By Alex Shashkevich
For several years, a debate has been ongoing in the United States over whether charter schools are good or bad for the country’s education system and the 50 million children it serves.
Supporters say that charter schools foster innovative learning experiences because they are not bound by the same governmental regulations imposed on public schools. Opponents say that charter schools deplete public schools of funding and contribute to racial segregation.
This is one of several complex issues that Stanford Professor of Education Susanna Loeb explores in a newly published book, Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-making.
Loeb says both the supporters and opponents of charter schools – and the decision-makers who set educational policy – might not have the data they need to fully weigh the pros and cons, in part because most research has focused on test scores rather than other measures.
While test scores measure outcomes such as the knowledge students gained in school, Loeb and her co-authors encourage policy-makers and education researchers to consider the many different outcomes of an education. They hope to inspire more social science research that focuses on more than just measuring test scores.
“Being explicit about what values matter helps decision makers understand what is at stake and helps researchers orient themselves to provide the relevant evidence,” Loeb and the other scholars write.
...
We spend a lot of time arguing about how schools might be improved. But we rarely take a step back to ask what we as a society should be looking for from education—what exactly should those who make decisions be trying to achieve? In Educational Goods, two philosophers and two social scientists address this very question. They begin by broadening the language for talking about educational policy: “educational goods” are the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that children develop for their own benefit and that of others; “childhood goods” are the valuable experiences and freedoms that make childhood a distinct phase of life. Balancing those, and understanding that not all of them can be measured through traditional methods, is a key first step. From there, they show how to think clearly about how those goods are distributed and propose a method for combining values and evidence to reach decisions. They conclude by showing the method in action, offering detailed accounts of how it might be applied in school finance, accountability, and choice. The result is a reimagining of our decision making about schools, one that will sharpen our thinking on familiar debates and push us toward better outcomes.