A Solution to Educational Inequality (From A Rather Unexpected Source)

[chromanebula]

One of America's big problems these days is the achievement gap--that is, the fact that rich white kids learn far more in school and graduate at higher rates than poor minority kids. You'd expect it would be liberals offering a solution to this, given that they see themselves as social justice crusaders. Yet it is conservatives who offer a tried-and-true solution--school choice. I wrote an entire paper for English class on the benefits of school choice (and why the reason it's not national policy is that it would be a blow to incompetent teachers who are protected by powerful unions), which is in the spoiler tag below. But here's the short spiel:

• American schools are funded by local property taxes, which are obviously going to generate more revenue for schools in higher-income areas, so poor children do not get as high a quality an education.
• Schools in low-income areas currently have no incentive to educate their students effectively, since their income doesn't depend on it.
• Without a high-quality education, poor children are less likely to graduate, go on to college, and ultimately succeed in life, keeping their children poor and perpetuating a vicious cycle. As one observer put it, “Education used to be the poor child’s ticket out of the slums. Now it’s part of the system that traps people in the underclass" (Schmoke).
• With vouchers, poor children will be able to go to any school at no cost, not just their neighborhood's local school. This will let them get a better education.
• Underperforming schools will be motivated to improve by the prospect of losing income when parents who are fed up with lousy education pull their children out and send them to better schools (which poor parents so far haven't been able to do because they can't afford to send their children to a different school).
• Research shows that vouchers work. Twelve studies have been performed in five major cities (Milwaukee, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., New York, and Dayton), and "in all 12 studies, the voucher group had better academic outcomes than the control group. In 11 of those studies, these positive results achieved a high level of statistical certainty...meaning we can be very confident that the better results in the voucher group were caused by vouchers and not a statistical fluke” (Friedman).
• People complain about the government paying tuition at parochial schools, but federal Pell grants and other federally funded student aid is used at religious colleges and universities all the time, and nobody cares.
• Teachers' unions argue against it on the grounds that it would just hurt struggling students more. While they may have somewhat valid points about potential negative consequences, there is a conflict of interest there since enacting school choice would result in incompetent teachers being fired and teachers' unions exist to protect teachers--not students.

​I guess that wasn't a very short spiel, was it? Anyway, here is the full-length version. Feel free to leave comments and counterarguments.

The Problem
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was dead, killed by police officer Darren Wilson. But his chances for success had been killed long before that. You see, Michael Brown had gone to Normandy High School. Ranked last in overall academic performance by Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, it eventually proved to need so much improvement on the state exams that its accreditation was revoked and its students went on a mass exodus to better, suburban schools, such as those in the nearby Clayton School District, which consistently excels by every measure. More than 19 out of 20 students graduate, and 84 percent go to a four-year university (Hannah-Jones). It’s also predominantly white with practically zero poverty. This is vastly better than the 98 percent black city school of Normandy, where 70 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, half of the boys never graduate at all and only one in four students goes to college (Hannah-Jones). The pattern repeats itself with other schools: Suburban schools educating rich white kids consistently do better than urban schools educating poor black kids. Such a consistent pattern demands an explanation.
It turns out that this problem of educational inequality boils down to the way schools are funded as well as how students are assigned to schools. Schools get their money not from the state, but from local property taxes. As richer people tend to have more expensive properties and therefore pay more in property taxes, schools in richer areas tend to get more funding. As more money is generally used to buy a better education, students who go to schools in poor areas are at an educational disadvantage. Compounding this problem is the lack of opportunity for poorer students to go to a better school. They are assigned to a public school based solely on where they live, and moving to a better school district would usually be prohibitively expensive for poor parents, as would sending children to private school (on top of the fact that there usually aren’t private schools in poor areas in the first place precisely because parents can’t afford them). Transferring without cost to the family is usually not allowed, and even when it is it’s a privilege granted to only a few lucky ones.
The result of all this--educational inequality--has results of its own, none of them good. A child trapped by geography in an underfunded school isn’t going to get as good of an education, which means they will be less likely to graduate, less likely to go to college, less likely to do well in college if they do go, and ultimately less likely to succeed in life (Hannah-Jones). Lack of a good education will close the doors for poor students to get well-paying jobs, which means they will continue to be poor, so they will be forced to live in a low-quality area, pay less in property taxes and send their children to poor schools, continuing the cycle (Hannah-Jones). As one observer put it, “Education used to be the poor child’s ticket out of the slums. Now it’s part of the system that traps people in the underclass” (Schmoke). I thought this nation was founded on equality of opportunity regardless of circumstance. Now, because of the way the school system is structured, poor and minority students don’t get equal educational opportunities, which screws them over when they grow up. This is unacceptable. Something must be done.

