New research by Harvard professor David J. Deming studied the crime rates of young adults who participated in a random lottery at the middle or high school level. The lotteries decided whether students were able to attend a school of their choice or whether they were forced to attend their assigned public school. Students who won the lottery committed significantly fewer crimes as young adults than those who lost it. So here is another in the long list of educational outcomes improved by market freedoms and incentives.

Send this to a friend who is still on the fence about the merits of educational freedom.

School Choice Lowers Crime is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The media tide of the past two days has carried in a great flood of stories on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. ABC, NBC, AP, Reuters, the Christian Science Monitor, Politico, the Detroit News, and others joined in. This torrent of attention is due to a White House science fair at which the president announced several initiatives to boost student achievement in those fields. Details are scant, but based on the administration’s press release it seems that $100 million or so would go to encourage particular kinds of teacher’s college programs. Various extracurricular STEM programs funded by non-profit foundations were also touted in the release.

The obvious irony in the president’s plan to tweak teachers’ college programs is that those programs are themselves a key part of the problem. The nation’s state school monopolies typically require most or all of their teachers to either have a degree from a government-approved college of education or to be pursuing such a degree during evenings and weekends. Few of those studying or working in STEM fields are willing to sit through a teachers’ college program—with good reason. Not only are these programs often pointless according to their own graduates, they are not associated with improved student performance. They are a requirement without a function–at least without a function that benefits students. The one thing they do accomplish is to erect a barrier to entry that protects incumbent teachers from competition, allows the specter of “teacher shortages” to be floated at regular intervals, and thus to justify above market wages [state school teachers receive compensation that is roughly $17,000 per year higher than their private sector counterparts].

As a result, many of the most promising teaching candidates in these fields are weeded out from the start. President Obama’s plans to “improve” this barrier to entry into the profession amounts to reupholstering the deck chairs on the sunken Titanic.

But how to ensure that only effective teachers lead the nation’s classrooms given that the government certification process is not just useless but counterproductive? Here, again, there is irony. Somehow, in the thousands of different fields in which scientists and engineers work every day, the competent are distinguished from the incompetent. And somehow, those who underperform are either helped to improve or cut loose to seek work in a field (or with an employer) to which their talents are better suited. It is ludicrous to suggest that managers can effectively evaluate the work of the scientists and engineers they employ in every field _except_ education.

The media would do us all a favor if they would look past the Obama administration’s marshmallow launcher for a moment and contemplate the effect that our massive barrier to entry into the teaching profession has on recruiting scientists and engineers.

The Irony of the President’s STEM Initiatives is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One of the first things you learn when you start to study the comparative performance of school systems is this: on average, Catholic schools are much more educationally effective and vastly more efficient than state-run schools. And then you learn that their impact goes beyond the three R’s. I wrote a little about these facts a few years ago, while I was with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and my Mackinac friends have resurrected the post for Catholic Schools Week. I’ve appended an excerpt below, but you can read the whole thing here.

When state-run public schooling was first championed in Massachusetts in the early 1800s, it was under the banner of “the common school,” and it was touted more for its predicted social benefits than its impact on mathematical or literary skills. The leading common school reformer of the time, Horace Mann, promised, “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.”

Having experienced more than a century-and-a-half of a vigorously expanding public school system, Americans are no longer quite as sanguine about the institution’s capabilities. Nevertheless, there is still a widespread belief that government schools promote the common good in a way independent private schools never could.

Is that belief justified? Scores of researchers have compared the social characteristics and effects of public and private schooling. They have found little evidence of any public-sector advantage. On the contrary, private schools almost always demonstrate comparable or superior contributions to political tolerance, civic knowledge and civic engagement. One group of private schools stands out as particularly effective in this regard: those run by the Catholic Church.

Catholic Schools and the Common Good is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The American Legislative Exchange Council has just released its latest Report Card on American Education, and will be hosting an event to launch it in Washington, DC, tomorrow, at the Heritage Foundation. I haven’t had a chance to get very far into it yet, but it was established on Monday of this week that ALEC can predict the future, so it’s certainly worth a look.

