Author Archive
Arne Duncan, Secretary of Wheel Reinvention
The final guidelines for the Administration’s “Race to the Top” education reform program have now been released. It’s a system that stimulates competition between the states to produce results that the customer (Secretary Duncan) wants, using financial incentives. Déjà vu, anyone?
It’s as though Arne Duncan recognizes the merits of free market forces, but rather than faithfully reproducing them in the field of education, he’s decided to give us his own reimagining of them.
Here’s the problem. There are already 25 years of scientific research comparing real free education markets to traditional public school systems. It overwhelmingly finds that markets do a better job of serving families. But we have no evidence at all that Secretary Duncan’s newly invented system will do anyone any good.
So why go to all this trouble to reinvent the wheel, when the Secretary’s own Department of Education has found that an on-going federal private school choice program—which gets much closer to a genuine education marketplace—is raising students’ reading ability by two grade levels after just 3 years of participation?
The Other Side Plays Dirty
On the day that we honor veterans for defending our freedom, I read this:
Community groups and Los Angeles Unified officials on Tuesday condemned an anonymous flyer handed to Latino parents that threatened them with deportation if they supported plans to convert their neighborhood school to a charter.
Calling it an escalation in a series of “scare tactics,” district officials and community advocates said distribution of the flyer was timed to weaken one of LAUSD’s boldest efforts to reform public education in Los Angeles.
A generation or two from now, when children are studying how school choice began to spread throughout America, they will read of such incidents and marvel at the depths to which opponents sunk.
If you’re a policymaker or opinion leader, on which side of that history will you want your name to appear?
How to Flunk the Taliban
An interesting story in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighting how private schools are outcompeting both radical madrasas and government schools in the hearts and minds of a great many Pakistanis. Sounds a little bit like this.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Foreign Policy and National Security
The Bell Curve Mean Business
Over the past month, Charles Murray and I have been debating the proposition that better schools can significantly improve educational outcomes – can shift the “Bell Curve” substantially to the right. Charles finds this “touchingly naïve,” while I argue that it is empirically inescapable.
Ben Chavis, founding principal of Oakland’s extremely high scoring American Indian Public Charter Schools, has invited Charles to put his skepticism to the test, and perform research to validate or refute the achievements of Ben’s inner-city students. But Charles believes he’d find only a modest (< 0.25 std. dev.) test score effect to AIPCS attendance, that would, moreover, be evanescent. Charles grants that Ben has created a very good school, he’s just convinced that even very good schools cannot have large or lasting academic effects.
The evidence simply does not support Charles’ skepticism.
I’ve already noted that there are average effect sizes for market education systems that are much greater than Charles’ threshold. Just a few months ago, it was reported that three years in private schools under DC’s voucher program raises reading achievement by two grade levels (0.42 std. dev.), and effect sizes of even 2/3ds of a std. dev. are not unheard of.
Those are average effect sizes of competitive education markets over public school monopolies. Since we agree that Ben’s school is quite special, there is every reason to expect his school’s effect size to be on the high end of the range already identified in the research.
And what of Charles’ assumption that school effects are necessarily evanescent, fading to insignificance within a few years after students leave the school? This, too, is contradicted by the evidence. Numerous studies have looked at long term effects of consuming market schooling instead of monopoly schooling – particularly on students’ eventual success in college and their earnings once they’ve entered the labor market. Economist Derek Neal has found that urban blacks attending Catholic schools are twice as likely to graduate from college as similar students attending public schools. That is a large effect several years out, and it, in turn, will have an enduring positive effect on students earnings. In fact, of 17 research findings comparing the eventual educational attainment and earnings of market school graduates to public school graduates, 11 find statistically significant positive effects, and none find significant negative effects (see Table 3 in the previously linked paper).
The evidence is clear that competitive education markets have significant, lasting, and often quite substantial positive effects over government school monopolies. So I can see no empirical basis for Charles’ skepticism.
What’s more, this should be intuitively obvious. The current mean of the bell curve of educational achievement is not some inescapable fact of nature, like the value of pi. It is a symptom of the monopoly school systems that have stifled educational efficiency and innovation for more than a century. Just as establishing the rule of law and liberating economies from the thrall of central planning have led to dramatic economic growth around the world, so would liberating education from the thrall of government school monopolies shift the bell curve to the right.
Why National Democrats are Like Wile E. Coyote
Illinois state senator James Meeks, an African American Democrat and long-time opponent of school choice, just switched sides.
In doing so, he swells the small but growing ranks of Democrats in Florida, New Jersey, and the nation’s capital, among others, who support giving parents an easy choice between public and private schools.
Like Wile E. Coyote, national Democrats have run off a political cliff in their reflexive opposition to educational freedom. And like Wile, they’re experiencing a temporary suspension of the law of gravity — not yet suffering for their mistake.
But we all know that the cloud at Wile’s feet eventually dissipates, and he realizes that he’s no longer on solid ground. By then, it’s too late.
As someone much happier under divided government than one party rule, I hope national Democratic leaders get a clue, and notice that the’ve left solid ground on education. There is still time for Obama and company to make it back to the cliff’s edge, calling for the expansion rather than the termination of DC’s K-12 scholarship program, and voicing support for education tax credits at the state level, as many of the party’s state leaders have already done.
States are going to continue passing and expanding private school choice programs with or without the support of national Democrats. If president Obama and friends continue clinging to the anvil of government schooling while that happens, we all know how it’s going to turn out.
Beep. Beep.
(HT: Alexander Russo)
Ben Chavis to Charles Murray: “Bring it”
In an exchange I had with Charles Murray earlier this month, he complained that there was no bulletproof scientific research documenting miraculous improvement in student achievement attributable to great schools like those of Ben Chavis.
At the time, that objection was beside my point, which is that there is copious evidence that competitive market education systems yield very substantial (if not “miraculuous”) improvements over the status quo government monopoly. We don’t need miracles to prove that there is a much better way of organizing and funding schools.
But that wasn’t enough for Ben Chavis. He called yesterday to pass along a proposition to Charles: come perform the research yourself. In fact, Ben offered to put Charles up in his own house.
I don’t know if Charles will go for this, but I wish he would (or find a grad student who will). And here’s why: I think Charles is so skeptical of the results of great schools and teachers because he has not come across any mechanism in his studies that could adequately explain those results. But I contend that there is such a mechanism: a school culture so strong and conducive to academic effort that it can overcome the absence of an academically supportive culture in the home.
If you read Jay Mathews’ wonderful book Escalante, or Ben’s Crazy Like a Fox, this becomes immediately clear. The school environment in these rare cases becomes a much more powerful influence on students’ willingness to work and expectations of success than is normally the case. These great schools tap into a fundamental human desire to belong to a team that offers them support and to which they feel an obligation to be supportive in return. It’s the same impulse that leads soldiers to put their lives on the line for their buddies in combat, and that sustains the insane work ethic in high tech startups.
This is one reason why free enterprise education systems excel all others: they offer the greatest freedom and most powerful incentives for excellent schools to replicate their cultures on a grand scale.
Attorney General Tries to Silence School Choice Ad
This, finally, is too much: Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States, walked up to former DC Councilman Kevin Chavous at an event and told him to pull an ad criticizing the administration for its opposition to the DC school voucher program. The Attorney General of the United States!
This is as outrageous and shameful as it is consistent with other administration hostilities toward free speech (see also here) and freedom of the press.
There is a deep revulsion to such behavior in this country. It is not a Republican or a Democratic revulsion, it is an American one. Obama administration officials seem not to understand that, but voters will help them get the message the next time they go to the polls.
Arizona Republic Corrects its Tax Credit Savings Estimate in Response to Cato Input
Last Wednesday, the Arizona Republic published a fiscal impact assessment of the state’s education tax credit programs for k-12 private school choice. While the story itself was a good faith effort, there were errors in both its data and assumptions. I wrote an op-ed intended for the Republic correcting those errors and e-mailed a copy to the story’s author, Ron Hansen, the same day his story was published.
While the paper’s editorial page expressed no interest in printing my submission, the Republic published a correction today based on the accurate spending and savings figures I provided. In a phone call, Hansen indicated that the correction was precipitated by my e-mail, though he opted not to mention that in his story, saying that he didn’t think the source of the correction was important.
On the one hand, Hansen and the Republic are to be commended for publishing a correction, and it should be noted that the bad data were provided to them by Arizona Director of School Finance, Yousef Awwad. On the other hand, their correction is incomplete — acknowledging only the bad data and not the mistaken assumption explained in my op-ed.
So while the Republic has now raised its savings estimate from their originally reported $3 million to a corrected $8.3 million, they have yet to explain that this figure could actually understate the total savings.
Still, their response is better than I expected. Most newspapers, in my experience, do absolutely nothing when factual and reasoning errors in their education stories are brought to their attention, and in fact go on to repeat those same errors in subsequent stories.
