If Vouchers Don't Measure Up, Just Change the Measure

I have thought for some time that the biggest threat to the hegemony of the testing accountability complex will come from the school privatization movement, whose own researchers know in dark center of their whoring hearts that charter schools and voucher schools more often than not produce lower test scores than the public schools they are replacing.

We have evidence that this now could be happening, as Trump's feds and states like Florida and Tennessee are beating the bushes to find any and all positive correlations between clean living, hard work, and voucher school attendance. 

An interesting piece from the Conversation, with good links, too:

For the past couple of decades, proponents of vouchers for private schools have been pushing the idea that vouchers work.

They assert there is a consensus among researchers that voucher programs lead to learning gains for students – in some cases bigger gains than with other reforms and approaches, such as class-size reduction.

They have highlighted studies that show the positive impact of vouchers on various populations. At the very least, they argue, vouchers do no harm.

As researchers who study school choice and education policy, we see a new consensus emerging — including in pro-voucher advocates’ own studies — that vouchers are having mostly no effects or negative effects on student learning. As a result, we see a shift in how voucher proponents are redefining what voucher success represents. They are using a new set of non-academic gains that were not the primary argument to promote vouchers.

How success is defined is particularly important now in light of the fact that Florida and Tennessee – which are both controlled by Republicans – have created new publicly funded voucher programs in May 2019.

In April, a large-scale study — conducted by voucher advocates — found substantial negative impacts for students using vouchers to attend private schools. . . .

Read on.