School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [53]
Chapter 6 explained why public and parental satisfaction with schools is an important school outcome. Survey data show the general public’s and parents’ dissatisfaction with public schools and their considerable and growing support for school choice. Survey data also show that public educators have much lower standards and expectations than those of the public, parents, and students, which is a major reason why these consumers increasingly favor choice. These differences help explain why public school teachers’ unions and administrators oppose proposals to introduce parental choice.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents may send their children to private, including parochial, schools and, more recently, that publicly funded vouchers for independent and parochial schools are constitutional. Since public authorities have severely restricted parents’ right to choose public and private schools, satisfaction surveys loom large in determining the demand for charter schools and vouchers. The public and parents strongly support allowing parents to choose the schools their children attend. Parents whose children attend charter, voucher, and private schools tend to be more satisfied with those schools than parents whose children attend traditional public schools.
Conclusions
Based on these and other findings discussed in the foregoing chapters, Table 7-1 briefly summarizes the overall findings. There are 20 possible positive effects of four forms of choice on five educational outcomes. As suggested in the table, the possible effect findings can be classified as being supported by suggestive or conclusive evidence (none of the evidence for the possible findings was clearly inadequate).
The evidence supports every single one of the 20 possible choice effects, and the evidence is conclusive rather than suggestive for 14. It is statistically improbable that these overall results arose by chance. The results are about as consistent as can be found in the social sciences, and it thus seems clear that school choice works. Assuredly, choice schools do not compare favorably with traditional public schools in every single circumstance since, as was explained in the first chapter, the effects are based on average differences between choice and nonchoice schools. Moreover, it is impossible in science to prove the correctness of any hypothesis or theory. All conclusions are provisional until strong, contradictory evidence appears.
In addition to these caveats, several assumptions underlying Table 7-1 should be made explicit:
• Charter schools: The fast growth in the number of charter schools and the frequency with which they are oversubscribed are taken as one set of indications of parental satisfaction. The facts that charters are concentrated in cities often segregated by social class and ethnicity and that charter students cross traditional public school boundary lines are included as evidence of social integration.
• Vouchers: The conclusions about voucher effects on cost efficiency and parental satisfaction are based partly on extensive private school research. By definition, voucher-bearing students go to private schools, which fare well on these two criteria. In addition, of course, voucher programs are usually heavily oversubscribed; there are far more applicants than places for them.
• Though the effects of vouchers and charter schools are positive, on average, they may be underestimated for several reasons. The studies reviewed rarely take into account the fact that many if not most of the voucher-bearing students are newly transferred to private schools, which, on average, are further from their homes, and the students need to adapt to new teachers, classmates, curricula, standards, and methods of teaching. Since many are new organizations, moreover,