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velvetpage) wrote2008-09-07 09:27 am
velvetpage) wrote2008-09-07 09:27 am
School choice: the red herring of Conservative education platforms
Every conservative government I'm familiar with in North America occasionally brings up the issue of school choice - that is, the right of students and parents to choose the school that best fits their values and will give their kids the best education. The mantra usually includes several elements of a moral conservative and economic conservative standpoint: the problem of religious education; the idea that competition provides a motivation to improve; and that engagement increases with the level of choice.
The remedy for all of this is school choice, with or without an actual voucher system, where some or all of the money needed to educate a child follows that child no matter what school she attends. The idea is that schools will start offering specialized programs to attract certain students, while schools who don't start improving will find themselves without enough kids to function.
I'm not against the right to choose a school. There are nations and situations where such a choice could work extremely well. The Netherlands has had school choice for ninety years, and 70% of elementary students attend independent schools. There are also smaller models of school choice that work pretty well in Ontario - for example, French Immersion, magnet schools, and specialized programs are all examples of school choice on a limited scale, within a school board. I've chosen one of those for my own children. As of day one of Senior Kindergarten, I'm happy with it. :) The third reason I provided above - engagement - is entirely true and a very good thing.
That said, I don't think broader school choice would work in a larger context in most situations in North America at the moment.
First, I don't believe that the government should be paying for religious education in any form. (Yes, that means I'd like to see the amalgamation of the Catholic and public school boards in Ontario.) I could see a reasonable compromise here, where a class in "moral education" could be chosen by the parents, including three or four different strands of religious-based moral education, such as is done in Quebec. But I don't see the need to use a publicly-funded school system to inculcate religious education. That's what Sunday School is for.
But even if you support religious education as a right, there are reasons why school choice on a broad scale is not the best of ideas right now, and most of them come down to that second point: competition provides a motive to improve failing schools.
This is the real red herring. It's treating a school like a business, and there are several ways in which this doesn't work. When a business is having trouble attracting customers, what does it do? First, it investigates the problem, polling customers or former customers, examining their product or service for flaws, and acting on what they find. People get fired and hired, and money is poured into improving the product or service. They adjust their pricing to be more competitive, narrowing their expenses as far as possible and possibly eliminating all profit for a while while they build themselves up. Then they advertise their new and improved status, or their niche market. Sometimes they do one and not the others, in which case their improvement is likely to be short-lived.
When a school is not succeeding, it also looks at data to figure out why. Test results are compared with other schools, as are socio-economic data on the students. Usually, it's found that the schools having trouble are in poor neighbourhoods where the parents have less education overall and less engagement in their children's education that would parents in a more suburban neighbourhood. In some cities, the poor neighbourhoods are vast, and access to a better-performing school is difficult even if the child has the right to it, because one of the things better-off parents buy with their money is reliable transportation. If Mom doesn't have a car, how exactly is the child to get where they're choosing to go? What if the public transportation system isn't good enough or the culture not open enough to consider having children under ten riding it alone while parents work? One of the things the Netherlands has going for it with its school choice model is an excellent public transportation network, a higher population density meaning shorter distances for almost everything, and more heterogeneous neighbourhoods in most cities. The slums/suburbs divide is much reduced.
So what does a failing school do to improve? First, its students are fleeing - those who have the option to flee, that is, most of whom are from a higher socio-economic level than those left behind. So it's losing funding. This makes it difficult to pour money into revamping the product being offered. Without extra funds, the school has no hope of offering a better education, because a good education revolves around two things: access to books, and access to excellent teaching. (The third, parental involvement, is not within the school's realm of influence to secure.) Failing schools which are not offered extra money to improve, have no hope of doing so. They can't raise sufficient funds outside of the vouchers, they can't go into debt to fund the improvement, and the pool of money available to them is shrinking. Hiring or firing personnel also takes money, and comes with a catch-22. If you hire experienced people who have the special training you need, you're going to have to pay for them. If you fire experienced people, you may be able to hire cheaper teachers, but they will have less training and less experience, and the chances of them being good additions to the team are somewhat slimmer than if you can afford to pay them better.
