Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

Talk about over the top rhetoric: “Will they stay with the leftist orthodoxy and defend the monopolistic economics of public-only education? “

Please point to any law or action by public schools to interfere with the supply and demand for private relgious based schools?

When an article makes statements like that, the entire article becomes less credible.

Please point to any law or action by public schools to interfere with the supply and demand for private relgious based schools?

Easy: private school parents are forced to pay for public school whether they send their kids there or not. Economically speaking, you can’t isolate the private school market from the public school market; the two are substitute goods for one another.

As far as the piece you quoted, that was my ideologically-driven conclusion :-) I’m not ashamed to show my bias in my writing, nor will I deny that I have bias. Likewise, I identified Bolick up front as an advocate. Certainly an article by a neutral observer would have more credibility (that’s the nature of arguments), but that’s why I appealed to facts, and left the various ideological arguments out of the meat of my article. So, yeah, I’m a flack, I’m biased, and I’m one-sided - but I have facts, and that’s more than I’ve seen from the other side in this debate. I showed you my data, now you show me yours.

One thing Public Schools have and Private Schools don’t are Army Recruiters. Remember that nearly all Public Schools are required to give data to Recruiters.

With the situation in Iraq deteriorating and the willingness of Americans to serve in the armed forces declining, a little-known Army publication called the “School Recruiting Program Handbook” is becoming increasingly important, and controversial.

The handbook is the recruiter’s bible, the essential guide for those who have to go into the nation’s high schools and round up warm bodies to fill the embarrassingly skimpy ranks of the Army’s basic training units.

The handbook declares forthrightly, “The goal is school ownership that can only lead to a greater number of Army enlistments.”

It then lists how to get teenagers to join without telling them their Rights or Priveliges.

Well, I don’t know about David, but as a child I did not care whether the rest of the class rotted.

As a parent, I’ve taught my two not to care about them either. Public education is the lowest common denominator. If a family wants to educate their children in a better way, it is their right.

What seems not to be mentioned in this “controversy” is that public schools are only interested in spending as little as possible on education so they can spend the rest on “administration”.

If I could afford to, I would contract a tutor for each subject they need to know, as well as what I want them to know. In time, when they are ready, I would have them tested for their graduating diploma. If I cannot find a school that will test them for graduation, I am glad that a General Equivalency Diploma is available. Of course, I would give them the best graduation ceremony we could afford!

This is what a high school education is about: what is required to gain a General Equivalency Diploma. Any other perks a school, public or private, offers can be duplicated by any family that is dedicated to their children’s education.

In our 21st century, it is more important to prepare them for college, or an apprenticeship. Either way, primary education is more about getting ready for college/apprenticeship than the public school system is willing to concentrate on.

Public school is more of a laboratory, where kids are studied, experimented on and judged to be in some category or another. Our federal government is a gold mine for contractors; our public schools have become a gold mine for academics.

What would school administrators gain from making their schools better? More work for the same pay.

Of course there are teachers and administrators who educate children as best they can. My family’s biggest educational comfort is in finding them in our schools. But our biggest fear is what may happen at any time: those people may leave, for whatever reason.

We want more control of their education. We don’t want to have to ask, beg and plead with some idiot whose agenda clashes with ours.

Why shouldn’t we be able to control the use of our taxes in terms of their education?

You know, I’m generally liberal in my thinking and politics (well, really I’m more of a centrist), but I am decidely sick and damned tired of hearing about the poor, disadvantaged kids.

Even when I was one I didn’t think of myself as one.

Now that I’m married and trying to raise my kids, I care more about the education of my kids than the education of others. Things are better now than they were in the 60s. Everyone can choose where their kids go to school. Why aren’t they dedicated to educating the children they chose to have?

Yes, there are disadvantaged children who depend on our government to grow up and get educated so they won’t have to depend on it as adults. If this isn’t the way government works now, it is the way it must work in the future.

But don’t ask me to put those poor kids ahead of mine. I’m concentrating on giving mine every advantage I can, and any effort I could donate is being given to them. Yes, I’m selfish when it comes to them.

The idea that the government can help the disadvantaged poor kids is laughable… What are they going to do? Throw more money at their schools? Please… What they need are stable families that enforce a work ethic… and the government can’t provide that. It then becomes the child’s responsibility to take care of his/her own education. An unfair burden, I know, but life isn’t fair.

Aldous said:

No update, or passed over too quickly for note-taker.

So I take it you are in favor of vouchers.

Oh, and were you going to credit Bob Herbert’s editorial, or were you trying to make like you’d heard of the Handbook before today?

Actually, snippets of the Handbook were printed in Harper’s Magazine in either the April or May issues. Somewhat scary how they try to penetrate the highschool market.

Common Man,
You didn’t come out and say it but it sure sounds like you are a home schooler trying to trash public schools. I can see why home schoolers are bitter about paying taxes while not using the schools. Some public schools are good, some not but they are products of the communities in which they reside. It certainly doesnt make it easier for them when the students with more concerned parents take their ball (kids) and go home.

Vouchers only go half way though. How about not taxing those of us with no children at all to pay for schooling?

