Let's discuss vouchers!

Thomas

You quoted me saying


and then asked:



Just because!

I don't ordinarily defend guesses. I just wait out the situation and see how the guess went.

My sense is that the people touting vouchers have something other than better schools in mind. My sense is that schools need lots of improving, but I suspect vouchers ain't the way to do it.

Perhaps we'll find out -- although I would not at all be surprised to see that vouchers never get much further off the ground than they are right now.

Only one reply, scrat - NUTS. How apt.

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

Re-educating the Voters About Texas' Schools

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

AUSTIN, Tex.
George Bush is more than two years gone from the Texas statehouse, but his signature can-do issue as a presidential candidate education showed increasing wear and tear as this year's legislative session ground to a close. For one thing, his state, like others, had to relax the testing standards for the new federal No Child Left Behind Act to avoid failing youngsters wholesale and subjecting schools to federal penalties.
For another, the budget crunch of the less glamorous, more revenue-starved era of statehouse politicking that succeeded Governor Bush had plans afoot to cut such basics as textbook financing and to procrastinate once more on a revision of the state's outdated school-aid formula.
But of all the products of the education hothouse that lent such bloom to the Bush candidacy, none is looking more wilted than that beloved conservative stratagem called charter schools. These are independent schools run at public expense as a nonpublic alternative to public schools.
In the closing legislative hours, the latest sorry wrinkle in the charter agenda was struck down a siphoning of public funds for computers to create "virtual" schools for students working in their homes. But the charter school movement lives on, six years old and costing taxpayers $5,000 per pupil, with limited state oversight on how the money is spent.
The movement, with its ballyhooing of entrepreneurial alternatives to public schools, helped Governor Bush polish his image as an education innovator. But the schools' shortcomings have become clearer since he left town, and the state's budget crunch clearly points to the unfairness of diverting shrinking public funds to private experimentation.
Unsurprisingly, considering the deliberate reining in of state controls, some of the schools have become standouts not for academic excellence but for the sort of greed and gamesmanship more familiar to patronage politics: nepotistic staffing, inflated attendance, false academic records, exorbitant salaries and employees with unchecked criminal backgrounds, according to investigators.
The head of one troubled charter school left town in the middle of the night and took all the furniture, stunning officials, who suddenly had to accommodate stranded students thrown back on the public system. Critics agree that there are good exceptions, but about 25 of the 200 charter schools created so far have gone under or have been closed for management abuses, with millions of dollars unaccounted for.
These scandals helped force the enactment of the first serious fiscal controls over charter schools two years ago. But this year, proponents rebounded with "virtual" schools and other tax-depleting variations on the charter theme. There were even calls to roll back the state controls as the new charter constituency put counterpressure on lawmakers.
If anything, more budget and educational accounting, not less, is needed. Early assessment tests are finding that public schools are outperforming charter schools by nearly a two to one margin. This pits the charter movement against the other one of President Bush's headlined cures for schoolhouse ills, his No Child Left Behind mandate to raise standards by rigorous, early testing of students.
As that law takes effect, Texas is among a number of states that have had to ease their own third-grade reading test standards to avoid failing thousands of students and subjecting hundreds of schools to federal penalties in the preliminary stage of the new law.
A conflict is thus becoming clear between the more demanding No Child Left Behind Act and the laissez-faire charter schools. The "no child" act allows students in low-performing schools the freedom to move to better-rated schools. The initial application of this feature has rated 46 Texas schools as low-performing; significantly, nearly two-thirds of them are charter schools, created on the promise of improving on the public system.
Nevertheless, the charter movement continues to be a serious rival for ever-scarcer public funds. A charter school being planned here by the University of Texas promises to be a worthy state-of-the-art experiment, and taxpayers can be pretty well assured that in this case, nobody is likely to decamp with the desks in the dark of night.
But it will still divert $1.5 million a year here from more hard-pressed and effective public schools. At the same time, local governments are being forced to pick up the slack as this strapped state shifts more costs downward.
It is in Texas that President Bush's education ideas took flight, and gave the nation hope. Now, it is in Texas where they're coming home to roost. "If people see where we are now in this state," says State Representative Garnet Coleman, a Democrat, "they'll begin to understand where the nation is going."

Another great experiment gone awry.

When many Texans saw Bush being given credit for education policies, we had that "WHAT? HUH? SAY THAT AGAIN?" response that characterizes many responses to his current policies. The all-hat and no-horse Bush is alive and well and living in the White House...

(By the way, outsiders moving into rural Texas, and urban Texans retiring to ranchland and some acreage have a new organization to join, called Rancher Wannabees. If we don't get serious and get out the vote and learn our lesson well, we're gonna have a succession of inhabitants in the White House who are members of President Wannabees...)

Au --

Your article is a bit thin on checkable facts, so I can't comment about it. (Did I hear a sigh of relief here? ) But I can assure you it is absolutely consistent with my view of the world that any system designed by George W. Bush falls apart as soon as he doesn't need it to win elections anymore.

-- Thomas

Thomas
No one can be all wrong but Bush is pushing the envelope.

Here's a very impressive study (in PDF) reporting evidence against my position. Fortunately Sozobe would never use it to win a debate against me, so I'm not afraid to post it.

Thomas -- I glanced at the study and am not against it in principle (I'm for vouchers) but I note that among its supporters are Milton Friedman (adviser) and the World Bank (funder, it appears). That kind of spoils the impact for me.

Tartarin -- I have to admit I can't make sense of your reply. This is a study which has examined the impact of voucher schools on schooling quality in Chile. It finds that vouchers have led to no detectable improvement of Chile's schools. In other words, the study comes out against vouchers.

Even if I buy, for the sake of the argument, into your assumption that Milton Friedman and the World Bank are corrupting influences, they would be corrupting influences in favor of vouchers. So the fact that the study comes out against them in spite of these influences should strengthen, not weaken your trust in the study's integrity. Could it be that, before responding to my post, you ignored the content of the study because you thought you already knew what to expect from me? And if this is the case, may I invite you to think again?

Apart from that, I don't understand your implication that Milton Friedman and the World Bank would be corrupting influences in the first place. Whatever you think of Friedman's politics, he is a competent economist -- competent enough for a Nobel prize, anyway. He has nothing to gain, and much to lose, from supporting bogus research that suits his politics. On the contrary: the fact that he supports work that turns out to contradict his position strikes me as strong evidence for his scientific integrity.

I would say similar things about the World Bank. Their politics is controversial and probably has to be, but I have never heard anybody claim that they corrupt research results to propagate their agenda. And if someone could find good evidence for such a claim, I would be very surprised indeed, because the World Bank has more to lose from eroding trust than to gain from tainted research. And again, I see pretty strong evidence for their integrity in the fact that they supported research that contradicts any pro-voucher position they might have. (I don't know if the World Bank has any position on the topic.)

But maybe I just misunderstood what you meant to say. Would you mind elaborating a bit?

Sorry, Thomas.

No problem, Tartarin