Fresh from Sean Cavanagh at Education Week, after interviewing Michelle Rhee at the DNC:
Rhee was skeptical of Republican challenger Mitt Romney's proposal to allow parents to use federal Title I and special-education money for private school vouchers.
While Rhee backs vouchers for impoverished students in academically struggling schools, she said there were far better strategies for large-scale school improvement than Romney's plan.
Universal voucher plans are not financially feasible, Rhee argued, especially given the state of the economy.
And a large-scale voucher plan like Romney is "only a sliver of what should be happen to fix the system," she said. "Unless you have a comprehensive set of policies, then that in and of itself is not going to have much of any impact.
Doug Tuthill's take on Michelle Rhee and her school choice evolution here. Researcher Matthew Ladner's take here.
Editor’s note: This is our second installment of “blog stars,” a compilation of thoughtful material from other ed blogs. If I missed something good, by all means let me know at rmatus@stepupforstudents.org.
Jay P. Greene's Blog: Much to Learn About Vouchers Rhee Still Has
Michelle Rhee’s faith in regulation is odd. The public school system is super-heavily regulated with laws and policies streaming down from the federal, state and local levels. Despite all of that, much of the system performs at a tragically poor level. That of course is not to say that vouchers should have no regulation, but the right level of regulation is not “heavy.”
Rhee also places far too much weight on the results of standardized test and gives far too little deference to the judgment of parents. Parents make decisions about schools for a large variety of reasons- including things like school safety, peer groups and the availability of specialized programs. In addition to missing the whole point about school choices being multifaceted with parents best able to judge all the factors, individual test scores bounce around from year to year, they often take a temporary hit when a child transfers and adjusts to a new school.
The notion of having program administrators looking at the math and reading tests and deciding to cast children back to their ‘failing neighborhood school’ is very problematic. Pity the poor voucher program apparatchiks who have to drag children back to a public school where they had been continually bullied because they had the flu on testing day. Pity the children more. The subject of what to do about poorly performing private schools in a choice system is a complex topic and opinions vary widely. Rhee’s proposed solution however does not begin to capture this complexity. Full post here.
The Blog, Huffington Post: Are Democrats Wrong to Blame Teachers Unions?
But why are teachers unions so much more successful than other unions? The answer is simple: public schools lack both competitors and paying customers, eliminating the checks and balances on union demands that exist in the private sector. A business whose unionized workers drive up costs without raising quality loses customers and may have to lay off workers or even shut down. Union success is thus self-regulating. But if, as a parent, you don't like the way your local district runs its schools, you have nowhere else to turn -- not without moving or paying for a private school. And as a taxpayer, if your local schools mismanage your tax dollars, you can't send those dollars anywhere else. That's why public schooling's inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending has more than doubled in the past four decades despite stagnating or declining academic outcomes: revenues don't depend on satisfying customers.
That's not the unions' fault. (more…)
