Voice For Liberty

Tag: School choice

  • Questions for Wichita school district

    At a luncheon event today, leaders of USD 259, the Wichita public school district, made short presentations and took questions from the audience. I didn’t get a chance to ask a question, but here are the questions I prepared.

    Both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have advocated differential teacher pay and charter schools. What plans does the Wichita school district have to incorporate these programs?

    Across the country it’s starting to become apparent that the characteristics of individual teachers is by far the most important factor in student success, far more important than class size, teacher experience, or teacher credentials earned. Yet the Wichita school district has made a large and expensive commitment to smaller class sizes. And while I’ve not read the new teachers’ contract, the previous contract made experience and credentials the only way to advance in salary. What are your thoughts on these matters?

    The Wichita school district last year claimed “11 years of rising test scores.” My research shows that Wichita test scores closely follow the trend of test scores for the entire state. But on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, Kansas scores are flat or rising very slowly. What is the reason for this difference? How can we be sure that Wichita and Kansas test scores are reliable and valid measures of student achievement?

    Two years ago The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released the study “School Choice by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006.” They found that “Every existing school choice program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce a substantial savings.” Why doesn’t the Wichita school district, in cooperation with the state, implement the proven strategy of school choice to save money?

    In May of this year, The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released a study that compared the attitudes of public school and private school teachers towards their jobs and working conditions. Public school teachers rated their jobs and working conditions much lower. The study said: “These are eye-opening data for the teaching profession. They show that public school teachers are currently working in a school system that doesn’t provide the best environment for teaching. Teachers are victims of the dysfunctional government school system right alongside their students.” Do you think that Wichita public school teachers feel the same way as did this national sample? What can the district do to improve working conditions for teachers?

    Last year Interim Superintendent Martin Libhart sent an email message to district employees in which he criticized bond issue opponents because, in his own words, they “openly refer to public education as ‘government schools.’” What’s wrong with using the term “government schools?”

    What is the Wichita school district’s position on the possible revival of the school funding lawsuit?

  • Challenges for Wichita’s new school superintendent

    Recently John Allison, new superintendent for USD 259, the Wichita public school district, was interviewed by the Wichita Eagle. The article reporting on the interview is at Great time to be superintendent.

    In the interview, Allison mentioned “painful” budget cuts. The cuts that K through 12 education is facing in Kansas, however, are minor compared to what many other state agencies are facing.

    We should also remember that many school districts have plenty of money, so much so that, as I’ve reported, spending advocates will challenge anyone who mentions just how much there is to spend.

    Allison mentioned teaming with other school districts to gain economies in sharing services and purchasing. While the district should do this if it will save money, small reforms like these are merely nipping at the margin. What the district needs to do is look at big reforms that can save large amounts and improve educational outcomes.

    One such reform is widespread school choice, implemented as charter schools and voucher/tax credit programs. School choice programs save money. Two years ago, The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released the study School Choice by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006. According to the executive summary: “Every existing school choice program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce a substantial savings.”

    Some school choice programs would require a change in Kansas state law. I’m sure if the new Wichita Superintendent testified in favor of them, it would have a big impact.

    Charter schools, however, require no new laws. All it requires is the willingness of the local school board to authorize one. Allison could take the lead on this.

    Allison mentioned mandates which require “more resources and often more paperwork and administrative costs.” Some of these mandates, such as the federal No Child Left Behind law, are roundly criticized as ineffective. This is a problem that a local superintendent probably can’t overcome.

    As a nation we need to examine these mandates along with their costs that Allison mentioned. Are they necessary? Do they add value? This examination is not likely to happen, as the public schools — at least in Wichita — operate with little real competition, and therefore face little pressure to control costs and allocate resources to what people really want.

    The new superintendent also needs to take steps to assure citizens that the many years of rising test scores claimed by the district (and the state of Kansas, too) are valid and meaningful. In some states it’s been shown that the tests are being watered-down or cut scores manipulated to show the results that politicians want.

    John Allison is taking over the Wichita school system at a dangerous time. The primary danger is that improvements like the expensive bond issue passed last year send the school district down a path that, while producing lots of shiny buildings, will do little to improve educational outcomes. It also sets up Wichita for much higher costs in the future as new facilities and classrooms come online.

    Whether Allison will be able to — or if he even wants to — buck the traditional educationist orthodoxy is unknown at this time. But here’s a clue: Would the present Wichita school board have hired a reform-minded superintendent? Not likely.

  • Kansas needs independent charter schools

    By John LaPlante

    Abraham Lincoln is said to have told this story: If you call a horse’s tail a leg, how many legs does it have? Four. Calling a horse’s tail a leg won’t make it one.

