“On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers’ effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience.” …Ms. Hannaway notes, “Students are better off being exposed to teachers with a high level of skill.”
Do you think the teachers’ unions agree with that? Uh, no…. The study referenced in this WSJ op-ed is from the Urban Institute: The Effect of Teach for America on Student Performance in High School. All I’ve had time to read is the Urban Institute summary — the conclusions look plausible, but let’s look for objective critiques of the study. I’ve read enough education study results to appreciate that it isn’t trivial to get reliable, repeatable results.
Today I heard a brief interview on the Cato Daily Podcast with economist John Merrifield. Merrifield is the author of a new Cato Policy Analysis which demonstrates that none of the essential ingredients of free markets exist in any of the US experiments. He is correct — but I had not focused on that fact until he raised it. Periodically we hear of some new study reporting that “we proved markets don’t work that well in education”. That’s rubbish, even advanced school choice systems like the Netherlands are nothing like real markets.
…The most intensely studied programs lack most or all of the key elements of market systems, including profit, price change, market entry, and product differentiation— factors that are normally central to any discussion of market effects. In essence, researchers have drawn conclusions about apples by studying lemons.
Merrifield suggests that for now, in the absence of any real world education markets, that
…economists should look to simulation models, indirect evidence such as outcomes in similar industries, and school systems abroad that enjoy varying degrees of market accountability.
Cato-at-liberty:
Matt Yglesias points to an article in Sunday’s Washington Post by economist Robert Frank that makes a strong case for school choice. Well, OK, he doesn’t explicitly talk about school choice, but he certainly does a good job explaining the problems caused by the absence of choice:
In the 1950s, as now, families tried to buy houses in the best school districts they could afford. But strict credit limits held the bidding in check. Lenders typically required down payments of 20 percent or more and would not issue loans for more than three times a borrower’s annual income.
In a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided move to help more families enter the housing market, borrowing restrictions were relaxed during the intervening decades. Down payment requirements fell steadily, and in recent years, many houses were bought with no money down. Adjustable-rate mortgages and balloon payments further boosted families’ ability to bid for housing.
…
The most important thing to note, though, is that the scarcity of good schools Frank identifies is not an inherent fact about the universe, but a consequence of the public school monopoly. In a competitive education market, a shortage of good schools in a given area would spur people to either start new schools or expand the best of the existing ones. But the public school system has few mechanisms for doing either of those things (charter schools are a very limited mechanism for starting innovative public schools). Which means that the supply of good public schools is artificially limited, leading parents to bid up their price. The way to alleviate the shortage of good schools is not to re-regulate the mortgage market, but to reform the education system so that it’s easier to start and expand high-quality schools. Few things would do that as effectively as a robust program of school choice.
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At Cato Unbound, Richard Rothstein wrote the lead essay, which opens:
In 1983, A Nation at Risk misidentified what is wrong with our public schools and consequently set the nation on a school reform crusade that has done more harm than good.
The diagnosis of the National Commission on Excellence in Education was flawed in three respects: First, it wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning.
…I do not suggest that American schools are adequate, that American students’ level of achievement in math and reading is where it should be, that American schools have been improving as rapidly as they should, or that the achievement gap is narrowing to the extent needed to give us any satisfaction. I only suggest that we should approach fixing a system differently if we believe its outcomes are slowly improving than if we believe it is collapsing. And we owe the latter, flawed assumption, to A Nation at Risk.
I didn’t find Rothstein’s essay very useful. He seems to be of the Krugman school of social policy, mainly criticizing education reformers and finding little fault with the monopoly public education system. As Sol Stern closed his essay:
Instead, he’s still waiting for the European-style welfare state that will never come.
There are three reaction essays: Michael Strong, Sol Stern, and Frederick Hess.
I didn’t find Rothstein’s essay very useful. He seems to be of the Krugman school of social policy, mainly criticizing education reformers and finding little fault with the monopoly public education system. As Sol Stern closed his essay:
Instead, he’s still waiting for the European-style welfare state that will never come.
I found the Hess essay especially compelling:
…Rather than ask why teacher colleges should hold a monopoly on teacher preparation, why technological advances were not yielding labor-saving practices or new efficiencies, or why schools and classrooms serving very different student populations should be expected to operate in similar ways and in accord with similar rules, the commission focused on recommending more academic courses, more instructional time, and higher standards for teachers.
…Along the way, little attention has been paid to the design of these efforts to deregulate a $500 billion a year industry, fostering a vibrant supply of effective providers, nurturing effective mechanisms for quality control, or understanding the multiplicity of arrangements and practices that stifle even nontraditional schools and service providers. For instance, the choice community has had next to nothing to say about the need for venture capital in education, about the ways in which personnel policies and benefit systems stifle new ventures, or about how consumer choices should impact the compensation and job security of educators and school leaders.
One result is that some who were once enthusiastic proponents of “choice” have reversed course and expressed doubts about the viability of educational markets — without ever having stopped to consider all the ways in which simply promoting one-off choice programs falls desperately short of any serious effort to thoughtfully deregulate schooling or promote a coherent K-12 marketplace. Indeed, some have abandoned the choice bandwagon with the same ill-considered haste that marked their initial enthusiasm.
For decades, we have poured money into schooling while seeing few obvious benefits. Current per-pupil spending in constant dollars more than tripled between 1961-62 and 2003-04, from $2,603 to $8,886. Pupil-to-teacher ratios plunged, from 25.1 students per teacher in 1965 to 15.3 per teacher in 2007. Meanwhile, educational progress has been disappointing, at best, over the past quarter-century. This is the epitome of pushing on a string. In an economy marked by new technologies, labor-saving devices, steady growth in productivity, and an evolving labor pool, we are hiring and deploying educators just the way we did a half-century ago. The result is that new investments have not delivered the hoped-for results.
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For more than 80 years, independent schools have been the preferred choice of parents in the Netherlands, with the number of schools and student enrollment outpacing the public school sector by a large percentage.
…This struggle ended with an amendment to the constitution, passed in 1917, that guaranteed equal funding for public and independent schools. Within a few years, close to 70% of students were attending independent schools. The Dutch education system had changed from a state-organized monopoly into a system that gave priority to parental choice and freedom of education. It continues to flourish today.
Sweden is only following in the footsteps of the successful experience of Denmark and the Netherlands. For more background, here’s a five-page report on the Swedish revolution from the Canadian think tank Frontier Centre for Public Policy:
Executive Summary More than a decade ago, Sweden reversed its long history of centralized school administration and adopted a school voucher program.
- Allowing parents a choice of schools rapidly expanded the number of independent schools.
- Schools that receive vouchers must except students regardless of ability or background, and must not charge tuition beyond the value of the voucher.
- Independent schools may not consider academic ability as a standard of admission.
- Non-state schools now house more than ten percent of school-age children; most are located in large cities, and few have opened in rural areas, although that is changing.
- Independent schools typically specialize in certain styles of pedagogy; they tend to be smaller in size than municipal schools.
- The growth of private schools has not harmed municipal schools; in fact, they have improved their performance in response to competition for students.
- Independent schools have increased the level of socio-economic diversity, as students from poor neighbourhoods can now attend schools located in more affluent areas.
- The school voucher system has garnered wide public and political acceptance.
Here’s a four-page report on the Netherlands school choice system, which provides 100% funding of private/independent schools.
Executive Summary
- Parents in the Netherlands enjoy a nation-wide system of free choice between public or independent schools, with no cachment areas.
- Non-profit organizations or groups of parents and teachers can organize and manage a school if minimum requirements are met.
- These freedoms have resulted in a comparatively diverse supply of schools.
- The central government provides a national curriculum and exams.
- Teacher salaries and work conditions are regulated through national collective agreements.
- Independent schools are protected by the constitutional right to freedom of organization, allowing a high degree of managerial autonomy.
- Around 70% of primary and secondary pupils attend independent schools.
- The money follows the child. The principle that governs the flow of funds is that of invisible per capita financing.
- School budgets depend on enrolment and vary according to demand in both public and independent schools.
- Government covers the full cost of schooling. There is no parental “topping up”, but financial contributions to extra-curricular activities are permitted.
- Schools with enrolling students from less privileged backgrounds receive more government money.
- If this model were applied to Manitoba, school boards would be eliminated and the system of passing along costs to local property owners by means of property taxes would cease to exist. Funding would simply follow the student and there would no longer be an administrative middleman to complicate lines of accountability
Lastly, a short report on Denmark, which has about 75% funding of the full cost, with parents contributing $720/yr [CD$ I think].
Teachers’ unions have traditionally opposed the idea of school choice, which they see as a direct threat to our system of universal primary and secondary education.
This reasoning is flawed. In fact, more choice tends to strengthen public schools, as recent evidence from Denmark indicates. In September, the Fraser Institute took a look at the Danish experience with public school vouchers. It turns out that schools there were all better off when parents are allowed to shop around.
The Danes have a long history of offering a diversified school product, a result of their fervent embrace of religious autonomy and parental control over education. When they made basic education compulsory in 1849, they also guaranteed parents would be able to send their children to the schools of their choice for whatever reasons moved them, whether religious, academic or political.
Vouchers in Denmark pay about 75% of the full cost of sending a child to private school. Believing that parental interest and control would suffer if the state footed the whole bill, the government requires families to pay around $720 a year for each child enrolled in an independent school. This small out-of-pocket touch makes parents “price-sensitive” customers. More basically, choice produces a powerful incentive for results. Compare, the competitive, choice-based Danish model with our own “free”, cost-plus monopoly system. The Danes educate a student for under $2900 and score higher on international literacy and math tests. Manitobans pay about $7000 per public school student, even though results are lower.
The Danes — including those in the Education Ministry — believe wider choice has improved government schools. To quote the Fraser report, “Danish municipal schools imitate successful practices pioneered in the independent sector because they risk losing pupils and popular support if they do not.” According to the OECD, “Municipal schools are starting to replicate the [independent school] model of parental involvement. . . .”
FCPP has more research resources on school choice at The Education Frontiers Project.
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FCPP is another excellent resource, with links to other studies:
In Brief:
- Sweden created a competitive school market by introducing vouchers in 1992.
- Subsequent rapid growth in independent schools has garnered wide public support, even from teachers’ unions.
- Although ethnic and religious segregation has increased, class integration is declining as poor children find better schools.
- The Swedish success confirms similar evidence from vouchered American states.
The principle that inspires them—that the best use of governments’ funding power is to direct resources, not to provide services directly—is also finding wider support in mature welfare states. The recent use of school vouchers in Sweden, where splitting the purchaser from the provider improved healthcare efficiency, offers another object lesson.
The Swedes started to use vouchers in elementary and middle schools in 1992, with the passage of national legislation called Freedom of Choice and Independent Schools, and expanded the program two years later to include high schools. Rapidly growing private, for-profit companies like Kunskapsskolan have introduced unique curricula to attract vouchered students.
In North America, vouchers are already in use in six of the United States and the District of Columbia, and many more are hearing increasingly vocal demands for such alternatives to assist children trapped in low-performing inner-city schools. The Province of Ontario installed a form of them in 2002 by expanding tax credits for children in private schools. A 2001 Compas poll reported that 57 percent of the Canadian public supports the use of vouchers.
Why, then, don’t we have them already? In spite of abundant evidence that provincial education systems cost more and deliver less than students, parents and their communities want, special interest groups like teachers’ unions stand in the way. In terms of influence, “educrats” will lose the most from the systemic decentralization of public schools. Competitive schools mean less concentrated bargaining power and more merit pay for teachers, long the bête noire of their powerful professional organizations.
