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A Lot of Deception about School Choice
There’s no shortage of distortion when it comes to education reform. The recent legislative debate over educational choice in West Virginia is a case in point.
West Virginia public schools receive more than $3.4 billion annually—including appropriations representing about 43 percent of the state budget. Yet most students are not proficient in the basics. Only 28 percent of public-school eighth-graders are proficient in reading, and less than one in five are proficient in math. Little wonder that despite the much-ballyhooed 90 percent public high-school graduation rate, at least one-quarter of high-school graduates need college remedial classes.
Against this backdrop, opposition to education savings account (ESA) programs makes about as much sense as telling people to stick with rotary phones because smart phones are too novel. The “untested” claim makes even less sense given the evidence from programs that inspired ESAs.
Voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs have existed since 1990 and 1997, respectively. Currently, there are about 50 of these programs in place helping more than 450,000 students in 27 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. ESAs represent next-gen education choice by helping parents pay for numerous approved education expenses besides tuition, such as tutoring, special education therapies, online courses, and testing fees. Arizona enacted the first program in 2011. Today, about 19,000 students in five states have access to ESAs.
Like all forms of education choice, ESAs are based on the principle that parents (not bureaucrats) know best when it comes to their children’s education.
Fully 78 percent of the 18 studies conducted over the past two decades show improved test scores for scholarship students, according to the pro-charter, ESA nonprofit EdChoice. What’s more, a just-released study from the Urban Institute finds that, compared to their public-school peers, scholarship students are up to 20 percent more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees.
Public-school students who don’t participate in choice scholarship programs also benefit.
Ninety-four percent of the 34 studies examining the impact of scholarship programs on public-school students’ test scores found they improved.
Then there are charter schools, tuition-free public schools following the same testing and admissions requirements as district public schools, which have operated for nearly 30 years. Currently, 3.2 million students, mostly minorities and from low-income families, attend 7,000 charter schools in the United States.
Charter schools positively affect student achievement for less money according to the preponderance of scientific research, including meta-analyses and multi-state studies by researchers from the University of Arkansas, University of California, San Diego, Harvard, Stanford and the RAND Corporation. Want to know how charter schools can work in the real world? Consider Arizona, which has had them for 25 years.
Arizona has the highest concentration of charter students nationwide, 19 percent. About 20 percent of its charters are alternative schools, enrolling dropout, homeless and over-aged students. Despite serving higher percentages of disadvantaged students and receiving around $950 less per pupil than district public schools, Arizona charter students outperform their district peers on the state test across grade levels and subjects regardless of their backgrounds.
Arizona charter students also lead the nation in fourth- and eighth-grade math gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—beating powerhouse states like Massachusetts, which have less challenging student populations and spend nearly twice as much per pupil. As for Arizona charter high schools, they dominate US News’ annual national rankings.
Research has long shown that district public schools facing competition for students have higher achievement gains than those not facing competition. Arizona district public schools prove it by outperforming the national averages in terms of NAEP achievement gains across grades and subjects.
Parents don’t need to be bombarded with research to know what education is best for their children. Hopefully, parents find it reassuring that the empirical evidence supports their freedom to choose. Thus, the only question left is just how many more generations of students do lawmakers plan on sacrificing to the status quo before they put the real experts back in charge?
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Small-Schoolers Aim High
Students at lesser-known colleges are devising their own strategies to get noticed by top recruiters
If the college-admissions scandal is any guide, attending an elite college is a ticket to a high-paying job. So what about students at lesser-known colleges, with names few people even recognize? Many find themselves on the wrong side of a recruiting gap, where students at colleges that aren’t on corporate recruiters’ list of target schools must battle hard to get noticed.
Ask Andrew Huang, a 2018 graduate of tiny Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. He chose Gordon for its sense of community, close student-faculty ties and proximity to Boston. But he aspired to work in finance—a competitive field where many firms recruit interns and employees from a cadre of elite target schools.
Dogged networking for an internship during his sophomore year netted Mr. Huang more than 100 new contacts—although many of his conversations with them were discouraging.
He still remembers one investment banker’s response to his pitch: “He said no, that because I didn’t go to one of the firm’s target schools, it would be too much of an uphill battle for me,” Mr. Huang says. “In that moment, I just knew that I had to keep working hard.”
Mr. Huang eventually reached his goal, landing an internship in finance and a job after graduation as an analyst at Cambridge Associates, a global investment-advisory firm in Boston.
Small colleges do have major strengths, of course. Students often seek them out for a well-rounded liberal-arts education and a more intimate campus experience.
They also tend to have cohesive networks of alumni who go to bat for current students seeking internships and jobs.
Still, students from elite colleges and universities such as the Ivy League and Stanford, or big, highly regarded state schools such as Penn State and the University of Michigan, are far more likely to see corporate recruiters on campus. Fewer employers are now sending representatives to colleges in the first place —about 72% compared with 89% in 2006, says Edwin Koc, director of research at the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Students from elite schools, however, are also more frequently the target of online recruitment ads.
Getting on recruiters’ radar as a sophomore or junior is more important amid a trend toward employers assessing potential candidates earlier. Recruiters in competitive fields expect students to start gaining internship experience by their sophomore year.
That means hiring decisions that used to be made in students’ senior year are now taking place two years earlier—a fact easily missed by the average 19-year-old.
Paul Pesek was almost blindsided by this ramped-up process. As a sophomore math and economics major at Wheaton College near Chicago, he knew he wanted to work in a high-impact job, but he had little idea how to proceed. He was shocked into awareness by a venture capitalist who spoke on campus about how to land challenging jobs in finance, consulting and technology.
The message: “This ship is taking off and you need to get on it now,” Mr. Pesek says.
He began networking with Wheaton alumni and others, in the hope of landing a summer internship in finance. “It took a ton of conversations, and frankly, painful ones at first,” he says. He flew to New York on one fall break with only a single appointment set up, then scheduled a half-dozen more by telling contacts, “I’m coming to New York for a networking week,” he says. His efforts paid off. He landed an internship at Morgan Stanley, and a job after his 2013 graduation at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. He later moved on to a private-equity firm. To help other students, Mr. Pesek co-founded a mentoring organization in 2016, Vocational Capital.
A friend, Evan Weir, founded a chapter at his alma mater, Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga. Mr. Huang, who was mentored at Gordon College by a friend of Mr. Pesek’s, is helping run a third chapter there. They’ve enrolled 91 students in the program so far, Mr. Pesek says.
Their message to other students:
“You’re going to end up working as a barista if you don’t have a plan,” says Mr. Weir, a 2015 grad whose networking helped him land an internship, and later a full-time position, at a Wall Street firm.
Big employers can’t recruit on all of the nation’s 3,000 four-year campuses, of course, but they’re more likely to recruit at lesserknown schools if alumni hold top jobs at the company.
Companies say they democratize the hiring process by posting internships and jobs on their websites so that students from any school can apply. Online applications are easily overlooked amid hundreds of competitors or weeded out by applicant-tracking systems, however.
Small colleges are taking steps to make their students more visible. Gordon College creates internships in-house. Neema Kamau, a senior there, says experience she gained as an assistant to the college’s CFO helped her land an internship this summer as a global markets analyst with Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York.
Another innovative program by a Chicago consulting firm, Parker Dewey, is an online micro-internship platform that links college students and recent grads with employers offering paid, shortterm projects. The site gives students from any school a chance to gain experience and show off their skills, and it has attracted many employers seeking more diverse candidates, says CEO Jeffrey Moss. “We offer a broader employee pool, as opposed to the walled gardens that exist now in campus recruiting,” he says.
Alexa Arakelian, a senior in prelaw studies at Beloit College in Wisconsin, says work experience she gained through Parker Dewey enabled her to compete successfully against students from larger schools for a summer internship at a Chicago security-consulting firm. “It puts us on the same playing field,” she says. “That experience helped me get an amazing summer internship I never thought I’d get.”
Stand Out, Even if You Didn’t Attend an Elite School
* Begin as a freshman to plan internships or other work experience.
* Update and polish your LinkedIn profile to reflect your experience and goals.
* Tap your college career-service centers to practice mock interviews and get advice on professional skills.
* Build your network of contacts via email, phone calls and events.
* Consider asking administrators at your college to shadow or intern for them.
SOURCE
Australia: Kudos to NSW for phonics check trial
The NSW budget included some very welcome education news: a trial of the Year 1 phonics screening check in some government schools.
This is a great outcome for NSW children, and CIS is particularly pleased to see it, as we have been advocating this policy for several years.
South Australia was the first state to have a trial — the feedback on which was overwhelmingly positive from students, teachers, and principals — and now conducts the check annually in all government schools (it is bi-partisan policy, with the trial having been introduced by the then Labor government).
There shouldn’t be anything partisan about wanting to ensure high-quality reading instruction in the early years of school. It is well-established that early reading ability is crucial and strongly influences later literacy skills and achievement across subject areas. It’s vital we identify students who are falling behind as soon as possible so we can intervene to help them.
And phonics instruction is especially important for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A comprehensive review by the NSW Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation found that explicit phonics instruction substantially reduces the reading gap between disadvantaged and advantaged students.
The context is that too many children aren’t learning how to read in primary school. The 2016 PIRLS test found that one in every five Australian Year 4 students had reading levels below the international literacy benchmark.
While the focus in the past has been on lifting education spending, it is more important that school systems implement evidence-based policies, with accountability and transparency.
The NSW government also announced in the budget that, along with a significant increase in school spending, in future, there will be an outcomes-based approach to NSW schools. Unsurprisingly, this was controversial, with a former NSW education minister labelling it a “bad idea”.
Imagine… a government wanting to ensure that additional billions of taxpayer dollars spent on schools actually leads to better outcomes? Just outrageous.
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