American Enterprise Institute

November 10, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

12:00 p.m.	Registration and Lunch
12:30	Panelists:	Robert Enlow, Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice
		Howard Fuller, Marquette University
		Frederick M. Hess, AEI
		Sol Stern, Manhattan Institute
		Joe Williams, Democrats for Education Reform
	Moderator:	Henry Olsen, AEI
2:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Henry Olsen: I’d like to bring today’s event to order and start the festivities. My name is Henry Olsen. I’m vice president and director of the American Enterprise Institute’s National Research Initiative which supports domestic policy research by academics and other independent scholars. It’s my pleasure to have been asked by Rick Hess to moderate today’s event on school choice.

Today’s event is going to be a little bit different because everyone here knows one other. Everyone here has engaged one another. And what I’d like to do is treat this more as another event in an ongoing conversation that started years ago and will continue after today, kind of the My Dinner with Andre for school choice.

What I’ll be doing is asking each person a structured question related to some positions that they’ve held before and ask them to respond to that but at the same time, ask everyone else on the panel to either during the person’s talk or shortly afterwards to offer their comments. And the idea is just to have a conversation and engage one another in a civil but serious manner. After we have gone through everybody on the panel, we’ll have a little structured discussion and then turn it over to the audience for questions and answers.

Before we start, let me introduce the dramatis personae of today’s play. Robert Enlow will go first, and he is the executive director of Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which is an organization dedicated to promoting universal school choice for all. He is the co-editor of Liberty and Learning: Milton Friedman’s Voucher Idea at Fifty.

He will then be followed by Howard Fuller, distinguished professor of education and director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University. Howard served as a superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools from 1991 to 1995 and is the chair of the board of the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

He’ll then be followed by Sol Stern, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at the institute’s flagship publication, City Journal. He is the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

Sol will then be followed by our own Rick Hess. Rick’s a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI and the executive editor of Education Next. He has been the author and co-editor of many books, including The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship, Educational Entrepreneurship, and Spinning Wheels.

And last, certainly not least, is Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a New York City–based political action committee. Joe is a former newspaper journalist and author of the book Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education. 

So let me start with you, Rob. In a sense, the modern school choice movement didn’t start with Milton’s idea at 50 but it started with Chubb and Moe’s book on schooling and markets published in 1990, where they famously said that school choice is a panacea. We’ve now had 18 years of experience with choice and all of its various forms, from vouchers to charters and inter-district choice and lots of research on all of these different things. I’d like to ask you is school choice still a panacea? How do you react to the experience on the ground and what can we learn from that? And if we can try and keep everyone’s response about five minutes and about ten minutes for each structured question.

Robert Enlow: So I’m debating here, as we were talking about dramatis personae, whether I’m going to play the role of Falstaff, Puck, or Henry V in this little engagement up here. The fact is, is choice a panacea? I think that is the first rhetorical excess in the school choice movement we had in 1990.

Let’s take a look on the ground real quickly. What’s happened since 1990? I think it is really important before we go forward, to find out where we were in 1990 and where we are now, to see where the progress of school choice has come from and where it is now. In 1990, there were five programs in existence, two in Maine and Vermont, which are old town tuitioning programs, two tax deduction programs in Minnesota and Iowa, and the newly minted program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

We knew nothing about whether those programs did anything for kids. We knew nothing about the civic values of those programs. We knew nothing about whether the public supported those programs. We knew nothing about whether those programs would withstand the legal scrutiny in the United States Supreme Court. So in effect, we had these programs but we had no idea whether they were working in any way, shape, or form.

Take a look at what’s happened in the 18 years since. And I think this is important to say this. In the 18 years since, we now have 24 programs that operate in 14 states in the D.C. area. So there has been an 80 percent growth in the amount of programs operating. We’ve gone from less than 10,000 children receiving vouchers or using tax credits or deductions to 190,000 families, almost, receiving scholarship tax credits or vouchers and over half a million using the tax codes to offset personal education expenses, so you see the growth in that way.

If you look at the studies, it’s, I think, pretty clear we could state with some confidence that school vouchers in these areas have led to a greater civic tolerance, a greater -- reduced segregation in schooling of these children, our attending schools are less segregated. They’re more tolerant.

We could state with some confidence, I believe, that the majority of the children receiving vouchers are actually doing better in school. This discussion is how much better and does that matter? That’s a good question that Sol and I were debating earlier. And I think you’re beginning to be able to say with some confidence, Dr. Forrester is coming out with a publication shortly, that there have been 17 empirical studies to examine how vouchers have affected achievement in public schools. Sixteen of those have found that public schools have improved as a result of competition and one has found no visible impact.

At least from the data and from the public support that you’re beginning to see -- we’ve been doing studies at the Friedman Foundation all around the country, that the support for school vouchers has gone up over the years, so you’re seeing more public support, you’re seeing positive data, and let’s remember, again, these are random assignment studies, the gold standard.

“We’ve come a long way, baby,” as the old Virginia Slims article used to say. The question is we haven’t gone far enough. Two of the mistakes I think the school choice movement had made to show that school choice has not been a panacea in the last 18 years have been that we’ve been able to accept any program as a good program. And this is, I think, to our detriment. We’ve avoided the conversations about the necessary conditions to create a true educational reform market and focused instead on winning and on winning, almost, at any cost for anything. So we’ve accepted almost any bill. And I think what that has done is because we wanted the public to support school choice and we wanted the public, our donors, to support us, we’ve sold some really good Timex watches, which are really good for kids on the ground, who are getting great education. And we’ve sold them, really, as the Rolex of market-based reform.