Data like this completely cuts the feet from under anyone who would argue that the program should be discontinued because of effectiveness. With that argument shattered, the shills of the teachers’ unions are left making their case using the language of secular ideology, though their opposition remains thoroughly predicated on the tenuous notion that their industry should be exempt from economic penalties and rewards.

You make this too easy. Correlation does not equal causation. You have not eliminated other programs from the running as causes. Have you eliminated fraud? Teaching to the tests? Recent economic developments? Even your own No Child Left Behind Legislation?

No, you WANT to believe it’s vouchers and competition. You want to believe that somehow market principles are applicable.

Okay, why don’t we permanently kick out of school any children who flunk a year! Oh, but you see, that would defeat the purpose of public education: to maintain a standard. Public education is our shield against the kind of crushing poverty that hamstrings industrialized countries. It is the one kind of welfare that actually works.

I am a public school educated child, and I don’t think I suffered too much for that. In the end, this is all about blaming the poor communities for the deteriorated condition they were born into, rather than actively trying to improve schools there. We send the most inexperienced, most naive teachers, with the worst possible funding to do the best possible job. Then we tell these half-hamstrung teachers that they got to make huge improvements in these already degraded school, or risk a hemorrhaging of funds and students. Great idea. What’s next, demolishing the school buildings so they get more sunshine and exercise in the outdoors? This is no different than having somebody go up and down the unemployment lines during a recession, yelling at people to get a job.

There’s a difference between models and real life. The Competitive model always promises to deliver results. Does it always deliver them? No. Sometimes, when dealing with government programs, it just pays to do things directly, rather than beat around the Bush.

Chops said: “Easy: private school parents are forced to pay for public school whether they send their kids there or not. Economically speaking, you can’t isolate the private school market from the public school market; the two are substitute goods for one another.”

You couldn’t be more wrong, Chops. My Mother hasn’t had kids in school for decades and she still pays property taxes for schools to this day. That is a whole other concept from private v. public school monopolization, and I think you know that. The society, the corporations, the very survival of the nation depends upon all members of society contributing to educating the society’s young, otherwise the nation has no future.

I still challenge you to provide evidence that public schools in anyway try, through law or other means, to monopolize private schools out of competitive existence.

Stephen -

In the end, this is all about blaming the poor communities for the deteriorated condition they were born into, rather than actively trying to improve schools there…What’s next, demolishing the school buildings so they get more sunshine and exercise in the outdoors? This is no different than having somebody go up and down the unemployment lines during a recession, yelling at people to get a job.

Is this straw man yours? Could you take him home, please? We were having a nice conversation. Nobody said anything about “blame”; we were talking about how to improve schools.

I brought data. So far, no liberal has brought anything but rhetoric. Rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper, and data beats rhetoric.

Of course correlation does not prove causality, but it’s strongly suggestive thereof, especially when backed up by scholarship and logic. That’s why Bolick’s group FOIA’d school records. Those records show what the principals saw as making them change: the threat of vouchers.

Take your straw man home, Stephen, and bring something valuable to the argument. Whining about how poor communities are being “blamed” for their condition can’t hold a candle to the folks who are actually trying to do something about it.

There’s a difference between models and real life.

My point exactly. Here’s a program that’s working, empirically, and liberals are out to kill it, on ideological and turf-protection grounds.

This is a market based program that works Chops, The Liberals will fight you tooth and nail about it and eventually try to blame President Bush if my guess is correct.

David said:

I still challenge you to provide evidence that public schools in anyway try, through law or other means, to monopolize private schools out of competitive existence.

Ok, I’ll take it a little slower this time, and come at the argument a different way.

(1) Private and public schools are in the same market. Those who consume one would (and do) switch to consuming the other if price/quality/convenience changes reach some threshold, and consumers consider these imperfect substitutes for one another.

(2) Public schools are provided to consumers free of charge; all taxpayers (parents and non) pay for it indirectly (as you said).

(3) The characteristic of a monopoly is that it uses unfair practices to gain a controlling share of a market.

[Side note: Obviously, public schools aren’t for-profit, so they don’t use their monopoly power the way a corporate monopoly does. However, private schools are still on the short end of the monopolistic stick.]

“Dumping” goods on a market below cost is illegal in international trade, and can be ruled illegal in domestic markets if a court decides that the intent & effect is monopolistic. By providing a K-12 education for free, public schools are drastically undercutting their competition. Again, they’re not gouging consumers, but private schools aren’t competing on an even playing field. Vouchers is one way to even that playing field. Abolishing free public education would be another way, but (as you say) it would be disastrous for society.

This is really tangential to the main argument I make in this post (which is that vouchers are effective in Florida), and if I wasn’t interested in the economics of it, I wouldn’t have replied. Frankly, I don’t much care that private schools aren’t on an even playing field: I care that students and parents have the opportunity to get a decent education. I hope the erudition doesn’t detract from the facts here, which is that by giving vouchers to 750 students, the state of Florida has improved education statewide by a terrific margin. That’s worth talking about!

