There's a terrific piece by Greg Anrig at the Washington Monthly that explains why some conservatives have decided to give up the voucher fight. Apparently some conservatives have decided that the voucher experiment has worked as promised to bring educational prosperity to inner city poor kids.
Let's start with the contention that the academic performance of low-income children would improve after they moved to private institutions. For a long time, it was absurdly difficult to find out whether this was true in the one place where vouchers had been tried over an extended period: Milwaukee. After that city's initial small-scale initiative produced ambiguous, but generally unimpressive, results (and a lot of fighting over that data), the Wisconsin legislature chose to omit testing requirements altogether when the program was significantly expanded in 1998. This February, however, a group of researchers led by professors Patrick J. Wolf and John F. Witte produced the first installment of a study intended to follow how comparable groups of students in the public and private voucher schools perform over time. At least at the outset, they found no statistically significant differences in the test scores between the public and private school fourth and eighth graders for the 2006-07 school year. For the private as well as the public school students, the scores generally hovered around the 33rd percentile—in other words, a typically low performance for schools with high concentrations of poverty.
In Cleveland, a similar but now completed study that followed the same students over time showed dispiriting results from that city's voucher program. Tracking the scores of students who began kindergarten in the 1997-98 school year through their sixth-grade year in 2003-04, Indiana University researchers found no significant differences in overall achievement, reading, or math scores between students who used vouchers and those who stayed in public schools, after taking into account socioeconomic differences.
Anrig goes on to explain that there were also not economic pressures forcing public schools to get better the way many theorists expected. There was always a fallacy about the "competition" between schools that stood behind the voucher argument. Voucher advocates thought that public schools would begin to work to attract students back from private schools the way a business would work to bring back clients lost to the competition.
This is a fallacious analogy brought up again and again by people who can only see education in economic terms. For one thing, schools aren't stores: they can't serve everyone who shows up. There isn't room in private schools to accomodate all of the students in public schools, or even a fraction of them. You can't have competition when so few choices really exist for the large majority of people.
But where the choice/competition argument really fails is in thinking that schools fail simply because they aren't working hard enough or that they don't care about their customers. Kids in public schools don't fail because the teachers and administrators are doing a bad job. Sure, sometimes they are, but sometimes teachers in wealthy districts with good test scores are doing a bad job too. The success or failure of students in schools isn't always about the quality of the people providing the instruction. Sometimes it's about the student's ability, his or her motivation, the resources provided by his or her family, his or attendance, and so on. Changing schools doesn't fix those other factors, and it's ridiculous to think that a child's motivation, intelligence, or aptitude will improve just because they change schools. Competition doesn't fix everything. But because "reformers" want to blame teachers and unions for the failure of public schools, they have to pretend that changing the setting will fix the problem. It doesn't work that way, and many of us tried to make that point years ago, the point that geniuses like Chester Finn are just figuring out.
It's also why critics of charters schools are sometimes off base. Should we close down charter schools because students in them are failing? Of course not. Many of those kids were failing in traditional public schools, too. Not a big surprise that changing the scenery would make a big difference. We should close charter schools for other reasons. But NOT because their students are continuing to struggle in a new environment.
Until we get our heads around the fact that kids who fail in public schools fail for a variety of personal, social and economic reasons that may have nothing to do with the quality of instruction or management inside that school, we're not going to be any closer to fulfilling the promise of public education. Gimmick fixes like charters and vouchers don't address any of those underlying issues, they just offer false hope.
