Transcript
R. Nessen: Good morning. Welcome to Brookings. My name is Ron Nessen, I'm the Director of Communications, and I want to welcome you to this Forum on Education Issues.
I'll just very briefly tell you about the event and our speakers, and then turn it over to them. The moderator today is going to be Tom Loveless. Tom is the brand new director of the Brown Center on Education Policy here at Brookings, a senior fellow in governmental studies here. He has just joined us from Harvard, the John Kennedy School of Government there, where he was associate professor of public policy. And he has a long record of research on education policy issues, and we welcome you to Brookings and to this important role on an issue that all the polls indicate is the number one issue on the minds of Americans as we head into the election season.
T. Loveless: Thank you.
R. Nessen: You know, at Brookings we sometimes say that this is the place for scholar practitioners, people who come here and study issues in a scholarly way, research and analyze the issues, and then periodically go out and apply their research in the real world. And Tom has really applied his research in the real world because he was a grade school teacher. He taught the sixth grade. So, he really knows education issues from the classroom level up to the scholarly level.
We also have with us today Joe Viteritti. Joe Viteritti is co-chair and director of the program on Education in a Civil Society at New York University, where he is a research professor of public administration in the Robert Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and also an adjunct professor of law in the School of Law at NYU. Joe is the author of a book, this is not what the book will look like when it comes out in a couple of weeks. This was an early copy that we had printed up so that you would have it. If you didn't get a copy, there are plenty of them outside for you to take one on your way out. It's a book about school choice, a scholarly, thoughtful, well-reasoned book on school choice, a very controversial issue and Joe will tell you in more detail his reasoning and why he concludes that a targeted voucher system is the way to assure equality of education opportunities for all American children, regardless of the financial status of their families.
I'm going to turn this meeting over to Tom, who will be the moderator, and also talk to you about his own area of special interest in education, which is tracking, and tell you what his plans are for the Brown Center. He and Joe will talk briefly, and there will be plenty of opportunity for you to ask your questions.
Tom.
T. Loveless: Thank you.
Let me say first that I'm delighted to be here, delighted to be at Brookings. I've been here for three weeks. This is my third week, and I'm down from 30 boxes unpacked in my office to 25 boxes, so I'm making progress. By the end of the year, hopefully I'll be unpacked and all moved in. I'm very happy to be here at Brookings. The history of Brookings and its authoritative voice in public policy is an important one. Education has now risen to the top of the nation's agenda, and it's good that Brookings is now going to assert itself and its reputation in this very important field.
What we want to do at the Brown Center is, over the course of the year, hold three or four of these press briefings, and do a couple of things. One, to introduce you to authors of upcoming books that we're going to publish at Brookings Press, and also to cover a very timely issue. This morning, I would like to tell you of one of the main projects that we have planned for the Brown Center in the upcoming year, and that's the preparation and release of a national report card every September on the nation's schools, and with a particular focus, unlike other kinds of reports like this, focusing specifically on achievement. The focus of the Brown Center will be on academic achievement. And very often what's done is, you'll get, for instance, the kind of release that we had two months ago where a certain spin is put on the scores when they are released. What we would like to do is take a very objective look at all of the data that we have coming in now on student achievement. As you know, about half the states now are testing students and administering tests, so we have a lot of new data coming online where we can really take a look and see, how are kids reading as opposed to how they used to read, how are kids doing in math, how are they doing in the other academic subjects.
So, the report card that we have planned, and the first one will be released next September, September of 2000, in the first week of school. It will consist of three parts. The first part will be this data analysis, and it will be written in prose that anyone can understand, basically. And that will consist of about 15 to 17 pages just saying how are we doing, how are America's kids doing in the academic areas.
The second section of the report will center on a particular theme. One year it may be the achievement of African Americans, where we take a long-term view and look at the achievement of a particular group, let's say, of students, or it may be in a subject, you know, how is math achievement doing over the long-term. So that second section of the report will be focused on a theme, a particular theme.
The third part will be the policy part. And in that section of the report, we will focus on policies around the country that we think are promising, or they're actually bearing positive results, and a positive effect on achievement, having a positive effect on achievement, and we might even single out some that we think are just simply nonsense, that are mostly what I call cotton candy reforms, they're all sort of puffed up and they're sugary sweet, and they're brightly colored, but they don't do much. They're not much of a diet in terms of our children's learning.
So, that's what the report is going to look like. That's what the Brown Center is going to be working on primarily over the next year is the preparation of that report. We will be holding, as I said, more of these press briefings focused to present authors of upcoming books, but also focused on particular topics. We have an event tentatively planned for December 8, which will be entitled Why Isn't Education Research More Like Medical Research, and the question that we will be tackling, we have three or four presenters that day who have looked at this issue, is why don't we do more experimental studies in education? Why don't we have more good controlled experimental studies with random assignment of the students to treatment and control groups? Other fields do this. Education does very little of it. And so, we have some scholars associated with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and with Harvard University, and the three of us, as organizations, are going to be making this presentation on December 8. So I hope you all can attend then.
The other thing we want to do is not spend a whole lot of time talking, so I'm going to stop right now and introduce Joe, so that you can ask questions about anything, the topics that we've talked about, or anything else that may pop into your heads. So, thank you, and I'll be talking in a minute about tracking when Joe is done.
Joe Viteritti.
J. Viteritti: Thank you, Tom.
I was asked today to provide a bit of an update on where we are in the whole debate about school choice, and it just happens to be the topic of a book I just finished that's coming out next month. The title of the book is Choosing Equality, and many of the points I make in the book and that I want to make to you today is that the choice debate is now entering the second generation. What do I mean by the second generation of the choice debate? Well, the first generation of the choice debate was built around a Milton Friedman market model of vouchers, and the vision of schooling that came out of that was a system of schools that was publicly financed but privately run. And those who were the real believers in that model anticipated the end of public education in a significant way.
The issue at the time resonated greatly with conservatives, Libertarians and Republican, but the support of the idea was very limited. In 1990, John Chubb and Terry Moe [sp] published a book out of Brookings which really brought the choice debate into the mainstream and got people in government and in politics talking about it, but until very recently support for the idea of school choice really remained focused among conservatives and Republican.
The second generation of debate, the second model of school choice is what I would call not a market model, but an opportunity model. We are no longer concerned as much with the abstractions of what power the market will have in making education more efficient, but more concerned about how choice can provide alternatives and opportunities for children who are not being well educated. The first voucher plans we've seen was the one in Milwaukee in 1990, and the one in Cleveland in 1999, which were specifically designed to help disadvantaged children and kids who were not being served well.
This year, earlier this year, we saw the State of Florida, at the urging of Governor Bush, create a voucher plan that was designed to target children attending failing schools, and just about a week or two ago, we saw presidential candidate or non-candidate George W. Bush propose that Title I should be reformed so that we invest money in children rather than in failing schools. Again, the target is poor kids and underserved populations.
Choice is no longer a plan that is designed specifically with the demise of public education in mind. Most voucher supporters today also support charter schools, and charter schools are public schools. In terms of sheer number, the most significant form of choice today is what is exists in charter schools. Depending on whose estimates you want to listen to, there are approximately 1,500 to 1,800 charter schools around the country. They exist in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Yes, charters and choice are designed to promote competition and eliminate failing schools, but the main force behind choice today is to provide opportunities for kids who are not being well-served in public schools, traditional public schools.
The most significant constituency for choice today is found in poor and minority communities, and we know that from poll after poll that comes out, whether you look at the Gallup poll or any public agenda polls, the most significant constituency for choice is in poor communities. I think the issue crystallized on August 24, when Judge Solomon Oliver made a very unfortunate decision in Cleveland and decided, at least temporarily to suspend the benefits of the choice program there to 4,000 students the day before school was supposed to be opened.
There I think for all who wanted to see it was a very stark exhibit on just who was benefiting form choice, and who was going to be hurt in a situation where choice was abruptly pulled out. I think the public outcry there was dramatic, and it was very interesting to see candlelight vigils not only in Cleveland but in Florida, in North Carolina, in Washington, in Michigan. I mean, it was a remnant of the old civil rights movement. Indeed, you had poor folks carrying candles and holding vigils and saying, give these kids an opportunity to go to the schools that they really want to go to.
Groups like the ACLU and People for the American Way, who have traditionally been defenders of poor people and their rights and very much associated with a progressive agenda, were on the other side of the debate.
I think the new politics of choice will create and has created a dilemma for the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party has always had a very strong support among minority and poor communities, but it's also very reliant on teacher's unions and other education groups that are opposed to choice. And it will be interesting to see how they deal with this dilemma.
What have been the results of choice so far? Well, one thing we know from the variety of experiments that we've had is that there is a wide range of choice programs around the country right now. I mentioned the charter schools, there are also in addition to the voucher programs that are in Milwaukee and Cleveland, there are private choice programs now being supported by private funding. There are 48,000 kids in the CPO program, and about 40,000 kids in the Children's Scholarship Foundation. It was amazing that earlier this years, when the Children's Scholarship Foundation had a national lottery, 2 million children applied to the opportunity to give up a public education for free, and pay $1000, which was the difference between the amount of the scholarship and the cost of tuition to attend non-public schools.
What have we seen in terms of the results of these schools? The achievement data I think has been encouraging but not definitive. Paul Peterson, who has written several studies that have been published by Brookings, has come out with some encouraging reports. There are counter opinions to that. And academicians have been involved in the debate over the efficacy of public and private schools over the last 20 years, and it's probably not going to be resolved within the next year. But, one of the things that we know for sure is when we ask parents how they feel about the choice programs their in, they like them a lot.
They like the quality of the education, they like the safety of the school, they like the opportunity for parental participation, they like the value structure of the school, whether it be disciplinary code, or whether it be religious orientation of the non-public school. Parents who have had an opportunity to choose like it. And that's clear across the board, both in the voucher programs we have so far, the privately supported choice programs, and the charter school programs. Poor parents seem to think that choice is an opportunity. It's an opportunity for the first time that they have that for a very long period of time in this country was limited to the middle class, the ability to choose the school that your children attend.
One of the questions raised about choice, and particularly vouchers has to do with constitutionality. Again, in the first generation there was a very strong consensus among legal analysts that vouchers, particularly vouchers for kids to attend religious schools, was unconstitutional. And that opinion was very much supported by a cluster of decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court in the 1970s. There was a whole assortment of decisions that came down in the 1970s. In 1981, when the Merula [sp] decision came down, we began to see a change.
The court had begun to recognize the very significant legal distinction of aid to children versus aid to institutions. And there's good reason to believe that based on what's known as child benefit theory, the U.S. Supreme Court when they finally get to give us clear decision on this, will find that vouchers and choice given to poor people, poor children, rather than a school, is constitutional. I think there are two very recent decisions that sort of suggest that. Agastini, overturned in 1985, the decision that made it illegal to provide remedial services to poor children on the grounds of a parochial school, and last year the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the Milwaukee program and let it stand. It's the largest voucher program in the country. We've also seen some very supportive decisions come down from the state supreme courts of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Arizona. There's been some alternate decisions, too. Maine, struck it down on federal grounds, and Vermont struck it down on state grounds.
I would say that in the second generation of the debate on choice we see a very different attitude today towards religious institutions than we did even five years ago. Once it was perceived that any aid given either directly or indirectly, any aid that would wind up, or government money that would wind up in a religious institution was detrimental to what we know as American democracy, detrimental to very sacred constitutional values. I think people are becoming more receptive to the idea of what positive role religious institutions can play in the United States. I think you see it in the charitable choice provision of the Welfare Act, which was supported by both Democrats and Republicans.
One of the things I talk about in this book is to show that this very strict notion of separation as a sacred constitutional value is almost a unique American concept. Most democracies around the world are very comfortable with the idea of providing aid to children who attend religious schools, and they see that as a way of embellishing religious freedom, and supporting a diverse environment. When you have this conversation in a room of people who grew up in Europe and under other systems, sometimes they're perplexed by our anxiety over it. I could go through the list of countries that do provide such support, but I won't because I know we're running out of time.
One of the things I want to leave you with, though, in this book is a very strong argument, which I believe needs to be heard about the role that churches can play in poor urban communities, in the educational realm. One of the things I would suggest is that this very strict notion of separation that we've entertained and that we've adopted in this country has undermined one of the most significant urban institutions around, and that institution is the black church. The black church is the bedrock and the most important institution of most urban communities. And they're a great potential resource for education. Many pastors are starting their own alternative schools, and there are about 350 black independent schools around the country. They have a serious problem, though, funding what they want to do, because their mission is to provide opportunities for the poorest population, and they don't have the money to do it. Money provided for poor children to choose where they want to go to school could help these institutions grow, and we'll be seeing more black church schools come about, and we'll be seeing more black churches become involved in the choice debate.
I don't know if you saw, there was a front page article in the New York Times yesterday about this Children's Academy in Harlem. That is a charter school, and it's a very unusual place, because it was started by Wyatt T. Walker. Wyatt T. Walker started it as a pastor for the Baptist Church. Wyatt T. Walker also has a very strong historic history in the civil rights movement. He was chief of staff for Martin Luther King. And he was a major force for having a charter school in New York City. And the school that was started there, was started in the community that was built around a church, but it's a secular school. And it's an interesting combination, you have a church there that is the brain child of a black minister, but it's a secular school, and it also happens to be run by a for profit organization, called Victory Schools, Incorporated.
So when you think about where education is going today, take a look in Harlem and you'll see some very extraordinary things going on. You'll see the role of a church being played out, you'll see a private entrepreneur providing a for profit education for kids. And you'll also see, as one of the mothers in the story said yesterday, black children in this community, in Harlem, for the first time going to a school that they believe in.
I will stop there, and open it up for questions.
T. Loveless: Thank you, Joe.
I'm going to speak about tracking from here, if that's okay. And I'll just take five minutes. I recently published a book called The Tracking Wars, which has to do with the ongoing controversy that has centered on the question of how we group students.
And tracking today, let me say right from the get go, tracking today refers just generally to any form of ability grouping, 20 or 30 years ago if you talked about tracking what you were talking about were primarily taking kids when they start high school, and channeling them into courses that essentially were predestined. If they were channeled into vocational education courses, they came out at the end of their high school careers with nothing but a vocational education, and they knew very little in terms of academics. If they were channeled into college prep courses, then they were prepared for college. There's almost no one today who defends that kind of program. But today what tracking means is almost any form of ability grouping.
So, for instance, take juniors in high school in mathematics. A junior in high school in mathematics might be taking Algebra II class, might be taking a calculus class, might be taking a geometry class, might be taking an algebra class, basic algebra, perhaps a pre-algebra class, if that student doesn't know basic arithmetic. That's a form of ability grouping, and that's the kind of tracking that occurs today, at least in mathematics. In English, and in history, not so much history but definitely still in English, children who can't read very well, for instance, might be in a remedial reading class, where their reading skills and their literacy skills, where teachers are trying to shore those up. Kids who are very good readers might in a reading class called Honors English, or College Prep English. But there are key differences between that kind of system and the system, the very rigid system that existed 25 years ago. For one thing, the groupings are decided from course to course, from subject to subject. So the math department typically gets together and decides how kids will be grouped in math, the history department in history, the science department in science, et cetera.
The reason why tracking is such a controversial issue in a number of small communities across the country is that some states and some localities have begun de-tracking. There's been a de-tracking movement that's been ongoing now since the late 1980s. My book looks at two of those states, the two most aggressive states in terms of middle schools, the schools serving young adolescents before high school. I look at California and Massachusetts, and I ask the question, okay, California and Massachusetts have been pushing schools to de-track, what's happened? Have they de-tracked? Did they just ignore the state? What actually happened?
What's interesting about asking that question is that's the kind of question that we really don't ask enough. And what's unusual, or what's rather puzzling, I should say, is the people who don't ask that question are really state officials. States, as you know, throughout the '90s, have been really raining down reforms on schools, but they really don't have the resources to go out and find out what happens. And I don't mean what happens in terms of whether it's good or bad, but even if those reforms are implemented or not. So my study is just a pretty simple study. What happened? Did the schools de-track, or did they ignore the state's recommendations.
And what I found was a mixed picture. I found, actually, that some schools did de-track, and it was very interesting the patterns that I discovered. One was that schools serving urban children, low income children, and students of color were more likely to de-track, to try to reduce ability grouping than predominantly white schools in suburban areas, or in wealthier areas. And what's fascinating about that is this. If you go back and you look at the reforms and how they were couched in both Massachusetts and California, they were really pitched to the schools as a reform that would help certain children. The reforms in both California and Massachusetts were presented to the schools as reforms that would help poor children, students of color, and urban children.
And so what happened was, the way in which the state framed the reforms, and I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about whether or not these are good or bad reforms, the way the state pitched the reforms to the schools actually had an impact on who then implemented those reforms or not. Does that make sense?
Now, let's take up the question of whether detracking is good or bad. Quite frankly, we don't know. The first study on tracking or ability grouping was published in 1919, and in the last 80 years we've made very little progress on asking that basic question, is it good or bad? When you crunch the numbers, you come out with basically what statisticians call a zero effect size, the tracking is neither good nor bad, that it has a non-effect in terms of students.
Now, you can crunch different segments of the numbers, and you can look, for instance, just at low achieving kids, how does it affect them. It appears that detracking can help low achieving children a little bit, not a lot but a little bit. That's what it appears. But even that's not conclusive. If you look at sort of the big, broad mainstream regular achieving child, they seem to lose a little bit when you detrack them, when you take them out of ability group situations. When you take high achievers, they seem to lose quite a bit when you take them out of ability group situations and put them into heterogeneous classes.
Now, heterogeneous classes are real simple to describe, you randomly assign students to classes. That's what heterogeneous grouping is about, you abolish all ability distinctions among kids when you organize them into classes, and you randomly assign them to classes. Does heterogeneous grouping work? We don't know. Now, that's not a fault of advocates of detracking, but there just haven't been that many detracked schools out there for us to study to find out whether it works or not. But here's the main caution that we should emphasize as the schools do detrack. We don't know what's going to happen with this reform. We don't know if it's going to be good or bad. We don't know if it's going to help the students that it's intended to help, and they're the ones who are the guinea pigs in this experiment of whether or not it's going to work or not, and that's the low income kids, that's students of color, and that's children who attend schools in urban centers. Those are the schools that have embraced detracking more than other schools. So that's the danger.
Now, there are some, there are three things in the research that have just been researched lately, in the last 10 years, that offer some caution. One deals with the subject of mathematics. There have been studies of NELS data, the National Educational Longitudinal Study, which is this big massive database that was created in 1988 of several thousand students, and we can look at students in both eighth grade, tenth grade, and then later on, even 12th grade, and on into college, and study their educational experiences. When you look at the NELS data, students who were in heterogeneous eighth grade classes in mathematics didn't do very well. It turns out that tracking actually, especially in the course of algebra, that all students of all ability levels lost a little bit by being heterogeneously grouped.
Now, what does that mean? First of all, there was not a massive number of schools out there like this, but what that means is, remember the press a couple of years ago by President Clinton to have all kids complete algebra by the end of eighth grade, this was a mantra of the administration for a little bit. Well, if you want all kids to take algebra in eighth grade, that means you would take all eighth graders, and you would put them all in algebra, and you would have an algebra course. And there are some schools that have actually done that. It turns out that low achieving children don't learn a whole lot in those courses, neither do grade level achieving children, and neither do the high achieving children. So, the kids don't do that well in heterogeneously grouped algebra classes. We don't have enough data to make that a conclusive statement, but that's one of the cautionary signs out there.
A second cautionary sign is a political one. There are reports in some communities where detracking has occurred of the phenomenon known as bright flight, and that's the notion that the parents of high achieving children pull their kids out of school and send them somewhere else when course are detracked. And that could have a pernicious impact on the ethos and the culture of a school, the academic focus of a school, if your brightest students are leaving. This also suggests, if you go back to the earlier pattern I discussed, that if there's anyone who is going to pay a price of detracking, it very well could be students of color, high achieving students of color in urban schools. They're more likely to attend detracked classes, and they're more likely to be subject to the risks that I've detailed here.
So, let me stop right there, and what we'd like to do is open up to you and you can ask questions about tracking, or choice, or any other topic that you'd like.
And I'm going to go back to Ron Nessen because he's pointing at himself.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: And Diane was going to speak on ESEA, and she's the authority on that, so I think what we'll try to do maybe is work her into the December 8th meeting.
Yes.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: There is some indication that when the parents who take advantage of choice--well, first of all, most of the voucher programs, both the publicly supported and privately supported voucher programs are usually needs based, so they're targeted at kids who are poor to begin with. With regard to the charter schools, they tend to be open to all who want to come, and usually when there's an over-subscription, they're done on the basis of a lottery, and there tend to be a disproportionate number of poor and minority kids applying for those schools. There is some phenomenon, I wouldn't call it bright flight, there is some observations both in the Cleveland programs and in the Milwaukee program and in the privately supported voucher programs that the parents who take advantage of this tend to be somewhat better educated, even though they're poor by definition.
