Denisha Merriweather used to think she’d be nothing more than a high school dropout. D’s and F’s were the norm for her, and it was embarrassing, and angering. She became disruptive in class, and then started getting into fights... School was a nightmare for her. Then, in sixth grade, Denisha began living with her godmother, who saw the writing on the wall and wished she could send Denisha to this excellent Christian school she knew of, right in their area. But it was no use -- as they couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. Then a friend told them about a school choice program available in their area, where low-income students were given a scholarship to help offset the cost of private education. This gave Denisha just the break she needed to attend the top-notch school, and the environment was drastically different for her. Her grades and self-confidence rose, and she began to believe in herself. She worked hard and graduated with honors, and today Denisha is a proud college graduate, the first in her family. She credits her state’s school choice program with giving her the opportunity she needed to succeed: “It allowed me to have dreams I didn’t know I could have.”
In her first visit to a public school since becoming our new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos was met head-on by an angry group of protesters, who physically blocked her from entering the school. “Go back!” yelled one protester, before another upped the ante, shouting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” The strongest chant, and the most damning, seemed to be “Stop DeVos, and fund black futures! Stop DeVos, and fund black futures!”
Listening to the protests that morning you would’ve thought that Satan himself had stopped by for a visit.
The pure outrage at Betsy DeVos on display that day -- and throughout the nation at the time -- got me thinking... what was it about Betsy DeVos, school choice champion, that had everyone so dead-set against her?... Looking through the media’s coverage of her, it didn’t take me long to see why.
I googled the term “Betsy DeVos” to find the top articles on her from the time she was first nominated as Secretary of Education up through the day of the protest above. Reading the media’s early coverage of Betsy DeVos -- namely, how she was introduced to the general public -- I found that many of the top articles described DeVos as a super-rich Republican, whose policies would strip funding from America’s public schools. A majority of the articles at some point characterized her as being a cruel person, especially towards children. Here’s a look at some of the descriptions of her:
- “diverting resources from the young people who most need them”
- “diverting money away from vulnerable students and into the pockets of the rich”
- “no consideration of the severe harm done to traditional public schools”
- “she has made a career trying to destroy neighborhood public schools”
- and my favorite: “Betsy DeVos is coming for your children”
In contrast with that demonry, you would never know from the media accounts that this same person once started a foundation specifically to give low-income children greater access to quality education options. And that this foundation has given financial aid to more than 400,000 low-income families to allow them to take their children out of schools where they weren’t getting a good enough education, and put them into schools they felt would be better for them.1 Out of 50 different articles on Betsy DeVos, only 1 of them mentioned any of this.
As for the children left attending traditional public schools, the articles said that DeVos’ policies would “devastate”, “severely harm”, “break”, or even “destroy” public schools. This sounds horrifying, and can only lead readers to believe that school choice will mean awful things for the educations of public school students... Yet, in not one article was there any discussion of how public school student achievement has actually been affected by school choice in the past.
Many of the top articles also seemed to imply that DeVos’ school choice policies would particularly hurt poor and/or minority students. Here are some examples:
- “these schemes do nothing to help our most-vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps”
- “would pull resources from struggling public schools”
- “lower-income students were effectively segregated into poorer-performing schools”
- “civil rights groups like the NAACP have expressed concern that low-income children and children of color suffer when oversight is scaled back”
- “the NAACP has demanded a moratorium on charter expansion nationally”
- “Betsy DeVos and other Republican lawmakers do not value quality education for black and brown children”
Yet, while many of the articles mentioned DeVos’ support of charter schools and voucher programs, not a single article pointed out that charter schools and voucher programs are mainly serving poor and minority students.2 Nor did any of the articles mention how well these programs have worked for poor and minority students.
Given the well-known achievement gaps that exist along lines of race/ethnicity and household income, the fact that school choice is being utilized by so many students who are underperforming their peers -- and whether or not it is working for them -- seem like pretty important aspects of the story to be left out of the news coverage entirely.3
So, it isn’t surprising that so many people are up-in-arms over Betsy DeVos, given how detestable the media made her seem... and given the fact that so much of the story of school choice has been left untold.
In the Upton/Druid Heights neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore, graduation parties are thrown for kids graduating 5th grade. Because, as one school director puts it, there’s no guarantee these kids will even survive childhood to get the chance to celebrate higher achievements. “It’s not just, ‘Oh my kid isn’t going to college.’ It’s ‘Will my child even be around, even be alive, to have those milestones?’”
43% of the kids in this neighborhood say they witness physical violence one to three times a week, and 40% of them know someone with a gun. 1 in 3 children said they knew someone under the age of 19 who was killed by violence.
For these children -- surrounded by violence, and faced with far too many examples of lives cut short, either by death or by drugs and crime -- getting a better education or a better school experience is not just a nice-to-have. It may be a matter of life and death. And it’s the best chance many of these kids have of making something of themselves, of gaining confidence and getting inspired to reach for what they want and achieve it! We owe it to these kids to think of school choice in terms of the impact it’s having for them academically.
For years now, some families have been choosing to take their kids out of traditional public schools and enroll them in nearby charter schools instead -- an option open to them through school choice. A recent national study, conducted by a leading research organization in education, tracked the progress of individual charter school students over time and compared it to the progress of public school students with the same demographics and same starting point academically. The study found that charter schools have had a positive impact on academic achievement for the following students:
- Students living in poverty, on average, gained an additional 3-4 weeks of learning per year in both reading and math, compared to public school students also living in poverty
- Black students gained an additional 3 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
- Black students living in poverty gained an additional 6-7 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
- Hispanic students living in poverty gained an additional 3-4 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
- Hispanic English Language Learners gained an additional 8-10 weeks of learning per year, in both subjects
These are remarkable gains for hundreds of thousands of poor and minority children across the country. And these gains aren’t even the extent of what charters are doing for some kids. Right in our backyard (and right by those protesters, funny enough), students in D.C. charters gained an astonishing 3½ and 5 months of learning per year in both reading and math.
In DeVos’ home state of Michigan, the average charter student gained an additional 2 months of learning per year in both reading and math, after starting far behind their peers in both subjects.
Voucher programs, too, have been studied as to their impact on student achievement. In certain states, vouchers are available to help low-income students attend private/religious schools instead of their local public schools, by covering a portion of the private school tuition. It’s paid for with the tax dollars that would’ve gone toward funding their education in public school.
Just last year, researchers published a “systematic review of systematic reviews” of voucher programs. Not the most exciting thing I’ve ever read, but it did give a clear consensus: vouchers generally produce modest achievement gains, or neither gains nor losses, for participating students. One review summed it up this way: “Voucher studies, generally of high quality, indicate a slightly positive impact, particularly for African American students.”
More recently, studies have found negative achievement effects for participants of voucher programs in Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana -- which are some of the first negative studies to come out on vouchers.
Not every student who participates in school choice will be better off for it. Like all choices in life, we don’t always make the right one. But if there’s one thing to take away from the studies on school choice, it’s that many minority students living in poverty have made real strides academically. And I’m sure their parents are thankful that they had a choice in the matter.
Going back now to the central argument against school choice -- that it drains money from the public schools, damaging them and hurting the kids who remain there -- there now have been plenty of instances of school choice having been implemented over the past few decades, in many different areas in the country. So I spent some time looking for evidence that school choice has been hurting public school students academically.
According to an article published last year, 11 different studies have measured changes in public school student achievement following the establishment or growth of charter schools in the area. Only 1 of the 11 studies (which looked at a single school district) found any negative effects of charters on public school student test scores. In 10 out of the 11 studies (comprising 6 major cities, 5 states, and a nationwide sample), they found no negative effects of charters on public school student achievement. And in the majority of studies, charter expansion was found in some cases to have a positive effect on public school student achievement.
The author summed it up this way: “Most of the research implies that charter schools do no harm to students in district schools, and may even promote improved outcomes for all students.”
Some voucher programs, too, have been found to improve the performance of the public schools mostly closely associated with them. As one economics professor put it, “Competition improves the performance of the public schools most closely threatened, for want of a better word, by the voucher program.”
In addition, I haven’t found any evidence that any public school curriculum has been negatively affected by charters/vouchers/school choice (such as the loss of an arts program) -- though I certainly could be missing something out there. I actually found one public school district that reinstated music and arts programs in most of its elementary schools in response to charter schools.
I did stumble onto this report though, in which numerous public school superintendents said that charter school expansion in their district contributed to them closing one or more public schools (due to budget impacts). And from what I’ve read, school closure can certainly have a negative effect on the academic achievement of students who are displaced.
But given the expansion of school choice across the country, for decades now, if it really were “devastating” or “disastrous” for public schools -- taking away critical funding, and causing the best/most motivated students to leave -- I would think there’d be more evidence of public school test scores having gone down as a result of school choice. From what I’ve seen, there seems to be more evidence that school choice has improved public school student performance than diminished it.
That said, I do know there’s much more to education than test scores. And I know I haven’t addressed a lot of the negative impacts that school choice has had on public schools and school teachers. All I’m saying is, if school choice is helping at-risk children achieve real gains in their test scores, all while having a neutral, or even positive, effect on public school student test scores... there is something to be said for that.
And what it says, about the real effects of school choice on our children, is the opposite of the story the media told us about evil Republican Betsy DeVos.
There is an important debate to be had about school choice in America. Just as we shouldn’t promote school choice in disregard of its impacts on public education, we shouldn’t dismiss it without acknowledging its real benefits to so many children in need. To do either would be a disservice to the lives and futures of too many young Americans.
Angelo Jones “would’ve been gun-toting in two years”, says his mom, if he hadn’t changed schools. Angelo, afflicted with ADHD, would routinely get into fist fights and shouting matches at his former school (where such altercations among the students were all too common). Angelo was falling further and further behind academically, when his mom -- a single mother of two -- decided to enroll him in a school choice lottery. She ended up winning a spot for Angelo at the Davis Leadership Academy charter school -- and just by changing schools, Angelo’s entire educational experience was transformed. Angelo’s family credits the charter school’s zero-tolerance discipline policy for teaching Angelo how to be respectful, and focused on his schoolwork. And they credit the school’s particular attention to African-American history and culture for inspiring and motivating Angelo. Now, far from gun-toting, Angelo pledges to someday inspire others and help bring about advancement within their communities -- to which his mother can only respond, with tears of pride in her eyes, “How’d I get so lucky?”
1. “Betsy DeVos founded [the American Federation for Children] to provide better education options for lower-income children throughout America. I’m very proud of what the AFC has achieved, particularly at the state level. More than 400,000 lower-income families have been empowered with financial support to take their children out of schools where they thought the kids were not getting an adequate education, and put them into schools that they thought were better.” -- Senator Joe Lieberman, at Betsy DeVos’ Senate confirmation hearing
2. A recent national study on charter schools found that 53% of students in charter schools are living in poverty, and 56% are either black or Hispanic (see page 16). And a 2016 review of school voucher programs says “The U.S. programs all are limited to students with incomes near or below the cut-off for the federal lunch program… The overwhelming majority of voucher participants in the U.S. are either African American or Hispanic.”
3. The same national charter school study found that the average charter student’s starting test scores are below the 50th percentile in both reading and math (see page 21).
