Dr. Patrick Wolf joins the Students Over Systems podcast to discuss education freedom research and implementation. Dr. Wolf, who leads the School Choice Demonstration Project at the University of Arkansas, kicks off the discussion with an update on the new Educational Freedom Accounts created as part of the LEARNS Act signed by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in March. He provides an overview of evaluations of school choice program outcomes, including test scores, safety, parental satisfaction, and competitive effects. The conversation concludes with a discussion of implementation and regulatory advice based on Dr. Wolf’s 25 years of evaluation experience.
TRANSCRIPT
Ginny Gentles:
Today on Students Over Systems, we’re celebrating a school choice journey. University of Arkansas Professor Patrick Wolf joins us to discuss education, freedom, research, and implementation.
Welcome to Students Over Systems, a podcast that celebrates education freedom. I’m your host, Ginny Gentles. At Students Over Systems, we talk with the creators, advocates, and beneficiaries of education freedom. On today’s episode, we’re joined by Dr. Patrick J. Wolf. Dr. Wolf is the Interim Department Head, a Distinguished Professor of Education Policy, and the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
He previously taught at Columbia and Georgetown University. He has led so many influential studies of private school choice programs, including studies in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, and the state of Louisiana. He’s authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited five books and over 200 journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, and policy reports on private school choice, public charter schools, special education, civic values, and many other topics. Education Week consistently ranks him among the most influential education policy academics in the US, and I rank him a really swell guy. Dr. Wolf, Pat, welcome to Students Over Systems, and thank you for joining us.
Patrick Wolf:
Thanks, Ginny. I’m delighted to be here.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. Before we launch into a discussion of education freedom research and some of the specifics of implementation that you’ve identified as really important, please tell us what’s going on in Arkansas, the state where you live. There was a LEARNS Act that was passed back in March. Governor Huckabee advocated for this bill and signed it, and it was a doozy as far as the scope of the bill. She referred to it as the largest overhaul of the state’s education system in Arkansas history. But let’s focus on the school choice provision in the bill. What does the LEARNS Act offer families in Arkansas?
Patrick Wolf:
Yes. It’s a new program called Education Freedom Accounts, which is an education savings account program that’s going to begin by targeting some of the most disadvantaged subpopulations of students, students with disabilities, students in foster care, children of active duty military, and then will grow to universal eligibility in three years.
Ginny Gentles:
This is part of what’s happening nationwide as far as the creation of what they’re calling in Arkansas educational freedom accounts. The common term is education savings accounts, or ESAs. I hear what you’re saying. This is a rollout, a three-year implementation. We don’t start at universal. We start more limited. Per student funding in Arkansas was somewhere around $7,413 for this past school year. Students are getting about 90% of that funding. But are students going to get 90% of the funding? There’s a lawsuit around this, right?
Patrick Wolf:
Yeah. The law was passed with what we call an emergency clause associated with it. That’s where the legislature can make a bill effective immediately when signed by the governor, as opposed to 90 days after the adjournment of the legislature, which is the standard effective date for new legislation. That would’ve been August 1st, or would be August 1st.
The legislators properly understood that you need the full summer to implement a major new education reform. They attached an emergency clause to this bill. After it was signed into law, a law professor pointed out that the legislature didn’t follow the procedures for enacting an emergency clause that are in the Arkansas constitution. Those procedures call for a separate vote for the bill and for the emergency clause. The legislature basically announced, “We’re going to do one vote for both,” and that’s how the LEARNS Act was enacted with an emergency clause.
That issue, that procedural issue, was being sorted out in the district court. Now, initially, the district court judge said, “I’m going to stay. I’m going to issue an injunction against implementation of the program, the LEARNS Act, because of this dispute.” The Arkansas Department of Education was not allowed to take any steps to implement the program for several weeks.
Then, the Arkansas Supreme Court removed the injunction said you can go ahead and implement while the case is decided, so we started implementation. Then, the district judge ruled that the emergency clause was enacted unconstitutionally, ordered implementation stopped again. Today, it was announced in the newspaper that the Arkansas Department of Education is not going to honor that order and is going to continue to implement the bill. Right now, we have an executive branch that is taking an action that they’ve been ordered not to take by a state judge. It’s an interesting situation. I imagine that the Arkansas State Supreme Court will rule very quickly on this issue to resolve it.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. I should clarify that we’re recording on the Thursday before. This episode’s going to be released on a Tuesday. So, sounds like never a dull moment in Arkansas, and we could even have new developments coming soon.
