Paul T. Hill

Home Schooling and the Future of Public Education

Home schooling, not a present threat to public education, is nonetheless one of the forces that will change it. If the high estimates of the number of children in home schools—1.2 million or higher—is correct, then the home schooling universe is larger than the New York City public school system and roughly the size of the Los Angeles and Chicago public school systems combined. Even if the real number of home schoolers is more like 500,000, fewer than the lowest current estimate, there are more children home schooling than in charter schools and public voucher programs combined.1 Home schooling is not a new phenomenon, but a very old one. In Colonial days, families, including wealthy ones, educated their children at home, combining the efforts of parents, tutors, and older children. The rural one-room schoolhouse was created by families that banded together to hire a teacher who could substitute for parents but would still use the same mixture of direct instruction, tutoring, and mentoring by older students. PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, 75(1&2), 20–31 Copyright

CHARTER SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT STUDIES

A study on charter school performance always makes for a good news story. Unfortunately, like many press reports on medicine and other scientific issues, stories about student achievement in charter schools are premature and often misleading. Americans are just now starting to ask tough questions about the effectiveness of particular schools and to keep and analyze the hard data needed. Studies done to date are perfectly good as rough early efforts to answer a very hard question. But they don’t have the scientific or policy significance the press, and sometimes their authors, claim they do. As part of our work for the National Charter School Research Program, we analyzed every study published since 2000 on the link between students’ attending charter schools and academic achievement. We identified only 41 studies focusing on test scores, of which we were able to obtain copies of 40. None report on longer-term results like persistence in school success at the next level of education, graduation rates, or college attendance. Though 40 states and the District of Columbia have charter laws, the available research covers schools in only 13 states, with 5 studies on California, 4 on Texas, and 3 on Florida. Because state laws are so different, and charter schools differ from state to state in mission, funding, size, grade-level coverage, and independence from regulations and teacher contracts, the absence of evidence from many states makes it impossible to make definitive statements about charter schools in general.

The Charter School Catch-22

When charter schools first emerged nearly two decades ago, critics claimed they would promote segregation by serving privileged white students whose families take advantage of choice. But state laws, philanthropists, and charter school founders targeted these new schools to serve disadvantaged students in urban districts. Critics then tried to show that charter schools serve fewer poor and minority students than neighboring public schools. In fact, enrollment variations by neighborhood appear to be no differently distributed in charter schools than in district-run schools. Now, critics claim charter schools worsen segregation by serving too high a proportion of minority students, essentially making the charter movement a civil rights failure for failing to achieve racially mixed schools. Authors Hill and Lake argue that there is a more important civil rights issue: ensuring good schools and opportunities for high school, college, and beyond for poor and minority students. As charter schools further develop and succeed, they will likely attract a more diverse population of students. In the meantime, their success in serving the most disadvantaged students should be cause for praise, not criticism.

Standards and Accountability in Washington State

In the early 1990s, Washington State was in the vanguard of the standards movement. Democratic governor Booth Gardner and leaders of the Washington Roundtable?a coalition of business leaders? agreed to press for a comprehensive statewide education reform package modeled after Kentuckys. David Hornbeck, who drafted the Kentucky con sent decree that started the standards-based reform movement, advised on drafting of the states reform bill. An omnibus reform package was passed in early 1993. By 1994, the National Business Roundtable rated Washington as one of four states that had enacted the most complete standards-based reform program. Washington political and business leaders intended to transform public education from a bureaucracy controlled by mandates and enforced compli ance into a performance-based system. They envisioned standards-based reform as a rational approach to improving public education. They sought to set standards that define what children need to know and be able to do, develop measurement systems to test performance against those standards, help schools find and use methods of instruction effective enough to allow them to meet the standards, give schools the freedom of action necessary to adjust their methods of instruction to meet student needs, and reward schools that meet standards and punish those that do not. Like proponents of standards-based reform in other states, Washington State policy and business leaders assumed that establishment of a perfor mance-based system would change the behavior of teachers, parents, school administrators, and students.1 Teachers and parents, informed by the stan 199

Spending Money When It Is Not Clear What Works

Public school funding in the United States is not a product of intelligent design. Funding programs have grown willy-nilly based on political entrepreneurship, interest group pressure, and intergovernmental competition. Consequently, now that Americans feel the need to educate all children to high standards, no one knows for sure how money is used or how it might be used more effectively. This article shows that Americans can learn how to make more effective use of the money available for public schools. But to do so, states and localities must keep careful track of how money is spent; how children are taught and by whom; and what programs, schools, and teachers are most and less productive. Foundations should sponsor rigorous development and testing of new instructional programs, and every level of government should permit experimentation with alternative uses of funds, reproduce effective schools and programs, and abandon ineffective ones.

Educational Accountability in a Regulated Market.

Public debate about school choice is often polarized between those who favor and oppose total free markets in education. However, the serious intellectual work on choice focuses on more moderate alternatives that involve a mixture of public and private accountability. A regulated market model of educational accountability would mix government regulation, options for families, and entrepreneurship on the supply side. It would sustain a role for government in licensing schools, protecting children, punishing misrepresentation, and ensuring free flow of information. This article shows how a regulated market in education would work and how one could be created.

The Supply Side of Choice.

For the last two decades, the struggle over school choice has focused on freeing up parents to choose. It continues to this day, with growing success in the forms of public and private voucher programs, charter school laws in 40 states and the District of Columbia, and state and federal laws that require school districts to offer options for children in failing schools. For a long time, it was so difficult to win freedoms for parents that supplyside questions never came up. In localities like New York City, Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., choice programs were limited to a fraction of all families, and there were enough empty spaces in existing parochial and independent schools to serve most of them. However, as choice programs grow school availability becomes a constraint. In Denver, for example, an open enrollment rule allows every family to choose a public school outside their neighborhood, but the options are so mediocre, and so alike, that few families bother to express a preference. In Seattle, where all families must express a preference, there is no mechanism to create new options. Consequently, hundreds of students are forced to attend schools that were their third or fourth choices.

Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America's Schools@@@Hard Lessons: Public Schools and Privatization

This is a discussion of the heated debate raging on the American nations schools, with proposals ranging from imposing national standards to replacing public education altogether with a voucher system for private schools. This study proposes a solution to the problem by finding a middle ground between these extremes. The book seeks to show how contracting would radically change the way schools are operated, keeping them public and accessible to all, and making them better able to meet standards of achievement and equity. Using public funds, local school boards would select private providers to operate individual schools under formal contracts specifying the type and quality of instruction. The authors also show how contracting would free school boards from operating schools, allowing them to focus on improving educational policy; how it would allow parents to choose the best school for their children; and finally, how it would ensure that schools are held accountable and academic standards are met.