I used to be a supporter of this. Now I'm not so sure. My group invested in a private education company that went into public school systems and took over the running of the schools. It was one of the few investments were we felt good about making a profit and doing good socially. But after years of watching it, I'm not sure if it did any better than the public schools.
Interesting debate for and against.
Fresh Air from WHYY : NPR
*shrugs*
snip-
When Mr. Obama first moved to phase out the D.C. voucher program in 2009, his Education Department was in possession of a federal study showing that voucher recipients, who number more than 3,300, made gains in reading scores and didn't decline in math. The administration claims that the reading gains were not large enough to be significant. Yet even smaller positive effects were championed by the administration as justification for expanding Head Start.
In any case, the program's merits don't rest on reading scores alone. In a study published last year, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas found that voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91%. That's significantly higher than the D.C. public school average (56%) and the graduation rate for students who applied for a D.C. voucher but didn't win the lottery (70%). In testimony before a Senate subcommittee in February, Mr. Wolf said that "we can be more than 99% confident that access to school choice through the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and not mere statistical noise, was the reason why OSP students graduated at these higher rates."
snip-
The positive effects of the D.C. voucher program are not unique. A recent study of Milwaukee's older and larger voucher program found that 94% of students who stayed in the program throughout high school graduated, versus just 75% of students in Milwaukee's traditional public schools. And contrary to the claim that vouchers hurt public schools, the report found that students at Milwaukee public schools "are performing at somewhat higher levels as a result of competitive pressure from the school voucher program." Thus can vouchers benefit even the children that don't receive them.
Research gathered by Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice also calls into question the White House assertion that vouchers are ineffective. In a paper released in March, he says that "every empirical study ever conducted in Milwaukee, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Maine and Vermont finds that voucher programs in those places improved public schools." Mr. Forster surveyed 10 empirical studies that use "random assignment, the gold standard of social science," to assure that the groups being compared are as similar as possible. "Nine [of the 10] studies find that vouchers improve student outcomes, six that all students benefit and three that some benefit and some are not affected," he writes. "One study finds no visible impact. None of these studies finds a negative impact."
more at-
Jason Riley: The Evidence Is In—School Vouchers Work - WSJ.com
I've gone from being a supporter of this stuff to being agnostic.
My first guest, Diane Ravitch, had been an advocate of choice, testing, accountability and market-based education reform. Now she has profound doubts about these same ideas. She says she was persuaded by accumulating evidence that these reforms were not likely to live up to their promise.
Diane Ravitch's latest book is called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education." She served as assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration. President Clinton appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing of student progress in different subject areas. She served on that board for seven years. Diane Ravitch is a professor of education at NYU and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ...
Well, here's why I think it's a problem, and it's because I step back and I'm a historian and I look at the data from studies across the world, and what I see is that the best-performing nations in the world have strong public education systems.
I don't see any of the high-performing nations handing over control of children in the public sector and handing over public funding to entrepreneurs. I see them instead building a public school system, building and strengthening their education profession so that their teachers are the best, so that they're well-supported, so that they feel passionate and energetic about the work they're doing.
And we seem to be doing the opposite. We're privatizing many of our public schools. We're demoralizing the people who work in the regular public schools. We're doing, as a nation, at this moment in time, doing nothing to improve our public school system and everything to undermine it. ...
So what's your assessment of the pros and cons of teachers unions today?
Prof. RAVITCH: Well, the first thing you have to understand about teachers unions is they're not the problem. The state with the highest scores on the national tests, the ones given by the federal government, the state - that state is Massachusetts, which is 100 percent union.
The nation with the highest scores in the world is Finland, which is 100 percent union. Management and labor can always work together around the needs of children if they're willing to. ...
handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to private entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them.
There's plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better,
Diane Ravitch: Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching : NPR
That last sentence has been my experience.
The nation with the least kids to teach, and the most homogeneous population on the planet is Finland. Findland HAS NO MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS. Finland HAS NEVER ENSLAVED BLACKS. Finland has a NATIONAL EDUCATION SYSTEM. Why do we constantly try to compare ourselves to FINLAND? They would have an educated population if they hired PENGUINS to teach!
My experience is that anyone that WANTS to be educated can be educated.
Very often, Americans do not want to be educated, certainly not for 12 years, and certainly not in 3 levels of abstract math. There is not any preceived value, because:
THE STANDARD OF LIVING IS TO HIGH!
In America you can be a complete ninny, and still live in an air-conditioned home, with clean water, and a cell phone, color TV, and usually own a car.
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