RALEIGH – North Carolina has a self-congratulatory streak. North Carolinians are more likely than any other population to believe that they live in the best state in the union (according to public policy polls and my own observations). They claim to be innovative across a host of business and public policy sectors, despite the lack of real evidence. They are proud (for the most part) of their history, their geography, and their collegiate athletics.
The problem lies when this civic-minded boosterism turns into a willful ignorance and a stubborn refusal to recognize contradictory information. I’ve written often in this space about North Carolina politicians’ tendency to overstate our very real gains in national test scores, for example, or to claim that programs like former Gov. Jim Hunt’s Smart Start are “proven successes.” There are other cases illustrating the same problem.
I was reminded, however, of the test sore and Smart Start instances while reading a paper presented by four scholars who have studied parental choice programs in a number of cities. In one study of privately funded voucher programs in Washington, New York, and Dayton, the Harvard-affiliated scholars found that expanding educational opportunities for minority children through choice had a dramatic effect on standardized test scores after two years. Other studies, including one the John Locke Foundation commissioned a couple of years ago of its privately funded scholarship program in Charlotte, have found similar results for low-income or minority children.
As you may know, similar claims have been made by advocates of testing regimes like North Carolina’s, of preschool programs like Smart Start, and of class size reductions. But here’s something you probably haven’t read on the front page of your local newspaper: the benefits of school choice have proven to be larger. In accountability reforms, for example, North Carolina and Texas have justly claimed to have gained the most in recent years in national test scores after implementing statewide testing programs. In statistical terms, the two-year impact is estimated to be about .12 to .14 standard deviations. On class-size reduction, the gain in a famous Tennessee experiment was estimated to be about .21 standard deviations. A recent report on Smart Start estimated that high-quality child care in North Carolina could result in improvement in kindergarten readiness of about .20 standard deviations (though Smart Start was not itself linked to this result and it does not mean that subsequent educational performance was necessarily better).
And vouchers? Their documented impact on recipients’ test scores have ranged around .30 to .35 standard deviations. Our CSF-Charlotte program showed a .25 gain in just the first year, or nearly four times that experienced in the first year of testing programs such as North Carolina’s ABCs of Public Education.
So why haven’t North Carolina policymakers and newspapers trumpeted the great success of school choice and recommend its dramatic expansion statewide? Why do we continue to hear about relatively smaller gains from far more expensive and intrusive government programs?
Because the ABCs testing program, Smart Start, and class size reductions were championed by North Carolina politicians who are still in office or who at least have a strong interest in preserving their reputations. They know that such puffery will continue to play well to many North Carolinians predisposed to think the best about the state and its accomplishments.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.