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News & ArtsWednesday, January 18, 2012
Education / Politics / Economy Maybe Public Schools Would Benefit from Less Competition...
Posted by Goldy on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 10:44 AM
Charter school proponents like to revel in their self-proclaimed boldness at rejecting public education orthodoxy: "It is hard to be here bucking against the system the way it’s always been done," Representative Eric Petigrew proudly bemoaned at a press conference announcing his charter school legislation, echoing countless other pro-charter school "progressives" before him.
Yet inherent in the very notion of charter schools is another orthodoxy, one so deeply entrenched in American culture that few elected officials seem capable of even mustering the imagination, let alone the will, to challenge it. The fundamental and driving principle behind charter schools is that by giving students and parents a choice, competition will force improvements in public education as a whole. As such, the charter school movement is as pure an expression of America's blind faith in the magic of markets, as anything you'll find in field of the economics. The unchallenged assumption behind charter schools is that competition is good.
But consider the contrary—and given that public schools have had stiff competition from their private and parochial counterparts since the inception of public education in the 19th century, there is plenty of evidence to consider.
Imagine for a moment that we outlawed private education, and mandated that all children between the ages of 5 and 18 attend their neighborhood public school until they graduate or age out. Instantly, average test scores would rise. That's just math.
Public schools must take all comers, while most private schools have minimum admissions standards beneath which students simply are not welcome, be it due to academic ability, special needs, or disciplinary issues. Students at private schools are more likely to be prepared to learn, and to have parents involved in their educations. Drive these students from their more exclusive schools back into the public school system, and average aggregate test scores will surely rise. You know, like magic.
But behind this test score facade, the schools themselves will improve too, for when parents of means and/or motivation have no other choice but to enroll their children in their neighborhood school, they will not only demand improvement, they will have the financial and personal resources to back it up. These are parents, on average, who are more willing and able to invest time and money in their children's schools, and who, on average are more highly educated themselves. And, when all our children are dependent on the same state-financed public education system, it becomes much easier to build the political consensus to force our lawmakers to properly fund it. Private schools allow many families to opt out of the public school debate, arguably to the detriment of public education as a whole.
Now, I'm not proposing that we should outlaw private education, but it is reasonable to suggest that doing so might make our public schools better. And if eliminating private competition would arguably improve our public schools, isn't it also reasonable to suggest that creating more competition through charter schools could actually make the remaining public schools even worse, not just by diverting public resources—something, at least, that private schools generally don't do—but by cherry-picking the best students and the most motivated families, leaving behind those who, in aggregate, are more difficult and expensive to educate?
Go ahead, challenge this thesis that competition is bad for public education. Pick it apart all you want. But don't you dare do so while leaving the opposite thesis entirely unchallenged: that competition is always good.
See, that's the thing about charter schools that is too often absent from the public debate. Pettigrew's charter school legislation is an education reform without education reforms, that proposes no theory, no formula for restructuring the classroom or the curricula. Instead, it proposes creating a competitive marketplace for public schools—competition through which better schools will magically arise. It is a reform that is based entirely upon an unchallenged assumption, even in the face of a growing body of evidence that suggests that this assumption is wrong.
There are no comprehensive, peer reviewed studies that conclude that, on average, students in charter schools perform better than their counterparts in traditional public schools. In fact, there is evidence that about a third of charter school students do worse! That is why former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch, who championed charter schools under the George H.W. Bush administration and throughout the 1990s, has since become one of the movement's harshest and most vocal critics. "[T]he promise has not been fulfilled," Ravitch wrote in a March, 2010, guest column in the Wall Street Journal, in which she cited a pro-charter-funded study to back her conclusion that "deregulation and privately managed charter schools were not the answer to the deep-seated problems of American education."
What we need is not a marketplace, but a coherent curriculum that prepares all students. And our government should commit to providing a good school in every neighborhood in the nation, just as we strive to provide a good fire company in every community.
On our present course, we are disrupting communities, dumbing down our schools, giving students false reports of their progress, and creating a private sector that will undermine public education without improving it. Most significantly, we are not producing a generation of students who are more knowledgable, and better prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship. That is why I changed my mind about the current direction of school reform.
Ravitch, to her credit, allowed real-world results to ultimately challenge her own assumptions about the inherent efficiency and infallibility of the market. Here's hoping local charter school advocates like Pettigrew will allow the facts to challenge their assumptions as well.
The Atlantic
December 29, 2011
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
By Anu Partanen
(Excerpts)
Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.
So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.
Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."
This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.
The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.
From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?
The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.
For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.
As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."
And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Puronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.
Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.
"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."
Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.
Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.
Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.
In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.
In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.
That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus.
"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."
Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.
The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arch…
http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty…
Once you can get rid of the bad teachers, it will improve learning. And before you try and deny bad teachers exist, I have personal experience with at least three teachers who should not be teaching children. Two and a half years of my children being forced to endure bad teachers with no other option.
