Unanticipated Results from Study of School "Choice"

Interesting results from a study about school "choice" in Milwaukee and its effects on school improvement.

Maria

Choice may not improve schools, study says

Report on MPS comes from longtime supporter of plan

By ALAN J. BORSUK
aborsuk@journalsentinel.com

Posted: Oct. 23, 2007

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."

Bad schools: A Journal Sentinel investigative report in 2005 of the
then-115 schools in the voucher program found that about 10% showed
startling signs of weak operations. In short, many parents were
choosing bad schools and sticking with them. Escalated government
oversight of schools' business practices and a new requirement that
all voucher schools be accredited by an outside organization have
played roles in putting most of those schools out of business.

Little change: Milwaukee has been a national laboratory for school
reform such as the voucher program, yet there is little evidence that
it has yielded substantially improved academic results - at least so
far. Test scores in MPS, especially for 10th-graders, have been
generally flat for years. The record of the voucher schools is
unclear, though results from a major study of the program are supposed
to begin coming soon.

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.

Asked whether the voucher program was leading to improvements in the
achievement of MPS students, as was once expected, Fuller said: "I'm
one of those people who believes that we may have oversold that point.
. . . I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there
hasn't been the deep, wholesale improvement in MPS that we would have
thought."

Fuller said he remains a strong supporter of school choice, but he now
has a more realistic understanding of what it can accomplish.
Lightbourn also said he and the institute remain committed to school
choice as a principle, but other reforms clearly are needed to drive
major improvement in the success of Milwaukee students.

Methodology of the study

The new report focuses on parental choice within MPS, including
parents who select schools within MPS or who use the state's open
enrollment law to send their children to public schools in the
suburbs. It does not discuss parents who select private schools in the
publicly funded voucher program or charter schools that are not
affiliated with MPS.

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.

Dodenhoff also concluded that parental involvement in MPS schools is
low - he estimated that 34% of MPS parents could be considered "highly
involved" in their children's schools. And he said his conclusions
were probably on the high side because people tend to give the "right"
answers when asked questions such as whether they are involved
parents, even when the answers are untrue.

In an interview, Dodenhoff, who has written other reports for the
institute, said that while it would be better to base conclusions on
data directly about Milwaukee parents, coming up with numbers by
applying national data locally was a defensible approach. He said his
results squared with what people involved in Milwaukee schools told
him were their best estimates of parental involvement.

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."

He did not specify what those reforms might be.

Options within MPS

Parents have numerous school choices within MPS. Each winter, the
district offers a "three-choice" registration period to parents whose
children will attend a new school the following fall. The process
allows parents to pick first, second and third preferences for
schools, and a large majority of people get the first choice.

The range of choices has been reduced somewhat in recent years,
largely with a goal of holding down busing costs, but it has been
difficult for MPS to persuade people to enroll in neighborhood
schools, despite a neighborhood school initiative launched in 2000.

Nonetheless, whether parents use the choices to pick schools that are
academically the best ones for their children is unknown.

MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos responded to the report in a
statement, saying: "We believe that there are many reasons why parents
choose a school. When we review parental choice in our district, we
see that parents pass up high-quality schools in their neighborhoods
for schools with lower academic performance outside their
neighborhoods. When that happens, we wonder why those parents choose a
school. Parents do make informed choices, but those choices have more
to do with talking with their relatives and neighbors than with
looking at data on academic performance."

Lightbourn said the conclusions of the report probably were relevant
to how parents make choices for private schools in the voucher
program, though Dodenhoff was reluctant to say how applicable the
conclusions were to voucher parents.

Lightbourn said, "We should continue to encourage parental involvement
in choosing for their children and for (parents) to be actively
involved in choosing based on academic criteria."

But he added, "If they're not picking on academic criteria, the impact
of choice will be minimized."

About 87,000 students are attending more than 200 schools in MPS this
year, at an average cost of more than $11,000 per student. Voucher
program figures have not been released yet but are expected to show
that about 18,000 students are attending more than 120 private schools
in the city, with the state generally providing the schools about
$6,500 for each student.