WFS is unapologetically pro-charter schools, and alot of people have a problem with this (including members of the faculty panel that was held after the showing). Caution and skepticism are warranted when it comes to charters — studies regarding their quality are inconclusive, and having a blind faith in any policy is unwise. But there are a few superficial objections to charters that I wanted to address here.

1. “Charter schools were not intended to serve as a major education reform. Rather, they were supposed to be testing grounds for reforms to be implemented in public schools, or to serve student populations with special needs.”

This is probably true. But, in short, who cares? Whoever thought up charters doesn’t have special authority over their implementation for the rest of time. Figuring out the proper place of charters in our education system requires looking at the actual merits of the cases for and against them. If the reasons for which charter schools were originally intended to have such a limited role still hold, then fine. If there is now good reason to use them in a different way, then fine. The intent of charter school pioneers is irrelevant.

2. “Only 2% of this country’s students are served by charters! We must focus on the public schools that the majority attend.”

Well, more students would attend charter schools if there were not so many arbitrary caps placed on the number of them allowed. That’s the whole point of the movie. This objection expresses serious status quo bias, and little else.

3. “Some/many charter schools are worse than public schools!”

This is true. Having charter status doesn’t automagically make a school excellent. It may be difficult for a parent to tell whether the public school that her child will potentially attend is better or worse than a particular charter school. But this is just the reality of the situation: schools of all kinds (public, private, charter) differ in quality — and will continue to do so, despite our best efforts to equalize them. While it’s sad to think that a parent might send her child to a worse (charter) school than he otherwise would have attended, that parent’s decision is not irrational. The expected payoff of the charter school, an admittedly unknown quantity, may be higher than that of the known but unimpressive quantity of the public school. In any case, we allow parents to send their children to less than the best schools in other contexts: by choosing a private school, or by moving to an area with not excellent schools. And it’s not as if the politicians have clean hands, they who allow millions of children to languish in bad schools every day, when it is allegedly in their power to change that. If the charter debate turned away from the sanctity of public education and towards empirical studies of charter vs. public schools, then parents could actually figure out which schools to avoid. And isn’t that what everyone wants: students staying out of bad schools, whichever they are?

None of this is to say that charters are an education panacea. But there are much better objections than these.

Sadly, the successful private schools are sometimes crowded out by public schools (that are often not any better, as I will discuss below). Other times, the “free” public schools are, in effect, unavailable to parents because they are too far away from students’ homes, require expensive uniforms, are not accepting new students, or accept only students of a certain class. Yet, even some of the best private schools have trouble operating under conditions of overregulation, political corruption, bribe-expecting inspectors, and scarcity of capital for investment. Still, many of them find a way to provide free and reduced price places to the poorest of the poor students.

According to Tooley, development experts are mostly either unaware of the existence of low-cost private schools, or they criticize them on a few main grounds, including that the teachers are uncertified and low-paid, that the facilities are inadequate, and that the education received is of low quality. However, there is no reason to believe that the low-cost private schools are in general any worse than the public schools in these regards. First, certified public school teachers frequently ignore or abandon their classes altogether, with major absenteeism problems. As such, their certification is not doing the students much good. The lower pay of private school teachers is in line with what the market will bear and keeps this form of private education sustainable. Moreover, the private school teachers are more often residents of the villages and towns in which they work, which beneficially decreases the “social distance” between them and their students. As for facilities, it is simply unreasonable to insist that schools in these areas must have, for instance, playgrounds of a certain size or a certain number of toilets. These amenities are not congruent with the standards of living for the area and are prohibitively costly for private schools  (besides, many public schools lack them as well). Finally, as for the education being of low quality —  Tooley forcefully argues that this criticism of low-cost private schools mostly just betrays experts’ distrust of poor parents’ judgment, or even contempt for them. Experts assume that parents who pay for a service that they can get for free must be getting taken advantage of by private school proprietors. However, the test scores from Tooley’s research, as well as his team’s observational accounts of public and private schools, clearly vindicate these parents’ judgment. Low cost private schools are, in fact, often better than public schools.

While Tooley’s research and arguments are very solid, I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone. In particular, I wouldn’t recommend it to libertarian folk who are more interested in political philosophy than education. Ten out of twelve chapters of the book rather slowly recount Tooley’s experiences in the field, right down to individual names, encounters, students, schools, etc — hence the subtitle “a personal journey.” If you are looking for hard hitting theoretical argumentation in favor of school choice, look elsewhere. That’s not to say that Tooley doesn’t make good arguments — just that they’re already familiar to people who are interested in, and sympathetic to, school choice and private education. Libertarian theories about education predict many of Tooley’s findings; as such, he will seem to libertarians as being in the less interesting business of confirming existing theories, rather than covering any exciting new ground.