4
Anyways, probably the better "reform" idea for you to be railing against in terms of the competitive market is vouchers. People can be in favor of charter schools for the "innovation" rationale (as I am), not for the choice rationale. But vouchers are actually solely about choice, and nothing else. And the Milwaukee voucher program has been shown not to improve performance.
As for outlawing private schools, I emphasize that this is a thought experiment intended to prove a point, and prompt people to challenge their assumption that competition is inherently good.
It became a shithole when teacher unions infected the system.
Goldie, you clueless sack of feces-
repeatX500:
"Unions DESTROY EVERY industry they infect"
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@3 - Teachers unions are not the enemy. Yes, bad teachers exist. But teachers unions aren't advocating for keeping bad teachers. They are advocating for a fair and objective way of evaluating teachers before being summarily fired by the whim of an administrator who doesn't like someone. If the state adequately funded public education and paid teachers a competitive wage, they would attract better quality teachers. If they had an evaluation system that wasn't based on a deeply-flawed testing regime, the teachers unions would probably back it.
11
Seriously. The current system may sometimes keep a bad teacher from losing their job, but it also shields good teachers from being forced out by the vendettas of overbearing helicopter parents with unrealistic assessments of their own child's brilliance (or more often, lack thereof).
13
She was out all December and half of January (and (dx'd w/ Asperger's in the interim) before I put her in a local private school. This school had smaller class sizes (15, compared to 25) and a different management style (more child-centered/humane, less CYA). She flourished there--her hair grew back, she wasn't kicked out every two weeks (I think she got sent home once in her first six months there), and she became 'just another student' (rather than 'the problem kid'). The private school she's in now--with small class sizes, and 1/5 'special needs' (Aspergers, autism, social anxiety, etc.) students--does a damn good job providing an education for @ 1/2 the 'per pupil' cost that our local public school district gets.
I support publicly funded education--I think it's hugely important (I would like to see less $$ stoppered up in central administration or tossed away on whim-of-the-moment curriculum changes or testing initiatives), but I am not in favor of outlawing private schools.
*Isolation closet w/ no door knob on the interior; parents had to okay their kid being transferred in but could not transfer their kid out short of pulling them from public school all together; typical constituency of self-contained classrooms (info from teacher friends--the district would give me no info) include children who have been physically/sexually abused and are acting out that abuse. The demographics of this particular classroom at the time I inquired were all male, 11 kids, K-6th grade.
14
There was a very thorough study of nonprofit CMOs just released that looked both at performance vs. local districts and what practices high-performing CMOs tend to employ. The study found that more CMO schools performed better than their local districts than performed worse, but that on average, their performance was about the same as local districts (or to be more precise, the overall average performance was positive vs. districts, but the effect wasn't statistically significant).
There was still a large amount of variation in performance, even looking at just CMOs, not the whole universe of charters. So, I found the discussion about what the really high performing charters are doing pretty interesting (e.g., intensive coaching/monitoring of teachers, school-wide behavior policies). In theory, charter-granting institutions should be looking at this kind of data to make their decisions about who to grant charters to, which would lead to better quality of charters overall.
Anyways, something to keep in mind as you're thinking about this issue.
16
I'd rather have a system in place where my choices were the local school or a private one that I had to pay for myself - namely, the way it was before Bill Bennett was Sec'y of Education. A system in which parents took an interest in their local school because there was no choice. I know that that system wasn't perfect, and plenty of parents gamed it in order to enroll their children in a "better" school. And the kids from the good neighborhoods usually were put in college classes while everyone else was in regular ones, thus continuing the separation of classes out in the real world. But it the system worked out better then. The dropout rate was a fraction of what it is (something like 50%), violence was minimal, expulsions seldom, and the teachers weren't all burnouts.
There's more to the school crisis, both here and in America in general, than the confluence of business, anti-unionism, standardized testing "reform" that makes schools teach to the test, and other pressures, but breaking the ties to the local school has wreaked as much havoc for kids and families who can't exercise the choices I can as it has helped kids who might have gotten lost under the old system. (A major drawback of the "we have to accept everyone" policy is that those kids who can't hack it in private or charter schools get a disproportionate amount of attention over the kids more likely to succeed - another aspect of the vicious circle, if not one of the things that kicked it off.)
Opponents of charter schools in Washington ought to be prepared to counter the pro arguments with remedies for what ails your schools now. Simply digging in, and even pointing out the problems in places like Denver, probably won't be persuasive on their own.
* The "local" elementary school is a mile away, but this charter school, just across the town line, is half that.
Also, we tried choice here in Seattle. It didn't work. It certainly didn't make any schools better.
This is like debating the value of "real" communism instead of what we actually saw when regimes followed Marxist-Leninist principles. In other words, utterly fucking useless.
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