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Fri, 25 Jul 2008
Charter Schools again: A report from the kingdom of data
A column about Mayoral academies a few weeks back sparked more than average response. Reviewing some of the letters I received, it seemed worthwhile to write a bit about what we know about school "reform."
The deafening clamor of energetic academic controversies attracts funding, and researchers fly to that honey. So one upside of the arguments over public education is there are swarms of economists and psychologists and other education researchers out there examining educational policies and social influences to try to figure out what works and what doesn't. They publish articles for curious people to read and evaluate. So I did. (And you can, too. Find the citations below.) Here's a little of what I learned while browsing academic literature about charter schools and school choice.
One of the perennial problems of studying public education is comparisons with private schools. Private and parochial schools generally get better academic achievement for less money. But how? Do they have a magic formula, or is it just that the students at such schools tend to be better off? The problem has long been that when researchers try to factor out the effects of race and economic class, there isn't enough data left over to make valid comparisons between private and public schools.
But this is no longer true, somewhat ironically due to the No Child Left Behind act. New testing mandates have increased the number of private and parochial (and charter) schools who administer the National Assessment of Educational Performance (NAEP) tests to their students. So now we can make statistically valid comparisons. And what we find is that private and parochial schools are generally no better than the students who attend them.
In a study of NAEP math tests from fourth and eighth grades, Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, researchers at the University of Illinois, showed that public schools perform as well as private, parochial and charter schools once you adjust the populations so you're comparing apples to apples. Where there are significant differences, the public schools came out ahead.
Be careful not to misunderstand. Though it does imply that public schools are better than you think, given the students they have, the study does not say that all public schools are better than private schools. Lots of public schools aren't very good. That is not controversial. But the Lubienskis' findings tell us that merely replacing them may not be a solution.
Another idea popular with school reformers is to allow students to choose the school they'll attend. A provision of NCLB says students in "failing" schools must be offered an opportunity to go somewhere else. Sounds like a sensible idea, right? The problem is that very few students actually take those opportunities. Nationally, around 97% of students who have a choice to leave a failing school don't take it according to Courtney Bell, a researcher at UConn.
This seems irrational, but Bell set out to take a closer look. She conducted a large number of interviews with parents of children in failing schools in a medium-size midwestern city. What she found was that people were usually making perfectly rational choices among the options they saw available to them. But she found those options were frequently not what education reformers imagined them to be. She found parents were not choosing from all schools, but among the schools they could get their children to safely, schools that used the same curriculum their children had already begun, schools where they thought their children would have friends, and so on. Among those schools, Bell found parents usually picked the best, but this was very often the original, failing, school.
An even more provocative study of school choice programs was done by Stephen Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and the author of "Freakonomics", a best-seller a couple of years ago. In Chicago, students can attend a selection of high-performing schools, but they are chosen by lottery. He looked at the academic performance of students who attended the schools and found they were, in fact, better than students who did not attend. But he also noticed something surprising: the best indicator of academic performance was whether a student had entered the lottery at all, not which school he or she wound up attending. That is, students who entered the lottery and didn't make it did just as well as their luckier peers who got in. The population who winds up at the good schools are the good students, because they're the ones who enter the lotteries.
The problem with education is it's so easy to be swept away by new carpets and shiny new programs and what sound like sensible reforms. But we live in a complex world, and what sounds good isn't always good. There is real data out there, and we can learn from it -- if we choose to.
At this point, the legislative wheels are greased and the train is moving; Cumberland is going to embark on this project. It's possible the designers of the Mayoral Academies will avoid the pitfalls I've just described. If so, good for them. But we'll be watching -- as will all the children who won't get to attend these wonderful new schools.
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