Juan Williams' liberal credentials encourage me to give his views (see below) on school vouchers full consideration, but unfortunately, he is mostly wrong. He is right that Washington, DC's federally funded school voucher program is unique in that it does not take away funds from DC's education budget. As I've said before, I strongly suspect that conservative politicians promote school vouchers as a way to indirectly de-fund our public schools, thereby further lowering their performance, and thus making private schools look even better by comparison, thereby strengthening their argument that vouchers work.
He is also right it's commendable how parents have found the extra money to pay the costs of private school that were not covered by the $7,500 annual voucher. (The average voucher amount in DC is about $6,000.) That shows their real dedication to education. Despite what school their kids may attend, these parents' emphasis on education is probably the biggest reason for their kids' higher relative performance. But unfortunately, removing their kids from the public school system is the equivalent of "brain drain," leaving behind children whose parents do not, or cannot, emphasize education as strongly. This hurts the performance of children left behind, since children learn not only from their teachers, but also from their peers. And the more good students who leave, the fewer positive examples remain for those children who are left behind.
Regarding the results of vouchers in DC, specifically, Matthew Yglesias remarked:
"After 3 years, there was a statistically significant positive impact on reading test scores, but not math test scores. The OSP improved reading achievement for 5 of the 10 subgroups examined. .... But given that the baseline is what's probably the worst-performing big city public school system in the country the results are actually kind of meager. DC needs its kids to be doing much better than this."
I share his sentiments, based on my personal experience as an after-school tutor at a DC charter school. The kids came from various DC schools. They had to apply for acceptance to the program, and even sign a study "contract" (if I recall correctly). We always told the kids they were special and above-average, and relative to their peers in DC, they were. But frankly, skills-wise, most were below their peers from the white suburbs where I'm from. This is the real problem -- the real relative performance problem. In the final analysis, it's not their performance relative to their own past performance that matters, or their peers in DC, but rather their performance relative to more affluent suburban kids (against whom they will compete for college entrance and scholarships), and indeed, relative to their European and Asian coevals (against whom they will compete for employment).
Juan Williams' swipe against performance-based pay has nothing to do with vouchers, but this is also probably a bad idea, at least if performance is defined solely by test scores. You proponents of private schools, ask yourselves: Have you ever heard of a private school teacher getting a bonus or a promotion because of her students' test scores? If they don't do this at private schools, which are supposedly the ideal, then why should we impose this kind of incentive system in our public schools? What's the logic?
Studies of student performance -- whether they attend public or private school -- show that performance is tied mainly to income and education levels of their parents. Imagine the absurdity of rewarding a teacher with a bonus, when she simply lucked out having students from good homes; or, conversely, punishing a teacher who decides to make a difference in a school district where children come from poor or broken homes! The remedy here would seem to be to make any bonuses relative to students' past performance; but this could lead to more absurdity. For example, say a student performed poorly in a prior year with a very bad teacher, but performed better the next year with an "average" teacher, relatively speaking. Then the average teacher would receive a bonus for being... average. Moreover, for financially-motivated teachers, the incentive would be to teach children in lower grades, who do not have such a long record of poor performance, rather than teach junior and high school, where years of educational neglect cannot be reversed in one academic year.
And, if unionized teachers really were as lazy and dastardly as critics say, they could game an incentive system based on relative performance by encouraging low-average performance at first, followed by spectacular "improvement" later on, thereby netting a big bonus. Beyond all that, I won't be the first to point out that teachers should not spend all their time "teaching to the test," which is the incentive created by the proposed performance-based pay system.
A critic of testing-based performance pay correctly noted in Education Week: "To believe that teachers will try harder if offered a financial incentive is to assume that they aren't trying hard now, that they know what to do but simply aren't doing it, and that they are motivated more by money than by their students' needs. These are unlikely and unsupported conclusions, which teachers find insulting rather than motivating."
