Author Archive
‘A Confident Person with Shiny Teeth’
“Sometimes people just want to hear a confident person with shiny teeth tell them appealing stories about the secrets to success.”
So writes Jay Greene in his debunking of Marc Tucker’s education reform book Surpassing Shanghai. Jay’s whole review is worth reading, but the basic point is simple: you can’t learn much about the systemic causes of success if you only look at a single success story or even at a small handful of them. You need to cast a wide net to detect meaningful patterns. Having spent a lot of time casting wide nets, into both the historical and modern evidence, I couldn’t agree more. But maybe Jay would just tell me that’s confirmation bias 
[HT: Bill Evers]
On School Choice, Jews Can Have Their Lekach and Eat it, Too
In a recent WSJ op-ed, Peter Beinart calls on American Jews to ease up on their concerns about freedom of conscience and freedom of religion and embrace school vouchers. Beinart notes that,
Outside the Orthodox community, American Jewish organizations have for decades opposed government funding for religious schools. The most common objection is that by intertwining church and state, such funding threatens religious liberty
Fortunately, Beinart’s Solomonic choice between freedom of conscience and educational freedom is unnecessary. It is not only possible to achieve both, it is easily done thanks to education tax credits.
A problem with school vouchers is that they channel state spending to families and thence to religious schools. This compels every taxpayer to support every kind of education, including varieties they may find deeply objectionable–violating their freedom of conscience in a way that Thomas Jefferson called “sinful and tyrannical” in his 1786 Act Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia.
But under education tax credit programs, no taxpayer is compelled to pay for any sort of private schooling at all, and those who chose to do so get to determine the kind of schooling they support. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this distinction in its ACSTO v. Winn decision last year, upholding a scholarship donation tax credit program in Arizona.
Here’s how scholarship donation tax credits work: taxpayers can choose to make a donation to a non-profit organization that subsidizes tuition for families who need it. When they make that contribution, their taxes are cut—usually dollar for dollar. If they do not make any such contribution, their income is taxed as it always was in the past, and cannot be used for the support of any private school.
“Direct” or “personal use” tax credits are even simpler: they cut the taxes of parents who shoulder the cost of their own children’s education. Here again, no one is forced to pay for any sort of education to which they might object.
Not only are tax credits superior to vouchers from the standpoint of freedom of conscience, they are also superior to the status quo public school system, which forces all taxpayers to support a single official organ of education that cannot possibly reflect everyone’s values.
So, rather than abandoning their principles, defenders of freedom of conscience can pursue them far more effectively by advocating education tax credits than by propping up the status quo or by advocating alternative school choice policies.
We’ve Added Feathers and it Still Won’t Fly?!?
Economist Rick Hanushek argues today that there is no evidence to suggest “weighted student funding” will improve public school outcomes as its bipartisan backers hope. He contends that simply tying school-level funding to students, and thereby bypassing some of the budgetary role of districts, will create no systemic incentive for improvement and will not advance more substantive reforms.
He’s almost certainly right. Instead, Rick contends that districts should be financially rewarded based on their performance, borrowing a key aspect of the free enterprise system. But just that one aspect… and that’s a problem. There is no reason to believe that slapping a single isolated aspect of the market system on to the side of our state school monopoly will transmogrify it into a model of efficiency and responsiveness. Any more that strapping feathers to a brick can make it fly.
Rick is of course right that no system can produce the outcomes we need and want unless excellence is rewarded and failure penalized. But much more is needed to achieve those ends than simply funding successful schools or districts at a higher level. In the free enterprise system, the entrepreneurs who create successful products and services are personally rewarded for that success. They are free to enter the marketplace with their new ideas and to risk their own and their investors’ money in the hope that those ideas are sound–losing it if they are mistaken. If successful, they can raise capital for expansion by being able to offer a return on that investment, and grow organically or by taking over and turning around failing competitors. None of that is possible within a monopoly school system.
