Corporation
of New York
Vol. 2/No. 1
Fall 2002
Moving Beyond Storybooks: Teaching Our Children to Read to Learn
Carnegie Corporation in Africa
Also in this issue:
Privacy in the Information Age
Studying Ways to Protect Privacy in an Era of Terrorism
Carnegie Corporation Holds a Journalism Forum
Past Issues:
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Scholarship for Social Change
Caroline Hoxby
When Caroline Hoxby was 13 years old, she signed up for the toughest course
her public school had to offer, an elective in what Thomas Carlyle dubbed
the dismal science, economics. “I just loved it,” recalls Hoxby,
now 35 and a professor of economics at Harvard University. “Growing
up in the 1970s, I was deeply aware of economic problems and I was really
excited to find out that there was a whole science seeking answers to
these questions. I can remember reading Adam Smith and thinking, ‘Oh
my gosh! Someone has figured this out!’ I was just thrilled. It’s
been a life-long love affair with the subject.”
Hoxby, who is also the director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research as well as being a fellow of the Hoover Institution, the Sloan Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2000 and given support to conduct research in promoting excellence in public education through an innovative system of student vouchers.
The project flows naturally from Hoxby’s longstanding interest in the economics of education, which was the subject of her doctoral dissertation as well as her theses for Oxford (where she earned an M. Phil. in economics), and Harvard, all of which won awards. As a pioneer in the economic issues of education, her research and testimony at state and federal hearings over the last decade have influenced policy and public debates on many school reform ideas, including the benefits of decreasing class size (it yields surprisingly small increases in student achievement, she found) and increasing students’ choice of schools (her research suggests that competition generates significant increases in student achievement). While she delves into these highly controversial school reform issues, she says she does so as a scientist with complete indifference to her findings or their political ramifications. “Frankly, I’m not very interested in politics.”
It was ten years ago, while doing research for her dissertation, that Hoxby began investigating the traditional form of school choice that Americans take for granted—parents’ freedom to choose schools for their children by choosing where they live or by choosing private schools. One implication of this freedom to keep in mind, says Hoxby, is that “middle-class parents won’t stay around to experience” unpopular school reforms. So while competition is inherent in our school system, it is an imperfect form of competition—urban school districts, having lost out to suburban districts, no longer face competition from any school because the remaining families are often too poor to move away or pay tuition at private school.
In 1980, the economists Milton and Rose Friedman first addressed this loss of urban competition by proposing a system that would give each student a voucher representing the annual public investment in his or her education. In their system, parents would then “spend” the voucher at any participating public or private school and, in the process, spur the development of a competitive and diverse educational marketplace that the Friedmans believed would engage parents and significantly improve education.
While the Friedmans’ voucher idea generated enormous interest and controversy,* the nation’s economists were too preoccupied with other issues to develop the Friedmans’ model, says Hoxby. In economists’ absence, a sociologist and two legal scholars developed the first voucher proposals; politicians launched experimental programs in a few urban districts; and, subsequently, political scientists, legal scholars and policy experts—not economists—evaluated the early voucher experiments. “It’s paradoxical that economists were out of the loop,” says Hoxby. “As a result, many commentators abandoned the idea of trying to find analytic answers to questions about choice—and many people decided that vouchers were essentially a matter of principle. Unfortunately, when people view something as a matter of principle, their positions tend to harden, undermining any likelihood of consensus or compromise.”