Author Archive
When Is $28,000 per Pupil Not Enough?
…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.
American Education, From Camelot to Obamaville
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.
Government, Education, and Freedom
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.
Obama-Reid ‘Jobs’ Bill Soaked in Greece
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.
How Does Your School District Compare to the International Average? Now You Can Find Out…
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?
Tarkenton Finds Truth Open on the 10 Yard Line and…
NFL Hall-of-Famer Fran Tarkenton writes in the WSJ this morning that lifetime tenure and fixed salary scales would make football as awful as they have made our public school system. Seems obvious enough… and that’s where truth comes in, which is said to go through three phases: first ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as if it had been obvious to everyone from the start.
With regard to the bankruptcy of state monopoly schooling, we’re in stage two, teetering on the brink of stage three. And that’s good. But let’s all remember that acknowledging the wrongheadedness of the education monopoly does not imply the automatic understanding of the most effective alternative—or even of a good alternative. So once Truth gets the ball on the ten yard line, let’s be careful not to fumble it. That means empirically determining which policies will create lasting free markets in education, accessible to all, and which will not.
College Board’s SAT Drop Spin Doesn’t Hold Up
Nationwide verbal SAT scores fell to their lowest level in years on the most recent administration of the test, and the College Board, which administers the SAT, has an explanation:
Average SAT scores fell slightly for 2011 high-school graduates, as the number of test takers and the proportion of minority students grew, according to a report released on Wednesday by the College Board, which owns the test.
The idea—which has been offered as an explanation of earlier declines—is that the overall average score can fall even if the performance of every participating group was stable or improving—if the groups that tend to score lower comprise a larger share of the total test-taking population than they did in the past. And, indeed, minority students (who often score below white students) now comprise a larger share of the test taking population than ever before.
So: case closed? Nope. If you actually look at the score breakdown for the major race/ethnicity groups (see chart) you’ll notice that only white students’ scores held constant from last year. The scores of all the minority groups declined. And, since 1996, white students’ scores have been flat, those of Asian students have risen appreciably, and those of Hispanic and African American students have declined.
Since there has not been any government program targeted exclusively at improving the achievement of Asian students, these data don’t exactly bolster confidence in the effectiveness of either state or federal education policy. If we want to see improved educational productivity, we might just want to look at more free enterprise education systems that offer schools the freedoms and incentives that actually make it happen.
Sen. Rubio to Sec. Duncan: Dear Sir, Obey the Law
Senator Marco Rubio has just written to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, requesting that he not break the law. At issue is the administration’s plan to offer states waivers from the No Child Left Behind act if they agree to adopt national standards or pursue other educational goals of the administration. Rubio states that these conditional waivers violate the U.S. Constitution, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the No Child Left Behind Act. He’s right.
As my Cato colleagues and I have noted many times, the Constitution mentions neither the word “school” nor the word “education,” and so, under the 10th Amendment, reserves power over those concerns to the states and the people.
The Act creating the Department of Education is equally clear:
No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system… .[Section 3403(b)]
Nor is the NCLB particularly ambiguous:
‘Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school’s specific instructional content, academic achievement standards and assessments, curriculum, or program of instruction. [Section 1905]
The Secretary’s conditional waivers from NCLB mandates, in return for dancing as he desires on national standards, seem to violate all of the above. I wonder if any education reporter will have the temerity to ask Arne Duncan on what grounds he believes he is entitled to ignore these laws? Senator Rubio’s letter certainly gives them a golden opportunity to do so.
Why More Money Hasn’t, and Won’t, Fix the Nation’s Public School Buildings
Adam Schaeffer has just blogged about the massive increase in public school facilities spending of the past two decades, and about President Obama’s likely call to throw even more money at the problem of decrepit schools (in his address on the economy, next week).
Adam argues that money hasn’t fixed the problem, but it isn’t hard to imagine that a true believer in the status quo (paging Matt Damon…) might conclude that we simply haven’t increased facilities spending enough.
I addressed this counterargument a few years ago, using federal government data on the condition of U.S. public schools and data from a survey of Arizona private schools. What I found is that public schools were four times more likely than AZ private schools to have a building in “less than adequate” condition, despite the fact that public schools spent one-and-a-half times as much per pupil. [And, yes, I'm talking total spending here, not just tuition].
So if private schools can and do maintain their buildings in far better shape than public schools, at far less cost, what exactly are public schools doing wrong? 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. However, maintenance can only be deferred for a short period of time before school facilities begin to deteriorate in noticeable ways. Without regular maintenance, equipment begins to break down, indoor air problems multiply, and buildings fall into greater disrepair… Additionally, deferred maintenance increases the cost of maintaining school facilities; it speeds up the deterioration of buildings and the need to replace equipment.
This routine deferral of necessary maintenance is not, as the spending data show, the result of a funding shortage; it is the result of mismanagement. Allowing a public school to decay has no inevitable consequences for management because public schools have a monopoly on k-12 funding. Private schools, by contrast, would lose students if their facilities crumbled, and so they make a greater (and more effective) effort to maintain them.
The solution to America’s public school repair problems is not to spend more, it is to unleash the freedoms and incentives of the free enterprise system on our creaking, calcified, government school monopoly.
