Kyle writes:

[F]or decades, we’ve allowed students in need to get federally subsidized loans to attend both public and private colleges and universities. Some states, even provide scholarships and grants that can be used at private institutions of higher learning. So how is it that for years we’ve used public funds to support sending needy children to private schools and the public university system has yet to collapse under the weight of such anti-public measures? Nor has public support for public universities declined in the interim.

First of all, comparing our public education system at the elementary and secondary level to our system of public universities is a lot like comparing apples to arugula. Whereas public schools let anyone sign up and attend for free, public universities are still exclusive institutions, and charge a fee in order to attend.

Second, who says that all these loans and grants have actually benefited poor students?  Many private institutions already had (and still have) their own scholarship programs for low-income students.  There was no need for government’s to subsidize their tuition further. (Actually, many private schools have similar programs at the elementary and secondary levels….)

All that extra federal cash simply allowed public universities to keep raising their tuition higher and higher and higher over the years. That’s the thing about subsidies. The more you subsidize something, the more expensive it becomes.

Who’s to say private schools accepting vouchers wouldn’t simply start charging more for their tuition as well?  I’d say that is a very likely outcome.  Meanwhile, public schools – which don’t charge admission like public universities and which must accept every student who comes knocking – will have fewer resources at their disposal.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t rethink public schools.  We might even find ways to make entire districts operate more like a batch of charter schools, with far more independence and autonomy and creative license.  But providing subsidies to students will only make good education more expensive.  It won’t necessarily destroy the public school system.  But I don’t think it will help it much either.

Rick Hess makes a great deal of sense in his critique of Diane Ravitch (and this bit echoes what Mark Thompson has pushed in the comments, arguments I also find compelling):

A lack of choice can force educators to simultaneously serve families with very different demands and responses to discipline or calls for parental involvement, making it difficult to establish common norms. A lack of autonomy makes it difficult for principals to assemble a team of teachers who embrace shared expectations and instructional principles. The institutional and political turbulence endemic to school systems means that superintendents change jobs every few years, and district priorities and initiatives change along with them. Bureaucratic and contractual rules governing discipline, the school day, or professional development can trip up district leaders seeking to emulate effective school models.

Organizational focus and instructional coherence are made vastly more difficult than they need to be by our K-12 systems, with their "little-bit-of-everything" mission, geographic monopoly, industrial era contracts and staffing arrangements, ill-defined aims, balky governance structures, contested disciplinary arrangements, and the rest. Choice and accountability, at their core, are an opportunity to create systems where focus and coherence are easier to come by and where robust curricula, powerful pedagogy, and rich learning can thrive.

I think this is all very true.  But on the flip side, I think that in the push for more accountability and more choice, we open a Pandora’s box of sorts, really allowing room for more federal involvement in our schools, less autonomy, and so forth.  There is a very real chance that in our Race to the Top, we end up racing directly to a new level of mediocrity.

There are a number of other very real detractions from the school choice movement, including the way the government could insert itself even into private institutions (see: Canada) as well as the very real possibility that the most talented students will be siphoned out of the public school system into an ad hoc network of charters and for-profit schools.

That being said, I’m all for re-structuring our schools to be less like industrial-era monoliths and more responsive to parents, students, and teachers alike.  If school choice really does lead to more autonomy and fewer standardized tests, I’m all for it.  If it really can avoid the dangers of a national curriculum, I’d be sold on it.

I just think, like Hess mentions, that school choice has been seen as too much a panacea and not as a means to an end.  And not enough public schools have learned from the success of their charter counterparts, either.

There is no silver bullet in education reform.  I will stick to my mantra: Education is local.  That includes school choice!

P.S.

Kyle asks:

You’ve persuaded at least me that trade schools should have a bigger role in our overall educational system, but wouldn’t their expanded prominence also attract students with aptitude for those trades? How is siphoning off the pre-college smart kids into a school focused on the continuance of academics study not just an academic trade school?

That’s a good question.  However, I’m much less interested in trade schools, per say, as I am in the concept of apprenticeship programs.  What I envision would be schools partnering directly with the local community to develop on-the-job apprenticeship opportunities for students who weren’t on the “academic” track.  This would take place in 11th grade.  They would still attend some classes in school, but would spend a portion of their day working in the community and learning relevant skills as well.

I think that ‘mainstreaming’ students works as long as their are extra opportunities for ‘gifted’ students to be challenged in higher level courses at a certain point in their education as well, and special-resource classes for ‘challenged’ students.  I don’t think 100% mainstreaming would work for a variety of reasons, but I do think we should move toward greater integration.

[updated]

Here’s the part that gets me – if, as is assumed in this critique (an assumption I largely agree with by the way) that it is not possible to adequately measure performance via testing, then by what standard is it appropriate to say that parents shouldn’t have the ability to determine their own criteria for evaluating their child’s education, and then act on that criteria to send their child to the school that best matches that criteria? ~ Mark Thompson in the comments

Here’s how I see this.  Standardized testing is a shabby substitute for actual community and parental involvement in our schools.  It’s a crutch.  Inevitably, it’s a crutch that empowers bureaucrats and enfeebles teachers and students and schools and families and communities.  If we want our schools to be more ‘accountable’ and our teachers to perform adequately, then we as a society need to reintegrate our schools and our communities. No man is an island, as Donne so aptly put it.  Well, no school is either.  Nor should they be.  School should be a piece of the larger community.  We should hold our schools accountable by holding ourselves accountable first, by being a part of our children’s education. 

There are many ways to do this, including more community partnerships and, as I’ve said before, apprenticeship programs.  In some places, this means we need to reevaluate how much influence teacher’s unions have.  Not everywhere, by any means, but in those places where bad teachers get preferential treatment over their students.  It strikes me that more and more we feel that all of this should be done for us.  How well are our schools performing?  We don’t know because we aren’t involved in them so we’d better have them take lots and lots of tests!  How are our teachers performing?  We don’t ever see or speak with our teachers, or really with our kids, so we’d better grade their performance based on these tests!

If parents want ‘the ability to determine their own criteria for evaluating their child’s education’ they should simply be more involved in that education.  Some school choice probably won’t hurt here, but I worry that school choice in general will be used as an excuse not to really become involved in the first place.  ‘Well we picked a really high-performing school for our kids, so everything will be just fine!’  Again – I think some school choice is probably not a terribly big deal.  It may do some good.  But I think it only addresses one tiny sliver of the problems our schools face*.

In a sense, this is the problem we’ve seen with retirees in places like Sun City who want to avoid paying taxes to pay for public education.  That is more malicious, obviously, than simply wanting to pick a better school for your kids – but both actions undermine a commitment to our communities.  And that comes back to haunt us.  In the end, I think you get what you put in.

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By chance, I happened to be driving and listening to NPR today when Diane Ravitch had a guest slot on the Diane Rehm show.  I only caught parts of the program, but what I did hear jived very nicely with some of the things I’ve been thinking (and writing) about on the subject of education lately.  A quick list of the points she made:

• School choice has a brain drain effect, drawing the most talented and motivated students out of their communities and placing them in high-performing charters, leaving public schools loaded up with the lower-performing students (and creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in the meantime).  Same goes for students with disabilities.  The most expensive inevitably end up at the public schools.
• Charters and private schools put public schools out of business, making schools in some communities non-existent.  Essentially she said that the idea of an education market was misguided because it kills the neighborhood school in favor of the “best deal”.  I tend to agree.  I would go even further, in fact.  If I had it my way we would work to reverse the brain drain at every level, including higher education.
• At the same time, Ravitch sees schools becoming more like businesses.  Instead of educators running schools and coming up with creative ideas, corporate suits are beginning to dictate how we should run our schools.  The ‘rainmakers’ behind charters are often paid exorbitant sums, while the teachers are over-worked and burn out quickly.  Instead, we should have teachers assuming administrative roles and taking leadership positions.  Not politicians or businessmen.
• One area I very much agree with Ravitch is her stance against rigid testing.  She claims the states cheat on their scores anyways, and that there is no evidence this sort of testing has led to any gains in performance.  Quite the contrary in fact.  NCLB, she says, has been a huge failure.  Schools were improving before it was enacted, and have regressed since.
• I also liked the idea of collaboration vs. competition.  I think we need much more of an open-source model for teaching, connecting teachers and schools across the country in as organic and natural a way as possible, allowing for the free exchange of ideas and techniques.  Rather than seeing it as a competitive process, we should view it as a collaborative process.  Indeed, Ravitch mentions that charters were initially intended to act as tiny R&D laboratories but that mission quickly turned to one of competition.  Also on this note, I’d like to address the notion of a national curriculum.  While open-source education would allow for tons of innovation and different ideas bubbling to the surface, a national curriculum would do just the opposite – creating a rigid, inflexible, and ultimately stifling (and easily captured!) curriculum.  A commenter asked if I would support a local public school’s teaching of creationism.  While I would leave that to the courts, let me just say this: I would rather have a handful of local schools teaching creationism then a national curriculum under the sway of the religious right.  That’s the danger with a national curriculum.  Well, that and the whole stifling of innovation and crushing of the very soul of our American education system.

