Financing Entrepreneurial Education: Part IV >> Nevada Policy Research Institute

Financing Entrepreneurial Education: Part IV

Do empowerment schools produce real educational achievement?

By Patrick R. Gibbons

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Many good things can happen when decision-making moves from the central district office down to the local school. It can save money, encourage the wise use of scarce resources, and even — during recessions — protect your school's finances.

But does school decentralization produce better quality public education?

Because empowerment schools are a fairly young concept, a genuinely definitive answer to that question is not yet available. Developments, however, are promising.

Among the more successful programs has been Houston's, where Dr. William Ouchi found the program closed the racial achievement gap by four points in reading and six points in math in three years. In Cincinnati, as of 2008, empowerment schools had in eight years helped raise graduation rates from 51 to 82 percent. In Boston, a Boston Foundation study found that students in that city's empowerment program outperformed students in the district's traditional public schools. Meanwhile, the Oakland Unified School District was California's most improved urban school district, four years in a row.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), however, suggests a less-definitive picture. Boston and Chicago have only pilot empowerment programs while the programs of Houston and New York City are district-wide. All of these urban districts have larger concentrations of minority and low-income students than is typical for the average American public school. The districts also have healthy charter school programs — making it difficult to separate out the impact of empowerment schools.

The results suggest that the districts with empowerment schools have improved student achievement on the NAEP mathematics exam at a rate faster than has the average public school. On the NAEP reading exam, however, the results were less impressive and more mixed. On the fourth-grade reading exam, only Boston saw a percentage improvement greater than did the average public school. On the eighth-grade reading exam, Boston, Chicago, and Houston saw improvement greater than did the average public school.

Table 1: NAEP Math Scores and percent increase 2003-2007

NAEP Fourth-Grade Math Exam
District	2007 Score	% Increase
Average Public	239	2.18%
Boston	233	5.94%
Chicago	220	2.59%
Houston	234	3.21%
New York City	236	4.27%
NAEP Eighth-Grade Math Exam
District	2007 Score	% Increase
Average Public	280	1.45%
Boston	276	5.34%
Chicago	260	2.36%
Houston	273	3.41%
New York City	270	1.50%

Table 2: NAEP Reading Scores and Percentage Increase 2003-2007

NAEP Fourth-Grade Reading Exam
District	2007 Score	% Increase
Average Public	220	1.85%
Boston	210	1.94%
Chicago	201	1.52%
Houston	206	-0.48%
New York City	213	1.43%
NAEP Eighth-Grade Reading Exam
District	2007 Score	% Increase
Average Public	261	0.00%
Boston	254	0.79%
Chicago	250	0.81%
Houston	252	2.44%
New York City	249	-1.19%

Because the available data supporting empowerment is limited, we cannot conclude with certainty that all empowerment schools will improve student achievement. A 2005 report by the National Education Association, the country's largest teacher union, said empowerment "will require time to prove effective or ineffective for large urban schools."

What we do know, however, is that other decentralization efforts have proven highly successful. Charter schools — privately run public schools — are similar to empowerment schools to the extent that they receive funding per student, control their own budgets and develop their own curricula.

Research by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University revealed that students randomly selected to attend charter schools in Chicago and New York City outperformed students who were randomly selected to remain in regular public schools. New York students attending the charter schools from grades K-12 closed 86 percent of the low-income/high-income achievement gap in math and 66 percent of the gap in English.

Charter-school competition has also made standard-model public schools better. Research by Marcus Winters at the Manhattan Institute found that competition from charter schools in New York City helped to provide a modest boost in student achievement for students "left behind" in other public schools. The Boston Foundation also found that students in charter schools not only outperformed the traditional public schools but even Boston's empowerment schools.

These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that decentralization improves student achievement. While charter and empowerment schools both receive greater autonomy from the central office, charter schools have more control over their budgets and operations. It would not be unexpected, therefore, for charter schools to perform slightly better than empowerment schools.

Clearly, decentralization can improve student achievement. So, while empowerment schools may not absolutely guarantee success, they can improve results — assuming the incentives are structured properly.

Incentives matter a great deal, as we shall see in our next installment.

Patrick R. Gibbons is an education policy analyst at the Nevada Policy Research Institute.

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Tags: Education, School choice, Teacher unions