All right. So there are educational freedom accounts in Arkansas. The implementation rollout’s a little bumpy due to this emergency clause hullabaloo, but parents can apply still, it sounds like, get in the system, and then we’ll see what happens going forward. You and I know that it’s not unusual for school choice programs to be contested and that there are to be lawsuits. It’s frustrating for the parents and for the educators who are looking forward to participating, but we can generally feel confident that it’s all going to get resolved.
All right. Arkansas, as I mentioned, is part of just a wave of states passing school choice programs, education freedom programs, many with a universal eligibility. This is shaping up to be one of the biggest years in education freedom history. For some people, because so much is happening, this might be the first time that they’re hearing about school choice and school choice programs. They might be thinking we are now going to have school choice.
You have been researching programs for 25-plus years, so I think that you are the right person to come and talk to us about the fact that, nope, school choice isn’t new. It’s been around for a while and, in fact, long enough to have a sense of long-term effects of the program. I’d love for you to start out by telling us about some of your earlier studies of older programs, including the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and the Milwaukee program. Tell us about your research into those.
Patrick Wolf:
Private school choice programs have been around for over 150 years now. The first ones were enacted in Vermont and Maine shortly after the Civil War because there were a lot of rural towns, small towns in those states that had private schools but didn’t have the big comprehensive public schools that were all the rage at that time. Legislators in Maine and Vermont quite wisely said, “Hey, there’s a solution to this problem. We will provide tuition funds to parents to send their kids to a private school in these rural areas.” So, it’s kind of interesting that private school choice got its birth in America in rural areas. Then, in the nineties, 1990s and forward, it became really popular in urban areas, in Milwaukee, in Cleveland, in Washington, D.C.
When my team evaluated the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program in the early aughts, we found that the effect of the program on student test scores was mildly positive but inconsistent and not really clear and compelling. But, the program had a clear positive effect on high school graduation rates for students, students who participated in this program. It was all low income inner city kids in Washington, D.C. They graduated from high school at a rate that was 21 percentage points higher than the students in public schools, the control group students in public schools. That’s a huge effect on a transformative life event graduating from high school as opposed to being a high school dropout.
That was our big takeaway from the D.C. program. We also learned a lot about how important it is for parents to visit multiple schools when they’re selecting a school, that accurate information about schools is important for parents so that they’re informed as well as empowered choosers. We learned a lot about the school choice journey by evaluating this first and only federal school choice policy, the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Ginny Gentles:
In fact, The School Choice Journey was the name of a book or a publication that summarized your interviews and focus groups that documented something like a hundred families and their experiences with the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. I have to admit that that’s when I first discovered your work. There were studies floating around on the academic scores, but I wanted to hear from the families. I wanted to hear their real stories and what the program was really doing for their children and the struggles that they were having with the program. So, tell us a little bit more about the school choice journey.
Patrick Wolf:
One thing about the school choice journey we learned, that was a eureka moment for me as an evaluator, was that parents are generally not chasing higher test scores for their kids. In our final focus group, we had 40 parents in a room and we used clickers, that were novel at the time. This was back in like 2008. Now those clickers are ubiquitous, but they were novel at the time.
My colleague Tom Stewart and I, we thought, “Well, gosh. Why are they using those kinds of measures?” And we realized it’s because they can. They’re parents. They see their child on a daily basis. They detect positive changes in their attitudes and behaviors that are going to have long-term payoff in terms of how far the kids go in school and how successful they are in life. That’s what really matters to parents. We evaluators who’ve been obsessing about test score gains and test score changes for so long, were missing the boat when it comes to what really matters for parents and what really matters to students. That was my biggest eureka moment.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. In addition to the school choice journey, you were part of the team, or were you leading the team, on the official federally commissioned study of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. I have to say, I’m still a little bitter or frustrated by the way that the law structured that study because you had to hold families back who had applied for the program, not give them a voucher or a scholarship, but keep them in this evaluation in order to have this gold standard study. I might be characterizing that incorrectly, but can you tell us a little bit about the way that the federal government structured that study of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program?