Schools are not businesses. They don't have the same options to increase their funding, and without that funding they are limited in their opportunities to improve their product. They are not competing on an even playing field - recent research suggests that 69% of the difference in test scores between high-performing and low-performing schools can be explained by socio-economic factors, so schools in poorer neighbourhoods are at a significant disadvantage.
The key to success is not competition, because competition implies that some will succeed and some will fail. That's it's nature. We can't afford to fail at educating our children. It shouldn't even be an option - but as long as school choice is occupying space on the political spectrum as a factor in the debate about improving schools, it will be.
The key to the success in the Netherlands - in addition to the opportunity to work out an awful lot of bugs in ninety years - rests in several facts. The first is that kids from lower socio-economic levels bring more money to their schools than kids from higher SELs. This means that the school in the poor neighbourhood is getting more money right at the outset than the school in the better-off neighbourhood five kilometres away. The second is that all teachers, at public and independent schools, are under the same nationally-bargained union contract, so schools cannot reduce their budgets by undercutting the wages of their teachers, or by hiring or firing willy-nilly. They have a contract to respect, and failure to respect it would land them in court. So hiring and firing is about suitability to the school, not money. The third is a facet of a densely-populated country, where a good public transportation system is in place and where socio-economic differences in neighbourhoods are less pronounced than they often are in North America.
So, before completely-open school choice can be contemplated in any part of North America, the following things need to be in place:
1) A formula that provides extra funding for students who statistically require more resources;
2) Collective agreements ensuring that teachers are paid the same no matter which school they are in, and that they have similar minimal qualifications, whether the school is independent or public, so that pay is based on education and experience and nothing else;
3) An expectation that any school accepting vouchers is funding the school entirely with the vouchers - that is, no tuition top-ups that skew the ability of some students to choose that school;
4) Transportation systems, either from regional education authorities or municipal governments, that ensure any child has the option to attend any school in the municipality regardless of their parents' ownership of a vehicle;
5) The belief, by parents, students, and educators, that failure is not an option. Schools may compete on specifics, but on the basics, all must be able to provide a good education to every student on their rolls.
When those things are in place, a jurisdiction is ready for school choice - but it may find it no longer needs it.
The remedy for all of this is school choice, with or without an actual voucher system, where some or all of the money needed to educate a child follows that child no matter what school she attends. The idea is that schools will start offering specialized programs to attract certain students, while schools who don't start improving will find themselves without enough kids to function.
I'm not against the right to choose a school. There are nations and situations where such a choice could work extremely well. The Netherlands has had school choice for ninety years, and 70% of elementary students attend independent schools. There are also smaller models of school choice that work pretty well in Ontario - for example, French Immersion, magnet schools, and specialized programs are all examples of school choice on a limited scale, within a school board. I've chosen one of those for my own children. As of day one of Senior Kindergarten, I'm happy with it. :) The third reason I provided above - engagement - is entirely true and a very good thing.
That said, I don't think broader school choice would work in a larger context in most situations in North America at the moment.
First, I don't believe that the government should be paying for religious education in any form. (Yes, that means I'd like to see the amalgamation of the Catholic and public school boards in Ontario.) I could see a reasonable compromise here, where a class in "moral education" could be chosen by the parents, including three or four different strands of religious-based moral education, such as is done in Quebec. But I don't see the need to use a publicly-funded school system to inculcate religious education. That's what Sunday School is for.
But even if you support religious education as a right, there are reasons why school choice on a broad scale is not the best of ideas right now, and most of them come down to that second point: competition provides a motive to improve failing schools.
This is the real red herring. It's treating a school like a business, and there are several ways in which this doesn't work. When a business is having trouble attracting customers, what does it do? First, it investigates the problem, polling customers or former customers, examining their product or service for flaws, and acting on what they find. People get fired and hired, and money is poured into improving the product or service. They adjust their pricing to be more competitive, narrowing their expenses as far as possible and possibly eliminating all profit for a while while they build themselves up. Then they advertise their new and improved status, or their niche market. Sometimes they do one and not the others, in which case their improvement is likely to be short-lived.