ALEC’s New Education Report is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Back in 1993, when Whitney Houston hit #1 with “I will always love you”, there was something that California-based state schooling advocates didn’t love at all: a school voucher ballot initiative. Much was written on the subject, and in 1994 a booklet was published summarizing the arguments for and against (Voices on Choice, K. L. Billingsley, ed.). In today’s School Choice Week installment, we’ll hear from those who were agin’ it.

Maxine Waters, United States Congress (D, Los Angeles):
“Contrary to claims, school choice will be devastating for urban, minority, and poor students who desperately need quality education.”

Delaine Eastin, California State Representative (D, Fremont):
“Having schools without [government] standards won’t improve learning.” Private school choice “won’t teach more kids how to read and write.”

Well, actually… U.S. private school choice programs usually do improve student achievement significantly in one or more subjects, and they have never been shown to have a negative impact on student achievement. The domestic scientific evidence to that effect was collected and summarized last March by Greg Forster, for the Foundation for Educational Choice. I do have one quibble with the report (it doesn’t count the insignificant findings in studies that have at least one significant finding, as is standard practice in literature reviews) but even after addressing it the aforementioned statements would still hold true.

Heck, even the few choice programs that don’t currently seem to be raising test scores are substantially raising students’ graduation rates–and doing it at substantially less cost to taxpayers than the state schools.

What’s more, when we cast a wider net and look at scientific studies comparing government and independent schools within countries all over the world, the results are even more dramatic.  In fact, it is the least regulated, most market-like schools that most consistently outperform state-run monopoly school systems such was we have in the U.S.

Delaine Eastin:
“[T]his initiative allows schools to fail. But it does nothing to protect taxpayers when they do. When public school systems go belly up as a result of the voucher initiative, the courts are likely to rule that taxpayers will be stuck with the tab—and it won’t be cheap.”

Modern private school choice programs have been operating around the country for as long as twenty years, and I know of no case in which they have been found to increase the total burden on taxpayers. In fact, the only systematic studies of the issue find that these programs save taxpayers money—sometimes quite a bit of it. Florida’s legislature has studied the fiscal impact of that state’s k-12 scholarship donation tax credit program, and found it to save $1.49 for every $1 it reduces revenues. That’s a nearly 50% return.

What’s more, the program has been found in two separate studies to both improve achievement of students who remain in public schools and to improve achievement of students who receive scholarships to attend private schools. It’s not hard to fathom why: on average, private schools spend thousands less per pupil than does the public school monopoly.

Warren Furutani, past president, Los Angeles City Board of Education:
“It is no coincidence that dollars are being pulled from our underfunded, overburdened school system at the same time our governor and the president of this nation are pushing vouchers and choice.”

Um… Yeah… About that claim that “dollars were being pulled” from “underfunded” public schools in California. I just happen to have the actual spending trend handy:

So, not only were these Status Quo Stalwarts unable to correctly predict the future, they had some difficulty accurately describing the present. Oh, and while thrifty school choice programs around the country have been improving student achievement and attainment, it’s hard to say the same for the California’s state education monopoly.

Status Quo Stalwarts, Meet Reality
[School Choice Week Blast from the Past, Pt. 2!] is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

*by 2005…

Defenders of the educational status quo have long argued that we don’t need wholesale reform because our state-run school system can be fixed. If we simply raise spending, shrink classes, hire more teachers, or wait for the latest government mandate to work, they’ve promised, our problems will be solved. Reformers have predicted the opposite: that pouring more resources into the public school monopoly will only make it more expensive, not better, and so we need to inject real parental choice, get rid of the red tape that hobbles educators, and unleash market incentives. Who’s right?

