Asymmetrical Information

Loving your take on this. There is a group in western NY called Coalition for Common Sense in Education - your points would be lauded by them as well, I suspect.

Thanks for you time and thought

A couple of thoughts:

Assuming that [introducing vouchers] produces a supply response ...

"... and then a miracle occurs ..."

In seriousness, this is obviously quite a big problem.

Being very reductive for a moment, American public schools are comprised of (1) good suburban schools, (2) rural schools, some good, some poor, and (3) generally poorly performing urban schools (and some inner-ring suburban schools).

As to (1), good suburban schools don't need fixing; indeed, it is at least plausible that vouchers would damage good suburban school systems.

As to (2), it seems unlikely that rural areas can support a "market" of competing schools.

As to (3), it's hard to understand why anyone would enter that low-margin, high-liability market.

It could be that with markets and vouchers, the better schools would get more expensive and the poor would not be able to afford them.

This is a big concern of voucher skeptics: if the major effect of vouchers is to undo in large part the redistributive consequences of the way we finance public schools, why would anyone who benefits from that redistribution agree to a voucher scheme?

(I would note that you could ameliorate that effect of voucher schemes by providing that schools accepting vouchers can't charge any additional fees to voucher students.)

alkali,

Some of the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest countries have operating private schools, why would you think that American urban areas, which are wealthier than their 3rd world counterparts, would be different?

Chris: Among other things, real estate, facility and labor costs are much higher in American urban areas. (To turn your question upside down: if it's so inexpensive to create a new private school in an urban area, why aren't they already there?)

"The invisible hand assumes that reward depends only on absolute performance. The fact is that life is graded on the curve."
- Robert Frank

Discuss.

This strikes me as yet another attempt to arrange the deck chairs in a more pleasing pattern, and maybe give them a new coat of paint as well. The best voucher system that can be hoped for will most likely just move students around within the existing universe of choices, but not really expand that universe.

I've worked with recent high school graduates over the years, and have seen a steady decline in fundamentals such as grammar and spelling, as well as the larger issue of being able to write coherent text. Some of this surely comes from a cultural bias in favor of video and against reading, but some of it also comes from the ever-lower-standards embedded in the average curriculum. If nobody ever expects a child to perform above a mediocre level, why should it be surprising that the child never does so? Mind you, the people that I worked with were in the top 10% to 15% of their respective public school districts or private schools; some were urban, some were suburban, some were rural, but they were all above average for their schools. Giving vouchers would merely have rearranged some of them from Rural School A to Suburban School B and since I already know the students from B cannot read, write or cypher any better than any other students, it isn't obvious how a voucher system would help.

It dismays me to contemplate what the median students are like...and I don't see how shipping them across the county to some magnet school would make all that much difference, either, because all the teachers in all the schools come from pretty much the same source: the "college of education".

The "college of education" has a lot to answer for. So long as the obsession with "methods" and various educratic fads is allowed to reign, we'll continue to see the bottom quartile of students (as ranked by SAT scores) continue to go into education. Who here would deliberately go out and hire the least studious and intelligent person available to teach their child anything? Yet that's what you are getting, in most public schools and more than a few private schools.

I won't even start ranting about the lack of basic discipline in schools and how it affects every student...

If the major effect of vouchers is to undo in large part the redistributive consequences of the way we finance public schools, why would anyone who benefits from that redistribution agree to a voucher scheme?

Well, yes, that is the problem. That's why when pro-voucher Bret Schundler, who was the popular Republican mayor of Jersey City, ran for governor of New Jersey, he was massively opposed by leafy suburban members of his own party and got terrible voting results in the suburbs. James McGreevey, a suburban mayor, definitely played on suburban fears of decreasing home prices and their children possibly having to share schools with poor children.

A strong reason why we don't have vouchers in many places is that it's an easy issue for moderate Democrats to beat Republicans on-- plenty of comfortable suburbanites will vote against voucher programs, and the poor, while they like voucher programs, won't vote for Republicans in sufficient numbers just for being pro-voucher.

1) good suburban schools, (2) rural schools, some good, some poor, and (3) generally poorly performing urban schools (and some inner-ring suburban schools).

I'd say that's overly reductive. In most cities, either you don't have a busing-type program, and you have a mixture of good and poor schools, with the better schools being attended by students who live in wealthier neighborhoods, or you do have a busing program, and then either the wealthier people leave for the suburbs or go to private schools. Busing has problems because people flee. Statewide funding systems have problems because they break local accountability.

I think your assumption at point #1 -- that spending money on a school will increase the quality of the education it provides -- is mistaken. I taught high school for two years and wrote a number of research papers about education in college, and I have seen nothing either anecdotally or in the literature to suggest that there is any clear relationship between a kid's test scores and the school's facilities and employees. Given that nearly all teachers in a given area attended the same nearby teacher colleges, and given the difficulty schools have in deciding what to do with facilities like computer rooms and etc. if they get them, this shouldn't be that surprising.

The single most important factor -- and arguably the only statistically significant one -- in determining whether a school is "good" or not is the sort of homes from which the school draws its pupils. If a school's parents are educated or value education, the school will be good. Suburban districts are self-selected in this regard; the better ones tend to have the most-educated parents. But most urban districts have a school or two where active parents make a difference. And urban Catholic schools whose parents care about their kids do a lot with a little.

One of the obvious ways to prevent this problem is to require that schools that accept vouchers must accept them as full payment for the student. That is exactly how it works in my state for charter schools and open-enrollment districts. The charter school or neighboring district gets the standard per-pupil funding. You get choice without any possibility of a bidding war.

Capping the price would ultimately lead to a shortage or an underground market for education. Bad idea.

A voucher system wouldn't create a system segregated by quality. We already have that. Think about it in terms of food. Poor people don't consume the same quality of food as do the rich, but that's not the issue. The question is, do they eat better food than they would if the government not only provided food stamps, but actually ran the whole system, from farms to grocery stores. If you're not certain, look at any of the Soviet Union's adventures in agriculture for your answer.

