'Ho-hum' Says Much About School Choice Foes
By Patrick McIlheran, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Last Update: September 26, 2007
Ho-hum: Another study suggesting good results from school choice in Milwaukee, not that it will make much of a dent with the opposition.
This tells you something about the opposition.
The latest study links the ability of poor parents to take state aid to religious schools to improvements at Milwaukee Public Schools.
Researcher Rajashri Chakrabarti found that while school choice showed little effect on MPS early on, it showed a much bigger effect after key changes in late 1990s: The Wisconsin Supreme Court cleared the way for religious schools to take part, greatly increasing the options, and changes in funding made MPS feel the loss of students more keenly.
Math, language arts and reading scores at Milwaukee's public schools showed more improvement after new competition came into the picture, says Chakrabarti. Scores improved more at schools that were more subject to competition - schools where a greater proportion of students were poor and could use a voucher if their parents chose. This shows the improvements weren't driven by other changes in MPS, such as new leadership. It was the increased competition, she says.
There are other reasons the new study should carry some weight. One is the researcher. While choice's critics often dismiss studies coming from researchers tied to groups that favor school choice, Chakrabarti is in that sense an outsider. She's an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This study builds on and refines earlier work by other researchers, addressing questions raised by their critics. This is how researchers approach a more definitive answer to a question.
The question here is whether increasing competition makes public schools better. Chakrabarti's answer is "yes." Designed well, a school choice program "can go a long way in inducing public school improvement," she writes.
This probably will not sway those who are out to torpedo school choice. The program has been under attack since its beginnings. It remains so, opposed on the most fundamental basis by powerful figures in state politics.
Even the most concrete evidence doesn't seem to make a difference.
"The program has proved its value by the lives of children who have been saved," says Howard Fuller, who heads the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. He's also involved with a choice high school, the CEO Leadership Academy. Eleven of its first 12 graduates went to college. Many were doing poorly before they came, he points out, and likely wouldn't have gone to college if not for choice. The same is true for hundreds of graduates of dozens of other schools. Enough anecdotes and you have a pattern showing that choice helps children.
It's plain to Fuller, a former MPS superintendent, that choice helps public schools, too. "It gives a superintendent leverage," he says. While there are many in MPS who try improving schools out of professionalism, there are some teachers and administrators who resist reform. Competition strengthens the reformers' hand.
And choice gives parents of students who stay in MPS more ability to demand reform. "The power to exit is a very important lever when you're trying to make change," Fuller says.
That none of this has ended the attack implies that the opposition isn't all about the children. Some is philosophical - an allergy to religion in schools or a belief that a single system is a social good.
Some is self-interest. For these, "they simply see it as a loss of absolute power and control over the money," as Fuller puts it. No number of studies could change that reckoning.
But most people aren't driven by such motives. Most are bystanders, interested but not invested in one viewpoint or the other.
For these people, Chakrabarti's findings are more than ho-hum. She uses the tools of economics to find with greater certainty that school choice can be made to serve those who remain in MPS. Choice improves public schools.
Since this is true, it is ever clearer that many objections to choice have little to do with what is good for students.
The above column appeared in the September 26, 2007 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Click here for a PDF of Chakrabarti's paper.