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False Choices: The Economic Argument Against Market-Driven Education Reform
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After experimenting with market-based, competitive education initiatives for 20 years with little statewide education improvement, it’s time Minnesota returns to what works best: proper education investment and supporting our students and teachers.
Minnesota is home to the nation’s oldest charter school law and has also implemented school choice initiatives, such as open enrollment. This simulated market experience has not supported the idea that increased competition drives improvement.
Minnesota's national test scores in math have increased by less than seven percent since the introduction of a competitive system 20 years ago, and reading scores increased by less than one percent during the same time frame.
The main problem, among many, is that school systems cannot function as free markets if we want to achieve universal post-secondary readiness. Free markets produce efficiency, not equity for all. Efficiency helps maximize profit, but what about students that aren’t profitable to educate?
Using the rules of economics, and assuming we must achieve universal post-secondary readiness, MN2020’s latest report, False Choices: Market-Driven Education Reform Doesn’t Work, demonstrates why free market thinking in education comes at a high price for students, parents and teachers.
As a result of competition-based thinking, many schools have focused on teaching-to-tests and advertising instead of broad based cognitive development that will provide students with the necessary skills to be successful in a 21st century workforce.
In moving Minnesota back toward a proven educational path, our latest report makes the following recommendations:
- There is a place in education for efficiency, incentives, and innovation; however, policymakers must stop trying to achieve these competitive goals with a false, market-based approach.
- Schools must adapt to achieve universal post-secondary readiness by focusing on initiatives that enhance teachers’ professional development and provide comprehensive teacher assessment and feedback.
- Instead of using a false market-mentality as political cover to systematically defund schools, we must invest in education for the 21st century, using some of that investment to develop a comprehensive and fair teacher evaluation metric.
- Charter schools have a place in the public education system as partners, not competitors, with traditional schools.
Comments:
February 21, 2012 at 10:45 am
Leslie,
I don’t think conventional districts will be “fixed” through one round of conversation with charters. Any single status quo is guaranteed to be insufficient over the long run.
Instead, I’d like to see more focus on increasing the diversity of programming available within traditional public school networks. Innovation must be internalized as a core part of our thinking on school development. We’ve seen some indication of what traditional public schools can do when given the freedom to develop specialized programs, and I’d like to see us focus on supporting that kind of work instead of writing off traditional publics as an unfixable monolith.
February 19, 2012 at 6:43 am
So, you think that after a few years the conventional districts will be “fixed” and anything they might learn from charters will have been learned. Then you hope the charters will go away? Not likely, Not in the changing social, economic, and technical environment that we all find ourselves in. If the conventional districts believe for a second that they can correct their problems and then continue on in a static manner…they will not have learned their lessons at all well.
Charters will continue to be a part of the systems of public education that educate our children for the 21st century. And they are getting better.
You can bet on it.
February 19, 2012 at 6:33 am
“Charter schools have a place in the public education system as partners, not competitors, with traditional schools.”
Amen. We charter school operators have been saying that from the start.
January 26, 2012 at 12:00 pm
Further to my comment, I just found out that a famed Stanford professor, Sebastian Thrun, has resigned from his tenured position at Stanford to start Udacity, an online educational venture. Here is what Prof. Thrun says on his web page:
“One of the most amazing things I’ve ever done in my life is to teach a class to 160,000 students. In the Fall of 2011, Peter Norvig and I decided to offer our class ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ to the world online, free of charge.
“We spent endless nights recording ourselves on video, and interacting with tens of thousands of students. Volunteer students translated some of our classes into over 40 languages; and in the end we graduated over 23,000 students from 190 countries. In fact, Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined.
This one class had more educational impact than my entire career.”
There are obvious differences in teaching Artificial Intelligence to adults and teaching elementary mathematics to children, but I am encouraged that this free, voluntary learning was both embraced by thousands and a proof of concept. Elementary online learning won’t be available soon enough to affect my kids, but it probably will be the mode by which my grandkids will learn (I hope!).
January 24, 2012 at 2:03 pm
If the last 20 years of education policy in MN represent a failure (or limited success) of market-style reform, I hope the next 20 years will be a revolution in pedagogical methods. Contrary to what many entrenched interests posit, I believe that students can and will be taught to reach age-appropriate competency in math, reading, science, history and technology via interactive technologies. For example, a third-grade math curriculum can be provided via computer, with interesting and functional lessons developed to keep students engaged and progressing. Testing can both evaluate progress and illuminate areas for immediate remediation, which can be provided via interactive technology. Learning can be both more comprehensive and more uniform, as well as blind to racial, gender, socioeconomic and other factors.
Just as the job of “secretary” is essentially non-existent today and has morphed into an administrative role, I hope that in my lifetime the job of primary school teacher is replaced by a more supervisory elementary administrator role.
(I realize that my opinion will be unpopular with those who earn their living teaching right now. To them I can only say: learn from the experience of secretaries, travel agents, record stores, book stores, postal workers, journalists, etc.)
January 17, 2012 at 10:51 am
Susanna,
Thank you for writing! I’d like to clarify that recommendation to make sure it doesn’t come across as supporting all charter schools. I agree with you that charters in the metro area have contributed to increased segregation by race and income and that this runs counter to the values our public school system should have. Similar segregation has been observed in other systems that have experimented with charters or outright privatization of education.
The recommendation is more about increasing dialogue between charters and the traditional public schools, something that isn’t very likely when schools are competing with one another. Very few charter schools are getting noteworthy results, and of those that are, only a few are doing so because of practices or programs that could be scaled up across our school system.
I’d like to see us do more to identify what, if anything, some charter schools have done well so that we can look into ways to better incorporate it into the traditional publics. Over the long run, I’d like to see the charter program shrink (and eventually vanish) as public districts continue to build more diversity into their school offerings. We’ve already seen examples of this diversification in the metro area, and I think it’s far healthier than the segregation and lackluster results of the charter sector.
We’ve had charter schools for 20 years, and they won’t go away overnight. Encouraging engagement with traditional publics so that the good (what little there is) gets used and the bad gets tossed aside seems to me a better way to move past this experiment than trying to force it to end in a political fight. I think a public discussion of the reality of charters, framed as a search for quality, will do more to dampen enthusiasm for them than just about anything else we can do.
Thank you for engaging with this,
Michael
January 17, 2012 at 7:55 am
I can’t go along with the idea that “Charter schools have a place…as partners rather than competitors…” Charter schools are the prime moving force promoting segregation in the “public” school system. Here in Stillwater we have seen attempts by evangelicals to take over one of the district’s charter schools; another has been established as a school for blonde, blue-eyed children from reasonably well-to-do families; certain charter schools in the heart of the city cater to specific minority demographics. If we are to remain true to our vision of a pluralistic society; a “melting pot” of cultures and nationalities, what better place to begin than in a truly PUBLIC school system?
Leslie Hittner says:
February 21, 2012 at 8:28 pm
Michael,
I have no argument with that. the problem with many large conventional districts is that they have a very lot of institutional inertia to overcome when changing directions - even a little bit.