John Thacker writes:

I'd say that's overly reductive. In most cities, either you don't have a busing-type program, and you have a mixture of good and poor schools, with the better schools being attended by students who live in wealthier neighborhoods, or you do have a busing program, and then either the wealthier people leave for the suburbs or go to private schools.

I don't think we really disagree here: if there's busing, I think my model works; if there is no busing, then functionally the wealthier schools are like the good suburban schools, and the model still works.

Joe Magarac writes:

I think your assumption at point #1 -- that spending money on a school will increase the quality of the education it provides -- is mistaken. ... The single most important factor -- and arguably the only statistically significant one -- in determining whether a school is "good" or not is the sort of homes from which the school draws its pupils.

I take your general point although I suspect there is some benefit in some schools (e.g., those in poor urban areas) having the financial flexibility to do things like extended school day and summer school.

One powerful point is that good suburban schools generally spend as much as urban schools even though they generally have far fewer special-needs kids (special ed, bilingual, disabilities, etc.). If there were no relationship between money and outcomes you would think that at least some suburban school districts would be operating on the cheap.

JL writes:

Capping the price would ultimately lead to a shortage or an underground market for education.

I'm not really sure how this would happen. Education isn't cigarettes; parents do have to be able to show that their kids are enrolled in school somewhere.

Joe Magarac--

If that is true, then voucher systems would primarily allow the motivated students with parents who value education to attend better schools. This is what's often called "creaming." It could help those students while harming those left behind. It's a bit controversial for those reasons; being a libertarianish conservative, I'm more sympathetic to the aspirational poor who are motivated to get a leg up than to those who don't value education who would be left behind, but YMMV. There are all sort of second-order effects to examine, too.

Joe Magarac is correct. "Good" schools are simply schools that have good students, for whatever reason. Unmotivated, ignorant, antisocial mindsets and behaviors among students willl not be eliminated by vouchers; a poor student in a poor school will not be transformed into a good student simply by changing the venue. All vouchers will accomplish is the destruction of the public school systems in the United States. And for what? To subsidize middle-class parents' private and parochial school bills?

We definitely don't want "creaming", which maximizes opportunities for those intellectually and / or motivationally capable of taking advantage of them. This would result in unequal outcomes, which would be intolerable.

We also don't want "layering", which groups students according to achievement into classes of students capable of / motivated to learn at approximately the same pace, even if there is the potential for students to move between the "layers" based on their performance. This also recognizes differences and leds to unequal outcomes.

In fact, we don't even want to test, because that might reveal that some students were learning more than other students, even though they were in the same classes being taught by the same teachers. Also, testing can lead to competition, which can cause some students to become more motivated to perform than other students, thus also resulting in unequal outcomes.

What we want is a nice, homogeneous (if mediocre) student passing through the system with all the bureaucratic oversight and support the school district can provide. Or is that what we really want?

The truly wealthy and the successful and motivated send their children to private schools, not to avoid the poor, or to avoid blacks and hispanics, but to avoid enforced mediocrity and lack of classroom discipline. Unfortunately, poor parents cannot afford to pay for both a "government school" education they don't use and the private school education they would prefer. Vouchers may not be the only way out of this mess for the poor (and the rest of us), but they are a way which has worked when if was allowed to be tried.

Capping the price would ultimately lead to a shortage or an underground market for education. Bad idea.

Why on earth would it do that? This system is already in place in Michigan with charter schools and open-enrollment districts, and there's no shortage or black market. Michigan equalized funding some years back, so every public or charter school in the state gets an equal per-pupil allocation from the state.

There is less choice than there could be because the number of charter schools is still pretty limited and because the public schools still have a signficant funding advantage (namely, charters have to fund their land & buildings out of current per-pupil allotments whereas public schools already own their land & buildings and can finance new ones through non-operating bond issues).

I believe there is also one more requirement that assures equity--districts and schools cannot cherry-pick. If they have more applicants than slots, they have to use a lottery. This is another feature that would make sense in a voucher -based system.

Overall, it seems to me a pretty reasonable way to provide both choice and equity.

Finally, realize that under such a system, there would still be private schools that charged far more than the standard per-pupil allocation -- but those parents would have to foot the entire bill rather than using the voucher for part of it. But most private and parochial schools already charge tuition that is lower than the public school average, so this would not put too many schools out of the voucher system.

Sue,
You're assuming that the destruction of the public school system is bad thing. My belief is that the less a gov't is involved in an industry the better it works.

Assuming that you can't remove the gov't from education, you can close down all of the education colleges. Teachers should have to major in the field (math, literature, chemistry, history,etc) and minor in how to teach. Our local school district made a quantum leap in quality when the school board started to actively recruit retired and semi-retired professional in lieu of newly mint education grads.

Only slightly OT: a letter writer in today's San Francisco Chronicle complains that we haven't yet undertaken the obvious "school reform" of barring entrance to state universities to any student who didn't graduate from a public high school. In writer Patrick Mattimore's words:

Many of our private and home-schooled families would think twice about abandoning the public schools and the post-secondary institutions would have a much larger incentive to work with K-12 public schools to ensure that students were arriving at college prepared to do the work.

I would hope that they'd at least arrive capable of inserting the odd comma in a sentence like that monster. But I wonder if such a scheme would be constitutional. A couple of old Supreme Court cases about private instruction were part of the basis of the "privacy right" in Griswold. One, IIRC, struck down a ban on private schooling; the other, a ban on the teaching of foreign languages. This wouldn't exactly ban private schooling, but it would effectively tax the hell out of it, since the UC system is the best public university system in the country, and the comparable alternatives available to top private or homeschooled CA would-be college students would all cost many, many times as much.

