Saturday, February 26, 2005

Book Review: Misstating the Obvious

From THE LEARNING CLASS: Essays on Education by Philip Vassallo, Ed.D. at EducationNews.org

All Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different? by Luis Benveniste, Martin Carnoy, and Richard Rothstein. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003. 206, xv pp. $19.95. Paper.

Anyone who has studied education half seriously knows that public and private schools have in common many imposing tasks: structuring and managing administrative offices and classrooms, supervising physical plant problems, effecting curricular decisions, acquiring useful print and electronic instructional materials, resolving professional and nonprofessional personnel issues, coordinating teacher development opportunities, implementing efficacious teacher evaluation instruments, encouraging teacher innovations, engendering parental involvement, monitoring volunteers such as PTA members and student teachers, confronting constituent pressures within and outside the education community, and a host of other challenges. (Have I mentioned educating and disciplining the students themselves?)

All Else Equal chooses to ignore these obvious similarities in claiming that none of the school-choice innovations launched over the past generation has made a difference in improving the affected education systems. The book fashions a revisionist historical tour of libertarian initiatives such as vouchers, private scholarship programs, charter schools, and private management of public schools. Along the way, it attempts to discredit Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s enduring market-side view of education and John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe’s 1990 landmark book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, which held that parochial school students outperform their public school counterparts. Authors Benveniste, Carnoy, and Rothstein begin their examination of voucher programs in the early 1970s with the Alum Rock school district in San Jose, California, and continue to the present day with a look at the controversial Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and Cleveland Scholarship Program. They also briefly discuss private scholarship programs for public school students in New York, Dayton, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, as well as public school projects run by for-profit education management organizations like the Edison Schools. Their conclusion: Any positive reports of these efforts are grossly exaggerated because they are plagued by validity problems, including consistently low follow-up test participation rates and limited progress among students. They submit that achievement “differences are at best small,” which “leaves us back at square one” in righting public education wrongs.

Friedman, the authors assert, failed to consider the simple fact that schools in a greater choice environment would reject certain students (just as the authors themselves failed to state that schools in a greater choice environment would likely seize the market niche opportunity to develop programs for addressing those rejected students). In fact, Friedman focused more on economic and political theory because he knew that school management issues would be better left to educators, entrepreneurs, and government overseers in a society where every student is guaranteed an education. In trashing Chubb and Moe’s study, the writers register the tired, shallow complaint that Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools made unequal comparisons between parochial schools, which were presumably more privileged in their student selection process, and public schools, which were strapped with lower-performing students whom they were required to keep. Nowhere in this section of the book do the writers conjecture that parental choice (they are as free to pull their children out of a private school as they are to place them in one) and the motivation that springs from parental sacrifice (private schools do not come free) might have contributed in an least some measure to student achievement.

All of these attacks serve a prelude to their own study, which they acknowledge provides limited quantitative data and heaps of unreliable qualitative data. For example, no high schools were in the study and the sample included only 16 California metropolitan-area primary and middle schools. Yet, from their findings, the authors insist that public schools would not improve by adopting greater accountability to parents and flexibility in hiring and firing teachers. They add that private schools do not do a better job at responding to parents and at organizing themselves around academic achievement. One of their parting shots: “Privatization and market accountability are not necessarily the solution to improving the public education system,” clearly does not emerge from the data they present.

While the authors go to considerable lengths to find holes in pro-choice arguments, they say virtually nothing about mediocre or dangerously negligent public schools. Unfortunately, they also steer clear of the central question underpinning the school choice movement: Should all American taxpayers be free to choose their children’s school—be it one run by the public or the private sector—simply in the name of democracy?


Philip Vassallo, Ed.D., writes on education issues and specializes in writing instruction, family participation, and school choice. His books include The Art of On-the-Job Writing and The Inwardness of the Outward Gaze: Learning and Teaching through Philosophy. He accepts messages at Vassallo@aol.com.

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