And they wonder why two thirds of the public now doubt their credibility….
NAEP Math Scores, NCLB, and the Federal Government
I’m surprised anyone was surprised by the recent flat-lining of scores on the NAEP 4th grade math test. The rate of improvement in NAEP scores has been declining since No Child Left Behind was passed, and the recent results are consistent with that trend.
But what really amazes me is that so many people think the solution is just to tweak NCLB! The unstated assumption here is that federal policy is a key determinant of educational achievement. That’s rubbish.
We’ve spent $1.8 trillion on hundreds of different federal education programs since 1965, and guess what: at the end of high school, test scores are flat in both reading and math since 1970, and have actually declined slightly in science. (Charted for your viewing pleasure here).
If we’ve proved anything in the past 40 years, it is that federal involvement in education is a staggering waste of money.
Meanwhile, education economists have spent the last several decades finding out what actually does work in education. They’ve compared different kinds of school systems and it turns out that parent-driven, competitive education markets consistently outperform state monopoly school systems like ours. I tabulated the results in a recent peer-reviewed paper and they favor education markets over monopolies by a margin of 15 to 1.
So policymakers who actually care about improving educational outcomes should be spending their time and resources enacting laws that will bring free and competitive education markets within reach of all families. And they should be ignoring the education technocrats who — like Soviet central planners — just want to keep spending other people’s money tweaking their fruitless five year plans.
Is Michelle Obama Right about Teachers?
First Lady Michelle Obama wrote yesterday in US News and World Report that we face a teacher shortage. She laments that up to a third of current teachers could retire in the next four years. The solution, she says, is to embark on an aggressive and multifaceted teacher recruitment campaign.
But here’s an interesting thought: What if a million teachers really did retire in the next four years, and we only replaced half of them?
Catastrophe? Millions of kids without teachers? Nope. In fact, we’d still have a lower pupil/teacher ratio than we did in 1970. Back then, we had 2 million teachers for 45.5 million students. Today, we have 3.2 million teachers for not quite 50 million students.
For the past 40 years, we’ve added teachers a lot faster than we’ve added students. In fact, we’ve added other staff even faster. As a result, the total staff to student ratio has gone up by nearly 75% since 1970.
There are plenty of critical problems with American education, but a looming crisis in the size of the teaching workforce is not one of them.
Paul Krugman vs. The Daily Show
In a recent New York Times column (“The Uneducated American”), Paul Krugman writes that, “for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars.” As a result, Krugman continues, U.S. education has been “neglected” and “has inevitably suffered.”
Readers who put their trust in Krugman might thus conclude that per pupil spending has stagnated or declined. In reality, as the chart below reveals, it has more than doubled since 1970, after adjusting for inflation.
Paul Krugman may not be an “uneducated American,” but he’s certainly a badly misinformed one.
Much more troubling is the fact that Krugman and the Times are spreading this misinformation on a grand scale. And that got me thinking about Jon Stewart. When Time magazine recently asked Americans to name their most trusted newscaster, the comic and Daily Show host won in a landslide. Many pundits have taken this as a sign of the Apocalypse, worrying that so many Americans are getting their facts from a presumptively unreliable source. But is the Daily Show really less reliable than Paul Krugman and the New York Times?
To find out how they stack up on this particular question, I Googled the Daily Show’s website for any discussion of education spending. The most relevant hit was an exchange in the show’s on-line forum. In it, a commenter claims that spending per pupil has risen by a factor of 10 since 1945, after adjusting for inflation. That’s not too far off the mark. The actual multiple is just under 8. So folks who get their facts from the Daily Show’s website will be better informed on this subject than those who trust the Nobel Prize winning New York Times economist.
Not only is Krugman wrong to claim that public schools have been financially “neglected,” he is wrong to imagine that higher public school spending spurs economic growth – which is the central point of his column. Better academic achievement does help the economy – but, as the chart above illustrates and many scholarly studies have demonstrated, higher public school spending does not improve achievement. And by raising taxes without improving achievement, it may actually slow economic growth.
Media elites have been wringing their hands over the collapse in public demand for their products, over the two thirds of Americans who now doubt their credibility, and over the fact that more people now get their information from the Daily Show’s website than the New York Times’s.
Perhaps the media might attract more readers and rebuild trust if they were to stop publishing material less reliable than the blog discussions on a comedy show’s website. Just a thought.
Throwdown with Charles Murray
In a response to my post this morning, Charles Murray remains unconvinced that changes to our school system could result in dramatic improvements in educational outcomes.
He asks to see the scholarly study showing that a school has miraculously boosted achievement above the norm. In one way, this hurdle is too low, and in another it’s too high.
If we could only point to a single study of a single school, it wouldn’t instill much confidence in the generalizability of the phenomenon. A consistent pattern of scholarly results is necessary for that. On the other hand, asking for “miraculous” improvement is a needlessly high standard. My disagreement is with Murray’s earlier, lower threshold claim that: ”reforms of the schools can never do more than produce score improvements at the margin.”
Let’s call a marginal improvement an increase of less than .15 standard deviations above the current mean (typically considered a “small” effect in the social sciences). Taking that as our litmus test, is there a consistent pattern of scholarly evidence that better school system design can boost achievement by more than .15 standard deviations? Yes.
That pattern is presented in the figure above, drawn from my recent review of the global econometric literature comparing educational outcomes across different types of school systems. The figure relates the number of statistically significant findings favoring free education markets over state school monopolies (in white), significant findings of the reverse (in light grey), and insignificant findings (in dark grey). Markets beat monopolies by a ratio of 15 significant findings to 1, across the seven educational measures for which data are available.
We Are not Seeing the Bell Curve’s Toll
Last week, I posted a chart on this blog showing the percent change in federal education spending and student achievement since 1970 (achievement has been flat while federal education spending has nearly tripled).
After laughing out loud when he saw it, IQ expert and Bell Curve author Charles Murray mused that “such a huge proportion of a child’s educational prospects are determined by things other than school (genes and the non-school environment) that reforms of the schools can never do more than produce score improvements at the margin.”
But consider the accomplishments of Ben Chavis, who spoke at Cato last Friday. When he took over the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland in 2001, it was the worst school in the district. Under his leadership (imagine a hybrid of Socrates and Dirty Harry), the school’s scores rose dramatically year after year. Within seven years, it had become the fifth highest-scoring middle school in the state — though continuing to enroll a student population that is overwhelmingly poor and minority.
It was not a freak occurrence. Chavis did it again, and again: creating a second AIPCS middle school as well as a high school, both of which are also among the top schools in the state, and both of which also enroll chiefly low income minority students.
Murray has made a compelling case over the years that IQ is real, strongly tied to academic achievement, and determined in significant measure by nature and home environment. But academic achievement is also powerfully determined by schooling. Typical U.S. test score data camouflage the significance of schooling because so many schools are so amazingly bad at maximizing academic achievement — especially for poor minority students.
But Chavis — and others before him and alongside him today — have shown how to do it: instill in the school environment those cultural characteristics necessary for academic success that are missing in the home.
In a free enterprise school system that would automatically disseminate and perpetuate great schools like Ben’s, average test scores would rise dramatically above their current levels. The Bell Curve would be shifted dramatically to the right.
Chart of the Day — Federal Ed Spending
The debate over No Child Left Behind re-authorization is upon us.
Except it isn’t.
In his recent speech kicking off the discussion, education secretary Arne Duncan asked not whether the central federal education law should be reauthorized, he merely asked how.
Let’s step back a bit, and examine why we should end federal intervention in (and spending on) our nation’s schools… in one thousand words or less:
While the flat trend lines for overall achievement at the end of high school mask slight upticks for minority students (black students’ scores, for instance, rose by 3-5 percent of the 500 point NAEP score scale), even those modest gains aren’t attributable to federal spending. Almost that entire gain happened between 1980 and 1988, when federal spending per pupil declined.
And, in the twenty years since, the scores of African American students have drifted downard while federal spending has risen stratospherically.
Who Will Fill the Gap Left by Don Fisher?
Don Fisher, co-founder of the The Gap chain, passed away on Sunday. Not only was Fisher a partner in the construction of a vast retail empire that would make any entrepreneur proud, he was also a partner in funding the expansion of the KIPP chain of charter schools — something that would make any philanthropist proud.
Thanks to the $60 million that he and his wife Doris committed to KIPP’s growth, it now serves 20,000 students in 82 schools across America. In k-12 education, public or private, that level of growth is unusual.
But how can it be sustained? How can those who share Mr. Fisher’s commitment to bringing excellent educational options within reach of all children ensure that his efforts are not simply maintained but expanded? And how can we ensure that not just KIPP but any similarly excellent school can scale up to serve a mass audience? These are questions that the education policy community desperately needs to answer.
