Issued by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, "A School Privatization Primer for Michigan School Officials, Media and Residents" examines the "contracting out" of public school support services — specifically food, transportation, and custodial services. The report describes the prevalence of contracting out and sets forth the practical steps in hiring a contractor and the benefits in allowing districts to focus on their core mission of instruction. This information may help districts already committed to contracting out. However, the report presupposes that the practice is beneficial. It relies primarily on testimony from district officials rather than direct data or research. And it does not consider the significant transactions costs associated with contracting out or the risks in ceding control to an outside vendor. Overall, the report is prone to overstatement and misleading contentions, resulting in a report that greatly over-simplifies how education systems operate and the purported benefits of contracting out education-related services.

This study examines the relationship between high-stakes school accountability and its effects upon student test scores and school policies. The authors seek to understand the extent to which accountability sanctions and incentives for the poorest-performing schools in Florida explain subsequent changes in school practices and policies as well as achievement — measured by state assessment data, Stanford-10 assessment data and surveys of public school principals. Based on statistical analysis of the lowest-performing schools, the authors report that accountability incentives and sanctions are related to school practice and policy as well as to student achievement. The report uses comprehensive data sources and applies appropriate methodologies to address the research question. Its analyses demonstrate a mediating relationship for school policies between accountability and achievement gains, a finding consistent with both the literature on the subject and common sense. However, the report overstates and makes causal claims about the relationship between accountability sanctions and improvements in school achievement. In this way, the report’s title and some causal statements in the body of the report are unfortunate in that they overstate the report’s sound findings and suggest that vouchers and other accountability measures are shown to be the cause of achievement gains in some of Florida’s lowest-performing schools.

Five sister reports published by the Friedman Foundation over the past two years have ignored the relevant research literature in asserting that private-school voucher programs can reduce the social costs of dropping out while increasing graduation rates. The reports are state-specific, targeting five different states. But each report follows a parallel structure, arguing that the state in question overestimates its graduation rate, that the costs of drop-ping out are dramatic and that a private-school voucher program can increase graduation and address the dropout problem by generating competition. Yet the reports largely ignore the existing research literature on the personal and social benefits of educational attain-ment, the effects of school competition, and the factors associated with either completing or dropping out of high school. Further, each report does not provide sufficient information about how the author estimated the statistical claims made for each state, and the author fails to compare the alleged benefits of private-school vouchers with plausible alternatives, such as increasing public-school choice programs or improving graduation through other programs. State policymakers interested in increasing graduation would be better served by seeking out the available, well-researched scholarship on the topic.