Conservative think tank finds school choice does not improve schools

Choice may not improve schools, study says / Report on MPS comes from longtime supporter of plan

By ALAN J. BORSUK

Posted: Oct. 23, 2007

Link: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=678202&format=print

Some quotes:

"A study being released today suggests that school choice isn't a powerful tool for driving educational improvement in Milwaukee Public Schools.

But more surprising than the conclusion is the organization issuing the study: the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank that has supported school choice for almost two decades, when Milwaukee became the nation's premier center for trying the idea. The institute is funded in large part by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an advocate of school choice.

"The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find," George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper's first sentence.

"We had expected to find a wellspring of hope that increased parental involvement in the Milwaukee Public Schools would be the key ingredient in improving student performance," Lightbourn wrote. But "there are realistic limits on the degree to which parental involvement can drive market-based reform in Milwaukee."

Even some of the most ardent supporters of school choice in Milwaukee have seen that the purest version of the idea - in which there is little government oversight of schools, and parental decisions in a free market dictate which schools thrive - does not square with the reality of what happened in Milwaukee when something close to such a system existed.

That reality can be summed up in two phrases: "bad schools" and "little change." "

______________________

"Howard Fuller, the most prominent supporter of voucher and charter schools in Milwaukee, has changed his position toward agreeing that government oversight of voucher schools is needed. In a recent interview for a workshop of the national Education Writers Association, Fuller said empowering parents to make good choices, improving student performance and creating good schools were proving to be much harder achievements than many once thought."

______________________________

Methodology of the study

The report did not analyze actual data from MPS or interviews or surveys with MPS parents. Instead, it used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Education analyzing decision-making by parents from different social and economic groups when it comes to school selection for their children and how they are involved in their children's schools. The report applies that data to MPS parents, assuming the same percentages of parents use the same methods of choosing.

The overall conclusion: Only 10% of MPS parents make school choices by a process that involves considering at least two schools and that brings academic performance data from a school into the choice.

"Given this number, it seems unlikely that MPS schools are feeling the pressure of a genuine educational marketplace," wrote the report's author, researcher David Dodenhoff.

_________________________

_____

In the conclusion of his report, Dodenhoff wrote: "Relying on public school choice and parental involvement to reclaim MPS may be a distraction from the hard work of fixing the district's schools. . . . The question is whether the district, its schools and its supporters in Madison are prepared to embrace reforms more radical than public school choice and parental involvement."