Why are we still talking about school choice?
It is July, and temperatures are raising not only outside, but also in the debate on whether or not students should return to a physical classroom in the fall, and what education in a COVID-19 world look like. However, if you listen closely, hidden among the arguments for reopening schools, are please to institute school choice and scholarships/vouchers for school choice. These issues are not the same, and should be debated separately. Re-opening schools is about how to provide students an education while keeping students, teachers, staff, and the community safe and healthy. The other issue is a debate on the merit of school choice and whether we should be using/redirecting federal and state level tax dollars to fund school choice vourchers or build more charter schools.
I want to focus on the school choice voucher/charter school issue. President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are proponents of school choice, and they are currently linking it to the reopening of schools.
The Administration View
In June, President Trump had this to say about school choice "We're fighting for school choice, which really is the civil rights of all time in this country…Frankly, school choice is the civil rights statement of the year, of the decade and probably beyond because all children have to have access to quality education." Here are some additional examples of the administrations support of school choice.
The problem with the focus that the current adminstration has is that they are focused on issues that sound good to voters, but don't actually work. Based on John Hattie's work, we empirically know what does and does not impact student growth. Spoiler alert, charter schools and school choice do not have an impact on student growth.
Hattie's Research
Hattie conducted a meta-analysis of 252 influences that can impact student growth. The value of his approach was that he wasn't doing one-off experiments. His analysis took into account over 50,000 studies to find what truly impacted student growth. He then used the data to come up with the "effect size" for each influence. The effect size is a calculation used to judge the performance of the test groups vs. the control groups. One of the key benchmarks to look at when evaluating influences is an effect size of 0.4. That represents one year of growth for a student. Hattie's recommendation is to focus on influences that have an effect size greater than 0.4. We should not invest time and effort into influences that are less that 0.4.
Secretary DeVos is pushing for school choice as the solution to our academic challenges. The data does not support her. According to Hattie's research, both charter schools and school choice are likely to only have a small positive impact on student growth. Both are well below the benchmark of 0.4. Religious/Parochial Schools have a bigger impact, but still below the .4 score.
Have there been successes with students in charter schools? Of course there has. But the success is not because it’s a charter school. The success has less to do with the school itself, and more with how the school itself works. A charter school's success is not due to the fact that it is a charter school. It is because they are focused on influences that have strong effect sizes. The same is true with public schools that have high growth rates.
What do we do?
We have empirical data available to us that we should use to guide our Education policies. We don't need to invest in school choice vouchers and charter schools to promote growth. Instead we need to invest in influences that will promote growth. We also need to hold our government officials accountable for public policy to help with the influences that have large negative effect sizes. Below is a listing of effect sizes of over 250 influences. In later posts, I'll dive into some of these influences.
On a side note....
President Trump and Secretary DeVos have both threatened to withhold federal funds from schools that do not fully open this fall. There are a lot of legalities on whether they can or can't do that. But, the ironic thing is that those federal funds pay for programs like Response to Intevention (RTI) programs in public schools. The effect size of RTI is 1.09. This represents more than two years of growth. Why are we threatening to withhold federal funding which pays for programs with high growth while promoting investing in strategies that result in little to no growth?
This was very interesting to read, Jeff. I was impressed to see you address politics. You did it in a very classy way. There were only facts, and you also assumed that decisions were being made with the wish to improve student learning. It seems to me that much of what we witness is based more on dollar. I think that the hope is to privatize education, regardless of what it would do for the students/families.
ReplyDeleteAn idea that your blog made me think of was the way kids are chosen for charter schools. I haven't researched this, but I feel like families that wish their kids to attend are placed in a lottery. That means that of all of the students who attend a charter school, every single one of them is backed by a family that cares enough to research and work at getting them into a "better" school. If nothing else, the caliber of families and the student body would be greater. This idea lead me to wonder what would happen if more and more schools were made charter or private... There would be some schools left over that would make up the left overs. I wonder if people pushing these plans know and want this. Another way of segregating, in this case not necessarily based on race, but ability. Thanks for stimulating the thinking on such an important issue. I look forward to reading your future thoughts.
Matt, thank you so much for the feedback. I really appreciate your opinion. I think its definitely worth a deeper dive. My personal opinion is that if we went 100% charter/private schools, we would have the same challenges in growth that we do now.
DeleteIn the world of Lean Six Sigma, the focus should always be on addressing the root cause as opposed to just treating symptoms. Just like we shouldn't expect a cancer patient to get better by just addressing the patient's headache with aspirin, we also can't just switch to charter schools and expect growth results. If we don't focus our energies on the influences with high effect sizes, we aren't going to move the needle.
I would love to see a deeper discussion on this. Based on Hattie's work, we know how to fix the root cause. How do we move forward though and implement it on a local, state, and federal level?