When people try to mobilize voters (whether for partisan or ideological reasons, or simply to increase participation), they usually rely on at least an implicit theory about what makes people decide to vote.

On one hand, there are so many strong reasons in favor of voting that we might expect everyone to participate at every opportunity. Federal, state, and local governments collect about $2.9 trillion of our money each year and spend even more (pdf). They also make policy decisions of great importance, including the decision to wage war. By the simple and cost-free act of voting, each person gains an equal power to move this whole apparatus in the direction of his or her preferences. At the same time, voting influences who governs, thereby affecting the character, style, and principles of public leaders. Even if one ends up on the losing side of an election, a vote expresses a citizen?s values and signals his or her preferences to other citizens and political actors.

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I commented earlier on the recent finding that students in charter schools perform somewhat worse than other students on standardized test. This finding was reported in a New York Times lead article that has prompted much criticism. A certain theme has emerged in some of the blog commentary on that article …

Matthew Yglesias: “‘charter school’ doesn’t really name a kind of school, so much as a kind of procedure for creating a school. Different charters are very different from one another and different jurisdictions have different rules for how a charter school can be created. Aggregate data about charter school performance, then, is much less useful than comparative data about what sorts of charter schools succeed (and what sorts fail) and what chartering systems tend to generate good ones (or bad ones).”

Chester Finn: [C]harter schools are astoundingly varied. We’ve known for ages that hanging a ‘charter’ sign over the door doesn’t assure a good school, or predict a bad school, nor can one readily generalize about them. In fact, the variability among charter schools surpasses that of regular public and private schools. That’s one reason they’re hard to study?because having a ‘charter’ may be less important than the school’s core mission, which might be dropout recovery, or the arts, or bilingualism, or giving new options to disabled children. Some of the best schools I’ve ever been in are charter schools, some of which are blowing the lid off test scores in such vexed communities as Boston, New York and Chicago. And some of the worst?and flakiest?schools I’ve ever been in are charter schools. Yet people are choosing them.”

Fair enough–I agree with this. Whether a school is a charter or not isn’t the important thing; what matters is the curriculum, the personnel, the leadership, the mission, the level of parental involvement, and so on. But note what this implies. Charter schools do differ from almost all conventional public schools in a couple of key respects: they compete for students and they develop their own rules and philosophies, independent of educational bureaucracies and teachers’ unions. Many people believe that bureaucracies and unions are the problems in education, and that competition and choice are the answers. If that were true, then charters, as a category, should be substantially better than non-charters, even granting that there is variance within the charter category. Instead, they are no better, even controlling for student demographics.

Although EduWonk is much more critical of the New York Times story than I am, I agree with his bottom line: “Charters are about creating space for good providers of public education to enter the educational sector, there is nothing magical about the charter label per se. … Is every charter school great? Of course not. Are there too many low-performing ones? Yes. However, the solution to that problem is not to do away with charters but rather to ensure that public policies rigorously weed-out the low-performers while not hamstringing the many high performing public charter schools changing the lives of youngsters every day. For that to happen though requires a d?tente on all sides of this debate and Eduwonk doesn’t see that happening anytime soon since most charter critics don’t want good charter schools, they want no charter schools and some in the charter movement don’t seem to have much use for the ‘public’ aspects of public schooling.”

I’ve been worried about terrorists using weapons of mass destruction since the mid-1990s, probably because my family and I live 3.25 miles from the White House. Even before 2000, there was plenty of alarming news about Osama bin Laden, if you looked for it in the mainstream press. For instance, on July 17, 1997, The New York Times reported:

Mr. bin Laden, whose fortune is estimated at more than $250 million, became involved with the resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970’s. After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, he moved to Sudan, where he became more involved with anti-American Islamic groups.

“Osama is a very dangerous character,” said Larry Johnson, a former State Department antiterrorist official now working as a private security consultant. “He has a lot of money, and he hates the United States.”

Mr. Johnson said Federal investigators had information that showed Islamic fundamentalist groups, consisting mostly of legal noncitizen immigrants from the Middle East, had received money from Mr. bin Laden. … Although it is not unusual for terrorist groups to raise money in the United States or to send money to supporters here, Mr. Johnson said, it is rare for foreign terrorists to carry out an attack in the United States.

“The level of terrorist activity within the United States is really very low,” he said. Groups typically do not want to trigger the type of response that an attack in America would bring, he said.

“Osama,” he said, “may not have the same constraint.”

A few weeks before 9/11/01, there was an unannounced fireworks display for Mexican President Vicente Fox, and I was afraid that terrorist bombs were going off. Although I was as shocked and saddened as anyone by 9/11, I felt a small undercurrent of relief that Osama hadn’t used atomic weapons. Now the publication of Graham Allison’s Nuclear Terrorism has got me worried again. On the bright side, his site generates “blast maps” for any US address you choose, and I have determined that our own apartment is out of the range to be “ravaged by radiation and fires” should a 10-kiloton bomb explode outside the White House. I guess we should count our blessings.

