School choice

Kansas schools need to be much more dynamic and diverse in order to meet students’ needs and effectively engage them in learning. But the lack of school choice and charter schools in Kansas means that Kansas children are missing opportunities for learning that are present in some states. Until Kansas changes its educational policies, it is unlikely that schools will see any significant improvement.

These are some of the conclusions and recommendations of a report produced on behalf of the Kansas Policy Institute titled reinventing the Kansas K-12 school system to engage more children in productive learning.

Part of the problem is that huge increases in spending have not produced much results. Paradoxically, the education bureaucracy claims that even mild cuts in spending will have catastrophic results.

(It’s true that tests under control of Kansas have shown increases in student achievement. But independent measures don’t have the same trend, leading to serious doubts about the validity of the Kansas tests.)

Student engagement is the key to learning, says the report: “Typically, service recipients don’t assist in production of the service, but in education they do. Intellectual growth occurs only with the active cooperation of the clients, the students.”

While student engagement is important, studies find that most students are not engaged in schools. The Wichita school district has used the engagement argument many times in its quest for more funding for sports, arts, and other programs.

The report is critical of “attendance zones,” that is, the practice of assigning students to schools based on residency within a school’s boundary. Currently the Wichita school district is struggling with the process of redrawing school attendance boundaries, a process a Wichita Eagle headline describes as a “tricky job to tackle.” The Wichita school superintendent is quoted as saying “We’re talking about change, and that’s never easy.”

The challenges that attendance zones cause are described: “While students living within public school attendance zones are often homogeneous in terms of socio-economic status and ethnic makeup, the students themselves still have very different goals, subject interests, and learning style factors that influence and motivate how they learn best. In the subject interest and learning style diverse classrooms that result from assignment by residence and mainstreaming of special needs children, the material will seem too difficult to some or confusing because they can’t learn it via the prevailing pedagogy. … Large disparities in student intellect within individual classrooms cause many teachers to lower their standards so that the majority of their students can ‘succeed’ but then many under-achieve (or worse; disrupt or drop out) because of boredom. The large differences between students within attendance zones create an impossible teaching task; namely find a uniform process to address diverse instructional needs. … ‘Watering down’ practices appear to be especially debilitating in inner city schools, where most students perform below grade level on essential subjects.”

This is an example of how public schools are failing those who most desperately need a good education.

Age-grouping — keeping students together with other students of the same age — leads to classrooms with students at wide levels of achievement, which is not conducive to instruction.

The “single salary” schedule for teachers, where salary is determined by only longevity and earned educational credentials, leads to teacher shortages in certain subjects and locations. It also provides disincentive for talented teachers to remain in the schools, as they are paid the same as the very worst teachers, which the report labels “insulting and demoralizing.”

Accountability in schools is a problem. Currently public schools are managed through top-down accountability, that is, accountability to government. Bottom-up accountability is more customer-focused: “Bottom-up accountability in the private sector forces corporations to address all possible customer concerns, even the ones that are hard to quantify into objective performance measures. Since public schools do not receive funding directly from their customers, and instead receive government financing mostly as a function of the number of students assigned to their schools, consumer accountability is minimal in the public school system.”

Public school officials bristle at the thought of having customers. But accountability to customers leads to systems that recognize and embrace the diversity of needs and desires. Government accountability is weak (“school system personnel face few if any major repercussions when they fail to meet their objectives”) and leads to ineffective and destructive accountability laws like No Child Left Behind and “teaching to the test.”

Past attempts at reform haven’t worked, says the report. The most often desired reform — spending more — hasn’t worked. Spending has risen rapidly and there is little to show for it, despite a “sharp narrowing of the curriculum to focus specifically on the tested items.”

Smaller class sizes — a favorite of the education establishment — hasn’t worked, either. “The average U.S. class size fell steadily from 22.6 in the 1970s to 16.2 in 2002; a time of sharp decline in academic performance, followed by the recent leveling off in scores as more time has been spent on the core tested items and test preparation.” Reducing class size is very expensive, too.

The solution, recommends the report, is a wide variety of schooling options that are as diverse as the student population and their needs and interests. There should be a variety of specialized schools. The present system of magnet schools provides a “small, but hopefully compelling hint” of the benefits that could be had with even more opportunities for specialization. Surprisingly, school specialization leads to overall cost savings.

Creating a diversity of schools requires meaningful school choice, says the report. Furthermore, market-based pries signals need to be employed to match supply and demand for different types of specialized schools. This means that some specialized schools that happen to be in high demand will be able to charge students an extra add-on tuition. While this may seem a strange and even undesirable idea to many, tha lack of price signals means we have what we always have when there are price controls: “waste, shortages, stifled innovation, and declining product quality.”

Real school choice also means that schools will have to be accountable to parents for a broad range of performance measures, not just the narrow test focus that government requires: “Meaningful school choice fosters direct accountability to parent/student clients, which provides educators the necessary strong incentives to focus on the full schooling experience, not narrowly, and sometimes fraudulently, on tested items.”

School choice leads to competition for students. One of the byproducts is that there will be competition for the best teachers, improving the desirability of teaching as a profession. And instead of requiring that teachers be trained in ways that have been shown to not affect student achievement, schools would be free to hire and retain teachers based on their effective in actual teaching.

The report recommends four policy options for Kansas to consider. First is open enrollment, meaning that students may attend any school within the district.

Second, Kansas need a charter school law that actually encourages such schools. Currently, charter schools must be authorized by the local school district. As a result, there are very few in Kansas.

Third, Kansas needs school choice through vouchers. The fourth, and related, idea is tax credits for individuals and businesses to create scholarships for children to attend privates schools.

The report contains appendices that cover a overview of the U.S. educational system, myths surrounding school choice programs, and a summary of charter school research from the states. There are 193 footnotes.

Tagged as: Education, Free markets, Kansas Policy Institute, School choice, Wichita and Kansas schools

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While Kansas schools perform well in comparison to other states, there is much room for improvement, as the country as a whole does not do well in teaching students to their full potential. School choice programs, either through vouchers or tax credit scholarships, would help Kansas students do even better, and would help close the gap between low-performing students and the rest.

Last week Kansas Policy Institute and The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice held a press conference discussing school choice and other school reform measures. KPI and FFEC recently launched the “Why Not Kansas” initiative to educate Kansans on the need to reform the state’s K-12 educational system to allow Kansas schools to continue to improve. Due to travel problems, the FFEC representative was not able to attend.

One of the insights Dave Trabert, KPI President, told the audience is that since rapidly increasing spending hasn’t helped student performance, cutting spending shouldn’t hurt it. Total school funding across Kansas declined 2.6 percent for the 2009 — 2010 school year, and will probably decline by a smaller amount this year and the next.

Kansas school spending and NAEP test scores. Since large increases in spending haven’t improved student achievement, smaller cuts should not harm it, says Dave Trabert of Kansas Policy Institute.

“It maybe isn’t great that we haven’t seen tremendous improvement, but especially because we’re concerned with school finance and how it will impact funding, this is really good news. If we’ve put that much more money — $2.5 billion more into our school system since 1998 — and we haven’t changed the numbers, then we shouldn’t be concerned. We have a problem we have to deal with, but money clearly isn’t the answer. Thank goodness it isn’t, because citizens don’t have billions more to put into this problem.”

Trabert said there are alternatives with a proven record of raising achievement. He used Florida as an example, noting that state started a series of reforms in 1998. School choice was one of Florida’s earliest reform measures, and one that the “Kansas education industry” consistently opposes.

School choice implemented through vouchers is one program Florida used. A voucher is a payment from the state made to a school — usually a private school — where a parent chooses to send a child. Today, Florida has a variety of school choice programs focused mostly on children from low income families and special needs children. School choice through tax credit scholarships are also used in Florida. Kansas has neither program.

Charter schools are also not available in Kansas on a widespread basis. Charter schools are publicly funded, but operate more independently, usually with less regulation. Generally the teachers do not belong to the teachers union.

In Kansas, the local school district is the only authorizer of charter schools. “Imagine, if you will, if Spangles had to get permission from McDonald’s to open restaurants. We wouldn’t have Spangles today if that was the case.”

While there are many successful charter schools, Trabert said there are examples of private schools and charter schools that have not worked well. As these schools don’t have a ready market of students forced to attend them by reason of geography, the bad examples usually close.

One of the benefits of schools choice is the competition it provides. Public schools do better when faced with competition from school choice, Trabert said. Public schools respond to competition and get better, as they don’t want to lose students.

Another benefit is — perhaps paradoxically — funding, on a per-pupil basis, goes up for public schools: “One of the knocks against school choice is that it would drive money away from school districts, and how could they afford that? In every state I’ve looked at where they have school choice programs, the money that is allowed to follow the student, whether to a charter school or a private school, is set at or below the state aid per pupil. In fact, in a lot of states they’re looking at school choice as a way to reduce costs.”

School choice and other reforms have helped Florida close the achievement gap, with low-income and minority students making large gains.

Trabert also said that school choice programs especially benefit low income children. “We have a lot of kids in the state and around the country whose education really depends on how much their parents make. That’s wrong. We shouldn’t accept that.”

A question from the audience asked why Trabert focused on school choice in Florida, when that state has implemented many reforms, such as merit pay for teachers and alternative certification. Trabert said we in Kansas should be doing these things, too. School choice was one of Florida’s first reforms, and Trabert again pointed to the benefits of competition and its effects on improving all schools.

I asked a question relating to a school choice bill introduced in Kansas this year that would fund scholarships through tax credits for low income students. Some criticized the bill by saying it would allow private schools to choose only the best students, the ones they wanted in their schools, even though the bill was specifically targeted to low income students. This is a common criticism of private schools and sometimes charter schools, that they “cherry pick” the best students, leaving the public schools to deal with the rest. Trabert said “That’s one of the misconceptions that’s commonly put out. The facts don’t support those assumptions.”

Another question had to do with the marketplace for private schools, either for special needs students or other students. Critics of school choice say there are currently very few public schools, so there is a lack of capacity to handle a large number of new students seeking admission using vouchers or tax credit scholarships as full or partial payment. Underlying these criticisms is a failure to recognize the dynamic nature of markets. Analyzed statically, the criticism is valid: markets tend towards equilibrium, with supply equal to demand. With private school tuition being what it is, relatively few parents can afford to send their children to these schools. But with the effective cost of a private school reduced dramatically by a voucher or tax credit scholarship, we would expect to see many new schools open.

Video of the press conference is available here.

Tagged as: Education, Free markets, Kansas Policy Institute, School choice, Wichita and Kansas schools

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