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The Kentucky Education Digest is a collection of ideas focused on four general themes:
Basic school choice information
If public schools fear competition, why have high school sports?
Best practices from other states
Ohio’s governor ignores evidence of charter-schools’ success.
Concerns that home-schooled children aren’t socially well-adapted are misplaced.
Answering objections to school choice
‘Pay for performance’ needs more consideration.
We invite your input and feedback because we know that healthy debate is the mechanism that produces the ideas that ultimately work.
Contrary to popular opinion, public and private schools in Kentucky do compete. But that competition mostly occurs in sports.
Yet the state’s public schools find even that level of competition troublesome.
Private schools, so the story goes, have a decided advantage in sports because they can (gasp!) recruit students from throughout an area to assemble superior athletic programs. Public schools argue that this renders them powerless to attract students based on anything but top-down mandates handed down to less-wealthy parents in a district.
So Kentucky’s school board decided to fix the problem – by penalizing high-school students whose parents choose to transfer them to private schools. After the idea receives approval from a panel of lawmakers, rules would prohibit students from playing competitive sports for one year after they transfer.
Citing sports as the primary motivation guiding a transfer remains questionable because parents overwhelmingly transfer students because of academics, not sports. Even so, parents of student athletes must now endure an intentional hamstringing – all in the name of making sure that private-school sports teams don’t rack up quite so many championships.
In supporting the proposal that won state education board approval, board member C.B. Akins said: “I really think that there has to be some curtailing of (athletic) recruiting … It’s totally out of hand. Anybody that will not acknowledge that it goes on has their heads in the sand. At the same time, I’m really concerned about over-punishing kids.”
What’s “over-punishing” is the mindset that leads schools to penalize parents and children for choosing one school instead of another. School officials who believe that children should pay the price for traditions of excellence at some schools should instead embrace the competitive processes that govern all areas of our lives.
The state school board should allow public schools to recruit just like private schools apparently do. Then we might see some improvement on – and off – the field.
Sources:
“Board OKs school change penalty” by C. Ray Hall, Louisville Courier-Journal, April 6, 2007.
“John Millea: Several states trying to slow high school athlete transfers” by John Millea, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, April 5, 2007.
Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland believes that charter schools waste taxpayer money.
In no uncertain terms, Strickland claims Ohio’s charter schools have been a “dismal failure.” He also wants a moratorium on the creation of new charter schools.
Before clinging too tightly to that position, Strickland should read a Buckeye Institute analysis of student performance in Ohio charter schools. Researchers Matthew Carr and Samuel R. Staley analyzed Ohio Proficiency Test scores to examine charter schools. The research shows that charter schools provide a quality alternative to traditional public schools.
The report found that charter-school students made greater gains on test scores than students in traditional public schools. However, the study provided an added bonus: It showed that traditional public schools made gains – perhaps spurred by the competition provided by charters. The gains – although less than those found in charter schools – indicate that traditional pubic schools can improve when using the right incentives.
The report concludes:
“Charter schools are, in general, living up to their academic potential. The cap on the number of charter schools, however, denies some Ohio students the opportunity to attend a school that can offer a better quality education. The number of charter schools was capped in the name of accountability of charter schools, but given their performance, the cap actually reduces the accountability of traditional schools. By limiting the growth or charter schools, the cap allows the traditional schools to revert to their old entrenched and monopolistic ways.”
Perhaps Strickland suffers from the same ailment that strikes many Kentucky policymakers: qualified ignorance with regard to evidence. Charter schools represent a constitutionally legal and inexpensive way to spur academic improvement.
Strickland may have no problem with stemming competition for Ohio’s public-school students. But Kentucky cannot afford to ignore the positive impact provided by charter schools on our neighbor to the north.
Sources:
“AP Interview: Governor calls school vouchers undemocratic” by Julie Carr Smyth, Associated Press, March 17, 2007.
“Using the Ohio Proficiency Test to Analyze the Academic Achievement of Charter School Students: 2002-2004” by Matthew Carr and Samuel R. Staley, The Buckeye Institute, Dec. 21, 2005.
The most common concern I hear expressed about home schooling from well-meaning but unknowledgeable people concerns whether children taught at home are socially well-adapted.
I have been researching home-schooling since before my oldest child was born, and can report unequivocally the socialization issue as a positive reason to home school.
In fact, if there is a socialization problem at all in a home school, it’s only because kids have so many activities from which to choose.
An abundance of learning opportunities – everything from science clubs to 4-H to choir to language-immersion camps – ensure that home-schooled kids are exposed to plenty of opportunities to grow both academically and socially.
Home-schooling families also often form groups to take field trips and hold academic contests. Home schooling actually offers more time for children to make friends in activities they choose and enjoy.
Traditional public schools enforce limits on student interaction for large parts of the day. And the socialization they receive often involves primarily negative peer pressure and groupthink. This peer-only segregation is an artificial situation and does not reflect the social structure of the world beyond the educational institution.
In today’s peer-influenced society, children are often over-exposed to adult themes before being properly equipped to handle them. Home schooling helps parents fulfill their responsibility as the gatekeeper of their children’s experiences while their moral structure is still developing.
A recent study conducted by the National Home Education Research Institute found that adults who were home schooled as youngsters are well-adjusted socially and involved in their communities. Other credible studies have shown that adults who were home-schooled also score high in self-concept tests, which also indicate a positive social adaptability.
Of course, parents who actually do the hard, but satisfying, work of home schooling their children already knew that!
Florence resident Stephanie Graham, a home-schooling parent, wrote this article.
Sources:
“Home Schooling and Socialization of Children” by Nola Kortner Aiex, ERIC Digest, 1994.
“Common Objections to Homeschooling” by John Holt, The Natural Child Project, 1997.
“Beyond graduation,” Home School Legal Defense Association.
It might seem like the start of a bad comedy routine to ask this, but here goes: “If we offer teachers ‘performance pay’ in addition to regular salaries, what does the regular salary pay for, if not performance?”
In testimony before the Kentucky House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, Frances Steenburgen, president of the Kentucky Education Association, spoke to the merit-pay proposal.
“There is … no research that shows that merit pay results in increased student learning, much less results in more students taking or being successful in AP classes,” Steenburgen told the committee.
Unfortunately, Steenburgen doesn’t read – or understand – the latest research.
A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper shows a relationship between teacher incentives and improved test scores. Researchers David N. Figlio and Lawrence Kenny concluded that, “Doling out merit pay to most teachers provides them with little incentive to do a better job,” but that an association exists between merit pay targeted to a few teachers and higher test scores for students.
However, the authors caution that the results don’t represent the last word. They suggest more research to remove all doubt about merit pay as a lynchpin in improved student performance.
Unions cleverly have fought every attempt to measure public-school teachers’ “value added” to students, so any attempt to reward these instructors based on performance will not be based on student improvement caused by teachers. But Kentucky can – and should – discover a way to accurately measure teacher impact in the classroom so it can consider moving toward merit-pay system.
Clearly, effective teachers should earn more money than less-effective ones. Achieving that remains a worthy task that Kentucky must undertake honestly and without political consideration.
Sources:
“Individual Teacher Incentives and Student Performance, NBER Working Paper No. 12627” by David N. Figlio and Lawrence Kenny, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2006.
“Testimony from the Kentucky Education Association Concerning Senate Bill 1 and Senate Bill 2, House Appropriations and Revenue Committee,” Frances Steenburgen, March 6, 2007.
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