Chops,
You stated that one of the aruements against vouchers is that disintrested kids or those with disintredsed parents will be left to rot in own disintrest and under funded filth.
If a kid is not interesed in his/her education then they need to stay in public school, because a private school will boot them out faster than you can say straight F student.
I wish every kid could have a great education, but fact is not every kid will get one vouchers or no vouchers.
There are many reasons for this:
(1) LACK OF PARENTAL INTREST. This is usually the cause of all the other reasons.
(2) The childs lack of intrest.
(3) Passing a failing student just to save his selfesteem.
(4) Lack of intrest by the teachers. I know, there are a lot of good teachers out there that care, but lets face it their are also a lot who don’t. I sure hoope they are in the minority.
(5) Lack of intrest by the school board. A cause of reason #3.
(6) Spending school district money on things other than the schools. I could tell you horror stories that my sister who lives in Sacramento has told me about their school board’s spending habits. And I’m sure you can find them in just about every major city, and a lot of smaller towns.
These are just a few of the reasons for a bad education as I see it.
Until we can straighten these things out, unfourtuntly there will be kids that don’t get a good education.
By the way I support vouchers although I have some reservations about them.

Chops, your model is all wrong, which is leading to the wrong conclusions.

Look, Public vs. private schools is analogous to neighborhoods. Everyone in the country pays for basic infrastructure like roads and power to their neighborhood as well as policing. This is analogous to public schools, regardless of whether you are homeless or live in Beverly Hills, Ca., we all pay our taxes on income and consumption and get access to these neighborhoods. Now Private schools are analogous to the Beverly Hills neighborhood, where for a premium, you can live in a community devoid of riff-raff, with far higher standard of living and infrastructure, with much higher police to population ratios, better maintained roads and gated security communities, plus Rodeo Drive for your shopping needs.

There is no competition between the inner city of Detroit neighborhoods and Beverly Hills. If you can afford the premium, you can choose to move from Detroit to Beverly Hills. If you can’t afford the premium, your tax dollars combined with everyone else’s guarantees you basic infrastructure and your children and society’s next generation of workers/citizens get access to at least minimum standard education.

Hence no monopoly, and no direct competition. It is very capitalistic that those who want exclusivity in education or highly specialized services, pay a premium according to supply and demand and recieve those premium services. But no society can afford, or will last long, if premium services price the majority of the population into unfulfilled demand - that is how revolutions and civil wars begin.

It’s not a straw man argument because I’m not saying that your intent is to do that. I’m saying the effect is the same. It is trying to hold somebody accountable for a system that they don’t control that’s not working.

Also, read this and tell me if this regards the study you’re talking about: Accountability test troubles.
Data trumps nothing if it’s not properly handled.

Correlation is quite meaningful for the sake of rhetoric, but not always meaningful in any scientific sense of things.

Let’s say you’re taking a medicine, and you feel that it’s working. Is that because the medicine you have works? Not necessarily. It could be that your medicine is a placebo, and it makes you feel better, which improves your condition, or at least dispels it, if there is a psychological explanation. Or it could be that you have a short term illness, and that it gets better as you take what is essentially ineffective medicine.

This struck me:

The results have been stunning. Even with tougher state standards, nearly half of Florida’s public schools now earn “A” grades, while a similar percentage scored “C’s” when the program started. A 2003 study by Jay Greene found that gains were most concentrated among schools under threat of vouchers.

What measure were the vouchers being measured from? From an at-risk test it appears. Where the at-risk test and the normal one the same? No, not at all. Was there a correlation? Yes, but the normal sort of strong correlation between two tests on the same subject, and this one suited a more rote approach to education, not necessarily an improvement. Also, I read that there were three other voucher driven schools where such gains were not seen.

I think you guys want to see Vouchers as the model. You see the low income poor performance as a product of the public school system, yet you don’t work out that comparatively, middle and upper class public schools are doing fine. If it were a problem of educational paradigm, for its purposes, the problems would plague middle class and upper class schools too. Instead, we see dependable education elsewhere.

You want to believe that Vouchers will save public education. Fact is, the problem is more related to the general socioeconomic problems of the areas in question rather than it is to the private or public nature of the education, much less the question of competition.

I have a question:

If it is merely competition which prompts schools to improve, why is competition between public schools and private schools necessary to achieve this affect? Why not simply the right to pick which school in a district, or a group of nearby districts, you send your schools to? Would not the deficient schools be weeded out in this system, if competition alone is the answer? And would not this keep ALL money involved within the public school system, if not the same public school? Why is it specifically private school vouchers that are the answer?

err, make that effect not affect.

It seems to me that what YOU put into education is what YOU get out of it! People that want to learn…learn. People that don’t want to learn….don’t! Don’t come back at me w/ such and such either, it’s a spit in the face to all those who have overcame odds!!
It’s just like another thread on here about obesity…..legislation will never cure it..EVER, it’s all in your desire.

Traci, if students can learn if they want to, then we don’t need schools at all, private or public… just shove books in front of kids and lock ‘em in a closet with a light on. They should learn just fine if they want to… Education, what a waste of dollars and effort, eh?

Hilarious!

Traci-
Exactly!

Chops-
I think what she said illustrates what you and the rest of the conservatives are missing. All the competition that matters is the competition to learn.

I think Public and Private schools are built with different games in mind. Private School’s game is the best education money can buy. Public Education is the most people educated to a satisfactory level regardless of socioeconomic class. They don’t compete directly, any more than a fast food restaurant and a a four star restaurant do. Spagos doesn’t worry about MacDonalds. The Niches, the needs fulfilled, are different.

There is no competition to undercut. Private schools aren’t interested in educating the masses and never will be. Public schools aren’t interested in top dollar education, and really can’t afford to be. They beat each other at the things they do best, and cede the battles they can’t win.

In the end, Vouchers are no solution, but a subsidy. But why? It isn’t as if private schools are unable to fill their rolls. No, somebody wants to engineer the market to allow private schools with public funding.

Somebody wants to be able to take an influx of student on the government bill and educate them in their own way, without having to bite the bullet and run the schools as exclusive institutions as private schools normally do.

I think what we’re talking about here is taxpayer funded education of the far right and the religious conservatives done their way, but using the government as their instrument to reconstruct society. The kind of reshaping that the market would otherwise discourage on a community-wide scale. Unfortunately, to get what they want, they have to take a lot of our funds and wreck and/or disparage a lot of our very functional system to panic people into believing this is all necessary.

Which it is not. The crisis here is more cultural than anything, with a common presence across secular and religious society. We have lost the notion of being educated or holding authority as carrying with it responsibility or respect. Only when respect for being educated returns, will our schools really see improvements.

David R. Remer-
Learning takes motivation, intention, the wish to get the answers right. That’s what we got to encourage.

Stephen:

Learning takes motivation, intention, the wish to get the answers right. That’s what we got to encourage.

From my own experience of learning, and further research into theories of education and how people learn in general, I would say that the wish to get the right answers is far less important to encourage than the wish to ask the right questions, and keep asking questions, and keep looking for answers, always. Curiosity is the motivator you’re looking for.

Education is best when there is a mix of public and private. Anybody who gets a monopoly and lives off tax dollars is corrupted by it. Teachers unions and public schools are no exception.

If voucher are allowed, the public school don’t empty out. Most people just want a good school. If the public school provides it, they will stay there. Private schools IMPROVE public schools by raising the standard for all schools.

Taylor

Those without kids should be grateful for those who take the expense and the time of produce the next generation. Life is a long chain letter. Nothing you have is worth anything unless there is a successor generation. Any investments you buy, any houses you own are only worth what someone will pay for them. When you turn 65, I suppose you expect that someone younger might work to maintain your lifestyle.

You need not be concerned with schools etc as long as you have the Lugar retirement plan. The Lugar retirement plan is the day you retire and/or can no longer take care of yourself, you put the Lugar in your mouth and pull the trigger. Otherwise, you will be dependent on that next generation and you should stop complaining about it.

Stik,

I’m no longer concerned with other people’s kids. Just mine. And I’ll be able to afford to educate them myself before they get to junior high.

David R. Remer
You’ve been watching too much Beverly Hills Cop (grin) (grin)

Hey Chops, interesting article.

Under the program, whenever a public school receives two failing grades on Florida’s academic performance standards, state educational officials come into the school with a remedial program, and the students are allowed to transfer to better performing public schools

Since you say the increased quality has little to do with the vouchers, it looks like it’s the school’s “remedial plan” that’s doing the trick.

Absolutely we should be tracking the success rates of our public schools. That’s the only way we know which ones need the “remedial plan”.

It sounds to me like the vouchers themselves are totally unnecessary.

Sounds like the real motivation for vouchers is to give a financial break to those that dont want to use the public schools anyway. The argument that those left in public schools will also be better off is thin. Common Man’s motivation is more believable - i.e. only concerned about his own kids.

Even the Remedial tests are questionable in this regard. If you reduce everything to basics and engage in rote education according to test, of course the scores are going to go up. I think that was the point of the article I linked in response to Chops.

The better approach keeps the same final tests, but teaches the material better. It is only regression to take any other course. Unfortunately for some who want an easy solution for the sake of appearances, that would not be it.

David~

I never suggested that we didn’t need schools for education. I suggested that as long as there is a teacher up front giving the information, it’s up to the child to take it in. If they are simply not interested no amount of govt. control will change that! I know this first hand, I was simply not interested in school and no matter what anyone said or did it didn’t change anything. I had to bring home progress reports every week that determined whether or not I had a social life that weekend or not, still it changed nothing as I sat home yet another weekend!
This was not the teachers fault or the govt., it was mine. I was very bright, just not interested, in fact when I moved to Missouri, I was lacking so many credits I had a full schedule plus I was to take Missouri Govt. on my own time in order to graduate. All year I never even went and met the Govt. teacher or got any of the hand outs, A week prior to graduating the school said, “look you have to pass a Missouri Govt. exam in order to graduate!” My first time ever meeting this teacher, I went in to take the exam,…..I got the highest grade out of all the students that took the whole class.
My only point is that when children want to learn they do! And teachers (from my experience) love to help as long as they see you’re willing! And why are they expected to create a miracle where in most cases even the parents could not?

Stephen -
Your article link wasn’t clickable in my window; could you post it as text? Also, regarding test scores & teaching-to-the-test, that’s a red herring. Did you read my data? For high schoolers, the measure was not a test score, it was graduation percentages. And since most schools are willing to graduate anyone who is willing to stay in school, that means that the big change is that more kids - especially minorities - are staying in school. For the 3rd-graders, it’s a measure of reading ability. If “teaching to the test” means teaching kids to read, then I say Hooray!

Jarandhel -
You asked if inter-public school competition would work. I think so, but the reason I posted this is because we have a real-world example of success. Now, the Florida system does have inter-public school competition as well, but the FOIA’d transcripts suggest that vouchers were what it took to light a fire under administrators. I’m planning to discuss the European high school model in my next post on education; that might be similar to what you’re thinking.

AP -

Since you say the increased quality has little to do with the vouchers, it looks like it’s the school’s “remedial plan” that’s doing the trick. Absolutely we should be tracking the success rates of our public schools. That’s the only way we know which ones need the “remedial plan”.

AP, you warm my heart. You’re halfway there! To complete the track of reasoning you began here, take into account that the remedial plans were not imposed from outside, but were self-motivated. The state set out consequences for failure, and the schools themselves figured out how to succeed, using their own internal resources.

See, I’m not saying that public educators are evil; I’m just saying they’re human. They can be creative and hard-working and successful, but like most of us they need incentives to do so. Vouchers have proven to be a remarkably successful incentive in Florida. That’s all I’m saying.

Traci said:

I never suggested that we didn’t need schools for education. I suggested that as long as there is a teacher up front giving the information, it’s up to the child to take it in.

Some students can succeed this way, Traci, but they are the distinct minority. Education is of huge personal benefit, but how many 10-year-olds can understand that their lifetime earnings will be a million dollars higher if they get a college degree, and are strong-minded enough to act on it? As a society, we understand that we all benefit from having well-educated citizens, so it’s incumbent upon us to design an educational system that allows students who aren’t self-starters and nerds to succeed and become engineers, doctors, accountants, and professors.

Stephen said:

There is no competition to undercut. Private schools aren’t interested in educating the masses and never will be. Public schools aren’t interested in top dollar education, and really can’t afford to be. They beat each other at the things they do best, and cede the battles they can’t win.

The schools we’re talking about here are those willing to accept $4,000 as full-tuition. Those aren’t “top-dollar” schools, and they are absolutely aimed at the “masses”. Inner-city private schools are tough institutions that scrape by to educate kids whose parents can’t afford to move to a nice suburb. Comparing them to the Andovers and Exeters of the world is utterly falacious.

David -

Your comparison of the neighborhood market to the school market is incorrect.

Here’s why: when you want to upgrade from one neighborhood to another, you pay for the difference. That is, selling your $200,000 house and buying a $600,000 only costs you $400,000.

With schools, however, you have to pay the “base cost” (analogous to the $200,000) as well as the difference.

Your analogy is correct only if you’re talking about free public housing; one of the downsides of that is that it makes the relative cost of private housing steeper for those who have the choice.

To complete the track of reasoning you began here, take into account that the remedial plans were not imposed from outside, but were self-motivated.

Chops, according to the article you linked, the remedial plan was imposed on the schools by the state,

Under the program, whenever a public school receives two failing grades on Florida’s academic performance standards, state educational officials come into the school with a remedial program

According to you and your article, the vouchers are totally unnecessary.

Stephen, Traci, and others:

Stephen said: “Learning takes motivation, intention, the wish to get the answers right. That’s what we got to encourage.”

This is the crux. Every child regardless of potential, is born with the desire and intent to learn. It is hardwired into every child. Want proof? How many children have you met who by the age of 5 had refused or were not motivated to learn language? Right! None! They all want to learn. It is up to society to capitalize on that innate desire and motivation, and encourage, reward, and reinforce it.

To do that a lot has to change. More parental involvement, many more teachers to get down to the ideal 12 to 15 student/teacher ratio, and licensing teachers as much on their ability to enjoy young people and teaching as their knowledge of the academic subject. That of course, means more money.

But I will tell you now, as long as our nation is intent to go down this divisive road of battling between creationism and religion vs science in the classroom, as long as our nation funds education through property taxes (thus, community aggregate income), as long as we use the capitalist model of balancing the most education for the least cost, the U.S. will continue to lose the education advantage to up and coming countries like China, Malaysia, and India.

All this choice and freedom to believe whatever we want to believe combined with collective lobbying of school boards and politicians black mailing their jobs if they don’t do it our way instead of the best way, is why mature democracies with large broad multi-generational middle classes, are doomed.

Despite the fact that education can’t be reduced to widgets per hour unit cost and markup profit margins limited only by competitive forces and consumer value assessment, the US continues to move in that direction in shaping education. Education is not about short term cost/overhead/production capacity. Education is more akin to long term investing - a concept America has almost completely forgotten the definition and implementation of. From government to Corporate Boards of Directors, to individual savings, long-term investing is becoming a lost concept.

