multiculturalist history that emphasized pluralism rather than identity politics--and also a practical one--creating a content-rich textbook that wasn’t, like so many others, homogenized and excruciatingly boring.

Today, Ravitch tells us in The Death and Life of the Great American School System that she still has a keen desire for students to be taught a rich curriculum in a variety of subjects. And who could disagree? But Ravitch then links this belief with her contention that the two central philosophies guiding today’s bipartisan reform movement--test-based accountability and school choice, both of which she used to embrace--have undermined teaching, learning, and content. It's here that her argument falters.

Indeed, while her closely argued polemic offers some useful insights into the inadequacies of many reform efforts to date, ultimately, she doesn’t deliver the goods. Ravitch fails to make the case that the broad philosophies governing today’s reform movement are off-target.

Perhaps most striking to me as I read Death and Life was Ravitch’s odd aversion to, even contempt for, market economics and business as they relate to education. She writes repeatedly, in withering terms of “corporate style superintendents,” the “tycoons and politicians” driving wrongheaded reform efforts, the “managerial mindset” behind experiments with value-added assessment for teachers, and the hopeless inapplicability of such business terminology as “return on investment” for foundations seeking to gauge the educational results of their grant-making. Decrying the “unfettered market” (cautionary tale: Wal-Mart!), she claims that “the problem with the marketplace is that it dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers.” Her populist ire is such that one almost expects her to announce that she will be spearheading a new Educational Tea Party movement.

Ravitch's rhetoric is so overblown that it doesn’t seem in keeping with her record of analytical gravitas. Who says markets are antithetical to community? Democratic capitalism in the United States, after all, has generally coexisted quite nicely with thriving communities. Moreover, who is to say that businesses and foundations (sorry, make that “mega-rich foundations”) shouldn’t participate in school reform? Are they not part of the civic fabric that Ravitch so commendably wants to nurture?

As for her claim that entrepreneurs see charter schools “as a gateway to the vast riches of the education industry,” that hardly jibes with reality at the most admired charter organizations. As far as I know, nobody at Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, or KIPP, all non-profits, is getting rich from those organizations’ notably successful efforts to help low-income kids learn. But if--if--for-profit charter operators are able to operate good schools, why shouldn’t those educational entrepreneurs get rich? Isn’t the point to make sure kids learn? It is not as if profit is an alien notion in the world of public schools. As Ravitch knows well, a vast industry of contractors, curriculum specialists, and the like was getting rich off public schools long before charters came along. (Ravitch also missed important aspects of the charter movement: its relentless self-examination, eagerness to weed out poor performers, and desire to take to scale those approaches that are really helping kids.)

Read the full review here »

Authors

Ben Wildavsky

Publication: The New Republic

Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:07:00 -0500

Executive Summary

Education choice exercises a powerful pull on parents of school children: Twenty-four percent report that they moved to their current neighborhood so their children could attend their current school; 15 percent of public school students attend parent-selected rather than district-assigned schools; the charter school and homeschooling sectors have grown from nothing to 2.6 percent and 3 percent of total enrollment respectively; private schools capture 11 percent of enrollment; and virtual schooling is poised for explosive growth. Consistent with these behavioral manifestations of the desire of parents to choose their children’s schools, schools of choice consistently generate more positive evaluations from parents than assigned schools.

Arguments for school choice include improving school quality and efficiency through competition among schools for students; enhancing opportunity for students from disadvantaged families who may otherwise be trapped in ineffective schools; and spurring innovation through the greater administrative autonomy likely to exist in schools of choice. Opponents of choice theorize that it will stratify students by family background, result in niche schools that do not convey the nation’s common heritage, provide taxpayer support for religious instruction, and nullify the advantages of standardization in curriculum, teacher preparation, and management that accrue when schooling systems are designed to deliver a common educational experience across a universe of schools. Opponents of choice also argue that many traditional public schools perform superbly and that those that do not can be improved through better resource allocation and management.

Advocates and opponents of choice typically lock horns over idealized systems of schooling that do not presently exist in the U.S. Thus choice advocates frequently espouse voucher systems that would be similar to federal Pell grants at the postsecondary level. Parents would be able to choose any school they wished for their child, public or private, with government writing the check. In contrast, advocates for traditional schooling envision a system in which every school is good enough to ensure that families’ place of residence and income no longer correlate with the quality of the schools to which their children have access.

