Author Archive
SAFRA-ficed?
Here’s a quick, preliminary reaction to the higher-education portion of the mammoth health-care reconciliation bill. I could find I’m wrong about some stuff as I delve more deeply into the bill’s language, but it appears that much of the out-of-control spending that would have occurred under the odious Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act has been axed under reconciliation. SAFRA, it appears, has been sacrificed, though to bring to life an even more destructive demon.
Unfortunately, some of SAFRA survived. While a great deal of the spending has been stripped out, reconciliation would still tighten the federal government’s already iron grip on college financing. It would also plow billions more into Pell grants despite decades of evidnece that schools just eat such increases by raising prices. And don’t be fooled by the deceptive accounting in which administrative costs for guaranteed lending are counted as mandatory, but for direct lending as discretionary. When one fully accounts for the costs of going to all direct lending the estimated savings drop from $19.4 billion to $14.4 billion between 2010 and 2019, a sizable chunk of change for a nation so in debt it needs to save every penny it can.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Run Away from ‘Common’ Education Standards
A couple of days ago, Fordham Institute president Chester Finn declared on NRO that conservatives should embrace new, national education standards from the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Today I respond to him on The Corner, and let’s just say it’s clear that neither conservatives, nor anybody else, should embrace national standards.
Oh, one more thing: I shouldn’t have to keep saying this to savvy Washington insiders like the folks at Fordham, but when the federal government bribes states with their own citizens’ tax money to do something, doing that thing is hardly voluntary, at least in any reasonable sense.
For more wise thoughts on the national standards issue, check out this interview with Jay Greene, and this Sacramento Bee piece by Ben Boychuk. Oh, and this interview with yours truly.
Obama’s Education Proposal Still a Bottomless Bag
This morning the Obama Administration officially released its proposal for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka, No Child Left Behind). The proposal is a mixed bag, and still one with a gaping hole in the bottom.
Among some generally positive things, the proposal would eliminate NCLB’s ridiculous annual-yearly-progress and “proficiency” requirements, which have driven states to constantly change standards and tests to avoid having to help students achieve real proficiency. It would also end many of the myriad, wasteful categorical programs that infest the ESEA, though it’s a pipedream to think members of Congress will actually give up all of their pet, vote-buying programs.
On the negative side of the register, the proposed reauthorization would force all states to either sign onto national mathematics and language-arts standards, or get a state college to certify their standards as “college and career ready.” It would also set a goal of all students being college and career ready by 2020. But setting a single, national standard makes no logical sense because all kids have different needs and abilities; no one curriculum will ever optimally serve but a tiny minority of students.
Also, on the (VERY) negative side of the register, Obama’s budget proposal would increase ESEA spending by $3 billion from last year — for a total of $28.1 billion — to pay for all of the ESEA reauthorization’s promises of incentives and rewards. That’s $3 billion more that the utterly irresponsible spenders in Washington simply do not have, and that would do nothing to improve outcomes.
Even if this proposal were loaded with nothing but smart, tough ideas, it would ultimately fail for the same reason that top-down control of government schools has failed for decades. Teachers, administrators, and education bureaucrats make their livelihoods from public schooling, and hence spend more time and money on education lobbying and politicking than anyone else. That makes them by far the most powerful forces in public schooling, and what they want for themselves is what we’d all want in their place if we could get it: lots of money and no accountability to anyone.
As long as such asymmetrical power distribution is the case — and it’s inherent to “democratic” control of education — no proposal, no matter how initially tough, is likely to make any long-term improvements. As the matrix below lays out, no matter what combination of standards and accountability you have, politics will eventually lead to poor outcomes. It’s a major reason that the history of government schooling is strewn with “get-tough” laws that ultimately spend lots of money but produce no meaningful improvements, and it’s a powerful argument for the feds complying with the Constitution and getting out of education.
When all is said and done, you can throw all the great things you want into the federal education bag, but as long as politicians are making the decisions you’ll always come up empty.
Ravitch-and-Hirsch-topia.
If you follow education news at all, over the last week or so — until the national-standards stories took over — you probably saw a lot about education historian Diane Ravitch’s supposedly sudden determination that school choice isn’t good after all. That’s one of the major selling points of her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, and just about every major newspaper has devoted a fair amount of ink to it.
Now I’ve devoted some ink — okay, pixels — to it, too. You can check out my review of Ravitch’s book on the brand-new School Reform News website. When you’re done with that, you can take a gander at my Cato Journal review of Core Knowledge guru E. D. Hirsch’s new offering, The Making of Americans. I think you’ll detect a unifying theme: Ravitch and Hirsch are excellent at their specialties — history and pedagogy, respectively — but they ignore just about everything they have lamented for decades about government schooling in order to proclaim that, um, we somehow need more government schooling.
Go figure!
Gagging on SAFRA
With national curriculum standards now getting some real attention, I haven’t been able to give the plan to shove bankrupting student aid legislation down our thoats via health-care reconciliation the scourging it deserves. I will soon, but until then this “Water Cooler” piece from the Washington Times should slake your thirst. Here’s a choice quote:
Watching the Democrats create two massive pieces of rotten legislation by themselves is bad enough, but piling them together is like watching someone make an enormous Dagwood sandwich with mysterious fillings and make you eat the mile high concoction in one sitting.
Darn — acckkk! — right!
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Health, Welfare & Entitlements; Tax and Budget Policy
Slippery Standards Slope
The draft national curricular standards released yesterday, as I wrote earlier, will in all likelihood do little or no educational good if adopted. They’ll either be ignored or, if hard to meet, dumbed-down.
That said, the really troubling question is not whether the standards will do any good, but whether they will do much harm.
The answer: Oh, they’ll do harm. They’ll move us one step closer to complete centralization of education, which portends many potentially bad things, from total special-interest domination to even more wasteful spending.
Perhaps the most concerning possibility is that complete centralization — meaning, federalization — will lead to nationwide conflict over what the schools should teach, much as we are seeing in Texas right now and witnessed in the 1990s, the last time Washington tried to push “voluntary” national standards. Back then national standards in several subjects were proposed, and a national firestorm was set off over what they did, and did not, contain.
If There’s Money, We Want It! (Whatever “It” Is.)
There seems to be a real trend in Washington to declare support for a bill now, but actually have the bill exist later. It’s been most obvious in the health care marathon, where often purely notional pieces of legislation have been boisterously celebrated or bemoaned for months. It’s also the case with the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which may or may not be tacked on to health-care reconcilation because supporters don’t, you know, want to actually debate the thing. Currently, there is no Senate version of SAFRA, and it’s unclear what changes would need to be made to the House version to make it reconcilable.
So why are so many people willing to take big chances on legislation that only exists in the fertile minds of congresspeople? As this Inside Higher Ed article on community colleges illustrates, it’s often because they want taxpayer money — $12 billion is the community colleges’ hoped for windfall – no matter what:
Sensing the urgency of the moment on Capitol Hill, many community college advocates believe that budget reconciliation is the most likely route for passage of the AGI this year. They argue that time is of the essence for those community college trustees and presidents visiting town for the summit to lobby their representatives and senators without focusing on quibbles over the bill.
“I know there’s a lot of discussion for many of you [about] what’s in the program,” said Jee Hang Lee, ACCT director of public policy. “‘What’s in the final program for SAFRA? What’s in the final program for AGI? What is it going to look like?’ What we’ve heard is that, for the most part, the House and Senate staffs and the White House have something in place. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know many people who do know what it looks like. But they have a broad agreement on the structure of these programs, so that’s nice to know that they have because that means it’ll likely get funded.”
Still, he advised visiting trustees and presidents to be direct in their support for the bill and wait until later to work out potential kinks in its specific provisions.
“My point is that you just need to press hard to get this money and get it passed, and we can work out some of the details, I guess, later, I guess through the negotiated rule-making period,” Lee said.
Hmm. And I guess money grabs like these explain a good bit of why the national debt is now approaching $12.6 trillion.
The Standards Themselves Are, Frankly, Irrelevant
Three days ago I reported that draft, grade-by-grade, national curricular standards would soon be released by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Yesterday, they were. (If you want to get a sense for what the proposed standards are follow the link to them. Don’t bother with the appendices, though, unless you really want to get into the weeds.)
Naturally, in the coming days lots of people will be offering heaps of commentary about what the standards do or do not contain. That’s not my main concern (though reading through the English standards I am dubious that mastery of them could be easily or consistently assessed). You see, the content of the standards is largely irrelevant because the main problem isn’t what the standards are, but standardization itself.
As I’ve blathered about on numerous occasions, it makes little sense to expect all kids to master all the same things at the same rates. All kids are different – they have different talents, desires, and abilities — and to impose one, “best” progression on them is simply illogical.
Another problem with imposing a single standard nationwide — and yes, this will be imposed, unless states suddenly decide they don’t like getting their citizen’s tax dollars back from Uncle Sam – is that it prevents competition between curricula. And that, in turn, kills innovation, the lifeblood of progress. So unless these standards have achieved perfection — and I’m pretty sure they haven’t — it’s a very dangerous thing to make them the end-all and be-all.
Finally, no matter how brilliant the draft standards, there is no reason to believe that they will drive meaningful educational improvement. Government schools will still be government schools, and the people employed by them will still have very little incentive to push kids to excellence, and every incentive to game the system to make the standards toothless. And no one yet has offered a decent proposal, other than school-choice supporters, for getting around that very inconvenient, public-schooling truth.
All of these problems help to explain why there is no convincing empirical evidence that national standards drive superior educational outcomes. Unfortunately, most national-standards advocates will talk themselves blue in the face about what’s in the standards, but avoid at all costs the question of whether standardization makes sense in the first place.
National Standards Coming Soon?
After months of delay, the Common Core State Standards Initiative will soon release draft, grade-by-grade, national curricular standards. According to the CCSSI website, the draft standards will be out this month.
Why the wait? The drafting process has been pretty opaque so outside observers can’t know for certain, but the scuttlebutt is that drafters just haven’t been able to agree on what the standards should contain.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby explains in a terrific new piece — which draws on my new national-standards analysis — getting very diverse people to agree on a single standard is extremely difficult, especially if the standard is going to be something other than lowest-common-denominator. It’s one of many reasons that having national standards might sound great in the abstract, but is far from fab in reality.
Hopefully, when the draft standards are finally released we will be hearing a lot more about the reasons, most of which are in my report, that national standards can’t possibly live up to the billing supporters give them. If not, our nation and our children will suffer for it.
Sneaky SAFRA
Great column on the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act by Tim Carney in today’s Washington Examiner. He hits the major points — SAFRA hardly threatens a sudden federal takeover of student lending, but also promises anything but “fiscal reponsibility” — while adding a critical warning: the whole stinkin’ bill could be tacked onto health care reconciliation.
Wow! As if the health care bill isn’t abominable enough on its own…
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Our Little Scholars
As I mentioned a few days ago, today is the “Day of Action” in California — and, it turns out, elsewhere – when college students and just general protectors of public schooling are supposed to take to the streets and demand that taxpayers fork over not one less red cent to students and schools.
Ironically, the mindless, property-destroying, absurd goings-on that have surrounded past such demonstrations in Cali — and are already in evidence today – brilliantly illustrate one major reason we need to cut higher education subsidies, not increase them. Clearly, too many college students have both far too much time on their hands, and far too little self control, to justify spending hard-earned taxpayer dough on their “education.”
But at least the ostensible motivation behind recreational rioting in California has been slightly related to a principle — namely, the principle that taxpayers owe students stuff. That’s actually a better excuse for taking to the streets than what set off last night’s student riots in College Park, Maryland: a victory in a basketball game. (To be fair, University of Maryland students also riot after losses – they’re no fair weather fans!)
And to think — one of the reasons we’re supposed to support massive subsidies for students is that it serves the common good. Go figure.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Higher Tuition and Two Subway Sandwich Shops!? Berkeley Students Declare War
A few months ago I highlighted a report about growing college-student “activism” focused not on lofty ideals like ending war or oppression, but on taking money out of taxpayers’ wallets and putting it into students’. Well today I apologize for doubting the high-minded idealism of at least some of our crusading college kids. Yes, recent student rioting in Berkeley, California was partially animated by outrage over moves to have students pay more for their massively subsidized educations, but the property destruction was about much, MUCH more than that:
Crowds outside the building continued to swell, and by about 1:30 a.m., people began to clash with police, throwing bottles, setting trash ablaze and breaking several windows on Telegraph, including the plate-glass front windows of a Subway sandwich shop, police said. Protesters lit a large garbage container on fire, then rolled it into the street…
A protest leader, UC Berkeley student Callie Maidhof, defended the vandalism and said rioters targeted the sandwich shop because a second Subway is scheduled to open on campus, just across Bancroft Way.
“There will be two Subways within 100 feet of each other,” she said.
The Vietnam War. Crushing racial segregation. A glut of hoagie shops! The student battle for justice clearly goes on! And Californians have much more to look forward to: Thursday will be a statewide “Day of Action,” and in addition to deafening demands for continued taking from taxpayers, students will no doubt also give Fuddruckers, or maybe even Starbucks, it’s long-deserved comeuppance.
The day of liberation – and really amped-up rent-seeking — is finally at hand!
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Does Duncan Have Any Clue What a Free Market Is?
On the heels of exploiting the name of perhaps the world’s all-time greatest free-marketeer, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has decided to cut right to the chase and abuse the term “free market” itself. Writing in the Washington Post as part of his ongoing effort to demonize banks and push the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act over the finish line, Duncan offers the following:
The president’s plan actually creates jobs and draws on free-market principles by selecting private companies through a competitive process to service student loans issued directly by the Education Department. These private companies, including Sallie Mae, compete for our business and are evaluated on the quality of their customer service and their default rates.
Got it? When the federal government decides which companies get to service loans that it completely controls, those are “free-market principles” at work.
Right. And the legislation Duncan is trying to sell us really is fiscally “responsible.”
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
You Always Lose with Top-Down Standards
Yesterday, Andrew Coulson and I wrote a bit on President Obama’s little talk with the nation’s governors about potential changes to federal education policy. The root of the President’s proposal — and we’ve probably only seen fragments of what will eventually come out – is a requirement that states adopt common “college- and career-readiness standards” to qualify for large chunks of federal money.
This certainly puts in place the “standards” part of “standards and accountability” reform, which has dominated education for roughly the last fifteen years. But where’s the ”accountability” part?
So far, nowhere. Yes, a state would have to adopt common standards — or, interestingly, somehow work with universities to certify its standards as college- and career-ready — but the administration has offered nothing by way of accountabilty for academic outcomes. Indeed, it has emphasized a move away from the “corrective” actions that No Child Left Behind imposes on laggard schools and has instead pushed getting extra resources (of course!) to those institutions.
This must be alarming to reformers who think the only way to fix education is to have government “get tough” on its schools. And the no-accountability approach certainly doesn’t make much intuitive sense. Without potential punishments or rewards for outcomes, what incentives do districts and schools have to meet standards, national or otherwise?
The answer, of course, is none. But don’t fret: Whether there are accountability measures for performance or not, in government-run schooling the outcome will be the same. Unfortunately, ”the same” always means ”poor.”
Why inevitably poor? Because the people employed in education — teachers, school administrators, bureaucrats — have hugely disproportionate power over education politics, and hence a tremendous ability to bend the system to their will. And what do they prefer from the system? The same thing you or I would ideally get from our jobs: as much money as possible with no accountability for what we produce. The impotence of NCLB is exhibit A of this.
With that political reality firmly in mind, the final result for any potential combination of standards and accountability becomes clear: No meaningful improvement. The handy matrix below lays it out:
So let’s give this to President Obama: His move to further federalize education authority is very troubling, but at least he doesn’t see the need for the accountability charade. Or so, anyway, it seems for the moment.
PS: I Also Want to Take over Education
Andrew already blogged about it a bit, but overshadowed by the release of President Obama’s price-controlling health-insurance proposal was his speech to the National Governors Association promoting the federal takeover of elementary and secondary school curricula. True, the White House would only require states to adopt some sort of “common” — not national and certainly not federal – standards to get federal funds, but don’t accept the semantic dodge: If the feds are paying, the standards will not only be national, but federal.
Implicit in the President’s proposal, as well as the rhetoric of many national-standards supporters, is that national standards will necessarily be high standards that push improved academic achievement. Unfortunately, these people have chosen to ignore actual tests of that proposition.
They can no longer: My latest Policy Analysis — Behind the Curtain: Assessing the Case for National Curriculum Standards – reviews the theoretical and empirical literature and shows that there is simply no convincing evidence that national standards drive higher academic achievement. Couple that with federal meddling in education being clearly unconstitutional, and the next critical battle in the war against Leviathan seems to be shaping up. And this time, we could very well be fighting for our children’s minds.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Education and Child Policy
Arne Duncan Embraces False Friedman
In a shocking development, U.S. Secretary of Arne Duncan embraced the ideas of Milton Friedman today, championing the funding of students instead of schools! Unfortunately, it was in the context of higher education — Duncan and his boss have done all they can to destroy school choice elsewhere — and he completely misrepresented what Friedman said about higher ed, suggesting that the Nobel Laureate somehow endorsed the federal Direct Loan Program:
We will end the loans under the Federal Family Education Program and make them directly to students — just as economist Milton Friedman proposed 50 years ago, and just as the Department of Education has been doing since 1993 through the Direct Loan Program.
Were Milton Friedman still with us, I think he would be pretty miffed with Duncan. For one thing, 50 years ago there was no Federal Family Education Loan Program. Moreover, assuming Duncan is referring to Friedman’s “The Role of Government in Education,” Friedman was clearly stating that if there is going to be any higher education aid it should go to students, not schools. And then there’s this:
The resulting system would follow in its broad outlines the arrangements adopted in the United States after World War II for financing the education of veterans, except that the funds would presumably come from the States rather than the Federal government [italics added].
It’s bad enough that Duncan and his boss reject Friedman’s very wise and proven counsel when it comes to elementary and secondary education. It’s even worse that Duncan then has the gall to blatantly lie about what Friedman wrote in an effort to sell a rotten and costly piece of federal legislation, the laughably titled Student Aid and Fiscal Repsonsibility Act.
Shameless Vote-Buying through Education?
There’s an act for that! And another act, and another act, and another…
Oh, did we forget to mention the painful results? Well, federal education “gifts” do have a tendency to blow up in your face.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Government and Politics
Public Schools = One Big Jobs Program
Who said public schooling is all about the adults in the system and not the kids? Everyone knows it’s even more basic than that: Public schooling is a jobs program, pure and simple. At least, that’s what one can’t help but conclude as our little “stimulus” turns one-year old today.
“State fiscal relief really has kept hundreds of thousands of teachers and firefighters and first responders on the job,” declared White House Council of Economic Advisers head Christina Romer today.
Throwing almost $100 billion at education sure as heck ought to have kept teachers in their jobs, and the unemployment numbers suggest teachers have had a pretty good deal relative to the folks paying their salaries. While unemployment in “educational services” – which consists predominantly of teachers, but also includes other education-related occupations – hasn’t returned to its recent, April 2008 low of 2.2 percent, in January 2010 it was well below the national 9.7 percent rate, sitting at 5.9 percent.
Of course, retaining all of these teachers might be of value to taxpayers if having so many of them had a positive impact on educational outcomes. But looking at decades of achievement data one can’t help but conclude that keeping teacher jobs at all costs truly isn’t about the kids, but the adults either employed in education, or trying to get the votes of those employed in education. As the following chart makes clear, we have added teachers in droves for decades without improving ultimate achievement at all:
(Sources: Digest of Education Statistics, Table 64, and National Assessment of Educational Progress, Long-Term Trend results)
Since the early 1970s, achievement scores for 17-year-olds — our schools’ “final products” — haven’t improved one bit, while the number of teachers per 100 students is almost 50 percent greater. If anything, then, we have far too many teachers, and would do taxpayers, and the economy, a great service by letting some of them go. Citizens could then keep more of their money and invest in private, truly economy-growing ventures. But no, we’re supposed to celebrate the endless continuation of debilitating economic – and educational — waste.
You’ll have to pardon me for not considering this an accomplishment I should cheer about.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Same Old SAFRA Tune
Congressman George Miller (D-CA) is at it again, publishing a letter in the New York Times Saturday implying that the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act — which is, thankfully, languishing in the Senate right now — would save taxpayers $87 billion over ten years.
Quite the opposite: The bill would almost certainly cost taxpayers additional tens-of-billions, not save money. But that doesn’t seem to deter Miller. Unfortunately, neither does the galactic national debt, nor that people appear to have had it with seemingly incessant expansion of federal power.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Tax and Budget Policy
Dr. Frankenstein on His Creation: It’s All The Monster’s Fault
As I have explained on numerous occasions, supporters of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) – which would end federal guaranteed student loans, turn everything into lending direct from Uncle Sam, and spend the resulting savings and way much more — have often shamelessly promoted the bill as a boon to taxpayers when it will almost certainly cost them tens-of-billions. Where they have generally been right is in rebutting criticisms that SAFRA would be a federal takeover of a private industry. With lender profits all but assured under federal guaranteed lending, the vast majority of student loans haven’t been truly private for decades.
Unfortunately, SAFRA advocates are just as clueless — or, more likely, rhetorically unbridled — about what constitutes a private entity as are status-quo supporters. Case in point, an article in today’s Huffington Post that, along with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, attempts to portray the suddenly rocky road ahead for SAFRA as a result of evil lender lobbyists dropping boulders in the selfless legislation’s way:
Taking aim at Sallie Mae, the largest student lender in the country and a driving force behind the lobbying effort, Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday accused the company of using taxpayer funds to lobby and advertise, and cast its executives as white-collar millionaires uninterested in serious education reform.
“Sallie Mae executives have paid themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade while teachers, nurses, and scientists — the backbone of the new economy — face crushing debt because of runaway college tuition costs,” Duncan said.
Here Sallie Mae is painted in the same ugly hues as Lehman Brothers, AIG, and all the other supposedly rapacious, unscrupulous companies whose unchecked greed, we’re told, brought the American economy to its knees. (We also get the baseless but obligatory pronouncement about “crushing debt” for teachers and other toilers for the “public good.”)
But wait! Doesn’t ”Sallie Mae” sound a lot like”Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac”? Of course! That’s because just like Fannie and Freddie, Sallie was created by the federal government, only with Sallie’s job being to furnish lots of cheap college loans. And guess what? Just like Fannie and Freddie, Sallie became by far the biggest kid on her block because her huge federal creator fed her and protected her for decades, not setting her off on her own until 1996. But that part of her story doesn’t fit anywhere into the evil corporation narrative, so it’s just not mentioned. All we need to know is Sallie is private, her owners and employees make a lot of money, and that is why she is evil and dangerous.
And so the politics of demonization and denial, a staple of the recession blame game, continues. Private institutions are portrayed as malevolent predators and government as a warm, pure, protective father-figure. But there is much more accurate imagery possible when it comes to Sallie Mae: Egomaniacal Dr. Frankenstein furiously blaming the monster he created for doing exactly what he built it to do.
And some wonder why there’s such widespread outrage — the real reason SAFRA is in trouble – about ever-expanding federal power?
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