Another Chance to See Bill Cosby and Ben Chavis
In case you missed the MSNBC education townhall event featuring Bill Cosby and star charter school principal (and author) Ben Chavis and others, it will re-air this coming Sunday from noon to 2:00pm.
‘Course, you can’t ask your television set questions (not with a reasonable expectation of satisfactory answers, at any rate). So why not plan to stop by the Cato Institute on Friday, October 2nd at noon, and meet Ben Chavis in person along with Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews? We’ll be reserving plenty of time for questions — and it should be a mighty interesting event: “America’s Top Models: Can the Nation’s Best Charter Schools Be Brought to Scale?”
Hope to see you there.
Duncan’s NCLB Reauthorization Push Shows Extreme Tunnel Vision
In a major speech to be delivered today, education secretary Arne Duncan will call for an end to ”‘tired arguments’ about education reform” and ask for input in crafting a ”sweeping reauthorization” of the federal No Child Left Behind act. His decision not to openly debate the merits of reauthorization — to simply assume it — guarantees the tiredness and futility of the discussion.
Americans have spent $1.85 trillion on federal education programs since 1965, and yet student achievement at the end of high school has stagnated while spending per pupil has more than doubled — after adjusting for inflation. The U.S. high school graduation rate and adult literacy rates have been declining for decades. The gap in achievement between children of high school dropouts and those of college graduates hasn’t budged by more than a percent or two despite countless federal programs aimed at closing it.
The secretary himself acknowledges that after more than half a century of direct and increasing federal involvement in schools, “we are still waiting for the day when every child in America has a high quality education that prepares him or her for the future.
In light of the abject and expensive failure of federal intrusion in America’s classrooms, it is irresponsible for the Secretary of Education to assume without debate that this intrusion should continue. Cutting all federal k-12 education programs would result in a permanent $70 billion annual tax cut. Given the stimulative benefits of such a tax cut it is also fiscally irresponsible for the Obama administration to ignore the option of ending Congress’ fruitless meddling in American schools.
Waiter, Cancel That Order of Crow
Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post writes today that she feels compelled to “eat at least a spoonful of crow.”
Her menu selection is driven by her assessment of President Obama’s “education reform” accomplishments to date.
The term “education reform” is meaningless. All it implies is that, in whatever small way, things will be done differently from the way they have been done in the past. Not necessarily better, or worse, just differently. Even the president’s painfully vague campaign message (”Hope and Change”) at least indicated that the sought-after change was supposed to be in a positive direction. “Reform” doesn’t even convey that — let alone giving any indication of the nature, rationale or evidence for the change.
So, yes, the president is “reforming” certain aspects of education. But whether it’s higher-ed, pre-k, or the qualified expansion of charter schools, the new form does not seem noticeably better than the old one.
Repeat after Me: “We Are All Individuals”
A millennium or so ago, Steve Martin played a stadium with his stand-up act. He got the crowd of tens of thousands to repeat a series of statements in unison. My favorite, for sheer irony: “We Are all Individuals.”
But, the thing is, we are.
This is why I never cease to be amazed by disagreements like the one currently playing out between the curriculum groups “Common Core,” and “Partnership for 21st Century Skills.”
Is there really one curriculum that is right for every child in this nation of 300 million people? Really?
Rather than fighting a winner-take-all Shootout at the O.K. Curriculum, which is what our illustrious leaders seem to want, how about this peace-loving alternative: we let teachers teach whatever and however they want, and we let families choose and pay for whichever schools they think are best for their kids (with financial aid for those who need it).
‘Cause the thing is, a quarter century of econometric research is repeating, in Steve-Martin-Like unison that: educational freedom works.
Public Schools Should TEACH Lord of the Flies, Not REENACT It
Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day…
– Horace Mann, the father of U.S. public schooling, 1841
How would Mann have reacted, I wonder, to the knowledge that his Common Schools would be expanded beyond his wildest expectations, end up enrolling 50 million children at a cost of over half a trillion dollars annually, and produce results like this:
And of course this attack wasn’t unique. A search for “school fight” on YouTube returns over 100,000 hits. How do private and charter schools compare to traditional public schools when it comes to safety and crime? Have a look at the Heritage Foundation’s recent study of the DC area.
And as for “the efficiency of which” Mann believed public schools were “susceptible,” it’s hard to find any sign of it a century-and-half into our experiment with them:
U.S. Total Per Pupil Spending vs. Achievement of 17-year-olds
Do we wait another century and a half to see if public schools will end crime and start spending efficiently? Or do we give families and taxpayers alternatives today?
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