    That’s what I thought of when I read a report by Paul Soutar, my colleague at the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy. Soutar, an investigative reporter, looked at the Maurice R. Holman Academy of Excellence charter school, in Kansas City, Kansas.

    In case you’re not familiar with charter schools, they are public schools that, like traditional public schools, receive taxpayer money and admit all students.

    But they are different from traditional schools in a few key ways. They sign a promise, or contract, with a school district, university, or state board of education (the specific organization, called a sponsor, depends on the laws of each state) that they will abide by certain financial rules and achieve specific academic goals. In exchange, they are freed from some laws and regulations. The sponsor shuts down a school if it doesn’t live up to the contract, which is also known as a charter.

    This performance-based contract is one key factor that distinguishes charter public schools from other public schools. Another is that the important decisions about running the school are made in the school itself, not in a district office somewhere down the street or across town.

    So how is the idea of charter schools working out in Kansas City? According to Soutar, officials with USD 500 Kansas City have not allowed the school to implement the curriculum the Holman Academy proposed in its charter. Further, the district has decided how many students and teachers the school will have, who will be its principal, and even who attends the school. The most relevant autonomy that the Holman Academy has is to find $200,000 worth of donations.

    It sounds to me like USD 500 isn’t letting Holman Academy be a true charter school. When the staff of a district assign students and teachers to specific schools and determine the curriculum, they do what we’ve come to expect from a district. But when it comes to Holman, USD 500 is trying to convince us that a horse with a tail is really a five-legged horse. Behold, the charter school that isn’t.

    From what I recall, USD 500 wasn’t a fan of the Holman Academy from the start. Saddled with the responsibility of overseeing a school it doesn’t want, the district has constrained Holman so much that it can’t succeed or fail on its own.

    There’s a way to avoid such awkward situations in the future: Change the law. The states that make the best use of charter schools, such as Arizona and Minnesota, let school districts sponsor charter schools if they wish. But they also let universities, independent state agencies and other organizations take on that responsibility.

    Some Kansas school districts have shown that they want to and can innovate. USD 497 Lawrence and USD 458 Basehor-Linwood, for example, are leaders in offering online education.

    But right now, only school districts can sponsor charter schools, and even then, only schools physically located within their boundaries. Some may be willing to give the schools the autonomy they need to be charter schools. Others, though, aren’t.

    So let’s give KU, K-State, education service centers, and other organizations the right to sponsor charter schools. That way, charter schools, which nationally are the face of school reform, can flourish in Kansas.

  • School choice would save, not cost, Kansas

    As reported in my post Moving Kansas schools from monopoly to free choice, the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy has recently reported how school choice programs could give Kansas a better return on its education dollar. Here’s some additional evidence that Kansas is missing out on an opportunity.

    Two years ago the The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released the study School Choice by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006. According to the executive summary: “Every existing school choice program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce a substantial savings.”

    How can this be? The school spending lobby and the teachers unions would have us believe that vouchers would kill public education. They say that school choice program drain scarce resources from the public school system.

    But when researchers looked at the actual effects, they found this: “In nearly every school choice program, the dollar value of the voucher or scholarship is less than or equal to the state’s formula spending per student. This means states are spending the same amount or less on students in school choice programs than they would have spent on the same students if they had attended public schools, producing a fiscal savings.”

    So at the state level, school choice programs save money. They don’t cost money to implement; they save money.

    At the local level, schools districts have more money, on a per-student basis, when school choice programs are used: “When a student uses school choice, the local public school district no longer needs to pay the instructional costs associated with that student, but it does not lose all of its per-student revenue, because some revenue does not vary with enrollment levels. Thus, school choice produces a positive fiscal impact for school districts as well as for state budgets.”

    Also, when schools are overcrowded, school choice programs can provide a way to solve this problem at no cost. This is illustrated in my article Will the Wichita Public School District Consider This Method of Reducing School Overcrowding? (The arithmetic of school choice in Wichita)

  • Moving Kansas schools from monopoly to free choice

    Paul Soutar of the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy has released a report that tells how Kansas could get better value for the money the state spends on K-12 education. Charter schools and school choice programs could — if not for opposition from the existing public school lobby and teachers unions — provide flexibility and and impetus for improving all Kansas schools.

    Kansas doesn’t have many charter schools. Part of the problem in Kansas, Soutar reports, is the law that governs charter school authorization: “… unlike most other states, Kansas charter schools are not truly independent. State law says they can only be authorized by school districts. That’s like Burger King having to ask McDonald’s for permission to open down the street. Even when local school districts authorize a charter school, there are obvious problems achieving the independence and educational difference charter schools are intended to offer.”

