School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [8]
These correlational findings were consistent with multiple experimental studies of laboratory animals randomly chosen to be exposed and unexposed to large “doses” of tobacco smoke. These multiple, multimethod, multisample studies in wide-ranging conditions enabled analysts to arrive at a decisive conclusion on the otherwise elusive health effects of cigarette smoking. Similarly, given the problems of evaluating social programs, the key consideration adopted here is the robustness, or consistency, of findings in many widely differing circumstances since any given study is likely to have possibly vitiating flaws.
Caveat
Much of the evidence assembled here concerns averages of achievement test scores and other outcomes for choice and traditional public schools. Even large differences in averages of any two school types, however, should not be taken as indicating that all of the schools of one type are better than all those of another. Undoubtedly, most private and traditional schools either underperform or overperform the averages for their types, and achievement by the two types of schools should be expected to overlap to a greater or lesser extent. Charter schools, for example, are heterogeneous because they were conceived as a way to promote diversity, innovation, and productivity. Some charter schools focus on at-risk or gifted students, others on pregnant teens, and still others are built around a particular educational philosophy or curriculum (such as the academically focused Core Knowledge program).
Despite such variation, statistically significant differences, expressed as averages, between charter and traditional schools are not to be dismissed. It is important if the average student in one type of choice school does better or worse than the average student in another type of school. Since student scores from lowest to highest in the two types of schools contribute to overall averages, they are the most useful, and therefore the most commonly used, indicator of group characteristics and differences among groups.
Still, in some instances, investigators have found distinctive effects on some kinds of students. When these special effects are consistent across studies, they are worth noting.
A Taxonomy of School Choice
Table 1-2 shows a simplified breakdown of the possible school governance and funding combinations. Starting in the upper-right category is an example of perhaps the most private form of education, self-schooling, exemplified by the famous autodidact Abraham Lincoln. Second, some 1.25 million youngsters, now schooled at home, represent strong and rising preferences for nongovernment schooling.
Table 1-2 CATEGORIES OF SCHOOL FUNDING AND OPERATION
Continuing in the upper-right quadrant, when families think they lack the knowledge, skills, time, or desire to pursue homeschooling, yet want things that public schools do not adequately provide, they may voluntarily choose to pay for private tutoring. East Asia’s thriving private tutoring sector is widely credited for at least a part of that region’s top scores on international achievement tests, and tutoring services are also popular with East Asian immigrants to the United States, who also tend to be highly successful students.
An interesting example is Korea, which has a $15 billion per year, highly competitive for-profit hagwon tutoring industry with extensive brick-and-mortar facilities. Since 2000, however, the firm Megastudy has been offering Web-based educational services and now boasts 2,000 courses. Teachers receive about a quarter of the subscription income to their lectures, which has added up to a payment of $2 million in the case of one charismatic English teacher in a single recent year.33 Such entrepreneurship and differential pay are nearly unheard of in