When a school is not succeeding, it also looks at data to figure out why. Test results are compared with other schools, as are socio-economic data on the students. Usually, it's found that the schools having trouble are in poor neighbourhoods where the parents have less education overall and less engagement in their children's education that would parents in a more suburban neighbourhood. In some cities, the poor neighbourhoods are vast, and access to a better-performing school is difficult even if the child has the right to it, because one of the things better-off parents buy with their money is reliable transportation. If Mom doesn't have a car, how exactly is the child to get where they're choosing to go? What if the public transportation system isn't good enough or the culture not open enough to consider having children under ten riding it alone while parents work? One of the things the Netherlands has going for it with its school choice model is an excellent public transportation network, a higher population density meaning shorter distances for almost everything, and more heterogeneous neighbourhoods in most cities. The slums/suburbs divide is much reduced.
So what does a failing school do to improve? First, its students are fleeing - those who have the option to flee, that is, most of whom are from a higher socio-economic level than those left behind. So it's losing funding. This makes it difficult to pour money into revamping the product being offered. Without extra funds, the school has no hope of offering a better education, because a good education revolves around two things: access to books, and access to excellent teaching. (The third, parental involvement, is not within the school's realm of influence to secure.) Failing schools which are not offered extra money to improve, have no hope of doing so. They can't raise sufficient funds outside of the vouchers, they can't go into debt to fund the improvement, and the pool of money available to them is shrinking. Hiring or firing personnel also takes money, and comes with a catch-22. If you hire experienced people who have the special training you need, you're going to have to pay for them. If you fire experienced people, you may be able to hire cheaper teachers, but they will have less training and less experience, and the chances of them being good additions to the team are somewhat slimmer than if you can afford to pay them better.
Schools are not businesses. They don't have the same options to increase their funding, and without that funding they are limited in their opportunities to improve their product. They are not competing on an even playing field - recent research suggests that 69% of the difference in test scores between high-performing and low-performing schools can be explained by socio-economic factors, so schools in poorer neighbourhoods are at a significant disadvantage.
The key to success is not competition, because competition implies that some will succeed and some will fail. That's it's nature. We can't afford to fail at educating our children. It shouldn't even be an option - but as long as school choice is occupying space on the political spectrum as a factor in the debate about improving schools, it will be.
The key to the success in the Netherlands - in addition to the opportunity to work out an awful lot of bugs in ninety years - rests in several facts. The first is that kids from lower socio-economic levels bring more money to their schools than kids from higher SELs. This means that the school in the poor neighbourhood is getting more money right at the outset than the school in the better-off neighbourhood five kilometres away. The second is that all teachers, at public and independent schools, are under the same nationally-bargained union contract, so schools cannot reduce their budgets by undercutting the wages of their teachers, or by hiring or firing willy-nilly. They have a contract to respect, and failure to respect it would land them in court. So hiring and firing is about suitability to the school, not money. The third is a facet of a densely-populated country, where a good public transportation system is in place and where socio-economic differences in neighbourhoods are less pronounced than they often are in North America.
So, before completely-open school choice can be contemplated in any part of North America, the following things need to be in place:
1) A formula that provides extra funding for students who statistically require more resources;
2) Collective agreements ensuring that teachers are paid the same no matter which school they are in, and that they have similar minimal qualifications, whether the school is independent or public, so that pay is based on education and experience and nothing else;
3) An expectation that any school accepting vouchers is funding the school entirely with the vouchers - that is, no tuition top-ups that skew the ability of some students to choose that school;
4) Transportation systems, either from regional education authorities or municipal governments, that ensure any child has the option to attend any school in the municipality regardless of their parents' ownership of a vehicle;
5) The belief, by parents, students, and educators, that failure is not an option. Schools may compete on specifics, but on the basics, all must be able to provide a good education to every student on their rolls.
When those things are in place, a jurisdiction is ready for school choice - but it may find it no longer needs it.
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My issues with school choice are 1) lack of quality control in some cases, e.g. children being subjected to ridiculously long hours of education or fundamentalist religious views, and 2) children whose parents aren't conscientious and aware being at a disadvantage. You brought up other important issues. I especially like the idea of disadvantaged kids being given more funding.
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We're better at diversity, I think, when we experience it in our daily lives.
I agree - there should not be a publicly funded Catholic system, because there aren't any other publicly funded religious education systems here, and because we should all go to school together, in the first place!
There are some ways that schools can influence parent involvement, but they all cost money!
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A very well-thought out approach. I'd be interested in seeing an entry from you with your thoughts on the whole home-schooling movement.
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My belief in a nutshell is that homeschooling CAN work, and well, but that there are pitfalls that many parents are not equipped to address. It's not the best solution to a lot of the problems it purports to solve.
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I think my wife and I are somewhere between the second and third of those, but we're a trifle daunted by the first group. We're slowlu exploring the whole community of homeschooling, since public education failed so dramatically for both of us.
I'm not sure your comment thread on an unrelated subject is the right place for this, but I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on the pitfalls and what the best solution is to the problems it tries to address.
Your journal is a place I drop by infrequently to see what you think on educational matters. Thanks for being so open and straightforward about it all!
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The second is harder: how to give kids a well-rounded education, including access to subjects the parents aren't particularly good at, with only a small number of teachers. What if your kid is a gifted musician but neither you nor your spouse can carry a tune in a bucket? How much opportunity will they have to learn a second language if both parents are unilingual? These can be alleviated, and sometimes even overcome, with a good homeschool group and extra-curriculars. All the same, the opportunity to work with someone who is passionate for their subject is a valuable part of being in many different classes over the course of a school career. A side note on this is the problem of religious homeschoolers and science; I wouldn't trust any religious homeschooling group in North America to do a good job of that subject, and it's one I'd want to be certain I'd gotten right.
The third is VERY sticky, because many parents deny that it is a pitfall: special education. If their child turns out to learn differently from how they learned themselves - or from how they were taught - many parents won't know how to move the child ahead. Of course, the school system has plenty of pitfalls of its own in spec. ed., and I've known a few parents who homeschooled their child for a few years to get them ready to enter a higher grade at the right level. I've also known a few kids to come to school after their parents tried homeschooling them, and then discovered that they weren't learning anything, and the parents didn't have the skill to diagnose the problem, nor did they have any strategies for dealing with it. I'd want to be in close contact with a spec. ed. specialist teacher who knew my child and had tested them, before trying to homeschool a spec. ed. child. Really, this is potentially the most serious pitfall. I'm trained to recognize spec. ed. problems, and I have resources for getting kids tested and strategies to put in place while they're on a waiting list. Nine times out of ten, I have a working tentative diagnosis in place within a few weeks of realizing there's a problem. I didn't have those things in my first year of teaching, because I didn't yet have nearly a thousand kids' experiences in my head to draw on and compare against the students in front of me. A parent with no teaching experience may not know what to look for, or be willing to recognize it when they see it.
The fourth is attitudinal, and
You're right, I need to do a post on this - but I'd want to do more research first. This is a good outline, though.
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Let me proffer my take on each of the four items you brought up. I've thought about each but the last, which is a fresh perspective for us to consider.
1) Socialization is a concern, yes. Our usual response to that is to counter that we really don't care for the kind of socialization we see in schools. Now, that said, we're also concerned about the predominance of hardcore religious stuff we see in home schooling groups. However, we're fortunate that Hamilton has a very large homeschooling population, and we've already figured out where to find the less religiously-focused homeschoolers.
2) Our solution to this problem is two-fold -- a) Use the homeschooling groups to cross-pollinate our children's education as much as possible. b) Throw lots of money at it. Hire teachers for spot subjects.
