School Choice . . . Works

[Universe Prince]

Excerpts from "Experimenting With School Choice", by Lisa Snell and Shikha Dalmia, about the California school districts of Oakland and Compton:

In short, the two districts have similar student bodies, similar challenges, and—until now—a similar history of failure. But Oakland is beginning to break away from this history, and the reason is the weighted-student-formula program it embraced some years ago and fully implemented last year. Under this program, kids are not required to attend their neighborhood school, especially if it is failing. Rather, they can pick any regular public or charter school in their district and take their education dollars with them; more students therefore means more revenues for schools. Furthermore, as the name suggests, the revenues are "weighted" based on the difficulty of educating each student, with low-income and special-needs kids commanding more money than smart, well-to-do ones. Schools have to compete for funding, but the upside is that they have total control over it. Compton has stuck to a completely different approach that does not involve empowering parents—or decentralizing control to schools. Instead, it has tried to fix its failing schools by mandating "classroom inputs." To this end, all Compton schools over the last few years have been ordered to reduce class size by 12 percent, improve teachers' credentials, adopt a tougher curriculum, and even clean up bathrooms.

[...]

Similarly, Oakland's score on the state's Academic Performance Index—a numeric grade that California assigns to its schools based on the performance of their students on standardized tests—went up by 19 points. Compton, in contrast, gained only 13 points. Yet even this overstates Compton's performance, because almost all of its gains came at the elementary level, where students are not so intractable. Compton's middle schools lost an average of 6 points, while Oakland's gained an average of 16 points. Meanwhile, half of Compton's high schools lost points on the API score—including Compton High, where now fewer than 6 percent of males are proficient in reading, and fewer than 1 percent in algebra. Conversely, Oakland high schools gained, on average, 30 points. Even Oakland's economically disadvantaged and limited-English students have shown major improvements. In 2006, its economically disadvantaged students gained 60 percent more on the performance index than Compton's, and its English-language learners gained 120 percent more.

Whole article at Reason Online.

[sirs]

So who keeps opposing choice?  Oh yea, those that supposedly advocate choice.  Apparently it's only the "choices" they (those smarter than the rest of us) deem acceptable     

[Xavier_Onassis]

If they are comparing one group of largely immigrant Asian students with another group of Black American students, I suggest that there are factors other than merely the choice/ non choice schools involved here.

If the ethnicity percentages are identical (which they are not), then the conclusion is valid.

The attitude of Asian parents and the attitude of Black parents are rarely the same, and there are other factors present as well.

[Plane]

If they are comparing one group of largely immigrant Asian students with another group of Black American students, I suggest that there are factors other than merely the choice/ non choice schools involved here.

If the ethnicity percentages are identical (which they are not), then the conclusion is valid.

The attitude of Asian parents and the attitude of Black parents are rarely the same, and there are other factors present as well.

Should this matter?

[Universe Prince]

If they are comparing one group of largely immigrant Asian students with another group of Black American students,

Here is what they said:

Oakland and Compton are not identical, of course. Compton, located in the outskirts of Los Angeles, does not have the gorgeous San Francisco Bay scenery of Oakland. It has a quarter of Oakland's population and no wealthy neighbors. But they are both high-crime inner cities. Both have a large Hispanic and black population, and a small Asian and white population. Average family incomes are comparable—about $40,000 for Oakland and $33,000 for Compton. They both became targets of a state takeover and a large financial bailout in the last decade. And the federal No Child Left Behind Act for two years in a row has ranked them both among California's 162 districts "in need of improvement." In short, the two districts have similar student bodies, similar challenges, and—until now—a similar history of failure. But Oakland is beginning to break away from this history, and the reason is the weighted-student-formula program it embraced some years ago and fully implemented last year.

Do you have some information that indicates one district is largely immigrant Asians and the other largely African-American? The authors of the article seem to believe that the student bodies of the districts were similar. Why do you believe they were not?

[sirs]

Do you have some information that indicates one district is largely immigrant Asians and the other largely African-American? The authors of the article seem to believe that the student bodies of the districts were similar. Why do you believe they were not?

Because school choice worked?  If it worked, they can't have been similar.  Just can't