Unmotivated, ignorant, antisocial mindsets and behaviors among students willl not be eliminated by vouchers; a poor student in a poor school will not be transformed into a good student simply by changing the venue.

Ah, but what about good students with a poor families which still value education? Can they not be helped by a change in venue? Must their education suffer merely because many of their socioeconomic peers do not value education highly enough? I think that's a bit harsh.

In addition, I think that one can make a fair argument that a system which says, "If you value education, you can get to a better school" might encourage, at the margin, some families and students to value education more than a system which says, "Too bad, you have to go to your local crummy public school and get a bad education due to all the other students who don't value education no matter how much you value it." So while vouchers may not eliminate attitudes which don't value education, they can increase the payoffs for valuing education, and thus the number of people who value it.

I don't pretend that any solution is going to fix the problem of motivation and valuing education, but I do believe in rewarding people who value it and providing resources for the poor who are willing to take advantages of opportunities.

One powerful point is that good suburban schools generally spend as much as urban schools even though they generally have far fewer special-needs kids (special ed, bilingual, disabilities, etc.).

As a sort of side point, and it's a crying shame, the school districts with the highest percentage of official "special-needs kids" are the wealthiest. They're not really special needs, of course; what happens is that under the modern regime, you can get extra time and what not for having a diagnosis of a special need, and lots of wealthy parents looking for that edge will find a psychiatrist or psychologist to give them one. When the SAT eliminated the "asterisk" for people who got extra time, this made it even worse; there's lots more incentive to game the system for people without real disorders, since no one has to know that you had extra time.

If there were no relationship between money and outcomes you would think that at least some suburban school districts would be operating on the cheap.

But some do. Suburban school districts in Utah and much of the West operate on the cheap. Very cheap in the case of Utah, less than $4,500 per pupil statewide in 2000. That's less than half of DC, New York, or New Jersey. (Citation.) In addition, public education expenditures per student do not differ by much based on income. They differ mostly by cost of living and region of the country. Yes, tony suburbs of big urban cities do spend a ton-- Marin County in California, for example. But the inequality is much less striking outside of the major cities and suburbs of New York and California. Perhaps when you think suburbs you're thinking of suburbs of LA, NYC, or SF?

Incidentally, jere's a new non-profit survey showing that parental involvement, behavior standards, and broader spending doesn't make nearly all that much difference, but finding some tactics that give better results at low-income schools.

If there were no relationship between money and outcomes you would think that at least some suburban school districts would be operating on the cheap.

But some do. Suburban school districts in Utah and much of the West operate on the cheap.

I was thinking more of an apples-to-apples comparison: all of the Boston suburbs spend more per student than Boston, Westchester and Long Island spend more than NYC, Shaker Heights et al. all spend more than Cleveland. I'm not aware of any wealthy suburb that spends signficantly less per student than its urban neighbor.

To turn your question upside down: if it's so inexpensive to create a new private school in an urban area, why aren't they already there?

Because the private schools have to compete against "free" public schools whose funding comes, free from any significant accountability, from tax money.

Los Angeles, for example, spends around $9000 per student, but charges poor families $0 to send their kids to the school. Private schools aren't handed a duffel bag full of free cash every year; they'd need to raise that $9000 by actually charging the parents $9000. Which option are poor parents more likely to go for?

That's where vouchers come in -- they give private schools a shot at that $9000 in tax revenue, and force the public schools to actually do something (besides paying off elected officials while the teachers' union marches around chanting) to retain that $9000 for themselves.

To turn your question upside down: if it's so inexpensive to create a new private school in an urban area, why aren't they already there?

alkali:

Such schools are "already there" in localities that allow charter schools. Here in Boston, which has some of the most unaffordable property in America, a number of independent, charter schools have opened in the last decade or so, since the legislation was passsed making them possible.

Personally, I would argue that a voucher system should take cost of living into account. That is, a school operating in a more expensive area should receive a voucher higher in value than one operating in a less expensive place (although the difference should only be high enough to account for this cost gap).

"Affluent parents want to send their children to "good schools," meaning schools that are attended primarily by other affluent children": perhaps you could break that cycle if your schools entered children in the International Baccalaureat exams - then parents might seek out schools that did well, after making allowance for the standard of their intake.

I'm not aware of any wealthy suburb that spends signficantly less per student than its urban neighbor.

Well, that really depends on your definitions. If you're talking about very wealthy suburbs near huge poor urban cities, you're generally correct. If you're talking about the broad mass of the country, then I can name plenty of exceptions-- in places like Durham and Raleigh (NC) there are plenty of examples where the good suburban schools do spend the same or less than the poor (in quality and wealth) urban schools. That's in more solidly middle-class suburbs, rather than the quite wealthy districts you're referring to.

The great American megacities have a much bigger gap between rich and poor in a lot of ways.

In addition, you should pay attention to the comments above-- there aren't low price cheap public schools in these urban areas because they would have to compete with subsidized (to the tune of $8-9k per student) public schools. It's crowding out-- it doesn't make sense to start a public school to compete at a "normal" level with that kind of subsidy. It only makes sense to compete at the very high end, in the place where public schools don't enter the market. (Unless you live in a super-rich area, where being able to buy a wealthy house determines it. Boy do I get annoyed at the self-righteous people who pride themselves on opposing vouchers and supporting public schools-- by sending their children to public schools in tony suburbs that poor people can't afford to buy a house in, with zoning laws that prevent affordable houses from being built there.)

Areas with charter schools and vouchers, like Milwaukee, do see such schools start up.

This post reminds me of one concern I have about vouchers that never gets addressed:

Since the home prices in many affluent suburbs are elevated by the included access to good public schools, wouldn't a voucher program lead to a decline in home prices in affluent suburbs?

Slocum - How on earth would capping the price lead to shortages or a black market in education? A thought experiment - set the cap at zero. Completely free education for everyone! Hooray! Now all we have to do is find someone who will provide that education for free.

