Harvard Scholar Criticizes Obama’s Anti-School Choice Slant

President Obama’s plans for overhauling the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as No Child Left Behind, leave behind choice and competition, a Harvard scholar writes in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.

Paul Peterson, a professor of government and director of director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, criticizes Obama’s blueprint to reauthorize the nation’s main education law for omitting key reforms.

Peterson argues restrictive teachers union collective bargaining agreements, court interventions, and “useless teacher certification laws” hinder more innovative reforms, such as charter schools. Peterson writes that expanding charter schools from 3 percent of schools to 50 percent would “eventually raise American students’ math scores to be competitive with the highest-scoring countries in the world.”

Obama touted his blueprint in Saturday’s weekly radio address and submitted the plan to Congress on Monday. Peterson writes that while few Americans would disagree with Obama that America’s public schools remain in trouble, the president’s solutions are incomplete.

“What the president left out is that the performance of American high school students has hardly budged over the past 40 years, while the per-pupil cost of operating the schools they attend has increased threefold in real dollar terms,” Peterson writes. “If school districts were firms operating in the market place, many would quickly fall victim to [Twentieth century economist Joseph] Schumpeter’s law of creative destruction.”

Peterson also criticizes historian Diane Ravitch, whose new book, The Death and Life of the Great American Schools, is receiving widespread media attention and some pointed criticism from reformers.

“In that book, she offers a naïve and static view of markets,” Peterson writes.

“Ravitch and other critics of school choice reverse causation by blaming the sad state of public schools on events that occurred long after schools had stagnated,” Peterson argues. “They point, for example, to President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law (enacted in 2002), mayoral governance of schools recently instituted in some cities, and the creation of a small number (4,638) of charter schools that serve less than 3% of the U.S. school-age population.”

“To uncover what is wrong with American public schools one has to dig deeper than these recent developments in education,” he says.

Peterson underscores charter schools’ potential for innovation. “Educational opportunity is about to be revolutionized by powerful notebook computers, broadband and the open-source development of curricular materials (a la Wikipedia). Curriculum can be tailored to the level of accomplishment each student has reached, an enormous step forward.”

“If American education remains stagnant,” Peterson writes, “such innovations will spread slowly, if at all. If the charter world continues to expand, the competition between them and district schools could prove to be transformative.”

Peterson’s latest book, Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, will be published March 30 by Harvard University’s Belknap Press.