What these programs are, they’re good for the kids that are in them and they’re beginning to show some systemic effects, although there is a lot more to do. So I think we have not seen a real marketplace in education, and we need to focus on that. So choice has not been the kind of panacea that we would want.

Going forward, there’s tons of things we need to do, not the least of which is work together as a group on this panel to promote all sorts of different reforms that are market-based performance. That includes a variety of things in terms of making sure we support quality options, not just any option, opposing bills that don’t create the necessary conditions for market reform -- we have lots of movement in the charter school movement. We should use that energy and work together better among the private school choice movement. We should support some of the instructional reforms that are out there, because there’s a lot in those.

The goal here, from my perspective at the Friedman Foundation, is to remember what Milton Friedman said when he first started this 50 years ago, 55 years ago. He said, “In order to effectively improve K-12 education in America, we need to separate the financing of education from the administration of schools.” Now that’s what the Friedman Foundation is focused on and I think until we get to that point, we will never have choice as a panacea. Thank you.

Henry Olsen:  Who wants to jump in first?

Robert Enlow:  Don’t chop my head off.

Henry Olsen:  Rick?

Frederick M. Hess:  Certainly, in terms of the institutionalization of choices in K-12 schooling, Bob is exactly right. We’ve seen enormous gains in the comfort level with charter schooling certainly, with a variety of choice options, and certainly, with vouchers and tax credit programs. They are part of the discourse in a way that was simply not imaginable 15 or 18 years ago.

The flipside of it is -- particularly the value of RCTs, Randomized Controlled Trials, in establishing the effectiveness of choice. What I would remind folks of is Tom Loveless and I wrote a piece on this for the Gates Choice Commission several years ago, that choice-based arrangements, whether charters, vouchers, anything else are not an intervention. It’s not an intervention strategy. It’s not something you administer to children to improve schooling. It is an opportunity to create a possible supply side response in which better schools may emerge and serve kids.

Once you create that opportunity, it is going to be all the action. It’s not like giving kids a pill. It’s like giving people the license to open a medicine cabinet. What you actually find sitting inside that medicine cabinet and what you stock it with is going to make all the difference. For my money, one of the reasons that choice has not delivered the results we might have hoped for 20 years ago, is we haven’t paid nearly as much attention to what and how we stock that medicine cabinet and how do we make sure that we set the preconditions in place that will foster a supply of good options.

Sol Stern: I think part of the problem that the choice movement is going through now is, in a way, it’s being hoisted by its own petard. To justify convincing people that choices are good or that vouchers was a good option, we’ve had these years of studies, the kind of studies that Robert mentioned, and we put all the eggs in. The idea is on whether or not a select of group of kids who get vouchers do better on basically state tests because, usually, we don’t measure with the NAEP test, and these are, first of all, flawed tests as a result of No Child Left Behind. There is a kind of race to the bottom, with every state trying to, in order to avoid sanctions, basically dumbing down their tests. They’re playing around with their tests because careers were at stake. And if you’re an educator and your career is at stake and you can manipulate the data or make the test easier and you get more kids passing, you’re going to do it. And we don’t have the checks and balances to prevent that.

So we’ve created a situation in which in order to argue the case for choice or for vouchers, it’s all based on whether a few thousand kids maybe got three or four or five points higher on a state test. And that basically misunderstands the very reason that parents want more options and more choice. It has nothing to do with getting their kid to a school where the test scores are a few points higher.

And I send my kids, both kids, to the public schools and I had a lot of choice because there are no longer neighborhood schools in New York City and there are a lot of options. I couldn’t care less about the test scores of a particular school. I couldn’t care less about whether my kid got four points higher or five points higher on another test.

Parents make that choice in a holistic way. They want to know if the school is safe, they want to know if the school imparts good values -- and I think, minority parents, disadvantaged parents approach the schools in the same way. So instead of focusing on the fact that having more choices is a good in itself, that having those choices is a moral imperative because it keeps alive schools like the intercity Catholic schools that have done so much for the cities.

We put it all on the question of test scores. Here is where we’ve had our disagreements -- I don’t think the test scores show that much about the superiority of the voucher schools. Later, I might quote from it, but the last several studies and the meta-studies, such as the one by Cecilia Rouse, professor of economics at Princeton and someone who clearly doesn’t have a horse in the game, who is not with a free market or choice institute and is not associated with any of the anti-choice movements, who’s approached it as a topnotch economist. She just published a study reviewing all of the studies in choice and finds very little, just marginal gains for the kids who actually get vouchers and no reason to believe that choice has, in those cities where it’s been implemented, has raised academic performance for the public schools.

And let’s look at the reality. Cleveland has a choice program. Cleveland’s NAEP scores for the public schools are the worst in the country. Arizona has the most choice of any state in the country. It has an abundance of charter schools and it has tax credits. Arizona test scores are terrible. In Milwaukee, black students in Wisconsin, we don’t know exactly about Milwaukee, but black students in Wisconsin schools have the lowest scores in fourth and eighth grade reading of any state in the country. If vouchers were really working to transform the public schools, I don’t think we’d see such terrible scores.

