Republicans Should Oppose School Choice
Advocates promise massive benefits to students and parents. The evidence says that it's bad policy.
A recent poll conducted by the University of Texas at Tyler showed that 62% of Texans support allowing parents to use state funding to send their children to charter or private schools, more commonly referred to as “school choice.”
Politicians can’t be counted on to give it to us straight on school choice. They’re simply too conflicted by the dollars that flow into their campaign coffers from special interests on both sides of the issue.
Republican politicians support school choice because teachers unions, who provide massive support to their Democratic rivals, oppose school choice believing that it would hurt their bottom line. Democratic politicians oppose school choice because their teachers union backers tell them to oppose it. Of course, neither side will say it this plainly.
Republican politicians will deliver a vague line about “competition” and “free markets'' and Democrat politicians will tell you that the right answer is to spend more money on the public school system. All the while, politicians from both sides almost universally send their children to elite private schools.
I attended California public schools and found them to be quite satisfactory. I would have likely benefited, if only slightly, from school choice if it had existed. As a staunch Republican, I would like nothing more than to score a blow against the teachers unions. That said, whether school choice is a policy that would comport with my own political enmity toward the teachers unions (*it would) and whether school choice would actually serve to help students and improve America’s education system are two very different questions. This article is aimed at addressing the latter.
In the class of 2014, students from non-religious private schools scored an average of 43 points higher on the reading section of the SAT, while scoring 64 points higher on the writing section and 79 points higher on the math section. SAT results from 2018 showed the same disparity, with independent private school students scoring 120 points above the national mean and public school students scoring 19 points below the mean.
The data is clear. Students in private schools score better on the SAT, so therefore allowing parents to check a box and send their children to private school will mean that they will enjoy higher performance on standardized tests and in life, right?
Wrong. A study published in 2018 by Robert C. Pianta and Arya Ansari in the peer-reviewed journal Educational Researcher followed a large and diverse swath of students from kindergarten to age 15. Here’s what they found:
“Results from this investigation revealed that in unadjusted models, children with a history of enrollment in private schools performed better on nearly all outcomes assessed in adolescence. However, by simply controlling for the sociodemographic characteristics that selected children and families into these schools, all of the advantages of private school education were eliminated. There was also no evidence to suggest that low-income children or children enrolled in urban schools benefited more from private school enrollment.”
Controlling for basic demographic and economic factors eliminates all of the outperformance shown by private school students versus their public school peers on standardized tests.
The Washington Post published an article in 2014 which definitively proclaimed that the SAT favors rich, educated families. The Post’s enthusiastic claims would lead you to believe that test scores should show students from rich and well educated families outperforming poorer students, regardless of other demographic differences—but they don’t.
A 2008 study from The Journal for Blacks in Higher Education seemed to show that a student’s race, not their family’s income level, was a much better predictor of their performance on standardized tests.
They study found:
“For both blacks and whites, family income is one of the best predictors of a student’s SAT score. Students from families with high incomes tend to score higher. Students from low-income families on average have low SAT scores. Because the median black family income in the United States is about 60 percent of the median family income of whites, one would immediately seize upon this economic statistic to explain the average 200-point gap between blacks and whites on the standard SAT scoring curve.”
One part of the study brought out the weakness in family income as a predictor of scores:
“But income differences explain only part of the racial gap in SAT scores. For black and white students from families with incomes of more than $200,000 in 2008, there still remains a huge 149-point gap in SAT scores. Even more startling is the fact that in 2008 black students from families with incomes of more than $200,000 scored lower on the SAT test than did students from white families with incomes between $20,000 and $40,000.”
A 2021 study in the journal Child Development showed that family net worth turns out to be a much better predictor of test scores than family income. Yet still, the study did not find that wealth closed the racial test score gap. The study’s abstract said:
“This article examines the extent to which family wealth affects the Black-White test score gap for young children based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (aged 3-12). This study found little evidence that wealth mediated the Black-White test scores gaps, which were eliminated when child and family demographic covariates were held constant. However, family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged children than that of preschoolers and a stronger association with school-aged children's math than on their reading scores. Liquid assets, particularly holdings in stocks or mutual funds, were positively associated with school-aged children's test scores. Family wealth was associated with a higher quality home environment, better parenting behavior, and children's private school attendance.”
Thousands of researchers have expended countless hours and untold millions of dollars examining which variables reliably predict performance on standardized tests and in life. Very few factors, even those which might feel on the surface like they would have an outsized impact, like family income and net worth, are able to reliably predict test scores on their own. There is one factor which is decidedly worthless in predicting how students will perform: whether or not they went to a private school.
When Republican politicians promise voters that closing test score and life achievement gaps between students is as simple as letting parents check a box to send their child to a private school, they are indulging a feelgood fantasy supported by absolutely zero evidence. Everyone would like to believe that checking a box and redirecting education dollars to another nearby school will remedy the underperformance of students from certain demographic and socioeconomic groups. Sadly, it won’t.
Furthermore, school choice is very likely to exacerbate the country’s already tenuous class divisions. Imagine being a student from a minimum wage household suddenly attending a private school full of kids whose parents fly them on private jets to vacation in Aspen and who spend their weekdays taking polo lessons and attending private extracurricular classes in Mandarin Chinese. School choice will produce a learning environment rife with social envy and without any measurable benefit to the students who have to endure it. And the go-to approach to attempt to remedy this envy, mandatory school uniform policies, have shown time and time again in studies to produce no positive impact.
The social animus would not merely flow from the bottom up. Whether they say it out loud or not, rich parents put their children in private schools to keep them from being exposed to the unwashed masses. How many junior members of street gangs have parents who can afford to send them to $50,000/year private schools? This obvious observation is backed by countless studies, including a 2013 survey that showed academic performance was seldom ranked as the primary reason that parents chose to send their children to private school. And this motivation for choosing private schools isn’t limited to the US. For instance, a survey of Malaysian parents showed almost identical results.
If suddenly, due to school choice, private schools have a demographic makeup that is no different than their public school counterparts, the already statistically flimsy mean test score advantage of the private schools will drop to zero, and the social and safety advantages of the schools would become moot just as quickly. Rich parents will quickly find other means of schooling for their children which have the perceived benefits that were previously provided by the private school.
School choice advocates will point to one-off examples of success, but at large scale, parents and students stand to gain nothing from the policy.
Good article, but homeschooling trumps all of these options. Getting smart caring teachers is next to impossible.