School Choice or Best Systems_ What Improves Education_ - Margaret C. Wang [9]
For-profit companies have begun to supply schooling in the United States and other countries.34 A little research on their effectiveness is available, but much of it has been carried out or sponsored by the firms themselves or by teachers’ unions, which are often hostile toward for-profit competition and choice in general. The research, moreover, does not meet the standards of studies summarized here. For this reason, the effects of self-schooling, homeschooling, and for-profit schooling are not summarized here.
Private schools, both independent and sectarian, are another choice. Many provide both academic and religious instruction. They may be not only more pleasing to parents but also more cost-effective and time efficient than homeschooling since a single teacher may have responsibility for a dozen to three dozen students, freeing parents’ time.
As is explained in Chapter 4, we may think of “traditional” public schools as the American way, that is, owned, funded, and operated by the government. But for the first two centuries of American history, nearly all schools were either fully private or locally organized public/private hybrid institutions. Citizens in tiny communities paid for and controlled their own schools, including one-room country schools. These schools assimilated tens of millions of English- and non-English-speaking immigrants into American society, and they became strong contributors to the economy and society. Tiny school districts in low population density states such as Montana, enrolling between one and few hundred students, still retain highly localized control and typically have among the highest achievement test scores.
Since around 1925, however, consolidation has collapsed roughly 115,000 separate school districts into about 15,000, and average school size has risen by a factor of five. This consolidation has greatly worsened parents’ prospects for influencing the boards of their children’s schools through school board elections. Political scientists refer to “voter dilution” as the comparatively weak weight of a citizen’s vote in a large city compared to one in a village.
Increased centralization, moreover, has produced school boards less well informed about the day-to-day operations of schools. Chicago Public School Board members, for example, could probably not name the more than 500 schools within their purview. Unlike students of yesteryear who went to private or nearly private locally controlled schools, most students today go to schools in large centralized districts, heavily regulated by state and federal government rather than governed by citizens in small school communities surrounding the school.
Charter schools are government-funded and government-supervised institutions whose management is directed by private boards. Although they are intended to offer greater parental choice and educational diversity, subsequent chapters document the often heavy regulatory and other burdens imposed on them, such as requirements to hire union employees and administer state tests and per pupil funding that is limited, on average, to about 80 percent of that received by traditional public schools.
Charter boards may appoint their own staffs or hire nonprofit or for-profit management organizations. The extent to which they are freed from conventional public school regulations varies substantially from state to state, but in all cases charter schools are accountable to their chartering authority, often the local school district, state, or state-appointed charter issuer, for student achievement and progress and are subject to closure for poor performance or insufficient enrollment.
Overview of Chapters
The remaining chapters focus primarily on the effects of the major types of school choice. Chapter 2 examines charter school studies. Chapter 3 describes research on the effects of vouchers, which are scholarships that state and