Andrew J. Coulson
Editor, www.SchoolChoices.org
Alison Halpern's review of Market Education contains two sorts
of criticisms: efforts to challenge the book's findings on empirical
grounds, and sophistries. While I am happy to respond to the former
category of criticisms, I am disappointed to find so many crude
rhetorical devices littering what purports to be a scholarly review.
Nevertheless, I respond to all of Halpern's points below, in the order
in which she made them.
In the third sentence of her review, Halpern refers to the
historical case studies presented in Market Education as "anecdotes." An
anecdote is by definition a detached incident, or a single event. In
contrast to that definition, each case study I present is a broad based
and thoroughly integrated account of the educational system in question,
the milieu in which it developed, and the cultural and economic
achievements of its society. The sources on which these studies are
based are either primary or reputable and widely accepted secondary
works. Halpern makes no attempt to defend her outrageous
mischaracterization of these case studies as anecdotal.
Halpern then criticizes the book's historical treatment of
state-run school systems, saying that I pay "only lip-service to the
successes of the public systems." This is false. I spend considerable
time and care examining the most notable claims for the successes of
state-run school systems, such as their being responsible for bringing
schooling and literacy to the masses in post reformation Germany and
19th century England and America.
Rather than glossing over these claims, as Halpern alleges, I
show that in general the historical evidence contradicts them. The
spread of education and the rise of popular literacy in Germany, for
example, began before the state-run school systems advocated by Luther
were established, and in fact it would have been difficult for the
Reformation to have proceeded with such speed and scope were it not for
the fact that so many of the German people were already able to read
Luther's missives. In England and America, the evidence shows that
majority literacy was achieved under the largely market-based systems of
the early 19th century, and that the spread of completely tax-funded
state-run schools did not accelerate that pre-existing growth in
literacy. Furthermore, the U.S. Census Bureau's own figures show that
the enrollment level of white children actually went down between 1850
and 1900 (p. 84), despite the fact that this was the period in which
state-run schooling expanded across the country and the majority of
states introduced mandatory attendance laws. Though African American
enrollment rose substantially after the Civil War, this was principally
due to the abolition of laws forbidding them from receiving an
education. The bulk of the schools serving newly emancipated black
children appear to have been private ventures.
Market Education describes few dramatic successes of state-run
school systems because there have been few dramatic successes under
those systems, particularly when they are compared to competitive
educational markets. Halpern fails to mention even a single purported
success of government-run schooling which is not discussed and confuted
in Market Education. Nor does she challenge any of those confutations. I
am open to the possibility that I have missed some significant
historical achievement of a government school system, and will gladly
look into any that are suggested to me.
Next, Halpern fallaciously trivializes the arguments presented
in Market Education, alleging that they equate to the simplistic
formula: "public equals bad and private equals good." This criticism is
patently unjustifiable given the repeated discussions in Market
Education of the shortcomings of private schooling and competitive
markets. The century-long stagnation in U.S. private schooling is
described at length in Chapter 8, the flaws of voucher programs and
private contracting arrangements are catalogued in Chapter 10, and the
weakness of free markets (absent an effective subsidy mechanism) when it
comes to serving low-income families is noted throughout the book and
emphasized in Chapters 9 and 11. Furthermore, a substantial part of
Chapter 6 deals with public school success stories. I cannot imagine why
Ms. Halpern chose to deny the existence of these subtleties.
With regard to the several chapters documenting the
unsatisfactory performance of U.S. public schooling, Halpern states:
"unlike many educational researchers who critique the practice of public
education while remaining committed to the idea of it, Coulson simply
condemns both the practice and the idea of public education." First, a
clarification. I draw a distinction between the ideals of public
education (e.g. that all children should have access to good schools)
and the institution of public schooling, which is only a mechanism for
advancing our ideals. I am a vigorous supporter of public education, and
have dedicated the past six years of my life to improving it. I do, by
contrast, condemn our state-run "public" school system for its gross
deficiencies in providing public education, and its inferiority to
parent-driven educational markets.
That said, I will assume that Ms. Halpern is referring to my
condemnation of the institution of public schooling, which she dismisses
as "simple." It is inexplicable how Halpern could hold in her hands a
170,000 word book supported by well over a thousand source citations and
call it "simple." Market Education meticulously documents the fact that
state-run school systems have been inferior to market systems in their
ability to serve the public. It would be nothing short of scholarly
malpractice to cling to such a deficient institution when a superior
alternative exists.
Halpern's very first effort to provide evidence backing up one
of her criticisms comes almost half-way through her review, when she
touches on the subject of reading instruction. She writes that Market
Education "relies heavily on the work of Jeanne Chall but ignores the
thorough critique of her work by Marie Carbo." I draw Ms. Halpern's
attention to the list of endnote references at the back of the book,
where she will find more than thirty citations on this topic. Of those
thirty or so references, only three are to works authored by Chall. That
is not heavy reliance. Contrary to Halpern's allegation, studies showing
success with whole language instruction are factored into this section,
as they are considered by all the major research syntheses in the field
(for example, M. J. Adams, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning
About Print, and R. Anderson, E. Hiebert, J. Scott, and I. Wilkinson,
Becoming a nation of readers: The report of the Commission on Reading).
I also cite several works by leading proponents of whole language
instruction, such as Constance Weaver, and address their arguments head
on.
The plain fact, as I write in Market Education, is that the
preponderance of reputable studies shows the superiority of structured
early phonics instruction. As new evidence continues to accumulate, that
consensus is only strengthened. After Market Education went to press,
the Scottish Office of the U.K. released the results of a 5 year, large
scale study (Watson and Johnson, 1999) comparing the effectiveness of
various early reading instruction methods. This study found yet again
that a synthetic phonics-first approach produced the highest achievement
in reading and spelling overall, and the fewest under-achieving
students.
No discussion of reading instruction techniques could mention
every article and book written on such a popular topic. It is
nevertheless possible to present the consensus of rigorous experimental
trials and that is precisely what is done in Market Education. Even the
American Federation of Teachers, hardly considered an organization of
reactionary anti-progressives, is now championing the need for early
phonics instruction. To present a single outdated article (Carbo, 1988)
as a supposed refutation of this consensus is preposterous.
Halpern decries the book's treatment of public school teachers,
saying that its assessment of teachers as generally having poor academic
abilities and a lack of interest in academics is "condescending."
Indeed, she dismisses these conclusions as "opinions." But indignation
is not an argument and my conclusions are not mere opinions. In
reputable surveys, teacher candidates themselves report much less
interest in academics than do other college students, as a group their
verbal and mathematics SAT scores are consistently the worst or
second-to worst of students in all ten discipline categories identified
by the College Board (which administers the SAT), teachers stress the
importance of academic achievement over other educational goals only a
third as often as do parents, they view the "nurturing and interpersonal
aspects of a teacher's role as more important than the academic
aspects," and the list goes on (p. 140). In is hard to see how these
research findings could be honestly construed as "opinions."
Halpern then moves on to critique the book's treatment of the
experimental evidence on school vouchers. Her criticisms are
inconsequential. Voucher experiments are treated only in passing in
Market Education and then only because of their high profile in the
current debate. Because they represent such tiny numbers of schools and
students, because they separate payment from consumption, because
participating schools are rarely if ever operated for profit, and
because whole categories of schools (most often religious schools) have
until recently been prohibited from participating, these programs do not
constitute truly competitive markets. A large portion of Chapter 10 is
devoted to explaining how and why existing voucher programs fail to
constitute true educational markets. The sections discussing empirical
evidence from existing voucher experiments could thus be removed
entirely from Market Education without affecting its conclusions, which
rest instead on the modern and historical evidence of actual educational
markets.
But no such revision is necessitated by Halpern's off-target
criticisms. She faults my rejection of the Witte study of Milwaukee's
voucher program, but that rejection is entirely justified. Randomized
experiments are overwhelmingly recognized in the scientific community as
superior to experiments in which control groups are cobbled together by
experimenters. While the Greene/Peterson/Du and Cecilia Elena Rouse
studies analyzed the randomized experiment, Witte failed to do so.
Criticisms of the statistical significance of the early
Greene/Peterson/Du findings on Milwaukee are interesting, but do not
apply to the Rouse study that also found academic improvements in
Milwaukee.
Halpern also fails to note that I do discuss the vigorous
disagreement between the Cleveland voucher studies performed by Green,
Peterson et al. (which showed academic gains), and by researchers from
Indiana University (which did not). She is almost certainly unaware of
the latest research in this field by the Indiana University team (which
was unavailable at the time of Market Education's writing). According to
the IU team's most recent work (Metcalf, 1999), students participating
in the Cleveland voucher program enjoy significant improvement in their
scores over those remaining in the public schools. So a consensus among
formerly opposed scholars is now developing around the positive academic
effects of vouchers. Note that there has never been any disagreement
over the fact that voucher programs lead to significantly higher
parental satisfaction and parental involvement in their children's
schools.
Halpern's last argument is equally ineffective. She faults
Market Education for failing to assess the works of writers such as
Henig, Whitty, and Meier. This is a fallacious appeal to authority. To
the best of my knowledge, none of the individuals cited has conducted
either a comparative historical analysis of school governance structures
or an analysis of contemporary free market educational systems (e.g. the
Japanese juku). In other words, these "experts" are not expert in the
subject matter of Market Education. Though some,
such as Henig and Meier, have studied and criticized quasi-market
education reforms (e.g., charter schools, the New Zealand model,
government-funded vouchers), Market Education does not advocate these
quasi-market reforms. In fact, it criticizes them as well.
Though I don't doubt that Ms. Halpern meant well, her review
consists almost entirely of linguistic gestures rather than rational
arguments. Her few attempts at offering supporting evidence or appealing
to dissenting authorities are specious, and her sweeping conclusions are
thus unfounded. I look forward to a more substantive review of Market
Education.
References
Metcalf, Kim K., 1999. "Evaluation of the Cleveland Scholarship and
Tutoring Program, 1996-99," Unpublished Manuscript, Indiana University.
Watson, Joyce E., and Johnston, Rhona S., 1999. "Accelerating Reading
Attainment: The Effectiveness of Synthetic Phonics." Government report,
Scottish Executive Education Department - Educational Research Unit
(ERU).
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