Of course, that won't happen, so the market has to clear some other way. The most obvious way is through under-the-table payments. For example, you provide your voucher for education and then endow a chair at the school, or supply the administration with new cars, or build them a new building, or slip someone an envelope full of cash.

Having the government step in and force schools to allot space on a lottery basis might get around that particular problem, but that, of course, is not a free market for education, and that loss of freedom comes at a price too, like not being able to send your child to the best school for her because someone else won the "lottery".

The fundamental laws of supply and demand don't stop working just because we're talking about education instead of widgets.

Yeah, but if I read the cap comment above correctly, the thought seemed to be that if anyone wants to charge more than the voucher amount, they have to not take the voucher. In other words, if the voucher is $7000, then a school that wanted to charge $8000 couldn't take $7000 from the voucher and $1000 from the parents, they'd have to take it all from the parents or drop their price to $7000. I don't agree with that suggestion, I should note(the medium-high is probably the best spot for competition), but that seems to be what he's saying, not an absolute cap on the total tuition for private schools.

Since the home prices in many affluent suburbs are elevated by the included access to good public schools, wouldn't a voucher program lead to a decline in home prices in affluent suburbs?

Yes. Economic research backs this up, too. One of several reasons why people in affluent suburbs are strongly against voucher programs, and like I said, why Republicans have difficulty pushing a real voucher program. They'd lose too many affluent suburban votes, and wouldn't gain offsetting votes.

Alkali's reductive cateogries of schools-- suburban, rural and urban/inner suburban-- ignores an enormous category of urban schools that succeed wildly beyond almost any other category of schools except for elite boarding academies: urban Catholic schools. Study after study has shown that, even when you adjust for selection effects, the Catholic schools perform far better than their better-funded public school peers. So much for the myth of any correlation between funding and school performance. Another myth: that the Catholic schools cherry-pick the best students. In fact, the Catholic schools get many of the worst students, the ones with disciplinary problems, fromt he public schools. Gang problems in the Catholic schools are unthinkable.

Full disclosure: I survived 12 years of Catholic schools and wouldn't dream of putting my kids in one. But the fact is that they succeed for the same reason that any good school succeeds: high standards, respect for the authority of the teacher, an atmosphere of care and love, and parental involvement. It's really not all that complex, folks. If the failing urban schools were run on the same principles as their successful Catholic counterparts, we wouldn't have a K-12 education problem.

I believe that, in areas with land for growth, home prices are not driven up by better schoools. Rather, home prices are driven down in areas with poor schools.

Vouchers would be a boon for "urban renewal". People wanting good schools and affordable housing would no longer have to relocate to distant exurbs. I can't begin to count the people I've known who have lived in the City of Dallas until their first child approaches school age- and then it's off to the suburbs.

Education would be radically improved because most people don't want good schools for their children- they want the very best for their children. Capping tuition to the voucher amount is a prescription for mediocrity. The market for K-12 education would become as competitive as the market for other professional personal services- like investments, accounting, and legal services.

It amazes me how teachers (or at least their unions) fight the one reform that would transform wide recognition of them from government employees to highly skilled professionals. The very best teachers would be handsomely rewarded in both prestige and earnings in a way that would raise standards for the entire profession.

When people are free to create new educational environments you can throw out many imagined issues- like "segregation equilibrium". I've been a teacher in both inner city public and suburban private schools and believe that many of the very best teachers, if the atmosphere is safe, would much prefer working with disadvantaged kids. A "chain" of schools, and there would likely be a lot of those, would certainly love to showcase what their methods and practices have achieved in the inner city.

Allowing market forces to guide our K-12 educational system would be the single greatest public policy improvement I can imagine. It would help productivity and civil society (a better educated citizenry), improve the environment (less urban sprawl), and most importantly, give us all more freedom.

Another element of unreality about America's educational debate: why is it that immigrant students from some of the poorest countries in the world-- namely, Russia, India, Vietnam-- run rings around even our best students when they come to this country? Every Russian immigrant family can tell you the story of how his child, upon coming to the US, found himself in math and science classes that were at least two, often three years, behind what he'd been studying in Russia.

Keep in mind that Russia's schools are so underfunded-- even with PPP adjustments-- that they make the average urban US public school look like Lawrenceville Prep. And yet even average students from those crumbling Russian schools which lack computers or even rudimentary libraries and athletic facilities easily outperform their peers from elite US schools! Again, there is no correlation between funding and achievement. There is a very high correlation between achievement and a) high standards; b) respect for the authority of the teacher and for intellectual activity generally; c) parental involvement; d) discipline and, ye, rote instruction in certain subjects-- like memorizing long poems, doing hundreds of calculus equations at age 13 or 14, learning foreign verb conjugations etc. It just isn't that complicated, folks. The Asians have figured it out and are moving forward as we chase our tails with this idiotic debate about funding.

Slocum - How on earth would capping the price lead to shortages or a black market in education? A thought experiment - set the cap at zero. Completely free education for everyone! Hooray! Now all we have to do is find someone who will provide that education for free.

No, no, you don't get it at all. The cap is not what schools are allowed to charge -- they can charge whatever they want. It's just that if they want to accept vouchers, they have to accept vouchers as full payment--they can't charge additional tuition on top of that. So you'll have some tony private schools charging, say $15 or $20K per year, but they'll be outside the voucher system. Within the voucher system will be all the public schools, charter schools, and all the private and parochial schools able to educate kids for the standard amount (say, $7 or $8K a year per student).

A further requirement for these voucher-accepting schools would be that, if over subscribed, they'd be required to allocate positions by lottery rather than by cherry-picking the most desirable kids.

Why won't the vouchers be badly underfunded? For the same reason that funding of public schools is generally protected -- because most people in a given state will rely on the vouchers for their kids' education and will want the funding to be adequate.

The fundamental laws of supply and demand don't stop working just because we're talking about education instead of widgets.

Of course not. What we're talking about here is establishing a standard per-pupil reimbursement rate and letting providers compete to provide educational services at that rate.

Assume Slocum's voucher plan. You should still expect to see significant price variation between schools on the basis of other fees and expenses. JL has some extreme examples, but think of how you raise prices in a rent-controlled area. In that case, you charge large fees for keys, cleaning, or pretty much any way you can re-create a market-clearing price.

Schools have far more ways to charge for extra costs. Actually, various public schools already have a lot of them. Pay-for-play in sports, raising money for class trips, lab or material fees for science classes, requiring students to buy their own equipment that is necessary (or nearly so) for classes... you have a lot of ways to vary prices. Charge for textbooks separately. You will see cheaper schools that offer "everything included" for that voucher price, and others will tack on charges in other ways. Reference car lots that offer "out the door pricing" or something similar.

Assume Slocum's voucher plan. You should still expect to see significant price variation between schools on the basis of other fees and expenses.

No, there are no other fees and expenses. The analogy is healthcare providers who accept Medicaid -- they either accept the Medicaid disbursement as total payment for the treatment or they don't--but there's no way to charge the patient extra fees. Of course, with healthcare, it's much more complicated because of treatment and diagnosis 'codes', but the principle is there--you either accept the standard fee or you aren't a provider.

It is quite easy for any voucher law to specify that the voucher must pay for all books, materials, and activities and that the schools are not permitted to 'cheat' by charging separately for these things.

thibaud writes:

Alkali's reductive cateogries of schools-- suburban, rural and urban/inner suburban-- ignores an enormous category of urban schools ...

To clarify, I was talking about public schools, whose problems vouchers are supposed to address.

Also, P.B. Almeida is correct that a number of public charter schools have opened in Boston. I would be interested to see if that trend could develop to the point that charter schools were taking in a considerable fraction of students (they don't as yet).

I am very glad to see this debate take a huge step towards realism by realizing that we have multiple school systems.

That is step one. Step two. The best schools have the best resources and they also have the best student -- from homes with good, educated parents that encourage their children to learn.

But step two is to also recognize that the poor schools also have the students with the least motivation and support systems to learn. So to really do something these structural problems need to be overcome and you can not expect to do that by providing these poor schools with poor students the same resources as the good schools with "good" students.

That is the fundamental problem with the voucher schemes.

The basic underlying factor is that the quality of a school is determined not by the amount of money you spend, but by the committment of the parents of the other children. Now that we have our public school system, the ultimate difference between Democrats and Republicans boils down to two different ways to keep the poor and minorities out of middle class white schools.

Republicans flee to the subarbs, Democrats use strong zoning laws that restrict small lots, apartments and multifamily tenaments.

The Democrat's method is much more expensive. That is why socially conservative families that believe that the mother should stay home with the kids are opting to flee rather than compete in the bidding war. With only one income they don't have much choice.

'Almeida is correct that a number of public charter schools have opened in Boston. I would be interested to see if that trend could develop to the point that charter schools were taking in a considerable fraction of students (they don't as yet).'

My kids go to Boston Public Schools and the problem isn't the lack of Charter schools which have had a mixed success record. The problems are the asinine school assignment system, lack of neighborhood schools, union retrenchment and reliance on the busing model instituted by Arthur Garrity, may his soul burn in Hell, in the 70's. The dwindling middle class is never going to accept the current or revamped Chinese menu assignment system which drives the middle class out of the public schools and without the middle class the schools are never going to improve. Since the assignment plan is just basically an extension of racial politics neither Menino or anyone else is ever going to scrap it. Union puppet Maura Hennigan is never going to get elected and would sabotage any reform anyway.

Let's have done with this canard that more money means better schools.

In New Jersey, the urban schools receive state aid and spend 30-40 percent more per student than my locally funded and well regarded suburban district.

In Marin County, California, the poorest performing school district, Sausalito, is almost entirely African American because the other families have moved out or enrolled their children in private schools. Guess what -- an odd state funding formula and a private foundation assure that Sausalito spends vastly more per student than surrounding districts.

If money were the answer, families would be flocking to these well-funded school districts,
but it's not happening.

Maybe there is some way to add funds and get better results in districts that desperatelly need to improve. But we haven't found it yet.

So to really do something these structural problems need to be overcome and you can not expect to do that by providing these poor schools with poor students the same resources as the good schools with "good" students.

Yes, but why not let motivated students and parents escape the bad schools? Why must their unmotivated peers drag down anyone who wants to escape?

In Marin County, California, the poorest performing school district, Sausalito, is almost entirely African American because the other families have moved out or enrolled their children in private schools. Guess what -- an odd state funding formula and a private foundation assure that Sausalito spends vastly more per student than surrounding districts.

Hmm, I didn't know all that. Here's a link to the data, too. Sausalito spends $16,555 per student and still gets poor results.

Jack Tanner writes:

My kids go to Boston Public Schools and the problem isn't the lack of Charter schools which have had a mixed success record. The problems are the asinine school assignment system, lack of neighborhood schools, union retrenchment and reliance on the busing model instituted by Arthur Garrity, may his soul burn in Hell, in the 70's. The dwindling middle class is never going to accept the current or revamped Chinese menu assignment system which drives the middle class out of the public schools and without the middle class the schools are never going to improve.

I agree with all of this save the imprecation against Judge Garrity.

I think some people need to learn just a little more about Sausalito. See, the thing about Sausalito is that it shares a school district with Marin City, which is not a slum, exactly, but is definitely the low end of the Marin demographic, always excepting the places the undocumented Mexican workers who do all that yardwork live. Sausalito proper is incredibly rich. Sausalito plus Marin City is an incredibly rich town with a hell of a lot of poor minority kids in it.

I am not certain of the details, but a year or so ago, Schwarzenegger at least wanted to confiscate the funds individual school districts raised by taxing themselves and add them to the general fund. Sausalito was the district to be hardest hit in the entire state; I recall that it was going to lose 37% of its entire budget. You can't absorb a cut like that without losing maybe a quarter of your staff, probably more.

That cut, IIRC, raised such a protest that it didn't take place — the districts that had taxed themselves to create better schools were also the ones best-placed to scream bloody hell when the Governator wanted their earmarked money to try to plug the giant hole in the budget.

The best example of spending not equalling good schools is the case of D.C. vs. the Northern Virginia suburbs. D.C. is in a different position than most of the major urban areas -- it has a huge underclass, but thanks to federal largesse, school spending is some of the highest in the country. D.C. spent almost 14k per student last year, while Fairfax County spent about 9k.

Northern Virginia routinely boasts some of the best public high schools in the country, while D.C. has arguably the worst. Its clearly not a functioning of spending. In Fairfax County, you have a bunch of upper middle class people with college and graduate degrees who are intent on getting their kids into one of the Ivies/UVA/Georgetown, etc. Many of the kids in D.C. are coming from extremely disfunctional backgrounds where many of their peers don't even graduate from high school. I would argue that you could double the spending in D.C. schools and cut it in half in Fairfax, and the Fairfax kids would still outperform their D.C. peers by a factor of four.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I do know that throwing more money at the problem isn't the answer as so many Democrats and/or teachers unions advocate.

The notion that "a 'good' school is an inescapably relative concept" is an assertion of fact that remains unproven. I personally suspect that it's incorrect: If all schools could increase (say) math test scores by 10%, students would be better off because they know more, in the same sense that if productivity of all workers increases by 10%, all will be richer, and will share in the 10% per-capita increase in GDP. Even with school tuitions "paid" in the housing market, it's not necessarily a zero-sum game.

Furthermore, parents do not differ only in their income; they may also differ in there preferences for (public) schooling. At any given level of income, some parents care more about school quality relative to (say) house quality than others. Under the current system, these parents would rather live in a smaller/older/worse house in a better school district; parents with the opposite preference would rather live in a better house in a worse school district. In the extreme case, parents with the highest preference for schools pay tuition to private schools and would benefit from living in a good house in a bad school district, since the public school quality doesn't affect their kids' education.

It's true that "half of all children will still attend bottom-half schools" -- but this is only relevant if the distribution of schools by quality is constant. If the top half of schools increase in quality by 10% and the bottom half stay the same (or even get worse), children in the top half get better educations, both in absolute and relative terms, than those in the bottom half.

Also, I'd suggest using the more standard term "separating equilibrium" rather than "segregating equilibrium." Not only is "separating" more standard in the literature, but "segregating" is a loaded word when it comes to schools.

Robert Book,

Also, I'd suggest using the more standard term "separating equilibrium" rather than "segregating equilibrium." Not only is "separating" more standard in the literature, but "segregating" is a loaded word when it comes to schools.

You might want to pass that on to Arnold Kling, whom Jane/Megan is quoting here.

Two thoughts:

1) The question of whether spending more money will improve education quality in a school district is not as simple as some commenters suggest. To take the most obvious fallacy, the fact that school district X spends a lot of money and gets poor results does not mean that no school district could improve education quality given more resources. A further question is whether the spending/educational quality relationship is linear; it could be that you don't really start seeing the spending benefits unless you spend at least $x extra per student.

2) Getting an apples-to-apples comparison of school spending is hard. Massachusetts uses a "foundation budget" system that assumes every regular ed student costs $x, every special ed student $1.25x, every bilingual student $1.4x, etc. (I am making the ratios up here, but that's how it works.) You can therefore look at what a Mass. school system is spending as a percentage of foundation budget.

By way of example, Boston and its wealthy suburb Brookline spend about $10K and $11K respectively per student -- i.e. pretty close -- but Boston spends almost exactly 100% of foundation budget and Brookline spends 160%. (Indeed, almost all the urban school districts in Mass. spend close to 100% of foundation budget; all the high-performing suburban districts spend 150-170%.)

(It would be interesting to see how DC compares to Fairfax on that kind of analysis. slightlybad's figures on gross spending in those districts are a bit out of date but the relative proportions are about right.)

"You're assuming that the destruction of the public school system is bad thing. My belief is that the less a gov't is involved in an industry the better it works."

Curious Texan,
You're right, but education is not an industry. it will never be directly profitable. No one ever made money directly off of education. Even well-regarded private schools need large endowments from private donors and grateful alumni. Investment in education is like investment in infrastructure; it pays off, but only indirectly. The government will never be out of the "ed business" unless we as a nation are prepared to accept a population of 50 percent illiterates.

Forget DC vs Fairfax County. Try any US district, rich or poor, vs Moscow (per capita income ca. $9,000) or Budapest or Shanghai or Mumbai schools. While I don't have exact figures, I'm pretty sure that per pupil spending, even after adjusted for PPP, in the latter cities is about an order of magnitude smaller than it is for a typical US city. And yet student achievement levels in the subject areas that permit direct, cross-cultural comparison-- math and science-- are significantly higher in Moscow, Budapest, Shanghai and Mumbai than in any US city or district, including Fairfax County.

Culture matters. The culture of the home, the cultural mores concerning the social status of the intellectual and the scientific professions, and cultural attitudes toward teachers and schools generally. Again, money means f-all to school achievement. If this were not so then the piss-poor, dreadfully underfunded school systems of Moscow etc would not be producing students who at the average, easily outdistance even our best students in math and science.

A quick check of OECD and UNICEF data indicates that in 2000, Hungary spent ca. $2,200 (PPP-adjusted) per primary and secondary pupil and South Korea ca. $3,300 per pupil. The figures for Budapest would be slightly higher than $2,200 per pupil and for Moscow, Mumbai and Shanghai significantly lower than $2,200. Again, these figures are adjusted for PPP to eliminate differences in standard of living, local factor costs etc.

Anyone with any experience of non-US, non-western, high-achieving cultures-- notably, the east European, chinese/mandarin and hindi/brahmin cultures-- recognizes the absurdity of Americans' quarreling over whether $9,000 per pupil or $19,000 per pupil is an appropriate level of expenditure. Educational attainment has next to nothing to do with expenditure and almost everything to do with cultural norms and values as regards intellectual inquiry and teachers and intellectuals' status and authority.

I think Slocum is exactly wrong. Schools which accept vouchers should be encouraged to obtain additional funding thru other sources proportional to the value added. In his model I could see a situation like we have in Milwaukee with the subsidized child care which is part of the replacement for old-fashioned welfare; bottom feeders offering minimal service but kickbacks.

By the way, I believe that vouchers should amount to less than the amount spent per student by the government schools, and should be issued to all students attending any school, including the government schools. Then the Board of Education will need to justify the additional costs to the taxpayers, just as the Select Acadamy for Young Gentlemen kicked out of three other schools has to justify their high tuition to the parents. Homeschool students would be offered limited vouchers providing access to such capital-intensive facilities as laboratories, workshops and shooting ranges.

Sue wrote:
The government will never be out of the "ed business" unless we as a nation are prepared to accept a population of 50 percent illiterates.

That's an interesting claim. I wonder what the real literacy rate today is? Not the canned-test-literacy rate, but the 'what can you read and understand' literacy rate...

Some years back I read James Fenimore Cooper's book "Last of the Mohicans". At the time it was published, it was the top selling work of fiction and was probably the most widely read work of its time. Common people who had maybe 8 years of schooling at most were reading that work. I strongly suspect that "Last" would tax most modern high school students, and many college students. I base this on working with college interns who are in the top 15% of their class, and who cannot write a coherent paragraph reporting what they did the previous week. These same people can't read Shakespeare and understand it; the language is just too complex for them.

It could be that literacy was higher then, than now.

John Taylor Gatto has some very interesting facts and conclusions about education. His work is worth examining.

If all schools could increase (say) math test scores by 10%, students would be better off because they know more, in the same sense that if productivity of all workers increases by 10%, all will be richer, and will share in the 10% per-capita increase in GDP.

Ehm...would that be the tautological sense?

Someone wrote:
If all schools could increase (say) math test scores by 10%, students would be better off because they know more, in the same sense that if productivity of all workers increases by 10%, all will be richer, and will share in the 10% per-capita increase in GDP.

Anony-mouse asked:
Ehm...would that be the tautological sense?

At least students would all be above average, and all the workers would have above average incomes...

The day the test scores came out, a child who had the median result turned to a child that had the average result and said, "You're mean!".

HAH! Hah! Ha! ha! h...

Ok, ok, it was funnier when I heard it in a stat class...

alkali, that's extremely interesting about "foundation" budgets in MA. It can't be that all the English-language learners, learning-disabled kids, &c. are in the rich suburbs, so how is this rigged? Is it only that the parents in the rich suburbs have figured out the system? I would have thought the administrators in the urban schools would've cottened on by now and started screening their students for learning disabilities, non-English-fluent parents, and anything else that'd come in handy. Why have they not?

Sue wrote:

"The government will never be out of the "ed business" unless we as a nation are prepared to accept a population of 50 percent illiterates."

Well, the government's not in the shoe business, but I don't see a whole lot of folks walking around barefoot.

Don,
Education is not a commodity like shoes. The "product" isn't the education but the student. Education is a process that adds value to the student. Since every student has different abiilities and needs (kids are not "widgets"), it is impossible to create a profitable, predictable system for educating them. Education is more like medical treatment. Some people will pay a lot for it, others not so much. It depends on the need and the value attached to it.

Ellipsis:
You make a good point about literacy. When Cooper wrote, literacy rates in the US were fairly low except among the elites. Now, however, one cannot even make a living without some minimal reading and writing ability. Our economy has no jobs for illiterates. That is the problem, and the reason why we still need public schools (at least at the K-8 level). Of course, most people cannot easily read literature, but I don't think that has ever been the case anyway. Shakespeare's plays, your other example, were originally meant to be seen and heard, not read.

Sue wrote:
Ellipsis:
You make a good point about literacy. When Cooper wrote, literacy rates in the US were fairly low except among the elites.

If that were true, then Cooper's book would not have sold nearly as many copies as it did. Please show how literacy rates then were low except among the "elites", and yet a book that would challenge many college students sold a stunning number of copies.

Now, however, one cannot even make a living without some minimal reading and writing ability.

Extremely minimal from what I can tell.

Our economy has no jobs for illiterates.

In a sense, this is true, and yet it is not. If you had actually read my previous postings, you would see that I have worked with fairly bright college students who cannot describe in a couple of paragraphs what work they performed in the previous week. These are not future fast-food clerks, either...

That is the problem, and the reason why we still need public schools (at least at the K-8 level).

If those schools were businesses, most of them would be in Chapter 11.

Of course, most people cannot easily read literature,

Of course. We certainly cannot expect the ordinary person today to match up to such extraordinary people as high school dropouts of 100 years ago...

but I don't think that has ever been the case anyway.

There was a time, not that long ago, when anyone who had a college diploma would have been quite embarrased to be shown unable to read literature. Indeed, literary references used to be quite common in ordinary conversation...

Shakespeare's plays, your other example, were originally meant to be seen and heard, not read.

From what I can tell, a whole lot of high school seniors are unable to read Shakespeare out loud. Too many big words they've never seen before in their curriculum...could there be a problem, there?

Sue wrote:

"Don,
Education is not a commodity like shoes. The "product" isn't the education but the student. Education is a process that adds value to the student. Since every student has different abiilities and needs (kids are not "widgets"), it is impossible to create a profitable, predictable system for educating them. Education is more like medical treatment. Some people will pay a lot for it, others not so much. It depends on the need and the value attached to it."

