Useful literature on school vouchers

August 28, 2009

Washington Post - link to original article

PRESIDENT OBAMA reportedly has a hefty reading list while vacationing this week, but we would like to offer two additions, both hot off the presses. One is an article by the education expert who studied the D.C. voucher program; the second is a study on school safety in the city’s public and private schools. Read together, they might cause the president to rethink his administration’s wrong-headed decision to shut down the voucher program to new students.

He should start with Patrick J. Wolf’s article in the new issue of Education Next. Mr. Wolf, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, is the principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. He was unequivocal in his findings: “The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.” Equally adamant was his opinion that vouchers paid off for the students lucky enough to win them: “On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.”

Mr. Obama, along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, has repeatedly promised to support “what works,” so we figure he should be interested in Mr. Wolf’s findings. Also instructive is a new report by the Heritage Foundation, in conjunction with the Lexington Institute, on violence and criminal activity in D.C. schools. The report pays particular attention to the plight of the 216 students who had planned to attend private school before the administration rescinded their scholarship offers while Congress debates the future of the program. The study looks at the 70 public schools to which these students have now been assigned and finds there were 2,379 crime-related incidents, including 666 violent incidents (one of which was a homicide), for the 2007-08 school year. No wonder many parents cite school safety when explaining why they want choice in where their child goes to school.

Latasha Bennett, for example, lost a nephew to school violence: “I wonder if he would be sitting here today as a success story, if a scholarship had been available for him to attend private school.” Ms. Bennett, as we have reported before, is scrambling to find a school for her daughter after Mr. Duncan decided to withdraw the scholarship that would have allowed her to attend Naylor Road School, where Ms. Bennett’s son is enrolled by virtue of a voucher.

As we’ve said before, vouchers aren’t the answer to Washington’s school troubles; we enthusiastically support public school reform and quality charter schools, too. But vouchers are an answer for some children whose options otherwise are bleak. In Washington, they also are part of a carefully designed social-science experiment that may provide useful evidence for all schools on helping low-income children learn. Why would a Democratic administration and Congress want to cut such an experiment short?

MARCH 13, 2009, 11:42 P.M. ET

Wall Street Journal - link

President Obama laid out his education agenda in a well-received speech this week that had him siding, in the main, with school reformers. He called for higher standards, more charter schools, merit pay, increased accountability and eliminating bad teachers. The question is whether and how Mr. Obama will back up his ambitious rhetoric.

In Washington, D.C., for example, Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is at loggerheads with the teachers union over a new contract. Ms. Rhee wants to reward teachers who improve student test scores with higher pay and fire teachers who persistently fail to meet performance benchmarks. Washington is among the nation’s worst-performing school districts, and everyone agrees that an effective teacher can make all the difference.

In his speech, Mr. Obama said that good teachers should be “rewarded with more money for improved student achievement” and that states and school districts should be “taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom.” The President added: “I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.” Does this mean that the Administration will speak up for Ms. Rhee?

The President also lamented that many states limit the number of charter schools “no matter how well they’re preparing our students.” In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are attempting to persuade lawmakers to renew mayoral control of the schools. The reform has facilitated a five-fold increase in New York charter schools, notwithstanding union opposition. There are currently 23 charter schools in Harlem alone, which is more than existed in the entire system prior to mayoral control.

On a visit to New York City last month, Mr. Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, complimented Mr. Bloomberg’s “extraordinary courage” in taking control of the city’s schools. But in the next breath he referred to the head of the teachers union as a “strong, strong voice for reform” and someone who the Administration is eager to work with.

If nothing else, this raises questions about whether the President’s commitment to reform extends beyond lip service. Will he fight for changes even when fellow Democrats and liberal interest groups resist them? Recall, too, that when Mr. Duncan recently spoke in favor of continuing a federally funded D.C. voucher program that allows poor kids to attend private schools, Democrats in Congress ignored his plea. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama remained silent and then signed a spending bill that phases out the program.

