Author Archive
The Political Class Really Is Better
In how many ways is this wrong? (Think Detroit’s chronic financial problems, public officials-private schools, and even a little sexism thrown in for good measure.) I suppose, though, the officers are making extra money, and any time that happens it stimulates the economy, right? That makes everything OK.
Could It Be They’re Listening?
While Friday’s compromise on the bankrupting “stimulus” would just dust snow off a glacier – and who knows what will end up in the final version – there is a small silver lining for those of us at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom: education saw the biggest reductions.
For months we have been hammering away at the utter waste of cramming yet more bucks into already obese schools, and maybe, just maybe, someone has been listening. They haven’t been listening all that well – there’s still a Toll House factory’s worth of extra dough for everything from Head Start to Pell Grants – but compared to the already passed House version, the compromise bill would eliminate $40 billion from the “State Fiscal Stabilization Fund” (a massive bailout for hugely bloated state education apparatuses) and all of the money for k-12 and higher education facility construction. So, even if the remaining bill still robs children tomorrow to enrich education bureaucrats today, at least there’s a bit of movement in the right direction.
Hitting Bone Is the Least of Our Worries
Once again, the monthly jobs report is woeful except in education, health services, and government, where there were employment gains. Yet a huge part of the ever-growing “stimulus” — about $140 billion, last I’d heard — is aimed at education, including $79 billion to help ensure that states don’t have to cut a nickel from their public schools and possibly let some staffers go. I mean, the situation is dire, right?
“We’re well past cutting through the fat, through the flesh, muscle,” Miami-Dade superintendent Alberto Carvalho frantically warned in USA Today last month. “We’re now sawing into bone.”
Ignoring the infamous dysfunction in Miami, is there any reason to believe that nationwide, many states or districts are really about to hit bone? I mean, when was the last time they even saw muscle, much less what lies beneath it?
Let’s take a look at some long-term trends and see how lean and mean our schools really are, keeping in mind that throughout the last few decades long-term reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress have been essentially stagnant, especially among 17-year-olds, our schools’ final products.
First, let’s examine per-pupil expenditures. The chart below, taken from table 174 of the federal Digest of Education Statistics, has a line for every state showing inflation-adjusted, current per-pupil expenditures between 1969 and 2004 (the latest year with available data). Obviously, you can’t pick out individual states, but I wanted to show that the overall trend for every state is upward. In addition, to help better put this chart into context, know that the average, per-pupil expenditure nationwide went from $4,060 in 1969 to $9,266 in 2004, a 128 percent increase. Also, the bottom line in the chart represents Utah, and even that state saw a 73 percent funding increase between 1969 and 2004. Finally, note that these are expenditures covering current costs, which exclude capital costs like building construction and maintenance, so the numbers do not reflect full educational expenditures.
Read the rest of this post »
We’ve Heard This All Before
I’m sure there’ll be much ado about President Obama’s rallying cry for the ever-growing “stimulus” in today’s Washington Post , but to me it reads as just so much lofty but empty rhetoric. And at least in education, we’ve heard it all before.
Here’s what the President wrote about education in today’s op-ed:
Now is the time to give our children every advantage they need to compete by upgrading 10,000 schools with state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries and labs; by training our teachers in math and science; and by bringing the dream of a college education within reach for millions of Americans.
Now, where might I have heard this sort of thing before? Oh, here’s an example! From President Jimmy Carter back in 1979, pushing for creation of the U.S. Department of Education:
The Federal government has a limited, but critical responsibility…to ensure equal educational opportunities; to increase access to postsecondary education by low and middle income students; to generate research and provide information to help our educational systems meet special needs; prepare students for employment; and encourage improvements in the quality of our education.
President Carter, of course, got his Department of Education, and schools have also gotten a lot more money, as Adam Schaeffer and I pointed out yesterday. Indeed, looking specifically at the period between 1979-80 and 2004-05 (the latest for which data is available), inflation-adjusted, per-pupil expenditures in public elementary and secondary schools rose from $6,549 to $11,470, a 75 percent increase. And total federal education funding? Adjusted for inflation, In 1980 Washington spent or helped to provide $94.5 billion. By 2006, that figure had ballooned 146 percent, hitting $232.0 billion!
So how can we have pretty much all the same needs as we had in 1979? Because education spending is almost always as empty as the rhetoric that drives it, doing little or nothing to actually improve outcomes for students while letting politicians appear to “care” and enriching powerful education interest groups. In other words, it does nothing of what it promises, but keeps the busted status quo going strong!
Drop the Pipe Dream
The gargantuan “stimulus” coming down the pike has suddenly gotten education a lot of attention, but commentators continue the pipe dream that politicians might finally leverage this infusion of cash into effective reform.
Here’s an idea: Wake up and smell reality instead of hoping upon hope that this time our billions…er…tens of billions will get us something. As Adam Schaeffer and I document today on RealClearPolitics, the U.S. has been stimulating education at all levels for decades, and have gotten essentially nothing for our money. And of course we haven’t: As the “Washington must do something” rhetoric driving the pork-laden stimulus-to-end-all-stimuli well illustrates, the overwhelming goal of most legislation is to make politicians appear to “care,” not to actually accomplish anything. And nothing, unfortunately, says “care” as much as wasting tens of billions in the name of cute, innocent children.
Schools Have Plenty of Money!
How many times do we have to repeat that the United States spends more per elementary and secondary student than almost any other industrialized nation before our political leaders stop talking like our schools get by on pennies a day? And how often do we have to point to state spending to show that, annual cries of the sky falling notwithstanding, expenditures have been on a very long, inflation-adjusted upward trend?
Judging by this tired fare from new U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan, and this standard story of rage from California, a lot more. So here you go:
Check out the OECD data here (table B1.1a)…
…see the figures for state spending here…
…and reporters who cover incessant assertions of financial misery from educators, please check out the contact info for Cato’s media department here.
Operators are standing by.
A Different Kind of Ownership Society
In the Christian Science Monitor today, Southern Illinois University professor William A. Babcock tries to make a case for mandatory national service — two years of forced toil in politically specified areas of “national need” that would be rewarded with two free years of college (and, presumably, no free years in jail). In addition, Babcock touts a bunch of valuable lessons that “youth corps” slav…er…members would learn, including how to be “more worldly wise,” whatever that means, and how to be “more fiscally self-sufficient.” Right…
I can really only see two lessons being taught by a national service program like the one Babcock proposes: (1) a college education is little more than a parting gift, not the way to gain truly advanced knowledge and skills, and (2) the state owns you.
Unfortunately, Prof. Babcock is not alone in endorsing a bizarro ”ownership society.” In fact, some guy who just became president, while stopping short of calling for mandatory service (but not the taxation to pay for it) is almost right there with the professor. It’s radical change we should all hope we’re not forced to believe in.
Lousy, Ungrateful, Punk Kids!
Yes, the title sounds like a line from the crotchety old man in a movie, but somehow it just seems to fit. In Nevada, the college students have taken to the anger/dance party streets, outraged over a proposal to cut state higher education funding in the face of recession:
Before the rally got underway, students crammed tents to sign petitions and receive information on how to contact state legislators. Others waved signs of protest like “Impeach [Governor Jim] Gibbons” as a DJ spun music near the stage. During the event, students bristled with indignation at the mention of the cuts, while they wildly cheered calls demanding action.
Now, I believe the children are our future and all that, but let’s put this in perspective. First off, everyone has lots of things they think are valuable and for which they want to use their money. Why should they have to support UNLV, or any other college, rather than, say, buy a car? More concretely, as the attached chart from the State Higher Education Executive Officers shows, Nevada has pretty steadily increased public per-pupil expenditures on higher ed over the last few years and, indeed, kept funding pretty stable or growing over the last few decades. Meanwhile, the state’s kept net revenue from tuition pretty constant. Moreover, relative to other states, Nevada is extremely generous, with public per-pupil expenditures of $8,589 in 2007 (versus a national average of $6,773) and per-pupil revenue through tuition of only $1,798 (versus a national average of $3,845).
And so, I repeat the crotchety old man’s line — “Lousy, ungrateful, punk kids!” — with a warning that the Silver State is hardly the only place we’ll see such self-righteous student greediness in the coming months.
Higher Ed Spendapalooza
When word first started leaking out about the upcoming “stimulus package” — not Bush’s little TARP, mind you, but the $825 billion doozy unveiled by congressional Democrats yesterday — it was clear that k-12 education would be in store for some serious cash. Well, that didn’t sit well with the higher education community, which complained — I mean, suggested in the interest of the common good — that giving it billions and billions of federal dollars is also crucial for stimulating the economy. It appears they’ve been heard: the proposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill of 2009 would furnish a windfall for all of education, blowing more than $100 billion on everything from university-based research to “teacher technology training.”
Now, don’t worry — I’ll be focusing a lot more on k-12 in the coming weeks. I wanted to attack one notion, however, right off the bat, especially since we held a forum that addressed it just two days ago: that higher education somehow needs increased government support.
Let’s start by confronting the constant and, one can’t help but conclude, deliberately misleading assertion that higher education has been the victim of ruthless public funding cuts that have forced costs onto “the backs of students.” As I made clear on Wednesday (watch the streaming video of the forum and/or download my slide show for details) the inflation-adjusted trend for total state and local higher education spending has been hugely upward over the last 25 years, and on a per-pupil basis has remained essentially constant. At the same time, net per-pupil public college revenue coming through tuition has gone consistently up, rising much faster than would have been needed to make up for any “lost” state and local funding. If you isolate four or five-year stretches — as the Delta Cost Project, for instance, has just done — you could say that tuition has increased just to keep revenue stable. If you check out the long-term trend, however, you absolutely cannot conclude that.
Which brings us to the second big public expenditure for the ivory tower: student aid. When college prices go up, the taxpaying public largely absorbs the blow. Between 1982 and 2007, total inflation-adjusted federal and state aid, including grants, loans, work-study expenditures, and education tax benefits, rose from $30.8 billion to $103.9 billion (Table 1). On a per-pupil basis, real grant aid (including, importantly, both institutional and federal and state aid) grew from $1,939 to $4,965, and federal loan aid rose from $1,562 to $4,841 (Table 3). Both amounts grew faster than the price of tuition, fees, room and board at public and private four-year colleges (Table 5).
So let’s be clear: The public has been paying out the nose for higher education. Indeed, all of this public largesse is a major reason — though not the only one — that the United States leads the rest of the industrialized world hands-down on tertiary education spending (Table B1.1a). And, as you’ll see on my slide show from Wednesday’s forum, it’s not like the money has translated into smarter grads. Quite the opposite: It seems largely to have enabled our college students to live higher on the hog while greatly depreciating the meaning of “a college degree.”
Educator Droning
As I’ve noted before, an incessant, plaintive drone comes from educators at both the k-12 and college levels about chronic underfunding of education and ever-falling financial skies. It’s a drone the media, all too often, is happy to amplify, repeating it constantly and almost never muting it with contradictory evidence.
In k-12 education, the most discomfiting part of this din is the mantra that public school teachers are woefully compensated. In a report released last month I present considerable evidence that this just isn’t true. On their teaching salaries alone – in other words, not including extra money they can and often do earn with their significant time off – first-year teachers in sixteen diverse districts could afford everything they need to lead comfortable lives…and then some. And salary is just a part of teacher compensation. As RiShawn Biddle lays out in a new American Spectator piece, the non-salary compensation that public school teachers get might be the real prize, including generous – and massively taxpayer-subsidized – health and retirement benefits. Check out Biddle’s story and my analysis, and you’ll get a good sense for the reality of k-12 educators’ compensation.
In higher education, there is no bigger myth than that government support for the ivory tower has been gutted, especially when in comes to public colleges and universities. (Just yesterday, a San Antonio Express-Times article stated that public colleges and universities have had to get “used to starvation.”) If you look at inflation-adjusted state and local funding per-pupil – as I have highlighted before – the trend is essentially flat; there has been no “starvation.” Indeed, digging deeper reveals significant evidence that far from starving, higher education is actually suffering from obesity.
So what is the obesity evidence? Unfortunately, as with the mention of my teacher salary report, I am writing this post as much to plug as to inform, so I’m not going to lay out all of the evidence right now. (Though, honestly, it’s not that hard to find.) To get all the fatty details, you’ll either have to come to Cato this Wednesday for our forum “Does Public Higher Ed Funding Drive Economic Growth?” or watch the proceedings via streaming video. In other words, if you want to cut through the tedious droning of public higher educators, you’ll have to put up with some quick and insightful presentations by forum panelists. It should be worth the effort.
The Mixed Up Minds of Education Neocons
Today is the seventh birthday of the No Child Left Behind Act and I’d planned to celebrate it with a review of all that ails the decrepit law. In a stroke of luck, however, an op-ed appeared this morning that lets me address the most important political force behind NCLB — and its impotence — without having to go over all the law’s flaws for about the billionth time. (If you want the gory details, though, feel free to go here, here, here, here, here, here, here…)
NCLB is basically a neoconservative creation, a mangy mutt that tries to cram together both a supposed neocon distrust of government and a burning desire to use Washington to attack things neocons don’t like. So NCLB demands standards, tests and full “proficiency” by 2014 — an attempted assault on ”progressive” or just uncaring state and local education systems – while leaving states to write the standards and tests and define proficiency for themselves. The result is the exact opposite of what neocons say they want: Instead of “tight” accountability and “loose” bureaucratic directives, federal bureaucrats get a lot more power while state officials set “proficiency” levels at hovercraft elevations.
In light of NCLB’s failure – and decades of public-schooling stagnation – you’d think neocons would finally learn that no level of government is going to give them tough standards and accountability. The people employed by government simply have far too much sway over it, playing tireless politics to keep their power and kill accountability. Yet somehow even after they appear to have finally mastered this lesson, neocons turn right around and prove they’ve learned nothing at all.
On NRO today, leading neocon education analysts Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, put their contradictory thinking out for all to see. Almost immediately after decrying proposals to spend tens-of-billions on public schooling as part of a federal economic stimulus package — “taxpayers have spent decades funding an enormous, inefficient jobs program,” they write of public schooling — the neocon troika commences to list a bunch of federal undertakings they think would be just grand:
- “Make the summers of 2009 and 2010 into ‘Summer of Learning.’ Invest billions to keep schools open from June to August across the land. Offer remedial classes, enrichment programs, sports camps, the works.”
- “Create a service-learning program whereby teenagers can travel to national parks and landmarks, do valuable public works there, and get paid a little.”
- Build “education data systems”
And, of course, there’s the obligatory call for national standards:
- “Uncle Sam could also invest in creation of world-class national standards, tests, and even curricular materials”
Neocons, one can’t help but conclude, must be politically and logically bipolar, able to swing from “no more government” to “hell yes, more government!” in a single op-ed. At the very least, they evince little understanding of why government works or fails, or what it can and cannot do. They appear simply to call on government to get the things they want and decry its dangers to fight things they don’t. But that’s no way to make policy. I mean, it gave us No Child Left Behind, for crying out loud!
‘Tis Better to Take
In a sign of how toweringly stacked government is against he who believes ’tis wrong to steal, my place of residence offers taxpayer-subsidized classes on how to maximize your taxpayer subsidy for college. That’s right: The government subsidizes classes on subsidy-grubbing.
“Strategies are revealed on how to reposition assets to minimize the amount the government determines you can afford to pay,” proudly declares the description of “Paying for College without Going Broke” in the winter 2009 adult education catalog from the Alexandria (VA) City Public Schools. Students will “find out how to use the IRS to fund college through ‘tax scholarship’. This seminar will give you the tools and knowledge to meet your goals.’”
That’s right: If your goals include maximizing the amount that other people have to pay for you or yours to go to college, Alexandria has a fantastic deal for you! And don’t worry, only saints refrain from stealing these days, and who wants to be one of them?
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