My colleagues and I at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom normally answer that question with empirical research, but in honor of School Choice Week

we’re taking a different tack. We’re letting the status quo defenders and reformers speak for themselves, by dredging up their predictions of decades past to see who was a Nostradamus and who a Nostradumb—. To kick off this week-long series, here’s our first blast from the educational past:

“School Spending Predicted to Climb 50% by 2005” [Education Week, Sept. 22^nd, 1994]

A report published by the American Legislative Exchange Council predicted that public school spending would climb “from nearly $262 billion in 1994 to $386 billion by 2005.” ALEC also warned that the new spending would do little to help children learn, because public schooling is a government-run monopoly and monopolies are notoriously wasteful and inefficient.

Not everyone agreed. The Ed. Week story cautioned that ALEC’s “projections do not square with [substantially lower] federal estimates, and school finance experts have questioned their methodology.”

Who was right? To find out, we first have to adjust ALEC’s prediction to account for inflation (their estimate of what spending would be in the year 2005 was, of necessity, made in 1994 dollars, which were worth a lot more than dollars in 2005). Using the BLS inflation calculator, we find that ALEC’s prediction amounts to $509 billion in 2005 dollars. That turns out to have been… too low. Real U.S. public school spending in 2005 was $529 billion, according to the 2008 federal Digest of Education Statistics.

As for student achievement, ALEC was right about that, too. Tested near the end of their k-12 schooling, students performed no better in 2005 than they did in 1994—or, for that matter, in 1970 (see chart below).

‘School Spending Predicted to Climb 50%’* is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As I explain in an op-ed in today’s Orange County Register, that’s not a theoretical question. After adjusting for inflation and enrollment growth, CA spent $27 billion more on K-12 public schooling in 2010 than it did when Jerry Brown was first elected governor back in 1974. SAT scores fell over that period (see chart below).

And if a $27 billion spending boost was associated with a decline in SAT scores, why would anyone expect Governor Brown’s proposal to raise another $7 billion in education taxes to do any good?

Note that the above version of the chart includes an extra two years of (estimated) spending data from the Brown administration’s current budget document, compared to the version than ran in the OCR. I’d left off those years because I didn’t want to include estimates, only concrete figures, but I’ve already been asked about them so I include them here. The picture’s the same either way.

Would an Extra $27 Billion Improve CA Public School Performance? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Many, if not most, of the stated goals of the Democratic Party have universal appeal in the United States. Foremost among those would be reducing poverty and ensuring that every child has access to a high-quality education.

The problem with the Democratic Party today is that its leadership seems not to understand the kinds of policies that will achieve those goals. Instead of finding out what works and implementing it, they simply call for new government programs on the assumption that those programs will work (or, if you’re jaded, on the assumption that doing so will get them re-elected).

It wasn’t always like that. There was a time when one of the most prominent Democrats in the nation was so deeply committed to these goals that he was willing to advocate the policies that would achieve them—special interests be damned.

Scott Walter has a little of that story at Philanthropy Daily.

To plagiarize Instapundit: more like this, please.

Back When Democrats Cared Enough to Advocate What Works is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a new op-ed, I have the regrettable task of pointing out to my fellow Washingtonians (of the PNW rather than D.C. variety) that we have increased public school spending in the past decade by $1.6 billion and gotten _________ in return. Nothing. Nada. Rien du tout, mes concitoyens.

NAEP scores are pretty much flat at the end of high school, as are SAT scores. It is hard to argue that we really care about children’s education when we’re willing to waste $1.6 billion that is purportedly meant for that purpose. If politicians and voters in the Evergreen State do decide, at some point, to do something for children, the first step would be to stop wasting that $1.6 billion. The next step would be to follow the lead of other states, like Florida, that have found ways to improve student achievement while _lowering_ taxes.

And the Other Washington Is Messed Up, Too is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Just in time for the Christmas baking season, Norwegians are facing an acute butter shortage. Last Friday, customs officials detained a Russian trying to smuggle 90 kilos of the creamy goodness into the country by car.

Wait. What?!? Isn’t Norway that rich Scandinavian country with all the oil ?

Yup, that’s the one.

Wow… This European debt crisis is already causing shortages of staples?

No, that’s not it.

Huh. I feel silly asking this, but are they at war with someone?

Not as far as we know.