The stimulus bill throws an unprecedented $100 billion at the nation’s 14,000 school districts, but it subsidizes the status quo and demands little from recipients in return. The Milwaukee school system is receiving millions of dollars for additional school construction though it has excess capacity and stagnant enrollment. Detroit Public Schools, according to a recent Detroit Free Press story, “stands to reap $530 million — $355 million with no strings attached — from the federal stimulus package that will hand Michigan nearly $7 billion over two or three years. . . . In all, the state and local school districts could have at least $2.5 billion to spend as they see fit.” (Our emphasis.)

Detroit graduates a mere 24% of its students and has a history of corruption. Audits in 2001 and 2004 found $2.5 million missing or misspent, and the city’s schools superintendent was fired in December for incompetence. How does shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars more into such a system advance Mr. Obama’s reform agenda?

The President said his Education Department “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.” Voters should hold Mr. Obama to that pledge.

Publicado el domingo 22 de febrero del 2009

El Nuevo Herald  - enlace

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Es posible que me haya equivocado. Solía creer que la atención de la salud era nuestra mayor vergüenza, considerando que gastamos el doble en atención médica que muchos países europeos y, no obstante, nuestros niños tienen el doble de probabilidades de morir antes de los cinco años que los checos, y nuestras mujeres tienen 11 veces más posibilidades de morir en el parto que las irlandesas.

No obstante, creo que nuestra prioridad debe ser la educación. De ahí que el nuevo paquete de estímulos fiscales sea una decisión histórica, ya que requiere de unos cuantos pasos hacia la reforma y da más de $100,000 millones a la educación.

Es una cantidad considerable — en comparación, todo el presupuesto discrecional del Departamento de Educación para el año fue de $59,000 millones — y salvará de la catástrofe que enfrentaban las escuelas de Estados Unidos. Una investigación de la Universidad de Washington había calculado que la recesión conduciría al recorte de 574,000 empleos escolares.

”Esquivamos una bala del tamaño de un tren de carga”, señala Amy Wilkins, del Fondo para la Educación, un grupo de Washington.

Así que, para quienes se oponen al gasto en educación en los estímulos, una pregunta: ¿realmente creen que quitar la mitad de los empleos educativos sería algo bueno para la economía, para nuestros niños y para nuestro futuro?

El secretario del Departamento de Educación, Arne Duncan, describe el estímulo como ”una oportunidad asombrosa”, del tipo que llega una sola vez en la vida. Argumenta: “La educación debe ser nuestro camino hacia una mejor economía, es la única forma a largo plazo para alcanzarla”.

Eso es exactamente correcto, y es en parte el porqué yo cambié mi punto de vista sobre la importancia relativa de la educación y la salud. Uno de los libros más inteligentes del año pasado es The Race Between Education and Technology, de Claudia Goldin y Lawrence F. Katz, ambos catedráticos de la Universidad de Harvard.

Proporcionan una riqueza de evidencias para argumentar que Estados Unidos se convirtió en el país más importante del mundo, en gran medida por su énfasis en la educación generalizada, en un momento en el que otros países sólo educaban a sus elites (con frecuencia, sólo las masculinas).

Muestran que la ventaja educativa de Estados Unidos creó tanta prosperidad como igualdad, pero esta ventaja se esfumó alrededor de 1970 y, desde entonces, un país tras otro nos ha superado.

Quizá debimos haber peleado ”la guerra contra la pobreza” en las escuelas o, como veremos a continuación, entre los maestros.

Algunos programas educativos han sido increíblemente buenos en la superación de las patologías de la pobreza. Por ejemplo, los niños del programa Perry de preescolar, en Michigan, tuvieron 25 por ciento menos probabilidades de desertar durante el bachillerato que sus pares en un grupo de control, y cometieron la mitad de los delitos graves violentos. Tuvieron una tercera parte menos de probabilidades de convertirse en padres adolescentes o drogadictos, y la mitad de hacerse abortos.

Asimismo, el programa KIPP, tema de un excelente libro de Jay Mathews, ha atraído críticas muy favorables para las escuelas que cambian totalmente la vida de los alumnos de bajos ingresos.

