Op-ed: School choice makes homeschoolers and private schools more safe from gov't -- not less

[UPDATE: for more articles and perspectives on SB 1647, click here]

The following opinion piece comments on school choice as it relates to homeschooling (in particular) and a new bill filed by State Senate President Greg Treat. SB 1647, according to ChoiceMatters, "proposes giving parents control over a portion of their children’s education tax dollars, in the form of Oklahoma Empowerment Accounts. The accounts would be eligible to fund private school tuition or to supplement home schooling with approved technology expenses, enrichment materials or other educational services." 

Homeschoolers in Oklahoma have traditionally been extremely wary (as I mentioned previously) when faced with proposed measures that would direct tax dollars their way for education purposes, and for good reason. The freedom to home educate in this state is simply unparalleled in the entire union. Generally speaking, where government funds go, government regulation follows.

This idea sounds good, and it would be beneficial for families who educate by any means. But, I do have concerns about the very real potential for long-term, unforeseen effects and changes brought by future legislatures. 

There is somewhat of a divide in the homeschool community on this issue. The more "old school" community - homeschoolers of longevity, who fought the past fights to protect homeschool freedoms, and are primarily religiously motivated - is much more adamant in their stance against measures like this. The "new" crowd (speaking broadly, here) - generally less religious, oftentimes transplants from other states where homeschooling is regulated - is much more open to the idea.

I plan to gather more columns from the homeschool community regarding this proposal, seeking perspectives that see reason to celebrate, as well as from those who see reason to be concerned. 

For now, here is one take in favor of Treat's measure:

SCHOOL CHOICE MAKES HOMESCHOOLERS AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS MORE SAFE FROM GOVERNMENT—NOT LESS

by Greg Forstert, Center for Independent Journalism [link]

I understand the concerns some have about protecting homeschoolers from government interference. I have a lot of close relatives who homeschool, including a couple who have been professionally employed providing services to homeschoolers. While my own special-needs daughter currently receives services in a government school, my wife and I took a very serious look at homeschooling several times during the pandemic, including as recently as a month ago.

So as Oklahoma considers an Education Savings Account proposal that would support homeschooling as a legitimate form of choice, I know it’s important to be vigilant about making sure government keeps its meddling hands off homeschoolers. But it’s just as important to be smart, and not undermine the cause of homeschooling with our efforts to protect it. The real-life track record of school choice programs across the country shows that—surprising as this may be to some—the programs greatly strengthen families against government interference, rather than weakening them.

I will take second place in line to absolutely nobody when it comes to vigilance against ever-grasping government. When I was in high school, we had a “dress like you would have looked in the 60s” day. My friends put on shaggy wigs and tie-dye. I put on a Barry Goldwater “IN YOUR HEART, YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT” button and walked down the hall scolding all my hippie friends: “Get a job!”

I know from experience that a lot of homeschoolers are actually more sympathetic to long hair and granola than to crew cuts and tax cuts. But you can’t tell me I’m not committed to keeping the government’s grubby hands off your freedom.

However, a commitment to freedom is one thing. Ignoring what actually happens in the real world because we have an abstract theory that tells us how things absolutely must happen is another. That’s exactly how movements for change, like homeschooling, can lose their way.

I’ve been a school choice advocate for 20 years, and from the beginning, I have always heard the same thing from champions of a certain abstract ideology: “School choice programs must inevitably become a back door for government to take control of education outside government schools!” And you know, I’m not sure if I have ever, even once, heard this concern expressed as something that could potentially happen—something we need to watch out for, something to be concerned about. It’s always something that must, must, must inevitably happen, like water flowing downhill, or two and two making four, or the French army surrendering. It’s almost as if people feel the need to reassure themselves that their ideology is unconditionally reliable as a guide to the facts.

Instead of talking about school choice programs in the abstract, guided only by ideology, let’s look at the extensive real-world track record these programs have produced. While the earliest school choice programs date to the 19th century, the modern school choice movement began with a voucher program in Milwaukee in 1990. Today, there are 76 programs in 32 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico that support families choosing non-government educational options. These programs serve over 600,000 students.

There have been no instances of government taking control of the content of education through these programs. None. On the contrary, in every case, protection for the right of educators supported by these programs to teach whatever they want however they want has been resoundingly vindicated both politically and legally.

