No Evidence for Voucher Choice

The heart of Governor Jindal's education reform package this legislative session will be a proposal that any low income family whose children attend a "C" or lower rated public school could receive a "scholarship" to attend a private or parochial school instead of his or her public school. The governor makes the claim that parents are the best judges of the best school for their child. To drive his point home the governor made a big indignant fuss over a statement by LAE Executive Director, Michael Walker-Jones that some low income parents may not have a clue as to which school is actually better for their child. Here's why Walker-Jones is correct and the Governor is guilty of misleading demagoguery on this issue:

So far the only accepted measure of a successful school has been the School Performance Score which is based primarily on student performance on state tests and which has been used quite arbitrarily by BESE to assign letter grades to schools. At the same time, no such data has been collected on private and parochial schools because these students are not tested by the state. So the governor and his supporters use state test scores to rate some public schools as unacceptable, so that parents can receive "scholarships" to switch their children to private schools, yet there is no such data on the private schools. The parents really don't have a clue based on the data used by the state to rate the private schools as good or bad.

There is however a small amount of data that has been collected on students in the New Orleans area where the public to private "scholarships" have been allowed for several years. This linked article from the Times-Picayune does a good job of analyzing the results of such limited public to private vouchers to date. The author also presents data from other systems such as the Milwaukee school system which have more extensive data on such programs. The title of the article makes it clear that the Governor has no legitimate justification to unleash this destruction of our Louisiana public education system. But just as he proposes to privatize the state group benefits health insurance program with absolutely no evidence of improved value for taxpayers, he is doing the same to the education of our children.

Do I think the Governor's vouchers will produce an immediate mass exodus of public school students to private and parochial schools? Absolutely not! The existing private and parochial schools do not have the capacity or the willingness to take on public school students en mass. That's not the danger. The problem is private schools are by their nature "exclusive". They will definitely take on some students but they will systematically exclude the lowest performers, the discipline problems, and the special needs students. In many cases, parents will not be the ones choosing schools for their children. The administrators of the private schools will be doing the choosing.

But there is another more destructive trend that will grow with time. When it becomes clear that there is money to be made by capturing public school students, new private schools are sure to spring up. If such schools are not carefully regulated by those entrusted to guard our taxpayer dollars, we cannot even imagine how many ways our taxes can be wasted and we cannot yet estimate how many students will be harmed. We see many abuses already in some of the semiprivate charter schools that have sprung up to handle takeover schools. The state has done a poor job of monitoring such schools and there is much evidence of artificially inflated school performance scores, huge salaries paid to administrators, unreported child abuse cases, and on and on. How will our state department possibly monitor dozens of new schools that are totally private. Yet the governor proposes to hand over millions of our tax dollars to these unregulated untested programs.

It is quite ironic that the public schools that have been micromanaged by the state for years will now be damaged and weakened in favor of profit making schools that have almost no safeguards for the taxpayers or parents. The LAE Exec. Walker-Jones is right. Many parents who are being used to support this scheme don't have a clue!

Jindal's Good Ideas

Not everything about Governor Jindal's reform plan is wrong or misguided. There are definitely some good ideas in the plan that should be considered. Here are some suggestions for making important parts of his reform package work.

• Streamline the Tenure Process and Remove Political Influence: All teachers want from tenure is a fair process that provides a review for possible errors or bias in the event they are recommended for dismissal. Sometimes personality conflicts occur on the job that have nothing to do with a teacher's performance. In rare instances there may be an effort to remove a teacher so that a politically favored person can have the job. That's what tenure should prevent. If the changes maintain reasonable due process, it is good for everyone to streamline the tenure process.
• Revising Teacher Pay Schedules: The Governor is right about wanting to allow flexibility in some areas of  teacher pay. It is a good idea to provide a special incentive pay supplement for teachers who agree to teach in some of our most difficult turnaround schools. This extra pay could easily be justified by the fact that more work is expected of teachers in a school with a high proportion of at risk students. One of the most critical areas in such schools is a major effort to improve communication with parents and to produce an increase in positive parental involvement. It takes extra time for teachers to communicate with parents, often after regular working hours. It is not a good idea however to "rob Peter to pay Paul". The governor proposes in his speech that pay increments for years of experience be abolished so that the money can be used to pay those who are more deserving or valuable. What about an experienced teacher who has put down roots in a community and who has a family to support and a mortgage to pay? Does it make sense for a school system to pay more to an inexperienced teacher who is much more mobile and will more easily leave the school system no matter what he/she is being paid. The Governor also suggests in his speech that persons who take advantage of alternative certification methods to become teachers should be allowed to receive higher pay from "day one". How can such higher pay be justified when the person has not yet demonstrated the ability to teach? In considering pay for experience, there should be such a thing as a social contract with long time employees that rewards commitment to the school system. Part of Jindal's plan would destroy that social contract and the loyalty long time employees have to a school system. Instead of forcing local systems to reduce the pay of some teachers to pay others more, the state should help fund incentive pay to attract good teachers to difficult to staff positions.
• Paperwork Reduction: The Governor talks about reducing needless paperwork that takes away from teaching time. Great idea! Often the state's efforts to ensure compliance with all kinds of mandates generates huge amounts of time consuming paperwork for administrators and teachers. Teachers need this time for classroom planning and for actual time with students.
• More Flexibility With Education Dollars: The Governor wants to request a waiver from burdensome federal regulations on the use of federal dollars. Many federal mandates on the use of federal funding have not produced acceptable results. Yet many local educators believe they can get better results by using the funds in more productive ways. The same may also be true of state funding. With money as tight as it is today, flexibility would be a welcome change.
• Early Childhood Education: This is one area where effective programs have been shown to produce good results for students for their entire school careers. Any change that would ensure that the most effective programs such as LA-4 are expanded would be desirable. Many educators question however, why the Governor recently passed up possible federal funding in this area.
• Empowering Teachers: Both Governor Jindal and Superintendent White talk about empowering teachers. This is also a good idea because teachers are smart and empowering teachers would recognize their status as professionals. I do not see anything however, in the Governor's reform proposals that would empower teachers in any way. On the contrary many of the proposals place teachers in constant jeopardy of suffering from mistakes in a rushed evaluation system, reduction of due process rights, seniority rights, and subject teachers to whims of the State Department of Education. This is the opposite of teacher empowerment.

