A commenter asks,

As a parent of two girls, age 5 and 4, and assuming the “null hypothesis” is true, how should I think about school choice for my girls?

Should I just ignore school choice altogether, and send them to the local public school without much thought? Should I look for the “best school”, as defined by what criteria? The “null hypothesis” seems to point to the former, but it would be great to hear your opinion of what the practical implications are for the “null hypothesis”.

First, let me report what we did. We live on the wrong side of the school tracks in Montgomery County. Our high school’s verbal and math SAT scores were each on average 250 points lower than those in the “better” schools. Of course, “better” simply means that they had more affluent populations. In fact, when I once asked a school board member at an election forum how he could explain this SAT differential, he said that demographics were the explanation. I wanted to follow up by asking that if demographics are everything, then why does the County spend so much money on schools.

Anyway, while I had not yet formulated the Null Hypothesis, we were not worried about the fact that the schools to which we sent our children were “bad.” They seemed to be doing all right. We took one of our daughters out of public school for high school and instead sent her to a Quaker school, but that was because we thought that she needed the less authoritarian approach that the Quaker schools offer. But her younger siblings went to public school all through high school.

I have no regrets about our choices. What I regret is what they were “taught” in college. They were fed a steady diet of moral narcissism, and I am afraid that a lot of it stuck with them.

That diet of gooey, progressive sentiment starts in K-12, and that is probably what makes me most hesitant about advising parents to stick with public schools. However, the ideological stuff isn’t really different in the better private schools–it’s not like a Quaker school is going to be a libertarian hotbed. So the only way out on that score is home schooling, and I think that requires a special set of circumstances to work.

Amy L. Wax writes,

The hallmark of no-excuses schools is a frankly paternalistic and unapologetic commitment to acculturating low-income students to the achievement-oriented habits and norms typical of their middle-class and affluent counterparts. That project is motivated by the belief that low-income children will benefit from a stable, highly structured environment in which conventional, bourgeois behaviors are actively endorsed, expected, and demanded.

…Courtesy is expected, and street language and profanity are strictly forbidden, as are fighting, loud talk, boisterous behavior, harsh teasing, and ridicule of other students, both in and out of the classroom. Students are expected to obey teachers and administrators, make eye contact, be punctual, participate in classroom discussions and school activities, work steadily, and study hard.

My thoughts:

1. Fifty years ago, all schools met most of these standards.

2. They also had gym and active recess every day, which I believe is one reason that attention deficit disorder was less prevalent in those days.

3. The null hypothesis may yet hold. She writes,

Evidence for academic improvement comes almost exclusively from scores on statewide tests, which assess relatively basic skills that many no-excuses schools target with intensive drilling. Most score gains are relatively modest and are subject to fade-out with time. Overall, the data is spotty and limited by small samples and short time frames.

4. She also discusses an approach to encouraging better behavior of low-income students by forcibly integrating them with affluent students. She points out a number of problems with this approach.

5. She cites Montgomery County, Maryland, as an example of a school district where income integration has had some success. But this comes from a handful of poor students brought in from outside the county, and Wax points out that the parents who chose to go to the trouble to participate probably were not a random sample of poor parents. Meanwhile, I can say that a resident of Montgomery County that there are large income disparities across high schools, and there are enormous disparities in test scores that go along with that. The overall percentage of students on free and reduced meals is more than one-third, which is too high for an income-integration strategy to work.

Andy Smarick writes,

Today, almost 60 state-level government programs enable students to attend private schools, and approximately three million students enroll in about 7,000 charter schools in more than 40 states.16 In 17 cities, at least 30 percent of public school students are now enrolled in charters. The continuous growth of these programs and participating students shows no signs of abating; for instance, national enrollment in charter schools has grown by about 10 percent annually for the past decade, and student participation in private school choice programs doubled between 2011 and 2016.

As a historical matter, in the existing paradigm’s early days, especially in rural areas, some districts had only one school. So initially the district-based approach was not especially associated with technocratic thinking, a powerful central office, residence-based student assignment, and so on. But over the course of the 20th century, as America’s student population expanded and migrated and as the benefits of economies of scale became attractive, districts grew in size. Today, the average district has seven schools, but even that masks the hundreds of districts (including county-based districts in the South and urban districts nationwide) that have grown gargantuan—some with hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of students.

