As a titan of economic theory, Milton Friedman more than deserved his Nobel Prize. But perhaps his greatest contribution came not with the Monetarist theory or the concept of permanent income hypothesis, but in developing the concept of school vouchers — the first step in expanding parent and student choice over education. Although vouchers remain controversial, small-scale experiments, his theories on school choice have helped education reformers offer an alternative path to traditional public education.

This excerpt from a debate with several education and economic theorists — including longtime American Federation of Teachers Albert Shanker –  from Friedman’s show, Free to Choose, offers a sense of the understanding Friedman had about the power of choice that most educators still lack today. Whether or not one agrees with him, one has to admire the intellect and the apparent care he had for the lives of children and families.

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Think this family cares what the ed school crowd thinks? Me neither. (Courtesy of COGIC)

A problem among the non-research and non-practice “educators” at university schools of education (and also found among some teachers) is this mistaken conceit that public education is somehow highly correlated (and even equals) Democracy, despite the fact that there are numerous dictatorships which also successfully educate their populations. Cuba and the old Soviet Union are two that come to mind.

This faulty thinking extends even into their concept of how public education should be designed. In their minds, the concept of public education cannot abide any rethinking of the status quo. If it doesn’t involve the direct operational control of a school by an elected official or body, it cannot be public. The fact that so much of public education outside of K-12 — for example, public universities (which derive most of their budgets from tuition, federal financial aid dollars and restricted public and private grants) — doesn’t fit such a definition never factors into their thinking. Nor do they ever consider whether the status quo is any more accountable in realistic terms than a model that involves privately-managed institutions that serve the public good.

One such observer still stuck in old school thinking is Alexander Hoffman, a doctoral student at Columbia’s famed Teachers College, who managed to get Gotham Schools to let him take some 1,300 words to explain what he could have said in less than half. Public charter schools may be “quasi-public” schools, but they are not to him public schools. Why? You can wade through this piece if you so choose. I”ll do the Mickey Kaus method and save you the time: The sum of the argument is that charters aren’t public schools because their boards aren’t elected — and therefore, unaccountable to the public — while they supposedly don’t have to accept all children and therefore, unaccountable for the public good.

Hoffman doesn’t accept the fact that charters are highly-regulated by the school districts and authorizing agencies that oversee them, must provide a full open accounting of their finances and accept all students via a lottery system that unlike magnet schools and selective schools such as Stuyvesant, must accept all students via lottery for all the seats they have. He manages to compare charters to restaurants even though the latter (along with most businesses and many nonprofits) don’t have to disclose their finances in writing to any public body (the IRS filing, which isn’t public information, doesn’t count). Declares Hoffman: “The fact of regulation does not make these entities public.”

There are more than a few flaws in Hoffman’s argument. I’ll hit on the most-important flaw: A willing ignorance of something called the law, which in some 42 states deigns charters as public schools on nearly equal fiscal and operational footing as traditional public schools (in most states, they are considered districts and corporations). Sure the ed school crowd chooses to ignore this fact and indulges in philosophical blathering (by the way, this explains why they are failing to adequately train aspiring teachers). But ignorance of the law, to paraphrase that old saw, is no excuse to evading reality. Essentially the argument over whether charters are public schools truly ended twenty years ago when Minnesota authorized the first batch of them.

The bigger problem with Hoffman’s thesis lies in the mindset of the writer and those who share his philosophy: They are far more concerned with philosophy than with practice. Essentially, they would rather indulge in thesis than in figuring out the more-important question of how to assure that every child receives the highest-quality education possible.

See, when a third of America’s children drop out annually into lives of crime and poverty, the question of what is “public education” can no longer be academic. The focus must be on turning around — or shutting down — dropout factories; improving the quality of academic instruction; staffing classrooms with teachers ready to teach every child no matter their socioeconomic background; offering rigorous, challenging curricula; engaging parents and the community in improving school quality; and providing as many educational options as possible in order for every child to get the education they need. The current system was never really equipped for that purpose and it isn’t achieving these goals now.

From where school reformers sit, this is ultimately achievable by abandoning the traditional definition of public education — a school district that runs school buildings — but by a more-expansive system of funding the best choices for each child. It doesn’t matter whether the child wants to attend a traditional public school, a public charter, a Catholic school or one run by Marva Collins. One could even see a situation in which students are served by teachers who are paid by families through a voucher (credit for this idea goes to Iowa principal Deron Durflinger). The matter is whether they get the best education possible and that we make sure that the money is there to make it happen.

Hoffman and company are encouraged to join this conversation in a more meaningful way than they do now. It would be nice if they accepted the offer and pitched in to do the work.