Hay preguntas legítimas sobre si dichos programas se pueden incrementar y si tendrían éxito de ser introducidos más ampliamente. Sin embargo, sí sabemos que el sistema educativo nacional existente está roto, y no estamos haciendo los esfuerzos suficientes para arreglarlo.

”Tenemos conciencia de dónde hay grandes oportunidades debido a los datos”, señala Douglas Staiger, economista de Dartmouth College.

El problema más difícil de resolver es el de las secundarias: aún no sabemos bien cómo rescatarlas. Sin embargo, hay una legítima excitación en cuanto a la educación obligatoria hasta la educación media.

Primero, lo más importante son los buenos profesores; son asombrosamente importantes. Resulta que tener un maestro increíble es muchísimo más importante que estar en un grupo reducido, o asistir a una buena escuela con uno mediocre. Una investigación en Los Angeles indica que cuatro años consecutivos con un profesor entre los mejores 25 eliminaría la brecha en los exámenes entre negros y blancos.

Segundo, no funcionan nuestros métodos para examinar a los maestros potenciales o para determinar cuáles son buenos. El estudio más reciente del Departamento de Educación, publicado este mes, volvió a mostrar que no hay una correlación entre la titulación de los maestros y su eficacia. En particular, en los primeros grados, pareciera no importar que un profesor tenga título o haya asistido a una mejor universidad o que haya obtenido calificaciones más altas en el SAT (examen de aptitudes académicas para ingresar a la universidad).

La implicación es que tirar dinero en un sistema que no funciona no va a arreglarlo, pero que los recursos son necesarios como parte de un paquete que implica desechar la titulación, medir mejor por medio de exámenes en los que los maestros sean efectivos y, después, pagarles significativamente más, con bonos especiales para quienes impartan clases en escuelas “malas”.

Una de las mayores injusticias es que, de manera abrumadora, los mejores profesores de Estados Unidos les dan clases a los estudiantes más privilegiados de Estados Unidos. En contraste, los que están en mayor desventaja invariablemente tienen a los maestros menos eficaces, año tras año, hasta que desertan.

Este paquete de estímulos brinda nuevas esperanzas de reformar nuestra mayor vergüenza nacional: la educación.

By WILLIAM MCGURN

Wall Street Journal - link

Jan 27, 2009

Of the many parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy, one has eluded all coverage: Both attended Catholic school as children. In fact, while JFK may have been the Irish Catholic from Boston, he spent less time at the Canterbury School in Connecticut than did young Barry (as he was then called) at St. Francis of Assisi in Indonesia.

At a time when America’s 6,165 Catholic elementary and 1,213 secondary schools are celebrating Catholic Schools Week, President Obama’s first-hand experience here opens the door to a provocative opportunity. In his inaugural address, the president rightly scored a U.S. school system that “fail[s] too many” of our young people. How refreshing it would be if he followed up by giving voice to a corollary truth: For tens of thousands of inner-city families, the local parochial school is often the only lifeline of hope.

“When an inner-city public school does what most Catholic schools do every day, it makes the headlines,” says Patrick J. McCloskey, author of a new book called “The Street Stops Here,” about the year he spent at Rice High — an Irish Christian Brothers school in Harlem. “President Obama has a chance to rise above the ideological divide simply by giving credit where credit is due, by focusing on results, and the reason for those results.”

You could argue that Mr. Obama is halfway there. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he states that disagreements over public funding often cloud all other judgments. “Our debate on education,” he wrote, “seems stuck between those who want to dismantle the public school system and those who would defend an indefensible status quo, between those who say money makes no difference in education and those who want more money without any demonstration that it will be put to good use.”

Put funding issues aside, however, and the results speak for themselves. A New York University study of the city’s schools showed that Catholic school children do better on tests — and the longer they spend in Catholic school, the more they out-achieve their public school counterparts. A more recent study in Los Angeles by Loyola Marymount’s School of Education found that poor and marginalized students attending Catholic schools have remarkably higher retention and graduation rates than their peers in public schools.

