BY HANK REICHMAN

“The educational reform landscape is littered with theories about what’s needed to improve low-performing schools. The Finnish model. The South Korean model. More money with more restrictions. More money with fewer restrictions. The answers are seldom so simple.”

Those wise words come from a January 2017 Los Angeles Times editorial responding to the failures of the now-defunct Bush-Obama School Improvement Grants (SIG) program.  According to the Times, “The program was begun under the George W. Bush administration to help turn around the 5,000 lowest-performing schools in the country.  It received a huge boost in 2009, when Congress included $3 billion for School Improvement Grants in the $831-billion economic stimulus package.  Overall, about $7 billion has been spent on such grants.”  Under the Obama administration, districts receiving the grants were given four options from which to choose if they wanted the money: (1) transform the school by bringing in a new principal; (2) turn the school around by firing a majority of the teachers and the principal; (3) restart the school by turning over its management to charter schools; or (4) close the school and enroll students in higher achieving district schools.

The program is now defunct, but the Department of Education’s post-mortem, produced by the Obama administration and published in January 2017, that prompted the Times editorial made clear that the SIG program was, to be blunt, a complete and total failure.  “Overall, across all grades, we found that implementing any SIG-funded model had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment.”

The results of other “reform” efforts, often touted on a bipartisan basis, have been similarly disheartening.  Take, for instance, school vouchers, one of the favorite remedies promoted by the political Right.  Voucher programs that permit students to use publicly financed “vouchers” to enroll in private schools are typically aimed at low-income families to offer educational opportunities they may not otherwise access.  Proponents claim that, as more schools compete for students, all schools will become more effective in encouraging positive student outcomes, especially for low-income students.  However, empirical research has not validated such claims.  [I won’t discuss here the often blatant violation of the First Amendment separation of church and state that their funding of religious education sometimes entails.] Research focused on city-wide programs reveals either modest positive effects on student test scores for certain subgroups of students and for certain years of program participation, or no effects at all.  Statewide studies on the impact of voucher programs in Louisiana and Ohio, as well as a study of the District of Columbia’s now-abandoned program, have shown negative effects on student achievement, especially in mathematics.

Now comes another study, this time of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program (ICSP), a voucher program heavily promoted by the state’s former governor, Vice President Mike Pence. “Public and private school students in Indiana, including all students receiving a voucher, have taken the same assessment for several years, even prior to the implementation of the voucher program,” the study notes, facilitating comparative judgment.  The study found that  voucher students saw a significant decline in math scores, with those losses persisting “regardless of the length of time spent in a private school.” “Although school vouchers aim to provide greater educational opportunities for students,” the study concluded, “the goal of improving the academic performance of low‐income students who use a voucher to move to a private school has not yet been realized in Indiana.”

But what about publicly funded but privately managed charter schools, the preferred remedy of so many Democratic “reformers?”  A recent study coming out of Harvard and using data from Texas throws more cold water on that “solution,” demonstrating negative impacts not only on test scores but on the economic success of school graduates:

at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but, due to imprecision,  have a statistically insignificant impact on earnings. The coefficient is almost identical to what we would expect given the correlation between test scores and wages. Other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings, and, surprisingly, the decrease in wages is more negative than one would anticipate. Using school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease average test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase average test scores have no discernible impact on earnings. In contrast, high school graduation effects

and four-year college enrollment are predictive of earnings effects throughout the distribution

of school quality.

As that LA Times editorial concluded, “The nation needs education leaders who think big but move forward on their vision with caution, starting with pilot programs, nurturing the careful growth of successful ideas and continuously monitoring and correcting.”  That, however, the Times continued, was not the approach favored by Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, “whose brash confidence in his own school philosophies too often pushed schools into dead ends and required frustrating changes of direction.”  The editorial was published on the eve of the Trump administration’s accession to power.  “Implementing change with prudence and requiring evidence of success doesn’t seem like the style of the Trump administration,” the Times predicted.  They were right, of course.  But as Trump and Betsy DeVos take meat cleavers to public education it is important to be reminded that the utter failure of — and real damaged caused by — the movement for educational “reform” has been a bipartisan project.