"Sidestepping the issue..."?
From the Post:
Spellings said that if schools cannot show progress after six years of required improvements under the federal No Child Left Behind law, then parents must be offered a way out for their children.Earth to reporter: the accountability comes from the parents. They don't think the school is performing? They take their child and their voucher somewhere else (as opposed to waiting for someone at the top of a large bureaucracy to decree, five-ten years later, "We think perhaps this school is not doing well."[...]Spellings was later pressed by reporters on whether private schools would be held to the same accountability standards under the plan, since they would be taking public money.
"Well, as we have gotten very sophisticated about data and measurements in public schools, I think parents have come to expect that, they have come to expect report cards not only about their child but about the quality of their schools," she said, sidestepping the question. "I certainly am a strong believer of accountability in education."
The whole point in the voucher program is to make schools accountable to the students and their parents. Matter of fact, if the system works correctly, it should be quite simple for the federal government to gauge the effectiveness of private schools when there are more vouchers available...there won't be any vouchered students attending.
There has been a bit of press and a bit of blogging regarding the education report (found here) cited in this article. Much of it (especially in the press) well off the mark.
Bottom line highlighted in the press: When viewed as 'blocs' - public or private - schools perform similarly in many cases.
REAL bottom line: that doesn't matter. What matters is the school YOUR child attends and the options YOU have to help your child succeed. Viewed from this perspective, it is largely irrelevant if the generic 'public' school does better or worse than the generic 'private' school. It matters that your child goes to the best school you can find...and you, as a parent can hold that school responsible for its performance. For someone trapped with a chronically underperforming public school, it is small comfort that, overall, public schools are not as bad as theirs, wouldn't you say?
9 comments:
I work in education and unfortunately it's children of disadvantaged families who get "left behind" at the underperforming schools...for lack of transportation or options that require tuition. It's criminal....we spend huge money for defense....and a fraction on education.
oh, and how do you maintain all of these blogs? Whew!
I really don't post to the MSN deal anymore and I try to push most of my deeper thoughts over here (as opposed to 360). It's usually pretty easy to tell when my work schedule starts to slack because my sites become a lot more active...
I'll comment on the specifics of your words here later. I was actually thinking about your job and your opinions after I wrote this.
On the money issue...US education remains near the top of the list within the OECD. Comparing defense spending (which I also think is too high...) to education spending doesn't really get us very far because it's an apples and screws sort of argument.
The two have such different requirements, infrastructure, and purposes (and, of course, defense of the nation is listed clearly as a federal responsibility within the Constitution while education is not...).
A possible benefit of the voucher program is that much of the money for education is tied up in bureaucracy and infrastructure...in other words, building a facility to house the bureaucracy that sits in DC in order to conduct expensive research in order to tell a parent (who should already know this)..."Hey, your school sucks (or does not suck)." The more money you dump into federal agencies, the less efficient they become...with DOD being the perfect example.
Here's a link to the OECD education survey from 2005 with a spending comparison between OECD nations.
Link
Being someone who has taught in inner-city schools in both NY and DC (public and charter), and seeing the advantages and disadvantages of each I think the voucher program is a terrible idea. It's typical of a government that has shown that its only interest is holding schools 'accountable' nad not actually improving them. They'll make standards higher, but give no additional money for resources or teacher training. sounds backwards right?
And how are students to be chosen? Will it be the best tudents in the poorest schools, thereby making the public schools even worse? More than likely, it will NOT be the students who are 'trapped' in failing schools, because if the idea was really to give EVERY child a proper education they would attempt to improve the existing schools instead of telling parents to flee.
And a program for 28,000 students is a drop in the bucket. There aren't even that many students in DC!!
But like Tim said, education is not guaranteed in the constitution, so why should anyone care about the public schools anyway?
It's clear that the Department of Education has already given up on public schools. The schools that serve mostly poor and immigrant families...
think it's a coincidence? Probably not....
ad what will happen once the private school parents get wind of this? the will just send THEIR kids someplace else.
I am completely in support of education vouchers, or any legislation for that matter, that offers parental choice. I am a true believer in competition in traditionally government-only enterprises. Competition forces educators to innovate and provide a superior product to the consumer (students).
While I can harp all day on the disparity in allocation of money to education vs. defense, there has never been a study that proves more money increases the quality of education in any substantial or meaningful way. It's like throwing money at poor people without sending them to school to aquire the skills to move ahead in life. It breeds perpetual dependency rather than sustainability.
The problem with education in our country is systemic rather....it's an inability to adapt to a dynamic economy and the skill sets required to be successfull in that economy. It's an inability to teach fiscal responsibility to generations of entitlement programs. (i use this analogy in so much as I was raised by a welfare mother who would work harder to keep her eligibility rather than aquire the skills to be self-sufficient).
I think it has less to do with economics than it does with the importance that we place on education. Which is as you know, is why it drives me insane to hear anyone in American revere "the common man" and have disdain for the overly educated man. When we stop equating education with eliticism..then we can start rebuilding our education system in such a way that at least is competitive with the rest of the world. Is this a novel yet...?
AEK,
From your perspective (and experiences) where is the leverage point? Where do we put money and resources in to see adequate (or measurable) returns coming out?
"Federal education funding increased tenfold between 1965 and 2001 and has more than doubled since 1990...."
"Spending per student has nearly doubled in the past 30 years, but test scores have seen no significant improvement."
link
Yes...that comes from the Heritage Foundation which many will say is on the right (or libertarian...depending on your ideological viewpoint) of the political spectrum but I'm referencing more the 'fact sheet' in the sidebar than anything else.
Where can we put additional resources that will generate more positive results? Simply dumping more money "into the system" doesn't appear to have worked particularly well. I would assume that's because the system is broken at some level (or levels). Would you view that as an incorrect assumption?
The education issue is complex, and there really is no magic bullet, but in working with school districts across the country, you can bet that I have seen some consistencies in bad practices.
The first is the tendency of teacher’s unions to paralyze education. While holding teachers accountable is not the entire problem, it is certainly a big part of the problem. How many industries in this country offer such benefits as tenure? Very few, because a bad employee is bad for business…and that is also the case with education. The power of teachers unions makes it extremely difficult to get rid of the bad ones. The union in my state is also by and large responsible for spreading misinformation about both charter schools and vouchers…whether their motive is ignorance or malice, their actions are unethical.
Second, our education is program driven. This needs to stop as well…creating more programs creates more expensive bureaucracy that is neither sustainable nor effective. Funding for intervention needs to be targeted and prevalent in the elementary grades. Students who are failing at 3rd grade are not likely to graduate. I have seen many schools create what they call “swat teams” whose job it is to observe language arts and math instruction…they are trained to identify the kids who are struggling with the material and they swoop in to help that child to better understand…this has been very effective and it does not involve what is referred to as a “pull out program”.
To address the other commenter’s concerns on vouchers, he couldn’t be more wrong. I have seen a very successful voucher program in Milwaukee. In a non-performing school traditionally, it was only parents with financial means who actually had choice in education, while the poorest were forced to endure a mediocre education. Vouchers give even the poorest the option of leaving, certainly this may not affect the disinterested parents who are not involved in their child’s education….but that is a personal matter, not one for legislation.
In response to the comments,
I agree that the problem with education is systemic. I would also agree that dumping more money into the system before there are CONCRETE PLANS on EXACTLY how and what the money is going to be used for is not the answer. there are programs in public schools across the country that work and those programs should be duplicated across the country.
I also agree that if teachers unions fought more for the rights of the students, we might be better off.
I believe in holding teahcers accountable, but only if you've given them all the tools they need to be successful. You can not throw someone just out of college into the classroom with no training or professional development and expect them to succeed. A few will, but not the majority.
It is things like this that are the reason so many public school are failing. there is no real plan to try adn change them. While I don't agree that we should just GIVE parents money to send their children elsewhere, I also do not feel that public schools should have to "compete" with the private schools when their "consumers" are not the same.
"In particular, private schools are “schools of choice.” Without further information,such as measures of prior achievement, there is no way to determine how patterns of self-selection may have affected the estimates presented. That is, the estimates of the average difference in school mean scores are confounded with average differences in the student populations, which are not fully captured by the selected student characteristics employed in this analysis."--NEA Report on Public v. Private Schools
and that comes from the very report that began this discussion.It is such a huge bureaucracy that we can look at stats like "$1400/yr are spent on every pupil in the U.S.", but is it really? Education spending has gone up, but hasn't the population as well? It's obvious that more money is going to be spent. the question is, how is it being spent? Maybe if less money was spent on making up tests and more money on actually teaching and training, the numbers wouldn't be so skewed.
Money per students has doubled since 1965 with no test score improvement, but how many times has "The test" been changed?
Statistics tell the stories they want to tell. When you work in a school, the stories are there in front of your face... and the solutions aren't as simple as giving parents their "freedom papers".
AEK,
Great points all. The issue I've found with 'first hand experience' vs. statistics is that both offer what I can only call 'false objectivity.' Yes, statistics can and are often skewed or misinterpreted...but personal experience is often just that...the subjective experience of one person - or a small group of people that can be so far removed from the norm that it offers little value added unless combined with a substantial pool of other first hand accounts. An excellent example of this would be the disagreement between yourself and Javacat. Both of you have a great deal of practical, real-world experience. Yet you disagree. Who had/has more 'valid' experiences? Is there really any way to judge? Obviously the trick remains combining personal experience with data analysis (statistics) and looking for correlation. That's the tough part when there is so data AND so much personal experience available - and so much of it is either contradictory or open to interpretation.
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