[MUSIC] Today we're going to be moving into the second unit of the course, focused on school choice. Within that, we're going to be talking about a broad set of issues around the kind of notion or the foundational history for school choice. To start with a couple of quotes. We've chose these to illustrate the debate and the kind of polarized view points around school choice. And what you see here really captures the polarized views that exist in the field about both the notion of school choice but also about what school choice has accomplished. I think one of the difficult things about the debates around school choice is how connected to political view points they've become, and so there's these assumptions that if you're Democrat you should think certain things about school choice. And if you're Republican you should think certain things about school choice. And as a result there is a tremendous amount of pressure that's placed along party lines and individuals within them to see these issues around school choice in certain ways. And so providing these quotes, opening with these, hopefully gives you a flavor of the way that stakeholders across different groups in the United States see what is a very charged and very political issue. So to begin, I want to provide an overview of the unit around school choice. There's going to be three segments in this unit. The first is going to be a summary, which is going to give kind of foundational history of how school choice came to be in the United States, and to help you to understand the many different forms that school choice takes. I think when most people think about school choice they think charter schools or the think vouchers, generally speaking. And in this foundational summary lecture, I think you'll be surprised to see that there are many different kinds of school choice and that actually some of them date back to as far as the 1860s. And this, I think, is an assumption that most people don't bring to this topic. Most of the conceptions of that people have about school choice are modern conceptions from about 1995 forward. So what we'll do in that summary set of lectures is to provide some context around the topic. So in terms of the school choice summary, what I hope you'll gain from the foundational set of lectures around school choice is a deeper understanding of the history and the theory behind it. Why would we think the notion of individuals, of parents and students, choosing where they get to go to school would be a good lever, either for school level improvement or for improving the outcomes of individual students. There are a lot of assumptions that are kind of baked into the notion of school choice, that being able to choose your own school setting has some kind of benefits for individual students but also has some kind of benefits for the system as a whole, for driving system-level improvement. [COUGH] Excuse me. And so we will try to understand from historical point of view what the theory of action is and how that's played out in different types of school choice across history in the United States. Another aspect of what I'll be providing in this summary is a viewpoint into some of the ideological issues that are raised in the school choice debate. One that's really foundational to that is this notion of whether education is a private or public good. I talked about this in the foundational, historical lectures, the tenets of American public schooling. That we have this notion that education is both a private good, so it's something that supposed to be for the individual, but there's also some aspect of the education experience and the education space supposed to be for the citizenry as a whole. And so trying to understand how we balance these competing demands and these views of education as a private or good will be part of what we do in this historical segment. Then we're going to get more deeply into a particular type of school choice and trying to understand charter schools, but also the theory of action behind it. There are assumptions about charter schools that some have. That these are not public schools and so I'm going to try to help to create a deeper understanding about what charter schools are and are not. Because they actually are public schools that receive public money. But also helping you to understand the types of autonomies that charter schools have around things like governance and selection of school staff. Around the way that money is provided to the school. And the way that school's are allowed to use their money. Kind of helping you to understand the distinguishing features of charter schools. And then we'll spend a little more time trying to understand are they effective or not. I'm sure that if you read the news, you see that there are arguments made that charter schools are a lot better than traditional public schools. And there are some studies and arguments made from those that suggest that charter schools are actually a lot worse than traditional public schools. So I'm going to give you some illustrations from research studies and data. As well as give you some recommendations of places you can look on your own to understand what we actually know about charter school quality. And I hope that through this, as we did in the first unit, what you'll gain is a much more nuanced understanding of what school choice is and isn't. And be able to formulate more informed viewpoints on what you think about this very controversial topic. So that ends the overview portion, and next we're going to move into a segment that focuses on the summary and historical aspects of school choice. [MUSIC]