Overview: School Choice

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From the course by The University of Chicago

Critical Issues in Urban Education

35 ratings

The University of Chicago

Critical Issues in Urban Education

35 ratings

Urban school reform in the United States is characterized by contentious, politicized debate. This course explores a set of critical issues in the education and educational reform space, with a focus on aspects of the field that have sparked controversy and polarized views. We will dig into these debates, situating them within the larger history of public education and school reform, and considering the viewpoints, the evidence, and translation of issues into educational policy. We will consider three broad topics in this course: 1. Federal Strategies in School Reform: How has the federal government legislated and incented public school reform? 2. School Choice: How does school choice aim to improve schools? 3. Accountability: What is the history of accountability in American public schooling? What are the policies and practices associated with accountability? Learning Goals This course will enable participants to: 1. develop an informed historical perspective about public schooling in the United States; 2. understand the unique contextual elements of the American approach to public schooling; 3. analyze and assess divergent viewpoints about American public school history and school reform policy. Teachers may be able to receive continuing education credit for successful completion of this course. To earn continuing education credits students must purchase and earn the Course Certificate, which they can then submit to the credit-issuing agency in their state. Students should also fill out the requisite paperwork stating that the affiliated provider is the Graham School at the University of Chicago, and that average time for certificate-level course completion is 18 hours. Students outside of Illinois should contact their state’s accreditation board to determine whether this course is eligible for continuing education credit. Note that it is up to the schools or districts that employ teachers to decide whether this course meet their requirements.

From the lesson

Summarizing Debates around School Choice

School choice includes a set of practices and policies that aim to provide new educational options for students, to improve individual, school and school system outcomes. The concept on the surface sounds simple and logical and yet school choice is complex in implementation and has sparked much debate. What are the reasons for this controversy? Together, we will examine the history, types of school choice, the debates about effectiveness, and the ways in which this theory of action has become highly politicized and controversial.

Overview: School Choice6:21

Meet the Instructors

Sara Ray Stoelinga
Sara Liston Spurlark Director and Clinical Professor
Urban Education Institute

[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]

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