The Controversy Over Competition
The Future of School Choice
Harvard Political Review
By Will Leiter and Will Ruben
April 10, 2007
There is a strong consensus that American education is in need of systematic reform, but no comparable consensus on what that change should be. An increasingly popular set of alternatives are market-based school choice programs, which promise a wholesale shift in the education system by establishing competing school options for parents to choose from. School choice programs consist of a number of different market-based alternatives, most notably vouchers and charter schools. Despite their differences, both vouchers and charters have encountered substantial challenges in demonstrating their effectiveness. Yet most significantly, charter schools have received comparatively tempered resistance from teachers' unions and have seemed avoid the political challenges posed by an American culture that cherishes public education. Although charter schools will encounter substantial obstacles to their implementation, they seem to represent the future of the school choice movement.
Why School Choice?
Market-based education solutions have garnered support by promising to replace the current public education system with an incentive-based system. In an interview with the HPR, Neal McCluskey, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, characterized America’s education system as a monopoly; most parents are presented with one option for their children’s education, public schools, instead of multiple competing options. McCluskey went on to argue that, in this monopoly system, there is “no reason to expect improvement because there are no real negative consequences if schools don’t improve.” In a market of competitive education options, the incentive for performance is student attendance.
While sharing the goal of introducing incentives, charters and vouchers utilize different mechanisms to achieve this goal. Charter schools are run independently of the public school system but still receive public funding by operating under a contract, or charter, with a government agency. Parents can opt to send their child to a charter by entering a lottery for admission. Ethan Gray, an education researcher and former research assistant at Education Sector, an independent education think-tank, told the HPR that charter schools are based on the principle of “increased flexibility for increased accountability.” Alternatively, vouchers provide flexibility by giving parents a coupon to finance their child’s education at the school of their choice, including private schools and religious schools.
Lack of ‘Conclusively Positive Evidence’
Despite creating greater flexibility, both charters and vouchers have had difficulty garnering widespread support due to the lack of proof of their effectiveness. Ruth Wattenberg, assistant to the vice president of the American Federation of Teachers and editor of American Educator, told the HPR, “There is no conclusively positive evidence for either voucher experiments or privatization experiments.” McCluskey believes that such scant evidence is a result of the small scale of current voucher and charter programs. Additionally, it is difficult for charter schools to demonstrate widespread success because, according to Gray, “nothing ties one charter school to another other than the mechanism through which it was authorized.” Vouchers have a similar problem in that the schools are brought together only by their acceptance of state coupons for funding.
Roadblocks: The Unions and the Public
By remaining publicly funded and monitored, charter schools receive less resistance from teachers’ unions than voucher programs. Two powerful teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, have expressed stiff resistance to choice expansion, at least partially because vouchers and charters permit schools to hire teachers outside of collective bargaining agreements. Their opposition to school choice, however, is more nuanced than it may appear. Wattenberg told the HPR that, while the AFT is “opposed to vouchers,” it sees charters as “an important part of the options that are available to communities.” Yet Wattenberg elaborated on her assessment of charters, arguing that they can become “a cover for a union-free environment.” While charters are unlikely to find strong support form unions, according to Paul Reville, director of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, they at least represent “a kind of political compromise” and are a “less difficult pill for the unions to swallow.”
The American public also views charters more favorably than vouchers. McCluskey said that many Americans embrace a “mythology that public schools have built their country” and consider public education “as American as hot dogs or apple pie.” Public perception, therefore, is a significant problem for vouchers, which Gray said, “evoke images of privatization” and can be viewed as inconsistent with American values. The dual obstacles of stronger union opposition and public uneasiness leave vouchers with less opportunity for expansion than charters. Thus, in the long run, voucher programs face political challenges that are likely to be insurmountable, while charter schools should be able to overcome their opposition with sufficient political will.
The Expansion of Charter Schools
In the near future, therefore, the expansion of charter schools is the most likely path for the school choice movement. Recently, charters have picked up momentum by receiving a virtual endorsement from the 2006 Report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, entitled Tough Choices or Tough Times, which proposes a system of publicly funded “contract schools,” closely resembling charter programs. The expansion of charter schools, however, is sure to be a slow process. Betsy Brown Ruzzi, a representative of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, told the HPR that America has a “political system of increment.” She stated that this reality hinders charters as they represent “very fundamental shifts.” Paul Reville, director of the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, added that “choice alternatives are premised on the creation of new schools” and that “there [currently] aren’t sufficient choices out there for a wholesale shift.”
A short-term shortage seems inevitable for charters, which, in many states, are also capped in number. While coping with this slow growth, however, charters must still show that they can provide quality options and will need to improve upon their current performance. “It’s going to be a marathon, not a sprint,” McCluskey concluded. However, the effort to change American education is continuing to gain momentum. Reforms will have to be made, and it is likely that charters will be an increasingly substantial part of the solution.
Posted on Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Copyright Harvard Political Review, 2007. All rights reserved.