But again, just to get back to my point, I don’t think that necessarily has to be a reason for not having choice. I think it’s still a very good thing to have in and of itself, and it helps support very good schools. And that’s where I would cast my vote.

Robert Enlow: Actually, the only thing I would add to that is I would like to point out how many -- there have been at least ten random assignment controlled studies of vouchers and they may have some issues, but how many other ed reforms have been studied so deeply with those kind of random controls?

Sol Stern: The biggest study in the history of American education was Project Follow-through, which was started under the Johnson administration. It was a billion-dollar study over 30 years, following or evaluating 15 or 16 different whole-school reform programs and direct instruction, which I think came out on top in that program. I dare say if we had direct instruction or something like direct instruction, such as successful reading programs in schools all over the country, we’d have a far better academic improvement than through just choice, through vouchers. I don’t see anyone in the choice movement in this battle at all. You guys have basically been on the sidelines on all of these battles.

Robert Enlow: I know Howard is probably going to comment on this, I hope. I think you’re right and we need to look much more holistically in the school choice side of things.

Howard Fuller: Well, I don’t think he’s right that you guys have been on the sidelines. I mean, it depends on who “you guys” are. I don’t know who that is because some of us have…

Sol Stern:  You.

Howard Filler: Well, I would say, Sol, that some of us, and I include me on this, have been engaged in all of these battles. And my question would be other than writing about it, where have you been? From my standpoint, out there on the battle lines, starting in the charter school movement, fighting to get quality schools for kids, there are a number of us who have been right there. I think you need to be careful when you make these broad sweeping statements like, “You guys have been on the sidelines,” because that just happens not to be true. It’s an interesting statement, but it’s not true.

Now that isn’t to say that everybody in the choice movement has engaged in all of these battles. But there are certainly people in this room, and I include myself, who have been very involved in these battles.

Sol Stern: So you and other people in the choice movement have fought to prevent Congress, for example, from undermining the Reading First Program, which tried to bring scientifically based reading programs into the schools? I didn’t notice anyone in those battles. I’m sorry…

Howard Fuller: I think, Sol, the thing is which battle are you going to pick, man? Just because somebody up there in Congress is talking about Reading First, it doesn’t mean you’re not engaged in other battles that have to do with creating quality schools for all children.

Sol Stern: No, no, but Howard, kids are not educated in schools. They’re educated in classrooms by a teacher. And whether that child advances academically has very little to do with the school. It has to do with the instruction given in the classroom. And if it’s the wrong instruction, if it’s instruction for which there is no evidence, no scientific evidence, as for example, whole language, then there’s not going to be any improvement. We have a test case of that in New York City. For the last seven years, we’ve had this great chancellor who’s being applauded as a great innovator and in favor of market reforms but he’s used whole language instruction in reading and on the NAEP test, from 2003 to 2007, there’s been absolutely zero improvement in fourth grade reading and eighth grade reading, despite spending an extra $8 billion on our education system.

Howard Fuller: Sol, to say that creating great schools isn’t what it’s all about, it’s about creating great classrooms inside the schools, and you’re going to take a stand on that? That’s like saying the key issue to comfort on an airline is the seats but the plane is not important. It’s the seats. The seats are on the plane. The classrooms are inside of great schools. And so if you’re out here and now saying we ought to focus our attention on classroom and forget about creating great schools, what kind of argument is that?

Sol Stern: No. I’m saying instruction --

Howard Fuller: That’s a bogus argument, man.

Sol Stern: Instruction goes in a classroom between a teacher --

Howard Fuller: Everybody knows that. But classrooms are located in schools.

Sol Stern: That’s right. They’re the vehicle. But the classroom, if a teacher is not giving proper instruction, the kids are not going to learn. Learning is a function of instruction.

Howard Fuller: The last I heard, teachers get hired by schools to work in classrooms. One of the key elements, going all the way back to Rod Edmonds, is what kind of correlates do you create in schools? It will be silly for me to sit here and argue that the curriculum that you use in a given classroom is not important. But to make an argument that to concentrate on creating quality schools is the wrong thing to do because instruction takes place in classrooms, I don’t understand the validity of it.

Sol Stern: I was trying to make a point about instruction. I wasn’t saying that we shouldn’t -- obviously, if a school is mismanaged, if there’s no discipline in the school, if it’s disruptive -- but the primal scene of all education reform, finally, is in the classroom. It’s got to happen between a teacher and the students. 

Henry Olsen: If I can draw that out a little bit, I guess what you’re saying is choice people have focused on meta issues of school government, structure and meta incentives and it hasn’t necessarily produced the curricula and instructional improvements that evidence demonstrates would help --

Sol Stern: Thank you --

Henry Olsen: So then, where should you put your marginal buck? Should you put your marginal buck behind school governance or behind the curricula? Is that a rough way of synthesizing what your criticism is of the emphasis that the choice movement or have I misstated where you’re going?

Sol Stern: Well, for the choice movement, I would say stop putting some bucks behind. I mean, all of the research money that goes into the choice movement is, well, almost entirely, it’s on incentivist kinds of reforms. Very little research money, very little organizing is done around the question of improving instruction.

Henry Olsen: Now Howard -- jump in and then I’m going to ask Howard.

Robert Enlow: Yes, I just want to jump in. To use your analogy, you said supposedly, the choice movement is concentrating less on what’s inside the medicine cabinet than what’s the medicine cabinet. So well, to put stuff inside the medicine cabinet, you have to make a medicine cabinet first, right? You have to create the societal structures by which you can put the stuff inside the medicine cabinet. And that’s what incentivist reforms are. You have to create a societal structure for education that allows all these cool things to be put inside of it. So you can’t just say, “I’m going to put all this stuff inside my pocket and that’s good enough,” right? I think it’s tremendously important that we focus what the choice reforms are about, setting the conditions is necessary to have all these other reforms exist.

Henry Olsen: Howard, you’ve done it all. You’ve educated from the outside. You’ve thought on the outside and you’ve done it from the inside. Taking account of everything we’re talking about right now, what have you learned from choice on the ground and what do you have to say about the question of what’s the best way to improve instruction? Do we have a hope?

Howard Fuller: It’s all about classrooms. I think the thing that I’ve learned is it’s both the power of choice and the limits of choice because actually, I agree with what Sol just said in terms of this issue about the limits of choice to create systemic reform. And I’ve made the argument that, and I think you might have quoted me on one part of this, that I thought that we oversold the question of systemic reform. But then there was a sentence right after that where I said but to me, the issue has always been about social justice. And that is the point that we ought not to have in America, where only people with money are able to choose the best school for their children.

The power of that is very important, but the limits of that are also very important. And I think I agree with his point that we went too far on trying to talk about -- that competition was going to almost automatically create greater schools for everybody because the reality is that has not worked and we need to say that that has not worked in that way. But it has created the ability of particularly low income and working class people to access schools that they never otherwise would have been able to access were it not for parent choice.

And some of the things that we’re now seeing out here that worked for kids, not all of them, some of them, we’re able to see it because of the power of choice, which has allowed us to create new schools that have great classrooms and are educating kids.

I think the second thing that I really learned is the hypocrisy around choice. And that is to say that I sit in rooms constantly with people whose own children are taken care of because they have the financial capacity to take care of them. And then I hear all of these arguments about why we got to be very careful about giving poor people options. But they would never accept those limitations for themselves because the reality of it is no matter what kind of government studies, no matter how many percentages of test scores or whatever, they’re going to take care of their children and they have the money to do so. Just the grinding hypocrisy around this issue.

And then, the third point is that I just think it borders on criminality what we have allowed to happen to poor children in this country. To sit around tables discussing whether or not they ought to have this option or that option, in the light of their reality, is to me, insane. I still believe deeply what Malcolm X said, and he said, “By any means necessary.” And I think we’re at a point in this country where we have to provide poor kids, who are in outrageous conditions, the possibility for change by any means necessary.

And as we’re all waiting for this, the change to occur, and I’m one of them and I’m hopeful, I’m cynical but I’m hopeful, I just always keep this in my head, and I’ll end with it, it’s an amazing thing that in America, on February 1st, 1960, four students sat down at a lunch counter and demanded to be served. And that action helped changed the world. And now, here we are, almost in 2009, we could go to that same restaurant and have our kids sit down and people are willing to serve them but they can’t read the menu. We have to ask ourselves how can we, as a society, allow this to continue? Focusing on arguments about whether or not people ought to have options or not have options when it’s clear that we have miserably failed, literally, thousands and thousands of these children. And for many of these children, the power to choose provides them the only possibility of trying to make a difference in their lives.

Sol Stern: I say amen to that.

Henry Olsen: Joe, you’ve been silent here for 20 minutes. Or just to the issue of challenging your party to stand and deliver, what do you say?

Joe Williams: When I went to college, I used to put marbles in this medicine cabinet so nobody would peek in at parties, knowing it would all come out. I was trying to find a way to work that in but I couldn’t come up with any at the time. So that’s what I was doing for 20 minutes. I’ve always been -- sort of along the lines of what Howard was talking about -- I’ve always been more swayed by the social justice aspect of this discussion than a systemic reform. But I think, ironically, choice, as a concept, is inevitable, not because of arguments about systemic reform or even social justice, but I think it’s a matter of habit.

We live in a world where people are just getting used to selecting a movie on pay-per-view and having that argument with their household. People are used to getting things instantaneously, choosing everything that’s in front of them. I think it’s only a matter of time before that becomes a part of regular activity and at that point, we’re going to bypass a lot of these lofty discussions that we’re having and then we’re going to have to deal with the issue that Sol was talking about. So now, people have choice. Now what? Now what do we do to make sure we’re at the point that people can read the menu.

I think one of the reasons the Democratic Party will be a part of this is that they’re going to have to be. They’re going to have to be responding to the choosers who want the choice, particularly in urban areas where this is going to become loudest. The party is not going to be able to survive without responding to the desire that’s out there, for a choice.

Now, we’re talking about choice in the context of things that we can identify right now, like charter schools or vouchers or tuition tax credits or whatever that is. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I suspect it’s going to look a lot more like charter schools than anything else but it’s going to happen. This last presidential election, I think, was a very telling sign of how far this thing can move. If you looked at every single candidate, major candidate, for president, on either party, every single one of them this year supported charter schools. I think it just is one of those signs that things have moved very far in terms of accepting one of the forms of choice which people have come to consider as a kinder, gentler form of choice.

If you look at the Democratic Party platform that’s voted on every four years, go back 12 years, eight years, four years, this year and just look at the language surrounding charter schools, you will see a creeping enthusiasm toward embracing charter schools, to the point where the official stance of the Democratic Party now is promoting accountable charter schools as part of its education platform. I think the comfort level with charter schools, in particular, has increased dramatically and we are seeing that with Obama even making a pledge on the campaign trail to double the amount of federal funding to charter schools. It’s just inevitable at this point.

Henry Olsen: I see a man who wants to get in --

Robert Enlow: A couple of things. Howard, you and I have had these conversations a long time and I, obviously, had been fighting on the ground with you in many states and will continue to fight. I don’t think the desire to try and look at -- you said “by any means necessary” -- and as a friendly challenge, I would say would that include universal choice then? Because it seems to me the things that have brutalized our kids has been the trifecta of dollars out of control of the parents’ hands, geographic assignment zones. The fact that if you’re just too poor to buy a house, you can’t leave that, so the rich will get to move, and that’s the control they have, is they move. And then the compulsory side, now you can argue the compulsory side of it, whether that’s needed or necessary, but absolutely, the assignment zones have been probably one of the most brutalizing factors for poor people. Let’s then get rid of those for everyone, right?

I would say that to Joe, I mean, essentially, the charter school stuff is great, I love that, but ultimately, the dollars are still not going to flow through the consumer’s hands. The Friedman Foundation is still going to be fighting there alongside all those states, too. Just as we look at all those things though, if the assignment zone has been what has caused the most damage to poor people, in terms of the delivery of education, forcing poor people who live in certain areas to go to certain schools that become places that no one cares about. Shouldn’t we get rid of that whole thing?

Howard Fuller: The issue on this universal thing is interesting, and I score one for you on how you turned Malcolm back to me. I’ll owe you one. I’ve always viewed the world like this, right or wrong, if you have money, you’re right here, and if you don’t have money, you’re right here. I did not get in this fight to do this. I got in it to do this. And I can’t see how I would support something that would give money to people who already got money. You and I have had these discussions.

That’s my issue with universal vouchers, because I don’t see how poor people get advantaged in that type of scenario. I’ve had to compromise, okay, I’ll go for sliding scales based on the political arrangements. But at the end of the day, the question is how do poor people get 100 percent of whatever it is and where is the cap that says if you’re at this point, we’re not giving you anymore money.

I know that that’s not something that everybody agrees with but that’s where I’m at. For me, this, literally, is a fight about how do we make education possible for the poorest children, the kids who are at my school. I chair the board of a small Christian high school with 196 kids. They’re all there by virtue of the voucher, except for four of them. And without the voucher, our school could not exist.

And when people say to me, “But Howard, you’re moving away from the Democratic ideal because if this was a public school, everyone would be there.” That’s the craziest stuff I ever heard. Ain’t no rich people going to be at our school on 33rd and Brown. For me, it is a fight for how do poor people survive in America? Education is still the one leveling possibility that I’m aware of. So the voucher, for me, is a fight to give them access to a better education to improve their lives. 

Frederick M. Hess: One of the things that this flags is -- Howard and I have talked about this a lot -- the way in which those who are comfortable with choice-based reform have tended not to talk exhaustively about these issues in public because there are so many folks who are profoundly opposed to choice-based reform that -- you say the wrong thing and it gets taken up and used in the context of a political discourse. There has been a real problem with coherent intellectual development of these ideas, which is why some of our intellectual touchstones are still 20 years old and largely unrefined in this debate.

One thing that Howard points out, is that there are actually really substantial distinctions between those who see choices and mechanisms of social justice primarily to make sure that kids in lousy neighborhoods, stuck in lousy schools, get a better shot and those who are more removed from these kinds of concerns, like me, who are, in a more egg-headed fashion, trying to think about choice mechanisms as a lever for systemic improvement.

Now one of the things that has been politically convenient in much of the debate is to just treat these as if they’re synonymous, to treat them as if programs give you one and give you the other -- that these things actually march hand in hand. And they don’t. What Howard is pointing out is not only are there tactical calculations as to how you do this but that if what your emphasis really is, is making sure kids who are stuck in really horrific urban schools are going to be given options out of there, this is a profoundly different ball game from thinking about how we use deregulatory approaches to try to change the systemic delivery of education.

The second thing that implies is the very word “choice” has confused our thinking on this issue because choice is about this notion of social justice. It’s giving people who don’t have options a choice to get into a better educational environment.

Now that’s great but that has nothing to do with market theory. In market theory, there’s a reason we don’t talk about telecommunications choice or trucking choice or airline choice because what we usually talk about is deregulation. Deregulation implies that we used to have a bunch of rules about how we provided a service or how a service was provided and we’re going to rethink those rules. When we talk about deregulation, there’s a presumption that you can do it smart or you can do it stupid. What matters a lot is how do you redesign those rules to encourage a supply of providers to come out and take care of the needs of the constituents and the consumers. This has been largely absent. When we talk about choice, we’re talking about the demand curve. We’re talking about giving people the chance to demand a different kind of schooling. One of the things this has done is led to a choice conversation where we spend a lot of time talking about program design and how to weigh the vouchers, the voucher eligibility in lotteries, but very little time or energy talking about the providers, the regulatory environment, how do we encourage the emergence of effective schools or classrooms, how do we think about the human capital piece, the venture capital piece, the less visible barriers to entry. This has simply not been part of what most of the choice conversation has been about.