Something Must be Done...But What?

To kill a weed, you have to pull it out at its roots. In this case, the root of the problem is that poor students are typically zoned into underperforming schools and don’t have opportunities to go anywhere better, so to solve educational inequality, we have to change that. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, at its core, school choice is a pretty simple concept: instead of paying schools, the government would pay students. Specifically, each student would get a voucher for a set amount of money, and then use that voucher at a school of his or her choice to buy education (Neely). If any student can attend any school essentially for free, then lower-income students will be able to go to the same high-performing schools as higher-income students--and reap the educational benefits. Essentially, students with choice would be going to the best schools possible, rather than just the ones in their neighborhood.

But--and this is the big but--under a school choice system, the best schools could be the ones in a poor child’s neighborhood. Why? Because school choice not only works by moving students into better schools, it also works by turning poorly-performing schools into top schools. It’s all based on market economics. One of the core principles of economics is that markets provide quality goods and services to all people, not because of the kindness of producers’ hearts, but because consumers are more willing to pay for goods and services of high quality--that is, the producer has a financial incentive to please the consumer (Neely). When consumers don’t have options, however, the whole system falls apart. They are forced to do business with one company, so that company will make money regardless of whether the consumer likes the product or not. If you give consumers options, they can take their business somewhere else--which means that companies that don’t please consumers enough to keep their business don’t make money (Neely). By extension, if you give parents options about where to send their children to school, schools with lackluster performance will lose students to better schools, so “[they] will learn this painful lesson: schools will either improve [in order to keep the voucher money they get for every attending student], or close due to declining enrollments” (Schmoke). Think about it: Would a grocery store selling groceries as pathetic as the education in some schools these days last very long? Of course not, because people would start shopping somewhere else, which would make the store lose money and go out of business! With the power of markets, even such Herculean tasks as improving shoddy schools can be tackled.

In fact, that task has been successfully tackled before through school choice programs. The United States has five major cities where some form of school choice program has been implemented and then studied using large-scale, highly-respected, gold-standard research: Milwaukee, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., New York City and Dayton (Friedman). To be more specific, the “gold standard” in scientific research is random assignment--which works perfectly in school choice research. Many of the programs have more applicants than slots available, so a lottery is usually held to determine which kids can participate. The lottery’s winners are the experimental group, and the losers are the control group (Friedman). Among the five cities, twelve studies were done, and “in all 12 studies, the voucher group had better academic outcomes than the control group. In 11 of those studies, these positive results achieved a high level of statistical certainty...meaning we can be very confident that the better results in the voucher group were caused by vouchers and not a statistical fluke” (Friedman). For example, in Washington, D.C., students who got vouchers had an 82% graduation rate, as opposed to 70% for students who applied for vouchers but didn’t get them; other studies showed improvements in reading and math scores for minority students (Friedman). These positive results haven’t just been limited to those five cities, though. Sweden switched over to a choice-based system in the 1990s, and its new independent (i.e. private) schools which have sprung up under the system score better than its public schools on many different tests (Lips). One such test is merit value, which is essentially the average school-wide GPA; another is the SALSA, a measure of performance adjusted for students’ family income and home life. On both tests, the independent schools did better (Lips). Also in Sweden, “Two major studies...have examined the public schools’ response to increased competition where independent schools were established. Both showed that public schools in these cities were more efficient and successful—both in using given resources and attaining higher student results—than the national average.” (Lips). The evidence has spoken: School choice works for both private and public schools.

