Author Archive
Depth Takes a Holiday
In yesterday’s New York Times, David Brooks lamented the yawning chasm in educational attainment that divides America: the children of wealthy and highly-educated parents graduate from high school and go on to college vastly more often than those of lower-income, less educated parents. Here, he is on solid ground. But, columnists being columnists, Brooks goes on to give us his unsubstatiated opinion that: “Barack Obama’s education proposals… flow naturally and persuasively from this research,” while “McCain’s policies seem largely oblivious to these findings,” as exemplified by the Republican’s “vague talk about school choice.”
A look at the evidence reveals Brooks’ intuition to be exactly backwards.
Senator Obama’s education platform can verily be described as more of what the federal government has already been doing: more spending on government pre-school programs aimed at ever-younger children, especially the fifty-year-old Head Start program; tweaking of the No Child Left Behind act to make it look a little more like it did in its first four decades, when it went under the name Elementary and Secondary Education Act., etc.
But these programs were in full blown operation during the entire period, from the seventies to the nineties, during which Brooks notes that ”America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl.” So Brooks is arguing that doing more of the same is a “natural” and “persuasive” solution to our longstanding educational problems. His hope in this regard is indeed audacious.
And what of McCain’s “vague talk” about private school choice programs? Is it really irrelevant to the educational attainment gap that Brooks is so concerned with? If Brooks had spend just a few minutes Googling the issue he would have come across the nationwide study by University of Chicago economist Derek Neal showing that urban African Americans are vastly more likely to graduate from high school, gain acceptance to college, and graduate from college if they attend Catholic rather than public schools. He would have found the similar findings by Evans and Schwab. He might even have come across the two separate studies of the Milwaukee voucher program showing significantly higher graduation rates for the poor students attending private schools under that program than for students in the Milwaukee public school system.
People who actually care about the socio-economic divide in our nation should familiarize themselves with the evidence before trying to influence public opinion on presidential candidates or policies.
If the Swedish System Is Socialist, What’s Ours?
As a recent AP story helpfully points out, big government, dirigist Sweden has had a private school choice program since the early 1990s, and parents are loving it. Private school enrollment is up from one percent to ten percent of total enrollment, and still climbing.
Interestingly, Sweden’s education system was described today in a separate news story as “socialist.” Now I’m the first to acknowledge that Sweden’s system is far from a completely free market (see the AP story above), but it is certainly less socialist than our own public school systems in the United States, which automatically assign most kids to government-run institutions.
So if reporters think the Swedish system is socialist, why don’t they describe ours in the same way?
Are Expensive Summer Camps Expensive…
… when compared to public schooling? For the interesting answer to that question, have a look at Jay Greene’s edu blog.
Public Schooling as a 1971 Chevy Impala
U.S. student achievement at the end of high school has stagnated (reading and math) or declined (science) since nationally-representative NAEP tests were first administered around 1970. Meanwhile, education spending has risen by a factor of 2.3 over that same period, from $5,247 per student to about $12,000, in inflation-adjusted (2008) dollars. [To get the most up-to-date figures you have to use multiple sources and adjust to 2008 dollars yourself, but an older data series can be found in this table.]
What would the U.S. automobile industry look like if it were run the same way, and had suffered the same productivity collapse, as public schooling? To the left is a 1971 Chevrolet Impala. According to the New York Times of September 25th, 1970, it originally sold for $3,460. That’s $19,011 in today’s dollars. If cars were like public schools, you would be compelled to buy one of these today, and to pay $43,479 for that privilege (2.3 times the original price).
But, thank heavens, the automobile industry is part of the free enterprise system that thrives everywhere in our economy outside the classroom. A brand new 2008 Impala, pictured to the right, costs only slightly more in real terms than the 1970 model did: $21,975. But it is a very different beast.
Apart from its far superior fit and finish, it comes standard with technologies that could barely be imagined 40 years ago: OnStar satellite communications, side-curtain airbags, and anti-lock brakes, to name a few. And if you don’t like the looks of it, or if it doesn’t fit the needs of your family, you can buy something else — something bigger or smaller, faster or more fuel efficient.
So, do you wish the automobile industry were run like public schooling, or do you wish that public education was part of our free enterprise system, with financial assistance to ensure universal access to the marketplace?
McCain to NAACP: It’s Time for School Choice
John McCain told the NAACP this morning that after decades of broken promises by the nation’s public school systems it is time to give all parents an easy choice of public and private schools. He is right, so long as he doesn’t propose a private school choice program at the national level.
The merits of wide-open parental choice — and the basic justice of it —are compelling, but the Constitution mentions neither the word “education” nor the word “school.” Congress and the president simply do not have a mandate to create such a program. More than that, a national private school choice program risks extending pervasive government regulation over private schools from the Potomac to the Pacific, homogenizing the options available to families and thus defeating the entire point of school choice. It is far better and safer for presidential candidates to tout the merits of school choice and encourage their state-level counterparts to put these programs into place. In that way, the varying experiences of the states – the so-called “laboratory of federalism” – can help to identify and eliminate problems in their implementation.
“NCLB Should Be Abolished” — TX GOP & AFT!
[TNR readers, please see update below.]
What poetic justice is this? The Republican party platform for the state of Texas has this plank dedicated to the No Child Left Behind act (which I quote in its entirety):
The No Child Left Behind Act has been a massive failure and should be abolished.
This is the same state that inspired NCLB, and whose Republican party gave us the law’s two greatest champions in the current president and secretary of education.
Not to be outdone, the new president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest public school employee union in the country, had this to say about NCLB today:
“NCLB has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had. Conceived by accountants, drafted by lawyers, and distorted by ideologues, it is too badly broken to be fixed,”
A pair of bedfellows that might make even the Marquis de Sade raise an eyebrow, n’est pas?
Barack Obama Walks the Walk
After telling a gathering of the American Federation of Teachers that he opposes school voucher programs over the weekend, Senator Obama added that: “We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools; not throwing our hands up and walking away from them.”
Senator Obama sends his own two daughters to the private “Lab School” founded by John Dewey in 1896, which charged $20,000 in tuition at the middle school level last year. Though he says “we” should not be “throwing up our hands and walking away” from public schools, he has done precisely that.
That is his right, and, as a wealthy man, it is his prerogative under the current system of American education, which allows only the wealthy to easily choose between private and government schools. But instead of offering to extend that same choice to all families, Senator Obama wants the poor to wait for the public school system to be “fixed.”
I could editorialize about this, but I really don’t see the need. Readers of this blog are perfectly capable of drawing the obvious conclusions.
Voucher Valedictorian
NRO has an editorial today by that title, sharing the story of Tiffany Dunston: class valedictorian at Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington, D.C. and first person in her family to attend college (she’s headed for Syracuse to study biochemistry and French). As it happens, she was attending Carroll thanks to financial assistance from DC’s voucher program, and her mother couldn’t otherwise have afforded the tuition. “I started praying every day because I didn’t want to go to a neighborhood school,” Tiffany told a reporter. “I was so nervous — there was no way to know if I was going to get the scholarship.”
Actually, though, there is a way she could have known that she would get the financial assistance she needed: if Congress and the City council replaced DC’s $24,600 per pupil monopoly with a universal system of school choice.
Instead, it seems likely that the next Congress will kill the fledgling school choice program that made Tiffany’s dreams come true. Over the coming year, congressional opponents of school choice must ask themselves: is it right to steal children’s dreams to curry favor with public school employee unions?
This Little Philly Did NOT Go to Market
The Washington Post claims that Philadelphia’s contracting out of 45 public schools to private management firms represented a test of whether “the free market could educate children more efficiently than the government.” It represented no such thing, and to claim otherwise the Post must not understand the city’s contracting arrangements or the nature of free markets.
Families cannot choose from among the privately managed schools. Students are assigned to these schools based on where they live, just as is the case with traditional state-run schools. Markets require consumer choice, and no consumer choice exists in this contracting arrangement. A free market also requires significant autonomy for providers. Under the contract signed by Edison Schools, the largest contractor, its teachers and principals remain employees of the school district. Edison is also bound to honor the terms of the collective barganing agreement reached between the local teachers’ union and the district. Hence, Edison may only make “recommendations” as to who will work in its schools, and has little input on the salaries they will be paid or the length of the school day or year, or other relevant factors. Finally, markets require a price system driven by supply and demand, but the private management firms may not charge tuition, and in any event they are not chosen so there is no basis for demand-driven pricing.
Philadelphia did not create a “free market” in education. What it did was to subcontract aspects of its monopoly to providers of its own choosing — an arrangement not too far afield from the one that gave the Defense Department $640 toilet seats. As I noted five years ago, there was never any reason to expect this subcontracting to yield dramatic gains.
As if to drive home the lack of research that went into this story, the Post’s reporter asserts that DC public schools suffer “a lack of funding.” Three months ago, I calculated the total per pupil spending in the District this year as $24,600, roughly $10,000 more than total per pupil spending in area private schools. That calculation was published in… the Washington Post (with further details on this blog).
Conflicting Data? What Conflicting Data?
The public school advocacy group Center on Education Policy released a new report today, titled “Has Student Achievement Increased Since 2002?” Its answer is “yes,” based on relatively worthless high-stakes state-level testing data and on the more esteemed National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). For reasons known only to the report’s authors, they make no use of the available U.S. trend data from either the PISA or the PIRLS international tests (though the CEP study mentions PISA results for a single point in time, it ignores the changes in that test’s scores over time.)
As it happens, U.S. scores have declined on both PISA and PIRLS in every subject and at both grades tested since they were first administered in 2000/2001. In the PISA mathematics and science tests, the declines are large enough to be statistically significant, that is: we can be confident (and disappointed) that they reveal real deterioration in U.S. student performance. In mathematics, our score has dropped from 493 to 474, causing us to slip from 18th out of 27 participating countries down to 25th out of 30 countries. In science, our score fell from 499 to 489, dropping us from 14th out of 27 countries to 21st out of 30 countries.
It is reckless and misleading to form judgments about trends in U.S. student performance without taking into account the declines on these respected international tests. And, as Neal McCluskey and I pointed out last year, the improving trends that exist on some NAEP tests predate the passage of the No Child Left Behind act, and have in some cases actually slowed since that law’s passage.
It is this rather discouraging reality that should guide policymakers in the coming year, as they debate the future of NCLB.
Should Suburbia Fear School Choice?
In a recent “Best of the Web” column, the WSJ’s James Taranto uncharacteristically ventures into the world of education policy. Suburban conservatives, he notes, often oppose school choice because they fear the impact of choice programs on their property values and their own children’s schools. “A voucher program,” he adds, “offers little to those who already have choice.”
Taranto, as always an astute political observer, is right that this perceived self-interest on the part of suburbanites is a serious hurdle for school choice advocates. Where he goes astray is in assuming that the perception is correct.
According to Taranto, parents who are wealthy enough to pick from among existing public school districts and private schools “already have” everything that a free educational marketplace could possibly offer them. That’s like saying upscale Soviet apparatchiks already enjoyed the benefits of capitalism because they could choose between a Lada and Yugo. The system of schools we have today is not a free market system. We have a legally protected 90 percent state monopoly school system with a small niche of non-profit schools mostly serving the religious education market due to the “free” government schools’ inability to serve that niche. This hobbled and distorted system no more captures the full panoply of options a true market would provide than the Yugo and Lada represented the full range of vehicle options in the capitalist West. Furthermore, no existing U.S. school choice program comes close to creating a genuine free market in education, as economist John Merrifield pointed out in a recent Cato Policy Analysis (“Dismal Science: The Shortcomings of U.S. School Choice Research and How to Address Them”).
Getting Americans to realize what they’re currently missing is indeed going to be a tough hurdle for school choice advocates. But it’s a hurdle that can be overcome.
As for the impact of school choice on property values, Taranto is right that there would likely be an important effect, but it is more subtle than he imagines, and there are countervailing forces he ignores. It is more subtle because property values and school district quality are not perfectly correlated. Some desirable places to live have better schools than others, and most homeowners do not currently have children in school. In otherwise desirable areas with mediocre or relatively poor schools, property values would go up, just as they would likely fall in expensive districts with relatively better schools. So, for some suburban homeowners the property value effect would be negative, while for others it would be positive. More importantly, well-designed market education reforms will generate very substantial state and local tax savings, year after year, because the current monopoly system is ridiculously expensive. Cato is about to release a study of the fiscal impact of a large-scale education tax credit plan, and it would save taxpayers billions of dollars in all five states analyzed. A one-time hit in property values may not seem so grim a prospect when offset by this falling tax burden. Most people own their homes for many years, and so would have plenty of time to reap tax savings.
Finally, the idea that a competitive education marketplace would lead to a mass migration of urban children into suburban schools is highly unlikely. Urban parents want the same things as suburban ones: good schools in their own neighborhoods. Urbanites do not commute to suburbia to go to Barnes and Noble or Starbucks. There are already good bookstores and coffee shops in our nation’s cities (in fact, there are good coffee shops in good bookstores in our major cities). Supply rises to meet demand in education as in every free marketplace. Once all families have the financial resources to easily choose schools, more and better private educational options will emerge in cities – just as has been the case with even the tiny Milwaukee voucher program. Most urban families will prefer good local schools to good schools in remote suburbs that would require long bus rides for their children.
WSJ Inadvertently Flaks for DC Schools
A WSJ editorial recently observed that “the $7,500 [DC school] voucher is a bargain for taxpayers because it costs the public schools about 50% more, or $13,000 a year, to educate a child….”
Um, no. As I reported back in April, it is costing taxpayers $24,600 to warehouse a child in DC public schools this year. The WSJ‘s reference to $13,000 is a fantasy no doubt attributable to the use of dated Census Bureau figures that exclude capital expenditures, and that capture neither the spending increases nor the rapid enrollment losses of the past few years (let alone inflation).
If an economically savvy paper like the Journal can fall into this trap…. Oy!
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