The Education Gadfly Weekly

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute
October 2007

Two findings in a new report commissioned by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute probably will not--sadly--come as much of a surprise: 1) many parents just aren't that engaged in their children's education, for reasons ranging from illness and job demands to lack of literacy skills and just plain apathy, and 2) parents who utilize school choice in urban areas usually do so for reasons other than academics. A third finding is more unexpected: parental involvement has not driven the substantive education reform that many had hoped for and the capacity for parent-driven reform is more limited than previously predicted, at least in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) district.

The study by David Dodenhoff included parents who exercised choice to select a school within Milwaukee Public Schools or a neighboring public district, not parents who select charter schools or use vouchers for private school. Although parent-driven reform did not produce the expected academic results, Dodenhoff does not call for the abandonment of open enrollment policies or intra-district choice efforts. Instead, he calls on the district to realize the full potential of parental involvement by getting more families involved in education choice and improving the information and resources available to parents. The report also suggests that MPS should embrace more radical reforms to achieve the changes it wants and needs--but does not identify what those reforms might be.

There is an underlying message in this report that is applicable to Ohio as parents exercise choice through charter schools and the state's voucher program. Parents will continue to make education decisions for their children based on factors like safety, school proximity to  home, loyalty to the school (I went to school there so it's good enough for my child) rather than on academic performance.

Policymakers and school choice advocates need to realize once and for all that school choice needs standards and accountability to deliver both market acceptance and academic improvements. School choice without standards and accountability will not close the achievement gap nor ultimately improve the life chances of children in the neediest schools and school districts.

The Ohio teacher misconduct scandal is moving forward in predictable ways with the governor and the General Assembly scrambling to do something, the state teacher unions asking them not to go too far, and the Ohio Department of Education and various local school boards looking befuddled at best.

Once the state resolves the current mess over tracking teacher child molesters, however, we need to learn a lot more about the other 99.99 percent of the Buckeye State's 150,000+ teachers. For example, exactly how well do they teach? How much do they actually affect their students' learning? We've got no real quantifiable evidence in Ohio to answer these questions. But, we know that teachers are the key to a better education system, a goal that seems to have eluded the educational policy in most industrialized countries, according to a new survey searching for common threads in the world's most effective school systems.

The British publication The Economist (see here) reports on a new survey by McKinsey & Company, an internationally renowned consulting group, that examines top-of-the-heap school systems like those in Canada, Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. McKinsey reports schools in these countries do three things right: attract the best and brightest into teaching, get the best out of teachers, and intervene when students start falling behind. This isn't rocket science but most of the world's school systems don't do it. Studies in Tennessee and Dallas, according to The Economist, also have shown that teacher quality is the most significant school factor on student learning.

The world's top-performing education systems do not necessarily pay teachers gobs of money, but they make sure teaching is seen as a high-status profession. That enables South Korea to recruit primary-school teachers from the top 5 percent of graduates, Singapore and Hong Kong from the top 30 percent. Contrast this to the United States where teachers often come from the bottom third of college graduates.

Countries with top education systems also intensely train teachers after they're hired. Singapore provides 100 hours of training a year. Senior teachers oversee professional development in each school. In Japan and Finland, groups of teachers visit each others' classrooms and plan lessons together. This idea is taking root in the United States. Teachers in Boston schools arrange class schedules so teachers of the same subjects have free time for common planning. In Ohio, the same idea is used in the Granville schools in Licking County, among other districts.

And, according to McKinsey, in the most successful countries teachers intervene early when students look like they're in trouble. Finland has as many as one teacher in seven providing remedial help in some schools. A third of the pupils may get one-on-one lessons, according to The Economist.

McKinsey's conclusions are optimistic: "getting good teachers depends on how you select and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind."

Ohioans continue to vote for charter schools with their feet. Ohio had 76,500 students--4 percent of the state's public school population and the sixth-largest number in nation--enrolled in charter schools, according to the latest rankings from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (see here).

Note: the Ohio Department of Education counts a few more students--76,966 last year and 77,223 in the current school year. Both figures compare with about 60,000 students just two years ago.

The first charter school opened its doors in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1992 and this year about 1.2 million students are enrolled in 4,200 charter schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia. That is up from 1.16 million in about 3,900 schools in the 2006-2007 school year.

Five Ohio cities made the top-10 list of cities with the highest charter-school enrollment. Those cities, with enrollment percentages, are Dayton (27 percent), Youngstown (23 percent), Toledo (18 percent), Cleveland and Cincinnati (17 percent), and Columbus (13 percent).

Enrollment has grown rapidly and reports this year of violence in Cleveland and Toledo and among rival students at Columbus high schools don't help parental unease with public district schools. In Columbus, an estimated 4 percent of public school students attended charters just four years ago.

In Cincinnati, however, school leaders indicate that, while public schools continue to lose students, the drop is not as fast as in previous years because of a leveling off of students moving to charters (see here). The Cincinnati Enquirer reported public district school enrollment of 34,796 students, down 2 percent from the preceding year but less than the 3 percent annual average decline since 2001. This doesn't come as a surprise considering Ohio has a cap on the start-up of new charter schools.

Nationally, New Orleans led the nation with 57 percent of its students enrolled in charter schools, while Dayton, Southfield, Michigan, and Washington, D.C., tied for second. In Dayton, about 6,000 students are enrolled in charter schools, compared to 16,000 in the district.

Other key findings from the report: 32 percent of the respondents reported mandating increased instructional time over their public district contemporaries. And, among reporting charter schools, the average per-pupil cost was $7,155 and the average revenue per-pupil was $6,585, forcing charters to raise funds to bridge the gap. That compares with an average per-student expenditure for district schools in fiscal year 2004 of $8,310 and revenue of $9,518.

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute
October 2007

Two findings in a new report commissioned by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute probably will not--sadly--come as much of a surprise: 1) many parents just aren't that engaged in their children's education, for reasons ranging from illness and job demands to lack of literacy skills and just plain apathy, and 2) parents who utilize school choice in urban areas usually do so for reasons other than academics. A third finding is more unexpected: parental involvement has not driven the substantive education reform that many had hoped for and the capacity for parent-driven reform is more limited than previously predicted, at least in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) district.

The study by David Dodenhoff included parents who exercised choice to select a school within Milwaukee Public Schools or a neighboring public district, not parents who select charter schools or use vouchers for private school. Although parent-driven reform did not produce the expected academic results, Dodenhoff does not call for the abandonment of open enrollment policies or intra-district choice efforts. Instead, he calls on the district to realize the full potential of parental involvement by getting more families involved in education choice and improving the information and resources available to parents. The report also suggests that MPS should embrace more radical reforms to achieve the changes it wants and needs--but does not identify what those reforms might be.

There is an underlying message in this report that is applicable to Ohio as parents exercise choice through charter schools and the state's voucher program. Parents will continue to make education decisions for their children based on factors like safety, school proximity to  home, loyalty to the school (I went to school there so it's good enough for my child) rather than on academic performance.

Policymakers and school choice advocates need to realize once and for all that school choice needs standards and accountability to deliver both market acceptance and academic improvements. School choice without standards and accountability will not close the achievement gap nor ultimately improve the life chances of children in the neediest schools and school districts.