Patrick Wolf:
Sure. Congress mandated that the evaluation be conducted using the most rigorous methodology possible. As you suggested, Ginny, that means gold standard random assignment study. To have a random assignment study, you need a control group that is denied access to the intervention. Basically, we had to work for two years to get the program oversubscribed, so there were more interested and eligible students than there were scholarships to award. Then, we held a lottery to determine who got the scholarships and who didn’t.
Yes, I mean, from a sort of empathy standpoint, that’s frustrating because all these kids want private school choice. They want access to a school of their parents’ choosing. And as evaluators, we’re denying some of them that access for purposes of determining the effect that the program has. In the long run, that’s positive because we gain reliable scientific knowledge about the effectiveness of school choice. But in the short term, it’s frustrating for parents and students.
We found that quite a few members of the control group were sort of sneaking into the Choice program. Because in many cases, we were even dividing families. There’d be one child in the family who would win the lottery, get a scholarship, another child would not and would be in the control group. Many of the private schools looked at this situation and said, “This is crazy. This is bad for the kids. This is bad for the family. We will take the second child for free.” So the control group that was supposed to be restricted from accessing private schools through the Choice program actually indirectly got access. We call this control group crossover. And it did complicate and dampen down the clarity of our evaluation because some of the control group kids were getting access to school choice.
But in a way, it underlined the point that choice finds a way, that parents are really committed to getting the best education possible for their children. And we are sort of kidding ourselves if we think that we can rigorously and rigidly control that access. Choice finds a way, and it did in the case of our random assignment evaluation of the D.C. Choice Program.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. That program was passed into law back in 2004. It’s understandable that way back when a new program would… the federal government would want to have a sense of how it was impacting the participating families. The obsession back then was on the academic scores, reading and math. Thankfully, you also separately did these focus groups so we could have a bigger picture. But, school choice research expanded in years after that, and you took a look at another older school choice program, the Milwaukee School Choice Program, and examined things beyond the academic scores. You actually looked at school choice effects on crime. Tell us about that study.
Patrick Wolf:
This was something that I’ve always wanted to do, is look at these character outcomes of school choice. I had an especially eager graduate student at the time named Corey DeAngelis, who of course has gone on to greatness as an advocate for school choice with the American Federation for Children, but also has maintained high quality work as a school choice scholar. Corey and I collaborated on this study of the effect of participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program on crime outcomes several years after high school graduation. Wisconsin is the perfect state to do that in because, for transparency reasons, the state of Wisconsin maintains a database with every interaction with the police entered into that database with the name, and birthdate, and descriptive information about the person who interacted with police. That database is publicly available, publicly searchable. If you’re going to commit a crime, don’t do it in Wisconsin because everyone’s going to know.
But, this was a wonderful tool for us as researchers because we were able to take our list of students who participated in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in the late aughts, our list of public school students carefully matched to those choice students, and we were able to search this database to see how often each group appeared in this list of criminal activities. We found that the students in the Choice program were much less likely to appear in the list of students who committed felonies, who were convicted of felonies, who were convicted of property crimes, who were convicted of drug crimes, and who were listed as parties to a paternity suit.
Basically, the students who had access to private school choice were less likely to have a criminal record in their twenties, were less likely to get involved in drugs, were less likely to destroy property, and were less likely to create a child out of wedlock. Well, all of those conditions are absolutely life-changing for low income inner city kids. I mean, if low income inner city kids avoid those four things, then their prospects for a successful life are hugely positive. If they don’t avoid those four traps, then they’ve got a tough road ahead. We were able to confirm that the experience of private schooling for these young inner city people, these young inner city folks was life-changing in terms of their character development. They developed these practices, these behavioral practices that will help them be successful in life.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. So this study was not a fluke. I felt like it was a breakthrough, and I was thrilled to read the results, both because it was proving the positive impact of the program, but also it was showing, “Hey, there’s so many things that matter to parents, to kids, to individuals’ futures.” It’s important to assess those two, and that’s exactly what you guys did.
You’ve continued that path of evaluating a number of different things, so I’ve got some stats, and I want you to sort out what it is that I’m saying here. Of the 29 studies that examined the competitive effects of school choice programs, 26 found positive effects, one found no visible effect, and two found negative effects. That’s 26 out of 29 studies showing super good news. Then, there’s another thing I’ve seen. Out of 187 studies conducted on school choice programs, a significant majority of those, 162 studies, have reported positive effects on various outcomes, including test scores, safety satisfaction, racial integration. What are we talking about when we talk about those 29 studies, and what are we talking about when we talk about the 187 studies?
Patrick Wolf:
I’ll start with 187. Those come from a very valuable resource that EdChoice produces called the 123s of School Choice. What they do is they compile all of the results from all of the studies of possible school choice effects on participants and on non-participants. Basically, that’s just what we would call a vote count meta-analysis. You just sort of say every study is one vote for or against school choice. What they’ve been able to determine is that the votes are overwhelmingly in favor of school choice when you look at the entire set of studies in the entire field. Now, I’ve contributed to maybe 15% of those 186 studies. I have many colleagues also tilling in the field who have done great work compiling this total record of the general positive effects of school choice.
The 26 out of 29 is a very important set of findings because they are about the competitive effects of school choice programs on non-participating students who remain in public schools. If you study economics, economics 101 is that when organizations and service providers face competition for their service, they improve the delivery of their service. That’s just a fundamental principle of economics.
For a long time in the education space, people have said, “Yeah, that works everywhere except in K-12 education. K-12 schooling is different because people do it because they care, not for self-interested motives. It’s supposed to be cooperative, not competitive, and so competition has no effect on K-12 education or it has a horrible negative effect. It basically drives public schools in a death spiral.”
Well, there’ve been enough studies, almost 30 studies of this question, that consistently find when private school choice programs are launched or expanded, test scores improve for the students who stay behind in public schools. In this case, test scores are, I think, a helpful metric to evaluate the competitive effects of school choice. Because for the last 20 years or so, that’s what public schools have been focused on for accountability purposes. With No Child Left Behind and other education reforms, they really did focus on test scores for public schools. That’s what they know how to do, how to push. And when they’re pressured by school choice programs, they do it better, they get better achievement results for the kids left behind. Basically, school choice becomes a win-win. It generates a rising tide that lifts all boats.
Ginny Gentles:
That’s something that we talked about early on in our Students Over Systems podcast series with Senator Tim Scott, and I love hearing the evidence of that. We can’t just talk in talking points. We do need evidence, and that’s where you come in, Dr. Wolf.
All right. You recently wrote an essay called School Choice Realized. You said, “Government programs accomplish nothing unless and until they’re implemented. How they’re designed and administered influences how beneficial they are to families.” With a quarter of a century of experience studying the impacts of school choice programs, you know a little something about implementation. Tell us what you wrote about in that essay and what you have found when it comes to structuring programs and implementing programs.
Patrick Wolf:
When it comes to policy design, I think there are some clear best practices that have emerged. The programs that I’m most excited about that I think are going to have the largest positive impact are programs that are designed to grow to universality. Universal eligibility has two major benefits. One is political sustainability. If larger populations and more diverse populations of students are eligible for a program, that program’s going to have a more broad-based political support, and it’s going to weather political transitions and shifts in the political winds much better.
We see proof of this right now, sadly, in the case of the Illinois school choice program, Invest in Kids program, which is likely to sunset on December 31st because the democratically controlled legislature and governor’s office didn’t take action to save it. As a result, 9,000 low-income kids are going to be thrown out of their public schools because there wasn’t a strong enough base of political support to sustain that program. It will be the first school choice program in the country eliminated by legislative action or inaction. Now, all the other programs have broader political support, and so this idea of universal eligibility really helps make these programs resilient.
The second thing that they accomplish is they satisfy the goal of equality. Basically, everyone’s treated equally. Everyone has equal access to private school choice with a universal program. That idea really resonates with the American public, and it satisfies a basic principle of fairness. The final fairness point, and most of these universal programs have this attribute, is prioritizing serving disadvantaged populations of students. If the program’s going to be universal and everyone has access to it, there’s concern that more advantaged families will get to the best schools first.