Well what gives then?

The story linked above claims bad weather hurt crops and milk production while demand has risen due to a high fat fad diet.

Well why don’t they just, you know, import more?

That’s what Sweden’s doing—they’ve had similar weather and they’ve got the same diet fad, but their stores (and soon their arteries) are chocked full of butter. But the Norwegians couldn’t do that.

Why on earth not?

Norway has a butter monopolist called “Tine” that is deliberately protected from foreign competitors by government-imposed import tariffs.

Well, with all due respect: duh! We’ve only known the damaging effects of monopolies and protectionism for, like a couple of hundred years. You’d think the Norwegian people would have wised up and ditched them by now. Americans would never stand for that sort of thing.

Norwegians seem pretty angry right now, and it sounds as though they may do just that. But I wouldn’t be too smug about the United States. Turns out, it’s got its own $600 billion per year government protected monopoly that makes Tine look like small potatoes indeed. Here’s a hint:

From Russia with Butter is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Orlando Sentinel published an article over the weekend titled “Education: Big reforms haven’t yet produced big results.” It seems to have been meant as a reality check, and certainly it does contain a few relevant facts, but it also leaves this statement from “critics” unchallenged: “schools won’t get better without more money.”

Slight problem: Florida’s k-12 scholarship tax credit is raising academic achievement at less than half the per pupil cost of the traditional state-run schools. That’s according to academic studies commissioned by the state of Florida and by the state’s own spending and enrollment data.

Figlio and Hart, 2010, found that the scholarship tax credit program improves academic performance in public schools; and Figlio, 2011, found that students using the scholarships to attend independent schools are also benefiting academically. As for cost, the average scholarship is about $4,000. For comparison, the state’s public school districts spent $27 billion in 2009-10 (bottom of page 21, first column), for 2.6 million students, for per pupil spending of just over $10,000.

Ed. Policy Reality Check (Now with More Reality!) is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Congressional Quarterly reports that Senate Democrats are pushing another $30 billion bailout—this time for public school buildings. By all accounts, many of those buildings are indeed sinking into decrepitude. But as I discovered a couple of years back, public schools are already spending 50% more per pupil than private schools that do manage to maintain their buildings. So what’s the real problem?

The answer comes from one of the federal government’s own assessments of school facilities nationwide. According to that report,

a decisive cause of the deterioration of public school buildings was public school districts’ decisions to defer maintenance and repair expenditures from year to year…. [And] deferred maintenance increases the cost of maintaining school facilities; it speeds up the deterioration of buildings and the need to replace equipment. [p. 3-4]

This is why we can’t have nice things: public school officials don’t take care of them. They already have far more money to spend than administrators of well-maintained private schools, so giving them yet more money won’t fix their problems. Perhaps Senate Democrats are not ignorant of these facts, and are merely proposing this new bailout in an attempt to make Republicans look bad for opposing a tax hike on the rich. Neither possibility shows the Democrats in a particularly favorable light.

Why Public Schools Crumble, and Why Another $30 Billion Won’t Change That is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ted Forstmann passed away yesterday at the age of 71. Forstmann was most famous for his pioneering work in the business world, and he was for a time a board member of the Cato Institute, but many others knew him as one of the most generous and thoughtful education philanthropists of our time. I first met him in the late 1990′s, when he was planning the launch of the Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF) with his friend John Walton. CSF is a non-profit K-12 scholarship organization that provides tuition assistance to low-income families wishing to send their children to private schools. Understanding that direct financial responsibility encourages parents to be more involved in their children’s education, Forstmann ensured that CSF grants required parents to make a co-payment out of their own pockets, based on what they could afford.

Critics argued that poor parents would be unwilling or unable to come up with even a small fraction of the cost of private school tuition to make these co-payments. But when CSF was launched in 1998, there were 1.25 million requests for the 40,000 scholarships initially available. The myth that poor, inner-city parents don’t care about their kids’ education was shattered. Since its inception, the program has raised nearly half a billion dollars and served 123,000 children.

