The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  At the same National Catholic Education Association conference in 1991, the sociologist Father Andrew Greeley predicted that the first voucher would arrive on the day that the last Catholic school closed. He knew that Catholic schools, despite their great success in educating working-class and poor children, were struggling to survive. He knew that help was not on the way. What he did not know—and what I did not realize—was that the new charter school movement would undercut Catholic schooling. Charter schools offered an alternative not only to regular public schools, but to Catholic schools, which were burdened by rising costs. As more and more states opened charter schools, more and more Catholic schools closed their doors. Between 1990 and 2008, some 1,300 Catholic schools that had once enrolled 300,000 children were shuttered.18 Many of them would have shut down anyway because of changing demographics and the diminished number of low-paid religious teachers to staff them, but competition with free charter schools was very likely a contributing factor.

  There was an undeniable appeal to the values associated with choice: freedom, personal empowerment, deregulation, the ability to chart one’s own course. All of those values appealed to me and many others. The anti-choice side was saddled with defending regulation, bureaucracy, and poor academic results. How much easier it was to promise (and hope for) the accomplishments, successes, and rewards that had not yet been achieved and could not yet be demonstrated, but were surely out there on the other side of the mountain.

  NOT LONG AFTER THE MILWAUKEE VOUCHER PROGRAM STARTED in 1990, researchers began to debate whether vouchers were improving student achievement. The Wisconsin State Education Department hired John Witte of the University of Wisconsin to evaluate the Milwaukee program. Witte found that the voucher students were not making large gains. Voucher supporters denounced his findings because he was appointed by the Wisconsin state superintendent, who was a well-known critic of vouchers.19 One study followed another, with a predictable pattern: The critics of vouchers almost always found small or no gains, while supporters of vouchers almost always found significant gains. Each side criticized the other’s research methodology. Each said the other was ideologically biased and not to be trusted.

  The same exchanges occurred in Cleveland, where a voucher program started in 1995. The critics saw little or no progress. The supporters said the critics were wrong. One side found promising gains; the other side saw no gains.

  By 2009, studies by different authors came to similar conclusions about vouchers, suggesting an emerging consensus. Cecelia E. Rouse of Princeton University and Lisa Barrow of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago published a review of all the existing studies of vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and the District of Columbia. They found that there were “relatively small achievement gains for students offered educational vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero.” They could not predict whether vouchers might eventually produce changes in high school graduation rates, college enrollment, or future wages. But they did not find impressive gains in achievement. Nor was there persuasive evidence that the public school systems that lost voucher students to private schools had improved. Since no one claimed that the voucher programs had produced dramatic changes, Rouse and Barrow cautioned against anticipating that voucher programs were going to produce large academic gains in the future.20

  A team of researchers that included both supporters and critics of vouchers launched a five-year longitudinal study of the Milwaukee program. In the first year of the study, they found that students in the regular public schools and those in the voucher schools had similar scores. Students in the fourth grade in voucher schools had lower scores on state tests of reading, math, and science than students in regular schools, while voucher students in eighth grade had higher scores. Neither group demonstrated high performance. At all grades, both public school students and voucher students were well below the 50th percentile nationally, mainly around the 33rd percentile, which was typical of low-income students.21

  In 2009, the same research team released another study that found no major differences between students in voucher schools and those in regular public schools. The research group included the strongly pro-voucher Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas and John Witte, who was considered a critic of vouchers. The researchers found “no overall statistically significant differences between MPCP [voucher] and MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools] student achievement growth in either math or reading one year after they were carefully matched to each other.” Perhaps there would be different outcomes in the future, but this was not the panacea that voucher supporters had promised and hoped for. 22

  The District of Columbia voucher program—the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program—was created by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2003. The scholarship, worth $7,500, could be used for tuition and fees at a private or religious school. The vouchers were awarded by lottery; priority was given to students attending “schools in need of improvement”—so-called SINI schools. Congress mandated annual evaluations of the program. The first evaluation in 2008 reported that in the first two years of the program (2004 and 2005), there was no statistically significant difference in test scores of reading and math between students who won the lottery and those who entered the lottery but did not win. However, the third-year evaluation of the voucher program (released in 2009) found that there was “a statistically significant positive impact on reading test scores, but not math test scores.” The reading scores represented a gain of more than three months of learning.23

  Supporters of vouchers were ecstatic about the third-year evaluation because at last they had hard evidence that vouchers would benefit students. They glossed over the finding that these gains were limited to certain groups of students. The students who experienced gains in reading were those who entered the program from schools that were not in need of improvement, those who entered the program in the upper two-thirds of the test score distribution, and those who entered in grades K-8. Females also seemed to benefit, though that finding was not as robust as the others. The groups that did not experience improvement in reading (or math) were boys, secondary students, students from SINI schools, and students in the lowest third of the test score distribution. The students who did not see any gains were those in the highest-priority groups, the ones for whom the program was designed: those with the lowest test scores and those who had previously attended SINI schools.24

  Test results were not the only source of concern about voucher schools. When a team of reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel examined the voucher schools in Milwaukee in 2005, they uncovered unanticipated problems. Applicants to run a voucher school did not need any particular credentials, nor did their teachers. The journalists visited 106 of 115 voucher schools (nine voucher schools would not let them in); they found good schools and awful schools, Catholic schools, Muslim schools, and evangelical Christian schools.

  The reporters judged that about 10 percent of the voucher schools were excellent, and the same proportion showed “alarming deficiencies.” Among the last group was Alex’s Academics of Excellence, which had been opened by a convicted rapist and remained open despite allegations that staff members used drugs on school grounds. At another school, the Mandella School of Science and Math, the founder went to jail for padding the school’s enrollment and stealing some $330,000 in public funds; he used part of his ill-gotten gains to buy two Mercedes, while his teachers went unpaid. Those schools and two others were eventually closed by the authorities, not because of parents voting with their feet to take their children out of bad schools, and not because the academic program was abysmal, but because of financial improprieties. One of the voucher schools that reporters visited was opened by a man with an expired license as a substitute teacher who had previously worked as a school security guard and a woman who had previously been a teacher’s aide. They collected $414,000 annually in public funds for the eighty pupils enrolled in their sparsely furnished rented space. When reporters visited the
school, only fifty students were present, and instruction was minimal.25

  But on the whole, the reporters concluded that “the voucher schools feel, and look, surprisingly like schools in the Milwaukee Public Schools district.” Student performance in the Milwaukee public schools increased in the first two years after vouchers were introduced—possibly because the new competition spurred teachers to prepare students for the state tests. After that, achievement in the regular schools stalled. As the competition got stiffer, there were no more improvements in the public schools. This was not the momentous result that voucher advocates had predicted.

  The one notable consequence of the voucher program was that (in the words of the Journal Sentinel reporters) “it opened the door for the spread of other forms of school choice, including charter schools, which have taken innovative paths and have been growing rapidly in enrollment.” As students enrolled in the voucher schools, charter schools, and interdistrict choice programs, enrollment in the Milwaukee public schools plummeted. In 1998, the district had about 100,000 students. A decade later, enrollment in the regular public schools dropped just below 80,000. Vouchers, charters, and choice were rapidly eroding the public education system.26

  A similar phenomenon occurred in Washington, D.C. As charter schools grew, enrollment in the District of Columbia’s public schools dropped sharply. When the first charter school opened in the district in 1997, the public schools enrolled nearly 80,000 students. By 2009, the number of students enrolled in public schools dropped to only 45,000, while fifty-six charter schools enrolled 28,000 children, over a third of the students in the district (with an additional 1,700 students in voucher schools).27 The media regularly pummeled the district’s public schools as the worst in the nation, while the highest officials in the federal and local government lauded charter schools as the leading edge of school reform. Little wonder that parents voted with their feet to abandon the public schools.

  The 2007 report of the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress had disturbing implications for Milwaukee’s public schools. That assessment found that the test scores of African American students in Wisconsin’s public schools were among the lowest in the nation, comparable to those of African American students in Mississippi and Alabama in both reading and mathematics in fourth and eighth grades. The gap between white and African American students in Wisconsin was one of the largest in the nation. This reflected poorly on Milwaukee, where two-thirds of the African American students in Wisconsin attended school. According to choice theory, vouchers were supposed to improve the public schools, but the NAEP results showed that the performance of African American students in Milwaukee continued to lag.28

  In sum, twenty years after the initiation of vouchers in Milwaukee and a decade after the program’s expansion to include religious schools, there was no evidence of dramatic improvement for the neediest students or the public schools they left behind.