With a lot of these programs, the Iowa program that Senator Sinclair was instrumental in enacting, the LEARNS program here in the state of Arkansas, the new program in Utah, all these programs that grow to universality, they prioritize serving highly disadvantaged populations first. So let those kids get into the best schools available first, then open it up to more advantaged families. So, I really like those design features.
In terms of implementation strategies, you’ve got to spread the word so that families are aware of the program and their eligibility for it. It’s important to use pastors and religious organizations to help spread that word because they have regular contact with families. You have to provide good information for parents and really drive home the fact that parents need to visit schools, multiple schools if possible, to do comparison shopping, because you really don’t understand a school, and what it offers, and how it operates until you actually set your eyes on it. Those are my tips for effective implementation of these choice programs going forward.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. You also mentioned regulations around the program. When you’re designing a program, whether it’s universal, or phased in universal, or more restricted, there are a number of things that you mentioned that are important to keep in mind as far as the providers, and that’s open admissions, prohibiting additional charges to parents, and state accountability testing. We haven’t talked about that Louisiana program and some of the evaluations that you’ve done around Louisiana, but I’m wondering if when you talk about state accountability testing it’s maybe born from what you’ve seen as evaluating the limitations in the Louisiana program. Could you talk about that, please?
Patrick Wolf:
I think the problem with the Louisiana Scholarship Program that was enacted in 2011 is that it included some regulations, some government regulations that made the private schools comparable to public schools in ways that discouraged quality private schools from participating. You mentioned them, Ginny, open admissions, administration of the state accountability test, and no ability for the schools to charge an additional fee in order to provide a higher quality education. These are all sort of principles of government-run public schools, is that if you live in the right neighborhood, everybody gets to go to the school for free, you can’t charge parents extra, and you have to administer a test aligned with the government curriculum.
Well, all these things basically take private schools, which are distinctive schools with their own curricula and designed to serve distinctive populations of students, and tries to transform them into public schools. Well, that undermines the whole point of parental choice in education. The whole point of parental choice in education is to let parents choose from among diverse and distinctive schools. Those three government regulations homogenize the schools and make private schools public schools. It doesn’t work for school choice.
We saw that in Louisiana where there were clear negative achievement effects of participation in the Louisiana Scholarship Program. I think it was largely because these intrusive government regulations scared away the high quality and high performing private schools, and it’s no benefit to parents if the regulatory regime in a choice program discourages the kinds of high quality choices that they want.
Ginny Gentles:
Absolutely. All right, Patrick. As we wrap up today, I’d love for you to address the school choice myth that bothers you the most and that you’d like to dispel.
Patrick Wolf:
That’s definitely the myth that school choice undermines democracy. We hear this a lot from opponents of school choice, that to sustain our democratic republic, we must have a robust public school sector, and that alternatives to public schooling through private school choice undermines and threatens our democracy. There have been over 50 studies of the effect of private schooling on a variety of important civic outcomes, including tolerance, political participation, political knowledge, and community involvement. And the overwhelming majority of them actually find that access to private schooling has positive effects on these civic outcomes, that it helps nurture our institutions of self-government and practices of self-government. So, there’s no reason to fear school choice in terms of it threatening or undermining our democracy. It actually helps sustain it.
Ginny Gentles:
Did you say 50 studies?
Patrick Wolf:
Yes. In our latest sweep of the literature, we found over 50 studies. Some of them are international studies, but most of them are US-based studies.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. Listeners, please consider Dr. Patrick Wolf your resource for information on research, but also implementation. Where can listeners find information about these studies that we’ve been talking about?
Patrick Wolf:
Yes. Most of my studies are on my project website, and that is at scdp.edu. That’s my School Choice Demonstration Project website at the University of Arkansas, and you can find most of the studies there.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, Dr. Patrick Wolf, thank you for all that you’ve done over the last 25 years to evaluate these programs. Thank you for talking with us on Students Over Systems today.
Patrick Wolf:
Thank you, Ginny.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. We hope listeners found today’s conversation informative and encouraging. If you enjoyed this episode of Students Over Systems, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to share this episode with your friends. To learn more about the work at the IWF Education Freedom Center, please visit iwf.org/efc. Thank you for listening to Students Over Systems. Until next time, keep celebrating education freedom and brighter futures.