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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I offer six steps for school reformers and grassroots activists to expand the role of parents in education decisionmaking. The expansion of charter schools and other forms of school choice, along with initiatives borne out of the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top such as Parent Trigger, offer great opportunities to truly put children and families at the center of education (and improve the lives of even the poorest children). But only if an infrastructure is built to help parents make the best decisions.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

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Choice is no panacea. But as seen in the consumer products market, choice can help spur innovation. Let's try this in education.

Back in December 2009, when this piece was written, the efforts to enact Parent Trigger legislation in California had just made it through its first round and charter schools hadn’t yet come under its latest array of criticism from the Gary Orfield crowd. And before events such as the protest by New York City parents (and tort filed) against the shutdown of 19 schools made one wonder about whether parents should even be allowed at the table.  In any case, this piece once again makes the point clear that family engagement in schools cannot be limited to field trips and homework. If school reform is to make any long-term impact — and if America’s public education system is to improve — parents must be the key decisionmakers in education. Even amid bad choices by parents, their participation is crucial.

I will offer more thoughts this weekend in the latest Dropout Nation Podcast.

If Calif. State Sen. Gloria Romero succeeds in allowing  parents in the state to to replace administrators and teachers at their schools (or convert the schools into charters), it will be an amazing step. Same is true if discussions in New Jersey about expanding its inter-district choice program come to pass. And the  federal Race to the Top initiative could provide even more options to parents — especially those stuck with sending their children to the worst urban school systems.

At the same time, these events offer an opportunity to consider what education policy — and America’s education system itself — should look like in the next half-century. And the answer is: Similar to the markets for consumer products everyone enjoys.

Few sectors in the American public or private sector are as dominated by experts, technocrats and lobbyists as education. From the development and approval of curricula to the kind of schools children can attend, the decisions are based, much consideration is given to what some adults want, how some adults want to be paid, national economic and social priorities, and occasionally, what children actually need. Every now and then, what children and their parents want does come into play. But this a rare event.

But imagine if children (and to be honest, their parents) actually could choose the kind of schools they want to attend, select the curricula that they will learn, even whether they will attend a neighborhood school or a manicured campus in suburbia? It would be difficult to figure out the direction of education at that point; after all, parents use schools as much for social-climbing and instilling their own values as they do for providing the most-rigorous education possible for their children. But it would be interesting: Perhaps “education villages” — where hipsters-turned-parents and single mothers can stay in the city and still gain the best of suburbia — would spring up in the heart of Atlanta. Or children otherwise deemed troublemakers in the traditional public school settings of today will learn in classes where the instructional day is compacted for more efficiency (and thus, less time for having to sit in class wasting time as likely to happen for students in Chicago).

These thoughts come as the Wall Street Journal presents its chart on the 25 largest companies in the world at the end of this decade. As pointed out by William Easterly (who spends his time criticizing foreign aid), only eight of the top 25 companies at the end of the 1990s kept their places by the near-end of 2009. Only six tech firms made up the top 25 versus 13 at the end of the 1990s; the tech firms on the list range from old-school software crossing into videogames and consumer wares (Microsoft) to handy cloud computing and search (Google), to a company that managed to switch gears and helped complete the personal technology revolution began by the Sony Walkman (Apple Computer).

Certainly, many of the companies knocked off the list had merged into other companies or went bust altogether; others just seen declines or stagnation in their market value. But mergers and market value losses represent a reality that these companies didn’t cater to their consumer markets. Notes Easterly: “Creative destruction is one of the triumphs of the market. The consumer is king: in 2009… The radical uncertainty of how to please consumers is an argument FOR free markets.”

At this moment, American public education is undergoing its own peculiar form of creative destruction, as education reformers and a smattering of parents — armed with data, research and political power — are forcing defenders of the status quo (teachers unions, schools of education, and school districts) to accept the need for effective change. As Fordham’s Checker Finn points out, reformers are slowly being forced to admit that their longstanding conceits also need updating (and more often than not, ditching altogether).

Yet, as I’ve pointed out over and over, the reformers must also rid themselves of their faith in expertise. They must begin to embrace the grassroots and, more importantly, accept that children and their parents must have more than just a seat at the table of decisionmaking. They must be the decisionmakers, period, and anything less just won’t do.Why? Because the nature of the reforms being proposed, promoted and legislated — all of which  involves choice, consequences and accountability — requires active participation from parents, and therefore, their support.

Choice begets choice; this is true when it comes to cellphone plans and this is also happening in education. The advent of Milwaukee’s school voucher plan in the early 1990s didn’t foster widespread development of vouchers. But the program, along with the charter school movement, has spurred the interest among parents in the kind of choice initiatives being considered in these states (and may likely become reality in the Los Angeles Unified School District). Once parents are exposed to having real power and engagement in school decisionmaking, they will not want the traditional expert-driven approach. This is a good thing.

Now, I’m not advocating for an education system that is fully free market in orientation. The reality is that the underlying infrastructure for such choice — easy access to useful information through guides, organizations or Web sites; actual mechanisms for exercising choice that exist outside of home purchases — is only coming into existence. Parents are just beginning to realize that the old concept of education — that the school can educate every child without active engagement of families that goes beyond homework and field trips — has gone by the wayside; they will make mistakes along the way.

Poor parents, in particular, need guidance; yet the current public education system treats them as even bigger nuisances than the middle-class families (who can exercise enough influence to just be merely ignored) and wealthier households (who ditch the public school system altogether). Assuring equality of opportunity in education, no matter one’s income, should not only be of paramount importance, it would be a more-effective form of economic policy than stimulus plans and tax cuts combined; the evidence largely clear that dropouts cannot be contributors to economic and social life.

But giving parents power, choices, options, advice and information should be the governing credo of education reform for the next half-century. It can be done.

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This week’s Dropout Nation Podcast focuses on California’s parent trigger school reform law (along with Connecticut’s efforts to pass a similar measure) and why the arguments against it from such skeptics such as Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews and Diane Ravitch don’t stand up to scrutiny.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

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Young black males need the teaching so they can learn and succeed.

What’s happening in the dropout nation these days:

1. National Journal is hosting the latest of their weekly questions about education. This week, it is all about whether the No Child Left Behind Act will be reauthorized this year. I have offered my thoughts in this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast.
2. The president’s budget “freeze” doesn’t include education (of course). Education research also fairs well (according to EdWeek), alongside plans to fund charter schools that follow the Harlem Children’s Zone model (notes Tom Marshall). The Department of Education offers up its series of justifications for its spending priorities.
3. What role does school choice play in housing prices. Eric Bruner and his colleagues say that choice-based enrollment policies across all school districts (inter-district) and within them can bring home price and income stability to surrounding neighborhoods. Which may prove the value of school choice of all kinds public and private.
4. Meanwhile in D.C., schools boss Michelle Rhee isn’t exactly polling well, at least according to Bill Turque and Jon Cohen at the Washington Post. Some of it, of course, has to do with Rhee’s PR gaffes and general demeanor. But let’s get real: It is also about some more-unmentionable matters and also about the fact that Rhee is ending D.C. Public Schools’ role as the District’s jobs program and patronage system. This isn’t going to make the adults happy (even if it helps improve the educational opportunities of the kids who actually have to sit in the district’s classrooms).
5. Jay Mathews, of course, makes no secret of his opinion of Rhee. Whether he thinks she’ll last beyond her current term? He’s not so sure. My opinion: It will depend on whether Adrian Fenty — just as unpopular as Rhee for reasons of his own creation — doesn’t draw strong primary and general election opposition. If he doesn’t, Rhee stays. But if he does…
6. In Southern California, L.A. Unified’s school choice reform is mired in squabbling, with accusations of  favoritism being tossed around by the district’s AFT local, according to the L.A. Daily News. Meanwhile the L.A. Times editorial board is disappointed by all the other problems emerging from the districts handling of the bidding process for the 30 schools offered for the first round of reform.
7. John Fensterwald notes a recent report on school district finances within the Golden State. Federal stimulus funds may have staved off fiscal belt-tightening for now, according to Fensterwald, but those funds are running out — which means more thoughtful approaches to operations.
8. In New York City, the local NAACP sues the city’s Department of Education over its shutdown of failing schools, according to Gothamist. As usual, NAACP attempts to strike a blow over the wrong issue — and failing black children in the process.
9. EducationNews re-runs one of Martin Haberman’s fine pieces on how to train teachers for urban school settings. Enjoy.
10. In Education Leadership, Eric Sparks, Janet L. Johnson and Patrick Ackos discuss using data in determining which students are at risk for dropping out. They look at 9th-grade performance. But they fail to mention Robert Balfanz’s innovative work in the early dropout indicators arena.
11. What is dropout nation: Tiny Schuylkill County, Pa., which has high levels of high school dropouts, according to a study cited in the Standard Speaker. The source of the data, Census sampling, may be unreliable for actually measuring the number of dropouts and graduates. But it gives some sense of the problems within Pennsylvania’s coal country.
12. Kevin Carey takes shots at EdWeek for a report on a for-profit college industry study. Certainly, Carey is no fan of University of Phoenix’s of the world for reasons both good and specious. You go figure out where you stand.

And you can check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, this on the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Enjoy.

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