Charter schools are publicly-funded institutions that operate independently of the main educational system. Each one develops its own ideas about curriculum, governance, admissions, discipline, and financial matters, negotiates an appropriate contract with the local or state agency that will fund it, and recruits students to fill its classrooms. In an earlier post, I argued that charter schools were not very promising means to improve student achievement (as measured by standardized test), but they were valuable because they gave Americans opportunities to “propose solutions to public problems, band together voluntarily, and then work directly to implement [their] ideas.”

Today’s New York Times leads with the news that students in charter schools scored lower than other public school students on almost every part of the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This is a very preliminary finding. Possibly, charter schools are more effective than other public schools, yet they attract a more disadvantaged student population, and this is why their scores are lower. As Tom Loveless commented after the release of his earlier study of charters, “One possible explanation for the lower test results is that the charter schools are not doing a very good job … But an equally plausible explanation is that charters attract large numbers of students who are struggling academically in public schools before ever setting foot on a charter school campus.”

In any case, strong supporters of charter schools are evidently shocked by the raw difference in student performance. “‘The scores are low, dismayingly low,'” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a supporter of charters and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, who was among those who asked the administration to do the comparison.” Finn and his colleagues apparently felt sure that schools that competed for students would dramatically outperform conventional public institutions.

The results reported in today’s Times suggest that charters are (at best) only slightly more effective than standard schools; and they are probably less good on average. Since charter schools operate in a competitive market, this finding should worry people who believe that competition is the best solution to educational problems. I have always been skeptical of that theory. After all, by what mechanism should competition improve schools? Perhaps

1) … by motivating teachers and administrators to work harder? Competition might force schools to shed the individual burn-outs and shirkers in their workforce. However, I doubt that a lack of motivation is the major problem in schools. Many educators are already overworked and underpaid. Nor will teachers and administrators be motivated to expand the size of their schools, since they don’t profit from expansion, and it may weaken their institutions as communities.

2) … by promoting experimentation and developing better models? Maybe, but this assumes that there are cost-effective, replicable “solutions” that could be developed in one school and implemented elsewhere. It is not clear that education works like that.

3) … by providing more options to parents/guardians and students? Diversity and choice are good, but they can be provided in many ways–not only through competitive market systems. A typical suburban high school rivals a shopping mall in the number of choices it offers its students. My sense is that skillful and motivated kids benefit from choice, but kids who start on the wrong track simply make bad choices and get into worse trouble.

People like Chester Finn not only believe in competition; they also believe that most public schools–or at least most urban public schools–are scandalous failures. It certainly is true that graduates (not to mention drop-outs) of urban school systems are poorly prepared for a competitive labor market. But it is not clear that the schools themselves are doing a poor job with the resources they have. It’s always worth asking: “Compared to what?” Compared to state-funded but competitive and innovative charter schools, standard schools appear to be doing fairly well.

Now that the raw difference in test scores has turned out to favor the non-charter schools over the charters, the government’s attitude toward research seems to have changed. According to the Times:

In a significant departure from earlier releases of test scores, Mr. Lerner said the charter school findings would be formally shown only as part of a larger analysis that would adjust results for the characteristics of charter schools and their students.

In the 1990’s, the National Assessment Governing Board had rejected requests from states for such analyses, with Mr. Finn, then a member of the board, contending that explanatory reports would compromise the credibility of the assessment results by trying to blame demographic and other outside factors for poor performance.

Although I haven’t read Finn’s remarks from the 1990s, I suspect he argued that it would be morally wrong to adjust test scores for factors like income and race, since that would imply that there was something intrinsically wrong with being poor or belonging to a minority group. Some conservatives advocate color-blind research as well as color-blind law and public policy. I’m sure they sincerely hold this view. I would respond that race is always only a proxy for something else; but we typically find differences by race, and we need to analyze them in order to develop appropriate responses. Likewise for family income, parental education, and gender.

Anyway, Finn and his colleagues expected that charters would perform better than non-charters on the NAEP. They may have feared that this advantage would be reduced once demographic factors were included in a statistical analysis. When charters scored worse than standard schools, there was suddenly an appetite for multivariate statistical models. The best hope of charter proponents is that those schools will score higher than standard institutions once we adjust for race, income, prior performance of students, urban residence, etc. However, an AFT study (pdf, p. 17) finds that charter school students are less likely to be poor than other students in the same districts. While much more research needs to be done, it appears that charter school students come from more advantageous backgrounds than other students, and yet score lower on the NAEP. I continue to favor charters because of their potential for democratic and civic renewal, but I wouldn’t argue that they raise test scores.

Follow up: Robert Garcia Tagorda led me to the AFT’s 2004 study of Charter Schools, which I should have seen earlier. In this study, charters performed no better, but not much worse, than non-charters, controlling for student demographics, location, etc. Tagorda and other critics of the AFT and the Times think that this report favors charters, because they performed almost as well as other schools; the gap reported in the Times article vanishes once when controls for demographics. [The previous sentence is not fair to Tagorda; see his comment.] But one could just as easily interpret the results as an argument against competition as a panacea. Even though charters compete for students, they get slightly worse test scores than standard schools with comparable populations.