Apologists for the “indefensible status quo” make all sorts of excuses for why this is so. But the most significant reason for the success of a school like Rice is also the most obvious. Teachers and principals at Catholic schools enforce high standards because they know the price of accepting excuses will be paid by the kids who walk through their classroom doors: lives lived on the margins of the American Dream.

Unfortunately, America’s Catholic schools are in the midst of a crisis that has its roots in the loss of the nuns, priests and brothers who once supplied these schools with low-cost teachers. Catholic school enrollment today is less than half what it was at its peak of more than five million, back when JFK was president. Thus inner-city Catholic schools have almost the opposite problem of their public counterparts: Though doing a heroic job, they are closing their doors at an alarming rate.

Now, Catholic schools are not for everyone, and they are not the answer for all that plagues our cities. But they are an answer — one answer that is real, less costly, and working for many families desperate for the opportunities these schools provide. With a little imagination, these schools could reach many more such children.

Here is where the president could provide a huge lift. The elephant in the room of education reform is this: No matter how much a white Republican leader may be committed to inner-city school reform, support from a black Democrat will always have more of an impact.

This doesn’t mean that Mr. Obama must embrace vouchers. Given the dynamic of his party, that would be expecting too much. And a president can’t institute vouchers anyway, except in limited ways. However, simply by acknowledging Catholic schools as a national treasure that should be preserved, Mr. Obama would give them a badly needed shot in the arm.

Bishops wondering about devoting so many of their scarce resources to people who are largely non-Catholic would be encouraged to work harder to keep their schools open. Business leaders who donate millions to support change in our public schools might devote at least some of these dollars to places that are already working. And good men and women who make it their mission to teach children others have given up on would be inspired to keep going.

Mr. McCloskey sums it up well. “The Catholic schools are supplying hope,” he says. “They could use a little help with the audacity.”

Write to MainStreet@wsj.com

Why Pennsylvania leads the nation in teacher walkouts.

Link to original article on Wall Street Journal

Dec 22, 2008

Teachers unions routinely claim that the interests of students are their top priority. So we would be interested to hear how the Pennsylvania affiliate of the National Education Association explains the proliferation of teacher walkouts in the middle of the school year.

According to a recent study by the Allegheny Institute, Pennsylvania is once again the worst state in the country for teacher strikes. No less than 42% of all teacher walkouts nationwide occur in the Keystone State, leaving kids sidelined and parents scrambling to juggle work and family, potentially on as little as 48 hours notice required by state law.

The strikes take place despite the state’s ranking in the top 20% nationwide for teacher salaries in 2006-2007 — the most recent data available — with an average of $54,970. Those paychecks go even further when adjusted for the state’s cost of living compared to top-spending school districts in places like California.

Pennsylvania taxpayers aren’t pleased. Last year, a bill to prohibit teacher strikes was introduced in the state legislature by Todd Rock and 28 co-sponsors, only to be sidelined thanks to union opposition. According to a group called Stop Teacher Strikes, 75% of state legislators between 2004 and 2006 received teacher union money. The office of Governor Ed Rendell, who received more than $500,000 in teachers union political action committee cash for his 2006 re-election bid, called the strike ban a “radical response” to the problem.

That “radical” revision is actually similar to the rule in 37 states that have passed laws banning teacher strikes. Under the text of the strike bill, due to be reintroduced in January, teachers would have to give up two days of pay for each day they are out on strike. Under current law, Pennsylvania teachers see no adverse consequences from a walkout. In New York by contrast, the Taylor law punishes unions that walk off the job with fines and other penalties. According to the Allegheny Institute, similar strike laws have been upheld in the courts and have eliminated walkouts in states like Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Stop Teacher Strikes identifies 110 school districts in Pennsylvania that are currently under immediate risk of strike — and more than 100 more whose contracts will expire by next summer. And while the number of strikes in Pennsylvania fell in 2007-2008, the time kids were furloughed during each strike rose to an average of almost 13 days. That’s a sizeable chunk of the school year.

For too many teachers, the motto seems to be: When in doubt, walk out. The burden of enduring a strike then falls on families in which both parents need to work. The disruption is used as negotiating leverage by the unions, which know that parents will besiege school districts with calls begging them to settle. This amounts to a form of legal extortion. If Pennsylvania’s teachers want to educate kids about justice and equity, they can start by ending a strategy that uses students as pawns to extract more taxpayer dollars.

OPENING ARGUMENT

THOSE WHO RUN OUR SCHOOLS AND HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS ARE PARALYZED BY FEAR OF BEING HAULED INTO COURT.

National Journal magazine

Saturday, Dec. 20, 2008

by Stuart Taylor Jr.

Link to original article

It’s no secret that America’s public schools, health care system, and lawsuit industry — among other institutions — are broken. After decades of alarming reports and reform efforts, they still cost far more, and with worse results, than those of almost all other developed countries. And President-elect Obama’s hope of changing things dramatically for the better faces an uphill battle.

A big part of the reason, New York City lawyer-author-civic leader Philip Howard writes in a forthcoming book, Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law, is that our institutions and their leaders are paralyzed by tangles of legal rules and diverted “from doing what we think is right” by fear of being unfairly hauled into court.

“We will never fix our schools, or make health care affordable, or re-energize democracy, or revive the can-do spirit that made America great,” Howard writes, “unless American law is rebuilt to protect freedom in our daily choices.” By this he means freeing ourselves from “the confusion of good judgment with legal proof.”

“Washington is paralyzed,” writes Philip Howard, by “decades of accumulated law, beyond the influence of anyone except special interests.”

Reprising the themes of Howard’s best-selling Death of Common Sense in 1995, Life Without Lawyers also proposes some far-reaching remedies, designed in part to affirmatively define and protect the freedom of people in positions of authority to fulfill their responsibilities in their own way. To be published on January 12, its 191 pages are crammed with telling cases, anecdotes, and data. It brims with insights into how “rights” that were created to prevent “unfairness by those in authority” are now “guaranteeing unfairness to the common good.”

Howard, who is a senior partner in the New York City office of Covington & Burling and chairs Common Good, a legal reform organization that he founded in 2002, has convinced an ideologically eclectic array of leaders that he is on to something. Life Without Lawyers carries admiring blurbs by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Sen. Bill Bradley, former Harvard University President Derek Bok, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The book focuses especially on our schools, health care system, and lawsuit industry — which itself plagues schools, as illustrated by the ban on running in playgrounds that one Florida county adopted after having to settle 189 playground lawsuits in five years, and health care, as demonstrated by the surge in childhood obesity caused in part by overcautious playground safety rules.

• Lawsuits. The modern American approach to litigation includes “letting anyone sue for almost anything,” Howard explains, with endless proceedings in cases that judges would once have dismissed out of hand. This is “supposedly neutral [but] in fact tilts the scales in favor of whoever is in the wrong. Defendants can coerce an unfair settlement by dragging their feet, and plaintiffs can extort settlements by suing for ruinous damages irrespective of actual loss or fault.”

The book traces how the “rights revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s, initially a shield against abuses of power by government and business, has morphed into an engine of abusive and often fraudulent lawsuits that allows “self-interested parties to invoke legal power unilaterally to threaten the livelihoods of other free citizens.”

This “tyranny of the angry individual,” Howard writes “turns our rights upside down…. The lawyers pretend that they’re Robin Hood, with the modern twist that they keep much of the money for themselves.”

One reductio ad absurdum was the $54 million lawsuit against a Washington dry cleaner accused of losing an administrative law judge’s pants. The multimillion-dollar claim was obviously frivolous. But the courts kept it alive for more than two years of legal wrangling at a cost of over $100,000 in legal fees, exhausting the savings of and inflicting misery on the store’s Korean-born owners. No wonder only 16 percent of respondents in a 2005 Harris poll commissioned by Common Good said they would trust justice if someone brought a baseless claim against them.

The incremental tort reforms pushed by business and physicians groups won’t fix the fundamental problem, in Howard’s view. What’s needed, he says, is to “restore the authority of judges to draw legal boundaries,” by dismissing unreasonable lawsuits at the outset and penalizing those who bring them. He also suggests creating independent “risk commissions” to propose guidelines identifying activities that should be immune from lawsuits.

