Howard Fuller and Harriet Tubman vs. Rick Hess and Sol Stern
I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona today (projected high: 99 degrees) for an education reform summit hosted by the State Policy Network, the Alliance for School Choice, and the Friedman Foundation. Savvy readers will surmise that at such an event, "school reform" equals "private school choice," and that no keynoter would be appropriate other than the 60’s-radical-turned-school-choice-godfather Howard Fuller. (They’d be right.)
Fuller is not known for dry oratory, and he gave a real stem winder of an address today. He took some shots at Barack Obama, whom he supports for president, for calling for change and yet not being willing to break with the teachers unions over choice. But he saved most of his fire for none other than my good friends Rick Hess and Sol Stern. (He went out of his way to say that he "likes Rick." Sorry, Sol.)
He argued that both think tankers quoted him selectively in recent articles (this one by Sol ; Rick’s is listed here but not yet available online). For instance, in the current issue of The American , Rick writes:
Howard Fuller, patron saint of the voucher program, has wryly acknowledged, "I think that any honest assessment would have to say that there hasn’t been the deep, wholesale improvement in Milwaukee Public Schools that we would have thought."
Fuller, after thanking Rick for "elevating me to sainthood while I’m still alive," said that he had left out the next sentence he said. Which was something to the effect of: But school choice is still worth fighting for because we are literally saving children’s lives.
Fuller went on to describe a small Christian school in Milwaukee whose board he chairs, and which is sending 35 of 37 graduating seniors to college. He asked if he should tell his younger students, sorry, the voucher program isn’t fixing the system, so it should end, and you should have to go back to MPS?
"Did Harriet Tubman want to end the system of slavery? Of course she did. 
But until that happened, she woke up every day to try to save every single slave that she could."
And with that, Fuller wholly embraced the "lifeboat" rationale for school choice: It may not transform the system, but it transforms the lives of students who participate, and that’s reason enough to support it.
This is important. And honest. And, for me, compelling. It’s why I supported the DC voucher program even though there was no chance it would do anything to improve the other schools in DC. (It’s tiny compared to the charter school sector and DC’s public schools were "held harmless" financially.) But it had the potential to dramatically improve the lives of 2,000 impoverished youngsters without appreciably reducing the quality of education of their peers. So for me, that’s a no-brainer.
But this is a big shift from the early days of the school choice movement. As Hess writes in his piece,
In 1990, scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe argued in their seminal volume Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools , "Without being too literal about it, we think reformers would do well to entertain the notion that choice is a panacea…It has the capacity all by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that, for years, reformers have been seeking to engineer in myriad other ways."
I’m with Fuller, as I suspect Stern and Hess would be too: Let’s save as many kids as we can through school choice programs. But let’s also admit, as both Stern and Hess have argued, that school choice is not enough if we want to transform the system too.
Related posts:
- Rick Hess in the house
- The Massachusetts Miracle and teachers unions: Sol Stern jumps into the fray
- Stand up for yourselves! says Rick
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September 11th, 2008 at 8:32 am
Why do we have to admit it when it isn’t true? There is strong evidence that expanding chocie and competition does improve the public school system. See http://jaypgreene.com/2008/08/25/systemic-effects-of-vouchers/ .
September 11th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I think (?) that what Mike is saying that those of us who support parental choice should also be interested in other reforms as well to improve schools.
The question shouldn’t be whether or not any of the limited private choice programs passed to date are a “pancea” or “transformative” but whether they are helpful in improving student achievement. The evidence is strong that they do.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have an interest in other sorts of reform. Almost all parental choice supporters I know do. Since we can walk and chew gum at the same time, arguing about whether choice could be a “panacea” is a bit absurd. Choice is great for a variety of reasons, we should get as much of it as fast as we can. Let’s get other reforms as well.
On the other hand Mike, you can’t attend a conference co-hosted by the Alliance for School Choice and the Friedman Foundation and be shocked, SHOCKED to find the event focused on choice.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
On April 16, Gary Huggins, Ben Wildavsky, Sol Stern, and I shared a Cato Institute stage to debate this very issue, whether ‘Choice is Enough’. Because nearly all of the well-known evidence is from very limited programs, I dared to assert the view of a minority of my colleagues to argue that is much too soon to conclude, especially publicly, that choice is not a panacea. It might be. Let’s truly study some large, unrestricted programs (Chile is not!) before we start viewing choice as a limited tool that must be packaged with other policy initiatives.
We have to remember that the other policy initiatives could undermine or hinder what might be accomplished through choice, entrepreneurship, and price systems, and even absent those conditions, the law of unintended consequences says that government directives aimed at improving the performance of a quasi-monopoly could make things worse for the system as a whole or for prospects for systemic reform.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
I agree, Matt. We should be interested in a variety of reform strategies and continue with whatever seems to work. So far the evidence suggests that expanding chocie and competition improves public schools and doesn’t just serve as a lifeboat for kids fleeing bad public schools. There’s also evidence supporting standards and accountability reforms as well as instructional and curricular reforms. Let’s move forward on all fronts rather than pitting one against another.
December 1st, 2008 at 12:14 am
As a journalist in Milwaukee reporting on the development of Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, dating back to 1994 when Fuller was still Superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, I can agree with Fuller that there is no evidence that expanding choice and competition improves public schools. There is also scant evidence that students in the choice program are achieving better, with the exception of the small sample that Fuller reports at his school and the high graduation rates reported at the Archdiocese schools. The choice schools are unaccountable to state/national standards and by and large we don’t know how the kids in the choice program are doing.
We do know that choice is popular and was expanded in 2006 to meet demand, and that there were many start-up schools entering the program. While the school Dr. Fuller is involved with may be a shining jewel of the choice program, many of these new schools are not. The big concern in Milwaukee in my view is that the introduction of free market ideas to the education of children has had the same effect that the free market economy has had in the delivery of other services to low income communities: Yes, there are choices but they are not often good ones.
And there is far more information available to consumers looking to buy a car than there is for parents about to enroll their children in many MPCP schools.
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