What happened in Sweden may change some of their minds. The two largest teachers’ unions are converts to the voucher system, probably because their colleagues who work inside the burgeoning market for independent schools are generally more satisfied with working conditions than those who remain in public schools. In a poll conducted by Svenskt Näringsliv, the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, students overwhelmingly confirmed they liked the new freedom of choice.
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Robert Holland on the Swedish revolution in School Reform News — excerpt”
School choice has come to Sweden in a big way over the past 10 years, confounding widespread perceptions of the Swedes as statists and providing inspiration for supporters of market-based education reform in the U.S.
Sweden has the highest rate of taxation in the West and the highest ratio of public spending to GNP of the industrialized nations. For all but nine years during the postwar era, the Social Democrats have ruled this Scandinavian country.
Yet, as a result of a top-to-bottom education reform launched in 1991-92, virtually anyone can start a school in Sweden and receive public funding. Families are free to choose whatever state-subsidized school they prefer for their children, including those run by churches.
After 10 years, what lessons can be learned from Swedish education reform?
School Choice Works
“The main lesson to be learned from the Swedish reforms is that school choice works,” concluded Swedish economists and researchers Mikael Sandström and Fredrik Bergström in a January 2003 study for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. “Sweden has left behind an almost completely centralized system, with tight national control of schooling and a minuscule role for non-governmental institutions.”
In short, Sweden has done a 180-degree turn in education over the past decade, in the process generating a number of positive results. Although the U.S. is far behind Sweden and much of Western Europe in school choice–ironically so, given the vibrancy of the American market economy–the researchers believe there are a number of lessons the U.S. can take from Sweden.
Among the positive outcomes they found from Sweden’s shift to free educational choice:
- The number of independent schools has increased fivefold. Under Swedish law, they now must be funded equally with the municipal schools–as Swedish public schools are known–once they have received approval to operate.
- Attendance in independent schools has quadrupled.
- Student performance in Sweden’s government-run schools has increased, the apparent result of competition from a much-increased supply of schools.
- Most of the independent schools are run by for-profit educational management companies, with no negative effect on the quality of education.
- Free choice under a voucher-style approach has not led to advantages for the elite rich. In fact, poorer Swedes choose independent schools at higher rates than do affluent families.
- While there are differences of opinion within the teaching profession, the Swedish teacher unions have not opposed school choice. Surveys show teachers tend to prefer working in the independent schools because they find the climate for teaching better there.
Were full choice to become the norm in the U.S., perhaps American teachers would begin to wonder why their unions have demonized vouchers. The study notes that when teachers can choose not only among several municipal schools but also many independent schools, they benefit by being able to market their skills and choose a school that best fits their interests.
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The Conservative Party is trying to introduce a free market education system into the U.K. In this Spectator piece Fraser Nelson examines the success of the Swedish reforms. A fragment:
This summer, at least 25,000 children will drop out of English schools without a single qualification to show for their years of compulsory education. Some 240,000 will graduate from primary school unable to read or write properly. By autumn, some 250 schools judged to be failing will welcome an intake of new pupils. Youth unemployment will probably hit an 11-year high. It will, tragically, be just another year in one of the world’s highest-funded education systems.
…He would, in short, seek to bring the Swedish education revolution to Britain. When Mr Cameron first promised to do this at the Tory conference in Blackpool (along with Wisconsin-style welfare reform), it sounded a rather abstract idea, the stuff of think-tank seminars rather than everyday life. Yet in the last five months Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, has been carefully designing a blueprint which would enable the establishment of a new breed of local independent schools, funded by the state but not run by it. It is potentially a plan of huge significance.
…Today one in every eight schools in Sweden is a so-called ‘free school’ — some 900 already, with a further 1,550 applications granted last year. That said, Hultin also points out that most of these applications do not result in new schools. ‘Many applications are by parents wanting to pressure a council which is threatening to close down a local school,’ he says. So of course, if the council backs down, the application is unnecessary. This tactic is hard to comprehend in Britain. Swedish parents don’t protest against school closures — they simply apply to open a rival school. This prevents councils from amalgamating good small schools into ever-larger educational warehouses.