And our educational breakdown in America is reflecting all of these trends.

I don’t have the link handy, but you do as a contributor with access to the system. You can go in there and inspect the code on the link. If I’ve made a mistake there, I can’t correct it from here, but you can.

My concern here centers on the methodology of the reporting. Are we reporting a correlation here, or are we reporting a causal connection. You want to establish it as the latter, but the evidence and the presentation, at most, establish it as the former.

Correlation does not imply causation. Higher graduation rates and better reading scores are meaningless as measures of success if the grades and scores by which they are attained stem from greater ease of material, rather than better teaching. These are all at-risk schools, as your article, your link says. My link says that the material these kids are getting is more rote, more basic- remedial.

When that is the case, it is no surprise that scores go up, that graduation rates go up: the material is easier to comprehend and the tests easier to pass. However, the facility of these tests fails at one crucial goal- the improvement of the student’s ability to handle the material as laid out originally.

Your 750 voucher kids do absolutely no good to the education in Florida, if all they do is scare the school districts into using material that requires less of the students.

The solution to this problem is not to encourage this kind of educational social promotion by competition, but fixing the environments, administrative structures, and teaching methodologies that prevent students from dealing with more challenging material successfully. Work the problem, not the numbers.

This topic came up in the red column a little while back, and I didn’t post because, quite frankly, the data does look pretty good. Stephen is right though, we’re still in the “too early to tell” stage.

The Chicago studies about school choice have been around longer. And they proved that the school choice system there did not work. But as mentioned before, Florida is doing this differently than Chicago.

Frankly, I think we need to be able to experiment, in order to see what works and what doesn’t. I don’t think this particular solution has ever been tried before, and I’d like to give it time. If, in the interim, the effected schools start showing poorer marks, then get rid of this new system.

Now, I could be wrong. Has this exact solution been tried before, and failed?

Of course, the irony is that the top ten states in public education have consistently been the same top ten states. Why are Massachussetts and Vermont always at the top of public schools, and Oklahoma and Hawaii always towards the bottom? Is it school choice? Or what?

http://www.morganquitno.com/edrank.htm

Julia -

It’s because people from Massachusetts are smarter ;-)

Stephen -

Seriously, your link isn’t there. The source code says (I replaced the open-angle-bracket with “?” so you can see the tags):

?p>Also, read this and tell me if this regards the study you’re talking about: ?a>Accountability test troubles.?/a>?br /> Data trumps nothing if it’s not properly handled. ?/p>

As far as the curriculum becoming more basic and tests becoming easier, I don’t, obviously, have enough data or access to data to write a scholarly paper on this. But I assume that Bolick is telling the truth when he says that standards have actually gotten tougher during the 2001 to 2005 window that we’re comparing.

Obviously, your goal here is to discredit everything that is being said about the Florida case. If you came with another study, or other programs that operated contemporaneously, etc, then I’d listen. But as it is, you’re giving reasons why the data might be flawed, and what might be going horribly wrong. But the only thing backing any of this up is your own distaste for vouchers!

AP -

Thanks for arguing intelligently, and correcting my mistake. You are right: the state does intervene in failing schools. I’d gotten the impression from further down in Bolick’s article that some of the austerity measures were self-imposed.

The purpose of my post was to point out that accountability-based voucher threats make a big impact, not to say that vouchering has been a big hit with parents (it obviously hasn’t).

But some threat must be in place, even with an externally-imposed remedial plan, especially if those schools are ever going to be self-sustaining for an appreciable amount of time. The state can come in with the methods (e.g. year-round classes, teacher tutoring, etc), but unless the incentive system is there to motivate the teachers and administrators, success will remain elusive, as it has in most urban school remedial programs.

Vouchers are not the only such threat/incentive that could work. Pay raises/cuts or firings could have a big impact as well, possibly.

Again, I appreciate your way of discussing this; you’ve offered a different and rational perspective on the facts here, rather than arguing that the facts do not exist. I wish that the liberals who are trying to get this program canned had the same willingness to look for solutions.

If you want public schools to improve, get the parents involved, and return control of them back over to the local school districts, AND GET THE FEDS AND STATE OUT OF THEM!

http://www.math.nyu.edu/mfdd/braams/links/rev-cr33.html

Chops-
Oh, the data may be alright, it just might not imply what you want it to imply.

I’m putting your conclusions to the test, asking questions about the quality of the tests. Are the gains real, or are they perhaps the product of other cause, or of practices that fulfill the letter of the intent of these policies, without fulfilling them in spirit.

Don’t take this personally. I think you should consider sources with less of an agenda.

Here are some other articles questioning Dr. Greene’s research
Selection effects
No Peer Review

The second one is interesting:

The Greene gang earns this prize by being the most irresponsible researchers in the field today. Greene’s weapon of mass deception is the “working paper.” The working paper, he says disingenuously, “is a common way for academic researchers to make the results of their studies available to others as early as possible. This allows other academics and the public to benefit from having the research available without unnecessary delay. Working papers are often submitted to peer-reviewed academic journals for later publication.”

