Contact: Janelle Scott, (510) 642-4740; jtscott@berkeley.edu
Nikki Rashada McCord, (303) 735-5290; Nikki.McCord@colorado.edu
BOULDER, Colo. and TEMPE, Ariz. (March 3, 2010) -- A new Think Tank Review finds that a recent Brookings report fails to provide the necessary evidence to support its call for a federally led, universal expansion of school choice.
The Brookings report, Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education, was reviewed for the Think Tank Review Project by Professor Janelle Scott of the University of California at Berkeley.
Expanding Choice makes its arguments in the name of equity. Scott, however, finds three broad flaws in the report: It relies too heavily on research in progress and research generated by advocacy organizations; it neglects prior research concerning the nature of parental choice; and it fails to acknowledge that unconstrained school choice has segregative effects.
Scott points out that much of the research used to support the authors' central arguments for expanding school choice is generated by advocacy organizations and, to some degree, reflects research in progress. Accordingly, the report's enthusiasm for school choice's ability to generate desirable education policy is oblivious to empirical research that overwhelmingly points to complications in school choice formation, implementation, and evaluation.
Scott also highlights the research showing that parents tend to choose schools largely based on racial and social class demographics as opposed to indicators of school quality. Because the Brookings report fails to acknowledge this, its recommendations do not include elements that would prevent those choice patterns from undermining the report's stated equity goals. "An expansion of school choice without provisions that incentivize and support the creation of diverse schools would likely inhibit the open
enrollment choice terrain the authors imagine," Scott writes.
Further, while Scott credits the authors for setting the goal of expanding quality educational choices, and acknowledges that many parents generally want better schooling options for their children, she concludes that the report "never supports its underlying assumption that this particular expansion of school choice is what parents want in federal educational reform." By contrast, national polls find that for parents, the No. 1 priority is the lack of resources for schools. "Accordingly, if policy makers wish to attend to parental preferences, the best approach would seem to be more attention to resource shortages in schools and across schooling systems," Scott writes.
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 Janelle Scott's review on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-expanding-choice
Find Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education, written by Jay Greene, Tom Loveless, W. Bentley MacLeod, Thomas Nechyba, Paul Peterson, Meredith Rosenthal, and Grover Whitehurst, and published by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, on the web at:
http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0202_school_choice.aspx
EPIC and EPRU 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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