New at Reason

February 26, 2007

Lisa Snell and Shikha Dalmia tell a tale of two school systems.

Comments

|2.26.07 @ 5:14PM|#

Let's not cherry-pick our examples, a lesson we all should have learned in school, whether private or public:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020101865.html

|2.26.07 @ 5:41PM|#

Interesting about the Compton school. IME, parents usually can move their kids if they make a stink about it. The bigger problem is parents who don't know or care about school or their kid's performance.

|2.26.07 @ 5:56PM|#

Ken,

Uh, did you RTFA? The post is about weighted-student-formula programs and your article is about school privatization.

|2.26.07 @ 6:12PM|#

Ken, the Philadelphia school experiment doesn't look like a competitive environment to me. From my interpretation for the story linked, it mearly showed that replacing a public employees/managers with private ones did nothing to improve anything - there was no incentive. With no incentives to improve, one should have expected the outcome. However, in what it appears to be the case with Oakland, the schools actually competed for students and their dollars - and as a result the improved schools were rewarded, and the poor schools tried harder to improve. Another factor for the improvement also probably has a lot to do with the parents themselves. When a parent feels that they are empowered to choose, they would then feel that they have an influence on their kids education, and would probably do more to see that johnny does his homework and attends regularly.

-- Leigh

biologist|2.26.07 @ 6:50PM|#

interesting and promising, but as the authors themselves warn (somewhat mutedly at the beginning of the article), be careful not to overextend the conclusions one can draw from the data. sample size = 1 for each treatment, and there is only 1 year of data for comparison.

The Wine Commonsewer|2.26.07 @ 10:17PM|#

Great stuff, just another argument for moving away from the public school, one-size fits all model. When you're a Molatov tossing radical it's hard to get behind incremental change and be patient, but in many respects that is the only way it's going to happen. Itty, bitty, little baby steps.

|2.26.07 @ 10:41PM|#

Uhh, yeah Rimfax weighted student formula and privatization have nothing in common...
My point is that news that empirically verifies libertarian ideological leanings gets trumpeted around here but big news (this Rand study was huge in the papers) that undercuts it gets either a. ignored or b. spun (if a seems impossible). This is not a problem with Reason alon, think NRO for conservatives and American Prospect for liberals. But This is why there are so many ideologues in the world, a person can plug into media outlets that share their spin on everything and they really think people that disagree are f***ing idiots who can't see what is "clearly" going on in the world. Who in the world thinks empirical reality will really come out, once everything is understood, to 100% verify the ideological predelictions they had when they started looking? Lord that seems arrogant for anyone to think...I try to base my libertarian leanings more on the validity of moral leanings even if they empirical reality does not always show that utility or whatever is maximized by these values (i.e., restricting handguns will surely save SOME lives, but if 96% of people who have the enjoy them harmlessly, then I say there is a liberty/autonomy reason to reject gun control, but sitting around screaming that there will be no or minimum harm to following my policy is nuts).

|2.26.07 @ 11:19PM|#

Ken,

We'll have to disagree about the analogousness of the Oakland system and the Philadelphia system. We'll also have to disagree on what the Post article on the Philadelphia system says about the merits of privatization.

However, you are quite right that Reason does not post stories that credibly highlight flaws in libertarian policies. I wonder if we could get one of the staff to comment about that on this thread.

|2.26.07 @ 11:27PM|#

My greatest concern about the weighted student formula is the same concern for all "controlled" markets. Namely, that of gaming. How long before half the kids in the system get reclassified by a school psychiatrist as "special needs"? I have confidence that they can create new policies to combat the obvious motivations for schools to game the system, but as long as it is an artificial market it will be a constant battle to stay ahead of the gaming techniques.

As a matter of clarification, I am not decrying the ethics of the public school administrators. I would not be surprised to hear that public school administrators are the most ethical people on the planet. I am acknowledging human nature and the obvious rewards in this creative but contrived market.

|2.26.07 @ 11:33PM|#

Ken,

I'm still waiting for Reason to address a recent Harvard study that found that states with higher percentages of gun ownership had more violent crime, or something to that effect. Personally, there appeared to be some inconsistencies in the Harvard findings, but I am not competent to declare that with any confidence.

Rommel|2.27.07 @ 12:20AM|#

Rimfax,
I agree with your concern. Gaming the system of standardized testing (sometimes called cheating) was discussed in Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. Essentially, it is a predictable outcome when teacher compensation is tied to testing results. Levitt and Dubner discuss mechanisms to detect it.

In my opinion, the most effective break on such cheating would be to have the actual consumers (i.e., the students and their parents) take an active role in the education process and be allowed to judge for themselves what is the best education available.

|2.27.07 @ 4:46AM|#

"Another factor for the improvement also probably has a lot to do with the parents themselves."

I think the large majority of success in school is due to parental involvement. Take a look at the academic success of home-schooled kids, for example. As long as order in the school is maintained, and parents expect academic achievement, and parents participate the kids will do just fine.

|2.27.07 @ 8:47AM|#

Rimfax
I think you are on to something about gaming the system as well. I also agree that some kind of market is usually the best way to go (notice the qualifier, I don't expect markets to work somekind of 'magic', it's just that I think incentives are a powerful guide to human action and to disregard them is as, and probably more, foolish than to worship them as cure-alls). I do worry about total markets or privatization in schooling. When it comes to pop music and jeans consumers can and should be free to make crazy decisions. But with generations of their children, who can outvote me and the few thoughtful folks I know, I'd rather not trust their mass choices. I realize this is horribly elitist. But LOOK at what the mass of people think about subjects like, for example, science (re: evolution). How these people will correctly choose which schooling is objectively better for their children is beyond me, and by the time they learned their lesson on this generations would be wasted and we could be living in an irreversible idiocracy. Instead incentives need to built into the system, both for school employees (teachers, administrators) and for students, to learn what the experts think needs knowing...

|2.27.07 @ 11:06AM|#

Ken,

Therein lies the difference between our perspectives. I don't think that there is any such thing as an irreversible idiocracy. There have been ample historical examples of "states of idiocracy" and homo sapiens has always consistently sought knowledge and truth in the long run. The only way that it has ever been suppressed for any profound length of time is when it was suppressed with government force.

You are quite right that a frightening number of people will choose unwisely for their children's education, but the outcomes will clearly bear the stupidity of those choices. The outcome may be a poorly educated generation, but it will be a generation that painfully learns at a far more fundamental level how important education choices are.

Our current system insulates parents and children from poor education choices, so we are a society largely devoid of the skill. It will take some time to develop it. Once it is developed, we will not only have a better educated society, we will have one that has a much better grasp of the importance and subtleties of a good education.

Rhywun|2.27.07 @ 11:19AM|#

I think school choice is great (and the single biggest change that would improve American education), but assigning a monetary value to each child? Really stupid. How is a rich or smart kid any "cheaper" to educate than a poor or dumb one?

The Wine Commonsewer|2.27.07 @ 12:50PM|#

How long before half the kids in the system get reclassified by a school psychiatrist as "special needs"?

That has pretty much already happened. IOW, everybody rides the short bus now.

|2.27.07 @ 12:58PM|#

Rhywun,

That's a great question. Apart from the political value to help sell per-student funding to progressive constituencies (and thus get school choice implemented over the objection of the NEA), there are indeed more costs that a school might bear to educate specific classes or individual students. For instance:

Certain classes of disability and special education have a federal barely-funded mandate for in-classroom paraprofessional aides. The federal grants don't completely cover this added labor cost. These classifications of students cost significantly more to serve.

School lunches and breakfasts. It's sad all around when a student's most nutritious meal of the day is an institutional lunch. It's even sadder if it's the only non junk food or only food the kid sees all day. If you want my libertarian decoder ring, fine: for several reasons subsidized school lunch would be the very last welfare program turned off by President Keith. I have no problem with including the costs of 1000-1500 calories per day of "once considered by a dietician" food in the value of a poor student to a district.

Security, vandalism. My childhood "property taxes off-the-hook" suburban district recently went nuts with hiring "school aides" to bust smoking in the boys room, because there was a post-Columbine opening and they ran with it. That was a discretionary decision. Schools serving neighborhoods more prone to gang violence, vandalism, etc have a school police staff that isn't discretionary. Those neighborhoods do cost more to serve. The "broken windows policing" theory also applies.

Finally, and I mention this with mixed feelings: it's an incentive to keep middling students from falling through the cracks. It's an incentive for regional schools to specialize to specific market conditions. If (and it's a big if, I apologize) it's possible to identify metrics that identify the students who will raise a school's standardized test score the most in 3 years (through no fault of the school, of course), and those who will be the most prone to keeping scores stagnant, well, price the cost to serve those kids appropriately. Schools still have to meet AYP; this would prevent them from only scrambling for the best natural students and the ones with the biggest federal grants (the special ed kids), but allow them to make a reasoned trade-off in marketing to those that can bring in more funds, or more likely, determining the optimal balanced portfolio of student profiles for the school. I admit, it's prone to gaming the system, it's a huge hole for a new entitlement to drive through, and it's pretty classist if not proxy racist.

On the other hand, maybe an individual cost assessment is what it will take for school bureacracy to consider a student as an individual.

Rhywun|2.27.07 @ 1:34PM|#

keith,

I agree that "special needs" students are probably more expensive to educate, but the rest is as you suggest mostly just classist blather to try to get the teachers' union on board. Good point on the free lunches, though. I didn't think of that. But that along with the cost of security are items I would not consider as part of "what it costs to educate a child". I think there should be more "tracking" and therefore schools which cater to various levels of ability. It works great for higher education. This funding system where dumb kids get more money just menas you're going to wind up with schools much like they are now: full of mostly mediocre students with a handful of smarter ones.