School Choice Doesn't Improve Outcomes — It Divides Students Based on Privilege
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that school choice programs don't produce better educational outcomes but instead sort students by family resources.
Key Takeaways
- Choice doesn't improve learning - Research consistently shows that school choice programs don't raise overall achievement
- It sorts by privilege - Families with resources, information, and transportation navigate choice systems; others don't
- Public schools are weakened - Diverting funds from public schools to choice programs harms the students who remain
Transcript
let's talk about the mirage of school choice there's this idea that we can improve schools by introducing competition that if parents have a choice about what school is the best fit for their child then parents will choose the schools that do a better job and then the schools that are not chosen will lose students they'll lose enrollment and they'll have no choice but to improve that was the case that was made to me recently.
You've probably heard that case many times.
And what people don't realize is that schools don't actually determine the majority of student outcomes.
About two-thirds of student learning outcomes are based on non-school factors.
Detterman 2016 is the citation I use.
I'll put a link to that in the comments.
But only about one-third of student outcomes come from the school.
So when you compare schools, what you're comparing is largely the parent population.
And if a new school opens up and markets to parents and tries to draw them in they're probably going to be somewhat effective in recruiting the parents who are more invested in their child's education who have more resources who can afford the time and the gas money to drive their kid across town and over time what's going to happen with no differences in pedagogy like let's assume the pedagogy is absolutely the same between these two schools.
The school that is better at attracting more privileged parents is going to look much better on paper, and the school that is less effective at that is going to be left with the students who have less privilege, who have lower test scores.
Again, these are two-thirds out-of-school factors.
So we end up rewarding schools for not doing a better job, but for doing better marketing.
And we have all of this effort being put into essentially splitting the student population according to privilege.
That's essentially what school choice does.
And I think this is going to be very hard to detect because our standardized tests too often measure those out of school characteristics much more than they measure what we've actually taught.
So I think the antidote to this, the protection against this, is better assessments that measure what we actually taught.
How well did we teach what we were supposed to teach?
Not, you know, how wealthy is your family, how much did you get read to as a two- or three-year-old, but, you know, how well is the school actually teaching you?
We have to have content-specific standardized tests, and too many of our standardized tests, nearly all of our standardized tests, are heavily G-loaded.
They depend on things that are not really very malleable from teaching.
Let me know what you think.