Every type of school choice program has the same unblemished track record. Some homeschoolers in Oklahoma have argued that a program providing school choice through the tax code would be safer than Education Savings Accounts (in Oklahoma they’re called Oklahoma Empowerment Accounts). I’m in favor of all school choice programs, but Education Savings Accounts are a better program design, and there’s no justification for seeing any difference when it comes to protecting the content of education.

Researcher offers proposals to improve Oklahoma teacher quality

Researcher offers proposals to improve Oklahoma teacher quality

OKLAHOMA CITY (August 21, 2019)—Oklahoma’s teacher-hiring woes have made national headlines and lawmakers have increased state spending by hundreds of millions of dollars in response. But the impact of that spending may be hampered by the fact that colleges of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers.

A new report by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) calls for changes that will make “a reinvention of teacher education plausible, attractive, and sustainable for the schools” and lead to better outcomes.

“Forming Teachers: The Education School Challenge,” by Greg Forster, notes that individuals who emerge from colleges of education are often unprepared. Sixty-two percent of teachers in one report agreed with the statement, “Schools of education do not prepare their graduates to cope with classroom reality.”

Another report found there was no notable difference in the academic achievement of students taught by traditionally certified teachers and those who are uncertified, a finding with much significant for Oklahoma given the rapid increase in emergency-certified teachers.

Forster says two major causes of those problems are the “widespread presence—even dominance—of indoctrination into political radicalism in education-school curricula” and the “role education schools play in the special-interest coalition that dominates the electoral politics of education policy.”

The curricula of many colleges of education, Forster writes, include “far-left agitprop well outside the mainstream even of liberal progressivism,” and Oklahoma “is no exception.”

Forster notes that a random-day review of the Twitter feed of the University of Oklahoma’s Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education included advertisements for four events, of which two were on “environmental moral reasoning and sociomoral reasoning” and “social justice in education.”

To improve colleges of education and their ultimate product—teachers—Forster calls for adopting “public policies that reward education schools for producing teachers who are judged to be high quality by those who ought to have the authority to make that judgment.”

To that end, Forster calls for removing “unnecessary barriers to the hiring and (especially) firing of teachers” that would leave principals with the “full authority” to make those employment decisions. Forster says this would incentivize improvement in colleges of education because education schools “would not be able to attract students unless they could show that principals value their graduates.”

He also calls for transparency efforts such as testing education-school graduates “on their mastery of content knowledge in the core academic disciplines” and then “publishing the results.”

Forster concedes that enacting those policies may be “politically difficult” and “would have to happen over the long term,” but says significant change is necessary.

“Imposing a ruinous false ideology of teacher training upon the profession was not all done in a day,” Forster writes. “And fixing things takes more time than ruining them, not less.”

OCPA president Jonathan Small said Oklahoma lawmakers need to take the issue of teacher quality seriously.

“For Oklahoma taxpayers to get the maximum value out of the significant spending increases in our public-school system, we need to have the best teachers possible in every classroom,” Small said. “That won’t happen when colleges of education are allowed to shortchange teachers when it comes to training them on the realities of classroom instruction.”

Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is the author of nine books and the co-editor of four books. He has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals.

To read the entire report, click here.

OCPA column: Collective bargaining not worth it for teachers

Collective bargaining not worth it for teachers

by Greg Forster, contributor for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA)

Oklahoma should follow the example of other states that are moving away from collective bargaining in K-12 education. It’s not just bad for kids, it’s bad for teachers.

I’m not against unions. My wife worked for a union for years, volunteering long hours as an employee advocate in company dispute resolution. The union was the only protection in her workplace from corporate mistreatment and contract violations.

But collective bargaining and representation simply isn’t a good fit for K-12 teachers. Doctors and lawyers don’t unionize. The nature of the work they do just doesn’t permit the standardization, controlled processes, and highly specified work outputs that are necessary for collective bargaining to be effective.

Teachers are like doctors and lawyers. Standardizing the work they do into a one-size-fits-all mold creates major headaches. But collective bargaining demands standardization, so processes and outputs can be negotiated.

The standardization demanded by collective bargaining is a major factor in all the complaints we’re accustomed to hearing from public-school teachers—useless paperwork, unreasonable rules, rigid systems, dysfunctional bureaucracy. In a 2009 study of national data from the U.S. Department of Education, I compared public and private school teachers. The difference in teacher working conditions was dramatic.

