Does competition from private and charter schools improve the performance of traditional public schools? Or make the traditional public schools worse?
The answer might depend on what you mean by “performance”.
Last week, three education economics scholars published in Education Next an examination of the effects of competition from private schools accepting Florida’s tax credit scholarship program on the performance of students in neighboring district elementary and middle schools on the state’s standardized reading and math tests, as well as on suspension and absence rates. The conclusion the authors stated in Education Next was unequivocal: “we find broad and growing benefits for students at local public schools as the school-choice program scales up. In particular, students who attend neighborhood schools with higher levels of market competition have lower rates of suspensions and absences and higher test scores in reading and math”. That is, competition is a win.
But parents and students expect much more from schools than high standardized test scores and low suspension and absence rates. In his book Charter School City on the post-Katrina all-charter K-12 ecosystem in New Orleans, Doug Harris pointed out that the arts – and perhaps other non-basic aspects of schooling – had taken a hit in the city’s system, which was the perhaps the purest large-scale example of K-12 competition seen at the time:
Government contracts require objective measures, which almost by definition align best to the most basic content and teaching strategies. Teachers had to teach like their school’s contract depended on it, but that can also work against the ultimate goal – what is best for students. By forcing schools to focus on what could be measured, the reformers may have lost sight of equally important outcomes that are harder to measure, such as the city’s rich tradition in the arts, making schooling uninspiring for students and teaching less attractive to the most skilled teachers.
In Florida, which is ranked number 1 on the Center for Education Reform’s “Parent Power!” index for school choice, the rates at which public high school students take physics and calculus – the upper-level courses recommended by university faculty and professional organizations to prepare for a wide range of college STEM majors – are far below the national rates. In fact, students in Florida take high school physics at only about half the national rate, and one-sixth of the state’s large (>1,000 students) public high schools weren’t even teaching physics in the fall of 2020. High school physics enrollment in Florida’s public high schools has been declining since 2014.
In fact, Florida’s 8th grade math NAEP results are frustratingly weak, as are the state’s math SAT results.
None of this looks like great “performance” for the number 1 school choice state in the nation.
To be sure, the featured graph in the Education Next article is interesting. For fear of violating the Education Next copyright, I’ve included below a version of the figure from the same authors’ working paper on the same subject. The argument underlying the figure, which shows a number of metrics of school “success” as a function of year for schools that are subject to a high degree of competition from private schools, is that the positive effects of competition on students in the district schools grew over time.
I am not an economist nor a scholar of educational policy. Alas, I am only an old nuclear physicist. So the reader should be excused for taking what I am about to say as the rant of an old crank. But the authors of the competition study may be guilty of being unable to see the forest for the trees. The authors zero in on a small subset of schools that are in neighborhoods with unusually large concentrations of private schools (or even churches) and heavily weight standardized tests on math and reading that students take when they are nine and thirteen years old. In doing so, they have missed the point that in the top ranked state for school choice in the nation high school graduates are very weak in mathematics in general, and the rate at which high school students pursue excellence in math and science is very much lower than it is in the nation at large. And as a result, the rate at which the state graduates bachelors’ degrees in science and engineering fields is in the lower third of the states.
This shortcoming in STEM fields may not have been caused by Florida’s school choice policies. But school choice has not solved this performance problem – and it’s likely there many other performance issues that have not improved during the rise of school choice in Florida. It’s important to keep that conclusion front and center.
Bridge to Tomorrow 