Fordham report offers interesting insights on class and education, but its call for expanding private school vouchers doesn't follow

Contact: John T. Yun, (805) 893-2342; jyun@education.ucsb.edu

BOULDER, Colo. and TEMPE, Ariz. (March 24, 2010) -- A recent Thomas B. Fordham Institute report identifies public schools across the U.S. that enroll very few students from low-income families. The report then pivots and argues for using public funds to provide vouchers for private schools. A review of that report, released today by the Think Tank Review Project, concludes that the report's policy arguments are based on tenuous logic, oversimplification, and "critical omissions of fact, context and prior research."

The Fordham Institute report, America's Private Public Schools, was authored by Michael Petrilli and Janie Scull and was reviewed by professor John Yun of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Yun observes that the report does raise interesting issues in its finding that about 4 percent of the public school population attend some 2,800 schools where fewer than 1 in 20 students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch.

Using the term "private public schools," the Fordham report's authors argue that the prevalence of these schools justifies expansion of private school voucher programs or private school tuition tax credit (so-called neovoucher) programs. Yet, Yun says, the report's attempts to use its findings to support that recommendation don't hold up. Moreover, even the term itself is misleading since it implies that lack of poverty alone makes a private school.

The report's primary argument to tie lower levels of class segregation to school choice policies is extraordinarily weak. Essentially, the report points to some states with choice policies and points out that they have fewer identified "public private schools." But Yun notes that the report offers little or no evidence to meaningfully link choice policies to lesser segregation, beyond sweeping "associational implications." The report also fails to explore alternative explanations for such variations, such as historic housing segregation or the presence of large county-wide districts (which tend to have less segregation) common in Southern states like Florida.

Beyond these problems, the review notes serious concerns about accuracy of the report's data, classifications, and calculations. Some schools classified as "private public" appear to be quite diverse, while others that escaped this classification appear to have few if any low-income students. Moreover, the report ignores prior research showing that private schools are more likely to be more economically exclusive than public schools, calling into question the recommended "solution" of sending more students to those private schools. Yun states that, "While policymakers should indeed engage with the issue of elite, secluded public schooling, shifting more students into a private sector that is even more stratified does not appear to offer a wise solution." The report fails to explain how even a voucher policy targeted to low-income students would result in overall improvement of the segregation problem.

"Taken together, these concerns cannot be dismissed, and they undermine the connections the authors try to make between the presence of socioeconomically isolated, non-poor public schools and private school voucher/choice policies," Yun writes.

He concludes, "In pursuing such a flawed argument on such an important topic, the authors miss a chance to seriously address this critical issue in favor of making an unsupported recommendation for a private school voucher policy that has very little hope of addressing de facto socioeconomic segregation in any substantive way."

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) and the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Find John Yun's review on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-Americas-Private-Public

Find America's Private Public Schools, by Michael Petrilli and Janie Scull, on the web at:
http://www.edexcellence.net/index.cfm/news_private-public-schools

The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/

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