Civics 101

Jay Greene continues to fight the fight on vouchers:

the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers. All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard. This would include NCLB and other federal education legislation that Kevin praises charter schools for more strictly obeying.

Well, yeah. The "taxation" in the "Taxation Without Representation" on DC license plates refers to the taxes Congress has imposed on the entire nation, including DC. Those laws, as they apply to DC, are undemocratic. But surely Jay sees the distinction between members of Congress imposing a law on everyone, including their own constituents, who can then respond at the ballot box if they're unhapy, and Congress imposing a law only on DC, the one place in America without representation in Congress. Think of it this way: a few weeks ago the DC City Council passed a law recognizing gay marriages performed in other states. How would the residents of Fayetteville, Arkansas feel if the DC council were also allowed to impose that law on them?

On the other hand, I have to admit that Jay is entirely right about this:

But I continue to be puzzled by the argument that vouchers are bad because they are less accountable than charters. Whatever regulation you believe is desirable for schools could be applied to vouchers as well as to charters.

True! I am willing to state, now and for the record, that if currently unaccountable voucher schools were, at some future point, held accountable in the same manner as charters, they would be accountable in the same manner as charters. Really, there's no escaping this sort of iron logic.

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Jay Greene's Long Strange Voucher Trip

Jay Greene has published a long and weirdly incoherent response to this post on DC vouchers. Most of it I'm happy to let stand, but this (you have to run it through a negative de-sarcasticizer to find the meaning) deserves comment:

...vouchers aren’t really accountable because even though they were democratically created, subject to oversight and renewal within 5 years of creation, and mandated (unlike charters) to participate in a rigorous random-assignment evaluation, they don’t have the word “public” in them.

I'm sorry, but democratically created? Really? This is how Jay chooses to describe the voucher program that was imposed on D.C. by Congress, that passed the U.S. House of Representatives by exactly one vote, i.e. the one vote that we don't have?

And let's dispense with idea that charters and vouchers are on any kind of equal footing in terms of accountability. Charter schools can be shut down by the D.C. charter board for low performance, and a number of them have. Charters schools have to administer a panoply of D.C. state tests and are subject to labels and consequences under NCLB, just like regular public schools. Private schools taking public money through voucher programs, by contrast, have always assiduously avoided being subject to same level of public scrutiny imposed on public schools, in D.C. and elsewhere. In addition to overall marginal results, the evaluation Jay cites doesn't include results by school.  It doesn't even include the names of the schools. 

Vouchers are a simplistic, unworkable version of a perfectly reasonable idea: giving parents educational choices and opening up public education to competition and innovation will improve outcomes for students.  Over time it's become clear that those goals are best accomplished in the context of non-profit organizations working under a regulatory regime that leaves sufficient room for innovation and new entrants while maintaining accountability for results and controlling who gets to participate--i.e. charter schools.  There's just no evidence that a freewheeling private sector approach will work, either in terms of response or outcomes--see Edison Schools, R.I.P. Why people like Greene continue to beat the drums for an obsolete policy idea is beyond me. 

Linkages

Imagine you are an 18 year old graduating from high school this May. You've made your college choice already based mostly on location, the school's football team, family ties, and money. Wouldn't you like to know whether that choice was a good one, whether kids just like you who had made the same decision in years prior turned out successful? That they'd been able to transfer their AP credits, enroll in regular coursework, begin accumulating credits, and earn good GPAs? Did they like the school and were they successful enough to return another year?

In some places, you can actually find this information already. North Carolina, for example, maintains interactive Web sites for prospective freshmen and transfer students that enable students to see how their peers performed at their new school. Students can see, for example, the average GPA among students transferring from Catawba Valley Community College to another state institution; the average credit hours those students completed after arriving; the number of students taking English, math/science, and social science classes; the average GPA earned; and the percentage of students in good academic standing at the end of the year. Similar information can be found for individual high schools.

I recently shared the high school site with a North Carolina teacher. She was astonished it existed and thrilled to be able to use it. She can now show it to her students considering where to attend school next year or to her administrators to demonstrate how well (or poorly) their kids perform at the next level.

