Tag Archives: University of Arkansas

Buckle up, friends. We’re heading back to Louisiana for today’s post. Figuratively, of course—Louisiana isn’t exactly somewhere I’d like to be in person right now. Here’s hoping everyone stays safe down there. The good news is that we get to remain dry (literally and figuratively) in our chairs and take a look at yet more research related to educational choice in Louisiana, this time on the financial consequences of scaling back the Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP). Those who argue that private school choice sucks money out of public education may want to brace themselves; today’s post may cause severe damage to their inaccurate worldview.

Well, friends, the 2016 legislative session is officially a done deal. I’ll have an official wrap-up (autopsy?) for you next week, but for now we can all breathe a little easier knowing that the crush of state-level education politics will recede for the most part until the fall. That leaves plenty of time to nerd it up, and nerd it up we shall. Let’s get the policy party started today with a new study out of the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform. Written by M. Danish Shakeel, Kaitlin P. Anderson, and Patrick J. Wolf, the study takes a look at the effects of private school choice programs around the world. Or, rather, the study looks at studies on the effects of private school choice programs around the world. That makes it a “meta-study.” Today’s lesson in impenetrable academic jargon: Studying studies yields meta-studies. You’re welcome. Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat: I have a love-hate relationship with meta-studies. On one hand, comprehensive examinations of previous research are enormously valuable for those of us who swim in policy waters. On the other hand, they can easily fall victim to cherry picking, or the tendency […]

Last Friday, we celebrated votes in two of my favorite districts, Jeffco and Thompson, to provide more equitable funding to charter school students. In that post, I briefly mentioned that there were some inaccurate anti-equitability arguments floating around before the board votes. We’re going to tackle one of those misconceptions today: The argument that charters do not need more funding because they pull in untold sums of money from philanthropic sources. First, though, a disclaimer: We will not be playing the irritating fill-in-the-blank game that often crops up in charter funding discussions. You know the one. It involves a statement that goes something like this: “Charters receive all their money from [INSERT SCARY ORGANIZATION OR INDIVIUDAL NAME]!” Anti-charter folks really love to go down this road from time to time, and they do occasionally come up with some pretty entertaining conspiracy theories. Even so, we’re going to stick with the numbers. I’ve never much cared for black helicopters, anyway. They’d be much cooler with green polka dots. Fortunately, we have plenty of numbers to stick with thanks to a brand spanking new report from the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

School choice doesn’t provide all the answers to our education challenges, but it’s becoming very hard to deny that choice in itself yields some positive results. Look at the new results (PDF) from the University of Arkansas’s School Choice Demonstration Project for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). Milwaukee isn’t just famous for that show about two women who work as brewery bottlecappers. The Wisconsin city is the granddaddy of school choice programs, and probably the best place for in-depth studies of all sorts of issues surrounding choice. And the School Choice Demonstration Project has brought together some of the best and most experienced education researchers – including Patrick Wolf, John Witte, and Jay Greene – to do just that. The series of studies released this week focus on everything from fiscal impacts to parental satisfaction to academic growth and real estate prices. Some of the more interesting findings:

Updated with more specific information about open enrollment Some things we learn about the world of education seem so obvious, yet when we hear about them they really seem to trigger a “light bulb” moment. Here is one in a press release from the University of Arkansas’s School Choice Demonstration Project: Parents report that having a choice of where to send their children to school boosts their satisfaction with and involvement in schools, a study of the publicly funded school voucher program in Washington, D.C., has found. You can hear some of the D.C. parents speak for themselves at the Voices of School Choice website. If there’s one thing we know with great confidence about school choice, it’s that parents who participate find great satisfaction with the opportunity. Parents overwhelmingly respond well to the consumer empowerment that comes with school choice, in part by getting more actively involved in their child’s education. The four-year focus group work of Patrick Wolf and his Arkansas team just have made that clearer than ever. And should we be surprised? Do you like being a savvy consumer when it comes to purchasing cars, clothes, electronics, or Legos (I had to throw that last one […]

Things are changing in Washington, DC, and my friends in the Education Policy Center are wondering what the new presidential administration will mean for school reform. That’s why they agreed to publish a paper by a really smart group of people – three professors from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The new paper is called The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Will President Obama’s School Reform Bring the Change Kids Need? (PDF). The authors are Robert Maranto, Gary Ritter, and Sandra Stotsky. You really need to read this paper if you care about education and the future of America. As a candidate, Barack Obama gave a lot of different messages about education reform. The authors of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly sort out the different competing proposals, and encourage the President-elect to “appoint a Democratic reformer who embraces the good, opposes the bad, and avoids the ugly, to serve as the nation’s next Secretary of Education.” The Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly has its ears to the Beltway grapevine, running a daily line to see who the favorites are to fill the Cabinet-level post. The latest entry has Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan […]

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 […]