NEPC Resources on Politics
Review of The State Education Agency: At the Helm, Not the Oar
This sincere and well-written but methodologically and politically unsophisticated report argues states should step aside from any direct involvement in the reform business and hand it over to an “ecosystem of nonprofit organizations.” The report makes five assertions about State Education Agencies (SEAs): they suffer from a lack of human resources; their procurement practices are cumbersome and time-consuming; they suffer from antiquated rulemaking; they are undermined by statewide politics; and they suffer from “institutional sclerosis.” These claims set the stage for the report’s basic recommendation: “The SEA should not attempt to implement the nuts and bolts of school improvement, but instead create an environment in which a variety of other organizations can fill the void.” In place of expanding the authority of the SEAs, the report suggests a“4Cs” model of operation: control, contract, cleave and create. Drawing on secondary materials, the report’s claims about the failures of the SEAs are strong but unsubstantiated by data independent from advocacy. Privatizing educational reform is an idea whose time has not come, and most likely never will, because it’s an abstraction based on a model of American education disconnected from the democratic ethos that animates public education. Public education is a public good; it is the loom by which citizens together weave the social contract.
Review of The Economic Benefits of New York City's Public School Reforms, 2002-2013
The Economic Benefits of New York City’s Public School Reforms, 2002-2013 attempts to estimate the economic impact of school reforms implemented during the tenure of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The report focuses on two types of effects: direct effects on the earnings of students graduating under the reforms (who might not otherwise have done so), and indirect effects of higher graduation rates and charter school availability on residential property values. The aggregate impact on earnings and property values is estimated to exceed $74 billion. While such estimates are always an exercise in some level of speculation, this report relies on highly inappropriate assumptions to reach its conclusions. Specifically, it attributes all gains in high school completion and college enrollment to the reforms, applies national statistics on earnings and college completion to the marginal graduate in NYC, and extrapolates cross-sectional associations between graduation rates and home prices at the zip code level as the causal effect of higher graduation rates. Without taking away from the real educational and economic gains that many students experienced during this period, this seriously flawed analysis should be taken by no one as a credible estimate of its economic impact.
Is American Education on a Bad Track?
Review of Report Card on American Education
The 18th edition of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress, and Reform draws on ratings from market-oriented advocacy groups to grade states in areas such as support for charter schools, availability of vouchers, and permissiveness for homeschooling. The authors contend that these grades are based on “high quality” research demonstrating that the policies for which they award high grades will improve education for all students. This review finds that, contrary to these claims, ALEC’s grades draw selectively from these advocacy groups to make claims that are not supported in the wider, peer-reviewed literature. In fact, the research ALEC highlights is quite shoddy and is unsuitable for supporting its recommendations. The authors’ claims of “a growing body of research” lacks citations; their grading system contradicts the testing data that they report; and their data on alternative teacher research is simply wrong. Overall, ALEC’s Report Card is grounded less in research than in ideological tenets, as reflected in the high grades it assigns to states with unproven and even disproven market-based policies. The report’s purpose appears to be more about shifting control of education to private interests than in improving education.
Review of Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement
In Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement: How Mayor-Led Districts Are Improving School and Student Performance, published by the Center for American Progress, the authors seek to bring fiscal and student achievement data to the debate around mayoral control. The fiscal analyses of mayoral-led cities are problematic due to inappropriate comparisons and a lack of reliable and valid evidence supporting the assertion that mayoral control has an influence on the amount or the distribution of resources. Throughout the discussion of student achievement, the report highlights positive findings in a few districts, but offers limited discussion of mayor-led cities where such gains were not found and of other cities in the country that saw strong gains without mayoral control. These issues call into question whether “mayoral control” is appropriately credited with the improvements identified in the report. The paper does not provide or explain the statistical methods or provide the findings essential to supporting the authors’ claims. Nevertheless, this report offers useful information about the context for shifts to mayoral control in different cities and the challenges that may arise in such governance changes. The limitations, however, preclude relying on either the report’s findings or its recommendations in making policy decisions.
NEPC Review: The Way of the Future: Education Savings Accounts for Every American Family (September 2012)
The Friedman Foundation recently published a report promoting Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). Like conventional vouchers, ESAs provide parents with public funds to purchase approved educational services, including private schools, online education, private tutors and higher education. The report presents ESAs as the optimal vehicle to bring Milton Friedman’s school voucher idea into the 21st century. While calling ESAs “the way of the future,” it lacks fundamental information to guide policymakers on their design, implementation, financing, and sustainability. These details ultimately determine the equity, efficiency and cost effectiveness of this proposal. For example, ESAs raise serious equity concerns: affluent parents could, if the policy allows, supplement their vouchers to purchase high quality educational services inaccessible to low-income families. This is indeed allowed in Arizona’s ESA program, the only existing ESA policy in the United States. Open to legal challenge, the report’s plan advocates using ESAs to sidestep prohibitions in state constitutions against supporting religious organizations with public funds. Unaddressed but relevant peer-reviewed evidence on school choice policies suggest that the claimed academic and economic benefits of ESAs are speculative and overstated. The absence of details and evidence in the report suggests it is ideological rhetoric rather than a workable policy proposal.