But wait! If school choice is so wonderful, why isn’t it a thing already? Well, not everyone sees school choice in the same way. One talking point opponents frequently bring up is the constitutional question. Is government funding of religious schools constitutional, or is it against the Establishment Clause? Fortunately, the Supreme Court has answered that question. The 2002 Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case upheld Cleveland’s school choice program on the basis that it was the result of private choices and didn’t favor any religion (Friedman). Additionally, federal Pell Grants and G.I. bill money are used to pay for religious university education all the time, and nobody cares. The only real constitutional obstacle would be the Blaine Amendments in some states, which prohibit government money from going to religious schools (Friedman). Ironically enough, those Blaine Amendments are themselves unconstitutional. As an analogy, would it be constitutional to make churches pay taxes but not secular not-for-profit organizations? No, because that would discriminate against religion. By only allowing government money to go to secular schools, Blaine Amendments violate neutrality with respect to religion. If the government can’t favor religion over non-religion, then it also shouldn’t be able to favor non-religion over religion. Clearly, even when government money does go to religious schools, school choice is still completely constitutional. Another common complaint is that vouchers cost the government more money than the current system. In the short run, that’s true, as the government now has to pay for everyone’s education instead of just public school expenses. However, in the long run, it saves the government’s money because the competition created by school choice encourages schools to use their resources more efficiently (Neely). For example, two different Florida government departments found that Florida’s school choice program was saving the state millions of dollars per year (Friedman). Clearly, school choice is financially sound.

Perhaps the most common objection, though, is that “school choice just drains resources from public schools!” Actually, states currently fund public schools in such a way that the amount of money they’d lose for every student who left is less than the cost to educate one student, so as students leave, the school actually has more money per remaining student (Friedman). And if so many students are leaving that a school loses all its money, that probably means it has so many problems that it would be better for it to shut down and send all the students to other, better schools. Maybe they would even be other public schools, seeing as “Each sector has great schools. Each sector has terrible schools” (Fuller). This is the entire point of school choice. The goal isn’t to do what’s best for public schools’ bottom lines; the goal is to do what’s best for students. Just as corporations with lousy products, mediocre employee performance and an inept administration wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) survive competition, schools with lousy test results, mediocre teaching and an inept administration wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) survive competition in the school system (Schmoke). The fact that school choice isn’t what’s best for poorly-performing teachers and administrators is why it hasn’t been more successful. They have fought at every turn to keep their captive customers and avoid being held accountable by the market for their poor performance (Neely). Clearly, although it will be painful for some groups, school choice will be beneficial for students.

Educational inequality is a Gordian knot we’ve been trying to untangle for years. We’ve tried throwing dollars at it. We’ve tried drowning students in standardized testing. We’ve tried pushing new benchmarks on the system. So far, none of them have really made a dent. But now, with school choice, we have a sword with which to cut that knot. We have a way to put each and every school to the test. We have a means to finally give poor children their long- overdue tickets out of the slums. For the sake of equal opportunity, for the sake of progress, for the sake of the values this nation was founded upon, let us use that sword which is school choice.

[Yatogami]

While I do agree that Liberal policies have destroyed the school system in USA (Don't believe me, look it up). I do not think income has anything to do with the basic learning at school. It does affect things like sports and afterschool activities though. Then lunchtime meals (which is also going to shit, due to liberal policies) People who are poor tend to come from broken families, and have poor motivation and desire to succeed. They have no parental/emotional support. No amount of good schooling is going to make that child less suicidal, and less defeated when he goes home and gets abused.

I do however, fully support competitive schooling. I hate the idea that you can only send your child to a specific school because you live in a specific area. Freedom of choice should be something parents can have to ensure their child has a better future. You cannot save everyone sadly, and you should not make rules/regulations based on race favoritism. Competition will provide a better learning environment, and eliminate underfunctioning schools. Though I am afraid there is so much more wrong with the education system that just localization. This wont solve the problem, but is a step in the right direction.

PS: Abolish teaching unions

[R_1]

For starters, schools should really start later. Yes, sleep deprievation is a serious issues for some.