Some people will pay a lot for shoes, others not so much. It depends on the value attached to them. And since everybody's feet are different (shoes are not "widgets"), it's impossible to create a profitable, predictable system for educating them. Moreover, the real good being sold isn't a commodity at all. Shoes are a process that adds to the wearer's ability to walk or run with comfort and style.

In NZ, while schools that have intakes from high-income families tend to dominate the top of uni result charts, there are a number of schools drawing on poor areas that do far better than the average for their decile.

This doesn't seem to be related to funding - the socio-economic decile is calculated for each school in NZ and funding is higher the lower the decile, but since this scheme was introduced I haven't seen any signs of a levelling in school results. Those who study the high-performing, low-decile schools attribute them to the principal.

And it does seem very unlikely to me that teaching and running a school is such an idiot-proof job that there is no quality effect - that you could put anyone up in front of a classroom and they will do equally well, anymore than you can put any musician up in front of an audience and hear the same music. There are multiple things a teacher needs to do to be successful - present at a rate suitable for the students, cover all the necessary material, remember to test regularly for understanding, be able to explain something several ways, be able to control the class, etc. It would be extremely unlikely that every teacher was equally competent, and every principal equally competent at training teachers.

And it does seem very unlikely to me that teaching and running a school is such an idiot-proof job that there is no quality effect

I'll go a step farther: There IS a quality effect and it is readily observable in any school that has a mix of good and bad teachers.

When I was still in Middle School (Grades 6-8), I recall there were five teachers in the sixth grade wing, each overseeing a classroom of 28-31 students for 2/3 of the day, followed by rotating class activities for the remaining 1/3. One teacher had what military types might call "commanding presence." The teacher in the room next door did not have that, but still managed to maintain a reasonably strict discipline. The third and foutth were good teachers but mediocre disciplinarians, and the fifth was downright lax on all counts.

How do I know this? Because all students were mentored by all of the teachers for at least one major curriculum segment, and the students aren't dumb -- they pretty quickly figure out what each teacher's limits are (or lack thereof), and then exploit them accordingly. I knew 'who was who,' and so did everyone else. And if you had a hallpass for some reason, you could observe this in action since doors were usually propped open.

The first teacher always had dead silence during assigned reading or writing activities, as did the second, although a well-timed gag in the second class could upset the peace a little bit longer. The third and fourth generally had a chattering drone coming from their doors at all hours of the day, and the fifth was essentialy running a rumpus room.

Mind you, I recall that all five of these teachers were nice people on a general social level, but they did not provide a uniform learning environment.

Michelle Dulak Thomson writes:

alkali, that's extremely interesting about "foundation" budgets in MA. It can't be that all the English-language learners, learning-disabled kids, &c. are in the rich suburbs, so how is this rigged?

I think you've got it backwards, which means I haven't explained it clearly.

Suppose for sake of example that the foundation budget amount is $10K for regular kids and $16K for bilingual kids (I'm making the numbers up).

Suppose that urban District A has 5 regular kids and 5 bilingual kids: the foundation budget for District A is therefore $130K (5 x $10K + 5 x $16K). If District A's actual spending is $130K, it is spending 100% of foundation budget.

Now suppose suburban District B has 9 regular kids and 1 bilingual kid: the foundation budget for District B would be $106K (9 x $10K + 1 x $16K). If District B's actual spending is $130K, it is spending 123% of foundation budget ($130K/$106K).

The point is that while A and B are spending the same per-student dollar figure, B is spending that amount on an "easier-to-educate" student population.

Looking at spending as a percentage of foundation budget suggests that -- at least in Massachusetts -- even though the suburban schools aren't spending a lot more per student in absolute dollars than urban schools, the effective spending disparity is quite large.

(Obviously it is fair to question the assumptions by which the foundation budget is calculated, but I think the general method is sound.)

penis size and genetics

Yep, you're right, alkali, I misunderstood you, and I don't think it's your fault.

What you're saying, basically, is that the urban and suburban schools have roughly the same per-capita budgets, but the urban schools have a lot more work to do on the same money.

I am curious, though, how this is calculated. Both how the baseline is set, and how it's decided which sorts of students are going to need more money. Because I would have thought that while bilingual students might be concentrated in urban areas, learning-disabled students (or rather students classed as learning-disabled, which of course isn't quite the same thing) might be commoner in the suburbs. And just-plain-poor students: how do they factor in? Or don't they at all?

I am curious, though, how this is calculated. Both how the baseline is set, and how it's decided which sorts of students are going to need more money. Because I would have thought that while bilingual students might be concentrated in urban areas, learning-disabled students (or rather students classed as learning-disabled, which of course isn't quite the same thing) might be commoner in the suburbs. And just-plain-poor students: how do they factor in? Or don't they at all?

1) The baseline is set by adding up line items (payroll, books and equipment, etc.). Baseline amounts are determined separately for pre-school, kindergarten, elementary, junior high, and high school. A wage adjustment factor is used to account for cost of living disparities across the state.

2) Which students get more money is determined by statute: special education, bilingual, vocational, and low income are the "plus" categories.

3) I am familiar with reports of high-income families making efforts to have their children improperly classed as learning-disabled so that they get extra advantages (e.g., more time on the SAT). I don't think that equates to being classed as "special education" for purposes of the foundation budget analysis.

4) Low income is a "plus" category under the act.

Because I would have thought that while bilingual students might be concentrated in urban areas, learning-disabled students (or rather students classed as learning-disabled, which of course isn't quite the same thing) might be commoner in the suburbs.

Not to mention students classed as bilingual, which of course isn't quite the same thing. It is not unheard of for Spanish-surnamed youngsters who speak only English to be pushed into "bilingual" programs where they flounder. There have also been efforts to push bilingual programs on immigrant communities which want their children educated in English. After all, bilingual pays better.

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