New Reports Question Education Strategy Pushed by Trump Administration
Donald Trump pushes expanding parental choice among schools as the way to help children learn. Parental choice defined as tuition vouchers for children to carry to private schools, more charter schools which are publicly funded but privately operated, and tuition tax credits of various sorts by which parents can apply the money they would have paid in taxes to pay for privatized education.
The thing is that private schools, on the whole, don’t do a better job than public schools. Chris and Sarah Lubienski, professors of education at the University of Illinois discovered evidence of this when they were studying mathematics achievement as measured by test scores: “We were both skeptical when we first saw the initial results: public schools appeared to be attaining higher levels of mathematics performance than demographically comparable private and charter schools—and math is thought to be a better indicator of what is taught by schools than, say, reading, which is often more influenced directly and indirectly by experiences in the home… But after further investigation and more targeted analyses, the results held up. And they held up… even when we used different models and variables in the analyses… (T)he data show that the more regulated public school sector embraces more innovative and effective professional practices, while independent schools often use their greater autonomy to avoid such reforms, leading to curricular stagnation. (The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, pp. xvii-xviii)
In a November policy brief for the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, Frank Adamson compares international test results from nations with strong public school systems like Finland, Cuba and Canada with school systems that have experimented significantly with New Reports Question Education Strategy Pushed by Trump Administration | janresseger: