Author Archive
Human Capital Con?
With President Obama hoping to turn the United States into the world’s greatest diploma mill, and greedy public university leaders shamelessly demanding more of everyone’s tax money, a critical question must be asked: Do more college degrees necessarily mean greater human capital? In a terrific essay, the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy’s George Leef answers with a resounding “no”:
Let’s put it this way: passing a college course no more indicates a human capital gain than just going to a gym indicates an improvement in physical fitness.
To get through college, many students don’t have to become better at reading, at writing, at math, at logic. Sadly, the key consideration at many colleges is not educational excellence or even modest progress, but simply enrolling and collecting tuition from as many students as possible. Therefore, course content has been watered down and expectations lowered so that even the weakest and most disengaged students can pass. As Steve Balch, founder of the National Association of Scholars says, “We don’t so much have higher education these days, as longer education.”
It all comes down to this: Bloviate all they want about the ”common good,” people in higher education are just as self-interested as anyone else, and will do whatever they can to get the most money for doing whatever makes their lives the easiest. And the best way to ensure that this yields the worst possible outcomes for everyone else? Rather than requiring schools and students to earn your money, have government just keep handing it over to them.
Don’t Worry, Onion. The Feds Have This Education Crisis Covered!
Today, crack Center for Educational Freedom research assistant Ian Hinsdale alerted me to an Onion News Network program on which panelists decried Americans’ shocking ignorance about whales, a problem the experts agreed, for the most part, started in the schools. Toward the end of the segment one of the panelists spoke a little whale, but she hadn’t learned it in her whale-studies deficient, inner-city K-12 schools. No, she had to learn it in adult school, illustrating how severely we’ve shortchanged so many of our students. And don’t think for a minute that whale ignorance is confined to low-income schools…
Now, you might think this was a joke – ONN does sometimes do a parody or two. But this segment could not have been more serious. How do I know? Because the federal government really does have a multi-million dollar, whale-based education initiative: The Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Exchange Program. And if the feds have a program for something the problem must be real, and it must be serious!
Ilwhaleracy, quite simply, threatens the future of our nation — consider just the potential devastation on our economic competitiveness with Atlantis! – and I for one am glad to see Washington tackling the threat head on!
Fed Ed Snow Job
When you get to the top of a mountain, what do you find? Other than maybe a mountain goat, or the frozen remains of an ill-fated previous climber, snow, that’s what. That’s why it’s almost appropriate that the Obama administration’s Race to the The Top Fund, as I have written before and write again in this new op-ed, is essentially a snow job. And it seems to be a particularly blinding one.
To qualify for Fund dollars, states have to make hardly any meaningful changes to their education systems. For the most part they just have to submit plans for how they could conceivably do good stuff. Moreover, the same “stimulus” that furnished the $4.35 billion for Race to The Top supplied roughly 20 times that amount to protect the abysmal, obese education status quo from recessionary pressures. Nonetheless, many conservatives, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, are going out of their way to lionize Obama & co. for their reform efforts.
Why the cross-spectrum adulation? One problem is certainly that some conservatives have given up on real reform — universal school choice and getting the feds out of education — in favor of being seen as “doing something” from Washington. Probably more important, though, is that Race to the Top is constantly being festooned in brash, combative rhetoric about pushing what are actually relatively minor — but still disliked by teacher union — improvements such as linking educator pay to student performance and increasing charter schools. (For a taste of the hyperbole, check out Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s opening commentary from Sunday’s Meet the Press.) That Race to the Top falls far short of actually doing even these very limited things seems not to matter.
That leads to a very familiar, but nonetheless dispiriting, conclusion: in education, a blizzard of rhetoric is all it takes to blind people to reality.
More on ‘Race to the Top’
Andrew Coulson has already touched on this, but I thought I’d throw in my two cents. “Race to the Top Fund” guidelines were released today and they should please no reformers. They are simultaneously too weak, and way too much.
They are too weak because they don’t require states to actually do anything of substance. Have plans for reform? Sure. Break down a few barriers that could stand in the way of decent changes? That’s in there, too. But that’s about it. And the money is supposed to be a one-shot deal – once paper promises are accepted and the dough delivered, the race is supposed to be over.
