Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Free to choose, and learn

New research shows that parental choice raises standards-including for those who stay in public schools

FEW ideas in education are more controversial than vouchers-letting parents choose to educate their children wherever they wish at the taxpayer's expense. First suggested by Milton Friedman, an economist, in 1955, the principle is compellingly simple. The state pays; parents choose; schools compete; standards rise; everybody gains.

Simple, perhaps, but it has aroused predictable-and often fatal-opposition from the educational establishment. Letting parents choose where to educate their children is a silly idea; professionals know best. Co-operation, not competition, is the way to improve education for all. Vouchers would increase inequality because children who are hardest to teach would be left behind.

But these arguments are now succumbing to sheer weight of evidence. Voucher schemes are running in several different countries without ill-effects for social cohesion; those that use a lottery to hand out vouchers offer proof that recipients get a better education than those that do not.

Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme, which selected children by lottery, provided researchers with an almost perfect experiment, akin to the "pill-placebo" studies used to judge the efficacy of new medicines. The subsequent results show that the children who received vouchers were 15-20% more likely to finish secondary education, five percentage points less likely to repeat a grade, scored a bit better on scholastic tests and were much more likely to take college entrance exams.

Voucher programmes in several American states have been run along similar lines. Greg Forster, a statistician at the Friedman Foundation, a charity advocating universal vouchers, says there have been eight similar studies in America: seven showed statistically significant positive results for the lucky voucher winners; the eighth also showed positive results but was not designed well enough to count.

The voucher pupils did better even though the state spent less than it would have done had the children been educated in normal state schools. American voucher schemes typically offer private schools around half of what the state would spend if the pupils stayed in public schools. The Colombian programme did not even set out to offer better schooling than was available in the state sector; the aim was simply to raise enrolment rates as quickly and cheaply as possible.

These results are important because they strip out other influences. Home, neighbourhood and natural ability all affect results more than which school a child attends. If the pupils who received vouchers differ from those who don't-perhaps simply by coming from the sort of go-getting family that elbows its way to the front of every queue-any effect might simply be the result of any number of other factors. But assigning the vouchers randomly guarded against this risk.

Opponents still argue that those who exercise choice will be the most able and committed, and by clustering themselves together in better schools they will abandon the weak and voiceless to languish in rotten ones. Some cite the example of Chile, where a universal voucher scheme that allows schools to charge top-up fees seems to have improved the education of the best-off most.

The strongest evidence against this criticism comes from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children. Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in the state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit. The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admissions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees (most American voucher schemes impose similar conditions).

The result has been burgeoning variety and a breakneck expansion of the private sector. At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now 10% are, and growth in private schooling continues unabated.

Anders Hultin of Kunskapsskolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served rule-the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place. So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).

More evidence that choice can raise standards for all comes from Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Harvard University, who has shown that when American public schools must compete for their students with schools that accept vouchers, their performance improves. Swedish researchers say the same. It seems that those who work in state schools are just like everybody else: they do better when confronted by a bit of competition.

Source




More on British teacher abuse

Teachers accused of abuse of pupils should be guaranteed anonymity while the allegations are investigated, the Lord Chancellor said yesterday. Lord Falconer of Thoroton said that teachers' reputations were being ruined by the "allegations culture" and an unfair disciplinary process that could leave their careers in tatters even if allegations proved to be completely unfounded.

The Lord Chancellor also called for a more "common sense" approach to human rights. Head teachers were perfectly justified, for example, in refusing unreasonable demands from Muslim pupils who claimed that it was their human right to wear Islamic dress in schools. He cited the decision of a Luton school to stop Shabina Begum wearing a jilbab - a long loose gown - to class.

Lord Falconer told the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers that teachers should not face automatic suspension when an allegation was made against them. False accusations should no longer be automatically reported to the local authority or appear on Criminal Records Bureau checks and job references, he said, and schools should have some means of making public statements of a teacher's innocence as soon as they were cleared of a spurious allegation.

Suspensions and investigations that lasted for years "ruin lives often utterly unfairly", he said. If teachers facing accusations were automatically suspended, regardless of the allegations' merits, that knowledge could spread very quickly, ruining reputations, Lord Falconer said. Nor was it fair that "patently false" accusations should be allowed to follow teachers through their entire career.

Teachers have long complained that allegations against them are recorded by the school and reported to the local authority. This means that the accusations appear on criminal record checks and job references, even when the teacher is cleared, blighting their chances for career advancement. "Where it's demonstrably the case that the allegation is false there should be greater discretion as to whether it's recorded," Lord Falconer said.

Mick Brookes, the association's general secretary, said that heads were sometimes able to protect teachers from false allegations by not reporting them to the local authority, yet there was nobody to protect heads when they fell victim. An accusation against a head would automatically be referred to the authority, which would suspend them at once. "If an allegation is made against a head, the cavalry come out very quickly. Social services are there in squads and there is an immediate, very high escalation," Mr Brookes said.

As a head teacher he had taken the risk of not reporting four cases in which his teachers had been accused of abuse because he had found all the cases to be unfounded. Those teachers were left to get on with their careers. He contrasted this with the case of a head who has been suspended and who attempted suicide as a result, even though the union expects him to be cleared of the claims against him.

Lord Falconer rejected the union's demands for sanctions against those who levelled false accusations against teachers and heads, arguing that this might deter those with genuine grievances from reporting them. He also ruled out changes to criminal investigations of teachers.

Public misunderstanding of human rights legislation partly explained the "allegations culture", the Lord Chancellor suggested. An overzealous interpretation of the Human Rights Act had led to claims in the name of "human rights" that were nothing of the sort.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

***************************

No comments: