The Travis Monitor: Perspectives on School Choice

Perspectives on School Choice (Submitted to Austin American Statesman but not published)

There as been an ongoing debate over school choice for decades. Proponents argue that vouchers help students who are shackled to poor schools escape into better ones and, at the same time, provide competition that forces betterment of the public school system. Opponents claim this would take money away from the education system where it is needed to improve low-performing schools.

However, both sides agree that our public schools are in need of substantial improvement.

Examples of a variety of approaches exist from which the education establishment could profit to help it thoroughly change the “system.” However, over the decades, it stayed the course with minor tweaks producing insignificent changes in performance and drop-out rates, sadly short-changing our children.

Our positions reflect our experiences. Mine have led me to support school choice.

First of all, my experience with other education approaches includes the Swiss education system, into which I was immersed when my father was transferred to Switzerland.

This system is multi-track. Two tracks lead to trade schools or apprenticeships. The third track is academically oriented and lasts through 12^th grade. I was admitted to the latter.

This college preparatory track is very demanding. There were a full 36 hours of classroom and laboratory instruction per week, and college type midterms and final exams. The teachers had doctorates in the subjects they taught.

When I returned to this country and entered college, I found this preparatory education to be much broader than ours, equivalent in several subjects to Junior College and many more subjects taught.

This experience led me to two conclusions: First, it is impossible to compare student performance of our single track system with this complex European system. Secondly, while I do not advocate duplicating the European systems for several reasons, we should expect our education establishment to benefit from them by creatively incorporating modifications to our own system for a seamless transition from high school to college or trade schools.

Then there is the interesting home schooling paradigm.

I did not understand how children can be educated without trained teachers until our son embarked on this approach with his five children.

It is really very simple. They first had to learn to read and subsequently got their learning from the excellent home school textbooks. At the earliest age they were taught to develop the discipline for daily study of a chapter in each book of several subjects, as well as doing the problems. No teacher was needed, only an adult for supervision and encouragement.

In my example, our grandchildren never sat on a school bench before going to college, where they excelled as “A” students. A high school age grandchild recently achieved 98 percentile in the PSAT.

These children are not geniuses but are advantaged by the discipline of independent study, a proficiency which carries over into life-long learning. It is by far the lowest cost and demonstrably the most effective education paradigm.

I conclude that this paradigm contains elements that ought to be creatively applied to public schools.

In my experience, our education bureaucracy strenuously resists any incisive solutions for genuine improvement, while teachers tended to be helpful and open-minded. I encountered this problem when I was on the Mayor Todd’s task force on Apprenticeships and Career Pathways some years ago.

Specifically, we addressed the fact that a large number of careers do not require college and that many high school students are not willing or equipped to go to college. Statistics showed us that only one in eight beginning high school students eventually graduated from college. Sadly, many high school students are thus short-changed and either drop out or graduate without marketable skills.

A Swiss expert in career development was hired to help out. We developed a pilot apprenticeship program with Koblenz, Austin’s sister city in Germany. The program enjoyed great success. Some seven high school students participated. However, the education establishment was unresponsive and the Swiss expert left after two years, admitting that changes to our entrenched education system could only occur when forced upon it by legislation.

In summary, legislation and public pressure are needed in order to free up education from the shackles of a flawed, yet unresponsive system. Mindlessly pouring in money does not help. Public education needs to be fundamentally improved, drawing on other laboratories of progress which need to be part of our educational landscape. To accomplish this, I firmly believe that education money must follow the child and the family needs to be given the informed freedom of choice.

REFERENCES:

FOR SCHOOL CHOICE

- Texas Policy Foundation:

http://www.texaspolicy.com/commentaries_single.php?report_id=1271

- CONFíA National Hispanic Organization supporting school choice: http://www.confianow.com/news.php?id=19&PHPSESSID=f4af505231fd6231b3444f8674bae298

- CREO Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options;

http://www.hcreo.org/content/article/detail/838/

- Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation

http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/schoolchoice/index.html#2

AGAINST SCHOOL CHOICE

- Texas Freedom Network

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/02/6/miller_edit_vouchers.html