School Choice Tradeoffs: Liberty, Equity, and Diversity

TWO. The Outcomes of School Choice Policies

T W O The Outcomes of School Choice Policies IN WILLIAM STYRON’S powerful and poignant novel Sophie’s Choice, a concentration camp guard forces Sophie to choose which of her two children will have a chance to live and which one will not. Opponents of expanding school choice assert that increasing school choice creates a similar choice for our society. Increased choice raises the question ‘‘Which disadvantaged children will receive increased educational opportunities and which ones will have their few existing opportunities reduced?’’ This choice occurs, opponents argue, because any policy that encourages the relatively more advantaged children and more active parents to leave their neighborhood school reduces the opportunities of the most disadvantaged children in that neighborhood. School choice is a zero-sum game. Peers who learn easily and parents who are most active and knowledgeable about education are important educational resources for their classmates and their schools. Whatever one child gains by moving to a choice school another child loses through the parting of the more educationally able student and her parents. To determine whether school choice is Sophie’s choice we first must examine the arguments that increased choice will improve academic outcomes for all children, including the most disadvantaged, and the claims of those who expect increased choice to harm students. We then can deduce the testable hypotheses from both sets of arguments and review the results of existing research that relates to those hypotheses. Such an analysis provides substantial insight into the likely outcomes of alternative school choice policies. WHY PROPONENTS EXPECT CHOICE TO IMPROVE ACADEMIC OUTCOMES Choice proponents believe that greater choice will improve outcomes through three causal mechanisms: (1) competition will force lowperforming schools to either improve or close, (2) greater choice will improve student outcomes by increasing parental involvement and matching students’ interests and aptitudes to a school’s pedagogy and curriculum, and (3) choice will reduce the harms caused by political control of schools by eliminating much of that control. We review each of these causal arguments and discuss the evidence for and against them. The Effects of Competition Many choice proponents hypothesize that schools would improve if only they had to compete for customers. Adam Smith showed in The Wealth of Nations that in the absence of collusion by firms or intervention by government , the real winner in a free market is the consumer. Competition forces all producers to look for ways to improve the product or for a way to lower the cost of production. Either change allows the producer to increase sales and, in the short term, profits. But competition forces all other producers to improve their products or lower their costs. If all producers are selling goods of equal quality, then consumers will seek out the lowest price. To see how competition works, take the example of cars. During the 1950s and early 1960s, almost all automobiles sold in the United States were produced by four automakers—General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors. The average life of a car produced in this period was only about fifty thousand miles, and its reliability and gas mileage were low. The American automakers engaged in price collusion, and they relied on government to protect them from foreign competition. When the government lowered its trade barriers, Volkswagen, Toyota, Datsun (now Nissan), and Mercedes invaded the U.S. market. These cars had life spans of over a hundred thousand miles, were significantly more reliable than their American rivals, and had better gas mileage than comparable cars made in the United States. Within a short time, enough consumers switched to foreign-built cars to force American automakers to improve the quality of their cars and to lower their prices. American Motors was unable to meet the foreign competition and went out of business. Proponents of increased choice, particularly proponents of public funding for outcomes of school choice policies 19 WHY PROPONENTS EXPECT CHOICE TO IMPROVE ACADEMIC OUTCOMES Choice proponents believe that greater choice will improve outcomes through three causal mechanisms: (1) competition will force lowperforming schools to either improve or close, (2) greater choice will improve student outcomes by increasing parental involvement and matching students’ interests and aptitudes to a school’s pedagogy and curriculum, and (3) choice will reduce the harms caused by political control of schools by eliminating much of that control. We review each of these causal arguments and discuss the evidence for and...