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Over the summer, Arizona lawmakers passed a universal educational voucher program, to my understanding the first in the nation. It attaches state education dollars to students rather than to specific schools, allowing parents to choose where to send the money the state spends on educating their children.
This was immediately challenged by, well, the whole education establishment. Kathy Hoffman, Arizona's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, was officially tasked with overseeing the program; instead, she doxxed parents who signed up for it. Arizona's teacher's union was immediately mobilized to work with the far-left non-profit "Save Our Schools" organization, which sought to gather signatures to put a repeal of the scholarship law on the next election ballot.
Arizona's Secretary of State excitedly tweeted her receipt of the supposedly over 140,000 signatures (almost 120,000 were required). Her statement that
is a bit confusing to me, I don't know how Arizona referendum law works but the idea that a petition to add an issue to the ballot could function to suspend the operation of a signed law raises several questions in my mind. However, as the Secretary of State maybe this was her call to make? Anyway she was too glib by half. The libertarianish Goldwater Institute, which had posted watchdogs on the filing process, immediately noted that fewer than 90,000 signatures had actually been filed. "Save Our Schools" Facebook page calls this "questionable" and notes that only the Secretary of State can make the final determination, but apparently the Secretary of State's office only received 8,175 petition sheets with a maximum of 15 signatures per sheet. Off their Facebook page, SOS concedes that they have likely fallen short. Their explanation of the miscount? "Well we were just estimating." Apparently Arizona's schoolteachers aren't so great with math!
SOS receives preferred treatment in the news reporting, but poking around some parent sites it looks like they have been predictably underhanded pretty much the whole way. Despite the support of both the Secretary of State and the Superintendent of Schools, both of whose offices are supposed to be effecting the law rather than repealing it, the voucher program is likely to proceed (which may only attract even more anti-choice money to the state's lobbies, I guess). With almost 11,000 applicants pending, it's likely to generate some very happy parents--along with at least some frustrated ones. I doubt we've heard the end of this.
But the victory here may encourage other states to follow suit. I feel like this is one more symptom of the present educational paradigm unraveling. COVID showed parents both how much, and how little, public schools do for them, personally. I know many parents who were relieved to send their children back to school. But I know many others who have simply decided to not. It's a bit of a homeschooling renaissance, it seems, and now in Arizona there are public education dollars attached to that. A family with three children could get something like $21,000 per year to help educate them.
The substance of the opposition is that this deprives neighborhood schools of much-needed funding, "skims the cream," hasn't got enough oversight, and empowers uncredentialed teachers to teach. These are basically all the same criticisms teacher's unions offer against charter schools, which are booming business in Arizona--Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.
Parents, apparently, are not buying these arguments, at least in Arizona. And indeed I have never seen any evidence that these arguments have any merit; to the contrary, I am persuaded by The Case Against Education that our existing K-12 system cannot be upended fast enough. So I have been, and will be, watching Arizona's voucher experiment with great interest!
But in case I have not sounded appropriately unhinged thus far--I do have to ask. What would have been the outcome, if the Goldwater Institute had not posted watchdogs on the counting process? The Arizona news media seems to want to cast SOS as the watchdogs, here, but SOS appeared to be quite happy to smear their numbers in their own favor, and they have at least two powerful allies within the government who swallowed their claims whole, declaring the law "on hold" even when the math obviously didn't add up. This kind of narrative-crafting is really disturbing to me, and the fact that the Secretary of State seemed happy to take SOS at their word, to the point of tweeting about it, even as the Goldwater Institute knew instantly from the math that this wasn't going to fly... well, the whole thing seems awfully shady.
(This is where I deleted a paragraph borrowing a jack about "finding" a thousand more pages in a box somewhere...)
I am extremely unconvinced by this logic. Those rankings mostly reflect the pre-existing traits of the students and their families. No one has provided any evidence that these rankings reflect anything causal and, to the degree they do, that these causal effects aren't purely zero-sum peer-effects. There is some evidence that specific inputs to rankings like this (e.g. class size) might have causal effects, but even there, the evidence is typically quite mixed.
To be quite honest, I would expect that the smart kids from stable two parent homes are doing a lot better in classes full of other smart kids from stable two parent homes than sharing classes with the local crack dealer’s bastards, and that you’re not going to help the latter anyways.
Those are the "zero-sum peer-effects" I reference.
The literature is mixed on whether they exist. For evidence contrary to your intuition, see https://doi.org/10.1086/666653
Even if they do exist, they're not a good reason to support non-public schools from a policy perspective, because peer effects are zero-sum. They're merely a reason to support private schools if you're rich/white/etc.
If peer effects are zero-sum, they are neither a reason to support, nor to oppose, non-public schools, right? Because it means that who your peers are has ~no effect on performance once you control for "pre-existing traits of the students and their families."
This isn't true. Zero-sum means the overall effect of the peers is zero-sum - we have a number of children, and some offer bonuses and others maluses to the performance of their peers. This is the traditional argument for removing ability-streamed classes, incidentally, that we need to put the smarter kids in with the dumber ones in order to ensure that everyone gets a chance to get the adjacency bonus from the smart kids.
I'm not sure things function that way in reality - it runs up against obvious limitations like 'putting a mentally disabled kid in the accelerated class is going to badly screw someone over, or possibly everyone involved depending on how you run things' but the peer effects being zero-sum means your peers do have an effect on performance, but the positive externalities are strongly connected to better students who in turn yield said positive externalities themselves.
What if putting smart kids together benefits smart kids to a greater degree than putting smart kids with dumb kids benefits the dumb kids?
What if the smart kid bonus only applies to other conscientious smart kids and the dumb scumbags don't really gain from sharing a learning environment with the smart kids, they just hold the smart kids back?
I agree and think that's true - I was accelerated in high school, but then the program got shut down and I got put with the speds for a few months (on the basis that the special education teacher was trained in gifted education) until they decided to put me back into regular classes. Spending time with a guy who couldn't read did nothing for me, nor did it help him. I viewed him with contempt because I hated being sat with him, and he was barely aware of anyone's existence at all.
I'm just outlining the logic of 'something can be net zero-sum yet be bad for some and good for others'.
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