How to fix public schools

The question is often asked, “How do we fix public schools?”

Dr. Jay Greene, an education professor at the University of Arkansas, has an innovative answer: “We can fix schools by going around them.”

“We can expand access to other educational options, including charter schools, voucher schools, tax-credit schools, ESAs, digital schooling, home-schooling, and hybrid schools,” he says. “We can also expand access to enriching non-school activities, like museums, theaters, historical sites, summer camps, and after-school programs.”

“Reformers should concentrate their energy on all of these non-traditional-school efforts and stop trying so hard to fix traditional public schools.”

Stop trying to fix traditional public schools? Why would he say such a thing?

Well, “the main reason we should stop focusing on fixing traditional public schools is that, for the most part, they don’t want to be fixed,” he says. “The people who make their living off of those schools have reasons for wanting schools to be as they are and have enormous political resources to fend off efforts to fundamentally change things.”

Professor Greene, who earned his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard, argues that “trying to impose reforms like merit pay, centralized systems of teacher evaluation, new standards, new curriculum, new pedagogy, etc. on unwilling schools is largely a futile exercise. They have the political resources to block, dilute, or co-opt these efforts in most instances.”

The best way to fix traditional public schools is to give parents more educational options. Because the truth is that school choice improves public schools. Repeat: school choice improves public schools.

Dr. Greg Forster, who agrees that we should fix public schools by not fixing them, recently surveyed the empirical research on school choice. He found that “23 empirical studies have examined school choice’s impact on academic outcomes in public schools. Of these, 22 find that choice improves public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found that choice harms public schools.”

Giving parents more options really shouldn’t be controversial. After all, as Professor Greene has perceptively noted, in a free society the government rightly defers to parents when it comes to raising their children. And since education is simply a subcategory of parenting, the government should defer to parents when it comes to educating their children.

In the end, “public education” is not about propping up a monopoly. The goal of public education is an educated public—regardless of where that education takes place. Oklahoma parents should be empowered to choose among various delivery mechanisms.

Professor Greene acknowledges that his recommendation to fix schools by not fixing schools “sounds like abandoning the millions of children who remain in those schools”—but he says that is not the case.

“Just as starving children in Africa are not helped by our finishing all of the food on our plates, our futile efforts to impose centralized quick-fixes do not actually help those millions in traditional public schools. The measure of a desirable reform should not be the extent to which it makes us feel like at least we are trying, even if those efforts are counter-productive.”

In the end, it is parents—not government officials—who have the moral right to determine a child’s path. Let’s empower parents with educational choices, so that every child has an opportunity to receive an effective education that prepares them for life.

Choctaw High School teacher arrested on rape complaint

NewsOK.com has the story.

There is no teacher shortage in Oklahoma

Gallup tells us that Americans' confidence in the media's ability to report the news "fully, accurately, and fairly" is at an all-time low. One reason for this is that too many reporters, rather than writing for their customers, are simply doing conventional center-left stenography for their sources (often sources in government). Reporters on the education beat are particularly prone to this, as witness the steady drumbeat of uncritical reporting about Oklahoma's "teacher shortage."

Unlike many reporters, Andrew Spiropoulos has seen it all before and is not swept up in the teacher-shortage alarmism. Spiropoulos is the Robert S. Kerr Senior Professor of Constitutional Law at Oklahoma City University and a former senior counselor to the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Oklahoma. As he writes today in The Journal Record,

A classic move of the partisan policy wonk is to stake your argument on a number that, to the uninformed, sounds impressive, but, once seen in the proper context, leads sensible people to reach the opposite conclusion. For example, 800 state teacher openings sounds high, but not when you know there are more than 40,000 Oklahoma public school teachers. Similarly, reading that there were 100 openings in Tulsa on July 30 causes concern, but when compared to the district’s nearly 3,000 teachers, you understand that it reflects a reasonable vacancy rate. Look, in any organization, you are going to have turnover. Some people retire, and others will resign, often at the last minute. Life refuses to adhere to the calendar, even the school one. 

The critical fact ignored or concealed by the myth makers is that each year Oklahoma teacher education programs produce many more new teachers than the number of open jobs. (Annually, the United States produces two-and-a-half times the number of new teachers it needs—and our state produces even more of a surplus.) Indeed, one of the principal reasons for low teacher salaries in Oklahoma, and elsewhere, is the glut of teachers on the market. 

The real problem with mythological arguments is that relying on them leads to poor public policy choices. There’s no doubt that there are some positions that, no matter how large the teacher surplus, are difficult to fill. Teachers fight over positions in the suburbs, but avoid troubled urban schools and isolated rural ones. Teachers with particular skills, including training in special and bilingual education, as well as those with real math and science degrees, are in high demand. We don’t need to raise the salaries of all teachers to reduce vacancies—we need to target our resources toward recruiting the teachers we really need.

I encourage you to read his entire article here. And while you're at it, check out Greg Forster's latest article for OCPA. "As for the so-called teacher shortage," he writes, "the unions have been inventing stories about a teacher shortage consistently for decades. The number of teachers can go up or down, it doesn’t matter; there’s always a shortage. If so, the best thing we can do is move students out of public schools, where the teaching profession is stymied by numerous union-backed barriers to entry, and into private schools that are free to hire talented young people into the profession."

Or as OCPA economist Wendy Warcholik recently argued in the Tulsa World, "the only real solution is to break up the monopoly by expanding school-choice opportunities."

School choice mythbusting (cont'd)

"For 13 years, I've been a researcher in the school choice movement, and from day one the most important part of the job has been mythbusting," Greg Forster writes in the new issue of Perspective. "Ask any other researcher in this field and he’ll say the same. There’s no other issue in American politics where one side has built its case so thoroughly upon untrue factual statements. It seems like no media story on this topic can get by without repeating these myths as facts. It never stops."

Because the myths never stop ("public schools welcome all children," for example, and "the research on school vouchers is mixed")—and because it's been a while since Jay Greene and Marcus Winters last did some mythbusting in Oklahoma—Forster's contribution is most welcome. I encourage you to read it here.

Let's foster better education

"If Oklahoma is going to adopt sweeping reforms to serve foster children better," Greg Forster writes, "it shouldn't just think about homes. It should think about schools. As state policymakers scrounge to find $150 million to implement a proposed plan to reform the foster care system, they should also implement a policy which would actually save money. By doing so, they could revolutionize life for some of Oklahoma’s most vulnerable children."

Tulsa mother of hearing-impaired child grateful for scholarship

"Life in Tulsa is hectic for single mom Laura Jones and her son, Manuel," Dacia Harris writes over at the OCPA blog.

Like any six-year-old, Manuel enjoys playing outside and learning to ride the new bike he got for Christmas. In the evening, they read stories and Manuel is starting to pick out words.  

When Manuel was born early he spent a week in the NICU, so Laura took 12 weeks off from her job as a special education teacher at a local public school, where she works with kids who have a hearing loss. After Manuel failed his newborn hearing screening, Laura thought, "No … I work with kids that have a hearing loss. My child doesn’t have a hearing loss. He just failed it because he was in the NICU." The family went back for two more hearing screenings to confirm the diagnosis, and when he was four months old Manuel got his first set of hearing aids.  

Today, Manuel’s receptive and expressive language skills are on par with any other kindergartner. But instead of attending the local public school—where he would be in a larger class with more distractions and background noise—Manuel receives funding from the Opportunity Scholarship Fund to attend Happy Hands Education Center, a center for families with children who are deaf or hard of hearing and children who have other communication disorders. These scholarships are made possible by a 2011 measure passed by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Mary Fallin.  

 "It was nice to know that there was something that could assist me as a single mom," Laura says. "Happy Hands doesn't turn anyone away due to inability to pay, but that there was another organization that would contribute to help Manuel's education was a blessing." 