Private school teachers, unhindered by the standardization of collective bargaining, were much more likely to have a great deal of control over selection of textbooks and instructional materials (53% v. 32%); content, topics, and skills to be taught (60% v. 36%); performance standards for students (40% v. 18%), curriculum (47% v. 22%) and discipline policy (25% v. 13%). Private school teachers were also less likely to report that various categories of student misbehavior disrupted their classes, and four times less likely to say student violence is a problem on at least a monthly basis (12% v. 48%).

It’s true that collective bargaining brings a moderate increase in pay. The Oklahoma State Department of Education reports that in 2016-17, the average high school teacher made $39,319 and the average elementary school teacher made $37,851. (This was before the $6,100 average pay raise teachers got this year.) In the same year, according to the Oklahoma Private School Accreditation Commission, the average private school teacher salary across all grades was $36,947. Public school teachers also get better benefits and have job security protections.

But teachers don’t live by bread alone. In my study, I found that private school teachers are more satisfied with their jobs, even at somewhat lower pay.

They were much more likely than public school teachers to agree that they planned to remain teaching as long as they could (62% v. 44%). They were less likely to agree that they only planned to teach until retirement (12% v. 33%), that they would leave teaching immediately if a job with a higher salary were available (12% v. 20%), that teaching “isn’t really worth it” because of the stress and disappointments (6% v. 13%) and that they sometimes feel like teaching is a waste of time (9% v. 17%). They were even slightly more likely to be satisfied with their salaries (51% v. 46%).

We should rethink whether teachers are well served by collective bargaining. Teachers don’t like our one-size-fits-all schools any more than parents do.

Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a Friedman Fellow with EdChoice, the author of seven books, and a regular contributor for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.

OCPA column: How beneficial is pre-K?

How beneficial is pre-K?

by Greg Forster

Should Oklahoma expand pre-K education, or invest those funds in other policy solutions? One of the critical questions at stake is how effective pre-K programs are relative to other things we might do with all that money.

The gold standard in education research is random assignment, the same method used in medical trials. When this kind of method isn’t possible, as is the case in Oklahoma’s pre-K programs, other methods can still be used, although they’re generally not as scientifically reliable.

Russ Whitehurst, former head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences and now a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution, conducted a comprehensive review of decades of research on pre-K programs. He found that the higher the scientific quality of a study, the less likely it was to find sustained benefits from pre-K. Of the 10 studies he identified that included data on later outcomes, six found meaningful benefits and four did not, but the four that found no long-term benefits were better-quality studies.

Specifically, Whitehurst noted that “not one of the studies that has suggested long-term positive impacts of center-based early childhood programs has been based on a well-implemented and appropriately analyzed randomized trial, and nearly all have serious limitations in external validity.” Meanwhile, “the only two studies in the list with both high internal and external validity (Head Start Impact and Tennessee) find null or negative impacts, and all of the studies that point to very small, null, or negative effects have high external validity.”

Since Whitehurst conducted that research review in 2014, one additional study has received special attention in Oklahoma. In a 2017 study, William Gormley, Jr., Deborah Phillips, and Sara Anderson found positive results from pre-K in Tulsa visible as late as seventh grade. However, to use the researchers’ own words, the size of the positive effects they found was “rather modest.”

Also, because of data limitations, they had to abandon the high-quality scientific model used in earlier Tulsa pre-K research in favor of a much less reliable method; its value is not zero, but it must be considered less informative than the studies we have that are of top quality.

Hence, their study continued the pattern identified by Whitehurst.

In addition to considering this empirical evidence, policymakers should ask if the expansion of pre-K might actually disrupt the parent/child bond or cause other unintended social harm.

Rather than grow the bureaucratic state and have government employees incrementally replace the role of parents in the lives of children, another approach is to strengthen the social capital of impoverished households in ways that strengthen parents rather than replacing them.

Policymakers shouldn’t spend big money expanding pre-K when the benefits are so uncertain. They should also take pre-K off Oklahoma’s automatic-funding conveyor belt; it should have to make a case for itself like every other discretionary expense.

Moreover, Oklahoma should consider introducing school choice design in existing pre-K programs, to strengthen the freedom and power of parents. Oklahoma’s existing program permits schools to partner with community organizations; why not allow community organizations to serve parents directly?

Greg Forster (Ph.D., Yale University) is a Friedman Fellow with EdChoice. He writes monthly for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) and has written numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals as well as in popular publications such as The Washington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education. This column is excerpted from a policy brief published this month by OCPA.