• Schools. Despite massive reform efforts, “reading scores in elementary and high schools have stayed flat for almost 40 years. In that period, the ranking of American students has consistently fallen relative to their peers in other developed countries.”

Why? In large part because literally thousands of bureaucratic rules imposed by local, state, and federal governments prevent good teachers and principals from using their best judgment on what works; because “due process” and special-education rules have made it very difficult to remove disruptive students; and because labor contracts have made it almost impossible to fire bad teachers.

Disorder is “at epidemic level” in many schools, Howard writes. In Public Agenda surveys, more than 40 percent of high school teachers have said they sometimes spend more time trying to keep order than teaching, and nearly 80 percent of middle and high school teachers said they have been threatened with lawsuits or accused of rights violations by students. Another survey found that one in seven teachers in urban schools had been physically assaulted by students. Some have been seriously injured. Principals send disruptive students back to class for fear of being sued or dragged through endless hearings. In New York City, more than 60 steps and legal considerations are required to suspend a student for more than five days.

Such disorder is not a big problem in most parochial and charter schools, or in other developed countries, Howard writes, because “teachers in those schools have the authority to enforce values of common civility.”

Meanwhile, “the toxic combination of union protectionism and the 1960s expansion of due process” have brought us to a point where “years of legal argument — years — are required to get rid of a bad teacher.”

How to fix all this? Legislatures should “shove the rulebooks aside” and purge law from the routine daily life of schools, and liberate teachers and principals to act on their own best judgment. This should include the freedom to remove disruptive students without hearings or fear of lawsuits and fire teachers without litigation over tenure.

Would this risk unfairness to some? Sure. But that would beat the unfairness to all students of disorderly classrooms and bad teachers. And as a check, independent committees of parents, students, and/or teachers could be created to overturn disciplinary decisions. Committees including union officials could be empowered to overrule unfair teacher firings.

• Health care. The legacy costs dragging down General Motors “are feathers compared with what’s weighing down health care,” Howard says in an interview. His book cites data showing that “unnecessary care — motivated by legal fear, greed, and ineffective variations in care — accounts for upwards of 30 percent of the total bill. Defensiveness seeps into daily decisions like an acid, corroding professional instincts of what’s right.”

This includes “a sea of forms and waivers” that waste doctors’ (and patients’) time, unneeded tests and procedures, and distrust between doctor and patient, all driven by fear of malpractice lawsuits, which often win monetary settlements even though the doctors did nothing wrong.

“Health care can’t be fixed,” argues Howard, unless we establish special “health courts” for medical malpractice claims, staffed by expert judges and neutral expert witnesses, with expedited proceedings, incentives for early settlements, and written opinions to establish and enforce consistent standards of care, rather than jury verdicts that vary from case to case. The result, he predicts, would be compensation for more people, fewer big-dollar pain-and-suffering awards, and dramatically lower legal expenses. Patients groups as well as providers support pilot projects of this kind.

• Washington. “Washington is paralyzed,” Howard writes, by “decades of accumulated law, beyond the influence of anyone except special interests that scurry around the baseboards making sure nothing ever changes.” It “can only be fixed from the outside,” he argues, by mobilizing “a national coalition of citizen leaders to propose an overhaul of government” and build public pressure for change.

He has had a taste of the current paralysis up close, in meetings in which a House Democratic leader dismissed his proposal for a health court pilot project out of hand because “the lawyers are against it.” A Bush political adviser rejected it because the president preferred to push a doomed damage-cap bill and then blame the Democrats when it failed.

Howard’s diagnoses may be a touch hyperbolic. His prescriptions will strike many as hopelessly utopian and others as unnecessary at a time when a man elected on a platform of changing Washington is about to take power.

But Life Without Lawyers makes a powerful case that unless leaders from outside the world of politics overpower the entrenched special interests that dominate both major political parties, even Barack Obama will have little chance of transforming Washington — and no chance at all of fixing our schools, health care, or stultifying legal culture.