The Milwaukee voucher schools have never outperformed the public schools on state tests: See here and here. The only dispute about test scores is whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools.
Accountability? Read here about some very low-performing schools in Milwaukee that have never been held accountable. One of them opened in 2001. Over the past 11 years, it has collected $46.8 million but its students perform worse than those in the public schools. Some choice.
And anyone who looks at the NAEP reports on urban districts will see that after 22 years of vouchers, charters, and competition, Milwaukee is a poster child for the failure of vouchers, charters, and competition. The students in those schools all perform about the same level. No sector is better. The Milwaukee schools are ranked among the lowest performing of the urban districts tested by NAEP, ranking just above sad Detroit.
If choice was the answer, Milwaukee should be at the top of the nation’s urban districts. But it is near the bottom. Why? Because choice is not the answer. Addressing the causes of low test scores is the answer, and choice does not address the causes of low test scores: poverty and segregation (Diane Ravitch)
See also the CREDO report from Stanford on how most charters underperform public schools.
Anybody who has been paying attention to what's been going on in neoliberal education reform understands that the big push to promote charters and vouchers has little to do with improving poor kids' academic outcomes and much more to do with pushing a privatizing ideology that in the minds of its proponents is medicine for all that ails us. And as I pointed out the other day, standardization tools like the common core have less to do with raising standards and more to do with providing a justification for closing public schools and privatizing them. This can be done because so many people buy the propaganda that our schools are failing rather than understanding that our society is failing the kids who go to those schools, and that there is little the schools can do that can make a real difference.
Where you go to school doesn't matter so much as where you grow up. Schools of any kind–public, private, or charter–cannot offer broad scalable solutions until you deal with the underlying causes and constraints of child poverty. Sure, some schools perform better than others, but there are no formulas. Success has to do with particular people finding something that works in their particular community. I think that particular communities, in an interdependent relationship with the broader educational community, should be given latitude do develop their own solutions.
I'm all for innovation and creativity. But charters don't offer that any more than normal public schools do, because both are constrained by the need to teach to the test. And so too many of these charters are standardized testing mills, and they are delivering exactly the opposite of what these kids need. All kids need to be challenged, but the challenges are different for different kids, and standardization doesn't promote choice; it puts all kids, whether they are in public or charter schools, in a one-size-fits-all straitjacket.
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I'm not anti-market; it clearly has its uses, but there's a difference between having a market economy and a market society. In the latter everything becomes a commodity, and there are some things that cannot be commodified.
I'm planning to do a piece, or maybe a series of pieces, on the origins of neoliberalism, and I'm want to frame it as a philosophical debate between Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi. I'm clearly in the Polanyi camp, but I want to give a fair representation to the concerns of people who are persuaded by Hayek. There is a serious debate at the bottom of all this, and it's essentially a debate about human empowerment and the conditions that promote or undermine it.
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