Author Archive
ALEC’s New Education Report
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.
Status Quo Stalwarts, Meet Reality
[School Choice Week Blast from the Past, Pt. 2!]
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.
‘School Spending Predicted to Climb 50%’*
*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. 22nd, 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).
Would an Extra $27 Billion Improve CA Public School Performance?
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.
Back When Democrats Cared Enough to Advocate What Works
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.
And the Other Washington Is Messed Up, Too
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.
From Russia with Butter
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:
Ed. Policy Reality Check (Now with More Reality!)
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.
Why Public Schools Crumble, and Why Another $30 Billion Won’t Change That
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.
Education Philanthropist Ted Forstmann, RIP
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.
Higher Taxes Don’t Improve Education; Lower Ones Do
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.
Michelle Obama on Personal Responsibility and the Limits of Federal Programs
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.
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