A great deal of empirical evidence exists indicating which education policies work, which don’t and why. The clear conclusion is that market freedoms and incentives are the answer to our education woes. But these freedoms and incentives cannot be retrofit, piecemeal, into our creaking, ossified, Rube Goldbergian school monopoly.
Hoover’s Mission Imponderable?
The mission statement of the Hoover Institution reads, in part, as follows:
This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its Bill of Rights and its method of representative government. Both our social and economic systems are based on private enterprise from which springs initiative and ingenuity…. the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social or economic action, except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves….
Hoover’s Koret Task Force on Education has just released a report calling for various changes to federal K-12 policy, but nonetheless preserving a significant role.
I have great respect for many of the members of this task force, and agree with their stated goals, but the U.S. Constitution delegates no education policy powers to the federal government, and the 10th Amendment reserves such unmentioned powers to the states and the people. So in keeping with its mission statement, no Hoover task force should be recommending a continued federal role in education policy.
No loophole is provided by the exception for cases where “local government, or the people, cannot undertake” the given actions for themselves. There are at least 15 states that are already moving in the direction of private school choice that the task force is suggesting. Clearly states can undertake such actions.
Of course Hoover is not alone in making recommendations unmoored from its stated mission and from the sound constitutional principles that mission embraces. But given its many brilliant and capable members, perhaps it is one of the few that can recognize it is adrift and still see the light of its principles on the horizon.
Why Are There No Googles or Apples in Education?
Invent a better way to search the Web and you can conquer the world in a few years. Make better tools for communicating and accessing the Web and it’s the same story. But come up with a better way to teach reading or math and … nada. Excellence routinely “scales up” in every field except education. Why?
Read on … “Education’s Missing Apple: The Free Enterprise Solution?”
This One Is of the Charts
Education professor Sherman Dorn imagines foul play and education policy maven Matthew Ladner is withholding judgment for the time being. Ladner recently made use of some of my charts of the public school productivity collapse, and Dorn has taken issue with one of them, depicted below [from my February 2011 testimony to the House Education and the Workforce Committee].
Actually, the earlier version of the chart Ladner used really did have some incorrect data in the first decade of the spending series [yes, even people who worked at Microsoft sometimes mess up cut and paste], but the corrected February 2011 version also shows the roughly tripling in cost to which Dorn objected, so he would presumably still hold to those objections. Here they are:
First, once I looked at Table 182 from the 2009 Digest of Educational Statistics, it became clear that the cost figure increases (supposedly the total cost of a K-12 education taken by multiplying per-pupil costs by 13) are false. If you look at the columns in the linked data (Table 182), the per-pupil costs when adjusted for inflation approximately double rather than triple as asserted in this figure. Second, there is no possible source for the approximate “0%” line from NAEP long-term trends data, unless there is an additional calculation unexplained by Coulson.
As described in its legend and title, this chart presents the “running 13-yr (K-12) total spending per pupil” to arrive at the “cost of a k-12 public education” in constant, inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a running total, here’s Wikipedia’s explanation. So for a student graduating in 2009, the running total cost of k-12 education is the sum of average per-pupil spending in 2009 and the preceding 12 years. It is, put another way, the average cost of having sent a child through the public school system, from k through 12. Dorn’s notion that a running total can be calculated by simply multiplying a number by a constant is mistaken, and that seems to be the source of his confusion.
For the class of 2009, the running total adds up to a little over $151,000, which is the final data point making up the blue spending line above. The rest of that line is made up of the corresponding running totals for the preceding years—each one the sum of spending for that year and its preceding 12 years (interpolating missing year data, as noted in the legend).