In light of those things, how is this more appropriately labeled the Over the Top Fund than the Race to the Top Fund? Because while not requiring anything, it tries to push unprecedented centralization of education power.It calls for state data systems to track students from preschool to college graduation. It calls for states to sign onto “common” – meaning, ultimately, federal – standards. It tries to influence state budgeting.
In other words, it attempts to further centralize power in the hands of ever-more distant, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than leaving it with the communities, and especially parents, the schools are supposed to serve — exactly what’s plagued American education for decades. And, of course, it does this with huge gobs of federal money taxpayers have no choice but to supply.
As The Dems Turn (To School Choice)
We’ve been writing a fair amount over the last several months about increasing support for school choice among members of the Democratic Party. The focus has typically been on legislators, but a new report from the Center for Education Reform give a glimpse into possible widespread support among private-schooling Dems and Dem donors in Washington, DC.
The Trustees delves into the political affiliations of board of trustee members of the “ten most prestigious private schools that support the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.” Based on trustees’ total donation amounts to the two major presidential candidates in 2008, or to candidates, party committees, and parties themselves, the report suggests that trustees lean Democratic by a ratio of roughly 9 to 1.
Importantly, only about 37 percent of trustees were found to have made any contributions, so the 9-to-1 ratio doesn’t necessarily mean that trustees overall are similarly skewed. In addition, the underlying assumption seems to be that if the schools participate in the voucher program their trustees support school choice, which doesn’t necessarily follow. A trustee may very well think a school should take some voucher kids but also think the program ought not to exist. And, of course, trustees almost certainly don’t all agree one way or the other.
Those things said, this is yet more evidence supporting an increasingly inescapable conclusion: Democrats — who have historically opposed school choice much more so than Republicans — are finding that they just can’t do it anymore. There is no justification for consigning kids to awful schools.
Of course, members of both parties — or no party at all — who support only small, hamstrung programs still have a lot of thinking to do…
Degree Disaster Behind The Great Wall
Based on my regular reading on education, but not China specifically, I know that the world’s most populous nation has had a lot of trouble finding jobs for its throngs of recent college graduates. I wrote a bit about that yesterday, pointing out that the important higher education lesson from China is that pumping out more college grads is meaningless if they don’t have skills that are in demand. Well, thanks to a very helpful Cato@Liberty reader who actually lives in China (and wishes to remain anonymous) I now have a much better idea just how important that lesson is. He directed me to this Asia Times article that includes, among many fascinating tidbits, this startling revelation:
An explosive report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in September said earnings of graduates were now at par and even lower than those of migrant laborers [italics added].
Wow! If this report is accurate, until now I have had no idea how truly ridiculous Washington’s obsession with pumping out more degrees to keep up with the Chinese has been — and I’ve been pretty sure it’s ridiculous! Much more troubling, if I’ve had little clue about the true extent of the absurdity, imagine how far from grasping it our government-loving federal politicians have been! Of course, as I wrote yesterday, even if they did know it, they probably wouldn’t let on.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Way To Go (Almost All the Way), Jay!
This morning Washington Post education columnist — and terrific Cato forum panelist – Jay Mathews called for abolition of the office of the U.S. Secretary of Education! Why? Because it has proven itself worthless, that’s why:
The president, I suspect, thought that Duncan, the former chief of the Chicago public schools, could use all he had learned there to raise achievement for students across the country.
It sounds great, but it was the same thought that led previous presidents to appoint those previous fine education secretaries to their posts. How much good did that do? Test scores for elementary and middle school students have come up a bit in the last couple of decades, but not enough to get excited about. High school scores are still flat. If national education policy had made a big jump forward, I would say we should continue to fill this job, but that hasn’t happened either. I think the No Child Left Behind law, supported by both parties, was an improvement over previous federal policies, but it was only copying what several states had already done to make schools accountable and identify schools that needed extra help.
Other than the “fine” secretaries part and the (sorta) nice words for NCLB, that sounds like something we at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom might have written. Bottom line: Washington doesn’t add any value to education, and at best just picks up on things states are already doing.
Unfortunately, after dropping the “ed sec must go” bombshell and furnishing ironclad evidence why the position is worthless, Mathews retreats from the obvious, ultimate implication of his argument: We should abolish the department the secretary leads!
The evidence screams this and, from a technical standpoint, you can’t keep a cabinet-level department and not have a secretary to head it. But in what smells a lot like a cop out, Mathews asserts that the department should stay (though in a smaller form). After all, someone has to be in charge of doling out all of the taxpayer cash that isn’t doing a damn bit of good:
Keep in mind I am NOT saying we should abolish the education department. That old Reagan campaign platform died a natural death long ago. We need the department to intelligently distribute federal money to the most promising schools in our cities and states. Cut back the number of people rumbling around that big building on Maryland Avenue—many of them are going crazy from boredom anyway—and put it under the control of a savvy civil service administrator who knows how to keep the checks and the useful data rolling out.
Too bad Mathews wasn’t willing to go all the way on this. But just for proposing that we put the position of U.S. Secretary of Education out to pasture, he deserves some hearty applause.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Government and Politics
If China Jumped Off A Bridge, Would We Do It Too?
Everyone has heard that China is leaving us in its dust when it comes to producing college graduates, and if we don’t do something drastic to catch up they’ll crush us economically as well. Indeed, it’s a driving force behind efforts to ramp up federal higher education intervention.
As President Obama proclaimed when introducing his American Graduation Initiative, which is now part of the ironically titled Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act:
By 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world….Already we’ve increased Pell grants by $500. We’ve created a $2,500 tax credit for four years of college tuition. We’ve simplified student aid applications….A new GI Bill of Rights…is beginning to help soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan to begin a new life — in a new economy. And the recovery plan has helped close state budget shortfalls…at the same time making historic investments in school libraries and classrooms and facilities all across America. So we’ve already taken some steps that are building the foundation for a 21st century education system…one that will allow us to compete with China and India and everybody else all around the world.
Now, while a college education could furnish important learning that helps drive innovation and economic development, it could also be as worthless as conferring a bachelor’s degree on a dog. What’s important is that people actually learn things of value, not simply that they get degrees. But a funny thing happened in China…
Yesterday, news broke that China’s top education official has been sacked. Reports the New York Times:
Facing rising criticism over the quality of schools and a crush of jobless college graduates, China’s legislature announced Monday that it had removed the minister of education after six years on the job and replaced him with a deputy.
China has been cranking out college graduates at a breakneak pace, but the quality of the education has become highly suspect and, perhaps more importantly, there haven’t been nearly enough jobs to employ all the newly credentialed. In other words, simply producing more graduates — no matter how much it has frightened some people in America – has largely been a waste.
The obvious lesson from this should be that it’s foolish to simply make massively expanding the ranks of degree holders a national goal. But that doesn’t compute for many U.S. politicians, despite abundant evidence that we don’t need heaps more graduates anymore than China does. It’s getting elected that matters most to politicians, and as long as voters keep believing that government is opening the door to the middle class simply by pushing more and more people to college, politicians will keep wasting taxpayer dollars on unnecessary degrees.
So let’s hope that both voters and politicians will learn China’s clear college lesson: Fixating on degrees is not very smart. Failing that, let’s hope that we at least don’t have any rioting…
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; International Economics and Development
We Should All Pay for Cal Athletics!
You might recall that a few weeks ago University of California at Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau co-authored a Washington Post op-ed calling on the federal government to provide direct support — meaning taxpayer dollars — to select public universities. Birgeneau decried decades of “material and progressive disinvestment by states in higher education,” despite, as I pointed out, no such disinvestment actually occurring.
Well now we know where much of the precious investment in Cal was going — to subsidize sports. According to Inside Higher Ed, over just the past few years Berkeley has provided tens-of-millions of dollars in subsidies and loan forgiveness to its sports programs, which are supposed to be self-supporting.
Now, the whole college athletics undertaking is one that deserves lots of scrutiny for its subsidies and excesses. Cal is certainly not alone in this. But for Birgeneau to take to the pages of the Washington Post, cry poverty, and call for the nation’s taxpayers to foot his school’s bills while he quietly pushes millions of dollars to water polo, rugby, golf, and sundry other sports? That takes a lot of gall. Of course, rent-seeking gall is not in short supply when it comes to higher education.
Thankfully, at least this time it looks like the arrogant aggressiveness is going to backfire. Birgeneau is scrambling, and seems doomed to be thrown for a loss.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Another Education Road Sign Screaming “Stop!”
This morning the National Center for Education Statistics released a new report, Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scores: 2005-2007. What the results make clear (for about the billionth time) is that government control of education has put us on a road straight to failure. Still, many of those who insist on living in denial about constant government failure in education will yet again refuse to acknowledge reality, and will actually point to this report as a reason to go down many more miles of bad road.