  CHARTER SCHOOLS WERE THE JEWELS of the school choice movement. They were far more popular than vouchers and multiplied rapidly. By 2010, about 30,000 students in the nation were using publicly funded vouchers, while some 1.4 million students were enrolled in about 4,600 charter schools. Every president lauded charter schools, from George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Charter schools appealed to a broad spectrum of people from the left, the right, and the center, all of whom saw charters (as others had previously seen vouchers) as the antidote to bureaucracy and stasis and as the decisive change that would revolutionize American education and dramatically improve educational achievement. Charter schools represented, more than anything else, a concerted effort to deregulate public education, with few restrictions on pedagogy, curriculum, class size, discipline, or other details of their operation.

  The charter school sector had its problems, which was not surprising in light of its explosive growth. In 2004, the California Charter Academy, the largest charter school chain in California, collapsed in bankruptcy, stranding 6,000 students in sixty storefront schools at the beginning of the fall term. The founder of the organization, a former insurance company executive, allegedly collected $100 million from the state to finance his statewide chain of charter schools.29

  Pennsylvania passed a charter law in 1997. Ten years later, there were 127 charter schools, nearly half in Philadelphia. The city adopted what is known as the “diverse provider model,” in which district schools compete with charter schools and privately managed schools (operating under contract to the district and not entirely free of districtwide mandates). Researchers from the RAND Corporation noted that achievement had improved in Philadelphia, but “with so many different interventions under way simultaneously in Philadelphia, there is no way to determine exactly which components of the reform plan are responsible for the improvement.” The RAND team concluded in 2008 that students in charter schools made gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the gains they experienced while attending traditional public schools. They found no evidence that the local public schools were performing any differently because of competition with the charter schools. In 2007, the same researchers had analyzed Philadelphia’s experiment in privatizing schools. They found that the privately managed schools—including for-profit and nonprofit managers—did not, on average, exceed the performance of regular public schools. In 2009, Philadelphia officials announced that the privatization experiment had not worked; of twenty-eight privately managed schools, they said, six elementary and middle schools outperformed the regular public schools, but ten were worse than district-run schools.30

  The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that at least four charters were under federal criminal investigation for nepotism, conflicts of interest, and financial mismanagement. The managers of other charters in Pennsylvania created private companies to sell products or services to their schools or placed relatives on the payroll. One charter, the Inquirer found, paid millions of dollars in rent, salaries, and management fees annually to a for-profit company owned by the charter’s chief executive officer. Cyber-charters, which offered online instruction to students at home, were receiving full payment for each student and amassing multimillion-dollar reserves; in virtual charter schools, relatively small numbers of teachers can “instruct” hundreds or even thousands of students online, generating huge profits for the charter company. Special education funding was also an issue in Pennsylvania, because charters collected payments for special education students but were not required to spend all the money they received on special education services.31

  When charters get outstanding results, researchers inevitably ask whether they enroll a fair share of the neediest students. Some charters specifically serve English-language learners or special education students, and some do have their fair share. But in many instances, charters avoid students with high needs, either because they lack the staff to educate them appropriately or because they fear that such students will depress their test scores. A 2008 study by Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider of the charter schools in Washington, D.C., showed that they enroll substantially smaller numbers of children with high needs than do the regular public schools. On the one hand, the D.C. charters have a disproportionately high number of poor children, but on the other, “the vast majority of charters have proportionally fewer special education and English language learning students.” A small number of charters target these groups, they said, but most do not. English-language learners were underrepresented in twenty-eight of thirty-seven charters, and special education students were underrepresented in twenty-four of thirty-seven charters, as compared to their proportions in the District of Columbia public schools.32

  Nonetheless, some charter schools unquestionably have achieved outstanding results. In Texas, the School of Science and Technology in San Antonio was the only middle school in that city to earn a rating of “exemplary” from the state. About 20 percent of charter schools were considered excellent by state evaluators, and another 20 percent were struggling to survive,
while the remaining 60 percent were somewhere in between.33

  The charter schools with the most impressive record of success are the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, which have been called culture-changing schools, because they aim to teach students not just academics but also self-discipline and good behavior. KIPP was launched in 1994 by two teachers, David Levin and Michael Feinberg, after they completed their two-year assignment in the Teach for America program in Houston. Feinberg opened a KIPP school in Houston, and Levin opened one in the South Bronx in New York City. Both schools achieved exceptional results. Generously funded by foundations, Levin and Feinberg opened dozens more KIPP schools across the nation, specifically to prepare poor minority students for college. Fifteen years after the organization was founded, there were eighty-two KIPP schools with approximately 20,000 students.34