Caveat Emptor
I’ve talked a lot about testing, because the testing monster eats through everything in education these days: third graders don’t get to be fourth graders; seniors don’t get to graduate; teachers are labeled ineffective; schools are labeled failing to make adequate progress… all based on hitting a number on a standardized test.
But just as pernicious is another pillar of the corporate school model: privatization, the commercial concept of market “choice”. You know how this one goes. Our schools should be in the “business” of competing for their market share of “customers”. Economic theory (in theory) says competition forces services and products to improve at a more efficient price to attract more customers. So, say the corporate school reformers, “why shouldn’t it work in education?” Good schools will attract more kids and money will follow the kids. Bad schools will lose customers, lose money, and eventually go out of business. Standardized tests come into the picture here because just as companies are measured by market share, profitability and stock value, “in theory”, schools should be graded based on standardized test scores and their ability to compete for customers—I mean students.
Those enthralled by the myth that competition in and of itself will magically improve education quality, while simultaneously reducing cost should be aware of another principle that is more accurate: caveat emptor.
Let the buyer beware.
Vouchers, franchise charters, and even public school choice have been around decades now. Competition has not produced the vast improvements that the mystical invisible hand of the market place promised. In his review of a voucher study purporting to show that competition leads to better public school outcomes, Professor Christopher Lubienski found that existing research provides “little reliable information about the competitive impact of vouchers.” Well, competition zealots may defend themselves saying there isn’t true competition here because we don’t have universal choice and public schools are protected from the fiscal impact of the limited choice we do have.
But Chile has universal vouchers, and a study of that system found “no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes as measured by test scores, repetition rates, and years of schooling.”
As part of its analysis of the 2012 PISA results, the OECD looked at the impact of competition, and found that “within school systems, there is no performance difference between schools that compete with other schools for students and those that do not, after taking into account students’ socio-economic status.”
It’s bad enough that we upend a system for something that doesn’t deliver anything better, but the evidence now shows it actually makes things worse. The unintended consequences of turning public schools into businesses that fight for the “best” customers can harm students. In Chile, competition has produced a stratified and segregated educational system. In their study of education reform in New Zealand (-When Schools Compete), Professors Helen Ladd and Edward Fiske found that competition concentrated the best teachers in the schools that attracted the most advantaged students, and schools became increasingly segregated by class and ethnicity. The PISA study I previously mentioned affirmed that when affluent families opt out of the neighborhood school, competition increases socio-economic segregation. That’s not good for kids, and it’s even worse for social stability.
Closer to home, a recent study of competition in New Orleans found that when schools compete for students, those schools might work to improve instructional strategies, but they are just as likely to seek niche markets that attract high-achieving students (and simultaneously discourage enrollment of low-achieving students), or even to actively exclude students who might cost more to educate than their enrollment would generate, or who might reduce Improving education is a cooperative process: