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A Bone Is Nice. Actually, No.
After House Republicans’ weak first attempt at offering cuts to gargantuan federal spending — a proposal that included nary a flick at education-related outlays — and the Obama administration’s hinting that it would leave education totally untouched, there is a tiny bit of good news: Both the GOP and the administration are apparently willing to trim funding putatively intended to help educate people. But these are just tiny bones they’re throwing to people who know that the federal government likely does zero net good when it comes to actually educating people, and that there is no acceptable excuse not to make big cuts to federal “education” programs.
House Republicans, for their part, scheduled lots of education programs for shaves in their second attempt at making a reasonable budget proposal. All told, though, the cuts would amount to only about $4.9 billion out of a total Department of Education budget of about $63 billion. For those keeping track at home, that’s just a 7.7 percent cut.
Now, maybe that would be reasonable if ED-administered programs worked, but as we at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom have laid out repeatedly, they do not. Overall, they pour money into already cash-bloated K-12 and higher education systems; insulate public elementary and secondary schools from ever having to compete for and earn their money; and fuel rampant college tuition inflation by constantly increasing aid that lets schools raise their prices with impunity. Perhaps the most telling sign that the House GOP is not serious about really cutting Washington down to size, though, is that the laughable Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners program is not on their chopping block. If you won’t pick off this ridiculous, almost-on-the-ground-it’s-hanging-so-low fruit, you simply aren’t really trying.
For the Obama administration, while the details of their proposed cuts aren’t yet out, early Fox News reporting says the administration will propose cutting Pell-Grant spending by $100 billion over ten years. That’s a bit surprising, because President Obama has made getting as many people to graduate college as possible — regardless, sadly, of whether that means there’s actually greater learning – a key education goal. Moreover, constantly growing Pell has long been a way for federal politicians to demonstrate that they ”care” about educating all Americans. So, maybe, one cheer for the administration.
Unfortunately, as is often the case when it comes to budgeting, this might be a trick. An unnamed administration official reportedly told Fox that the administration will propose keeping the maximum Pell at $5,550 a year and would realize savings by ending year-round Pell eligibility. With year-round Pell, a student could get two grants in a calendar year for taking a regular academic-year load as well as summer school. According to the Fox News story, the ”official said the costs” of year-round Pell ”exceeded expectations and there was little evidence that students earn their degrees any faster.”
So why’s this potentially a trick? The budget experts could no doubt give you lots of reasons, but knowing education policy I can safely say one thing: It is far too early to say whether or not the year-round Pell would help students earn their degrees any faster. Why? Because year-round Pell was only instituted in 2008, much too recently to have any useful empirical data about its effect on graduation rates. It also seems likely that this will produce no savings regardless because students will still take Pell grants for the same number of total credit hours.
Of course, the main problem with Pell is that it enables schools to ratchet up their tuition rates, capturing all the aid and not making students any better off. Even bigger than this, though, is that almost certainly because spending on education plays so well politically, the administration is ignoring the same screaming reality as the House GOP: Federal spending on education does little if any educational good! Add to that the unconstitutionality of federal involvement and there is simply no acceptable argument – including a desire to “win the future” — for not eliminating federal spending done in the name of “education.” Indeed, if we want to win the future, ending bankrupting spending we know does zero good is absolutely imperative.
Secretly Happy Colleges Should Mean Overtly Angry Taxpayers
Yesterday, House Republicans introduced their preliminary list of spending cuts, cuts that were, they declared, ”to go deep.” Unfortunately, coming in at just $74 billion, they were about as deep as onion skin. After all, the total federal budget is well over $3 trillion, and the national debt now exceeds $14 trillion.
The relatively lilliputian size of the proposed cuts should give any taxpayer major queasiness over Republicans’ desire to truly rein in government. But if that doesn’t scare you, this report from Inside Higher Ed absolutely should:
Shhh. Don’t tell, and they’ll never admit it publicly. But college officials are (very quietly) feeling okay — at least for now — about how Congressional Republicans would treat the programs that matter most to higher education in their first whack at the federal budget.
Why should ivory tower denizens be secretly peppy, and taxpayers openly upset? Because the House GOP pretty much left higher ed funding untouched, despite the fact that the ivory tower is soaking in putrid, taxpayer-funded waste. Quite simply, the federal government pours hundreds of billions of dollars into our ivy-ensconced institutions every year, but what that has largely produced is atrociously low graduation rates; at-best dubious amounts of learning for those who do graduate; ever-fancier facilities; and rampant tuition inflation that renders a higher education no more affordable to students but keeps colleges fat and happy.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: If federal politicians won’t significantly cut ”education” spending – spending that has done next to nothing to increase actual learning — then they are not serious about reining in the deficit or cutting government down to size. They are still, sadly, much more concerned about appearing to “care” about education than doing what needs to be done.
GAO Confirms: It Did Nothing Wrong, and It’s None of Your Business
Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirmed what we already knew it would confirm: According to its own investigation, errors were made in producing a report highly damaging to for-profit colleges, but no one had any bad intentions and the report still stands. Well, the significantly revised report – the one much more favorable to for-profits schools that got almost no attention because GAO sneaked it out — still stands. And please, don’t try to hold the GAO accountable yourself: The GAO’s press release states that the report on its internal investigation will not be publicly released.
Now, it’s quite possible that the GAO investigation on for-profit colleges really was on the up-and-up and there truly isn’t anything to see here. But given the very basic things that the GAO, um, overlooked in its initial report — not to mention the fact that the GAO works for the public – it’s simply not acceptable to tell the public that it’s none of its beeswax what the GAO’s internal investigation found. And really, why should anyone be satisfied with a government agency declaring itself its own judge and jury?
Science: ‘All Kids Different’
It didn’t get a lot of attention, but in last week’s State of the Union address President Obama celebrated the spread of national curriculum standards that’s been fueled largely by the federal Race to the Top. Of course, he didn’t actually call them “national standards” because no one is supposed to think that these are de facto federal standards that states have been bribed into adopting. The point, though, was clear to those in the know:
Race to the Top is the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation. For less than one percent of what we spend on education each year, it has led over 40 states to raise their standards for teaching and learning. These standards were developed, not by Washington, but by Republican and Democratic governors throughout the country.
Despite the celebration of national standards by both the President and lots of other supporters, there is essentially zero evidence that such standards will produce better educational outcomes. Much of that has to do with the reality of democratically controlled, government education: Those who would be held accountable for getting kids to high standards have the most clout in education politics, and they naturally fight tough standards. It also has a lot to do with human reality: All kids are different. It’s an inescapable observation for anyone who has ever encountered more than one child, but the national-standards crowd prefers to ignore it.
Maybe science will help them see the light. According to the BBC, new research comparing identical and fraternal twins reveals that genetics — something that exists before standards and schooling — has a lot to do with how much and how quickly someone learns:
The researchers examined the test results of 12-year-old twins – identical and fraternal – in English, maths and science.
They found the identical twins, who share their genetic make-up, did more similarly in the tests than the fraternal twins, who share half their genetic make-up.
The report said: “The results were striking, indicating that even when previous achievement and a child’s general cognitive ability are both removed, the residual achievement measure is still significantly influenced by genetic factors.”
In light of this confirmation of the obvious, isn’t it clear that a single timeline for what all children should know and when they should know it makes little sense? And doesn’t it point to the best system being one that gives kids individualized attention?
Of course it does, but that would require “experts” of all stripes to stop trying to impose their solutions on all children. It would also, ultimately, necessitate a system in which parents would choose what’s best for their children, and educators would specialize in all sorts of different curricula, delivery mechanisms, and teaching techniques.
Unfortunately, few in the education policy world are willing to adopt that utterly logical — but power relinquishing — solution.
For-profits Fighting Back, Harkin to Flog-on
Last week, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Comittee, announced that on February 17 he will continue his obssessive attack on for-profit colleges, holding yet another hearing to determine just how evil profit-seekers are. At least, that is what will presumably be discussed — the specific subject of the hearing is yet to be identified. But the committee actually tackling, say, rampant waste throughout higher education driven by federal student aid, or just giving for-profit schools an even-handed treatment, would be too huge a turnaround to contemplate.
Despite there being no end in sight to Harkin’s seige, for-profit institutions aren’t just rolling over, and today they launched their latest counterattack. This afternoon the Coalition for Educational Success — a for-profit college advocacy group — filed a lawsuit against the Government Accountability Office. At issue: The GAO’s ”secret shopper” report on for-profit institutions that was eventually — but very stealthily — revealed by the GAO to be riddled with errors, and which could be shown to be an even bigger smear job were the GAO to allow for-profit schools to examine the evidence behind the report.
Clearly there will be more to come on this, if for no other reason than Harkin’s show-hearings have garnered a lot of coverage in the past. Hopefully, this time potentially disturbing behavior by the GAO, as well as the huge problems federal policy has created throughout higher education — you know, the really important stories — will also get a little attention.
I Said Believe!
Since its beginning, one of the primary drivers behind public schooling — government schooling — has been a desire to compel belief, whether in “American” values, God, the primacy of science, or myriad other things that some people have thought it essential for all people to accept. The result has been constant conflict that, rather than uniting diverse people — a companion goal of public schooling — has divided them. And not only have crusades to force belief created ongoing conflicts, there’s generally been little evidence they’ve actually changed the targeted beliefs. So we’ve gotten all the downside of trying to force alterations to hearts and minds without actually changing them.
Case in point, the seemingly endless war over the teaching of human origins.
Despite decades of keeping religion out of the public schools, the latest polling shows that 40 percent of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form about 10,000 years ago, while only 16 percent think that human beings evolved without the participation of God.
New research from a couple of Penn State political scientists elucidates one reason – besides simple, honest disagreement — that this is the case. While law can prohibit the teaching in public schools of such alternatives to evolution as creationism and intelligent design, it cannot actually make biology instructors teach evolution. And, it turns out, a major reason many teachers tiptoe around evolution is that they fear the backlash that would come from forcing a singular view on diverse people.
According to Michael Berkman and Eric Pultzer, roughly 60 percent of respondents in the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers reported that they either steer clear of evolution or dance around it not necessarily because they reject the theory, but because they don’t want trouble. “Our data show that these teachers understandably want to avoid controversy,” the researchers said. It’s a finding that confirms an anecdotal New York Times report from a few years ago, and that fits with other analyses of public schooling that conclude that often the easiest thing for public schools to do is simply avoid any disputed topic.
So what do we do?
For starters, stop making education policy based on the notion that some things are so important all people must be forced to believe in them. You simply cannot compel belief — at best, you’ll get the parroting back of what you want to hear, not true acceptance. Worse, you’ll very likely create a situation where no one gets what they want and everyone ends up with empty, incoherent, compromised curricula.
The ultimate solution is to let parents choose options for their children without first having to pay for the “one, best system,” and to let educators provide schooling tailored to the values and needs of whomever they wish to serve. Then everyone will be be able to access coherent curricula rather than being saddled with educational mush.
Of course, many people will choose to have their children learn things with which neither you nor I agree. We can make that clear to them by selecting different options for our own children and openly debating conflicting opinions. What we cannot do is continue to try to impose our beliefs on them: not only is it incompatible with a free nation and antithetical to social unity, it often ends up keeping everyone from getting what they believe is best for their children.
Hollow Ivory
Rumor has it that President Obama, no doubt because it is always a warm and fuzzy subject, will feature education prominently in his upcoming State of the Union address. If so, he will almost certainly stress his goal of having the United States lead the world in the percentage of its citizens with a college degree by 2020.
Unfortunately, doing what feels good often isn’t the same as doing what’s smart.
Today, we get more evidence that simplistic, rhetoric-driven education policymaking — more degrees equals more learning equals economic bonanza! — is ultimately counterproductive. It turns out, students generally learn very little in at least their first couple years of college, and many learn little over four years.
According to Inside Higher Ed, that’s the main story of a new book being released today, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. IHE says the book reports that ”45 percent of students ‘did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning’ during the first two years of college” and 36 percent “‘did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning’ over four years.”
But if students haven’t been nose-to-the-grindstone learning, what have they been doing?
Think of just about every television show or movie you’ve ever seen about college, and you’ll have your answer: They’ve been focusing on havin’ fun, or what Ivory Tower officials euphemistically call “student engagement.” And they’ve been doing it with hundreds-of-billions of taxpayer dollars annually.
Now, all of this needs be taken with a grain of salt. The measure of learning used in the book was the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a test that according to IHE “is designed to measure gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other ‘higher level’ skills.” Such fuzzy outcomes are notoriously difficult to pin down and aren’t necessarily major areas of concern for pupils studying, say, biology or engineering. It’s also worth noting that results varied significantly both between schools and within schools, so the findings are not at all universally applicable.
That said, the findings are a very troubling addition to the already mammoth heap of evidence that government pushes higher education way too much, not too little. But don’t expect to hear that in next week’s State of the Union. It is decidedly not warm and fuzzy, and that’s all that seems to matter in education policymaking.
Dear Defamed: Trust Us, We’re the Government
With the release of a new report analyzing a quietly amended Government Accountability Office study that’s been used to club for-profit colleges, fear of GAO bias has reached a fever pitch. Sadly, the GAO’s response to the report does anything but assuage that fear.
To get a decent sense for the government abuse both surrounding, and possibly perpetrated by, the GAO study in question, it’s worth a quick rehash of events.
Basically, the study was requested by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee who has been waging war against for-profit colleges on the suspicion that the sector is rife with fraud, waste, and abuse. To get data to support his suspicion, Harkin asked the GAO to conduct “secret shopper” research in which investigators pretending to be prospective students visit schools to discover fraudulent admissions and financial aid practices.
In August 2010 the GAO released selected findings in testimony to Harkin’s committee and an accompanying report. The GAO said that it found abuses in all the schools it visited, which Harkin and others suspicious of profit-seekers seized on to assert that the sector is, indeed, teeming with fraud. That the GAO’s report explicitly noted that the sample of schools it visited was non-random and, therefore, its results impossible to apply to all of for-profit higher education was no matter: the rhetoric of those with a bias against for-profit schools was off and running.
In November, while for-profit schools sought unsuccessfully to get all the recorded and other material needed to substantiate the GAO’s findings, the GAO silently slipped a revised version of the report out, one that featured numerous changes, all of which redounded to for-profits’ favor. And it wasn’t just correcting minor oversights: There was lots of recorded dialogue that had been missing from the original report, material that the GAO must have known about before issuing it’s initial, very damaging report.
Which brings us to the present day, and the new report that tears apart the amended version of the GAO study. Using available audio recordings of the shoppers’ visits — and many recordings and other evidence is not available, being held by the GAO and U.S. Department of Education — investigators from the firm of Norton/Norris, Inc., commissioned by the Coalition for Educational Success, report that only a quarter of the GAO’s findings can be substantiated after factoring out missing recordings. In other words, an already crumbling report seems to be utterly collapsing.
So is the GAO apologizing for this, or at least saying they’ll make all their material available? No way, as their statement to Inside Higher Ed makes clear:
“The consultants hired by the Coalition to discredit the report never contacted GAO for explanations and failed to take into account many factors, including the fact that not all information in the report can be found on the audio tapes posted to the Internet,” Chuck Young, GAO’s managing director for public affairs, said in an e-mailed statement. “For example, GAO turned over some videotapes to the inspector general at the Department of Education due to evidence of serious wrongdoing uncovered by investigators. Audio from those visits was not able to be posted. There were also written materials that were examined as part of the work and are not on the tapes. We are reviewing the tapes to see if there were any segments that were not provided to the committee.
“But the bottom line remains that a GAO review team independent from the investigators who did this work examined the report and found no material flaws in the evidentiary support for the overall message of the testimony and consequently our findings did not change. We did issue the errata at their suggestion to clarify our work and provide more precise language. We continue to stand by the overall message of this report.”
You don’t have to suffer from tinfoil-hat paranoia to see real and potential government abuse all over this sorry episode. First, opportunist politicians and others misused the initial GAO report to smear the whole for-profit sector. Then, once the damage was done, the GAO made significant changes to their report without even so much as issuing a press release. And now, as even the amended report is being ripped to shreds, the GAO’s response is basically “you can’t have access to the evidence being used against you, and you don’t need it: We’ve already decided we’re right and you’re wrong.”
Now, are for-profit schools pure and blameless? Absolutely not: Norton/Norris confirmed several of the GAO’s findings, and some findings they questioned are probably accurate. Moreoever, as I’ve pointed out before, many for-profit schools are happy to take students carrying taxpayer dollars despite knowing there’s little chance that those students will ever finish their studies. Of course, that makes those institutions no different from many public and nonprofit private schools about which Sen. Harkin evinces no concern.
Ultimately, though, much more important than the immediate effect of all of this on for-profit schools is the lesson it offers for all Americans: Run afoul of the sensibilities of the wrong politicians – especially if you make a deal with the devil and take government funds — and government can hobble you without ever worrying about due process, transparency, or just plain fairness. All it has to do is make accusations.
Thank You Mr. Graduate, I Will Have Fries with That!
The United States is facing a gigantic debt problem, as we all know. Governments at all levels have simply been spending too much, which most Republicans and Democrats now seem willing to concede. But don’t expect to hear the following from many members of either party: We need to stop spending taxpayer money on sending so many people to college! Indeed, President Obama has already said he’ll support spending cuts but not to education, and few Republicans have ever shown the willingness to flatly declare student aid a costly waste. And maybe they’re right. After all, doesn’t more college education necessarily translate into more productivity and prosperity?
Nope. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, lots of people never finish the education they start, and colleges just raise tuition to eat up aid increases. What I haven’t discussed as much is the problem of college-grad underemployment: college graduates taking jobs that don’t require college degrees. Well it’s a huge inefficiency, as the good folks at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity point out in a timely new study. And it could become an even bigger problem as President Obama pushes to have the United States lead the world in the percentage of the population with a college degree. As CCAP reports:
Evidence shows that currently more than one-third of college graduates hold jobs that governmental employment experts tell us require less than a college degree. That proportion of underemployed college graduates has tripled over the past four decades.
From an economic standpoint, that’s obviously a lot of waste. So why do our policymakers persist in simplistically asserting that more college education is always a good thing? I can’t read minds, but I’m inclined to agree with the CCAP authors:
[T]he notion of President Obama and many higher education leaders that our nation’s future depends on higher numbers of college graduates is fundamentally flawed. It is based more on assumptions, and perhaps almost an ideological attachment to colleges and universities, than on labor market realities.
Many people, it seems, do just assume that more education — without ever looking at what actually goes on in higher ed — is always a good thing, while others believe that government should constantly funnel money to our precious ivory towers no matter how little of concrete value taxpayers get for their dough. But whatever the reason, the facts almost all point in one direction: We need to spend much less taxpayer money on higher education, not much more.
The RTTT Made Me Do It!
Adopting national curriculum standards — the so-called “Common Core” — is voluntary for states. That is what we’ve long been told, and that is what the text of a new report looking at implementation of the standards repeats. But within that report is powerful evidence of how involuntary and federally led Common Core adoption has truly been.
According to the report, which furnishes results of a November 2010 survey of state education officials, the vast majority of states that had adopted the Common Core as of November had done so at least in part because of “the possible effect” of doing so “on success of our Race to the Top application.” Race to the Top, you might recall, was a $4.35 billion federal contest for education funding, and to maximize their chances of winning states had to adopt national standards.
The report tries to downplay this revelatory finding by emphasizing that a slightly larger number of states – 36 versus 30 – cited ”the rigor” of the Common Core in their adoption decisions. But what state education official is going to say that adoption was only about money and not also at least some educational considerations? On the flip side, that officials in any, much less thirty, states were willing to concede the importance of ugly federal-dollar chasing says a ton. In particular, it says what reasonable observers have been stating all along: National standards have largely been bought by Washington, not “voluntarily” adopted by states.
We Must Protect This Failing House! (And To Heck With the Kids In It)
The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” website is once again hosting a forum on education, to which I have contributed some thoughts. The topic: whether there should be federal tax credits for home schoolers.
I won’t rehash my contribution — obviously, you can read it right on the site — but I wanted to respond quickly to two other entries.
The first is from Chester Finn, president of our favorite conservative sparring partner in education, the Thomas B. Fordham Instititute. I just want to thank him for substantiating a warning I offer in my contribution: Create federal home-schooling credits and don’t be surprised if you also get requirements that home schoolers be judged on stultifying standardized tests. It’s exactly what Finn calls for:
In return for the financial help, however, home-schooled students should be required to take state tests, just as they would do in regular school, charter school or virtual schools. And if they don’t pass those tests, either the subsidy vanishes or the kids must enroll in some sort of school with a decent academic track record.
The second person I want to respond to is former Bush II official Susan Neuman, who generally offers the right advice by warning even more starkly than I did that home schoolers demanding tax credits are making a deal with the regulatory devil. That’s fine, as is her reporting that by what indications we have “children who have been home-schooled do remarkably well, attending well-respected colleges and universities and going on to successful careers.” Unfortunately, all that was preceded by the Reductio ad Hitlerum of education debates: Smearing any effort to even the playing field between public schools and other educational arrangements as an “attempt … to destroy public education.”
I know that this will never catch on with people determined to preserve public schools’ near-monopoly on tax dollars no matter how well other arrangements actually educate children (not to mention serve taxpayers and society overall), but it is time to stop treating public education as if it is synonymous with public schools! Indeed, you demonstrate more dedication to public education if you fight to get kids access to the best education wherever it is offered than if you make your ultimate goal preserving government schools. Yet the monopoly defenders insist on smearing choice advocates as being at war with public education.
Stop with this trashy tactic. Wanna say supporters of educational choice are at war with public schools? Fine. But with public education? Sorry — if anything, they’re the ones truly fighting to get the best possible education for all.
Hurrah for ‘Draconian’ Education Cuts!
Over at the Daily Kos they’re getting ready to demonize. Some congressional Republicans opposed language in the continuing budget resolution passed yesterday that would fill a shortfall in Pell Grant funding and keep individual grants at their current sizes. By not filling the shortfall, individual grants would get smaller, something that Kos contributor Jed Lewison characterizes as “draconian.” He also suggests that Republican concerns foreshadow mean things to come in next year’s Congress.
Oh please, let this be true!
For far too long, almost anything related to education has seen pretty regular, sizeable funding increases due largely to the simplistic — and easily demagogued – notion that spending more money on education must be good. Anyone opposing such increases has generally been attacked as a fool or heartless idealogue. But here’s the thing: All this spending has produced little if any discernable good! In higher ed, it has mainly encouraged more and more people to pursue degrees that they either don’t need, can’t handle, or that don’t signify much learning, all while enabling colleges to raise their prices to capture the aid increases! In other words, all the magical thinking about education spending notwithstanding, the evidence strongly suggests that more spending ultimately does little educational good while bleeding taxpayers dry and expanding our utterly unsustainable debt.
So let’s get those “draconian” cuts going, and maybe even have an honest discussion of what really happens when government spends on “education.”
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