|
|
|
|
| April 10, 2012 | HML Blog # 12 |
|
The Horace Mann League Blog
|
|
|
|
Greetings!
Three recent articles are highlighted in this week's notice about the Horace Mann League Blog. Your comments and suggestions are always appreciated. Jack McKay, The Horace Mann League. |
|
|
|
Major Articles Added to the HML Blog
|
Best Part of 'Schools-Threaten-National-Security' Report:
The Dissents
The most interesting part of the new Condoleezza Rice-Joel Klein report, which bemoans how American national security is threatened by the poor state of public education, is not in the body of the document itself. The real story is in the dissents at the end of the report.
Some of the dissenters - including Linda Darling-Hammond and Randi Weingarten - express such broad disagreement with the actual thesis that national security is threatened by our public schools, as well as with some of the recommended solutions, that one could wonder why they agreed to stay on the commission and put their names to the document.
(Following is part of Dr. Darling Hammond's comments.)
 | |
Linda Darling Hammond
|
One shortcoming is that this report accepts, uncritically and despite significant evidence to the contrary, that competition and privatization are essential - indeed perhaps the most important - strategies for improving public educational systems. It ignores the fact that the nations that have steeply improved achievement and equity and now rank at the top on the PISA tests (i.e., Finland, Singapore, and South Korea) have invested in strong public education systems that serve virtually all students, while nations that have aggressively pursued privatization, such as Chile, have a huge and growing divide between rich and poor that has led to dangerous levels of social unrest.
|
| The Assault on Public Education
Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.
"There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it's the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill," concludes Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a trustee of the State University system of New York and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute.
A more accurate description, I think, is "Failure by Design," the title of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has long been a major source of reliable information and analysis on the state of the economy.
One primary justification for the design is what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz called the "religion" that "markets lead to efficient outcomes," which was recently dealt yet another crushing blow by the collapse of the housing bubble that was ignored on doctrinal grounds, triggering the current financial crisis.
|
Going Public: Who Leaves a Large, Longstanding, and Widely Available Urban Voucher Program?
By Joshua M. Cowen, David J. Fleming, John F. Witte, and Patrick J. Wolf
Source: Sage Publications
Conclusion
This discussion informs the literature on school vouchers by providing evidence from a program that has matured from a small pilot program to a widely available option for which most students are eligible. Most of the evidence for the efficacy of school vouchers comes from relatively small, one-time interventions. The data in this study offer the perspective of a group of students for whom the status quo is not the public sector they leave when offered a voucher as part of a small pilot initiative, but rather the private sector they leave after having made use of a large-scale and fully developed public voucher program.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