As for the academic achievement data series, the chart indicates that they represent the “percent change in the performance of 17-year-olds” on the “NAEP Long Term Trends” tests. I’m not sure what difficulty Dorn has with this, since calculating the percent change from an old value to a new one is straightforward. For example, the Long Term Trends NAEP reading score for 17-year-olds in 2008 was 286, and the corresponding score in the first year tested was 285. So the percent change to year 2008 = (286 – 285) / 285 = 0.0035 = 0.35 percent. That is the last data point in the green series in the chart above.
If he’d bothered to ask, I would have been just as happy to explain this to Dorn privately as I am to do so publicly.
Girl Likens Public School Failure to Ban on Teaching Slaves to Read
A 13-year-old black girl from Rochester likens the pedagogical malfeasance of her public school to the deliberate prohibition against teaching slaves to read–as recounted by Frederick Douglass in his autobiography. And she is hounded out of the school.
We can do better than this. We need a free marketplace in education with financial assistance to ensure universal access. Scholarship donation and personal use education tax credits can do that.
Cap on Arizona Education Tax Credit Program Doubled
New legislation signed Wednesday by Arizona governor Jan Brewer doubles the old $500 cap on tax credits for individual taxpayer donations to k-12 tuition granting organizations. The Arizona program, upheld last year by the U.S. Supreme Court (in ACSTO v. Winn), cuts taxes on those who make donations to k-12 tuition scholarship organizations. The result is that the donation costs the taxpayer nothing, but it brings a wide range of new educational options within reach of families all across the state by helping them to pay independent school tuition.
As I found in a statistical analysis of school choice programs, education tax credit don’t generally result in suffocating regulation being imposed on independent schools, so they really do expand access to a free educational marketplace. The same can’t be said for other private school choice programs, so the expansion of Arizona’s tax credits is truly welcome news.
Of course in order to keep up with leaders in the field, Arizona needs to take one more step: add a clause to the program that allows it to grow automatically as long as more parents want tuition assistance for their kids. Florida leads the way in this regard, with an education tax credit program that grows every year as long as demand is nearing the limits imposed by its current caps.
Since these programs save money as well as spreading educational freedom, what are we waiting for?
David Brooks, Charles Murray, and Market Education
In a recent column, David Brooks considers Charles Murray’s thesis that “America is coming apart,” and concludes that:
The country… needs to rebuild orderly communities. This requires… building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.
The first recommendation is reasonable. The second suggests Brooks is not very familiar with the history of education.
For the past century and a half, the biggest single intervention by the government in American lives has been our state school systems. Prior to the mid 1800s, all education in this country was local. The majority of children attended private schools, and those who attended the local “common” or “public” schools usually paid tuition. Even “common” schooling was only free for the truly destitute. Partly as a result of this direct financial responsibility, parents had ultimate control over what and by whom their children were taught.
From the 1830s to the 1850s, Massachusetts state senator Horace Mann and his colleague in the House, James Carter, imagined and ultimately laid the foundation of the state school system we know today. They did so for a variety of reasons, one being their belief that the common man and woman could not be trusted to educate their own children. Their solution was to take educational power and responsibility out of parents’ hands and place it under the control of state-trained, state-appointed experts.
Shockingly, taking responsibilities away from people does not make them more responsible. Responsibility is like a muscle: use it, or lose it. The kinds of “organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly” are those that actually impose responsibilities upon them. When parents must not only choose but pay for their children’s education, they expect rather more from the system than when they are assigned “free” schooling by the state. And school efficiency rises as a result.
Some parents could not afford to pay for a good education for their children even without the heavy tax burden imposed by the present bloated state school monopolies. For those parents, we could easily provide financial assistance to cover most or (as necessary) all the cost of schooling. This is already being done on a small but growing scale in 8 states, thanks to k-12 education tax credit programs.
If Brooks wants “an organization and structure” that induces people to behave responsibly, he need look no further than the free enterprise system. “Using government” to achieve that end has been tried for 150 years, and the results are not impressive.
School Choice Lowers Crime
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.
The Irony of the President’s STEM Initiatives
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.
Catholic Schools and the Common Good
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.
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