And that has led some people to believe, I've heard the term creaming and skimming, and what I would say to that is it's a design problem. What I would say to that is, it's a design problem because up until this point many of the voucher programs that exist, particularly in the private sector that are privately supported don't pay the full tuition. And so, there is somewhat of an economic skimming effect, I think, and I think there is a phenomenon that many people are concerned about that once choice is instituted the most motivated parents are going to take advantage of it, and others are going to be left behind. And I think that's a real issue to be dealt with.
My response to it is two-fold. One is that that problem already exists, if you look at any urban school system, it's always the more alert, the more aggressive, the more informed student's parents who know where the best schools are and how to get them into them. Again, I think also on the design side, you know, there's also a concern that kids are going to be left in under-performing schools. And that's only premised on the idea that we're going to allow under-performing schools to exist, which I think is a serious design flaw in a lot of choice programs.
T. Loveless: I would just say, if I could just add, too, the best evaluation we have of charter schools is Checker Finn's evaluation. And if you look at his data, it looks as if the kids who go to charter schools don't look any different in terms of achievement than kids in regular public schools. So there doesn't appear to be a skimming effect yet. There could be.
J. Viteritti: I think the RPP study that was commissioned by the Department of Education also found that.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: No, I didn't. We have no scientific evidence that if there is money made available for children to choose non-public schools that the non-public schools will grow in number. There have been some problems in areas where these experiments have been run where there's been a concern as to whether or not there were enough seats in schools that children wanted to attend. I have to believe based on fairly sound reasoning about how the market works that if you put more resources, and real resources into education that you will have more non-public schools exist, and my hunch will be a larger proportion of them will not be religious schools.
I think, with regard to the charter issue, there's been a supply problem, but it's been an artificial problem that was designed by public policy again, because most charter school laws put a cap on the number of schools that they allow. And it's an artificial constraint to competition and allowing the market to grow. And it's basically a function of the kind of political deals that are made in legislatures between people who want laws and people who don't want laws. So the compromise is, we will let you have a law that will only let you have so many schools. New York just passed a law, and there is a limit of 100 schools, which sounds like a lot, but when you realize there are 6,000 public schools in New York State 100 is not a lot. So, yes, I think there is a supply problem particularly in the charter school issue, and I think that it's a problem that has been a direct result of public policy.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: I think that poll is pretty consistent with the other polls I've seen. And what I think it suggests is that what I've said before is that the largest constituency for choice is found in urban areas where people are not happy with the schools that their kids are attending. I think people who live in suburbs and more content with the quality of their children's education are less enthusiastic about choice, and are probably going to be less inclined to look at alternatives. That's fairly reasonable.
What choice should do is allow people who want alternatives to have them, and those that don't want alternatives don't have to go to a school. Choice is not going to force anybody who is happy with their local suburban school to pull their kid out of it. What choice should do, it should provide an opportunity for people who are not happy with their schools to have an alternative. And, unfortunately, for good reason, the demand is found, there's a high concentration of demand in cities where urban school systems have not been performing at the level they should.
You know, we've been talking about education equality for almost 50 years now, since Brown, when the litigation started, and still the most reliable predictors of education performance in this country are race and class.
T. Loveless: It will be interesting too, just to go to another topic briefly, and then we can get back to Joyce, in terms of the standards issue, I think this also applies, the suburban complacency with school may be ill-placed. We may find as, for instance, in the State of Virginia, they're finding that kids aren't scoring very well in suburbs either. And a lot of folks who think they are seeing their kids do excellent in schools may find out their schools are okay, but they're not as excellent as they thought. And as we continue, and as states continue to implement rigorous tests, you may find those suburban numbers sinking some in terms of competence in schools.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: I think he's articulating a principle, and I think the principle is invest in kids and not in systems, invest in schools and not in buildings, and invest in kids and not in buildings, invest in individuals and not in failing institutions. I think that if choice is going to be a major force in trying to achieve educational equality in this country, and I don't think it's the sole answer and I don't think it's the magic bullet, you're going to have to see policies emerge at the state level because that's where the funds are.
But I think what somebody in the White House can do is exercise some moral leadership and articulate certain principles on how we ought to invest our education dollars. I think that if those dollars are used wisely, they could be beneficially. We've had study after study showing that most Title I dollars have not, and most of the evaluations we've seen have demonstrated that Title I has not been very effective since it's begun. And to think that we are hesitant to experiment with different ways of investing that money is mind-boggling because it's not exactly a system that has a great record that we need to worry about tampering with. So, experimentation seems to make a lot of sense to me, and so I think it's a move in the right direction. I don't think it's going to be the answer to the problem.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: I think the major difference between the market approach and what I would call the opportunity approach is the market would give vouchers to everyone. Friedman's model would say, everybody should get a voucher. And one of the strong reactions to that was that it would be a disaster of inequality, and it would lead to further segmentation. I think what we see now in the voucher programs that have been implemented so far, and there haven't been a lot of them, it's been more a private experimentation, is money directed at poor kids defined by needs. You don't get a voucher in Milwaukee unless you can demonstrate that you're at a certain level of income.
There was a program, a private voucher program implemented in New York some years ago, and again it was needs based. I think that's a major difference. And I think what it's showing is, and what the difference is, is that assistance is targeted. I see that as a redistributive kind of policy. It's providing poor people with public funding to purchase private services for the public good. And it is very much assistance, I would add, with a kind of redistributive social agenda, which we'd ordinarily associate with liberals. Whereas, the old market model was very different, and it was a much more conservative agenda, and it wasn't targeted.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: Yes, again, we have to get back to the design issue, I think that a choice program works if you have serious standards. And what I would say is that, you first have to have serious standards for traditional public schools. You cannot start the discussion by saying, we're going to assume that there are going to be so many schools out there that don't work, and that somebody is going to be left, all we need to decide is on whom. That's a bad way to start the discussion. What we have to start the discussion with is the premise that you're going to have standards that lead to closing down failing public schools, number one.
Number two, I think those standards have to be put into effect, and conservatives aren't going to like this idea, in any school that participates in the choice program. So that if the XYZ private school in East New York decides that they want to participate in a voluntary choice program, then they have to demonstrate that they're meeting the same academic standards as public schools. And by standards I mean standards in terms of learning skills, things like that.
T. Loveless: Right here, and then we'll go there.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: Reference tests that are based on certain curricular standards, on what we expect children to know at this particular grade, reading, math, language arts. And this has to be determined, but if a certain percentage of kids in a school fail over a period of time, we have to determine that the school is not functioning well. We could spend a whole day talking about how to do this, allowing that a lot of children who become involved with choice, who are coming from schools where they were poorly educated, are showing up with extreme deficits. You have to adopt an approach to say how much progress has the child made.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: I think different schools are motivated by different things. I think there are people who are in this for profit. And profits will motivate them. And I don't think they're not well meaning, but profit is an incentive. I think different people have different incentives.
T. Loveless: You know, one of the books that was a landmark in this debate was the Brookings book, it was Chubb and Moe's book. One of the things that often goes unremarked is Chubb and Moe tackled this problem at the end of the book, in the last chapter. They urge differential vouchers, that everybody would not have the same voucher, for instance, children with special needs would have a higher voucher to provide an incentive for schools to accept them. And so if, for instance, the George W. Bush, and I'm not a big voucher advocate, but I am just speaking to this issue of what you do with policy, you could take, say, special ed money, that's billions and billions of dollars, convert that to a voucher that would then be attached to any local voucher. So a special ed child then might carry a $20,000 voucher, instead of a $5,000 or $6,000 voucher. That would then incentivize the system to serve those children. That's the theory.
Richard?
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: It's a voluntary program, if you have a parochial school or a private school. I'm not saying we should set those standards for all non-public schools. What I'm looking at, and really what I'm suggesting is that the model for governing should be a good charter school model. And what I'm saying is that if an institution decides that they want to participate in this publicly funded program, the terms of the agreement is that we will allow you to receive state funds, so long as you demonstrate you are performing at a high level, or at a level that is comparable to what we find acceptable for public schools.
T. Loveless: I think that argument is a red herring, by the way. For instance, if I get a Pell Grant, I can take my Pell Grant and go take it to a private university. I can take it to a religiously based private university. I can go to Notre Dame with my Pell Grant. I cannot, however, use my Pell Grant to take a course in how to read the daily racing forms. There are certain standards that are imposed, and it doesn't seem to be a problem in terms of the issue of whether the institution is religious or private.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: If 20 percent of the non-public schools enter the market, we've at least increased the supply somewhat. But, again, I think accountability is important. I would not let go of that. I think you have to ensure that people who participate in this program, have to abide by certain rules of accountability. I think that's reasonable. These are public funds, and there should be some public accountability. That's different from the market model.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: Sometimes it's all of those things, sometimes it's just one of them. The only thing that can really can be said in answer to your question is that we do know with charter schools that the theory is that different charters will bloom serving different kinds of kids. And we've seen some evidence of that. There are charters, for instance, there's a charter in Minnesota, that specifically deals with non-sighted children, children who have vision problems. There are charters that deal specifically with children who show signs of autism. There are charters that deal with a variety of different forms of special needs, or special interests. So the theory of charter schools is you would have different charters being developed to fill these different niches.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: Again, that could happen with charter schools, especially as these tough standards are implemented, and social promotion comes to an end. Everybody is in favor of ending social promotion, but one of the realities, one of the implications of that may be that kids who are failing math, just the math portion of the test, may have to go to a special charter school where they have math, perhaps. That's very possible. They may have to work longer, and harder on mathematics in order to pass that portion of the test. Again, that's another thing that may happen in charter schools. But, the basic answer is we don't know.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: I don't think there's a big danger that 100 percent of the population is going to a particular. I talk a lot about this in the book. Americans are the most church people in the world. But we also are becoming increasingly more diverse religiously. And, what the people who came over here were worried about is an established church. They were concerned with a church where public authority and ecclesiastic authority were one and the same. And they were concerned about religious minorities who didn't quite fit into that scheme. I'm more worried about the low level of education that we're providing to so many kids in this country than I am to about whether or not everybody is going to wake up one morning and decide that's the church I want to go to, and leave the rest out. That's just not going to happen. That's not who we are. We're a very pluralistic population. And most of us take religion very lightly.
Read Alan Wolfe's book, and what he tells you is that we go to church, but for the most part we live secular lives. So, despite the kind of alarm that's raised over religious fanatics who we think are going to take over our schools if there are vouchers, I don't really see that as a serious problem. I think the more serious problem is the problem of inequality.
