By Dave Anderson:
I am not a fan of vouchers in education because so far the evidence has shown that they have had minimal real impact on education outcomes. They make parents happier, but that is the wrong measure of a public policy that is supposed to provide systemic educational improvement and attainment outcomes. Two donuts and a cream laden sugar make me happier in the morning, but if the breakfast is supposed to make me healthier, happiness is at best a secondary metric. However, Pennsylvania's government is a Republican and a fairly conservative Republican tri-fecta right now, so my policy preferences on most issues have a low probability of being enacted into law.
Gov. Corbett (R-PA) is a voucher fan, and he indicated in his inaugural address that he wants to push vouchers. The indicated program design shows that this is a scheme to make his supporters happy without caring too much about creating even more concentrated pockets of failure. The Post-Gazette has details:
Two guidelines will determine the size of a tuition voucher. The base amount would be 100 percent of the per-pupil subsidy that the state gives annually to the school district where the low-income child lives. The subsidies vary in size, but are usually several thousand dollars per pupil (such as $5,300 per pupil in Pittsburgh schools and $9,000 per pupil in Harrisburg.)
Also, a scholarship or voucher cannot exceed the actual tuition that a student will pay at his/her new public or private school.
Students who want to enroll outside their resident district would apply directly to the desired new public or private school. However, voucher approvals will be made by the new Educational Choice Board. A payment will be sent to a child's parents, but made payable only to the new school.
A student's desire to switch to a new school wouldn't be automatic, however. The desired public/private school would have to approve a student's transfer -- in other words, it could turn down any or all requests.
my emphasis
The bolded portion is the key policy component that indicates to me that this is not an educational reform policy but a wealth transfer policy from the public sector to the private sector. Schools will be allowed to cherry-pick. Why?
Let us assume that schools and school districts are relatively rational. They know that their marginal cost structure per student varies significantly depenedent on the attributes of a student. One South Carolina study illustrates the magnitude of variance:
We are able to estimate separate marginal costs for regular, gifted, and disabled students. The variation in these estimates is remarkable to say the least. The marginal cost of training a disabled student is more than half again more than for regular students, while the marginal cost of training gifted students is only 75.1 percent as large as for normal students.
If a school has fifteen slots open for transfer before they run into any capacity constraint, so their overall marginal costs are very low for each new student, they want to cherry pick the kids who are applying for transfer so that they choose the fifteen kids whose voucher values are greater than both the district's marginal cost of education and the average cost of education as the average cost is probably what the state will designate as the district's tuition rate.
This means a district if it is being economically canny is looking to pick up students from weak districts who already have good grades, good extra-curricular activities, strong parental involvement, no special education needs, no interaction with the criminal justice and abscence from the behavioral/mental health system. Those students will transfer leaving an even greater concentration of problems at the original school district without any systemic change; instead we would be transforming our local educational intake system from an all-comers model to the US university model where the raw inputs (students and their capacities) are more important than the actual value add capabilities of the univiversities in determining which school is good or prestigious.
Now if the voucher law is written so that every school district has to have a lottery to determine which voucher kids they accept, it will not behave as strictly as a wealth transfer mechanism from the public to the private sector; it may actually force increased competition on value add metrics instead of just prestige and skill of the district's data geeks metrics.
Your point about schools cherry-picking is excellent. Whether a school is public or private, some students will always exhaust more resources than others, so leaving the decision up to individual schools is clearly a license to "redline" those students out. It was wrong for mortgage lenders and other for-profit enterprises and should be wrong for schools.
ReplyDeleteIf outcomes were demonstrably better some weak argument might be used, but as you pointed out, even the outcomes are not all that impressive. Last week I linked a thought-provoking piece in Dissent, Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools by Joanne Barkan, which has the temerity to criticize the three biggest philanthropic groups in education, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for undue leverage in public policy. I've read through it twice and haven't decided what my reaction should be but it makes some good points.
Having grown up in the South, I have a jaundiced view of private education. Following desegregation, white-only private schools popped up all over the South like mushrooms (in the same way that public swimming pools got filled and covered). Over time the private schools have morphed into the educational counterpart of gated communities, accepting minorities whose families can afford to pay, which is another form of redlining, economic this time, keeping out "trash" and "Mexicans." One of several reasons I have stopped going to church is that many of these schools are established and funded by Evangelical churches advancing the unsubtle anti-science and political agendas of the same crowd that gave us the latter-day Tea Party. And there is a deafening silence about this sub-Christian situation even in churches which do not directly sponsor such schools.
Lest I come across as a complete curmudgeon, I want to say good things about KIPP Academies, Baby College and similar groups that do not fit the molds we have been discussing. Part of the confusion about education is a fundamental misunderstanding of the mission. Private education is by definition a set-aside for cherry-picked groups but PUBLIC education is responsible for ALL students not otherwise blessed. (Compare INDIVIDUAL retirement schemes with SOCIAL Security.)
When private money gets into the public domain the results are not always as positive as we want to believe. The designations of "not-for-profit" and "philanthropic" are illusory. My examination of health care has made me more skeptical than I was a few years ago about the not-for-profit sector because there are so many designated groups (hospitals, foundations, specialty treatment facilities) with heart-warming missions and results. But a closer look reveals them to be the profit-making equivalent of money laundering because they cater to for-profit providers who of course are not working pro bono. The relationship between profit and non-profit health care providers is incestuous at best.
It is not a crazy idea that the same relationship is well established in the field of education.