by Jonah Shepp
Here, he floats the idea that private schools improve the public education system by keeping costs down:
By foregoing a public education for their children, private school parents relieve a financial burden on taxpayers. Without private schools, [economist Andrew] Samwick estimates that U.S. public K-12 schools would have to spend $660 billion rather than $600 billion per annum. If this positive externality interpretation is correct, Samwick suggests that parents could be underutilizing private schools because they fail to appreciate the benefit they provide others by making use of them.
To address this problem, he proposes treating the decision on the part of parents to send their children to private schools and to forego a public education as, in effect, a charitable contribution equivalent to the per pupil expenditure in their local public schools. The idea is that today’s school districts offer a “voucher” that can only be redeemed at local public schools, and private school parents are effectively donating these vouchers to their school districts so that the money can be spread among public school enrollees.
And in another piece, he argues that public schools have an obligation to improve their efficiency:
If you really care about public education, calling for more spending is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Pouring more money into dysfunctional schools gives incompetent administrators the excuse they need to avoid trimming bureaucratic fat and shedding underutilized facilities and underperforming personnel. It spares them the need to focus on the essentials, or to rethink familiar models. The promise of constant spending increases is what keeps lousy schools lousy. When private businesses keep failing their customers year after year, they eventually go out of business. When public schools do the same, they dupe taxpayers, and the occasional tech billionaire, into forking over more money. If you really, really care about The Children, call for a system in which the most cost-effective schools expand while the least cost-effective schools shrink, and school leaders are given the freedom to figure out what works best for their teachers and their students.
In response, Freddie deBoer loses it, calling the above “an awful piece that marries broad ignorance about its subject matter to the condescending Slate house style”:
Now it happens that there is no such thing as private school pedagogy that’s distinct from public school pedagogy. Private school teachers often attend the same college programs as public school teachers, teach from the same collection of textbooks, give the same sort of tests. They are often exempt from the manic standardized testing that public school teachers have to participate in, freeing up class time, so there’s that, I guess. But it’s not like there’s some secret lesson plans that get passed around only between private schools. And here’s another dirty secret: there frequently isn’t a big difference in the day-to-day administrations of private schools, either. Oh, you can fire a teacher easier in your average private school. But there’s absolutely no reputable evidence to suggest that this is why private schools seem to have better educational outcomes than public schools. There is, on the other hand, an argument that has been supported by decades of responsible studies from thousands of responsible researchers: student demographics are more powerful determinants of educational outcomes than teachers or schools. And private schools systematically exclude the hardest-to-educate students, through high tuitions, entrance exams, and opaque selection processes. For these schools, the fact that the hardest-to-educate kids can’t attend is a feature, not a bug.
The Dish 