More on Bush’s War on Public Schools

by David Safier

Mike Bryan suggested I expand on yesterday’s post about the Bush administration’s War on Public Schools, using some of the information I later added in the Comments section. OK, Mike, here it is.

As I wrote yesterday, the War on Public Schools began during the Reagan years, accelerated during Bush I, and has run rampant for the past 8 years. The ultimate goal of the conservative anti-public school crowd is to create a voucher system which will help the well-healed pay for private school, provide a second tier of mediocre education for the middle class, and warehouse the poor in the shattered remnants of our current schools.

No Child Left Behind was not created to improve public education. Millions of dollars – probably billions if you lump state and national costs — that could have been used to improve education have been spent on state and national testing and evaluation whose purpose is to put a “failing” label on as many public schools possible.

The other part of the plan was to have students flourish in charter schools and voucher-supported private schools, proving the free market model was superior.

But to the administration’s dismay, two of their own studies indicate that public schools are doing as good a job as charter and private schools. (Links to the studies and a few salient quotes are at the bottom of the post.)

Now, if some “Evolution-believing, Birth-control-teaching Left Wingers” created the studies, the Bush crowd could have dismissed them as liberal hype. But it came from their own hand-picked folks at the U.S. Department of Education which, like the rest of the administration, is supposed to be expert at creating Faith-Based Science. And even they couldn’t cook these results.

So instead of holding a press conference to discuss the studies, as they would have done if the results were to their liking, they released the results without fanfare and said they weren’t conclusive. “Just move on, folks. There’s nothing to see here.”

Let us imagine a nonpartisan Department of Education releasing these results at a press conference. Here is what we might have heard:

“Public schools, for all their well documented failings, educate the students as well as private schools. That means we can not simply blame teachers’ unions, bloated bureaucracies and poor budgeting for our public schools’ problems. Apparently, educating children is a very challenging task, whether the children are in public or private schools, and the challenges increase where poverty and discrimination come into the picture. We need to face this challenge head on and search for ways to improve education.”

But that’s not what we heard. Clearly, these folks hate public schools, just like they hate most social programs that don’t put money in their cronies’ pockets. So they downplayed their own results by saying they weren’t conclusive.

Here are passages from the 2004 and 2006 U.S. Department of Education studies. As you read their caveats, which are reasonable from a social science standpoint, ask yourself, how often has this administration questioned evidence when it is in their favor? (Can you say WMDs in Iraq, boys and girls?)

From the 2004 U.S. Department of Education study:

“Charter schools in all five case study states were less likely than traditional public schools to meet performance standards even after controlling for several school characteristics. This finding, which does not imply a lack of charter school impact on student achievement, may be linked to the prior achievement of students or some other factor. The design of this study did not allow us to determine whether charter schools are more or less effective than traditional public schools.” (emphasis added)

From the 2006 Department of Ed. Study:

“In grades 4 and 8, using unadjusted mean scores, students in private schools scored significantly higher than students in public schools for both reading and mathematics. But when school means were adjusted in the HLM analysis, the average for public schools was significantly higher than the average for private schools for grade 4 mathematics and not significantly different for reading. At grade 8, the average for private schools was significantly higher than the average for public schools in reading but not significantly different for mathematics. Comparisons were also carried out between types of sectarian schools. In grade 4, Catholic and Lutheran schools were compared separately to public schools. For both reading and mathematics, the results were similar to those based on all private schools. In grade 8, Catholic, Lutheran, and Conservative Christian schools were each compared to public schools. For Catholic and Lutheran schools for both reading and mathematics, the results were again similar to those based on all private schools. For Conservative Christian schools, the average adjusted school mean in reading was not significantly different from that of public schools. In mathematics, the average adjusted school mean for Conservative Christian schools was significantly lower than that of public schools.”

“When interpreting the results from any of these analyses, it should be borne in mind that private schools constitute a heterogeneous category and may differ from one another as much as they differ from public schools. Public schools also constitute a heterogeneous category. Consequently, an overall comparison of the two types of schools is of modest utility. The more focused comparisons conducted as part of this study may be of greater value. However, interpretations of the results should take into account the variability due to the relatively small sizes of the samples drawn from each category of private school, as well as the possible bias introduced by the differential participation rates across private school categories.” (Emphasis added)