Yet, too few people know about these resources. They're buried on the University of North Carolina System Web site, and I wouldn't have found them if I hadn't been explicitly looking. They also have some jargon--they refer to "Transfer Student Performance" as TSP reports, which means nothing and is a serious barrier to a layperson (and whose cousin was mocked in Office Space). And, even when you find the information, it comes in an ugly computer-printout-circa-1987 style.

In an era where college access and completion are more important than ever, it's vital to get this information in the hands of students. That requires better data for most states, because far too few have such capacity. States like North Carolina are leaders in this area and should be commended, but even they need to make a concerted effort to get the information to students making choices. Or else, as in the past, they'll base their decisions on other, less important things.

Oversight Needed

There's probably no better report out there on the continuing implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) than this one from the GAO. It focuses on general and specific trends in 16 states and the District of Columbia. Most scary are passages like this one, present in sections on each of the states under study:

However, due to the present economic conditions, state officials said the Massachusetts oversight community is facing budget cuts of about 10 percent at a time when increased oversight and accountability is critically needed. To illustrate the impact of the impending budget situation, the Inspector General told us that his department does not have the resources to conduct any additional oversight related to Recovery Act funds. This significantly impacts the Inspector General’s capacity to conduct oversight since the budget of the Inspector General’s office is almost entirely composed of salaries, and any cuts in funding would result in fewer staff available to conduct oversight. In addition, the State Auditor described how his office has already furloughed staff for 6 days and anticipates further layoffs before the end of fiscal year 2009. Similar to the Inspector General’s office, 94 percent of his department’s budget is for labor and any cuts in funding generally result in cuts in staff.

The story is similar in other states. Georgia, for example, has cut its State Accounting Office 43 percent, its Inspector General 19 percent, and the Offices of Planning and Budget and the State Auditor 11 percent each.

Why DC Vouchers Don't Matter

President Obama wants to appropriate enough money to keep the DC voucher program going for the children currently enrolled. Good--this is the only ethical position to take. I know some Democrats in Congress wish the program had never been implemented, but that's the price of losing elections. Dragging low-income and minority students out of their schools just so the N.E.A. can score some petty political revenge would be inhumane and a political debacle besides.

That said, there's a strong element of artifice to this whole debate. The DC voucher program does not represent serious public policy. It was a P.R. move, a bone thrown by the previous administration to the privatization crowd it marginalized by supporting NCLB. The voucher dream (setting aside the obvious anti-labor agenda for the moment) has always been to introduce market dynamics to public education--to create new competition and provide incentives for innovators and entrepreneurs to bring energy and resources to the enterprise of educating students. 

The DC voucher program does none of these things. No new schools have been built as a result, no groundbreaking programs created, competition spurred, or innovators attracted. It's basically just an exercise in seeing what happens when you take a couple thousand students out of pretty bad schools and put them in a range of other schools that are, collectively, somewhat better. Answer: some of the students may be doing somewhat better! I think we already knew this. 

Remarkably, the DC voucher program is being taken seriously even as, right here in the same city, charter schools are actually creating the whole range of market responses that vouchers are not. Drive across the river and see the brand-new schools built by KIPP and SEED, which are just a part of the tens of millions of dollars of new investment in public education spurred by charters, a wave of new organizations and people coming to the nation's capital to educate disadvantaged students, along with many others who were here already, people who never would have been able to operate within the traditional public system. 

One could argue, I suppose, that if vouchers had been given to 17,000 students instead of 1,700, they would have had more impact. But I'm not so sure--I kind of doubt that Sidwell Friends and Georgetown Day would up and build annexes in Anacostia in response. In any event, why bother? DC charter schools are directly accountable to the public and specifically designed to serve urban students. Why would it be better to re-direct public funds to schools that are neither of those things?  

Yet the DC voucher debate is playing out on national television and has provoked a seemingly endless series of righteous editorials from the Washington Post. This seems to be the real purpose of school vouchers--giving people the opportunity to scramble for the moral high ground of defending disadvantaged youth. Many wealthy members of Congress send their children to private school! So does our wealthy President!  Outrage!  Hypocrisy revealed! Meanwhile, voucher opponents paint themselves as brave defenders of the education system, as if this was some crucial battle against the Wal-Martification of public schools. 

In that sense vouchers do have some utility--they separate people who are serious about education policy from people who aren't. The more you shout and carry on about them, the less you're paying attention to the issues that really matter.