Indeed, financial incentives work for greedy Wall Street bankers, for example, who enter a finance career and endure 70- and 80-hour work weeks precisely because of the insanely big payoffs. But people don't become teachers because of the fat paycheck. Their incentive is moral and personal fulfillment, which is why throwing money at them doesn't make any sense. And let's not forget that teachers at many parochial schools receive less pay than their public school counterparts. This is not because they are worse teachers. Their schools can't (or won't) pay them as much, but they can offer smaller class sizes, strong organizational support and discipline, and bright, motivated students from well-to-do and religious families. For these teachers, the personal rewards they receive outweigh the financial rewards available elsewhere.
But if you believe money makes the world go round, then the choice is clear: We must dramatically increase teachers' pay (with 6-figure salaries for the best teachers), to encourage the best and brightest to become public school teachers instead of lawyers, bankers, and corporate managers. If you don't like the idea of your taxes being increased to pay for that, then let's think about other solutions, like seeing what works at charter and parochial schools and emulating that.
Nevertheless, it might be possible to create a relative-performance-based incentive system that avoided most of these problems, but it would have to be pretty complex to avoid incentivizing the wrong behavior. I can't imagine it off the top of my head.
Another problem with basing everything on standardized testing, in general, is that testing is not standard. Bush tried to remedy this problem by pushing a uniform national standardized test for all students. This quite sensible big-government idea failed, in part, because it did not push a standardized curriculum to go along with it. In other words, all kids now take the same national test (in addition to their state's standardized tests), but they are all learning different things. Doesn't make sense, does it? That's why we need to do away with local, politicized boards of education, state boards of education, and put the Dept. of Ed. in charge of schools everywhere, and evening out the funding gaps nationwide. Beyond having special needs and coming from better or worse backgrounds, kids are kids, and they should be learning the same things in Brooklyn as they do in Boise, in order to compete in the future global economy.
By the way, a Hoover Institution study discovered something very interesting about parents' backgrounds and what they want from their kids' schools: "Parents in high-poverty schools strongly value a teacher's ability to raise student achievement and appear indifferent to student satisfaction. In wealthier schools the results are reversed: parents most value a teacher's ability to keep students happy."
And yet poorer, more demanding parents get worse teachers: "…the teachers in higher-poverty schools in [Hoover's] sample have fewer years of experience than their counterparts in lower-poverty schools (11.8 years vs. 14.0 years). In comparison to their counterparts, teachers in higher-poverty schools are less likely to have credits beyond a bachelor's degree (66 percent vs. 78 percent) and are less likely to have attended the most prestigious local university (75 percent vs. 80 percent) for their undergraduate degree."
So here's the upshot: "In more affluent schools, parents are likely to oppose measures that increase the focus on standardized test scores at the cost of student satisfaction. More generally, programs that increase the focus on basic skills or classroom management at the expense of student enjoyment or other academic facets not measured on standardized tests are likely to be unpopular in more affluent schools."
In other words, No Child Left Behind-type emphasis on test scores has the most support from parents whose kids score the lowest. Makes sense, right? Wrong. Teaching to the test hasn't improved test scores. Indeed, students from affluent suburbs -- where testing is de-emphasized and more touchy-feely teaching is valued -- score better on standardized tests. What does this tell us? We're short-sighted and employ double standards, that's what. As with teacher pay and incentives, many of us have come to believe that what's good for poor and inner-city schools is different than what's good for wealthier suburban schools.
Obama's Outrageous Sin Against Our Kids
By Juan Williams
April 20, 2009 | FOXNews.com
As I watch Washington politics I am not easily given to rage.
Washington politics is a game and selfishness, out-sized egos and corruption are predictable.
But over the last week I find myself in a fury.
The cause of my upset is watching the key civil rights issue of this generation — improving big city public school education — get tossed overboard by political gamesmanship. If there is one goal that deserves to be held above day-to-day partisanship and pettiness of ordinary politics it is the effort to end the scandalous poor level of academic achievement and abysmally high drop-out rates for America's black and Hispanic students.
This is critical to our nation's future in terms of workforce preparation to compete in a global economy but also to fulfill the idea of racial equality by providing a real equal opportunity for all young people who are willing to work hard to succeed.
In a politically calculated dance step the Obama team first indicated that they wanted the Opportunity Scholarship Program to continue for students lucky enough to have won one of the vouchers. The five-year school voucher program is scheduled to expire after the school year ending in June 2010. Secretary Duncan said in early March that it didn't make sense "to take kids out of a school where they're happy and safe and satisfied and learning…those kids need to stay in their school."
And all along the administration indicated that pending evidence that this voucher program or any other produces better test scores for students they were willing to fight for it. The president has said that when it comes to better schools he is open to supporting "what works for kids." That looked like a level playing field on which to evaluate the program and even possibly expanding the program.
But last week Secretary Duncan announced that he will not allow any new students to enter the D.C. voucher program. In fact, he had to take back the government's offer of scholarships to 200 students who had won a lottery to get into the program starting next year. His rationale is that if the program does not win new funding from Congress then those students might have to go back to public school in a year.
He does not want to give the students a chance for a year in a better school? That does not make sense if the students and their families want that life-line of hope. It does not make sense if there is a real chance that the program might win new funding as parents, educators and politicians rally to undo the "bigotry of low expectations" and open doors of opportunity — wherever they exist — for more low-income students.
And now Secretary Duncan has applied a sly, political check-mate for the D.C. voucher plan.
With no living, breathing students profiting from the program to give it a face and stand and defend it the Congress has little political pressure to put new money into the program. The political pressure will be coming exclusively from the teacher's unions who oppose the vouchers, just as they oppose No Child Left Behind and charter schools and every other effort at reforming public schools that continue to fail the nation's most vulnerable young people, low income blacks and Hispanics.
The National Education Association and other teachers' unions have put millions into Democrats' congressional campaigns because they oppose Republican efforts to challenge unions on their resistance to school reform and specifically their refusal to support ideas such as performance-based pay for teachers who raise students' test scores.
By going along with Secretary Duncan's plan to hollow out the D.C. voucher program this president, who has spoken so passionately about the importance of education, is playing rank politics with the education of poor children. It is an outrage.
This voucher programs is unique in that it takes no money away from the beleaguered District of Columbia Public Schools. Nationwide, the strongest argument from opponents of vouchers is that it drains hard-to-find dollars from public schools that educate the majority of children.
But Congress approved the D.C. plan as an experiment and funded it separately from the D.C. school budget. It is the most generous voucher program in the nation, offering $7,500 per child to help with tuition to a parochial or private school.
With that line of attack off the table, critics of vouchers pointed out that even $7,500 is not enough to pay for the full tuition to private schools where the price of a year's education can easily go beyond $20,000. But nearly 8,000 students applied for the vouchers. And a quarter of them, 1,714 children, won the lottery and took the money as a ticket out of the D.C. public schools.
The students, almost all of them black and Hispanic, patched together the voucher money with scholarships, other grants and parents willing to make sacrifices to pay their tuition.
What happened, according to a Department of Education study, is that after three years the voucher students scored 3.7 months higher on reading than students who remained in the D.C. schools. In addition, students who came into the D.C. voucher program when it first started had a 19 month advantage in reading after three years in private schools.
It is really upsetting to see that the Heritage Foundation has discovered that 38 percent of the members of Congress made the choice to put their children in private schools. Of course, Secretary Duncan has said he decided not to live in Washington, D.C. because he did not want his children to go to public schools there. And President Obama, who has no choice but to live in the White House, does not send his two daughters to D.C. public schools, either. They attend a private school, Sidwell Friends, along with two students who got there because of the voucher program.
This reckless dismantling of the D.C. voucher program does not bode well for arguments to come about standards in the effort to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. It does not speak well of the promise of President Obama to be the "Education President,' who once seemed primed to stand up for all children who want to learn and especially minority children.
And it's time for all of us to get outraged about this sin against our children.
