February 7, 2006--Privatizing Belief
This will be about how at times belief trumps reality. In the secular realm where belief can be as powerful as in the scared.
This will be about the reform of poorly performing public schools. There are about 45 million children in our schools, more than a third of them in schools that are failing. We have been having a national debate for decades about what to do to help fix these schools so their students can realize their true potential. This debate has been heated because this not only threatens the country’s standing in an increasingly competitive world but also because the inequalities that are being exacerbated by in the schools are socio-economic and race based, with kids from poorer backgrounds faring decidedly less well that those from more affluent families. And perhaps worse, with those most disadvantaged by the schools being children of color.
The debate about what to do involves fixing things like under qualified teachers; inadequate school principals; classes too large to teach well; teaching reading via an emphasis on phonics; and if all else fails, enabling parents to enroll their children in charter schools or, more radically, giving them money so they can pay the tuition for private schools. It is these two latter reform strategies that I want to discuss—the potential effectiveness of charters and vouchers to close these unacceptable academic achievement gaps.
Educators call this privatization because it involves, via charters, a version of a market approach where public money is deployed to schools that are reconstituted outside the normal ways of doing business and governing traditional public schools. Or taking tax dollars and through vouchers transferring that money to private school ventures.
These privatizing approaches are highly favored by business leaders who get their corporate foundations to fund charters and vouchers, conservative governmental leaders (including our current president) who see the market economy to be the solution to most social problems, and many educators and philanthropies who have for all intents and purposes given up on the public schools’ ability to reform themselves. Sounds good, right?
Sorry, not exactly. Though charters and voucher programs have been around for quite some time and have received billions of dollars of support, there has as yet not been one independent evaluation of charters and vouchers that indicate that they work to close those academic gaps. The most recent was reported in the NY Times (linked below). This University of Illinois study concludes that if you control for race and socio-economic background, students do no better in either charter schools or private schools.
There are lots of data to cite but let me mention just one—about how vouchered students do in Catholic schools, those schools most often cited as working well with low-income minority students: the study found that though raw scores of fourth graders in Catholic schools were 14.3 higher on math and reading tests, when these scores were looked at so as to compare vouchered students attending these schools with their equivalents left behind in public schools, the vouchered students scored 3.4 points lower.
One would think that this stream of negative evaluations of charter schools and voucher programs would drive corporate types away from supporting them since they are so “bottom line” oriented. Well, wrong again. The support continues; in fact it has increased. Rather than be guided by the facts on the ground, the data, by reality itself, they persist in their belief that this privatized approached is the solution.
If there were no examples of other kinds of reform models that were in fact working, I would say, keep going with what you believe. But belief here will not get the job done. Only effective practices that have evidence that they work will.
This will be about the reform of poorly performing public schools. There are about 45 million children in our schools, more than a third of them in schools that are failing. We have been having a national debate for decades about what to do to help fix these schools so their students can realize their true potential. This debate has been heated because this not only threatens the country’s standing in an increasingly competitive world but also because the inequalities that are being exacerbated by in the schools are socio-economic and race based, with kids from poorer backgrounds faring decidedly less well that those from more affluent families. And perhaps worse, with those most disadvantaged by the schools being children of color.
The debate about what to do involves fixing things like under qualified teachers; inadequate school principals; classes too large to teach well; teaching reading via an emphasis on phonics; and if all else fails, enabling parents to enroll their children in charter schools or, more radically, giving them money so they can pay the tuition for private schools. It is these two latter reform strategies that I want to discuss—the potential effectiveness of charters and vouchers to close these unacceptable academic achievement gaps.
Educators call this privatization because it involves, via charters, a version of a market approach where public money is deployed to schools that are reconstituted outside the normal ways of doing business and governing traditional public schools. Or taking tax dollars and through vouchers transferring that money to private school ventures.
These privatizing approaches are highly favored by business leaders who get their corporate foundations to fund charters and vouchers, conservative governmental leaders (including our current president) who see the market economy to be the solution to most social problems, and many educators and philanthropies who have for all intents and purposes given up on the public schools’ ability to reform themselves. Sounds good, right?
Sorry, not exactly. Though charters and voucher programs have been around for quite some time and have received billions of dollars of support, there has as yet not been one independent evaluation of charters and vouchers that indicate that they work to close those academic gaps. The most recent was reported in the NY Times (linked below). This University of Illinois study concludes that if you control for race and socio-economic background, students do no better in either charter schools or private schools.
There are lots of data to cite but let me mention just one—about how vouchered students do in Catholic schools, those schools most often cited as working well with low-income minority students: the study found that though raw scores of fourth graders in Catholic schools were 14.3 higher on math and reading tests, when these scores were looked at so as to compare vouchered students attending these schools with their equivalents left behind in public schools, the vouchered students scored 3.4 points lower.
One would think that this stream of negative evaluations of charter schools and voucher programs would drive corporate types away from supporting them since they are so “bottom line” oriented. Well, wrong again. The support continues; in fact it has increased. Rather than be guided by the facts on the ground, the data, by reality itself, they persist in their belief that this privatized approached is the solution.
If there were no examples of other kinds of reform models that were in fact working, I would say, keep going with what you believe. But belief here will not get the job done. Only effective practices that have evidence that they work will.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
11:42 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home