    The article also explores the battle over school choice programs in Kansas.

    (This is a Scribd document. Click on the rectangle at the right of the document’s title bar to get a full-screen view.)

  • Markets could guide Wichita school district

    Yesterday I had a discussion with a person who had an idea how to save money in USD 259, the Wichita public school district.

    He believes that there are too many highly-paid administrators. It’s also a common complaint leveled by many people. Reduce either the number of administrators or their salaries, and that would make more money available for other things, such as teachers. Currently the district needs to cut its budget, however, so the savings would more likely be used to meet that demand.

    This brings up the broader question of staffing in the Wichita public schools. How does the district know how much management it needs? For that matter, how many teachers, custodians, etc. does it need?

    There is a simple solution that provides an answer to these questions. The public school lobby, however, resists this solution at every step. They spend huge sums in the political arena to make sure they aren’t subject to the discipline that this solution would impose.

    Market competition is the solution. It provides the incentive and imperative for firms to organize themselves in the way that will best meet the needs of their customers.

    Under the dynamic discovery process that market competition provides, we might learn that in some cases, under some circumstances, it might be best for students if more was spent on administration and management. Laws like the “65% laws” that dictate how school funds should be spent would prevent this discovery from being made.

    Market competition, if the public schools faced it, would give them a huge incentive to structure themselves to meet the needs of the customers, which are their students, parents, and the public at large.

    Public schools don’t face these market incentives. They organize themselves based on their own needs rather than the needs of their customers. I don’t think there’s much way to change that except for schools to face market competition, and they resist that in every way they can.

  • The inevitability of parental choice

    By Howie Rich

    A year ago, the nation’s largest newspaper wrote in an editorial that it was time to “move beyond vouchers” in the debate over America’s educational future.

    Although it did not reject any particular solution outright, the paper’s recommendation at the time was that America focus its energy and attention on less controversial education reforms. In other words, it was a victory for those who have spent years — and expended untold taxpayer resources — in an effort to demonize parental choice and its supporters.

    Then, two weeks ago, USA Today suddenly changed its tune.

    Not only did the paper enthusiastically embrace parental choice — it also roundly criticized our nation’s teachers’ unions for “protecting failing schools.”

    “Twenty million low-income school kids need a chance to succeed,” the USA Today editorial board wrote. “School choice is the most effective way to give it to them.”

    What caused the turnaround?

    While there’s certainly no shortage of reasons, the initial impetus for the shift appears to stem from President Barack Obama’s rank hypocrisy in closing an effective parental choice program in Washington D.C. to new applicants.

    “Teacher unions, fearing loss of jobs, have pushed most Democrats to oppose vouchers and other options that invite competition for public schools,” the USA Today editorial board wrote. “Put another way, they oppose giving poor parents the same choice that the president himself — along with his chief of staff and some 35% of Democrats in Congress — have made in sending their children to private schools.”

    Of course, it’s not just about failing schools and low-income students. It’s about giving all parents a choice in their child’s academic future, no matter where they live.

    With each passing day, the mountain of evidence attesting to the futility of our nation’s failed status quo grows higher. Correspondingly, in those rare instances where choice has been permitted to take root and flourish, its success is undeniable.

    According to the most recent data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), America’s per pupil expenditure on public education is the highest of any industrialized nation in the world.

    Unfortunately, we are not receiving anywhere near a commensurate return on our investment.

    On the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, American students scored well below the average of other industrialized nations on both the math and science portions of the exam – just as they did the last time the tests were administered. And the time before that.

    And in a telling nod to the sort of institutional incompetence that has long plagued our public system, America’s reading scores on the most recent PISA exam had to be thrown out due to a printing error by the company that the U.S. Department of Education hired to administer the tests.

    But our crisis is much bigger than poor standardized test results and bureaucratic errors. Over 12,000 schools across America currently rate as failing or below average — with hundreds of thousands of children trapped inside of them. Of course, each year when organizations like “Teach for America” try to place talented, highly-motivated college graduates in teaching positions within higher-risk school districts, their efforts are always rebuffed by the unions.

    Each year, the purveyors of this country’s education monopoly continue failing children at a record clip – and yet in a perfect example of precisely what’s wrong with our system, they are rewarded for their poor performance with additional taxpayer resources.

    In fact, according to President Obama’s plan — the more children you fail, the more money you get.

    This self-perpetuating cycle serves no one. It doesn’t serve our children, it doesn’t serve their parents, and it doesn’t serve the best interests of our country.

    Nor are we well-served by pretending that our “average” public schools are meeting the needs of most middle income children.

