Better Schools, Fewer Dollars is a thought provoking essay. It's very much worth taking some time to become acquainted with its contents and stated reasons for supporting charter schools and vouchers. Free choice, in other words.
Here's an excerpt:
"Here's what looks like a policy dilemma. To attain the economic
growth that it desperately needs, the United States must improve its
schools and train a workforce capable of competing in the global
economy. Economists Eric Hanushek, Dean Jamison, Eliot Jamison, and
Ludger Woessmann estimate that improving student achievement by half of
one standard deviation—roughly the current difference between the United
States and Finland—would increase U.S. GDP growth by about a full
percentage point annually. Yet states and the federal government face
severe budgetary constraints these days; how are policymakers supposed
to improve student achievement while reducing school funding?
In reality, that task is far from impossible. The story of American
education over the last three decades is one not of insufficient funds
but of inefficient schools. Billions of new dollars have gone into the
system, to little effect. Luckily, Americans are starting to recognize
that we can improve schooling without paying an additional dime. In
fact, by unleashing the power of educational choice, we might even save
money while getting better results and helping the economy's long-term
prospects.
Over the last four decades, public education spending has increased
rapidly in the United States. According to the Department of Education,
public schools spent, on average, $12,922 per pupil in 2008, the most
recent year for which data are available. Adjusting for inflation,
that's more than double the $6,402 per student that public schools spent
in 1975.
Despite that doubling of funds, just about every measure of
educational outcomes has remained stagnant since 1975, though some have
finally begun to inch upward over the last few years. Student scores on
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the only
consistently observed measure of student math and reading achievement
over the period—have remained relatively flat since the mid-1970s. High
school graduation rates haven't budged much over the last 40 years,
either....
Obviously, it's misleading simply to compare the performance of
private and public school students without adjusting for the type of
student enrolled in each sector. A student whose parents can afford to
pay private school tuition is likely to score higher on standardized
tests than the average public school student, regardless of the quality
of the school.
But there's another way to prove that public schools don't get as
much for their dollars as private schools do: research on school voucher
programs, which pay tuition for students (usually low-income) to attend
private schools. The best studies use a random design similar to what's
used in medical trials and broadly accepted as a "gold standard"
methodology. They take advantage of the fact that when more students
apply for a program than there are vouchers available, the program
awards vouchers randomly, ensuring that the only difference between the
subsequent performance of those who received vouchers and those who
didn't is whether they wound up going to the private school or a public
school. A researcher can thus compare the achievement of these two sets
of students and determine which setting, public or private, does a
better job.
The nearly uniform finding from this research is that students
benefit academically when they attend private school, rather than the
public school that they would otherwise have attended. Some disagreement
persists about how large the private schools' impact is and about
whether it affects all students or only those from particular
backgrounds—but not even the harshest critics claim that attending a
private school harms students.
Of particular interest to budget-strapped state and local governments
is that the cost of the vouchers in these studies—and even the total
tuition charged by the private schools, if it's greater than the cost of
the voucher—is well below what the public schools would spend to
educate the same child. For instance, economist Robert Costrell found
that by paying tuition to send 18,500 public school kids to private
schools, Milwaukee saved taxpayers $31.9 million in 2008.
The data on charter schools are more mixed, but the general lesson is
similar. Charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate
essentially as their own school districts, free of the rules that bind
regular public schools. Like voucher programs, charter schools usually
admit students by lottery when there are more applicants than available
seats. Here again, studies using the random-assignment approach have
found that charter schools in New York City, Boston, and Chicago produce
better educational outcomes than the local public schools that students
would have attended. Further, state funding for charter schools is, at
most, equal to—and usually less than—the funding for traditional public
schools. The bottom line: a substantial body of research shows that at
worst, students perform as well in private and charter schools as they
would have in regular public schools, and at a lower cost.
Public schools are inefficient for many of the same reasons that the
Department of Motor Vehicles and other government bureaucracies are. In
her book Educational Economics, University of Washington researcher
Marguerite Roza shows that public school inefficiencies are largely the
product of burdensome regulations imposed by a top-down organizational
model. School districts collect money and allocate it from a central
base according to a variety of bureaucratic rules, only some of which
make sense. Schools themselves have little discretion over how to use
their resources.
Consider the way public schools spend money on their most important
asset: teachers. According to the Department of Education, teacher
salaries and benefits account for about 54 percent of public school
budgets, which surely suggests that they should be structured in a way
that maximizes those dollars. Instead, teacher salaries depend entirely
on two criteria that, the evidence shows, bear little or no connection
to a teacher's effectiveness: years of experience and number of advanced
degrees. As a result, schools must pay higher salaries to teachers who
may not be more effective than teachers lacking advanced degrees or with
fewer years on the job. A more efficient system, of course, would
direct capital to the teachers whom the school most wants in the
classroom, regardless of what their résumés look like.
In most districts, public schools aren't even allowed to decide which
teachers to employ, since tenure ensures that principals can't remove
the least effective teachers. Most collective bargaining agreements also
allow more senior teachers to push their way into job openings,
regardless of whether the principal thinks they're right for the job.
Nor can schools make their own decisions about whom to keep when they're
laying teachers off: either by state law or by collective bargaining
agreement, most school systems require that layoffs be carried out
strictly according to seniority, without any consideration of teachers'
value. Thus, when budget cuts arrive, schools not only face staff
reductions; they often lose their best young teachers. And since pay is
based on seniority, the schools are simultaneously dismissing their
least expensive teachers. . . .
Schools don't need more funds; they need the freedom to use their
funds as they see best. That can happen only if the restrictions of the
current system no longer bind them. A better system—one that the United
States should begin moving toward—would be a taxpayer-funded one of
relatively autonomous schools. Every school would become, in effect, a
charter school. Districts would still have a role in this kind of
system, imposing performance standards that schools would have to meet
to keep their doors open. But it would be each school's responsibility
to adopt sound policies and use its resources wisely. . . .
As more students use public dollars to attend schools outside the
traditional public school sector, student achievement will probably
improve, and expenditures will certainly decline. That's an outcome that
should interest lawmakers in these fiscally troubled times."
Summing Up
If you've made it this far, you've received the message loud and clear.
Choice matters. It's a vital element of all free markets where customers rule.
Lower taxpayer costs and higher quality student outcomes will be the result in both voucher and charter situations.
Local autonomous schools are a great idea.
In fact, they remind me of the way it was when I attended public school in a small Illinois town long ago. It was a great experience and provided an excellent education.
Oh, and by the way, there were no teachers unions then either.
Let's bring the good old days back. Our children and grandchidren deserve nothing less than our very best efforts to do just that.
Thanks. Bob.
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