It is important to note that both the hopes of the advocates of idealized versions of choice and the fears of the detractors diverge from empirical reality. Charter schools and voucher programs are strongly favored by advocates of choice, but studies of the effects of charter schools on student achievement tend to show that on average charters nationally are performing in the same ballpark as traditional public schools, notwithstanding demonstrations that oversubscribed charter schools in Boston and New York City have generated above average academic gains. Studies of voucher programs, including those in Milwaukee, New York City, Dayton, and the District of Columbia, have found some positive effects, but the differences are not large or across the board. At the same time, concerns that voucher programs or charter schools would deplete the budgets of traditional schools, or result in skimming of the most qualified students, or destroy cultural cohesion or learning of common academic content have been unrealized.

The corresponding reality of public schooling is that the quality of schools is substantially correlated with geography and parental income and likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. While there have been improvements in performance in some large urban school districts and prospects for more, not even the strongest advocate of traditional public schools can maintain that we are close to a point at which a parent living in a low-income area can consign her child to the closest neighborhood school with confidence that the school will be as good, on average, as any other school within a reasonable geographic radius of her home, much less good enough to secure her child’s educational future.

We think the situation on the ground with respect to choice is so different from the idealizations that it warrants a new and different perspective on policy. Choice is most frequently realized within the public sector using the mechanisms of residence, magnet schools, and open enrollment systems, whereas the voucher-like systems applauded by choice advocates and feared by opponents are extremely rare. Further, the charter sector is neither large enough nor sufficiently prepared to go to scale to represent a threat to the traditional system of public schools.

Our policy recommendations are framed within the realities of large variation in the quality of public schools, widespread selection of schools by choice of place of residence, and choice being exercised predominantly within the public sector. These realities offer opportunities for common ground between advocates for choice and advocates for public schools. The goals these communities can share are providing more educational opportunity for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and reducing the number of low performing schools. The mechanisms they can share are: a) a system that affords parents as much choice as possible within the universe of taxpayer supported students and schools, b) portals by which parents can readily access rich information on the performance of schools that is framed to be useful in exercising choice, and c) a funding system that supports the growth of parentally preferred schools and school systems, including virtual education programs.

Specifically, to support the expansion of choice we recommend that:

choice be exercised through systems in which parents have more options than at present (with the expansion of virtual education programs being a promising means to that end);
admission into particular schools within choice systems be open;
selection into oversubscribed schools and programs be determined by lottery (which could be conducted using weights to enhance socioeconomic or geographic balance when that is a desired goal);
choice systems not include a default (all parents would have to choose);
all schools supported with public funds within choice systems be subject to the same standards and assessment regimen under which traditional public schools within a state are required to operate in order to provide transparency for choice;
the popularity of schools as revealed through parental preferences be reflected in funding formulas so that more popular schools garner additional resources to meet enrollment demand; and
substantially undersubscribed schools be restructured or closed. In order to ground the exercise of choice in valid and easily used information on the characteristics and performance of education programs, we further recommend that:
school systems be required to provide timely and relevant information to parents to support choice; • one or more choice navigation websites be developed with the support of federal funds that would be independent of education providers; and
school systems be incentivized to link these choice navigation websites to their parental choice systems.

The choice navigation sites would provide substantially more information on the performance of individual education programs than is presently available to parents (via expanded data collections and enhanced investment in an information infrastructure by the federal government); allow parents to create rankings of programs based on the parents’ own dimensions of preference; and give parents access to decision support tools that would aid in considering dimensions of the performance of schools and education programs that have been linked empirically to better student outcomes.

We recognize that meaningful choice and competition can be constrained even when nominal choice is available, for example because all the schools in a district are low performing, or because transportation to higher performing schools is unavailable, or because all schools are homogeneous. We also recognize that both nominal and meaningful choice are constrained in school districts with small populations, many of which are rural. We suggest means for enhancing meaningful choice, for example, by having multiple operators of schools within urban areas, expanding inter-district choice, subsidizing transportation costs when parents choose schools out of the neighborhood, stimulating the formation of quality charter schools, and fostering virtual education by a variety of operators, including nationally chartered providers.

To support the enhancement of meaningful school choice, we recommend:

the development of a metric of the extent of choice at the school district level that would be available to the public and policymakers; and that
school districts with both low levels of choice and low levels of performance be especially encouraged at the federal level to increase their levels of choice.

Our recommendations do not represent advocacy for any particular type of education institution or program. Rather, school choice should be a democratic process that benefits from the informed participation of parents. Our recommendations are suitable to a range of schooling designs, from a school district in which there are no choices other than district-run public schools, to a system of charter schools, to a division of courses between traditional and virtual schools, to a voucher-based open market in which all providers are on an equal footing, and to many variations in between.

A traditional school district could follow our recommendations by instituting an open enrollment plan at all of its schools, giving additional funding for expansion to oversubscribed schools, closing manifestly unpopular schools, providing transportation to students so that residence does not prevent the exercise of choice, making accredited virtual courses fully count towards graduation, and linking the choice system to a high-quality choice navigation website. Our recommendations are equally applicable to an open market in which public, private, charter, and virtual schools compete on an equal footing for students and the tax revenues that are attached to them.

Our position is that whatever the education delivery design the public has chosen to put in place in a particular school jurisdiction, parents should be afforded the maximum degree of choice, provided with valid information on the performance of the education programs that are available, and have their preferences for education programs reflected in the funding of those programs.

We believe the best evidence suggests that a) parents, including those with low levels of education, can make choices of schools for their children that are sensitive to school performance; b) students from low-income backgrounds benefit from their parents’ decision to send them to higher performing schools; c) the form in which information is presented to parents has important effects on their choice of schools; and d) parental choice can create a competitive market for better schools if the growth of preferred schools and the closure or restructuring of unpopular schools is provided for.

Evidence also suggests that there will be substantial variation in the impact of choice systems on parental behavior, student outcomes, and competition among schools depending on the design of the choice systems and the education options that are available. Poorly designed systems may create greater stratification of schools, reduce educational opportunity for disadvantaged students, and have no systemic competitive effects. Thus, the power of choice to increase educational achievement and opportunity is very much in the details of the design and implementation of choice systems. Because the knowledge base on which to construct school choice systems is far from mature, our final recommendation is that:

the federal role in advancing choice be carried out in a learning context — thoughtful variation in the design of choice systems should be encouraged, systematic data on effects should be collected, and redesign should follow naturally from what has been learned.

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Authors

Michelle Croft
Jay Greene
Tom Loveless
W. Bentley MacLeod
Thomas Nechyba
Paul Peterson
Meredith Rosenthal
Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Expanding Meaningful School Choice and Competition

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 10:30:00 -0500

Event Information

February 2, 2010
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Education choice exercises a powerful pull on parents of school children. Twenty-four percent of parents moved to their current neighborhood so their children could attend their current school; 15 percent of public school students attend parent-selected rather than district-assigned schools; and parents choose private schools or homeschooling for 14 percent of students. Despite its prevalence, school choice remains hotly debated among education policymakers.

On February 2, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings and a task force composed of leading education policy experts released proposals on how to expand school choice to increase equity and create a market within the public sector for school quality. The first of a series of Brown Center reports on rethinking the federal role in education, Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education, argues that parents should be afforded the maximum degree of choice. It provides a series of practical and novel recommendations for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including national chartering of virtual education providers; expanding the types of information collected on school performance; providing incentives for low-performing school districts to increase choice and competition; and creating independent school choice portals to aid parents in choosing between schools.

After the program, the panelists took audience questions.

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Expanding Meaningful School Choice and Competition

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Participants

Moderator

Panelists

Jay Greene

Head of the Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas

W. Bentley MacLeod

Professor, Columbia University

Thomas Nechyba

Professor, Duke University

Paul Peterson

Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University

Meredith Rosenthal

Associate Professor of Health Economics and Policy, Harvard School of Public Health

The Scouting Report: Education Policy Challenges in America

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:30:00 -0400

Event Information

September 2, 2009
12:30 PM - 1:30 AM EDT

Online Only
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

As students across the country head back to school, it’s time to focus on persistent challenges facing education in the United States: teacher quality and standards, the efficacy of charter schools, school underfunding and evaluating how the United States measures up to international standards. These will be key topics when Congress returns from recess and as the Obama administration lays out its priorities for education policy in the coming year.

On Wednesday, September 2, Brookings expert Russ Whitehurst, who directs the Brown Center for Education at Brookings, and Fred Barbash, senior editor of Politico, answered questions on American education policy.

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Moderator

Fred Barbash

Senior Editor
Politico

Panelists

Secretary Arne Duncan and the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:00:00 -0400

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within U.S. Department of Education released a study on April 3 of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides up to a $7,500 annual voucher for students from low-income families in the District of Columbia to attend private schools. Notably, the study found that students who won the lottery to receive the limited number of available vouchers had significantly higher reading achievement after three years than students who lost the lottery.

Yet last month Congress voted to eliminate funding for the program. Columnists for the Wall Street Journal and the Denver Post, accompanied by the blogosphere, have alleged that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sat on the evidence of the program’s success. The WSJ writes that, “… in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.” The Denver Post questions the Secretary’s denial of having known the results of the study prior to congressional action, asserting that he was, “at best … willfully ignorant.”

