Choosing More Than Choice

In opening his City Journal article “School choice isn’t enough”, Sol Stern is careful to assert that he resolutely supports the practice of giving tuition vouchers in order to promote educational independence. Indeed, he states that tuition vouchers’ competition-based ideology would be key in forcing public schools to improve, at the risk of losing their students to, say, urban Catholic schools. Stern muses: “Since competition worked in other areas, wouldn’t it lead to progress in education too?”

Stern answers his own question in the remainder of the article, first by acknowledging the recent failures that have been wrought by the tuition voucher system. For example, he cites the most recent crushing defeat of voucher program proposals which took place in Utah, by a margin of 62 percent to 38 percent. Further contributing to dire prognosis for voucher prospects is the Catholic schools’ burgeoning financial crisis, which would make it difficult for such prospects to materialize.

Since the first voucher program was established in Milwaukee 15 years ago, the meticulously scrutinized programs have heralded both academic and social benefits for voucher students. This, Stern emphasizes, justifies the vouchers’ moral and civil rights arguments. The voucher programs have since been the weapon of choice for the so-called “incentivists,” whose ideology is essentially capitalism translated into the classroom. Fittingly, incentivists stringently rely on the market’s “invisible hand” in prompting much needed improvement in public schools by way of competition and, naturally, incentive.

However, evidence that competition from vouchers has improved the condition of the nation’s public schools remains negligible. Stern notes that, upon reporting on the Milwaukee voucher experiment in 1999, initial indications suggested that competition was indeed garnering positive results from the local public schools. One prime indicator of this improvement was the dramatic improvement in test score particularly among those schools under the highest threat of losing pupils to vouchers.

Since this initial promising examination, the situation has dramatically worsened. Milwaukee’s public schools still produce dismal graduation rates and low achievement scores, with test scores having plummeted following their brief climb. Although voucher students continue to benefit, the public school system remains stubbornly resistant to progress, therefore indicating that competition does not necessarily translate to automatic improvement within the educational realm.

Although the “incentivist” approach continues to steadfastly hold the reins of educational reform, it is facing an increasingly assertive challenge from the “instructionalist” approach. The instructionalists aver that the most telling methods of educational reform are improvement in teaching and curriculum change. In other words, instructionalists maintain that it is important to penetrate the core of the system in order to instigate lasting change. This is, as Stern indicates, a far cry from the ideologically-based proposal that is wielded by the incentivists. A concrete solution to a concrete problem.

Stern cites Massachusetts as a shining example of school reform, going so far as to say that “something close to an education miracle has occurred.” Among the components of the Massachusetts school system’s sterling improvement rate are:

1) in recent years, Massachusetts has marked an improvement in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests superior to those of almost every other state,

2) in 2007, it received top scores in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading,

3) the rate of improvement of the state’s average scale scores is far higher than that of most other states during the course of the past 15 years.

After listing these impressive statistics, Stern drops the bombshell: “The improvement had nothing to do with market incentives. Massachusetts has no vouchers, no tuition tax credit, very few charter schools, and no market incentives for principals and teachers.” Stern identifies the state’s key educational leaders, including John Silber and Sandra Stotsky, as instructionalists who push for, among other things, a uniformly rigorous curriculum and a comprehensive exit exam for prospective high school graduates. Stern quotes Stotsky as saying: “The lesson from Massachusetts is that a strong content-based curriculum…can be the best recipe for improving students’ academic achievement.” Therefore, Stern’s own concluding opinion clearly follows suit, having morphed from a strictly incentivist stance to one that places the greatest emphasis on the raw basics of education: teaching style and curriculum.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Stern’s argument is his immediate acknowledgement of the appeal that the incentivist educational approach carries, particularly for a nation that feels largely indebted to capitalism. In theory it makes perfect sense: create a strong aura of competition between public schools and voucher schools, and the public schools will fight back by bettering the quality of education. Stern, a previous adherent of the incentivist viewpoint, now touts a more moderate stance, and uses recent examples of voucher-based failures and instructionalist triumphs as basis for his argument. He does not discard the importance of the voucher-based program for assisting students in need; rather, he maintains that this program does nothing to improve conditions for those students who remain in the public schools. The quality of public schools remains relatively low, demonstrating that the original problem remains unchanged.

Louisa Tavlas is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.