Editor's note: This is the second of a three-column series on the crisis in Texas public education.
Given the strong evidence that Texas education is in dire straights, the question then becomes, "How can we fix this broken system?" Our state's children are far too important to leave many of them languishing in poorly run and ineffective public schools. Some claim the solution lies in funding: If only the Texas government pours enough money into the insatiable education bureaucracy, our children will receive the education they deserve.
As the numbers indicate, this is a pipe dream that attempts to merely cover the gaping problems in our education system with green paper. The most logical solution is not to feed the bureaucratic beast but to train it and make it more limber by introducing market forces into public education and giving our lowest income families some control over their children's educational fate.
School choice is loosely defined as any governmental policy which allows parents to select the best schools for their children. This definition encompasses a wide range of programs, from scholarships to governmentally funded private school vouchers.
The benefits of private schooling could easily be extended to include the nation's urban poor. Many scoff at vouchers because not every child would be able to attend well-known prestigious schools such as Saint John's or Fort Worth Country Day. This may be true, but what these critics fail to realize is that even poor urban areas are full of private schools. Many are run by religious organizations and others by civic activists. While they are not nearly as lavish as their suburban counterparts, they consistently deliver a high quality education to their low-income students.
There are currently several choice programs operating across the nation. There are publicly funded vouchers in Cleveland, Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., and privately funded scholarship programs such as San Antonio's Child Educational Opportunity program. All plans award vouchers randomly within their applicant pool. This provides an excellent opportunity for social science research as scholars can compare the progress of those students in the applicant pool who were awarded vouchers and those who were not. Because awards were random, there is no difference between these two groups other than the vouchers.
To date there have been eight such random assignment studies performed. Amazingly, every single study revealed greater progress among voucher-receiving students than their public school counterparts, and in all but one study the performance difference was statistically significant. The studies' total findings are beyond the scope of a column but there are a few points that merit special attention.
One complaint parents made to researchers was that their children had been inappropriately placed in "special needs" programs by public school administrators. Indeed, many children in such programs who enrolled in the San Antonio CEO program excelled once attending a local private school.
The reason for this discrepancy is both obvious and depressing: "special needs" students are exempt from TAKS (formerly TAAS) requirements and are not included in a school's testing scores during statewide assessment. These students are tested separately and are not considered when the State Board of Education ranks and classifies the public schools.
The numbers strongly support this conclusion. For example, in 1999, 10.8 percent of Edgewood ISD (the low-income San Antonio district where the CEO program operates) students were classified as "special needs" while the statewide exemption proportion was only 6.9 percent.
The trend has only gotten worse: 14.6 percent of Edgewood students were categorized as "special needs" in 2003 while it rose to only 11.6 percent statewide. This indicates an increasing statewide trend most acute in the lowest performing districts most burdened by sagging test scores to avoid addressing the problem of low-performing students by simply classifying them as "special needs."
Another study by the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance analyzed choice programs in Washington, New York and Dayton. This study found that after only two years, students participating in each program were scoring significantly higher on standardized testing than the non-scholarship receiving control group. They improved by 4 percentage points in New York, 7 percentage points in Dayton and 9 percentage points in Washington, D.C.
Two other studies of the Milwaukee choice program produced similar results for voucher-receiving students. One found children participating in the program to be 6 percentile points higher in reading and 11 percentile points higher in math than their public school equivalents.
The authors of all eight random assignment studies that have been performed, as well as three additional non-random assignment studies, found at least some benefit from the choice programs they analyzed and absolutely no negative results.
I will address the variety of other arguments raised against school choice next week, but it is important to understand that for students participating in such programs, the results have been totally and uniformly positive. Not one of the many studies conducted has found a decline in participating students' performance.
It is also worth noting that these programs typically award scholarships worth between three and four thousand dollars annually while Texas presently spends $7,136 per pupil each year. The private schools that scholarship recipients attend are more efficient and cost much less than their public counterparts.
It is a travesty and a terrible disservice to our nation's disadvantaged children that we have not made more progress in implementing a program that saves money and demonstrates positive results in all instances studied.
Burnham is a government senior.
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