Part of the Conservatives’ problem in selling the policy is trying to get across the idea of a system where pupils choose schools, and not vice versa. Where parents on council estates are inundated with leaflets from schools competing to educate their child. And where fee-charging private schools might revert to the purpose they served before the comprehensive era: social clubs for the richest.
The first question you might ask is: how would people find the buildings? This question takes as its premise the Grange Hill model of a secondary which has, alas, become the norm in England. The average English school here now has a roll of a thousand pupils — whereas the new breed of Swedish schools averages just 180 pupils. So new schools can, and usually do, open in a former office.
Per Ledin, head of Kunskapsskolan group, which owns 25 schools, explained the process to me. ‘Most office buildings are constructed in a way that it’s no big deal to tear down a wall and make a classroom.’ But don’t the council schools put up a fight against their new competition? ‘Of course,’ he shrugs. ‘They say, “We already have 500 surplus school places, so please, no more misery.” But it doesn’t work. The 1992 Act says new schools can only be blocked on very specific grounds.’
This is the secret to the system’s success (which the Tories would replicate): a central body granting planning and financial permission. New schools cannot be blackballed by jealous local authorities as they are in Britain. Mr Blair could only look on and weep last year when councillors in the deprived borough of Tower Hamlets rejected Goldman Sachs’s offer to open a city academy. Even now Lord Adonis, the schools minister, is being dragged into the High Court by groups trying to stop the government opening new schools.
The second charge is that this funding system creates educational apartheid. If money follows pupils, won’t a socially damaging segregation between the best and worst schools be a natural consequence? Were it not for the evidence of the Swedish model, it would be easy to imagine any such proposal being still-born in this country. But there is now a mass of academic studies — one surveying 28,000 pupils — showing that such fears are unjustified. In education, a rising tide really does lift all boats. The older schools improve as they are galvanised by the pressure of the new: shape up, or lose pupils and money. It works.
What is perhaps most surprising about these new schools is their Spartan appearance. In the south of Stockholm I visited Enskede School, which could not strike a greater contrast with the flagship city academies I have been shown around in England. There are no trophy buildings, interactive whiteboards or other gizmos. There is an Ikea-style simplicity at work. The classrooms have tables and chairs, but not much else. Playgrounds are converted car parks. But no one seems to mind.
…Yet there is one part of the Swedish system which is too openly capitalist even for the Tories: allowing schools to make a profit. In the Prime Minister’s Office in Stockholm’s old town, Mikael Sandström, a state secretary for the Moderate party administration, explains why the Tories are wrong. ‘If you’re a not-for-profit school, then the longer the waiting list the better,’ he says. ‘It’s a lot of trouble to expand, so they don’t. Also, profit-making schools have been shown to have less social segregation.’ And then he says something one would be surprised to hear in the White House, let alone the Rosenbad in Stockholm. ‘The question for me is whether we should abolish non-profit-making schools,’ Sandström says. I am not at all sure he was joking.
I visited another school which illustrates Sandström’s point. Engelska Skolan, which teaches primary children in English, had two founders who disagreed whether to seek profit. They went their separate ways. The original school still stands, on its own in a trust, six applicants for every place. The profit-making version is now a chain of eight English-speaking schools. If the waiting list grows big enough, they open another one.
Technorati Tags: School Choice
Thanks to Tom Clougherty for this link:
The Stockholm Network released its latest policy video yesterday, this time tackling education reform and commending the Swedish model. Summing up the video’s message, Helen Disney, the SN’s director, said: “The State should continue to fund most primary and secondary education, but such money ought to follow pupils in the form of a voucher and be spent in a much more competitive and open market of independent providers. Learning from the Swedish policy agenda which has greatly encouraged school choice, parents and teachers must be allowed to set up their own schools where there is a critical mass of local support.” Hear, hear.
The video is not to be missed!
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