THE PAROCHIALISM OF CHOICE:

After Milwaukee: The most heralded experiment in education teaches us valuable lessons. (Frederick M. Hess, September 24, 2008, The American)

Despite political victories, early promises about school choice have lost much of their luster. While research suggests that some participating students benefit from private school vouchers, these results may largely reflect the ability of students in places like New York City or Washington, D.C. to find empty seats in established parochial schools. There is little evidence that voucher or choice programs have succeeded in fostering the emergence or expansion of high-quality options.

Similar concerns plague the charter movement nationally, even as the number of charter schools has surged above 4,000 and charter enrollment has passed the one million mark. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has compared the performance of students in district and charter schools, reporting, “After adjusting for student characteristics, charter school mean scores in reading and mathematics were lower, on average, than those for public noncharter schools.” While there is reason to be quite cautious about inferring policy implications from such research—because it cannot determine how much students are actually learning during the school year and because charters spend less than do district schools—the results are hardly compelling. Stig Leschly, executive director of the Newark Charter School Fund, has observed that only about 200 of the thousands of existing charter schools “really close the achievement gap.” Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, has argued for stepping up efforts to “cull the bottom-feeders.”

Milwaukee illustrates the uneven quality of new providers and reminds us that high performing schools are (like so many nonprofits) ill-equipped to expand in response to demand. Indeed, it has taken the celebrated KIPP schools—operated by an organization lauded for its aggressive expansion—14 years to grow to 65 schools enrolling 16,000 students in a nation where 95,000 K–12 district schools enroll 50 million students. Even today, the national KIPP network serves just one-sixth as many students as the Milwaukee public school system. The struggle to find capital and talent, overcome regulatory obstacles, and maintain quality has forced even growth-minded KIPP to move at a pace that would be considered maddeningly slow in almost any other sector (14 years, after all, was more than enough time for ventures like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to grow from boutique firms to omnipresent brands serving millions of customers).

Milwaukee isn’t the only city where choice advocates have been disappointed by developments. Among the eight cities where charter schools enroll 20 percent or more of students are Detroit, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio; and Washington, D.C. In 2007, Education Week reported that, despite a substantial charter presence, Detroit had the highest dropout rate among the nation’s large school systems. A 2008 analysis found that just 57 percent of Youngstown’s charter schools, and just 38 percent of its district schools, met Ohio’s growth targets for student improvement in reading and math.

In a 2007 study of Washington, D.C., which has one of the nation’s highest rates of charter school enrollment, researchers Margaret Sullivan, Dean Campbell, and Brian Kisida found no evidence of improvement in D.C. public schools even as they lost nearly a third of their students to charter school competition. They traced inaction to a district “hampered by political dynamics and burdensome regulations.” They explained, “District leaders, preoccupied with leadership problems and administrative headaches, have concentrated their efforts on politics, budgeting, and school choice, leaving individual schools to respond to charter school competition on their own,” and principals have not responded “to competition from charter schools in the ways that elites expected because they do not have the appropriate autonomy and resources to do so.”

This is something less than was advertised. In fact, a decade ago, when charter and voucher enrollment was only a fraction of today’s, some proponents claimed the fruits of competition were already obvious. In 1999, David Osborne, coauthor of Reinventing Government, wrote in The New Republic, “Those who invented charter schools . . . wanted to improve all 88,000 public schools in the country [and] . . . empirical studies have demonstrated that, indeed, competition works just as the reformers predicted.” That same year, the Heritage Foundation’s Nina Rees reported, “Though still in their infancy, school choice programs have improved overall student academic achievement in public schools.”

In romanticizing school choice, enthusiasts have typically made two key mistakes. First, they have not fully considered what it takes for market-based reform to deliver results at scale. Second, they have mistaken the presence of choice for the reality of competition. Unless these challenges are addressed, political victories will prove pyrrhic—yielding modest results, sowing disillusionment, and fostering the perception that choice was just one more educational fad.

There's an exquisite irony in the fact that the Catholic Church, hardly identified with capitalism and libertarianism, affords the only consistently good alternative for those with a choice.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2008 7:13 AM