(P.S. at this point I’d like to just add that while I advocate local solutions and “localism” writ large, that is not the same thing as saying I support all actions of local governments.  Local governments can be very tyrannical, very corrupt, etc.  I just think top-down solutions are generally ineffective and can actually exacerbate local problems.  Nor do I think that we, as a nation, shouldn’t come up with as many good ideas as possible.  That’s part of open-source education, after all.  I just bristle at the notion that we should somehow implement these ideas from the top down, as NCLB did.)

I didn’t hear the whole program, and I hope to listen to it the next chance I have.  You can stream it online here and read a section of Ravitch’s book, as well as some highlights from the program.  I wonder about a few things that this anti-school-choice position leaves open-ended:

• What about unions?  There are some very serious problems with too-powerful unions making it almost impossible to get rid of bad teachers.  Leaving aside the question of merit pay, what about simply getting rid of these awful teachers?  Something needs to change, especially in heavily unionized areas.  Again, this is a local problem.  Schools in Arizona do not have the same union-related problems that Californians or New Jerseyans (Jersyites?) face.
• Along these lines, how do we get more, better teachers into the system?  I think more creative autonomy is more important than more money – and I think this touches on something Ravitch said, which is that we need to make teaching more professional.  I agree, but it’s only one part of what I think will be a much more difficult problem.
• Schools are facing serious budget issues, and will need to cut back on the excessive budgets of the housing boom years.  How can we do this without causing a great deal of pain?  In my home town we voted to raise property taxes to help ease the pinch, as the state legislature oscillates between sheer madness and sheer stupidity in their attempt to pass a damn budget.  More and more I think we need to make schools less dependent on state and federal governments, but it won’t be easy.  Autonomy for schools and teachers is key here, but how do we implement autonomy?  The nature of the beast is to take it away!

As always, I appreciate your thoughts on all of this.

Lots of interesting feedback on my last post.  Kevin Drum and Ryan Avent  both focus on the notion that the sort of choice Bramwell describes is only available to higher-income families, leaving poor Americans and their children to waste away in subpar schools in broken neighborhoods. (Avent called my defense of public schools regrettable, though I think he focused entirely on Bramwell’s argument instead…)

My point, however, while riffing off of Bramwell’s initial argument, was simply that schools are a secondary issue, and won’t be fixed until the neighborhoods and communities are fixed first.  Without fertile soil for public schools to grow and improve in, all the school choice in the world will have negligible effects.  Even the sort of choice Bramwell claims we already have.  A couple quick thoughts:

• School choice not only undermines public schools by draining their coffers, it creates a “brain-drain” on communities, often pulling the most determined, driven students out of the local school and placing them elsewhere.
• Notably, many voucher-proponents are wealthy, and as is the case with many charters, it seems likely that the already wealthy would benefit the most from any voucher program. 
• School choice does not address the problems of affordable housing, restrictive zoning, and lack of business investment in many of these communities.  Avent makes a really good point about zoning in particular:

But that doesn’t mean that the issue of affordable housing should just be forgotten. It’s really important. The quality of schools isn’t the only thing capitalized into the price of a home. So too is the value of neighborhood amenities, including things like public safety and convenient grocery stores. And of crucial importance to home values is access to employment centers, and the stronger the local labor market, the higher are home values. You’re not just paying for a building or a piece of land; you’re paying for a location that secures for you certain opportunities and a certain quality of life.

I just think it’s strange — and really troubling — that writers of all stripes shrug off the huge set of regulatory and legal restrictions that hold down housing supply and density in the country’s strongest economic centers. There are serious consequences to these rules, and we should take them seriously.

I think that while many Americans can move across town to a better school, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a charter or magnet nearby as well.  Some school choice, I believe, can be a net benefit to a community.  Too much, and I think you’ll start to see an even greater divorce between schools and communities than already exists.  Focusing instead on creating cities that have mixed zoning, better opportunities for low-income families to live in nicer areas, and better climates for business investment in areas that are currently low-income will do a better job at addressing the problems with our public schools than simply busing students off one by one to better schools elsewhere.

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Arizona is considering selling off its prisons as part of a larger process of balancing the budget.  Even death row would be privately run.  The state government predicts the move could save them $100 million dollars, which is a sizable chunk of change until you consider the budget shortfall totals over $2 billion dollars.  According to the New York Times:

Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state, then charge them per prisoner to run them. But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million up front to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the private firm.

I can certainly see why governments would want to contract out the building of prisons, or some of the services surrounding the management of prisons.  But I get wary when we start talking about wholesale privatization of prisons or any other part of the legal system.  The whole “crime doesn’t pay” thing should apply to everybody, not just the criminals.  When we start profiting of the results of crime, a whole lot of bad incentives come into play, not the least of which is lobbying to keep current bad laws in place or to crack down even further on easy targets like non-violent offenders.

But there’s more to this story.  At the same time as prisons are being privatized, school budgets in Arizona face major shortages.  There’s talk of a number of schools being shuttered entirely, massive layoffs, and increased classroom sizes.  Last year, in my home town, every teacher with fewer than three years service, every art and music and extra-curricular teacher, every counselor and school psychologist, and a number of other education professionals were advised that their contracts would not be renewed.  They were saved by the stimulus.  This coming year, with no bailouts for the states, and with over $300 million likely to be cut from education and social services by the state – not to mention the falling local revenues from decreased home values and sales taxes – things look much more grim. [Read more →]

Will backtracked last week from this post, which included a chart detailing federal spending increases in education and the rather flat results over the past few decades.  And I wish he hadn’t, despite the many good points brought up about education spending, possible causes for increases in federal education spending, and so forth.

Here’s the thing – during those same years that the federal government has increased its role in education funding, state and local governments have become increasingly dependent on the federal government to shore up budgets, step in during a crisis, and keep them solvent.  Look no further than the recent stimulus money and the bailout of the states.  Many states could barely sustain their commitments to education budgets without federal padding.  Is there any reason to think this will change next year?  Next recession?

It’s not so much that this is a serious problem right now, either.  As Will notes, the federal government is responsible for only about 8.3 percent of all education spending in the country.  The problem lies in the future, as state and local governments continue down the path of dependency, relying more and more on the federal government to catch them when they fall, and doing whatever it takes to make sure they qualify for the handouts.  [Read more →]

Picking up the merit pay ball from Will for a moment, let’s hash out a few competing ideas.

First of all, I think just about everyone agrees on two fundamentals: teachers are probably paid too little, and yet teacher pay in and of itself will not solve the problem with our education system.  There are other areas filled with more contention.  Should teachers be paid on seniority alone?  Has tenure become an outdated model that protects teachers over students?  If we do decide to offer merit pay to keep the best teachers rather than merely the longest-serving teachers, how do we measure the success of those teachers?  Or would offering merit funds to schools be more effective?

There is a contradiction inherent in my two-item-wish-list for teachers.  I want to see a return to teacher autonomy and I’d like to see merit pay on the table.  Autonomy is important for the same reason merit pay is important – it gives smart, creative, involved teachers a reason to begin and to remain teaching.

One huge problem with a program like Teach for America is that it brings in all these bright, hard-working young people who are only in it for a couple years.  But that Teach for America enthusiasm can be transported to the rest of the teaching field.  We just have to make teaching a desirable profession.  Most Teach for America alumni go on to be lawyers and investment bankers because the program offers them great benefits at lots of good schools.  Perhaps if young people saw teaching as a profession akin to being a lawyer, more high quality teachers would remain in the field instead of basically coming on as temporary employees in programs like Teach for America. [Read more →]

I ramble on for far too long about education reform over at New Majority…. [Read more →]

So Dan Miller critiqued me and conservatives in general for not talking about health policy enough, and he’s right.  We haven’t.  Part of this is because when it comes to government planning there is just so much to talk about.  If I were a progressive blogger I could talk about how we could plan this or that development, or structure this or that plan around our education system, or shape this or that policy to use the government to at once cover more people and save money doing etc. etc. etc..

Lots of charts and numbers and predictions would be at my fingertips.  Conservatives scorn social planning and therefore dismiss a lot of this wonkishness.  So you don’t have the elaborate plans that liberals do when it comes to something like health care.  (Ironically the most effective rebuttal to Waxman-Markey was via Jim Manzi who used lots of charts and other wonkish communication tools…)

Now, this is okay up to a point – conservatives shouldn’t want to map out everything as much as liberals do, because part of what conservatism stands for is organic, market-driven growth and individual choice.  But the problem with leaving it at that is that we are in fact stuck with a pretty massive state and we do need to have an exit strategy if we want to deregulate or have a shot at changing entitlements to better fit a conservative model – because, quite frankly, entitlements are popular.  They can be better managed then they are.  They can make better use of market solutions.  But they’re more than likely not going away, and maybe they shouldn’t.  We need safety nets.

Things like vouchers, and direct-payment rather than relying on lots of red-tape-adorned bureaucracies are good ideas that need to be more fleshed out.  Viable alternatives that don’t leave people thinking their health care or their social security would be left as vulnerable to a crash as their 401k’s were are important to articulate.

Conservatives need more wonks, plain and simple.  But the job of conservative wonks should be to plan out the gradual dismantling of big government without falling prey to all sorts of pitfalls that we’ve seen in the past – like hiring private contractors to do government work, both domestically and increasingly overseas.  Deregulatory capture is something I’m interested in but don’t know much about – though I think I know enough to believe that it’s a very real threat.

In any case, not to ramble, but I think a lot of things – from conservative takes on community-building and new urbanism to health care and better schools – all have a need of more in-depth, critical thought from the right of the aisle.  Blaming those damned liberals for everything will simply not do.  I think this is what I was touching on a bit in my post on distrust of government.  Sure, we should distrust it for its inefficiency and the ease with which it is manipulated by special interests, but we should also work to figure out how the bloody clock ticks.  If you can’t figure that out, then any attempt at dismantling it will fail.

Exit question: Why didn’t the Democrats just push Medicare expansion instead of a brand new program?  Wouldn’t that have been a lot safer and cheaper?  This has been raised in the comments and elsewhere.  I’m curious to know if this sort of thing would have been acceptable for progressives.  Certainly it would have been (I imagine) more palatable for conservatives.  It’s more palatable to me – just expand existing programs to cover essentially everyone who isn’t covered now, and then maybe start scaling toward more market-oriented solutions.  Try to get those benefits taxed to help pay for it, etc.

E.D. thinks that market economics don’t apply to education.  Chris disagrees, but thinks that market economics ultimately are about controlling people and inevitably creates – specifically in the realm of education – a form of corporatism.  Chris also explains that this is why he is not a libertarian. 

I.  FREE MARKET ECONOMICS ARE NOT ABOUT CONTROLLING PEOPLE

I find these criticisms a bit off.  First, Chris’ argument against the field of economics as a form of study is almost identical to some of the arguments made by the undeniably mainstream libertarian Will Wilkinson against the practice of economics as a useful policy tool.  While I don’t pretend to speak for John, I think most advocates of free market economics would actually agree with this critique – while economics may be useful at creating the most “efficient” outcome for achieving a particular result, they are not useful as a tool for determining which results are better or worse or are more worth pursuing. 

But to me that doesn’t mean that basic economics is worthless, nor does it have anything to do with understanding markets.  It just means that the democratic value of any sort of science as a policy tool is desperately limited: it can, at least theoretically, give us a path for achieving solutions; what it emphatically cannot do is tell us what is and is not a problem, nor what would constitute an acceptable solution, and it definitely cannot evaluate whether solving the problem is more valuable than the inevitable collateral consequences. 

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This depressing Los Angeles Times story inspired a pretty interesting debate on teacher unions over at the American Scene. In comments, Freddie mounts a persuasive defense of union-backed tenure for professional educators, arguing that job security is a major incentive behind recruitment and retention. This certainly makes sense to me, though it’s worth noting that a few proposed reforms replace tenure with a different incentive structure. Here, for example, is a good summary of DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s new program:

Rhee has proposed a two-track, green and red, system for D.C. teachers. Teachers who volunteer for the green track would give up all tenure rights and, in return, would get larger pay hikes and become eligible for performance bonuses that could put their annual income well above $100,000. Red track teachers would not give up tenure; they would receive a smaller pay increase; and would not be eligible for performance bonuses.

Rhee’s reforms have become something of a cause célèbre, garnering praise from Nicholas Kristof and a high-profile Time cover story. Her abrasive personality and take-no-prisoners approach hasn’t endeared her to the local teacher union, however, which is generally wary of performance-based reforms.

From what I understand (I have a few friends with the DC Teach for America program) the divide over Rhee’s reforms is mostly generational, with new teachers favorably disposed towards performance-based pay while older teachers are more concerned with job security. This may also reflect different career priorities, as a lot of DC’s Teach for America volunteers are not planning on staying with the DC school system.

To be perfectly honest, this is not an issue I pay close attention to, although I did get the chance to see Rhee speak last summer and was suitably impressed. The (younger) teachers I know in the DC system are almost uniformly enthusiastic about the proposed changes, and I think that replacing tenure with performance-based pay has the potential to incentivize better teaching. Having said all that, the environmental barriers to improving student achievement in DC are pretty overwhelming, and I’m sympathetic to teachers who feel that they’re being unfairly scapegoated for structural defects.

Good teaching does seem to be quantifiable, and DC’s public school system definitely needs a major overhaul, so I’d tentatively place myself in the reformist camp. What do you all think?