It’s not only been an unfortunate blind spot, but I think it’s really resulted from this unresolved conversation that Howard has pointed out that it’s okay for us to not agree what we want choice to accomplish but we need to understand what we’re trying to argue for, we need to understand what the points of disagreement are, and we need to be thoughtful about the policy implications of these various approaches.

Henry Olsen: Rick, let me just jump the queue here for a second. When I’ve read your stuff and heard your stuff, I think I’m beginning to understand it.

Frederick M. Hess: Well, that will be a first.

Henry Olsen: It would be a first for me. But any political action has to place its marginal efforts toward certain things and the choice movement has placed its marginal effort on creating a political coalition to build the demand side. And what you basically said is that’s insufficient.

So in your advice to the political movement, you basically posed two different options, and one would be put more effort on more deregulation, not creation of the demand side but deregulation at the supply side and the market will help to solve these problems.

On the other side I see you saying, “No, what we really need is not total deregulation but better regulation,” that we should not think of this as a movement that’s ultimately going to create kind of like a market in cars but really more like a market in electricity where there’s choice within a regulatory structure.

And then there’s a third thing I hear you saying, which is, “Physician, heal thyself,” that what’s the problem is not as much the barriers, and not as much the regulatory structure, but our own self understanding. So that the marginal effort should be talking to people who can provide the venture capital independent of the specific structure, talking to the entrepreneurs. That the most important thing that Rob Enlow can do is not lobby 4,000 or 5,000-kid voucher program in Georgia but the most important thing that Rob Enlow can do is sit down with curricular instructors and with management experts and say, “Here, you’re the entrepreneur. Regardless of the choice structure, you can create a better school with this.”

So those are three different ways that the marginal reform/choice movement could go in. Could you enlighten me as to which of those ways might be most important if you could only choose one and why?

Frederick M. Hess: It’s highly unlikely. But I will flail at it for a moment, just to give Sol and Howard something to have fun with. First, I think you point this out beautifully and I think it shows the corner in which we’ve walked ourselves into in education. It’s actually the exact same corner with the credit markets right now where you’re either for allowing a whole bunch of irresponsible players to get off the hook altogether or you’re for the government nationalizing huge swathes. I mean, this doesn’t strike me as an optimal choice. The whole purpose of smart deregulation, in theory, is to try to create a latticework in which one doesn’t get walked into these kinds of no-win options.

So the first thing is more deregulation. The question is kind of deregulation of what? I wouldn’t suggest that the programs that Bob pointed to suffer from any problems of regulatory overhang. What I would suggest though is that are we talking about creating options which are about creating systemic effects? If we actually are talking about systemic effects and not all of us necessarily think that should be job one, then there is a massive need for deregulation of the existing sector, not more deregulation, necessarily, of the space in which the voucher program and tax credit programs are operating.

This is why I’ve never been able to understand my good friends, who try to prove that vouchers or charters yield competitive effects. I mean, let’s think about this for a second. If I’m a principal in Milwaukee or DCPS and my school is built for 450 kids and I lose 50 kids, this is bad for me, why? It doesn’t affect my district evaluation or performance. It doesn’t affect my job security. It doesn’t affect my compensation. True, I don’t get two FTE teachers assigned, but given turnover rates in D.C. and Milwaukee, that probably just means I don’t have to hire those two folks. It means my cafeteria is a little less crowded. It has no adverse consequences on me whatsoever.

If I add 50 students because I’m out there competing effectively, it has no impact on my evaluation, no impact on my compensation. I might have to roll two trailers out back for 50 kids, which now means I have 50 sets of hacked off parents and two hacked off teachers, there are no benefits to me from competing effectively. If we want to imagine that choice is going to lead to competitive behaviors, we have to deregulate, but not necessarily deregulate, but change the rules under which districts operate in a way that they actually are going to have self interest and cause to compete.

What I’m really talking about is smart deregulation, changing the rules in which districts operate. Conversely, when it comes to charters and when it comes to tax credit voucher space, I think it’s naïve to imagine that parents are going to make good choices. One of the things that I find funny is that when we debated welfare reform, when we debated TANF 12 years ago, it was conservatives who were concerned that if we didn’t have work requirements that these low-income families are going to make horrific choices and it was liberals who kept telling us that everybody wanted to do the right thing and didn’t we just need to respect their innate motivation?

Well, when we talk about choice, everybody is on the other side of the dance card. There, it’s liberals who are concerned about these folks being unable to make good choices and conservatives who suddenly have a newfound respect for their innate genius. And it strikes me that, if these people are such geniuses, they or the middleclass wouldn’t have been buying a whole bunch of 3/1 ARM negative amortization, no money down loans the last five years. This is the house over their head and their children’s head, right? It’s their children that make the difference. So you would think people would be thoughtful about these things. And yet, people still make really stupid decisions.

And people make stupid decisions because people will only make decisions as good as the information they have, as good as the choice structures in which they’re making those decisions, and as good as the way these opportunities encourage them to choose. I have enormous confidence that choice-based schooling decisions are better than geographic assignment. However, I think that’s entirely contingent on people having good information, on us having good metrics, and us steering people to make thoughtful choices.

I’m actually, necessarily, for government regulation to do this, but I think we need to necessarily think kind of in a Tocquevillian fashion about who are the private actors and who are the entities who are going to steer behavior and provide information that allows family to make good choices.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s about understanding so much, your third point, but what I would say is that we tend to make two mistakes. The systemic reformers want to imagine it’s about curricula and educators and students and let’s go in and fix these schools and not get distracted by all these governance level stuff.

And the choice community often wants to say, “Look, if we create choices, we know that markets work.” Well, markets don’t always work and systems are really hard to change. Well, what makes a difference is that when you have that -- it’s really the Tocquevillian solution -- in order for markets to be effective, you need a variety of private goods that have to create the conditions for markets to succeed. You have to have cooperative private activity. You have to have money at work. You have to have transparency. You have to trust. You have to have human capital. You have to have all of these conditions that we take for granted in Route 128 or Dulles Airport Quarter or Silicon Valley or most of the American economy but which have simply never taken natural root in the education space. In order for choice to deliver the results we want it to deliver, we have to make sure that we are thinking about and investing in and creating those kinds of struts and infrastructure and scaffolding that are going to support not just choice but good choices. These are all elements of a coherent approach to how we take a bureaucratic monolithic schooling educational sector from the 20th century into something that makes sense in the 21st.

Henry Olsen: All right, bridge to the 21st century means bridge to Joe.

Joe Williams: 21st century Joe. I just want to respond one thing right off the bat, that Rick’s point about the lack of a true competitive market, a point well taken and that when you look at the politics of this, the deals that we often cut in order to get some of these choice mechanisms in place force us to create scenarios where it’s not going to work.

In New York, where I live, if you’re a school district that’s losing students to charter schools, not only do you not have an incentive to try to keep them, we pay you more money if you lose kids. So we reward the failure as it phases out over time but your point is well taken on that, Rick.

Following up on something I said before about this difference between the political viability of say, vouchers and charter schools. A lot of the people that I deal with, we look at this as a horse race from time to time and I see charter schools winning that race at this point in time. It’s because they’ve been much more poised as a sector to address some of these supply and demand issues that you’re dealing with right now. Some of the discussions about how you grow this to get the kind of capacity you need to make this happen, getting the funders involved in this, it seems like the voucher movement, in some ways, is sort of stuck in like a 1994 mentality where the charter schools are just going -- that the movement itself is moving much faster.

Robert Enlow: I would agree with that and one of the things that I’ve been thinking in the Friedman Foundation is the deregulation side of things. So why is it that a public school for 350 kids cost $20 million to build and a charter school for 350 kids cost $3 million to build? These are institutional arrangements that are set up by a legislative purpose. So why don’t we put bills, in the bills we pass for school choice, things like that and smart deregulation options and something like that?

So I would say though that this ultimately comes down to the money, right? Who’s got control of the money, where it goes? And a lot of times in school choice, what we’ve been doing the last 18 years is accepting, when we get a voucher kid out, the money still stays in the system. A lot of times, we got bills where we’re allowing the system to get paid twice for not having the children, and that’s not in every single place, but the more we actually start putting the dollars directly with the child, the more we’re going to have a system that responds to competitive pressures quickly.

Sol Stern: I think there’s something, aside from my classroom analogy, there’s something else that’s missing from this entire discussion. We have 1,500 Ed schools in this country. They produce just about 90 percent of all the teachers that will go into the classrooms and teach our kids, whether they’re in the public schools or in charter schools or, to a great extent -- even in voucher schools, since Catholic schools, which are the recipients of most of the vouchers, more and more Catholic schools want their teachers to be certified -- it’s done in the education schools.

Now what are the education schools, the system of education schools? That’s a pretty good model of a competitive open market system. I mean, we have 1,500 independent education schools. They compete with each other for students. They compete so a student can choose to go to a cheaper school, like the city university, or a much more expensive school with supposedly more prestige, like teacher’s college. And faculty, the schools compete with each other for grants, they compete with each other for the best faculty, and presumably, they compete with each other for the research, the great research they produce so that the schools that produce reliable research get benefits from it.

It’s not a perfect competitive market system but it’s pretty close, I would think, at least theoretically. What’s the reality of that system? Has all that competition produced better goods, led to a better mousetrap, better classroom instruction? Quite the contrary.

All the schools, all the 1,500 Ed schools are terrible. Okay, I’m sorry, maybe there are a couple of exceptions. Throughout the Ed schools, there was a study done a couple of years ago by the National Council for Teacher Quality. They surveyed all of the introductory reading classes, teaching future teachers how to teach reading in the Ed schools and they found that only 20 percent of those courses even mentioned, even discussed the fact that we have, for 40 years, there has been tremendous explosion on our scientific understanding of what are the best ways to teach reading and this is totally ignored in the Ed schools.

So before we start talking about all of these different structures of whether entrepreneurship should be encouraged or whether charters are better than vouchers, again, I would say we ought to start talking about education and what’s wrong with the education in the classroom. To me, it’s just amazing that there are literally dozens and dozens of these kinds of conferences and panels and discussions on education reform that go on in Washington and New York and a few other cities and there’s never a discussion of education. Everything is discussed, entrepreneurship, choice, vouchers, et cetera, et cetera, but not education.

And the reason, Howard, that those kids at the lunch counter can’t read the menu is very, very specific. They can’t read the menu because for the same reason that, basically, 2/3 of intercity kids can’t read by fourth grade. There’s a connection between the instruction that their teachers get and the fact that we’re ignoring the enormous degree of science that’s developed on curriculum and pedagogy and what’s actually being done in those classrooms in the urban centers.

