BuckeyeBlog

The Cincinnati Enquirer had a great column yesterday by Peter Bronson that notes an interesting trend in one Cincinnati neighborhood:

While most of the city has been losing families to suburbs that offer more land, newer houses, lower taxes and better schools, this neighborhood is a magnet for young professionals with large, growing families.

Why is this happening? EdChoice vouchers. Orthodox Jewish families are being attracted into the city so they can be near a private Cincinnati Jewish school. These are young professionals, the same type of people who have been fleeing urban settings since the 1960s.

As Bronson notes:

This is not your typical economic development plan. But it shows how a strong school can glue a neighborhood together. These families bring contributions far more valuable than the cost of vouchers.

Freedom as a way to spur economic development? Who would have imagined?

The way states calculate their high school graduation rates has been big news the past few days. The New York Times carried a story about the US Department of Education’s plan to require all states to use the same formula for determining graduation and dropout rates. Their decision, according to the Times, is based on the widely accepted belief that states currently use inaccurate and misleading methods for determining these rates.

Recent graduates line up at South High School in Cleveland, last August. Research shows the city’s public school district had the third highest gap between urban and suburban graduation rates (35.9%) during the 2003-04 school year. Baltimore City’s public school system had the highest at 47%.
By Tony Dejak, AP

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The Alliance for School Choice has just published their School Choice Yearbook. The report is a compendium of interesting and useful information about choice programs across the country. Along with descriptions of extant policies, the report also includes a section providing a brief review of previous studies on the effects of choice, a section describing how choice policies work, a spotlight on special needs scholarship programs, and even a how-to for creating a school choice bill. Overall, an important source of information for anyone interested in the current state of school choice across the nation.

The Friedman Foundation has graded 21 school choice programs across the country against to the gold standard ideal set forth by founder Milton Friedman. Programs were rated based on student eligibility restrictions (demographic, geographic, and program size), the purchasing power of the vouchers, and school restrictions (school eligibility, admissions restrictions, and testing requirements).
Two of Ohio’s three publicly financed school choice programs fared relatively well on the criteria – the Autism voucher program (6th) and EdChoice (8th). The Cleveland voucher program, however, did not fare well, ranking a low 17th.

The most important contribution of the Friedman report is that it serves as a strong reminder that not all school choice programs are created equally. Too often terms like choice and markets are used to describe markedly different types of programs. This has created confusion and overshadowed important distinctions and differences. Quite often, as this report clearly shows, states have created limited choice programs which, at best, generate quasi-market forces.

The media typically report on school choice programs as though they were all the same. In reality, there are numerous differences between school choice programs, in large part because opponents of reform have succeeded in saddling school choice with all kinds of restrictions that prevent them from offering full educational choice to all students. Everything from who may participate, to how much of their education funding they may take with them out of the government-run system, to what kinds of schools they may attend, is tangled in a thicket of legal and legislative proscriptions.

As Friedman notes, that extant school choice programs do not live up to the ideal of a true education market is not cause for doubting the market model in general. Rather, it should serve as a catalyst for continued efforts to create programs that serve more students with fewer restrictions.

I’m looking forward to reading this report just released by the Pacific Research Institute, our sister think tank in California.

First of all, having gone through the gyrations of finding a house and paying significantly for the privilege of having our kids educated in one of the select school districts in our community, I have found the quality of education services to be of less value than I want and what we pay for in dollar terms.

I’m not saying the school system is bad, but I don’t get the sense that the schools are trying to meet our family’s needs in the way, say that a car dealer, or computer retailer, or a remodeling contractor, or insurance agent or whole lot of other services are trying to meet our needs. The quality of middle class education is going to be less than the quality of American life on the whole, because it is far less condition by the expectations of maximizing individuals’ values than American life on the whole.

I am also looking forward to reading the report as co-author Vicki Murray, now a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, visited Columbus about this time a year ago to assist with the special needs voucher legislation moving through the General Assembly. Vicki did great work for us and I expect this new book will reflect her commitment to excellent scholarship.