Mr. Gibbons' Report Card: Never getting beyond the rhetoric while Americans United fumbles the facts

Jack Schneider and Julian Vasquez-Heilig:

Jack Schneider, an education historian and professor at Holy Cross, is correct that education and education reform are incredibly difficult policy arenas – perhaps even harder than rocket science, as he argues. This complexity is why some education reformers are wrong to think they can improve education by simply by passing another top-down mandate on public schools or by changing a cog in the proverbial ed-machine.

Schneider

But Schneider descends into his own simplistic (and unrealistic) explanation of ed reform, including rhetorical flourishes about baking brownies and launching rockets.

Referencing Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s foray into charter schools, Schneider says imagine “philanthropists deciding to apply lessons from their successes in domains like DVD rentals to ‘disrupt’ the NASA ‘monopoly.’” No billionaire would dare leave their area of expertise (like DVD rentals) to disrupt something as complicated as NASA, so why do that to education, Schneider appears to argue.

Yet private corporations like Virgin Galactic (founded by a guy with a record label), Blue Origin (founded by an online retailer) and Space X (founded by a cyber-cashier) are “disrupting” space exploration at this very moment.

Not surprisingly then, Schneider makes a fairly poor defense of school choice when he plays “Devil’s advocate” on his blog, “Beyond the Rhetoric,” as part of a discussion about vouchers and segregation with Julian Vasquez-Heilig, the director of the Doctorate in Educational Leadership at Sacramento State.

Vasquez-Heilig

Schneider offered no resistance to Heilig’s slippery slope argument that vouchers will lead to socio-economic segregation. (Isn’t the current school zone system already segregated that way?) He fails to correct Heilig’s misstatement that “current case law suggests that private schools are able to discriminate based on race.” (They cannot; see Runyon v. McCrary). Worse still, both agree vouchers have a “sordid” racial history, without any recognition of the very real racist history of public education in America.

Grade: Needs Improvement

Oklahoma Office of Juvenile Affairs

According to the Oklahoma state agency handling juvenile corrections, half of the children under its supervision have been suspended from school for a year or longer. To ensure they continue to receive an education, and even work toward re-integrating them back into public schools, the agency wants to found and operate charter schools.

“I’m not being critical of the school districts. I think they’ve tried hard and done a reasonably good job. (But) I think it can be more effective,” Keith Wilson, the agency’s executive director, told The Oklahoman.

School districts are not happy with the idea (they provide education services at the facilities), so the agency will have to turn to the state education department to sponsor the charter school.

I’m intrigued that a government agency wants to run a charter school. I also think it’s worth a try.

Grade: Satisfactory

Americans United for Separation of Church and State

Last week Americans United received a “Needs Improvement” for getting a basic, but very important, fact wrong about a legal case they are involved with in Florida. This week AU’s Vanessa Wolbrink writes a blog post with a laundry list of errors about the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

• AU provides a PDF with cherry-picked stats about the research on the D.C. program. It ignores the massive improvements in graduation rates and fails to mention that the lack of difference in student achievement in the final report occurred, in part, because about half of the control group (non-voucher users) ended up using school choice to attend charters and private schools anyway.
• AU claims a report found D.C. “lacked sufficient oversight,” but that report was about problems with multiple bureaucracies overseeing the program, not with the regs themselves.
• AU says vouchers “do not actually help students who need it most,” but the referenced research by the U.S. Department of Education doesn’t say that. The report found 64 percent of students from public schools labeled “in need of improvement” accepted the voucher, compared to 73 percent from non-failing public schools. That doesn’t tell us if the students are truly in need of help or not, because we don’t know their achievement level prior to being offered a voucher. The fact is, students can struggle at good schools too.
• AU says the program is “unpopular” because less than 5 percent of eligible students choose it, but the U.S. Department of Education says it is “impossible to determine” why eligible families don’t apply for the program or don’t accept the scholarship if one is offered.
• AU claims “the program isn’t reaching disadvantaged families,” but the program is limited to families at or below 185 percent of the poverty level ($41,348 for a family of four).

Grade: Needs Improvement

Update: Schneider appears to support limited public school choice. Read his latest discussion with Vasquez-Heilig on public school choice here.