Mitt Romney's Education Plan: Overview and Analysis (Part Two)

06/18/2012

PoliticOlogy’s Analysis

As part of a weekly series exploring the policy positions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, this article examines Mitt Romney's education plan: what it claims, what it promises, and whether it delivers. Make sure to check back on Wednesday for a full analysis of Barack Obama's education plans, and follow PoliticOlogy for weekly analyses of the candidates' positions.

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Romney's education plan has a misleading focus on choice, efficiency, transparency and results. But once broken down, the plan's flaws become obvious and untenable.

Promoting choice and innovation:

Romney’s new, innovative approach to education reform comes directly from Milton Friedman, who wrote the following:

Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system — i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal, available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to the vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate.

Friedman's idea is simple: education would be better without government regulation and districting. The problem is that freedom and choice in schools rarely serve the most disadvantaged students. Dr. Pedro Noguera, a professor at NYU and director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, argues that choice systems rarely enhance schools uniformly; instead, choice systems "have the effect of concentrating the neediest children in the most troubled schools."

This point can't be passed over. When politicians like Romney say that American schools are failing to compete with schools in Beijing, they aren’t talking about every school. Normal and charter public schools can operate well and efficiently, producing test scores that rival the results from any other school in the world. But, for the most part, you'll only find those schools in affluent communities.

Poverty is a huge obstacle to higher student achievement. Giving the 2011 Ridley Lecture at UVA, Dr. Noguera said,

For the most part, in this country, if you are born poor, you stay poor. And schools, typically, are much more likely to be implicated in reproducing poverty across generations than in breaking it. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Policy makers aren't dumb; they know this. Yet, their policies rarely take any strides to reduce the deleterious effects of poverty on education. Rather, they introduce measures that magnify the illusion of choice, hiding the reality that choice systems do very little for the impoverished and disadvantaged.

There is a secondary issue: the available research shows that vouchers and charters have negligible effects on school performance. In a study conducted by the Center on Education Policy, researchers came to three significant conclusions: vouchers do not have a strong effect on students' academic achievement; voucher proponents rarely talk about student achievement, focusing instead on freedom, choice, parent satisfaction and graduation rates; and, voucher programs are "moving beyond serving traditionally low-income families reaching middle-income families in broader geographic areas." This is what Friedman meant by "no conditions should be attached to the vouchers." Unfortunately, this results in clusters of underperforming schools, serving mostly poor kids.

There is another practical concern. Perfect mobility and information do not exist. For choice to be free, consumers — in this case parents and students — must know what the product is — in this case schools — and how good it is. But there is no reliable way to systematically evaluate school performance. And, there is no way to ensure transportation for the underprivileged.

Ensuring High Standards and Responsibility, Recruiting and Rewarding Teachers:

Because the second and third part of Romney’s K-12 education plan both rely on test scores, critiques of it can be comined.

There is something to be said about math and reading scores. But what about everything else? Music, history and art have no purpose in education? Most educators will agree that there is a reason — and a good one — for a multidisciplinary approach to education. This, however, is not central critique of the standards based approach to education reform.

John Jackson, the president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and Dr. Noguera have an apt analogy about the ways in which standards based reforms reinforce existing patters of inequality:

It is as if New York is testing black, Latino and poor students on their swimming abilities after knowingly relegating them to pools where the water has been drained. These students are then stigmatized as failures, their parents labeled as less than fully engaged, and their teachers called ineffective.

As such, standards mean little more than means by which government officials can deem schools, parents, students and teachers failures. The strange mess of it all is that test scores (even for a single teacher) vary widely from year to year, indicating that it is very difficult to assess a teacher’s effect on student academic achievement.

What’s more, there is no way to systematically evaluate schools reliably and objectively. To ensure responsibility, there must be transparency and perfect information, both of which are impossible to achieve. So, what are standards used for? Punishment.

Romney hopes to eliminate tenure, making it easier to "guarantee success in the classroom." There is no research to reaffirm that teachers perform better if their jobs are constantly in jeopardy. Nonetheless, Romney understands tenure to be a mark of stasis and a failing status quo.

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