3) Both my wife and myself had special education needs, which is a big reason that we're avoiding public and private schools, because neither did a thing for us. Quite the contrary, sadly. It is entirely possible that our children will have a different set of needs. Fortunately, we have access to some pretty brilliant people in the field of educational development, to act as a second set of eyes on the job we're doing.
4) As someone who went through normal school, I had absolutely no interest in post-secondary education. I viewed it as a nuisance, at best. To paraphrase Good Will Hunting, why spend $50k on an education I got for a $1.50 in late charges at the local library?
My wife had an entirely different experience. She bought into the myth her post-secondary school told her — graduate from here, and you will get a job in your field! And then she found out that her field was dominated by nepotism and sexism, and ended up having to go back to school for something completely different.
I question whether or not children are adequately prepared for post-secondary education by their earlier years. Most people I know are disgruntled with their choice of employment, but feel shackled by their degree. And many people I know who excelled in pre-university schooling completely bombed out in university, because the structure was so wholly different from what they were taught.
Moreover, academics (in my experience) tend to fail in business, because they are bound by the very strictures that make post-secondary education work.
My theory on this is pretty simple. I will encourage my child to do something they love. If they end up being hungry for that knowledge, they'll go to university or college to find it. That's what I did, much later in life, and find myself a much happier person in university at 30 than most of my 18 year old classmates, who had the dull-eyed look of people who either a) had no idea why they were there, or b) just viewed it as another set of tests to be passed.
I should also point out that Canada, as a nation, places a far higher value on post-secondary education than just about anywhere else I've ever been. I suspect that my children, like myself, may end up leaving the country to get the experience that makes possession of a degree largely irrelevant.
As for the question of 'playing well with others', I think it hearkens back more to item 1 than you might think. A homeschooled child is not necessarily acting alone, especially if the parents seeks out a homeschooling group that supports putting children together on select projects.
Anyhow, just my rambling thoughts after spending a few hours digesting your post. I'll look forward to hearing more, and thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. It's often hard to have a decent conversation with educational professionals about homeschooling, because so many take it as a personal assault.
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Am I right in thinking you don't have kids yet? If not, or if they're small, allow me to make a suggestion. Hamilton schools are changing. Since you're not on my friends list and those changes are, necessarily, locked down, and I don't know any other Hamilton teacher in my position who's also on LJ, you may not realize how much. The difference between now and when I was growing up - even between now and when I started teaching ten years ago - is absolutely astounding, and most of the changes are positive. (And unfortunately, they're fuelled by a few of the things that are less-than-positive, making those things a necessary evil.) My suggestion is: when it's time to consider school for your first child, go visit. See what the local school has to offer, and ask questions about how they'd handle any potential learning difficulties you're spotting, or any that you suspect might come up. Judging the current education system on the system that was in place twenty years ago is unfair.
One of my pet peeves in life is people who think they understand education because it was done to them. :)
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That's always been on the menu. Judging current schooling based on what happened to me twenty years ago would be about as valid as judging schools based on the fact that, fifty years ago, they put my dad into a class for deaf kids because he couldn't speak English.
We're trying to keep an open mind as possible. At the end of the day, I don't care which approach we take, so long as we've evaluated the best possible choices for our children.
And, to answer your question, our son is 3.5 months old, and we're *ahem* scheduling another in the near future.
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It seems like you have a pretty balanced approach to things. I suspect your kids will be just fine, whichever road you choose for them.
Which part of Hamilton are you in?
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We're in West Hamilton, about five minutes from McMaster.
And in regards to how the kids will end up...well, I sure hope so!
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The problem with the West End schools is that they do well enough on the testing to get away with not applying all the teaching strategies that the East End schools can't manage without. That will be changing, though, if it hasn't already started. There's a new provincial initiative, being launched in all schools this fall or next, to bring every school in the province up to the same standard. I suspect us East End people are going to be quite mirthful at the moans and groans from that end of the city when they realize how much work they have ahead of them. :)