Obama Jobs Plan to Push More K-12 Bloat?
In a recent interview, President Obama hints at the core of his much-anticipated jobs plan:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: what we do have, I think, is the capacity to do some things right now that would make a big difference …
TOM JOYNER: Like?
OBAMA: For example, putting people to work rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our schools all across America…
We’ve got the capacity right now to help local school districts make sure that they’re not laying off more teachers. We haven’t been as aggressive as we need to, both at the state and federal level.
So we haven’t been aggressive enough with our hiring at the K-12 level, hmm? Perhaps I’m an unusually timid sort, but the trend below looks pretty darn aggressive to me: k-12 employment has been growing 10 times faster than enrollment for forty years.
And the $300 billion question is: what impact has doubling the workforce had on the cost and performance of America’s public schools? According to federal government data, the answer is this:
We’ve nearly tripled the cost of sending a child all the way through the K-12 system, while performance near the end of high school has been stagnant (reading and math) or even declining (science). Just returning to the staff-to-student ratio of 1980 would save almost $150 billion annually—and somehow students weren’t performing noticeably differently in the ’80s than today.
And yet President Obama apparently wants more hiring and more spending. I wonder if voters will want more of President Obama if he indeed continues to flog the failed policies of the past two generations?
‘Back to the Future,’ or: ‘The Math of Khan’
Oklahoma has just enacted a law that requires students to be held back a year if they are not reading on grade level by the end of 3rd grade. The inspiration is sound: poor readers cannot keep up with their classmates as the curriculum becomes more sophisticated and relies more heavily on reading comprehension across subjects. But this particular approach doesn’t begin to tackle the larger problem of age-based grading itself. Kids are not all identical widgets who learn every subject at the same rate. Individual children even learn different subjects at different rates. So the idea that all children should be grouped by age and, by default, moved through every subject at the same pace is ludicrous on its face.
More than that, it is a retrogression from the pedagogy of the early 1800s. In an early 19th century one-room schoolhouse, children of different ages and aptitudes progressed through the material at their own paces. It wasn’t unusual for an 11 year old girl to be on McGuffey’s or Elson’s 4th Reader while her older brother was still on the 3rd. It wasn’t unusual, and it wasn’t a problem. Age-based grading is a problem. Fortunately, technology will dump it on the scrapheap of history within a generation, as services like Khan Academy and software like Dreambox allow children to progress at their own rate through the material.
We can’t get back to the future soon enough.
The Sodom and Gomorrah of Public Schooling?
I was tied up when the massive Atlanta School District cheating scandal broke last month, and so didn’t get around to blogging it. [Recap: nearly 200 teachers and principals in half of the district's 100 schools were involved]. But, with other large-scale cheating investigations still on-going, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was asked about the problem yesterday during a video-taped “Twitter town hall” (minute 12:00). Specifically, he was asked if the high-stakes tests mandated by NCLB are to blame (minute 16:50). Though Duncan made an off-hand comment that high-stakes NCLB-required tests may have contributed to the pressure that lead to the cheating, he repeatedly blamed the cheating on a uniquely “morally bankrupt culture” in Atlanta’s public schools. That didn’t convince interviewer John Merrow, who cited several other cities where cheating investigations are underway—nor should it convince you.
The problem is not that Atlanta is the Sodom and Gomorrah of public schooling. The problem is that state schooling separates payment from consumption. The accountability mechanism of competitive markets—the only such mechanism that actually works—requires the payer to also be the consumer, because the central incentive for any service provider is to please the payer. So if the consumer isn’t paying, he or she is rendered relatively unimportant in the eyes of the provider. Atlanta parents want their children to be well educated, but a lot of work is required to meet that goal. State and federal bureaucrats just want high scores on NCLB-mandated tests—that’s much easier to achieve by cheating than by doing an excellent job teaching. So there is an incentive for school officials to cheat because they are paid by the bureaucrats, not by the parents. Not every teacher succumbs to this incentive, of course, but the incentive is very clearly putting pressure in the wrong direction.
Now consider the incentive structure of schools paid directly by parents in tuition. The incentive in that scenario is to give parents what they want, which is usually a high quality education for their children. Certainly schools could try to lie to parents about how well their children are doing, but this is much harder than lying to bureaucrats. A great many parents will notice a discrepancy if their illiterate children are awarded A’s. And parents considering a school will notice a discrepancy if the “A”-graded graduates of that school somehow cannot gain admission to, or often drop out of, the next higher level of education. Word of mouth—and now word-of-social-networking-apps—is a powerful thing. So it’s much harder for parent-funded schools to get away with cheating, even if they were predisposed to use that strategy.
This is why no system of education that relies exclusively on third-party payment will ever match the quality and progress that we have come to expect in every other field. Indeed, it argues for finding ways of ensuring universal access to education that rely, as much as possible, on direct payment of tuition by parents. Of all the currently viable education policies, the one that fits that description best is the education tax credit—particularly direct credits for families’ own education expenses. And, among third-party payment methods, scholarship tax credits also have advantages over the alternatives.
This is a reality many folks will not want to hear or accept, but reality is not optional.
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