I’ve been thumbing through a number of studies of competiton in education. From EPI (and yes, AFT supports EPI), there’s Martin Carnoy et al’s latest study, "Vouchers and Public School Performance." It finds that you can’t make the case that school choice has caused public schools in Milwaukee to improve.  The conclusions dovetail those of Wisconsin’s conservative/anti tax think tank the Wisconsin Public Research Institute (and yes, AFT usually doesn’t have a kind word for WPRI).  WPRI estimates that just 10 percent of parents in Milwaukee are smart school shoppers who make decisions based on real indicators of school quality.  Their method is a kind of Jacob’s Ladder of assumptions that I’m still pondering, but the conclusion fits with other work on why and how parents choose.

In addition to these Milwaukee reports, Hank Levin’s Center for the Study of Privatization in Education has two new reports on charter schools and competition. One by Mathew Carr and Gary Ritter and finds that charter schools in Ohio have a small detrimental effect on nearby traditional public schools.  Yongmei Ni, examining charter competition in Michigan over time concludes: "The effect is small or negligible in the short run, but becomes more substantial in the long run."  Ni notes this is "consistent with the conception of choice triggering a downward spiral in the most heavily impacted public schools." 

There are kids in these schools. And competition not only doesn't seem to help them, but it is likely hurting them.

For those who said more charters couldn't make things worse in Detroit Public Schools, this is a pretty sound rebuttal.  One important note: Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan are similar cases. I don’t know that the same effect would be found in a high-growth state like Florida, or in a giant district like New York City to the extent that it retains mega economies of scale. But there are plenty of other cases like Ohio and Michigan. The results should trouble everyone involved in promoting charter schools.

A long time ago, Howard Nelson, Rachel Drown and I wrote a piece about charter schools and school districts that used the metaphor of an ecosystem. I still think that metaphor holds, and that we’re doing a pretty lousy job of managing the ecosystem.  Change is needed.  Which, mind you, is different from saying "get rid of charter schools" (although I’d get rid of vouchers where they exist in a heartbeat.) I would like a new deal as far as the relationship of charter schools and traditional public schools. Part of that is a better mutual understanding of school finance and the effects of how we fund charters on traditional schools and vice versa. Part of it is an understanding of the limits of competition and the possibilities of cooperation.  The idea that competition between districts and charters would just be about educational quality, particularly when the evidence suggests that this wasn’t quite what parents were shopping for, was always ridiculous.

As for cooperation,  I could go on about Kropotkin here, but suffice it to say I think we'll do a better job helping kids if we build structures to help us focus on doing that together. Underlying all of this is the understanding that, for a variety of reasons, parents send their kids to poor schools (traditional, charter and voucher alike), and that fact should reaffirm our commitment to creating both better schools and a more rational system of schools via collective action. 

My favorite quote from the Milwaukee news coverage, by the way, comes from Howard Fuller, who when asked about the right's use of the competition theme to drive marketization said: "I'm one of those people who believes that we may have oversold that point." He may get the award I wanted to give Checker Finn for saying that closing failing charter schools is hard.