Why Private Schools? The sequel.

If private schools don’t, on average, do a better job of educating kids than public schools, why should we channel public dollars away from public schools to private ones? On the other hand, if the Federal government is willing to come up with new money to produce better school choices for kids in bad schools, why not? Those are among the central questions of the voucher debate.

Developments this week indicate that advocates on both sides of the debate better arm themselves with the facts now because a showdown is coming.

As reported by the Associated Press on the CNN.com home page, Republicans in Congress just unveiled a $100 million school voucher plan that would “let poor children leave struggling schools and attend private schools at public expense.”

AP says that Congress “likely won’t even vote on the legislation this year. Still, the move signals a significant education fight to come. GOP lawmakers plan to try to work their voucher plan into the No Child Left Behind law when it is updated in 2007.”

And yet, this comes just on the heels of a major report from the Department of Education showing that private schools, on average, are no better at educating similar children than public schools. For more on this and how quietly the DOE released the report, see my last blog entry “What’s So Great About Private Schools?”

The AP coverage notes:

“The Bush administration requested the school-choice plan, but Tuesday's media event caused some awkwardness for the Education Department. The agency just released a study that raises questions about whether private schools offer any advantage over public ones. …[DOE Secretary] Spellings faced questions about her department's handling of [the] new study comparing students in public and private schools that had been quietly released on Friday. The study found that, overall, private school students outperform public school children in reading and math. But public school students often did as well, if not better, when compared to private-school peers with similar backgrounds. The study had many caveats and warned that its own comparisons had "modest utility." Spellings said she first learned about the study -- one produced by the Education Department's research arm -- by reading about it in the newspaper. She said the agency must improve the way it releases such reports. But she rejected any suggestion that the department buried the study because it put public schools in a favorable light compared to private ones.”

I’m not sure which I find more disconcerting – the idea that the DOE purposely downplayed its own research in order to smooth the path for vouchers or that the Secretary may only have found out about this major piece of research through the media after her own department released it.

Regardless, opinion research over the past several years has pretty consistently shown that majorities support giving families whose kids attend underperforming schools the option of choosing better schools, but not plans that take away money from the public schools that are struggling to succeed  Check out Public Agenda Online’s Red Flags section on vouchers – it’s a must read! What’s more, Public Agenda’s experience with parents suggest that their grasp of the voucher debate and the arguments on both sides is often piecemeal and hazy.

Right now, the majority of parents don’t seem to be clamoring for vouchers. In our most recent release on findings from Reality Check 2006, we reported that only 19% of parents say they would vote for a hypothetical educational leader who advocated the position that “school vouchers give parents the power to choose the best school for their children.” The plurality (45%) said they would be most likely to support school leaders who advocate the position “if public schools finally got more money and smaller classes, they could do a better job.” But in fact, there wasn’t consensus level support for any one approach

In some ways, the most important insight from surveys, given the current state of the debate and current level of public understanding, is that whether people support vouchers or not, they still want to improve the public school system. And in some ways, the most important question raised by the DOE research, is why aren’t even our private schools doing better?

Those for and against vouchers will surely be gathering their facts and marshalling their troops over the coming year. Let’s just hope that the American people get a chance to think this one through with some semblance of honest and open debate without being subjected to a lot of sloganeering, name-calling, and people playing fast and loose with the facts.

Well, we can hope, can’t we?

Comments

[Nick Blosser]

My daughter attends a private school in Georgia. The tuition is $5,000 per year. The state of Georgia currently pays $10,000 per student per year. Georgia is 2nd to the last in testing in the country and less than 50% of children starting Kindergarten here will make it to graduation. My daughter’s school has large class sizes and less money yet every child in Kindergarten knows how to read half way through the year. Every child can do addition, subtraction, and understands fractions. Every child creates science projects and writes fictional stories. All of that and Spanish classes and computer classes and that is just in Kindergarten. You can pretend Public Education works if you must but realize it is only your own children you experimenting with. If they end up losing in life's big race they can always know who’s to blame.

[Deborah Anne Stewart]

I teach in a public school during the day. Nights and summers, I am an assistant principal in a Catholic high school.

The public schools are dangerous because Mayor Daley refuses to allow more students to be arrested when they commit violent crimes at school. He wants the schools to appear safe by forbidding the arrests to be made.