{"id":2542,"date":"2022-09-15T04:08:54","date_gmt":"2022-09-15T09:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/?p=2542"},"modified":"2022-11-19T12:02:57","modified_gmt":"2022-11-19T18:02:57","slug":"school-choice-it-doesnt-do-what-you-think-it-does-part-2-of-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/blog\/2022\/09\/15\/school-choice-it-doesnt-do-what-you-think-it-does-part-2-of-6\/","title":{"rendered":"School Choice: It Doesn\u2019t Do What You Think it Does (Part 2 of 6)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"School choice is a term that\u2019s been applied to a variety of programs in education. In one very large district in North Carolina, school choice allowed parents to tell the district which elementary, middle, or high school they wanted their children to attend among all the public school options in the district.\u00a0 In public school districts with magnet schools, school choice was a similar proposition where parents applied to the program they wanted for their child, like STEM or French Immersion.\u00a0 Then it began to apply to public charter schools within districts, again with an application process for the parents\u2019 school of choice, \u00a0and now it refers increasingly to a movement in which parents can use public money to fund private school tuition for their children, opting out of the public system altogether.<\/p>\n

There are a range of arguments for school choice out there, but a survey of research both domestic and international shows that school choice doesn\u2019t actually deliver on some of its biggest promises. More than that, voucher\/choice programs inflict very real harm on the public schools and on society as a whole. We’re going to look at multiple aspects of school choice over the next several posts, starting with the elephant in the room: the persistent myth that private schooling leads to improved student learning.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Probably the strongest argument for school choice is that it will offer more kids the chance at a better education, but the much-vaunted reputation private schools have for providing a better education than public is not as robust as once believed. What looked like great achievement in private schools turned out NOT to be a result of better educational programs but rather of the parents\u2019 higher educational attainment and income level. The results of a University of Virginia study from 2018 showed that,<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile private school students may be outperforming public school students, the difference is eliminated completely when researchers control for family income and parents\u2019 level of educational achievement. Children birth through age 5 from high-income homes have educational resources that other children don\u2019t get \u2013 conditions that are presumed to carry on through the child\u2019s school years.\u201d 1\u00a0<\/sup><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When income level and parental education are controlled for, achievement between public and private schools is essentially equal.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

There has been some rejection of this conclusion from people who don\u2019t understand why researchers control for variables so let me say here that controlling for variables is essential to isolating the cause<\/em> of a particular effect \u2013<\/em> to prove that one is causing the other.\u00a0 This allows researchers to hold constant one or more particular variables that might also<\/em> be producing the same effect.\u00a0 Without controlling for these variables, there\u2019s no way to know which<\/em> variable is producing the good performance. Here\u2019s an example: \u00a0If you are trying to relieve pain in your knees and you start a walking program, begin taking a collagen supplement, and lose weight, it would be hard to say which of the three was the reason your knee pain improved.\u00a0 You wouldn\u2019t be able to tell unless you could go back and only do one thing at a time for several months and measure its effects.\u00a0 However, if you wanted to prove that the collagen supplement was the reason for the improvement, you could take a\u00a0 large group of people with knee pain who are taking collagen and see if they experience improvement. BUT your results wouldn\u2019t be valid unless you control for other things they might be doing, like walking or losing weight, because these things have already been proven<\/em> to reduce knee pain.<\/p>\n

In education, it\u2019s already been proven<\/em> that parental income and parental education level improve student performance.\u00a0 To make the study valid, researchers had<\/em> to control for these two variables to isolate the effect of the private school setting by itself on student performance. The fact that the higher achievement for private school students went away when they controlled for income and educational level demonstrates that the private school setting was not<\/strong> producing higher achievement.<\/p>\n

This is an important point because we already know that students whose parents are highly educated and wealthy also achieve highly in public <\/em>schools and kids whose parents aren\u2019t highly educated and wealthy will not achieve as highly in private<\/em> schools.\u00a0 That\u2019s the nature of those \u201ceducational resources\u201d in the quote above; we call it Cultural Capital and it makes a huge difference in achievement across a range of metrics.\u00a0 Cultural Capital actually renders where a person is educated much less important because it fills in any potential gaps with travel and cultural experiences, private lessons and camps based on a child\u2019s interest or aptitude, and all the accumulated experiences and education the parents possess and can deploy to help their children succeed.<\/p>\n

Internationally, countries that have school choice or voucher programs have also not demonstrated higher achievement when compared to other countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cSweden has had an educational voucher system since 1992, but its achievement levels on international tests have been falling for two decades. Chile has had such a system since 1980, and there is little evidence of improvement in achievement relative to countries at similar levels of income. \u201d2\u00a0\u00a0<\/sup><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I looked up the PISA scores from 2018 \u2013 the last year I could find that was \u201cnormal\u201d \u2013 and found that the top three countries in every category were China, Singapore, and Macao — countries with little or no school choice.\u00a0 Among countries with choice?\u00a0 Sweden ranked 11th, <\/sup>the U.S. ranked 13th<\/sup>, and Chile ranked 43rd <\/sup>in reading. In math, Sweden ranked 17th<\/sup>, the U.S. ranked 37th<\/sup>, and Chile ranked 59th<\/sup>. In Science, the U.S. ranked 18th<\/sup>, Sweden ranked 19th<\/sup>, and Chile ranked 45th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

In England there has been a dramatic shift away from schools governed by public councils (similar to our public schools) to academies run by private groups with great autonomy and the ability to select their own students, but student achievement results show no distinct advantage to these private schools.\u00a0 The evidence suggests that if the U.S. were to widely adopt a voucher program, our achievement levels would drop further compared to other countries. Indeed, evidence coming out of pilot programs for vouchers demonstrates that this is likely to occur:<\/p>\n

\u201cCleveland, Milwaukee, and the District of Columbia have issued vouchers to low-income families, but sophisticated evaluations find no difference between achievement in private voucher schools and public schools with similar student populations. Students from low-income families in Louisiana who have used vouchers to shift from public to private schools have experienced striking reductions in achievement gains relative to similar students in public schools.\u201d 3\u00a0<\/sup><\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So if the most ballyhooed aspect of private school vouchers doesn\u2019t deliver on its promise to\u00a0 improve student achievement, what do vouchers for private schools actually do?\u00a0 We\u2019ll discuss that in Part 3.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You can go back and read Part 1<\/a> of this series, where we discussed the recent Supreme Court decision on Maine school vouchers.<\/em><\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

1<\/sup> Pianta RC, Ansari A. Does Attendance in Private Schools Predict Student Outcomes at Age 15? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study.\u00a0Educational Researcher<\/em>. 2018;47(7):419-434. doi:10.3102\/0013189X18785632<\/a><\/p>\n

2 <\/sup>https:\/\/www.usnews.com\/news\/best-countries\/articles\/2017-01-30\/little-global-evidence-suggests-school-choice-helps-performance<\/a><\/p>\n

3 <\/sup>https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/research\/more-findings-about-school-vouchers-and-test-scores-and-they-are-still-negative\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

School choice is a term that\u2019s been applied to a variety of programs in education. In one very large district in North Carolina, school choice allowed parents to tell the district which elementary, middle, or high school they wanted their children to attend among all the public school options in the district.\u00a0 In public school […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2542"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2542"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2800,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2542\/revisions\/2800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curriculumsolutions.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}