According to the report, almost no state has set its “proficiency” levels on par with those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the so-called “Nation’s Report Card.” (Recall that under No Child Left Behind all children are supposed to be “proficient” in reading and math by 2014.) Most, in fact, have set “proficiency” at or below NAEP’s “basic” level. Moreover, while some states that changed their standards between 2005 and 2007 appeared to make them a bit tougher, most did the opposite. Indeed, in eighth grade all seven states that changed their reading assessments lowered their expectations, as did nine of the twelve states that changed their math assessments.
Many education wonks will almost certainly argue that these results demonstrate clearly why we need national curricular standards, such as those being drafted by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. If there were a national definition of “proficiency,” they’ll argue, states couldn’t call donkeys stallions. But not only does the existence of this new report refute their most basic assumption – obviously, we already have a national metric — the report once again screams what we already know: Politicians and bureaucrats will always do what’s in their best interest — keep standards low and easy to meet – and will do so as long as politics, not parental choice, is how educators are supposed to be held accountable. National standards would only make this root problem worse, centralizing poisonous political control and taking influence even further from the people the schools are supposed to serve.
Rather than continuing to drive headlong toward national standards — the ultimate destination of the pothole ridden, deadly, government schooling road – we need to exit right now. We need to take education power away from government and give it to parents. Only if we do that will we end hopeless political control of schooling and get on a highway that actually takes us toward excellent education.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Government and Politics
Federal Education Results Prove the Framers Right
Yesterday, I offered the Fordham Foundation’s Andy Smarick an answer to a burning question: What is the proper federal role in education? It was a question prompted by repeatedly mixed signals coming from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about whether Washington will be a tough guy, coddler, or something in between when it comes to dealing with states and school districts. And what was my answer? The proper federal role is no role, because the Constitution gives the feds no authority over American education.
Not surprisingly, Smarick isn’t going for that. Unfortunately, his reasoning confirms my suspicions: Rather than offering a defense based even slightly on what the Constitution says, Smarick essentially asserts that the supreme law of the land is irrelevant because it would lead to tough reforms and, I infer, the elimination of some federal efforts he might like.
While acknowledging that mine is a ”defensible argument,” Smarick writes that he disagrees with it because it “would presumably require immediately getting rid of IDEA, Title I, IES, NAEP, and much more.” He goes on to assert that I might ”argue that doing so is necessary and proper because it’s the only path that squares with our founding document, but policy-wise it is certainly implausible any time soon.” Not far after that, Smarick pushes my argument aside and addresses a question to ”those who believe that it’s within the federal government’s authority to do something in the realm of schools.”
OK. Let’s play on Smarick’s grounds. Let’s ignore what the Constitution says and see what, realistically, we could expect to do about federal intervention in education, as well as what we can realistically expect from continued federal involvement.
First off, I fully admit that getting Washington back within constitutional bounds will be tough. That said, I mapped out a path for doing so in the last chapter of Feds In The Classroom, a path that doesn’t, unlike what Smarick suggests, require immediate cessation of all federal education activities. Washington obviously couldn’t be pulled completely out of the schools overnight.
Perhaps more to Smarick’s point, cutting the feds back down to size has hardly been a legislatively dead issue. Indeed, as recently as 2007 two pieces of legislation that would have considerably withdrawn federal tentacles from education — the A-PLUS and LEARN acts – were introduced in Congress. They weren’t enacted, but they show that getting the feds out of education is hardly a pipe dream. And with tea parties, the summer of townhall discontent, and other recent signs of revolt against big government, it’s hardly out of the question that people will eventually demand that the feds get out of their schools.
Of course, there is the other side of the realism argument: How realistic is it to think that the federal government can be made into a force for good in education? It certainly hasn’t been one so far. Just look at the following chart plotting federal education spending against achievement, a chart that should be very familiar by now.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Law and Civil Liberties
The Constitution? Not That Old Thing!
Over at Flypaper, Andy Smarick can’t figure out what the Obama administration thinks is the proper federal role in education.