But where Tooley really shines is in bringing market-based education ideas to those who are primarily interested not in politics but in education, people who might otherwise find libertarians’ ideas too abstract, impractical, elitist, undemocratic, unsympathetic, etc. The book’s blend of appeals to emotion and reason, empirical and qualitative evidence, and the past and the present makes it an exceptionally well-balanced addition to the education literature in this area. I would encourage all of my education friends to give it a try. It will at the very least enlarge your education imagination.

Ravitch is an historian of education and, viewed as a history, I think the book is really great. It concisely traces a few important strands of recent education history: how the school standards movement got turned into the testing movement, the rise of the business model of education and “accountability,” the segregation-tainted past of “schools of choice,” the conception and effects of No Child Left Behind. If you don’t feel like reading the book, though, Ravitch covers most of these topics ( maybe less comprehensively) on the Education Week Bridging Difference blog she co-writes with another influential educator, Deborah Meier.

Ravitch’s conclusions in this book are particularly notable because they represent a significant departure from her former views. While she used to approve of standardized testing and support market-based education reform, she has come to reject them pretty much entirely. Testing is bad because the tests are often unreliable and invalid, and provide strong incentives for people in control of education to game the system, cheat, or at very least to narrow the curriculum to just the tested subjects. Market-based education reform is bad because there isn’t much evidence that choice and charters actually get any results. (She cites a ton of studies on both of these points).

In the end, Ravitch recommends a strengthening of public education. This can be best achieved by doing away with the high-stakes testing, establishing rigorous and coherent curriculums in all subjects (not just reading and math), making sure that teachers are not only trained in pedagogy but are also experts in their subject material, treating teachers as autonomous professionals, and helping struggling schools rather than closing them down, etc. They’re all pretty conservative recommendations — nothing radical here.

But I’m not as happy with the book’s prescriptions for education as I am with its historical sections, for two main reasons:

1. Having explained how easily the movement for curriculum standards was disrupted in the 9os, why would Ravitch then go on to put so much stock for future reform in strengthening standards? This is at best idealistic, possibly naive. There is no reason to think that political consensus on what should be taught will be easier to reach now than 15 years ago. Maybe this is ideally the best thing we could do for school reform. But, if it’s exceedingly unlikely to happen, then we need to start looking at next best options, and how to move forward without such curriculum.
2. Ravitch’s disapproval of school choice and charter schools is based upon their disappointing results in terms of raising test scores. But, she disapproves of the tests, so why should their inability to raise tests scores itself be an indictment against them? And, more importantly, many people support school choice and charter schools at least partly independently of their ability to raise test scores. School choice and charter schools might be valuable simply insofar as they afford parents and students additional freedom. Or, they might be good because they achieve the same mediocre results but at a lower cost. Furthermore, just because school choice and charter schools haven’t yet produced astounding results doesn’t show that they won’t in the future — most programs are in their infancies. An education market, with its increased flexibility, may still have a better chance of innovating to students’ benefit than the current public school system. And anyway, none of the choice or charter programs studied are what the staunchest, most free market of reformers really have in mind. They could still maintain that market-based education *done their way* will work. So Ravitch’s condemnation of choice and charters is maybe a bit hasty, although I think she’s right that the evidence to date is not fantastic and that it is being overblown or ignored by ideological proponents of choice.

So, basically a solid book. I’m definitely still chewing it over. While I’m pretty sympathetic to the market-based education reforms that Ravitch has come to reject, my faith in them is by no means unlimited. I think that the arguments for and against school choice/charter schools are usually pretty tired, and I plan to explore some of the finer points of the issue in the coming months and years. This timely book serves as a solid starting point for understanding school choice/charter school (and testing) skepticism.

Recently, I saw the above video on Facebook. Basically, it illustrates the argument that a public option in health care would compete against private insurers to the benefit of those covered under both kinds of plans. This argument seems like it is supposed to appeal to the market-minded among us, who are into competition amongst businesses. And “competition is as American as apple pie,” quoth MoveOn.org

Now, I’m going to take the liberty of guessing that alot of people who are in favor of the public option also oppose school choice (in my experience, this is true, but feel free to take issue with this assumption in your comments). To the extent that their arguments for the public option are really about competition, their opposing school choice — which promotes competition amongst schools — is inconsistent with their position on health care.

Alternatively, perhaps this just exposes the fact that the proponents of the public option really don’t care about competition much at all, that it was just a strategic argument aimed at pro-business types, and that really they favor something about the state provision of important goods and services, like health care and education.

Thoughts anyone? I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who favor the public option but oppose school choice. Please explain to me your real position on competition, as I am confused. Thanks in advance.