Saturday, October 18, 2003

Evaluating School Choice

A recent study of Chile’s school choice program, which purports to show no significant improvement in student performance under the program, has touched off another round of Alex and Tyler’s mini-debate on educational vouchers (see here, here, here, and here). Like Alex, I continue to think that vouchers are a good idea. One study of one foreign country’s school choice program – in the context of other studies showing better results elsewhere – is not sufficient to make me a pessimist.

But what if it turned out that school choice programs (to clarify, vouchers are just one mechanism for implementing school choice) were not really effective in improving student test scores and other measures of performance? Would that necessarily mean school choice is a bad idea? I think not, for three reasons.

First, even if school choice delivered no improvement in performance, it might deliver the same level of performance at lower cost. I only skimmed the report on Chile, but I found no reference at all to the cost of education.

Second, there are reasons to favor school choice other than cost and performance, one of which is the value of choice in itself. Standardized performance measures cannot capture the value to students and their families of being able to get the kind of education they want. As I argued in one of the first posts on this blog, school choice has the potential to defuse a number of policy conflicts that result from the one-size-fits-all character of public education: bilingual education vs. immersion, prayer vs. no prayer, single-sex vs. coeducation, and so on. Even if all private schools performed equally on measures of basic skills, they could be producing greater value as perceived by the actual consumers.

Third, we should be skeptical about performance as measured by average or median scores on standardized tests, repetition rates, and drop-out rates (as in the Chilean study). Measures like these are unlikely to capture changes in the performance of the very best students. Median scores are completely unaffected by improvements in the performance of students at the top end of the scale. Average scores are affected, but possibly not much, because standardized tests typically cover basic skills that the very best students are likely to understand well anyway. (Taking calculus in high school was valuable to me, but it probably had little effect on my standardized test scores, because calculus is not a topic covered on those tests.) Repeat and drop-out rates have little to do with the best students, who are inclined to finish high school on time whether there’s choice or not. Yet the top students could be among the greatest beneficiaries of school choice, because they can attend schools that specialize in providing upper-level courses in the areas in which students are most motivated.

As a corollary to this point, we should also be skeptical of the claim that the “cream-skimming” apparently practiced by private schools in Chile (according to the study) is necessarily a bad thing. There are virtues to separating students according to their ability, and some of those virtues will not be picked up in the standard measures. (The cream-skimming in Chile seems to be related to socioeconomic status, but the authors themselves used socioeconomic status as a proxy for ability, and they do not try to separate the effects.) Public school systems often have Honors tracks and magnet schools, and while these programs have their critics, I have never heard them referred to as “cream-skimming.” The fact that the ability-level tracking might occur across schools, rather than within them, under a school choice program is hardly a compelling argument against school choice.

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Thursday, October 16, 2003

Tragedies

On the front page of today's L.A. Times, the lead headline was "3 Americans Die in Bomb Attack in Gaza." Next to it was a large picture of a woman crying. I assumed she must be a relative of one of the dead, until I saw...

... she was wearing a "Cubs" cap.

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Lawyer Humor

Here's a nice legal-linguistic one-liner, via my brother:

Did you hear the one about the jurisprudence fetishist who got off on a technicality?

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The Schmo Must Go On

In the context of popular culture, I’ve heard post-modernism defined (or characterized) as the quality of being relentlessly self-referential. If that’s so, then I can think of no better example of post-modern television than “Joe Schmo,” Spike TV’s reality-show spoof.

The premise, in case you haven’t heard, is that a regular guy named Matt Gould has been led to believe that he is participating in a reality show called “Lap of Luxury,” in which nine contestants living in a luxurious house vote each out one-by-one, “Survivor”-style, to win a prize of $100,000. But in reality (heh), all the other contestants are actually actors; Matt is the only person on the set who isn’t in on the joke.

Here’s the key question: Is this reality TV or not? On the one hand, the whole point is that it’s a scam, not reality: everyone’s an actor, everything’s been planned, just one guy is the patsy. But the patsy’s actions can’t be scripted, and his presence creates an unavoidable element of unpredictability. For Matt, this clearly is a reality show, and that will continue to be true even once the truth is revealed. Moreover, while the other “participants” have scripts to follow, they also have to ad-lib and roll with the punches in response to Matt’s choices. They are constantly on the spot, responding to the unexpected, sometimes trying to cover up their own laughter. In one physical challenge, some actor/participants were unable to complete the challenge as required to assure that the planned person “won” immunity in the next vote. The other actor/participants had to alter their behavior (such as by faking errors) to keep the scheduled plot on track.

And here’s where things get truly self-referential. This is a reality show about a reality show. We are not just observing Matt’s trials and witnessing Matt’s commentaries; we also get to hear the commentaries of the actors, producers, and crew about the difficulty of maintaining the charade. In some segments, we see split-screens, one showing Matt’s activities “on camera,” two others showing actor/participants laughing into their fists, and another showing the crew members in the control room watching those very events on camera. We see them gasp and bite their nails when it looks like Matt might catch on to the scam. This is not just reality TV -- it is reality TV caught in a hall of mirrors. M. C. Escher might have been impressed.

Consider this. The show is intended to ridicule the extremes of other reality shows, yet the extreme moments are engaging for precisely the same reasons as those they lampoon. The contestants participate in a series of (rigged) contests, and each one is a ludicrous over-the-top version of similar contests in other programs. On “Survivor” and “Fear Factor,” contestants are asked to eat an endless variety of revolting plants and animals. On “Joe Schmo,” Matt is asked to eat… a steaming dog turd. In another contest, contestants jump into a swimming pool to create splashes large enough to wet down the T-shirts of models, thereby revealing the messages (and blurred-out nipples) underneath. A contest like this is, ostensibly, a spoof of the voyeurism of other reality shows (e.g., strip trivia contests on “Dog Eat Dog”). And sure, there is commentary here, but there’s also bare skin. It’s no mistake that “Schmo” is broadcast on Spike TV, “the first network for men.”

After this much discussion, you might get the impression I think “Schmo” is good television. Well, it’s not. But in a way, that’s the whole point. “Schmo” succeeds by taking what is bad in other reality programs and making it worse. If you find the show’s silliness or vulgarity enjoyable on its own, great; if you don’t, the producers can claim they are mocking the silliness and vulgarity of reality TV. And in so doing, they also mock themselves.

Yep, I’ll be tuning in next week for the season finale.

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