The Children’s Scholarship Fund continues to operate today, and its website can be found here.

Ted Forstmann wanted all families to have access to a free and dynamic education marketplace. He didn’t live to see it, but he greatly advanced that cause. The fact that it is now within reach is in no small part due to his efforts. Scholarship programs like CSF are now operating around the country, many of them bolstered by education tax credit programs that allow donations to them to be written off, dollar for dollar, from state taxes. Such programs exist in Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona and four other states, with a new program passed this year in Oklahoma and another under consideration in Ohio. By scaling-up these programs it would be possible to achieve the goal of universal access to the marketplace that Forstmann and many others have long pursued.

We’ll keep working toward that goal. And we’ll miss you, Ted.

Education Philanthropist Ted Forstmann, RIP is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Coloradans resoundingly rejected a tax hike for education spending last week. In a new op-ed, I note how wise that decision was, and explain how lowering taxes actually does improve education—while saving taxpayers millions of dollars along the way.

Higher Taxes Don’t Improve Education; Lower Ones Do is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday the First Lady addressed high school students visiting Georgetown University for a day. Her message was to encourage students to strive for academic success and college degrees, but her answer to one question said a whole lot more. Here’s the question:

about the community, like, about this violence and teen pregnancy that’s going on…. What could you and your husband do to change or help out us young people?  Because it’s like someone dying every day.  Like, it’s just crazy.

Mrs. Obama answered at length, stressing the need for every individual to take responsibility for his own life and his own destiny, going so far as to add that

there’s all this stuff the President and Congress can do, but trust me, they can’t fix that.  No matter what, they can’t get in your head and change that.  You have to do that.

The First Lady is right that people must take responsibility for themselves, but what she seems not to realize is that government programs often stifle that kind of behavior. Responsibility is like a muscle: use it or lose it. The only way you learn how to behave responsibly is to actually have real responsibilities. Government has gotten in the way of that process in a host of ways, but nowhere so perniciously as in education. Today, the only educational responsibilities most parents have is to get their kids up in the morning and point them in the direction of the school or the school bus. They don’t decide where their kids go to school, who teaches them, or what they’ll be taught. The natural result—the inevitable result—is the atrophy of parental responsibility towards their children’s education and the horrendous cascade of social ills that flows from it.

Most of this is the fault of our state school monopolies that automatically assign children to schools based on where they live. But the federal government has exacerbated that problem by centralizing control over schooling even further. By abolishing their failed k-12 education programs alone, Congress would save the nation’s taxpayers roughly $70 billion annually. And by encouraging states to return power over education to parents instead of leaving it with bureaucrats, they would dramatically increase the exact kind of responsible behavior that Mrs. Obama knows is essential to solving so many of our social and economic problems.

Consider that the state of Florida has a program that cuts taxes on businesses that donate to non-profit k-12 scholarship funds. Those scholarship organizations subsidize private school tuition for low-income families. According to two separate studies, this program improves achievement in public schools, by virtue of the new competitive pressures it introduces, and it improves the achievement of the students who participate. And by requiring parents to make the difficult decisions as to where to send their children to school, and by requiring most parents to contribute at least a small co-payment, this program builds exactly the kind of responsibility and exactly the kind of social capital that Mrs. Obama so rightly yearns for.

Oh, and, by the way, it saves taxpayers $1.49 for every dollar it reduces state revenue, so it makes economic sense in the immediate term as well as in the long term.

But there’s a catch: This practical and proven solution does not seem to fit well with Mrs. Obama’s political ideology—or, more damagingly, with her husband’s. So instead of ending failed federal education programs and encouraging parental choice, power, and responsibility, the president will keep pursuing federal programs that even his own wife recognizes are doomed to fail.

But while it’s hard for a person to change his ideology, it’s easy for a country to change its president.

Michelle Obama on Personal Responsibility and the Limits of Federal Programs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

…Apparently, when you are the District of Columbia public school system. The Washington Times reports today on a candle-light vigil beseeching the federal government for extra cash for new computers. The group organizing the vigil, OurDC, shares this “horror story” from former technology teacher Toval Rolston:

I’ve been in D.C. schools where the computers are so antiquated that you can’t even download a basic pdf file; our children don’t have the tools to compete in today’s high tech world.

The twin implications of this plea are that DC schools are underfunded and that more money will actually be spent wisely. The first statement is false and the second is decidedly unlikely. The last time I calculated total spending on K-12 education in DC, from the official budget documents, it came out to over $28,000 per pupil (the linked post points to a spreadsheet with all the numbers).

How do you manage to spend $28,000 per pupil and not manage to keep your computer hardware up to date? Or, for that matter, manage to have among the worst academic performance in the country? Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with not being capable, or perhaps even inclined, to spend the money on what works.

The Washington Times, by the way, points out that OurDC is headquartered at the same address as the Service Employees International Union. Go figure.

When Is $28,000 per Pupil Not Enough? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The president has relentlessly called for a more extensive—and expensive—federal role in education. Here’s just one example:

The human mind is our fundamental resource. A balanced Federal program must go well beyond incentives for investment in plant and equipment. It must include equally determined measures to invest in human beings—both in their basic education and training and in their more advanced preparation…. Without such measures, the Federal Government will not be carrying out its responsibilities for expanding the base of our economic… strength.

And if we spend all those new federal dollars on k-12 education, the president promised that “it will pay rich dividends in the years ahead.”

But here’s the strange part: in that same speech, the president made this seemingly ridiculous claim:

Our progress in education over the last generation has been substantial. We are educating a greater proportion of our youth to a higher degree of competency than any other country on earth.

It’s actually not so ridiculous when you learn that the president who said it was John F. Kennedy, in February of 1961. Back then, we really had been making educational progress.

Aside from the ill-fated National Defense Education Act of 1958, the federal government had made no attempt to improve k-12 academic achievement or attainment in the four decades before JFK… and yet, as he noted, American education did in fact improve during that period.

But within a couple of years of JFK’s assassination, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now known as the No Child Left Behind Act. And in the four plus decades since, the feds have spent roughly $2 trillion trying to improve outcomes and attainment. Over that course of years, both graduation rates and academic achievement at the end of high school have been flat or declining.

Perhaps it could be argued that JFK couldn’t have known better. There was no history showing him what an expensive failure U.S. federal education spending would turn out to be. But the same cannot be said of President Obama, or of those in Congress who continue to tell the public, and presumably themselves, that fed ed. spending is a useful “investment.”

Today, we can look back at a half-century of failed federal education programs. We can think about how much better off the U.S. economy and our children would be if we hadn’t thrown $2 trillion at a calcified school monopoly that cannot spend money efficiently.

And reflecting on that history, perhaps we’ll find the wisdom not to repeat it.

American Education, From Camelot to Obamaville is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I did the above interview recently with ChoiceMedia.tv on the subject of education tax credits and vouchers, in which I argued that credits are a better way of ensuring universal access to the education marketplace. Credits can either directly reduce the taxes owed by families who pay for their own children’s education (as in Illinois and Iowa), or they can offset donations taxpayers make to non-profit k-12 scholarship programs that provide tuition assistance to the poor (as in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and several other states).

The interview elicited an important question from a commenter: If financial assistance for the poor comes from scholarship programs, isn’t there a risk that those programs will impose restrictions on how the scholarships can be used, thereby curtailing poor families’ educational options?

Minimizing that problem is actually one of the many reasons to prefer education tax credits over vouchers. Any time someone other than the parents is footing the bill for a child’s education, there is the risk that this third party is going to limit parents’ choices. The worst case, historically, has been when that third party is the government. When governments pay for schooling, there is a single set of regulations on what choices parents can make, and there is no way to avoid those regulations short of rejecting the financial assistance altogether—which the poorest families have difficulty doing. Vouchers bring with them this single set of government rules (and it is often an extensive one as I discovered in this study).