The fact is that Reading First, even though it’s regarded as a bureaucratic failure and there were a lot of screw-ups with the Bush administration, this is an enormous step forward, where the federal government, for the first time, said, “We’re going to insist, if you want this money that we’re giving out for reading instruction, that you follow what we know works in the classroom.” And they’re already, even though the program was messed up, there are tremendous examples such as Richmond, Virginia which used the scientific approach to reading, used systematic reading, systematic phonics program and increased proportionally. They just about matched the white kids in Fairfax because of their adoption of a systematic, explicit, phonics programs.

I would come back to my point, yes, it’s very good to have choice and as a moral proposition, it’s something we ought to support. But it’s all meaningless if we don’t start discussing what’s actually taught in the classroom.

Howard Fuller: I think the point I would make, Sol, is there are a lot of conferences where those exact discussions are going on. That’s the point I’m trying to make here.

Sol Stern: I guess I don’t get invited to the best conferences.

Howard Fuller: That’s what I’m saying. I got to start getting you out more, man.

Sol Stern: Yes, but, you know, I do know the Internet.

Howard Fuller: No, but I want to be really serious about that. Whether you’re talking about the National Charter School Conference, I know at our BAEO conferences we have very specific sessions on not just the politics of choice but what actually is working in classrooms. What is actually going on to improve instruction in classroom.

And all I’m trying to get you to do is to avoid the kind of sweeping generalizations that none of this is really going on because it really is. And it’s going on at conferences sponsored by people who support various forms of parental choice. Now, you may not think there’s enough of that, but I just want to assure you that there is a lot of discussion about that taking place.

The second point I want to make is that, it’s a point that Joe made about how charter schools have advanced. I want people to remember though, back in the early days, a lot of people went to charters to try to stop vouchers. And then we need to be clear that if the voucher movement had not existed and had not been a “threat” for a whole lot of people who embrace charters, they wouldn’t have embraced charters.

And we also need to be very clear that there are still people out there who, in spite of what seems to be acceptance of charter, still on their agenda is crushing charter schools. Or if not crushing them, at least making sure that they’re all unionized because there are folks out there whose view is there is no such thing as a pubic school unless it’s run by the government and the people who teach them are unionized teachers. And in all of our euphoria about how we’re all being accepted and all of this, we’d better not forget that there is a sizeable number of people out here who not only have not accepted this but are waiting for their opportunity to turn this around and to push us back in a different way. And I tell all of my charter friends that you all have better not get comfortable with how much you are loved because there are people out there who do not love you.

The last point I want to make is, I’m actually not a supporter of vouchers or charters or any of that in the absolute. I’m a supporter of quality education for the poorest children in America. And for me, it’s important not to get committed to an institutional method to get to a purpose. Because the moment you become totally committed to a particular institutional arrangement, you become a protector of the status quo. And what this is about, for me, is right now, charters work. I do believe in choice. I believe in all of that. But, if the end goal is educating kids, I believe that you can’t ever trust bureaucracies to educate kids, therefore, you’ve got to always empower the people. I’m still stuck. I actually believe in power to the people. And I believe the way you empower people is to give them instruments to fight bureaucracies, even those who come in saying, “Trust me, trust me, I believe in you all.” I believe that people have always got to have instruments that allow them to fight.

For me, a voucher is an instrument that allows you to fight. The fact that you can go to a charter school is an instrument that allows you to fight. And so I’m always trying to make sure I stay committed to the fight, to the purpose of the fight and not the particular instrument, at a moment in history, that allows you to engage in that fight.

Henry Olsen: We’ve been going for about an hour, and I’m going to take a moderator’s prerogative and throw you all a curveball. Short answer to the question I’m about to pose, no more than a minute. It’s January 20, 2013. President Palin has just given her first inaugural.

Howard Fuller: Who?

Joe Williams: What?

Henry Olsen: And she’s -- House Bill 1 is going to be Florida’s McKay’s Special Education Vouchers for All, special education vouchers for every Special Ed kid in America. Yes/No and why? Rob.

Robert Enlow: The why is obvious. The answer is yes and I hope it’s January 20th, 2009, under President Obama, as opposed to anyone else. The why is obvious. You can create a system of educational options for a group of people who already take power. My child has Asperger’s and I can tell you, as a group of people, it’s a very organized community, and so one way to really instill choice in this country would be to give that community power and even more power. So the answer is yes.

Henry Olsen: Rick.

Frederick M. Hess: Yes, they don’t fit cleanly. The student population question doesn’t fit cleanly in our accountability systems. We don’t know quite what to do with them. We’ve already got a highly individualized framework for delivering services and for trying to impose some kind of accountability. If there is a population for whom this is a relatively clean option to provide, it’s the special needs population.

Henry Olsen: Howard.

Howard Fuller: I would say yes with the proviso that we make sure that poor children with special needs are going to be able to access this newfound policy for all children with special needs.

Henry Olsen: Sol.

Sol Stern: That’s an easy one. Special education, we already have special education vouchers, even where we don’t have an official special education voucher program. In New York City now, a lot of parents, after they go through a certain ritual of trying to find a school that will work for them, they are given vouchers for other schools. I don’t think that’s controversial at all.

Henry Olsen: Well, I’d like to thank all the diners at our educational feast for partaking of the meal and for all of you for coming to the restaurant and thank you for an interesting educational set.

[Applause]