School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [5]
Strong majorities of parents favor programs that enable parents to choose the schools, public or private, that their children attend, with public funding following the student. Parents also favor holding schools accountable for results. A majority of parents say they would send their children to private schools if they could afford the tuition. And, perhaps a sign of growing dissatisfaction with public schools, a large and growing number of parents are homeschooling their children. About 1.2 million children, or 2 percent of age-eligible youngsters, are currently homeschooled.
Discontent with public schools is reflected in most states’ legislation and efforts to expand school choice, but these efforts have been fought, usually successfully, by public school boards, teachers’ unions, and administrators and their allies. The federal No Child Left Behind Act and new laws in a growing number of states require authorities to give students in repeatedly failing public schools the choice of transferring to other public or private schools. Even though states and districts often evade this requirement, enrollment in voucher, education tax credit, and charter school programs is growing rapidly, though from relatively small numbers, in cities across the country.
Because of the growing interest in school choice and its importance for public policy and the nation’s future, this book assesses a broad range of school choice outcomes, focusing particularly on achievement test performance, costs, and parental and public opinion. It also brings together research on “market effects,” that is, the effects that competition from charter schools, voucher programs, and private schools as a whole have on traditional public schools.
This book gives little attention to homeschooling or tax credits for tuition and other expenses, since little rigorous, empirical research is available to assess their effects. Readers interested in these and related topics may find the following references useful starting points: the history of school choice from ancient to modern times,29 private school choice in foreign countries,30 analysis of various forms and degrees of choice,31 and legislative principles for school choice. 32
Measurable Outcomes
A major focus of this book is on standardized achievement tests, even though such tests do not represent the sum of students’ knowledge, attitudes, and skills or capture a host of other outcomes expected from education. They are, however, America’s and other countries’ academic currency. Standardized achievement tests are the most common measure used to assess school performance across all 50 states and the chief indicator of progress of state legislation and the No Child Left Behind Act. The public supports more extensive test use, wider reporting of results, and accountability for progress.
Early academic test results are reasonably accurate predictors of students’ success in later grades, retention in school, and college admission (even to elite universities). No one has shown that high achievement scores deter critical thinking, ethical behavior, or other valuable outcomes; rather the opposite appears to be evident: greater knowledge is likely to help people make better decisions, contribute more to society, and lead desirable lives.
Even so, academic achievement is not the only outcome that may be valuable to all the parties who participate in the K-12 education process. Some schools are greatly oversubscribed while others sit half empty: Parents, by their choices, are