Various bloggers–for instance, Togorda, EduWonk, and Daniel Drezner–see the AFT’s fingerprints on the Times story and assume that the union is working against charters. Drezner says, “Shame on the Times — and its editorial board, for that matter — for buying the AFT spin hook, line and sinker.” It does seem likely that the AFT prompted the story. But that doesn’t mean that the union is an implacable enemy of charters. AFT President Al Shanker first proposed the whole concept in 1988. The people I know at the union remain generally in favor. Perhaps the AFT isn’t trying to destroy charters but just wants more rigorous research, now that we’ve seen a sequence of relatively discouraging preliminary results.

If you were worried that charter schools were bad for education, then the AFT study suggests that you can relax. I wasn’t worried about that–I guessed that they would be marginally beneficial. If, however, you believed that charter schools would quickly and substantially raise test scores, because they operate in a free and competitive market, then the AFT study should send you back to the old drawing board.

There are reasons to think that youth turnout will increase in 2004, after thirty years of decline (pdf). Young people are clearly more attentive to news and issues this year, and more convinced that voting is important. Just for example, according to Harvard?s Institute of Politics, half of college students said in April 2000 that they would ?definitely? vote. Four years later, that proportion has increased to 62 percent. As I recently told the (Spokane) Spokesman Review, “those in Generation Y ? an age bracket generally considered to include those born in the 1980s and later ? have grown up in an era of serious news. … They’re clearly paying more attention and are expressing more interest in voting.”

Furthermore, political parties and interest groups seem to be shifting their campaign tactics and technologies in promising ways. Since the 1970s, they have generally preferred to target likely voters whose political views they know. In my New Progressive Era book (p. 127), I quoted several campaign consultants’ advertisements that made sales pitches like this one:

Targeting Contributors, Targeting Voters, Targeting Issues, and Automated Dialing to Targeted Homes …. Automated dialing can be used both to identify supporters and key issues, and … on election day to maximize key voter turnout. Sophisticated databasing techniques including desktop mapping are used to deliver mail and voice messages to specific constituency groups.

It’s most efficient to target mail and phone messages to specific addresses, but television and radio ads can also be aimed at narrow demographic groups. Unfortunately, young voters are never on the target lists. They always vote at lower rates than older people, and their voting preferences are unknown. A vicious circle results: young people are not sent campaign messages, so they don’t vote, so they are viewed as even less desirable targets.To make matters worse, no one needs their labor, because computers and technical experts can handle databases and mailings all by themselves.

This vicious cycle may be turning virtuous. The parties are in a deadlock, so they need every vote they can get. People are throwing away mass mailings and TIVO-ing their way past campaign commercials, so those techniques are less and less effective. Rigorous experiments conducted by Donald Green, Alan Gerber, and others have proved beyond a doubt that young people will vote if real human beings call them or knock on their doors, encouraging them to participate. Although the parties keep their precise campaign tactics secret, I have it on good authority that both parties, led by the Republicans, are pouring resources into face-to-face campaigning. And they are including youth on their target lists and as campaign workers.

Meanwhile, non-profit groups–some ideological and some interested only in youth participation–are spending many millions of dollars on advertising, events, and door-to-door canvassing aimed at youth.

This is the good news, and it’s good enough that I’m hopeful about youth turnout in November. There are, however, some clouds in the sky. Most of the positive factors were already in place earlier this year, yet youth turnout in the Democratic primaries (pdf) was basically flat. Whatever major social forces have depressed youth participation in the United States and Europe may not vanish so quickly. I believe these factors include the weakness of parties and ideologies, the pervasive cynicism of the news media, and the tendency of schools to abandon their civic missions.

Also, candidates, parties, and ideological groups are clearly going to emphasize “battleground” states this year. Although they may spend money on door-to-door campaigning, they won’t bother with California, New York, or Texas, large states where the result is considered certain. That’s bad news for turnout. The question is how narrowly they define the “battleground.” If they continue to see quite a few states as contested, then turnout should be as good or better than in 2000. If the list of swing states shortens, participation could actually decline.

Finally, I’m convinced that persuading people about the generic importance of voting is only one step in a two-step sales pitch. Prospective voters also have to decide to support or defeat a particular candidate. Youth turnout surged in 1992, and there were two reasons for that temporary increase: Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. Both men attracted millions of marginal voters who would not have participated without them. It remains to be seen whether any of this year’s candidates can motivate youth as strongly. Again, they don’t have to be seen as heroes; sometimes voters turn out to defeat a perceived villain. But young people must feel that there is a clear choice. If the next ten weeks plant the idea that the 2004 race involves a flip-flopping professional politician versus an incompetent frat boy (who share the same positions on Iraq and the economy), then I won’t be optimistic about youth turnout.

p.s. Surveys from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press are showing that the percentage of young people who are registered to vote is flat compared to 2000.