Tag Archives: debate

Krista Kafer Says Take Another Look at the Facts about Preschool

With her column published yesterday, Independence Institute senior fellow and Face The State columnist Krista Kafer drops a fly or two into the early childhood education debate soup: In Colorado, taxpayers spend $29 million a year on state preschool programs. Denver voters passed a sales tax in 2006 to subsidize preschool. According to a Denver Post article by Jeremy P. Meyer, 3,650 students receive subsidies. James Mejia, director of the Denver Preschool Program, told Meyer that “Studies show that for every dollar you spend on early childhood education, you will get back $10 to $12 in services you would otherwise be spending on social services, incarceration, remediation.” Sounds great, but upon closer examination, this just isn’t true. The cost-benefit analyses routinely bandied about by advocates come up short. The analysis is largely based on exaggerated claims from a tiny subset of studies misrepresented as the whole. When the vast majority of research is considered, it becomes clear that preschool does not reap the amazing benefits touted by advocates. Four decades of legitimate research actually shows that the majority of low-income children experience only short-term positive impacts and there is little long-term impact from preschool participation. Research also shows that preschool […]

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Independence Institute Highlights Rural Colorado School Performance

There are plenty of kids in Colorado who live out in the country or in remote small towns. I don’t know many of them myself. Yet while I’m sure they have their own challenges in learning and education, they don’t get as much attention as those of us who live in and around the big city of Denver. That’s part of the reason why my friends in the Education Policy Center put together a project looking at the academic performance of Colorado’s rural school districts, compared with the numbers of poor and non-white students they serve. The author of the newly-released Assessing Colorado Rural Public School Performance (PDF) is Paul Mueller, who spent the summer working in our offices. (Just in case you were wondering, I didn’t see much of Paul, because I spent much of my summer months off school playing outdoors rather than visiting the Independence Institute.) Anyway, for those of you who don’t have the time to read Paul’s paper, you can listen to him and Pam Benigno talk about the findings of the report – including a couple school districts that succeeded at “beating the odds” despite high-poverty or high-minority student populations – on an iVoices […]

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Barack Obama: School Choice for My Children, But Not Thy Children

Rocky Mountain News guest columnist Robert Maranto – an endowed chair at the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform – makes some striking points about some politicians’ school choice hypocrisy. Especially about one very prominent politician in particular: Candidate [Barack] Obama declares that “We need to fix & improve our public schools, not throw our hands up and walk away from them,” the way Barack and Michelle Obama have with their own children. Candidate Obama’s official education program opposes private school choice, and only under pressure gave a very qualified endorsement to public charter schools. Instead of letting parents choose, Obama emphasizes bureaucratic programs like teacher certification. Supporters of traditional teacher certification programs, like Obama education adviser Linda Darling Hammond, want all public school teachers to be certified. They argue that no one wants children to be operated on by uncertified doctors, so why should they be taught by uncertified teachers? Yet unlike medical certification, there is precious little evidence that teacher certification works. Those same rich people who would never send their children to unlicensed doctors choose to pay big bucks to have those same children taught by unlicensed teachers. Just look at Sen. Obama and other recent […]

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Hooray! Sarah Palin Stumps for Federal Vouchers to Special-Needs Students

It was about six weeks ago that the very smart Dr. Jay Greene and a wise old Uncle Charley suggested that special-needs vouchers would make a hallmark for the McCain-Palin Presidential ticket. A few weeks later I complained that Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s debate remarks left me unimpressed with her views on education reform. But then happily, Jay Greene points readers to these inspiring remarks Palin made today to a Pennsylvania audience: In a McCain-Palin administration, we will put the educational choices for special needs children in the right hands their parents’. Under reforms that I will lead as vice president, the parents and caretakers of children with physical or mental disabilities will be able to send that boy or girl to the school of their choice — public or private. Under our reforms, federal funding for every special needs child will follow that child. Some states have begun to apply this principle already, as in Florida’s McKay Scholarship program. That program allows for choices and a quality of education that should be available to parents in every state, for every child with special needs. This process should be uncomplicated, quick, and effective — because early education can make […]

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School Choice Takes National TV Stage at Last Night's Presidential Debate

In contrast with the unimpressive remarks provided at the vice-presidential debate, I was excited to hear the candidates in last night’s presidential debate talk so much about school choice. The candidates agree on public school choice. First, an excerpt of Senator John McCain’s remarks: So choice and competition amongst schools is one of the key elements that’s already been proven in places in like New Orleans and New York City and other places, where we have charter schools, where we take good teachers and we reward them and promote them…. Charter schools aren’t the only answer, but they’re providing competition. They are providing the kind of competitions that have upgraded both schools — types of schools. And here’s some of what Senator Barack Obama had to say: Charter schools, I doubled the number of charter schools in Illinois despite some reservations from teachers unions. I think it’s important to foster competition inside the public schools. But then came the point of disagreement.

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There's No Evidence that Merit Pay Negatively Affects Teacher Teamwork

Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews wrote a column earlier this week suggesting that “merit pay could ruin teacher teamwork” in Washington, DC. In response, Jeanne Allen from the Center for Education Reform wrote an open letter saying that merit pay is in fact the key to building a culture of teamwork inside the district schools of our nation’s capital. But there’s more to throw into the pot of this little debate. Findings from a study of a merit pay pilot program (PDF) in Little Rock, Arkansas, further questions the conventional wisdom in Mathews’ piece: The data do not indicate that ACPP teachers experience divisive competition, suffer from a negative work environment, or shy away from working with low-performing students – despite the fact that these are three oft-cited potential problems inherent in merit pay plans. More research is needed, but it looks like there’s reason to believe that the old teachers union saw about merit pay being divisive isn’t necessarily true. More teamwork, higher quality instruction, and ultimately, students learning more: I have a hard time seeing what’s not to like about paying teachers for performance. Several Colorado school districts and charter schools are leading the way in this […]

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Evidence from D.C. Shows Need to Improve Focus on School Accountability

There’s a great story in the Washington Post today about the positive impacts of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability on poor and needy students in and around our nation’s capital (H/T Joanne Jacobs): Since enactment of the No Child Left Behind law, students from poor families in the Washington area have made major gains on reading and math tests and are starting to catch up with those from middle-class and affluent backgrounds, a Washington Post analysis shows. The achievement gap between economic groups, long a major frustration for educators, has narrowed in the region’s suburban schools since President Bush signed the law in 2002, according to Maryland and Virginia test data. In Montgomery County, for instance, students in poverty have earned better scores on Maryland’s reading test in each of the past five years, slicing in half the 28 percentage-point gulf that separated their pass rate from the county average. They also have made a major dent in the math gap. In Fairfax County, another suburban academic powerhouse, such students have slashed the achievement gaps on Virginia tests. Now, my friends in the Education Policy Center tell me that NCLB has some problems and flaws that need to be […]

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Let Parents Choose Single-Sex Classrooms … Who Needs Yucky Girls?

An interesting story from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette looks at an elementary school that has divided boys and girls into separate classrooms (H/T Joanne Jacobs): In a typical classroom, the boys are asked to sit calmly in desks, complete story problems and answer questions after raising their hands. But speed, enthusiasm and competition get the pupils in Long’s all-boys class motivated to learn and to participate, she said. Teachers at Monitor Elementary School in Springdale created classrooms segregated by sex as an experiment to allow teachers to adapt their strategies to each, Principal Maribel Childress said. The idea of sex-segregated classrooms has been catching on more and more in different parts of the country, though it’s still a fairly rare enough practice that it makes articles like this one of general interest. Like so many other things in education, separating boys and girls into different classrooms isn’t the be-all and end-all answer to our problems. (But it’s not a bad idea. Who needs yucky girls around, anyway?) One critic quoted in the story – New America Foundation senior research fellow Sara Mead – makes a great point: The variation among students within each sex is greater than the average differences between […]

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Jay Greene Shows Again Debating the Facts is a Winner for School Choice

If you are going to enter a debate with Dr. Jay Greene over what the research on school choice says, you had better at least come in fully armed. Leo Casey, the blogger for the American Federation of Teachers, made the accusation that Greene cherry-picks evidence, but he probably wasn’t prepared for this kind of intellectual smackdown: If Leo Casey is going to make the charge of cherry picking and improperly citing evidence, he has to deliver proof of those charges. To the contrary, the facts indicate that Casey is the one cherry picking and improperly citing research. Is there a union for playing fast and loose with the truth? Maybe Leo Casey should join it. Oh, I forgot. He’s already a member of the AFT. By the time he had delivered this rhetorical punch, Greene had already dismantled Casey’s arguments in effective and short order. When will they ever learn? Never, of course. Admitting that 9 of the 10 high-quality school choice studies show solid evidence of academic gains would be self-defeating. (Then again, another new study has just shown positive results from the Ohio EdChoice voucher program.) After digging into the question of how well school choice works, […]

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