As director of IES through November 2008, I was responsible for the evaluation that is at the center of the controversy. Given the established procedures of IES it is extremely unlikely that Secretary Duncan would have known the results of the study until recently.

The discussion of preliminary results from the study in November 2008 would have been with technical advisors to the contractor who was carrying out the study. No one in the Department of Education other than a few staff within IES would have been included in that meeting and the results would not have been shared.

That is as it should be. All IES reports are required by law to go through rigorous scientific peer review under a documented set of processes before being released. “Preliminary results” are just that. The analysis and presentation of data in an IES report very frequently change between the preliminary version and the released version. It would be irresponsible and unlawful for IES to disseminate preliminary findings. Accordingly, it keeps them under very close wraps.

How does the institute manage to do so? By law, IES reports are not subject to the approval of the secretary or any other office of the Department. They are released on the authority of the director. However, IES is required to provide the secretary and other relevant offices with an advance copy of its reports before they are released to the public. Operationally, when an IES report is approved for release within IES, the pending release is included in the director’s weekly report to the secretary. Two weeks are allowed for briefing the secretary or any other officials in the department who are interested in the report. During my six years as director, there was no occasion in which the secretary or other senior officials were briefed on a report before it was in final form and approved within IES for release. I expect I would have heard had that changed.

The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 sunsets the Opportunity Scholarship program. It was passed by the House on February 25 and by the Senate on March 10. The IES report would have had to be approved for release and the secretary briefed on it sometime early in this period if the secretary were to be able to alert Congress to the positive findings. It is not plausible that the IES report was approved for release by late February/early March. An annual evaluation report on the program is required by law. There have been 5 previous reports. The reports for the last two years were released in June. The earliest that any prior report has been released was April.

In short, Secretary Duncan and his senior staff would have learned of the positive results from the evaluation of the DC Scholarship program in the last two or three weeks, which is subsequent to congressional action. There is no basis for the claim that he sat on the evidence or was willfully ignorant of it.

There is, however, substantial reason to believe that the secretary didn’t want to draw attention to the report. It was released on a Friday, whereas IES stopped releasing reports on Fridays several years ago when an important report just happened to come out on that day and critics accused the agency of trying to bury it. And there was no department press release or press briefing, which typically occur for important reports, including previous annual reports from this evaluation.

The future of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program is far more important than the contretemps over when the secretary knew what. Many in Congress are on the record that their support of the program in the future would be contingent on findings from the evaluation. Many cited the results from last year’s evaluation, which found no effects on academic achievement, as the basis for voting to terminate the program. Was that a smoke screen to cover their real concerns – separation of church and state, opposition by teachers unions, whatever – or did they really mean that they would be guided by evidence on the program’s effectiveness? The 2009 Appropriations Act provides that funding for the program will end next year UNLESS Congress votes to reauthorize it. There is plenty of time for Congress to hold hearings, deliberate, and make a decision that is informed by the most recent results from the evaluation.

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

The Impact of Milwaukee Charter Schools on Student Achievement

Stéphane Lavertu and John Witte — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:00:00 -0400

Executive Summary

As part of a multi-state evaluation project on the impact of charter school attendance on student achievement, we put together and analyzed panel data on Milwaukee Public School (MPS) students spanning the 2000-01 through 2006-07 school years. Specifically, we employed “fixed effects” models to estimate the impact of charter school attendance on student gain scores on mathematics and reading achievement tests. We found that:

charter school attendance is associated with higher scores on mathematics exams than attendance at traditional public schools, but there is no statistically significant relationship between charter school attendance and performance on reading exams;
positive results in mathematics are due to student performance in the initial years of the program—the performance of charter schools and traditional public schools is statistically indistinguishable for the most recent years of our study;
the positive impact of charter schools on achievement (relative to traditional public schools) declines as the number of years a student has attended a charter school increases;
charter schools that have operated for a number of years and those that had been traditional public schools drive the positive charter school results;
student mobility has a negative effect on performance and it is a more robust predictor of student performance than the organizational factors we consider;
there is no evidence that the presence of charter schools induces better student performance in traditional public schools.

We conclude that while charter schools overall may help the education of urban youth, our study of Milwaukee indicates that they should not be expected to be the silver bullet that some reformers seek. We also suggest that it is important to better understand and deal with instability in school attendance in urban school districts, as it proves to be the most significant determinant of student achievement in all of our statistical models.

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Authors

Stéphane Lavertu
John Witte