Learning as We Go: Why School Choice is Worth the Wait (Hoover Institution Press Publication) - Hardcover

Hill, Paul T.

9780817910143: Learning as We Go: Why School Choice is Worth the Wait (Hoover Institution Press Publication)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081791014X ISBN 13: 9780817910143

Publisher: Hoover Institution Press, 2010

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Paul T. Hill examines the real-world factors that can complicate, delay, and in some instances interfere with the positive cause-and-effect relationships identified by the theories behind school choice. He explains why schools of choice haven't yet achieved a broader appeal and suggests more realistic expectations about timing and a more complete understanding of what must be done to make choice work.

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From the Inside Flap

Why haven’t schools of choice yet achieved a broader appeal? Choice opens up what our public education system now holds tight, allowing innovations in curriculum and other aspects of instruction that are not now possible. Thus, choice is a necessary if not sufficient condition for needed innovations in curriculum, methods, use of time, and human resources. Publicly funded school choice programs—charter schools in forty-three states and vouchers in a few localities—have for the most part been qualified successes; along with many mixed results, some have in fact been more dramatic successes. Yet the rhetoric of choice supporters promised much more effective schools and an era of innovation that has not come to pass. Is there something wrong with the theories behind the choice movement? Paul T. Hill answers this question with an emphatic no. In Learning as We Go: Why School Choice Is Worth the Wait, he examines why continuous improvement that school choice was supposed to introduce to public education has been so slow to occur.

Hill details four key factors to explain the delay. The first and most important is political opposition. The second is composed of policies and regulations—themselves the results of politics that advantage incumbent administrators, educators, and interest groups—that either create big obstacles to the success of choice or go only halfway toward creating the conditions necessary for its full operation. Thirdis an entrenched system built on procedure, compliance, employee protection, and secrecy about resource use and productivity. A fourthsource of delays is a set of time lags intrinsic to the operation of a system of choice.

The author then suggests changes in public policy along with philanthropic investment that could overcome barriers and increase the rate of progress toward full operation of what he calls the “virtuous cycle” stimulated by school choice. To reach its potential in education, he concludes, choice will need steady, persistent support based on understanding what it will take, not doctrinaire insistence that analysis and strategic investment are counterproductive because the market will provide.

From the Back Cover

Have publicly funded school choice programs--charter schools and voucher programs--been qualified successes or crashing failures? Studies of student achievement in charter and voucher schools find some dramatic successes and many mixed results; only sworn opponents of school choice would call it a failure. But how does this square with the rhetoric of supporters who predicted quick and dramatic success for school choice? In Learning as We Go: Why School Choice Is Worth the Wait, Paul T. Hill examines the real-world factors that can complicate, delay, and in some instances interfere with the positive cause-and effect relationships identified by the theories behind school choice. He explains why schools of choice have not yet achieved a broader appeal and suggests more realistic expectations about timing and a more complete understanding of what must be done to make choice work.

Hill identifies the key factors that account for the delay and explains how, even if politics, policy, and regulation were less hostile to choice, dealing with the other sources of the delay--dismantling a strongly defended system and building knowledge, capacity, and human resources--would take a significant amount of time. Choice supporters, he says, need to acknowledge that positive results will not just come automatically and that full development of what he calls the “virtuous cycle” stimulated by school choice will take time. Under current laws and at the current level of investment and effort, he concludes, it is not clear when, if ever, choice will reach its full potential.

Paul T. Hill is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. He is the John and Marguerite Corbally Professor and director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington-Bothell.

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