    In an increasingly competitive global economy, we cannot afford to maintain a failed status quo on one hand and mediocrity on the other.

    USA Today’s acknowledgment of this fact – and its support for parental choice – is yet another example of the inevitable march toward a system of education that promotes true academic achievement, a system built around a competitive, parent-driven marketplace where schools are held accountable for their performance.

    The author is Chairman of the Parents in Charge Foundation.

  • School choice is a civil rights issue

    Why does America tolerate this?

    In his commentary Dumbest Generation Getting Dumber, Walter E. Williams reports on some new research about our public schools:

    McKinsey & Company, in releasing its report “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools” (April 2009) said, “Several other facts paint a worrisome picture. First, the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent cross-country comparisons of fourth grade reading, math, and science, US students scored in the top quarter or top half of advanced nations. By age 15 these rankings drop to the bottom half. In other words, American students are farthest behind just as they are about to enter higher education or the workforce.” That’s a sobering thought. The longer kids are in school and the more money we spend on them, the further behind they get.

    Williams reports that for black and Latino students, the situation is far worse, with these students being two or three years behind in learning. It’s such a problem that even traditional black leadership is noticing:

    Al Sharpton called school reform the civil rights challenge of our time. He said that the enemy of opportunity for blacks in the U.S. was once Jim Crow; today, in a slap at the educational establishment, he said it was “Professor James Crow.” Sharpton is only partly correct. School reform is not solely a racial issue; it’s a vital issue for the entire nation.

    We need the type of competition in education that school choice provides. In Kansas, the public school lobby — firmly opposed to even the gentlest of reforms such as charter schools — retains its firm grip.

    Wichita and Kansas schools claim years of rising test scores. But when we get test results that the Kansas school bureaucracy doesn’t control, we find that test scores are flat. There’s a discrepancy there that needs investigation.

    In the meantime, schoolchildren, especially minority children, remain stuck in a failing system.

  • Study of public and private school teachers reveals sharp differences

    Last week the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice published research that examines how teachers feel about their jobs. In particular, the study compared how public school teachers and private school teachers viewed their jobs and working conditions.

    The study, which you can read by clicking on Free To Teach: What teachers say about teaching in public and private schools, uncovers a huge problem in our nation’s public schools. Here’s a passage from the executive summary:

    These are eye-opening data for the teaching profession. They show that public school teachers are currently working in a school system that doesn’t provide the best environment for teaching. Teachers are victims of the dysfunctional government school system right alongside their students. Much of the reason government schools produce mediocre results for their students is because the teachers in those schools are hindered from doing their jobs as well as they could and as well as they want to. By listening to teachers in public and private schools, we discover numerous ways in which their working conditions differ — differences that certainly help explain the gap in educational outcomes between public and private schools. Exposing schools to competition, as is the case in the private school sector, is good for learning partly because it’s good for teaching.

    Here are some revealing results from the research (response levels are given in the study document):

    Private school teachers are more likely to say:

    • “I plan to remain in teaching as long as I am able.”
    • “I have a great deal of control over selecting textbooks and other instructional materials in my classroom.”
    • “I have a great deal of control over selecting content, topics, and skills to be taught in my classroom.”
    • “I have a great deal of control over disciplining students in my classroom.”
    • “Necessary materials such as textbooks, supplies, and copy machines are available as needed.”
    • “I am given the support I need to teach students with special needs.”

    Public school teachers are more likely to say:

    • “I plan to remain in teaching until I am eligible for retirement”
    • “Routine duties and paperwork interfere with my job of teaching.”
    • “The level of student misbehavior in this school interferes with my teaching.”
    • “The stress and disappointments involved in teaching at this school aren’t really worth it.”
    • “A student has threatened to physically injure me.”
    • “A student has physically attacked me.”

    The study concludes “Private school teachers consistently report having better working conditions than public school teachers across a wide variety of measurements. Most prominently, private schools provide teachers with more classroom autonomy, a more supportive school climate, and better student discipline. It appears that the dysfunctions of the government school system — long evident in mediocre educational outcomes — are a problem for teachers as well as for students.

    A question I have is this: Since nearly all public school teachers belong to a union and practically no private school teachers belong, what are the teachers unions doing? Don’t the unions care about the working conditions of their members?

    A bigger question is why we continue to pour increasing resources into a system where the workers feel so negatively about their jobs when an alternative is available. Government monopolies like the public school system rarely do a good job. We need to give Kansas parents a choice as to where to send their children, and we need to give Kansas teachers better places to work. The government school system has had plenty of time and huge amounts of money at their disposal. Widespread school choice in Kansas deserves a chance to correct this dismal situation.