 Hear more from Laura and some other grateful parents in this brief video:

Mindless fallacies about accountability

Economist John Merrifield has no patience for the persistent fallacy that accountability to political authority is the only kind of accountability.

Luther band director resigns amid allegations

News 9 has the story.

Jeffersonian Project supports charter school expansion

[Below is the text of an issue alert distributed yesterday by The Jeffersonian Project, the 501(c)(4) affiliate of the American Legislative Exchange Council.]

To:          Members of the Oklahoma House of Representatives 

From:     The Jeffersonian Project 

Re:          Please Support HB 1696

This week, the Oklahoma House will consider House Bill 1696, which allows the cities of Oklahoma City and Tulsa to authorize charter schools. Each municipality may only authorize a charter school inside their own inner-city school district and within their own city limits. This bill is specific to Oklahoma City and Tulsa public school districts and provides students in some of the lowest-performing schools additional school choice opportunities.

Any charter authorized by Oklahoma City or Tulsa is subject to a veto by the people of the school district. The bill is permissive only, and the cities do not have to exercise the new power. All potential charters are still subject to the reforms and accountability measures recently included in Senate Bill 782, which expanded charter opportunities outside Oklahoma City and Tulsa, but did not significantly expand charter opportunities in the inner cities. 

The Jeffersonian Project recognizes there should be a variety of institutions that can authorize the establishment of charter schools and that independent but publicly accountable multiple authorizing authorities—such as the cities of Oklahoma City and Tulsa—contribute to the health and growth of strong public charter schools and thriving economies.

Therefore, the purpose of this bill is to establish the cities of Oklahoma City and Tulsa as potential charter school authorizers in addition to other authorizers already defined in law.

Additionally, this bill provides the people of a community with ultimate oversight by providing the authority to fully veto a charter. There is no fiscal impact to HB 1696. HB 1696 passed the Senate on April 22 by a vote of 38 to 6. 

In accordance with the model policies of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Jeffersonian Project supports HB 1696.

Fallin approves statewide charter school measure

Jay Chilton of MiddleGround News has the story.

Oklahoma mother raising bullying awareness after student attempts suicide

This photo, taken Jan. 24, 2012, shows a billboard in Edmond, Okla.

"A little girl's on the road to recovery after trying to take her life in the walls of her own middle school," Adam Snider reports for KFOR. "Her mother says it was bullying that pushed her daughter too far."

Every last dime

Remarking on the amicus brief Oklahoma's public school administrators filed in support of the lawsuit seeking to wipe out the state’s Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarship Program for Children with Disabilities, law professor Andrew C. Spiropoulos says they "have let a narrow and poorly conceived view of their self-interest cloud both their judgment and conscience."

If you read their brief, it’s clear that what they are most concerned about isn't the constitution or the welfare of the children in the program. Their first sentence of their argument is a complaint that the cost of the scholarships is deducted from the total amount of state public education funding. What really matters to them is making sure they swoop up every last dime of taxpayer money. 

What's interesting about their argument is that, despite their obsession with funding levels, they never mention how much the scholarship program costs. This year, out of nearly 700,000 public school students, only 384 receive Henry scholarships. ... Henry scholarships aren't a burden—they’re a rounding error. Although the cost to schools is insignificant, the benefit to the recipient families and the state is too great to be measured. ... 

The school leaders must, and do, argue that the state receives no benefit when it assists parents to obtain the best education for their children. So when a family, whose child was bullied at the public school, frequently leaving her in tears and dreading the day, can now afford a new school where she laughs and learns, our state doesn’t benefit. So when a child, who in her previous school remained silent and impassive, now comes to life, makes friends and reads beyond grade level, the state received no value for its money. 

Fortunately, the rest of us know that we are all better off when the government empowers parents to find the right school for their children. 

I encourage you to read his entire column here.

The most popular TED talk of all time

Sir Ken Robinson's talk has more than 32 million views so far.