This is an interesting point. I think that a big weakness of the modern version of state-run schools is its centralization and bureaucracy. The Department of Education, especially under Democrats, reinforces the way in which power is taken away from parents, classroom teachers, and school principals.

In many private industries, firms have discovered that they cannot dictate to consumers. They have to empower employees to serve consumers. Back when school districts were small, they had to operate that way. Now they do not, and Smarick sees the trend toward choice expanding as a result.

Education Realist writes,

dive into “special education”, the mother of all ed spending sinkholes.

… research hasn’t revealed any promising practices to give those with mild learning disabilities higher test scores or better engagement. And that’s just where academic improvement might be possible. In many cases, expensive services are provided with no expectation of academic improvement.

Read the whole post. A couple of comments from me.

1. The special-ed phenomenon supports a Hansonian theory of education spending, which is that it is about “showing that we care.” Who can be against spending money on children with special needs?

2. In California, lawyers have a great gig. It turns out that taxpayers will pay you $350 an hour to advocate for parents of special-needs children against the taxpayer-run schools.

Neerav Kingsland writes,

In the course of a year, urban charter schools increase student achievement 4X as much as increasing public funding by 10%.

The effect sizes are small, but statistically significant. How strongly this contradicts the null hypothesis I leave up to you to decide.

This is in response to comments on some previous posts about teachers’ unions and other matters.

1. The U.S. leads the world in health care spending per person, but not in health care outcomes. Many people look at that and say that health care costs too much in the U.S., and we should be able to get the same our better outcomes by sending less. Maybe that is correct, maybe not. That is not the point here. But–

2. the U.S. leads the world in K-12 education spending per student, but not in student outcomes. Yet nobody, says that education costs too much and that we should spend less. Except–

3. me. I believe that we spend way too much on K-12 education.

4. We spend as much as we do on education in part because it is a sacred cow. We want to show that we care about children. (Yes, “showing that you care” is also Robin Hanson’s explanation for health care spending.)

5. We also spend as much as we do because of teachers’ unions. They engage in featherbedding, adding all sorts of non-teaching staff to school payrolls (and adding more union members in the process). In Montgomery`County, last time I looked, there was one person on the payroll for every 6 students, but there were more than 25 students per classroom teacher. That is why I do not think that cost disease, as discussed recently by Scott Alexander, is the full story. It’s not just that it’s hard to raise productivity in teaching. It’s that teachers’ unions cut down on productivity by continually getting schools to add non-teaching staff.

6. If I could have my way, the government would get out of the schooling business.

7. If we wish to subsidize education, we should do it through vouchers. Note that this could be done on a progressive basis, with the size of the voucher a declining function of parent’s income.

8. I do not expect educational outcomes to be any better under a voucher system. That is because I believe in the Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions do not make a difference.

9. However, a competitive market in education would drive down costs, so that the U.S. would get the same outcomes with much less spending.

A few additional notes:

10. When parents seek out schools with good reputations, they are going after schools where most of the students come from affluent families. The schools themselves do not do much.

11. Even within income-diverse school districts, affluent parents figure out a way to keep their kids from being surrounded by poor children.

12. I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the leftist ideology preached in government schools.

Jenna Robinson writes,

Emphasizing amenities over education also does a disservice to the faculty and students more interested in academic pursuits. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper found, perhaps not surprisingly, that demand for high-quality academics is limited to only the best and brightest students, while wealthy students with low academic aptitude have the strongest demand for recreational amenities. In such an environment, university leaders likely feel financial pressure to cater more to the lowest common denominator.

She goes on to give examples. Pointer from George Leef.

I really hate the fads in college facilities. The state-of-the-art fitness centers, the Kennedy-Center-rivaling performing arts centers, etc. Brandeis University, which is hurting for money because of the Madoff scandal, nonetheless wasted money on building a new admissions office. Swarthmore College probably has the equivalent of several buildings worth of unused facilities on its campus, and it still campaigns for more donations.