There was a rather extraordinary piece on the WSJ Web site yesterday that I meant to call to your attention, but the piece was so long I couldn’t find a chunk of time long enough to finish reading it myself. Now I have, and I highly recommend it.
Here’s a link. I hope it works for you; I’m never sure since I subscribe to the Journal, and I can never tell what I have access to as a subscriber and what’s free.
The piece, written by an advocate of private-school vouchers, is a point-by-point explanation what’s wrong with the idea that if we just provide market-based options, our education problems will be solved. What really struck me about it was the extent to which it supports pretty much every point we’ve tried to make as to why vouchers and tuition tax credits are a bad fit for South Carolina.
- For "choice," in the sense of vouchers and tax credits, to work at all, there have to be real choices — there has to be someplace for kids and parent to spend those incentives. As we’ve said so many times, it makes zero sense to apply a system designed for dense northern cities with an existing, parallel Catholic school system to South Carolina, where the usual problem is in poor, rural areas where there are no viable private alternatives, and where the population is insufficiently dense for such alternatives to arise as an economic response to vouchers or tax credits. As this writer says (about the Catholic schools that are themselves going away, in spite of the availability of vouchers), "where would the city’s disadvantaged students use vouchers even if they had them?" The question has exponentially greater force in the Corridor of Shame.
- The existence of voucher-backed private competition does NOT cause the public schools to get better. This would seem obvious to most people, who understand that if external pressure were all that was needed, the Accountability Act would have solved all our problems. Ask a teacher whether he or she feels pressure to perform. They’ll probably answer that pressure is about all they feel from the world outside the classroom. As the author says, "sadly — and this is a second development that reformers must face up
to — the evidence is pretty meager that competition from vouchers is
making public schools better."
- The only thing that will improve the public schools is — drumroll here — improving the public schools (which, in the absence of the kind of alternative educational infrastructure northern cities once had, are the only schools most kids will ever have the opportunity to go to, with or without vouchers and tax credits).
Mr. Stern holds up Massachusetts as an example of what works:
Those in the school reform movement seeking a case of truly spectacular academic improvement should look to Massachusetts, where something close to an education miracle has occurred. In the past several years, Massachusetts has improved more than almost every other state on the NAEP tests. In 2007, it scored first in the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. The state’s average scale scores on all four tests have also improved at far higher rates than most other states have seen over the past 15 years.
The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credits, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers. The state owes its amazing improvement in student performance to a few key former education leaders, including state education board chairman John Silber, assistant commissioner Sandra Stotsky, and board member (and Manhattan Institute fellow) Abigail Thernstrom.
Starting a decade ago, these instructionists pushed the state’s board of education to mandate a rigorous curriculum for all grades, created demanding tests linked to the curriculum standards, and insisted that all high school graduates pass a comprehensive exit exam. In its English Language Arts curriculum framework, the board even dared to say that reading instruction in the early grades should include systematic and explicit phonics. Now a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, Ms. Stotsky sums up: "The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum, together with upgraded certification regulations and teacher licensure tests that require teacher preparation programs to address that content, can be the best recipe for improving students’ academic achievement."
Mr. Stern hasn’t abandoned his faith, in spite of the evidence: "Obviously, private scholarship programs ought to keep helping poor families find alternatives to failing public schools." And he remains one of those ideologues who considers "choice" advocates and school "reformers" to be the same set of people. (We see that in South Carolina all too often, in which people who simply don’t buy into the idea of public education decry others for standing in the way of "reform.") But within his own definitions, he asserts that "we should re-examine the direction of school reform."
And I will say yet again, the proper direction is clear. We should implement the kinds of reforms that our editorial board has pushed for years, starting with curriculum standards (which the EAA is meant to address) to such innovations as merit pay for teachers, principals empowered to hire and fire without interference, and consolidation of districts to get money out of administration and into the classroom.
Unfortunately, every effort to implement ANY kind of educational reform — and "reform," when I use it, means fixing schools, not abandoning them — is quickly suffocated by "choice" advocates in our Legislature, who tie their amendments around the neck of any education bill that tries to get through the General Assembly. This, of course, has the the effect on education reform of tying an anvil around the neck of a swimmer, causing all sides to spend all available political energy arguing about their digressions. So we get nowhere.
(that’s him at right, at