Researchers? The Public? Later publication in peer-reviewed journals? The lay public would not know enough to evaluate the research (and in any case Greene doesn’t say enough about the methodology to allow such an evaluation, although he does clearly tell the reader what the reader should believe the data say). The working papers insult real researchers four times over.

First, the papers often attack other researchers. For example, Paper No. 6, “The Teachability Index” says “For years [Richard] Rothstein has defended the education status quo against all types of systematic reform by arguing that social problems are the cause of inadequate student achievement.” No real research paper would contain such a personal attack even if it were true which it is not (Arizona State’s David Berliner, Missouri’s Bruce Biddle, independent Alfie Kohn, and Washington Post columnist, Richard Cohen, receive similar treatment in Paper No. 6).

Second, the papers insult real researchers’ intelligence and training. In Working Paper No 1., Greene writes, “Because these results are statistically significant we can be very confident that the charter schools in our study did have a positive effect on test scores.” Any legitimate researcher or, really, any non-researcher who has passed Statistics 101 would know that that statement is false. The lay public, of course, would have no way of judging it one way or another. That’s the idea, of course. To the public, this trompe l’oeil Research cannot be distinguished from the real thing.

Third, the papers do not provide sufficient detail for other researchers to actually evaluate the research. This is suspect, to say the least. As I wrote in my 13th Report in 2003, “The researchers tell you what they did, but they don’t show you what they did. They dropped six states from the state-level [charter school] analysis because they had insufficient data. They say. They present no figures, nor do they even tell readers what decision rules they used for including or excluding a state.”

Fourth, Greene and his group write as if theirs is the first study in the field worth considering. In working paper No. 7, Greene dismisses an entire body of research on the negative effects of retention-in-grade. “It is questionable whether research on students who were retained on subjective criteria is even relevant in the first place to retention policies based on objective criteria.”

On the basis of his lone “study,” he argues that Florida’s retention policy benefits the kids who pay for it with a year of their lives.

Worse still, the gang Greene rush from their inadequate “research” to whatever op-ed pages they can find to launch attacks on various targets. Shortly after the Teachability Index appeared, Greene wrote an op-ed for the Hartford Courant, “Connecticut’s Schools Are Worse Than They Look,” arguing that because CT spends a lot of money on its schools and because its kids are more teachable now than 30 years ago (according to the index), it should be scoring higher on NAEP than it does. It strikes me as curious that virtually all of the inefficient states were in the Northeast, and the efficient states were mostly in the Deep South. Thus far, I’ve heard nothing about mass migrations to Mississippi by Yankee parents seeking efficient schools.

Similarly, Greene deployed his Florida retention study-which even he admits is too short-term to be significant-in the New York Post arguing, “Bloomberg and Klein should hold firm” to their tough retention policy, Bloomberg being the Mayor of New York, Klein the public school chancellor. (Greene’s op-ed efforts often make the Post and the Wall Street Journal, but never the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post.

As noted, the Working Papers declare that “Working Papers are often submitted to peer-reviewed academic journals for later publication.” Oh, really? I haven’t seen any of the seven extant papers anywhere else. If anyone reading this has, please provide me with the relevant citation.

This is the center of my critique. Are we dealing with well done research? We can’t tell. Are we dealing with a real phenomena here, or just a ghost in the numbers. You charge me with wanting so badly to believe that vouchers are not of any use, that I would be willing to deny continuously any reasonable argument. You never consider that perhaps you’re not starting from the best research yourself. You merely accept the word of a Wall Street Journal editorial writer, who’s obviously biased, and a researcher from whom I can’t google one damn negative article on vouchers.

No matter how strongly you believe in vouchers, there are standards of transparency and professionalism that must go into any study whose conclusions fall in its favor. My concerns about this go beyond simple partisanship, because I am very much a person who believe in the fragility of truth in language. I know very well how easy it is to take good data and twist it, bad data and make it conventional wisdom.

We do not need to be basing our policies on bad data or analysis, and Greene’s studies don’t give us much opportunity to seriously determine the quality of his work.

I apologize for the mix up on the quotation there, it should read like this:

The Greene gang earns this prize by being the most irresponsible researchers in the field today. Greene’s weapon of mass deception is the “working paper.” The working paper, he says disingenuously, “is a common way for academic researchers to make the results of their studies available to others as early as possible. This allows other academics and the public to benefit from having the research available without unnecessary delay. Working papers are often submitted to peer-reviewed academic journals for later publication.”

Researchers? The Public? Later publication in peer-reviewed journals? The lay public would not know enough to evaluate the research (and in any case Greene doesn’t say enough about the methodology to allow such an evaluation, although he does clearly tell the reader what the reader should believe the data say). The working papers insult real researchers four times over.

First, the papers often attack other researchers. For example, Paper No. 6, “The Teachability Index” says “For years [Richard] Rothstein has defended the education status quo against all types of systematic reform by arguing that social problems are the cause of inadequate student achievement.” No real research paper would contain such a personal attack even if it were true which it is not (Arizona State’s David Berliner, Missouri’s Bruce Biddle, independent Alfie Kohn, and Washington Post columnist, Richard Cohen, receive similar treatment in Paper No. 6).

Second, the papers insult real researchers’ intelligence and training. In Working Paper No 1., Greene writes, “Because these results are statistically significant we can be very confident that the charter schools in our study did have a positive effect on test scores.” Any legitimate researcher or, really, any non-researcher who has passed Statistics 101 would know that that statement is false. The lay public, of course, would have no way of judging it one way or another. That’s the idea, of course. To the public, this trompe l’oeil Research cannot be distinguished from the real thing.

Third, the papers do not provide sufficient detail for other researchers to actually evaluate the research. This is suspect, to say the least. As I wrote in my 13th Report in 2003, “The researchers tell you what they did, but they don’t show you what they did. They dropped six states from the state-level [charter school] analysis because they had insufficient data. They say. They present no figures, nor do they even tell readers what decision rules they used for including or excluding a state.”

Fourth, Greene and his group write as if theirs is the first study in the field worth considering. In working paper No. 7, Greene dismisses an entire body of research on the negative effects of retention-in-grade. “It is questionable whether research on students who were retained on subjective criteria is even relevant in the first place to retention policies based on objective criteria.”

On the basis of his lone “study,” he argues that Florida’s retention policy benefits the kids who pay for it with a year of their lives.

Worse still, the gang Greene rush from their inadequate “research” to whatever op-ed pages they can find to launch attacks on various targets. Shortly after the Teachability Index appeared, Greene wrote an op-ed for the Hartford Courant, “Connecticut’s Schools Are Worse Than They Look,” arguing that because CT spends a lot of money on its schools and because its kids are more teachable now than 30 years ago (according to the index), it should be scoring higher on NAEP than it does. It strikes me as curious that virtually all of the inefficient states were in the Northeast, and the efficient states were mostly in the Deep South. Thus far, I’ve heard nothing about mass migrations to Mississippi by Yankee parents seeking efficient schools.

Similarly, Greene deployed his Florida retention study-which even he admits is too short-term to be significant-in the New York Post arguing, “Bloomberg and Klein should hold firm” to their tough retention policy, Bloomberg being the Mayor of New York, Klein the public school chancellor. (Greene’s op-ed efforts often make the Post and the Wall Street Journal, but never the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post.

As noted, the Working Papers declare that “Working Papers are often submitted to peer-reviewed academic journals for later publication.” Oh, really? I haven’t seen any of the seven extant papers anywhere else. If anyone reading this has, please provide me with the relevant citation.

Stephen,

Wow. That set me back on my heels. You’re completely right. Before we can have an intelligent argument we need the source data. Real reform, unfortunately, requires a lot of research and expertise. I’m glad to see someone doing the legwork.

Thanks Stephen! I thought I smelled a rat when I read Chops’ post…I was doing some research when I checked back, and I see that you did it already—EXCELLENT! I have to admit that my first instinct was that this “study” was done to prop up Bush’s NCLB policy—like the thousands of tax dollars being used for fake “news reports” touting the wonderful results of all things Bush.

I wonder if tax dollars went to funding this non-peer reviewed “study” also?

This is what I find by doing a quick net search:

Jay Greene—he who did the study in question—works for the Manhattan Institute, a Conservative Thinktank! SURPRISE! Here’s Wikipedia’s entry (look at the bottom of listing for “Notable member of Board of Trustees”…Noonan, Kristol…sound familiar?):

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is an influential conservative think tank based in New York, and established in 1978. Their self-described mission is to “develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.” The Institute publishes the quarterly publication, City Journal which has a circulation of roughly 10,000, targeted at policymakers, politicians, scholars and journalists.

The Institute was influential with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani during his tenure as mayor of New York City, providing many of the ideas and direction towards New York City’s policies in the 1990s.

People affiliated with the Manhattan Institute include:

Lawrence Mone, president
Myron Magnet, editor City Journal
Notable members of the board of trustees [1] (http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/trustees.htm) include: William Kristol, The Weekly Standard; Peggy Noonan, formerly of The Wall Street Journal; Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek International; Robert Rosenkranz, CEO, Delphi Financial Group, Inc.

Could Mr. Greene’s findings be any more biased? That’s like asking the tobacco companies to do a study on the benefits of smoking!

…and here’s a reply to a critique Mr. Greene did of someone else’s work:

http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/EPRU/peer_reviews/cerai-01-11.html

It seems he made some mistakes in his reply.

This doesn’t realy have anything to do with vouchers, but it does have something to do with education. Besides I’m so proud of my 9 year-old granddaughter I’m busting at the seems to tell everyone.
At the beginning of last school year my granddaughter who attends public school up around Atlanta told me that her school was giving $10.00 Barnes and Noble gift certificates to every student who read 50 books during the school year. She told me she wanted one of those certificates. I told her to go for it.
Her parents brought her down here today because she wanted me to take her to the local Barnes and Noble so she could get a book with her gift certificate.
I asked her how many books she read and she said 75.
If $10.00 can get kids to read I’d gladly pay of a program like that.

Carri, your link is dead.