Those are the potentially good ideas in Governor Jindal's reform package that could make improvements in our public education system. The problem is that some of the Governor's other initiatives such as more vouchers, and more charters will take vital funding from public schools at a time when MFP freezes and increases in mandated costs have already devastated local school system budgets.

The worst thing about the Governor's reform package is that as presently proposed it will make it even more difficult for educators to close the achievement gap for our high risk students. Struggling schools in high poverty areas need the best administrators and the best teachers and, yes, even more resources. The new evaluation plan is guaranteed to drive the best teachers and administrators away from such schools because the system will be punishing educators for factors over which they have no control. In addition, the vouchers and charters will only draw away the highest potential students from high poverty schools leaving the students that are more expensive to educate. Finally, switching to site based budgeting may make it more difficult for school systems to allocate extra resources to such schools.

It is unfortunate that the Governor's good ideas may be overshadowed by the destructive ones.

School Choice; A Short History Lesson

"Freedom of Choice" That was the title of some of the original plans for school desegregation proposed by many school systems in Louisiana in the early stages of federally mandated school desegregation. Some school boards in Louisiana had originally proposed to desegregate schools by allowing students who had previously been "trapped" in racially segregated schools to transfer to a school with a majority of other race students. The purpose was also to guarantee equal opportunity to such students to receive their education in a school that was perceived to have better opportunities than their segregated school. This looks a lot like Governor Jindal's more recent proposal doesn't it? Although the Governor's proposal is not a racial desegregation plan, it is supposed to work in a similar way. Students would be allowed to transfer to another school that is perceived by parents to offer better opportunities. Another difference is that the Governor now assumes that the "superior" schools parents could choose would be private and parochial schools. These are schools that have never participated in the accountability program that has labeled some of our public schools as failing.

The "freedom of choice" desegregation proposals across the nation however, were struck down by the federal courts as not sufficient to reverse the many years of entrenched segregation. Instead the courts in most cases implemented a system of forced transfers of students to balance the ratios of black and white students in  schools. This plan was referred to by many opponents as "forced busing". After 50 years of desegregation efforts it is obvious from the numbers that many of these efforts to achieve desegregation failed. In cities such as Baton Rouge, many white parents either moved to neighboring parishes or enrolled their children in private schools. The East Baton Rouge school system over a period of 40 years therefore went from a black-white ratio of 40% black and 60% white to 81% black, 11% white, and 8% other.  Even so, the East Baton Rouge parish school system has now been declared by the federal courts as unitary or desegregated.

Soon the legislature will consider Governor Jindal's new "school choice" proposal. The two new criteria for "school choice" will be that a student be originally enrolled in a "C" or lower rated public school and that his/her parents have an income below a certain level. If the new choice legislation does not contain additional careful restrictions, it is quite possible that it will result in a new variety of segregation. Since private schools by their nature can choose which students they are willing to enroll, and since most such schools have only limited slots available for new students, it makes sense that they will choose to enroll mainly the students with the highest potential for achievement. So it turns out that most of the "choice" will be in the hands of private school administrators rather than with parents. Incoming State Superintendent John White seemed to endorse this idea when he stated recently that parents of "promising" students who are presently enrolled in low performing public schools should be able to choose another school where the parents believe their child will be more successful.

This new segregation could occur when students who "show promise" are "chosen" to attend private schools and some of the new charter schools that will spring up under the Governor's plan, leaving the low achievers, discipline problem students, and special needs students in the public schools. Such student transfers would result in a decline of average student achievement in many public schools. This trend would be the exact opposite of what the No Child Left Behind law and Louisiana's accountability system were intended to rectify.

The idea that creating "competition" for low performing schools (that in fact are serving high poverty communities) will somehow force improvement is wrong. It has not been shown to work anywhere in this country! Such a scheme is based on the assumption that low performance is caused by lazy or incompetent teachers and administrators.  The real reason for low performance is, to paraphrase Carville; "It's the poverty stupid!" To chastise such schools with D or F ratings and to encourage some selected students to transfer out is destructive. What Louisiana needs to do is to work hard to provide quality education to students in their communities by encouraging positive parental involvement and by providing incentives for teachers and administrators who have demonstrated an ability and willingness to work effectively with high poverty students.  The Jindal "choice" plan will only set education back.