A couple of weeks ago, commenting on a speech by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Smarick couldn’t tell whether Duncan was advocating that the feds be friendly Helpy Helpertons, no-excuses disciplinarians, or something in between. Yesterday, Smarick revisited the whither-the-feds theme, pointing out the frustrating contradiction when Duncan both praises local and state education control and blasts states for doing stuff he doesn’t like.
But Duncan isn’t alone in his fuzziness, according to Smarick, who says he’s ”yet to come across anyone with a comprehensive, water-tight argument for what the feds should and should not do.”
I’m sure this is not the case, but from reading that you’d think Smarick had never run across a little thing called “the Constitution,” which furnishes just the “water-tight argument for what the feds should and should not do” that he seeks. It also appears that he’s never encountered numerous things that I’ve written pointing this out. For instance, in Feds in the Classroom I wrote:
Because two of the sundry words that do not appear among the few legitimate federal functions enumerated in the Constitution are “education” and “school,” the federal government may have no role in schooling.
Ah, but what of the “general welfare” clause that comes before the enumerated powers in the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8? Doesn’t that give the feds authority to do anything that is in the nation’s best interest? At the very least, doesn’t it break the water-tight seal against federal education intervention?
Nope. I give you James Madison on the general welfare clause in Federalist no. 41:
For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.
The general welfare clause confers no authority on the federal government, it just introduces the specific, enumerated powers that follow it. Among them, you’ll find not a peep about education.
Many educationists will think me hopelessly retrograde for bringing up the Constitution, although Duncan at least mentioned the dusty old document in his recent federalism speech. Unfortunately, he engaged it with all the courage and gusto of Sir Robin. But at least he acknowledged its existence — too many policymakers and wonks ignore the Constitution completely because it forbids Washington from doing the sundry things they want it to do.
But why shouldn’t the Constitution be treated like an ancient grandfather, a nice old guy whose utterances, in a half-hearted effort to be respectful, we acknowledge in the same tone we’d use with a toddler and then promptly ignore?
Because it is the Constitution that clearly establishes the bounds of what the federal government can and cannot do, that’s why! And because when we ignore the Constitution we get exactly the sort of government that is confounding Smarick: government that is capricious, often incoherent, and is ultimately an existential threat to freedom because government officials can claim power without bounds. See TARP, campaign finance, and executive pay for just a few examples of this last threat coming to fruition.
Which leaves all of the people who want Washington to have some role in education, but are frustrated by not knowing what else the feds might do, with only one choice. They can either continue to face inscrutable and ultimately unlimited federal power in hopes of getting what they want, or they can acknowledge what they keep choosing to ignore: That the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it gives the federal government no authority to govern American education.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Nothing Good about The Higher Ed Pricing Game
On Tuesday I noted that the College Board had released its annual reports on college prices and student aid. At the time I wrote the post I hadn’t yet been able to download the reports, but was planning to provide a rundown of their major findings once I’d read them. I’ve now done the latter, but it turns out that Ben Miller over at the Quick and the ED has already posted a pretty good summary of the most important findings. Go there if you want the highlights. Don’t go there, though, if you want to know what the highlights mean, at least for anyone other than students. For that, you’ll have to read on here….
The big news is that net college prices — what students pay after aid– have actually decreased over the last 15 years. While sticker prices were rising much faster than incomes and inflation, what students were actually paying dropped. The implication of this is so obvious that Mr. Magoo couldn’t mistake it: Student aid, much of which comes through taxpayers, enables schools to charge ever-higher prices with near impunity.
Back to the Quick and the ED. To some degree, Miller sees declining net price as a triumph for federal aid, making college more affordable even as prices explode:
This story should be encouraging for legislators that fought hard to win Pell Grant increases over the last few years. The steepest decreases in net price occur beginning in the 2007-2008 academic year, the same time Congress began passing legislation that boosted the maximum Pell Grant award several times. This at least suggests that the money spent on the program did play some role in lessening the financial burden for students and was not completely eaten up by sticker price increases.
On the flip side, Miller at least acknowledges that:
The net price figure also lessens the pressure on schools to actually take proactive steps to lower their costs. If the price you list isn’t actually what you charge, then why should anyone care what the listed price is and how high it gets? Net price thus serves as a kind of smokescreen that gets colleges at least partially off fo[r] charging an arm and a leg.
So what’s wrong with this analysis?
Most important is that Miller softpedals the aid effect, suggesting that the main negative consequence of ever-increasing assistance is that it bleeds off a bit of the pressure for schools to lower costs. But it likely has a much more destructive effect than that, not just curbing efficiency pressures, but enabling schools to constantly charge and spend more. It’s a likelihood that student-aid defenders try to dispel by citing studies that cover very short periods of time, or that simply pronounce that we don’t know that it happens. That it probably happens, however, has been borne out empirically, and it’s readily ackowledged by prominent higher educators including former Harvard president Derek Bok, former Stanford vice president William F. Massy, and former University of Iowa president Howard Bowen. Indeed, the latter’s “law” couldn’t be more blunt: “Universities will raise all the money they can and spend all the money they raise.”
Miller’s other major failing is that he completely ignores that all this aid has to come from somwhere, and that “somewhere” is largely taxpayers. (OK, first it’s China.) Just to give you a sense of the impact on taxpayers, College Board data show that between the 1998-99 and 2008-09 academic years, total federal aid — including grant money recipients don’t have to pay back, and loans they (sometimes) do — rose from $61.1 billion to $116.8 billion. Add state aid to that, and the total goes from $66.6 billion to $126.2 billion.
And what are some of the major downsides of these forced third-party payments? Miller mentions a few pricing difficulties for students, but makes no mention of the potentially huge negative consequences for the nation: Encouraging lots of people to attend college who simply aren’t prepared for it; cranking out many more degrees than the job market demands; and potentially slowing economic growth by taking funds from productive uses and giving it to efficiency-averse colleges and students.
The big finding in the latest College Board data, which the Quick and the ED nails, is that net college prices have been going down. The important story, however, is that this is bad news for the country. Unfortunately, the Quick and the Ed misses that almost completely.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
College Prices Aren’t So Bad When Other People Are Paying
Today the College Board — maker of such fine products as the SAT and Advanced Placement exams — released its annual reports on college prices and student aid. College prices, it seems, have gone up significantly over the last year. However, if the following statement from the reports’ author, economist Sandy Baum, is accurate — I haven’t been able to see the reports myself yet — student aid largely offset the price increases. And do you know what that might mean? Colleges were able to charge students more without greatly affecting access by pawning much of the new charges off on donors and taxpayers:
Sandy Baum, the College Board senior policy analyst who wrote both reports, said it was important to focus on the net price students actually paid, after subtracting grants and tax benefits, rather than the published tuition, or sticker price. And in that regard, Ms. Baum said, the situation looks far less dire. “Over all, it could have been worse,” she said.
So could it actually be, as I and others have argued repeatedly, that student aid helps fuel tuition increases by having third parties cover so much of the new costs? Here’s yet more evidence saying that yes, it could.
Duncan Blows Off Constitution, Facts
It never ceases to amaze me how effortlessly federal “educators” blow off the Constitution. Amazing me today is none other than U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who in an address to the National Association of State Boards of Education offered the following cavalier dismissal of the Supreme Law of the Land:
I’d like to talk to you today about the federal role in education policy. It’s often noted that the Constitution doesn’t mention education, and that the provision of education has always been a state and local responsibility.
Yet, it is also true that American leaders have always considered education to be an important priority. They’ve always believed that a strong and innovative education system is the foundation of our democracy and an investment in our economic future.
This national commitment to education predates even the ratification of the Constitution. In the Northwest Ordinance governing the sale of land in the Northwest Territories, the fledgling government required townships to reserve money for the construction of schools.
In the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act to create land grant colleges and universities. Today, those institutions are some of the best teaching and research institutions in the world…
Here you see a textbook example of how you can brush off the Constitution in just a few easy steps! First, you acknowledge (actually, this part is optional) that authority over education is nowhere among the federal government’s specifically enumerated powers. Next, you shamelessly imply that all the founders really wanted power over education to be in the Constitution. After that, you always mention the Northwest Ordinance, even though it had nothing to do with the Constitution. Finally, you laud blatantly unconstitutional things other people have done and — voila! — the Constitution disappears!
Of course, making a factually or logically sustainable argument that you are not violating the Constitution when you obviously are is not the real goal here. This is just the standard political kabuki dance, a necessary bit of deference-payment to those few rubes who might still think that the Constitution serves some legitimate purpose.
That said, don’t you expect more from our secretary of education? After all, he has undertaken the incredibly noble job of teaching all of our children. Don’t you expect complete honesty from him, and maybe even some respect for the Constitution that he has taken an oath to uphold?
Of course you don’t. Neither do I — not one bit.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Law and Civil Liberties
All That NAEP Tells Us Is Things Ain’t Good
Yesterday, another round of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress – the so-called “Nation’s Report Card” — came out. They revealed flattened 4th-grade math achivement between 2007 and 2009, and a two point (out of 500) increase in 8th grade.
So what do these bits of data portend? Ask the experts:
“The trend is flat; it’s a plateau. Scores are not going anywhere, at least nowhere important,” said Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, according to the New York Times. “That means that eight years after enactment of No Child Left Behind, the problems it set out to solve are not being solved, and now we’re five years from the deadline and we’re still far, far from the goal.”
Next, former National Center for Education Statistics commissioner Mark Schneider concluded that “either the standards movement has played out, or the No Child law failed to build on its momentum. Whatever momentum we had, however, is gone.”
And then there’s Michigan State University professor William Schmidt, a leading national-standards proponent, who opined in the Baltimore Sun that “there is a hardly any change. There is hardly any difference. How could we as a nation let that happen?” His solution to the problem: National standards, of course.
So what do I think about all this? As a long-time critic of NCLB, I am glad to see people seizing on the latest results and declaring the law a failure. It helps to advance my goal of ending the greatest federal education intervention to date, and I think NCLB supporters kind of deserve these attacks on their law. They have repeatedly given NCLB credit for positive things the evidence couldn’t come close to supporting, and it’s nice to see them on the defensive after all their overreaching.
Race to the Top = Klondike Bar
Remember the ads in which actors…er, people…would enthusiastically do demeaning things for Klondike Bars? You know, ads like this one, in which Shakespeare stoops to writing a TV sitcom in exchange for one of those chocolate-encrusted ice cream blocks?
The message, of course, was that the Bard and all the other Klondike-cravers took the deals for the dessert, not, obviously, for the love of what they were being bribed to do. They just wanted the reward – even the biggest idiot understood that.
Sadly, it seems that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan might be hoping that the public is dumber than the biggest idiot. In a recent interview, he talked as if there might actually be states suddenly making education changes needed to get part of his $5-billion “Race to the Top” fund not because they want the money, but because the reforms are the right thing to do.
“It’s really not about the money – it’s about pushing a strong reform agenda that’s going to improve student achievement,” he said. “We’re going to invest in those states that aren’t just talking the talk but that are walking the walk….If folks are doing this to chase money, it’s for the wrong reasons.”
Only in politics would you bribe people to act, then declare that they’d better not be acting just to get the bribe. But you wouldn’t want the public realizing that politicians and bureaucrats are just as selfish as corporate titans or swindlers, would you?
The problem Duncan is trying to deal with, of course, is convincing the public that reforms coerced with Race-to-the-Top dollars will stay in place after the one-shot-deal bucks are gone. But as even the biggest couch potato knows, Shakespeare simply won’t write for Gary Coleman if there’s no ice cream at the end.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Zero Tolerance for Difference
When both the New York Times and Fox News poke fun at a school district it’s a good guess that district has done something pretty silly. That seems to be the case in Newark, Delaware, where the Christina School District just suspended a 6-year-old boy for 45 days because he brought a dreaded knife-fork-spoon combo tool to school. District officials, in their defense, say they had no choice — the state’s “zero tolerance” law demanded the punishment.
Now, the first thing I’ll say is that I was very fortunate there were no zero-tolerance laws — at least that I knew of — when I was a kid. Like most boys, I took a pocket knife to school from time to time, and like most boys I never hurt a soul with it. (I’m pretty sure, though, that I was stabbed by a pencil at least once.) I also played a lot of games involving tackling, delivered and received countless “dead arm” punches in the shoulder, and brought in Star Wars figures armed with…brace yourself!…laser guns! I can only imagine how many suspension days I’d have received had current disciplinary regimes been in place back then.
Before completely trashing little ol’ Delaware and all the other places without tolerance, however, there is a flip side to this story: Some kids really are immediate threats to their teachers and fellow students. And as the recent stomach-wrenching violence in Chicago has vividly illustrated, there are some schools where no one is safe. In other words, there are cases and situations where zero tolerance is warranted.
So how do you balance these things? How do you have zero-tolerance for those who need it, while letting discretion and reason reign for everyone else? And how do you do that when there is no clear line dividing what is too dangerous to tolerate and what is not?
The answer is educational freedom, as it is with all of the things that diverse people are forced to fight over because they all have to support a single system of government schools! Let parents who are not especially concerned about danger, or who value freedom even if it engenders a little more risk, choose schools with discipline policies that give them what they want. Likewise, let parents who want their kids in a zero-tolerance institution do the same.
Ultimately, let parents and schools make their own decisions, and no child will be subjected to disciplinary codes with which his parents disagree; strictness will be much better correlated with the needs of individual children; and perhaps most importantly, discipline policies will make a lot more sense for everyone involved.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Law and Civil Liberties
Intemper, Intemper!
Yesterday, in conjunction with the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Cato held a debate on how to control spiraling college costs. It was a terrific discussion, and I encourage everyone to check it out. It also got some coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education, though nothing beats taking in the whole thing for yourself!
Concerning the latter point, I’d like to respectfully suggest that at least one person who saw only the Chronicle’s piece imbibe the whole event, as well as what follows in this blog entry. Unfortunately, it appears that the Chronicle article got her a tad apoplectic, and I think she might have written some things she didn’t really mean.
On her blog, Sara Goldrick-Rab calls me an “ideologue,” accuses me of being totally ignorant of empirical research on aid and college prices, and even calls me “unoriginal” because in 1987 then-U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett asserted what I did yesterday: that government aid to students enables colleges to keep raising prices. Oh, and she matter-of-factly declares that “after more than 20 years of this nonsense it’s time to call the idea what it is– just plain stupid– and stop giving ink to the people who repeat it.”
Hey, wait! I need that ink…
Now, I might very well be an ideologue (if by that you mean someone who doesn’t pretend to approach every issue as if I’ve never given it, or anything else, any previous thought), and I might even be a pretty ignorant guy – nobody’s perfect, right? – but that doesn’t change several, glaring problems with Goldrick-Rab’s assault on my character and on the Bennett Hypothesis.
Lies Our Professors Tell Us
On Sunday, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by the chancellor and vice chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, in which the writers proposed that the federal government start pumping money into a select few public universities. Why? On the constantly repeated but never substantiated assertion that state and local governments have been cutting those schools off.
As I point out in the following, unpublished letter to the editor, that is what we in the business call “a lie:”
It’s unfortunate that officials of a taxpayer-funded university felt the need to deceive in order to get more taxpayer dough, but that’s what UC Berkeley’s Robert Birgeneau and Frank Yeary did. Writing about the supposedly dire financial straits of public higher education (“Rescuing Our Public Universities,” September 27), Birgeneau and Yeary lamented decades of “material and progressive disinvestment by states in higher education.” But there’s been no such disinvestment, at least over the last quarter-century. According to inflation-adjusted data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, in 1983 state and local expenditures per public-college pupil totaled $6,478. In 2008 they hit $7,059. At the same time, public-college enrollment ballooned from under 8 million students to over 10 million. That translates into anything but a “disinvestment” in the public ivory tower, no matter what its penthouse residents may say.
Since letters to the editor typically have to be pretty short I left out readily available data for California, data which would, of course, be most relevant to the destitute scholars of Berkeley. Since I have more space here, let’s take a look: In 1983, again using inflation-adjusted SHEEO numbers, state and local governments in the Golden State provided $5,963 per full-time-equivalent student. In 2008, they furnished $7,177, a 20 percent increase. And this while enrollment grew from about 1.2 million students to 1.7 million! Of course, spending didn’t go up in a straight line — it went up and down with the business cycle — but in no way was there anything you could call appreciable ”disinvestment.”
Unfortunately, higher education is awash in lies like these. Therefore, our debunking will not stop here! On Tuesday, October 6, at a Cato Institute/Pope Center for Higher Education Policy debate, we’ll deal with another of the ivory tower’s great truth-defying proclamations: that colleges and universities raise their prices at astronomical rates not because abundant, largely taxpayer-funded student aid makes doing so easy, but because they have to!
It’s a doozy of a declaration that should set off a doozy of a debate! To register to attend what should be a terrific event, or just to watch online, follow this link.
I hope to see you there, and remember: Don’t believe everything your professors tell you, especially when it impacts their wallets!
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