Florida Voucher Threat Makes Schools Improve

From a report by Brendan Farrington for the Associated Press:

Gov. Jeb Bush's education accountability plan is working a lot better than his brother's is in getting low performing schools to improve, a Harvard University study found.

The stigma of receiving an F grade under the governor's "A+ Plan" combined with the threat of losing students to private schools has led to an increase in test scores, according to the study distributed Tuesday.

Simply put, the threat is that inadequately performing schools will lose students to private schools unless they improve. Consequently, public school educators are motivated to teach the students for fear of losing their funding.

On a school-by-school basis, performance is measured by how much classroom knowledge students actually acquire as demonstrated through testing results from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. It's assumed that the testing doesn't cover self-esteem or tolerance or diversity or feel-good factors and other subjects that frequently crowd the curricula away from classes on core subject material.

The Harvard study also states that the Florida voucher-threat system achieves better results than the No Child Left Behind law.

President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) doesn't quite have the same impact, largely because the stigma of not making the grade isn't as strong and its school choice provision doesn't have as much of an impact on school districts, the study said.

The researchers are indicating that the provisions of the NCLB law are not as threatening as the Florida plan and, therefore, not as effective.

Opponents of the NCLB law believe that it is too threatening now. Nonetheless, according to the study, if it were more threatening, better results would be achieved.