[Vision2020] Forwarding Jack Wenders Reply

[Mike Curley]

At his request, I am forwarding (below) Jack Wenders' 
response to my posting replying to his comments on VA 
Hospitals and public schools.  
Please note Jack is not a V2020 member, so if you 
respond to his comments below, please include him as a 
separate recipient of your posting. mike curley

JACK WENDERS' COMMENTS:

 1. The idea that the private sector could not absorb all
 the 
students who would want to leave the public schools if 
given
a voucher is spurious. Of course, in the short run, they
could not. However, if one thinks in more realistic longer
run terms, simple economic incentives would  take over:
demand creates supply. If every student were given a 
voucher
for, say, 65% of the present cost of educating a public
school student--that would be somewhere between $4800 
and
$5600 per year (see
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2003/digest02/tables/dt036.asp) my
prediction is that over time you would see a huge supply
response from the private schools sector. Indeed, one 
would
expect many current public school teachers would go into 
the
schooling business, and with all those empty public schools
around, capacity would be selling for a song.

 2. Sixty five percent is the approximate per pupil cost of
comparable private schools compared to US public 
schools and
public schools in OECD (developed) countries. See:
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~jwenders/Essays%20In%20Persu
asion/New2/Public_School_Ineff_(APEE-MSW).htm I have more
recent drafts of this paper, if you're interested, but the
overall conclusions of this draft are about the same.

 3. I find it curious that you assume so many students would
 
want to leave the public schools if given a voucher for
their cost. This belies the common assertion that they are
so great. My prediction is that most would leave if given a
voucher for only 65% of the current public school cost, and
there would, over time, a plentiful supply of private
schools. See also:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-025.html for a survey of
comparable private school tuition.

 4. You say "there is no evidence that public schools
 teachers 
are less skilled than private/parochial teachers." Not true.
 If one looks at the characteristics that make for a good
teacher--primarily verbal cognitive ability and, at the
secondary level, a masters in one's teaching subject--one
finds that private (and charter) schools tend to hire more
teachers with these characteristics. See Chapter Six in:
Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky. 1997.  Teacher Pay and
Teacher Quality. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for
Employment Research. And, with respect to charter schools,
Caroline Hoxby's recent paper:

 ". . . [S]chool choice would change the teaching profession
 
by raising the demand for teachers with high quality college
education, raising the demand for teachers with math and
science skills, and raising the demand for teachers who make
extra effort and assume responsibility. Keep in mind that
school choice raises the demand for teacher characteristics
that attract parents. The evidence suggests, therefore, that
parents value teachers' college quality, teachers' effort,
and teachers' subject area knowledge (math and science are
fields with chronic shortages of subject area knowledge).
All of the characteristics apparently valued by parents are
characteristics likely to improve student achievement. . . .
.  The evidence suggests that school choice would reduce the
demand for credentials that are not valued by the broader
labor market, such as master's degrees in education (many of
which are low quality) and teachers' certification."

Hoxby, Caroline M. 2002. "Would School Choice Change the
Teaching Profession?" Draft; January 2002.
(http://post.economics.harvard.edu/
faculty/hoxby/papers.html).

 In a larger sense, these findings of Hoxby, and Ballou and
Podgursky, are remarkable. There is a large body of
independent literature that the teacher characteristics that
produce better student performance are cognitive ability,
some experience, and, at the secondary level, a major or
masters degree in one's teaching subject matter. Little in
traditional teacher education seems to matter much.
Remarkably, it turns out that these teacher characteristics
are also the very ones that are emphasized by private
schools. In other words, private schools, driven by parental
choice in the marketplace, emphasize the very
characteristics that independent research has found to be
most important in student performance. I find that a
remarkable non-coincidence. It also shows that market
mechanisms do a better job of effecting teacher quality than
do top-down, credentialed, approaches.

 5. You say: "there is no clear administrative savings."
 Well, 
since private schools usually have NO administrators above
the school level, clearly there would be a savings there.
Even the Catholic schools, which do have an administrative
structure above the school level, have much lower
administrative costs. In the mid-1980s, there were 3,300
employees in the central and district offices of the Chicago
public school system, a mere 36 administrators oversaw the
schools of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, although its
student population was 40 percent of that of the public
schools and it served a much larger geographical area. At
the same time, the nation's largest school district, New
York City, had 6,000 administrators in the government
schools and only 25 in the Catholic schools, although the
Catholic schools served about one fourth the number of
students the government schools did. The Baltimore
Archdiocese manages 34,000 students in 101 schools with 7
administrators, while the nearby Harford County public
schools need 64 administrators to oversee 36,000 students in
51 schools.

 6. Mandates are part of the problem, they are not an excuse
 
for it. Why not turn all public schools into charter schools
and dump the mandates?

 7. I do not recall mentioning anything about teachers' pay
and unions but I would be happy to provide some facts about
that too. In summary, the evidence shows that private
schools' pay their individual teachers some 80-85% of what
public school teachers are paid. In addition, public schools
have a very inefficient personnel management and pay policy:
the salaries are much too top heavy. In Moscow, for example,
74 (45%) of  teachers are in the single top cell of the
salary grid where total compensation is $62,358 per year.
123 (75%) are in the top five highest paying longevity
cells. No private enterprise has such an unproductive,
bloated, top heavy compensation structure. The combination
of higher individual pay and the top-heavy nature of the
salary distribution in public schools explains why private
schools, on average, have a per teacher cost of about 65% of
the public schools', and goes a long way toward explaining
why comparable private schools' costs are similarly lower.

 I would be pleased to respond further to any questions you
 might have.

 Jack

-- 
John T. Wenders
Professor of Economics, University of Idaho
Senior Fellow, The Commonwealth Foundation

Mailing Address:
2266 Westview Drive
Moscow, ID  83843

Voice: 208/882-1831
Fax:    208/882-3696
Cell:   509/336-5811
Alpine, AZ: 928/339-4342

www.uidaho.edu/~jwenders

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