By contrast, scholarship tax credit programs, like the one in Pennsylvania, give rise to a multitude of different organizations that provide tuition assistance to poor families. If any one of those organizations decides to impose a particular set of restrictions on the use of its scholarships, it has no effect on any of the other organizations. Parents looking for financial assistance are thus free to seek it from a scholarship organization that aligns with their needs and values. The multiplicity of different sources of funding is instrumental—in fact it is essential—in ensuring that poor parents’ choices are not curtailed.

I’ve made this argument in a variety of places, most recently in a U.S. Supreme Court brief in the Arizona tax credit case ACSTO v. Winn.

Government, Education, and Freedom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A stated aim of the Obama-Reid jobs bill is to preserve the “competitive edge” that our “world-class” education system purportedly gives us. In an attempt to do that it would throw tens of billions of extra taxpayer dollars at public school employees.

A few problems with that: we’re not educationally world-class; we don’t have a competitive edge in k-12 education; and this bill would actually push the U.S. economy closer to a Greek-style economic disaster.

First, the belief that increasing public school employment helps students learn is demonstrably false. Over the past forty years, public school employment has grown 10 times faster than enrollment. If more teachers union jobs were going to boost student achievement, we’d have seen it by now. We haven’t. Achievement at the end of high school has been flat in reading and math and has declined in science over this period. I documented these facts the last time Democrats decided to stimulate their teachers union base, just one year and $10 billion ago.

So what has our public school hiring binge done for us? Since 1980, it has raised the cost of sending a child from Kindergarten through the 12th grade by $75,000 — doubling it to around $150,000, in 2009 dollars.

And what would going back to the staff-to-student ratio of 1980 do? It would save taxpayers over $140 billion annually.

But don’t those school employees need jobs? Of course they do. But we can’t afford to keep paying for millions of phony-baloney state jobs that have no impact on student learning. We need these men and women working in the productive sector of the economy — the free enterprise sector — so that they contribute to economic growth instead of being a fiscal anchor that drags us ever closer to the bottom of the Aegean. Freeing up the $140 billion currently squandered by the state schools would provide the resources to create those productive private sector jobs.

Continuing to tax the American people to sustain or even expand the current bloat, as Obama and Reid want to do, cripples our economic growth prospects by warehousing millions of potentially productive workers in unproductive jobs. The longer we do that, the slimmer our chances of economic recovery become. This Obama-Reid bill is such an incredibly bad idea, so obviously bad, that it is hard to imagine any remotely well-informed policymaker supporting it… unless, of course, they think the short term good will of public school employee unions is more important than the long-term prosperity of the American people.

Obama-Reid ‘Jobs’ Bill Soaked in Greece is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The often ingenious Jay Greene has been ingenious again. Greene chairs the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and with his co-author Josh McGee has come up with a way of ranking every school district in the United States against the international average. The idea is simple: 1) find out how each district performs in mathematics compared to the other districts in its state, 2) find out how that state compares to the U.S. national average, 3) find out how the U.S. compares to the international average, and 4) do a few straightforward statistical manipulations to make each of those findings comparable to the others, and then add them together. Rinse and repeat with reading scores.

The results, of course, vary from one district to another. The single most elite district I could think of in Washington state, Mercer Island, manages an international percentile ranking in the low 80′s—well above the international average (by definition = 50) but still a good ways away from the top of the international heap. Many other elite districts do dramatically worse. How about yours?

The one caveat I’d offer for this ranking is that it uses the PISA test to compare the performance of nations, and there are good reasons to prefer the TIMSS test as a measure of academic performance. Results on the two tests are highly correlated overall—as is the case for virtually all academic tests—but their results can differ quite substantially when a nation’s curriculum is aligned with one and not the other (Finland is a case in point, ranking #1 on TIMSS, but having ranked between 10th and 14th the last time it decided to participate in TIMSS, a decade ago).

I’d love to see Jay and Josh plug the TIMSS results into their model and provide the alternate rankings it would generate. Any chance of that, guys?

How Does Your School District Compare to the International Average? Now You Can Find Out… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog