Death and life

Diane Ravitch has written a book about her retreat from supporting school choice, accountability, and other “market-based” reforms such as vouchers and charter schools. She supported these reforms not from any strong philosophical perspective, but simply from a pragmatic one: she thought they would work. Now, after something like 30 years of observation, Ravitch concludes that these reforms have not worked and she’s taking it all back. It may not come as a surprise to hear that I have a problem with all this. A few problems, actually.

Problem 1: What do you mean by “work”?
Ravitch considers trends in educational achievement to conclude that the reforms mentioned above have not worked. She’s right in one sense, that student achievement is stubbornly uncorrelated with just about anything we can control – at least anything we can control by throwing money at it. So it’s hard to tease out any significant improvement in outcomes for students in charter schools or private schools or who use vouchers, who are bused, who attend a community school, who have a small class, who get free lunch, who wear uniforms, whose parents are vegans, who have a pony, or anything else. (Note: this of course assumes you control for the very stubborn demographic characteristic that the schools do not influence: socio-economic status.) No matter what you do, kids turn out about the same. So Ravitch concludes that the reforms have failed. But is that the whole story?

There are at least three reasons to look at, say, charter schools and suspect they’ve been successful. First, skimming. Charter schools tend to attract disproportionate numbers of students from “good” families, where the parents are interested enough to help their kids get into the school and do the extra work. In some cases they even pay extra. This suggests that charter school students are likely to be better students than the ones left in the public school. This is one of the main arguments against charters: they leave the worst students in an even worse environment than they would have been in otherwise. But I disagree, I see this as a benefit: it gets the best students out of a bad environment and puts them in a better one.

Second, revealed preference. Charter schools are chosen by the students and parents who attend them. In fact, there are many more applicants than spaces. This suggests that the consumers of charter schools see benefits – whether they manifest themselves in standardized tests or not.

Third, benefit/cost ratio. Charter schools spend less per student than public schools do. The difference ranges from small to very significant. If the benefit of an investment stays the same (i.e., student achievement is unchanged) but the cost decreases, then the investment just got better.

Problem 2: Who cares about public schools per se?
A big problem for Ravitch seems to be the effect charters and vouchers might have on the public school systems. She goes so far as to say that one of her hopes was that competition would improve the public schools. In fact, this was one of the possible benefits noted by Milton Friedman in the 1960s when he laid out one an early case for vouchers. Well, Ravitch hasn’t seen it. In fact, she’s concerned that “skimming” means the public schools are actually worse off. However, education does not exist for schools, teachers, or bureaucrats. Education is for students and it’s paid for by parents and taxpayers. Those are the stakeholders. Any negative effects (assuming there are some) on public schools are irrelevant. Totally irrelevant.

Problem 3: “Incentives” are not the same as “markets.”
People who don’t operate in the real world – bureaucrats, teachers, politicians, etc. – are sometimes confused about how markets work. They talk about “creating” markets as if it’s possible. But it isn’t possible. A set of government-created incentives is not the same as an emergent, consumer-driven market. In fact, the law of unintended consequences suggests that attempts to create a market and control it by fine tuning the incentives are dangerous. The textbook example is the “deregulation” of the energy market in California. The hubris of those who thought they could mimic a free market by creating just the right incentives is pretty staggering, and it led to a real disaster for Californians. In fact, the current financial crisis is another excellent example. (Fortunately we’ll soon have another round of regulatory tinkering to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.) No less so for education.

Problem 4: You can’t beat something with nothing.
Ravitch concludes that vouchers, charters, and accountability don’t work. But she doesn’t really have any better ideas. Is non-accountability better? What about non-choice? It’s hard to see how moving away from these ideas can possibly improve education – by any standard.

How about this?
One reform she doesn’t consider is simply less. Less money spent on education, less federal involvement, less State involvement. It seems obvious to me that the problem with education is not that too little is spent or that too little attention is paid. We should instead focus on maximizing the return on investment, and at the same time free up local educators to optimize and innovate. Is this fair? No. But it will be better.