T. Loveless: There's was a great book published three or four years ago called, Catholic Schools and the Common Good, by Anthony Brich [sp] and Valerie Lee [sp], and they argued actually that Catholic schools today are the model of the old common school. They showed with their data that it turns out Catholic schools are more integrated than public schools. The kids who come out of them embrace the set of values in terms of democracy, tolerance, respect for others than kids who come out of public schools. And their argument was that the model of the old common school of the 19th Century, that Horace Mann talked about, is actually being seen today not in public schools but in private schools, and particularly in Catholic schools. It's kind of an interesting argument.
J. Viteritti: When you look at the dynamic of vouchers, first of all, when we talk about choice, we can't leave out charter schools. Charter schools are public schools and they don't allow religious training and they shouldn't. They're not religious schools. So, one thing that's happening in the development of choice where the numbers are is, a lot of public schools that are not religious schools that people are going to be attracted to. And my prediction is that they're going to provide at least as much competition to Catholic schools in the inner city as they do for public schools. So, that's one phenomenon.
The other phenomenon is that you're going to see a lot of--you may see private schools come into existence, and I think you will, but a lot of them are not going to be religious. So, I think this idea that we're going to move towards an established church or something, which is really what the First Amendment was about, because of vouchers is just unreal.
T. Loveless: Question in the back.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: James Coleman, who I think is probably the greatest sociologist of this century, one of the most important commentators of the social scene, he used to always say, you know, any time you ask the question about stratifying kids based on choice, you have to ask compared to what. And if you compare it to the present system, we have a grossly stratified system now, and it's based on income. If you have enough money and you're motivated, you can go to any school you want to. And that's how we stratify our school system now. We have a system that is based on parental wealth. And if you're wealthy enough, you can go, you have choice, and if you're not wealthy enough, you don't have choice.
So, the question is shifting the stratification from wealth to, say, motivation maybe. So, you can't just ask the questions in a vacuum, they do have to be compared to the present system is my point.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: The numbers of kids in public schools declined by 25 percent from 1973 to 1985, roughly, and the level of money going into schools did not decline. It's not true that kids leaving schools cause a subsequent decline in the budgeting of schools. What happened was class sizes shrunk during that period of time. Don't forget, the peak of the baby-boom was in 1973, we had roughly 50 million kids in schools. It's taken us from then until now to get back to that level, but the numbers of children in schools shrunk considerably over a 15-year period, 20-25 percent.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: I'm talking about if you look at real dollars per child on a national basis.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: Well, if you're starting off with the situation now, where those are schools are not being attended to, then you have to look at what we need to do to make it better. I mean, you don't want to save that, do you? Do you want to save it?
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: Okay, but I think, if I can go back to it, first of all, I don't accept the idea that if you provide choices for kids that you must divest from public education. In my own sense of the politics of it, and there's been some anecdotal evidence of this, when you have real alternatives it provides some pressure on school authorities to actually do something with those schools and make them function better, and I believe that.
I can't give you evidence to that, but if we really believe--
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: Well, there's some evidence.
T. Loveless: It looks charismatic, though. It looks like you have a great leader, but hard to draw system-wide conclusions.
J. Viteritti: I don't want to pretend that we have scientific evidence to show. But part of the problem is, we don't know what the effect of competition is going to be really because we've never tried it. You know, we have charter schools, and even in Milwaukee when the law was first passed they said, 1 percent of the kids can go to these schools. And, by the way, they're not getting funded at the same level that the kids in the public schools are. That's not competition, that's the pretense of competition.
So, I would say that if we have real competition, I would think that schools would get better. If I didn't believe that, then I would be ultimately cynical, because if you didn't believe that they could get better under the most stark competitive situations, then you're really saying there's no hope at all. So, I think that's what you have to rely on.
And if your argument is, well, what happens if these students leave and take the dollars with them? And the answer is, they don't need the dollars anymore if the children leave, because the child is being educated somewhere else. And the infrastructure is not the issue, it's the issue of investing in programs that make kids learn. I was just reading a chapter of a book that I'm editing now, somebody wrote a chapter on schools that work in New York. And it's very interesting, she visited 150 schools, and some of the schools that work are in the craziest places, and why they work is because of the programs in there.
Infrastructure is a problem. When I was at the New York City School System, we were thinking about closing buildings down. Part of the problem is the infrastructure because it marries us to old buildings that are of another era. You know, small schools is the way to go now, it's not these big monstrous factories that we created years ago. So, I'm not worried about what we're going to do to support those factories that don't work anymore. What I'm more concerned about is putting the money into programs that work. And I think that competition is healthy. I really do. There is some evidence. There are some economic models. The reason why I say we don't know for sure is because I don't think we've really tried it. There's been no experiment. San Antonio maybe in the next couple of years. Anyway, that's my long-winded answer.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: No, what I am saying is, you read the polls. What the polls tell you, basically, is the American people are ambivalent about it. You know, it's 51 support, 49 support, depending on which week, what's going on in the news, what question is asked, who asked it, and who reported the results. So I think what you see the American people by and large are ambivalent.
When you look at specific sectors of the population, though, look at poor communities and minority communities, the numbers go way up, 75-80 percent. When you look at certain age groups, it goes up again. That's when I say the strongest constituency is the poor communities.
T. Loveless: And, again, I just want to go back to this, you do have to compare it to the present system. If you have a school that's failing and its population declines from, say, 500 down to 100 kids, how many of those are closed today under the present system with no choice? And, you know something, you're going to find very few of them are closed. It's very difficult to close a school under the present system. So, I'm just saying, we do have to compare what school closures would look like, and the propensity of them under a choice system to what they look like under the current system. I think that's the fair comparison.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: I don't think we have enough evidence yet. Again, my basic ideology is neither left nor right, but my ideology is based on achievement. If it turns out that vouchers promote achievement, I will be their biggest fan. If it turns out that they depress achievement, I will be their biggest enemy, and I don't think we know yet. So, I would like to see more experimentation, controlled experiments in different areas of the country, and political jurisdictions that want to do that.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: Again, I think much of what goes on in Washington has enormous symbolic importance, and what is being suggested here is you definitely have two very clear different points of view on this issue between George W. and the two Democratic candidates now. And I think that's important. I think it's important because it is a philosophical difference in terms of how you invest education dollars. I think it's important because that next person is going to appoint people to the Supreme Court who are going to hear voucher cases. So, yes, I think it's extremely important.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: I don't think so. That's my answer, no. I think the key issues next year in choice will be what happens, if it's on the ballot in Michigan and California, I think it's going to be what happens in those referenda, and it very well could be on the ballot next year in both states. It almost certainly will be on the ballot in Michigan. If it's on the ballot, the interesting thing is that vouchers have not yet won a ballot fight. They've lost every single one. They've been on the ballot four times, they've lost four times. They're zero for four. If they go zero for six, and they're on both ballots next year, I think then it puts the choice advocates on the defensive. If they win, especially if they win in one of these two big states. I think then choice gains momentum politically.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: Well, the idea is, if they're competing for students, then they will put satisfying students' parents first.
J. Viteritti: Well, I think that it depends on whether you think that the children are failing because of who the children are or are they failing because of how they're being taught. And I think if you're running a school system, you have no choice but to believe the latter, because that's what you have control over. You're not going to change who the students are. I happen to think that if you work with students well and you try programs that succeed, and you know what program succeed by the way, this is not a secret, you know, there is some evidence about some programs that succeed, then you believe that you can hold the schools accountable, and competition will matter.
I can't get into, you know, it's the kids' fault. I can't tell you how many--when I first got into this business 20 years ago in the chancellor's office in New York, I happened, by accident, my dissertation advisor became the head of the New York City School System and I wound up there, the debates that took place between the old guard and the new folks were incredible, because there was a real belief that these kids were just hopeless. And I remember one of the first meetings we had, we talked about putting out a white paper about what we intended to do, and we were advised very strongly not to be too ambitious because there's only so much that was possible. And what was really being said is, it's the kids' fault.
Question Inaudible
T. Loveless: It's hard to say empirically, but there is a survey that's been done of teachers, where teachers were asked that question, who do you think would leave if they were given a voucher, and the teachers said the high achievers would leave. I don't know what that says about our school system, or who we're serving or not serving, but that's who the teachers think would probably leave.
J. Viteritti: The way I would answer the question is I think the evidence has been quite to the contrary. The people who are opting out, if you look at the studies in Milwaukee and Cleveland in the private program and charter schools, it's low achievers. They don't think they're being well educated.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: There's a paradox here.
T. Loveless: But, it's really designed for them.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: No, I think what it's showing is that, they're not doing it by school, the comparisons are who left versus who stayed. It's not by school. And the kids who left tend to be lower achievers. You know, it's interesting. You know why they are leaving? Because they don't think the school is doing a very good job. The schools say they're low achievers, the school blames it on the kid and the kid blames it on the school, and you can take whatever position you wish. You know, you can take your choice there. But, I think the people who are leaving tend to be lower achievers, because they're not happy with what they have. If your son or daughter is in a school and they're doing very well, you have no reason to leave.
T. Loveless: Just, again, a caution, we have very few children, percentage wise, in the United States involved in these choice programs now. So to extrapolate the pattern from there to what would happen if, is very dangerous, and I'd urge you not to do that. And the teacher poll that I'm referring to asks the question, if everybody were given a choice, forget about targeting low income kids, or kids attending poor schools like we have in Florida, but if everybody were given a choice, who would leave, and that's what they answered.
Question Inaudible
J. Viteritti: We would have a much more diverse offering of schools. There would be much more equality. The major argument I make in this book is an egalitarian one. And it starts with the idea that most people already have choice. And the people who don't are people who can't afford either to move to good school districts where the public schools are good, or who can afford a private school. So it's not a question of whether we should have choice, to me the question is whether we should expand it so everybody can enjoy it, and it's not so much a function of economics and class, which happens also to imply race. And what I would say is what you need is a system where there's a great variety of schools, and that children can pick from, and that many of them will be public schools, and some of them are going to be non-public schools. My hunch would be over the years is that the real change is going to take place with charter schools, and that you're going to have an interesting assortment of private providers. And I think there's been interesting things being done, for example, by Edison, good schools, and I'm not sure what percentage of the market is going to be take up by them. But, I think you're going to wind up with a lot more charter schools, and I think what's going to happen, my suspicion is that you're not going to see great growth in religious schools. In fact, the proportion of religious schools might even shrink, because what you're going to have in religious schools is people who want to go there, because they have a religious orientation that they want their children to be educated in, which I think is fine. But, I don't think there are a lot of those folks.
T. Loveless: I need to actually stop you right there. We're running over. I want to thank you all for coming. Thank Joe for coming. And I hope you can all come again on December 8th. We'll see you then.
[END OF EVENT]