School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [51]
7. Major Findings and Conclusions
This chapter highlights the most important findings discussed in the foregoing chapters and offers broad conclusions based on the evidence as a whole.
Major Findings
Chapter 1 reviewed evidence on U.S. academic achievement and concluded that, despite having among the highest (and still rising) per student costs in the industrialized world, U.S. schools are among the poorest performers. At the high school level, the United States has among the worst academic achievement test scores of member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The productivity (academic achievement per dollar spent) of public schools in the United States fell an estimated 55 to 73 percent between the 1970-71 and 1998-99 school years.
Since youngsters’ future well-being and the nation’s prosperity depend on educational effectiveness, the public, legislators, and parents are interested in the possibility that school choice may increase educational performance. To provide them with some guidance on that question, this book reviews a wide array of research on the effects of choice schools on their students and on students in neighboring traditional public schools.
Chapter 2 surveyed the research literature on the academic effects of charter schools. Because there are more than 4,000 charter schools in the United States enrolling more than one million students, they offer a sufficiently large database to conduct valid empirical research. Many charter schools are heavily regulated, subject to various obstacles, and less well funded than nearby traditional public schools. These handicaps prevent a fair test of market forces in education.
Despite these handicaps, charter schools perform well. The largest single-point-in-time study of charter schools involved nearly every charter school in the nation and its nearest neighboring traditional public school. The study showed that charter schools outperformed the comparison schools; that poor and Hispanic students achieved particularly well; and that outcomes improved as charter schools were given more autonomy, funding, and time to work out the initial startup kinks in their operations. Of 26 studies of achievement gains, 22 showed that charter schools yielded either a better or an equal effect. Three over-time studies and one random-assignment study found significant achievement gains by charter school students relative to traditional public school students. Five of seven studies examining the performance of individual charter school students over time showed positive achievement effects.
Charter schools are popular with parents who send their children to them as well as with the general public. Charter schools, on average, have succeeded despite the burdens of overregulation and while spending perhaps a fifth less than traditional public schools.
Chapter 3 reviewed research on public and private school voucher programs in the United States and elsewhere. Vouchers could be expected to improve student achievement and parental satisfaction because competition often brings out the best in people and organizations; because competitors provide benchmarks against which to measure all schools’ performance; and because vouchers allow and encourage parents to more actively participate in their children’s schooling, which in turn is positively related to student learning.
Eight random-assignment studies and three non-random-assignment studies of education vouchers all found positive effects on the academic achievement of some groups attending voucher schools but sometimes showed little or no effect on white students.