School choice: what if parents choose bad schools?
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 2:38 pm by Robert Lowry
Here is an interesting piece by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham disputing the idea that school choice is a sure-fire strategy to improve schools. He speculates that parents are quite likely to choose schools for their children based on factors other than their performance.
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June 16th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Thanks for wasting my time with a totally worthless piece of rubbish. The author’s premise that people make decisions based on irrational factors is poorly made but he has totally convinced me that he writes articles and makes arguments based on his own irrationalities. It’s mind boggling that anyone with an intellect and a college degree could recommend such an article to others. However, I will say this: To the extent you believe that parents are incapable of making rational decisions about where to send their children to school, and to the extent they choose to send them to public schools, then the existence of public schools is highly dependent on the irrational choices of others. If you don’t accept that, you can’t accept the author’s argument.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Well thank you.
That parents might choose to send their children to poor public schools would prove the author’s point that school choice, by itself, is no guaranteed strategy to improve school quality.
I was struck by his observation that, “I can imagine administrators becoming well-tuned to factors that parents care about. And if one of those factors is not academic quality, where will that leave students?”
The author grants that some proponents would contend that allowing families to choose schools would be a good in its own right. But he observes that is different from arguing that choice will raise the overall quality of schooling. He also notes that law proscribes some of our choices, if they might detract from the overall public welfare – we cannot choose not to educate our children, for example.
We’ve experienced an explosion of choices in other realms of life over the past 20 or 30 years. (Buying a box of Wheat Thins a few days ago I had choose from among 14 different flavors and nutritional attributes.) I’m actually surprised that has not translated into more pressure for more educational choices, whether within public schools or beyond.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Bob,
You don’t need 100%, or even 70% of parents choosing “the best school” for a system of school choice to work better than a system of no choice. Think about population growth or bacterial growth. In general, it’s sufficient if a plurality of parents (in a three-or-more choice system) consistently make the “right” choice for the system to evolve to a steady state where “the best school” dominates. The author, without any quantification, assumes that because some parents will make mistaken choices, school choice, alone, may not be sufficient to ensure improved outcomes. There’s no discussion of a tipping point, or of system dynamics or of statistical growth models. It’s pure conjecture.
As you know, school quality varies over time, so today’s best choice may evolve into tomorrow’s poor choice. And I’m sure you know that the best choice for some students isn’t necessarily the best choice for other students. In a system with 3 schools, each will have strengths and weaknesses regarding different types of students unless they are simply clones of one another. This is particularly true if they strive to specialize by academic discipline, by student ability, by ideology and/or by pedagogical philosophy. The bottom line of this observation is that it is an audacious oversimplification to talk about a best school. Just as you can’t talk about a best gas–oxygen or nitrogen–without knowing which organism you’re talking about, you can’t talk about a best school without knowing which student you’re talking about.
As for administrators latching onto non-academic selling points, I admit it gave me pause, because that’s exactly what public school administrators do. They know parents want mowed grass, nice flowers, clean floors–a good appearance. They know parents want lunch menus and returned telephone calls–good communications. There’s a hundred non-academic things parents look at to judge the quality of a school district, and school administrators attend to them all. None of these have anything to do with providing the best learning experience, but in my experience they are used to deflect concerns about programs and performance and to make the inference that if the district keeps its floors clean, then it must be doing other things right, too. So, I have no doubt that both public and charter school administrators attempt to manipulate perceptions to produce an image of academic quality that may not exist.
[*thinking to myself* How many people think X is a good teacher because she is friendly and has a nice smile? In 8th grade my daughter admitted at the end of the year that she learned the most from the grumpy, mean, strict, old teacher than from the fun teacher. Will parents choose schools base on first impressions of staff? Is that irrational? Is it irrelevant?]
But is it true that a good appearance and good communications have nothing to do with academic outcomes? I doubt it. Everything is interconnected. A good appearance is not a distraction that may slow learning. Good communications may align the efforts of parents and teachers to provide an added boost. The author says some things are not rationally related to school quality, but they may be related to the academic outcomes of a particular student. And while one student may hate the roses outside one school, to the point of trampling in them and getting suspended, to another student, they may stimulate creative thoughts and feelings of acceptance. Roses may be irrelevant to academic quality, but not necessarily to academic outcomes. The author evades this important point.
The author implies that some parents won’t understand academic measures. That’s true for some educators. Other parents will reject standardized test results as meaningless, as do some educators. It’s irrational for a parent to feel that her child is doing fine in school if test scores are low. But is it? Might the child do even worse in a “better” school? Mobility disrupts learning, as well as friendships. Are these irrational factors? But if parents won’t leave bad schools, then school choice can’t work, right? Doubtless, there is a stickiness that prevents all students from abandoning “poor schools” and enrolling in the “best schools.” That doesn’t mean school choice, alone, can’t improve school quality. It also doesn’t mean parents are being irrational by leaving their children in “poor schools.”
If a parent chooses to ignore test results and look at other factors in deciding which school is best for his child, I wouldn’t call that irrational. If a school has a great music program and sucks at science and math, and a parent chooses that school, I wouldn’t call that irrational. Does that mean a “poor school” has been chosen? Balderdash. Does that mean school choice isn’t improving school quality? Double balderdash.
I’ve spent way too much time with the electron-wasting nonsense of the author. It would take a book just to straighten out all the errors in logic and fact made in his tiny article. Just as manure can stimulate the senses, idiotic writing can stimulate thinking. Nevertheless, there’s just too much to read and learn without losing time to the idiots.