My wife Luana, who's Brazilian, enrolled Monday in Kaplan's intensive English as Second Language (ESL) program, at their campus here on M St. in DC. Yesterday, when she arrived for her first real class, the teacher was maintaining the classroom in complete silence. No hello, no introductions, no icebreaker games, just silence. She then attempted to conduct their entire 150-minute session without actually speaking a word. To top off this bizarre performance, the teacher quit in the middle of the day. And this is what I just paid $400 a week for?
I'm sure that this was an anomaly, but I was still understandably frustrated. The course was not cheap (though I thankfully got it refunded), and Kaplan has a reputation that I was hoping I could trust. As I pondered our apparently poor choice in ESL programs, I started to wonder: when I was shopping around for private English courses, why was quality so hard to determine? In a panel on common standards I attended last year, Neal McCluskey suggested that a truly free educational market would spontaneously converge on its own, superior standards and tests. Where are they in the private ESL world?
The most obvious answer is that good testing is prohibitively expensive, which is why the government really has to be in that business in one way or another. But even as I considered that possibility, I wondered: assuming that schools did offer their value-added ESL test scores, would we be able to make sense of them? Would they tell us which program was best for Luana's needs (she needs to work on her writing), and which teachers to request? I'm only mildly optimistic that they would.
So my insight from my brief foray into school choice is this: in retrospect, when picking an ESL school, I think we actually would have benefited most from alumni feedback. We searched Yelp, Google Local, and RateMyProfessor, but their reviews were incomplete or inconsistent. But if we'd actually been able to connect with other individuals with similar needs, see their ratings of ESL schools in a variety of categories, and look at review trends for a statistically valid sample of alumni, we'd have been vastly more happy with our choice, and probably less likely to request an immediate refund based on a single really bad day. ?I realized that the next generation of the GreatSchools and RateMyProfessor sites ? more detailed, more analytical, more social ? will actually give the school choice movement an enormous boost. Advice is a cheap, plentiful, but priceless resource. We shouldn't underestimate it.
?Mickey Muldoon