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Breaking News: Not All Children Are the Same

Posted by Neal McCluskey

An article in this morning’s Los Angeles Times reports that delaying children’s entry into kindergarten “appears to help some, harm others or have no effect at all.”

This shouldn’t be a surprise. In fact, what would have been surprising is if all children responded to delayed kindergarten in precisely the same way. After all, no two children are exactly alike, right?

Of course. Which is why American public education works so poorly: Even though all children are different, public school districts have no choice but to educate them as if they weren’t. By their very nature, uniform systems of education must do things uniformly.

Consider reading instruction: Just like their varied responses to delayed kindergarten entry, children respond in numerous ways to different reading curricula. School districts, however, can typically teach reading using only one technique, usually either whole language, phonics, or so-called “balanced” instruction. That means that if your child would benefit most from phonics-based instruction but is in a whole language district, he’s out of luck.

Or look at discipline. Some children need rigid rules and regulations, while others need freedom to thrive. School districts, however, can’t apply different disciplinary rules to different children, so a large number of children are going to get the short end of the stick (or carrot) no matter what.

The best way to ameliorate this problem is to eliminate it: Get rid of one-size-fits-all public schools, and create a system in which “the public” does nothing more than help needy parents afford the schools that best address their children’s needs. In other words, let the market go to work. Only then will all children finally get the made-to-order education they need to succeed.

Money Packs

Posted by Neal McCluskey

Perhaps because it’s what most Americans grew up with, we tend to assume that “public education” must mean public entities building and controlling schools, and students going wherever they are assigned by their home address. It’s a system that has failed us for decades, yet many people can imagine nothing else. Thankfully, public education doesn’t have to be this way.

In today’s New York Daily News, Fordham University professor Bruce Cooper introduces a simple but powerful way to reinvent public education: Attach funding to children, not schools and districts, enabling parents to choose their children’s schools and forcing schools to compete for students.

Unfortunately, Professor Cooper’s proposal would only let kids take their new “backpack[s] of education funding” to different public schools. But there is no compelling educational reason for such a restriction. Instead, we should give parents maximum educational freedom by letting them send their children to any schools they want—public or private—with their new money packs attached. Do that, and we might finally have a system of public education worth keeping around for decades.

Are We Reading the Same Report?

Posted by Neal McCluskey

I have to disagree with Arnold Kling’s surprisingly upbeat assessment of the draft report from the Secretary of Education’s higher education commission. While some of the recommendations he likes may be tolerable in an ideal world, it’s critical to remember that we’re talking about politics here.

First, Arnold applauds the report’s call for colleges to improve data collection on student persistence in order to help inform prospective students and parents. That’s fine, and I would encourage consumers to avoid schools that wouldn’t furnish such information. Unfortunately, it’s not supply and demand that the report says should make schools publish the data. It’s government:

Federal and state policy should focus on improving persistence and sealing the leaks in the educational pipeline at all levels: K-12, post-secondary and workforce education. Colleges should be held accountable for the success of the students they admit. Improved collection of data on student persistence will allow consumers of higher education to evaluate institutional success and identify best practices.

What a terrific tool for government control! Once they collect persistence data, opportunistic politicians can declare that schools must graduate very large percentages of their students in order to receive government funds. If grade inflation seems bad now…

Next, Arnold blesses the report’s recommendation that states and schools “review and revise” their credit transfer policies. Again, this is a fine thing for consumers to require, but if government mandates it, credit transfer policies will end up being based on political calculations, not academic merits.

The same problem applies to Arnold’s next point, in which he supports reorienting student aid from “broad-based” to “need-based.” That sounds good at first, but the reality is that in order to build enough political support to give more aid to the “needy,” politicians will define “needy” to include almost everyone. Just look at the current system, which directs oodles of cash to aid programs in the name of the poor, yet somehow always ends up putting a bunch of it in the hands of upper-middle-class kids.

Finally, Arnold approves of the recommendation that all 50 states encourage “the collection of data allowing meaningful interstate comparison of student learning.”

Now, I’m not so sure I want state governments encouraging colleges to implement standards and testing regimes, which is what this would ultimately require. I’m positive, though, that I don’t want the feds doing it, because federal “encouragement” invariably leads to federal “control.” Just look at elementary and secondary education, where the No Child Left Behind Act has given Washington unprecedented control over local schools.

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, say hello to NCLB:

The federal government should provide incentives for states, higher education associations, systems, and institutions to develop outcomes-focused accountability systems designed to be accessible and useful for students, policy makers, and the public….

In the end, like Arnold, I encourage people to read the Commission’s draft report for themselves and reach their own conclusions. As far as I’m concerned, though, one recommendation alone completely sums up the report’s frightening, command-economy thrust:

The Secretary of Education should take the lead in developing a national strategy to keep the U.S. at the forefront of the knowledge revolution, creating a system that encourages knowledge and skills to be obtained and continuously updated on a regular basis through a lifetime of learning.

I don’t know about anyone else, but that sounds like a bad thing to me.

Blueprint for an Ivory Tower Disaster

Posted by Neal McCluskey

Late Monday, the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education – a group tasked with creating a “national strategy” for post-secondary schooling – released a preliminary draft of its findings and recommendations. Thankfully, it is just a draft, because almost everything it calls for – from marked increases in student aid, to more government-imposed “accountability”– would devastate American higher education.

American academia’s biggest problem is that thanks to government aid to both students and institutions it is financed largely by taxpayers rather than the students it is educating. This “third-party payer problem” has led to huge waste, as the draft report acknowledges:

In our view, affordability is directly affected by the failure of post-secondary institutions to take aggressive steps to improve institutional efficiency and productivity. That…can be traced to a system of third-party payments…that gives college and universities little incentive to control costs and find innovative ways to teach students. On the contrary, for many institutions the path to prestige involves spending more money, whether on costly laboratories or lavish student dorms, an academic arms race that often doesn’t serve the public interest.

Having apparently understood the third-party payer problem, you would think the commission would call for the obvious – eliminating government interference in higher education. You would be wrong. In fact, the report’s very first recommendation is for the nation (read: “government”) to “commit to an unprecedented effort to expand access to college by providing substantial increases in need-based aid…”

Of course, expanding student aid isn’t the report’s only recommendation. It also calls for new “Lifelong Learning Accounts” to be financed through tax incentives; federal enticements for states and higher education organizations to implement standardized testing schemes; a new “national student unit record tracking system” that would include data on almost every college student in the country; and a “national accreditation framework” that the federal government could use to impose uniformity on the ivory tower.

All of these big-government recommendations are supposed to help us compete in the global economy, which is ironic given the performances of our competitors’ very centralized systems of higher education. In the late 1990s, for instance, China’s economic planners offered huge incentives for young people to go to college. Today, roughly 60 percent of recent Chinese college graduates are struggling to find jobs. Or look at Europe: According to the Centre for European Reform, that continent’s colleges and universities “are failing to provide the intellectual and creative energy that is required to improve the continent’s poor economic performance.”

Clearly, to keep itself and the country competitive, the last thing American higher education needs is more government money or control. Unfortunately, the Secretary of Education’s Commission seems poised to recommend a lot more of both.

China Syndrome

Posted by Neal McCluskey

Higher education policy is being driven by the assumption that to compete in the global economy, especially against burgeoning powerhouses like China, the United States will need a lot more college graduates. It’s the foundation of President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative, and the ivory tower’s justification for demanding ever more taxpayer dollars.

Ironically, China itself illustrates the pitfalls of having the government set education policies based on predictions for the future. Several sources have reported unrest among Chinese college students and recent graduates, whose unhappiness appears to have a single underlying cause. From today’s New York Times:

In 1998 the government encouraged a vast expansion in college-level education. Hundreds of new colleges were founded almost overnight to accommodate millions of new students thought to be needed as engineers, bankers, traders and marketing experts in the fast-growing economy.

So what happened?

The number of college graduates has multiplied fivefold in the last seven years, to an estimated 4.1 million this year. But at least 60 percent of that number are having trouble finding jobs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission….

As I wrote in a recent op-ed, don’t believe the hype: Special interests and politicians will try to scare you about the future economy in order to take your money. But as China itself has shown, the only thing we can predict with any reliability is that the government’s predictions will almost certainly be wrong.

Nothing Laughable about Student Aid Mess

Posted by Neal McCluskey

Over at The Huffington Post, Anya Kamenetz belittles a recent op-ed I had on Fox News about higher education. “Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute got Fox News.com to print a laughable retort to the Page One USA Today story last week on student debt,” Kamenetz writes. 

Actually, my laughable retort to USA Today’s article was in a letter that the newspaper printed last week. The Fox News piece was more of a laughable response to several higher education myths, though that included assertions like the one in USA Today that student aid is shrinking. Happily, Ms. Kamenetz’s piece offers an opportunity to do a little more hilarious misinformation busting.

First, while agreeing that the figures I cite in my Fox News piece are accurate – aid per-student aid really has been growing, including grant aid that students don’t have to pay back – Kamenetz responds that the maximum Pell Grant hasn’t risen since 2003, as if that somehow shows that my conclusions about overall aid are actually wrong.

Unfortunately, this is the standard response from people who want to see an endless flow of taxpayer dollars poured into students’ pockets. Of course, it makes no sense. It’s like saying that even though per-person steak consumption increased between 1996 and 2006, and people added a whole lot of new items to their diets in addition to steak, more people are starving today than 10 years ago because steak eating recently stagnated.

Having played the Pell Grant gambit, Kamenetz next asserts that on a per-student basis, state support for higher education is at a 25-year low, part of a trend that has led to increasing tuition costs. She cites a report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers to substantiate her claim, a report that does indeed show that in 2005 the average, inflation-adjusted, per-student public expenditure on higher education was $5,825, the smallest amount in 25 years. Of course, she neglects to mention another little tidbit in the report: In 2001, public expenditures per-student actually reached their highest point in 25 years, hitting $7,124!

What intervened between 2001 and 2005? Oh yes, a recession, which reduced tax receipts and forced states to cut spending, a process made more painful by the fact that many states spent wildly on higher education during the boom years. Even the most college-friendly states, apparently, couldn’t keep giving away taxpayer money that they didn’t have.

Finally, Ms. Kamenetz asserts that “what really makes me laugh is the argument that since the federal government is already spending a hell of a lot of money on this problem, that means the problem is not really a problem at all.” She then offers a deal: “let’s shake hands and agree that throwing more taxpayer dollars away is not going to get at the root causes of this mess.”

I agree that more taxpayer dollars won’t fix the college cost problem, but Ms. Kamenetz misses the main point: Not only won’t throwing more taxpayer dollars get at the problem’s root cause, it IS the root cause. As I wrote in my letter to USA Today, “clearly, aid is not shrinking. Indeed, that’s the problem: Like everyone else, colleges want as much money as they can get and will raise their prices if they think someone will pay them. All this aid ensures that someone will.”

It’s really fairly simple: As long as government is willing to increase student aid, colleges will inflate their prices to capture it. Moreover, as long as states continue to subsidize public postsecondary institutions with taxpayer dollars, we will see public colleges and universities waste massive amounts of money. Finally, as long as those subsidies continue, we will keep seeing tuition at public colleges and universities buffeted by the boom-and-bust cycle that governs most state budgets.

Frankly, there’s nothing laughable about any of the consequences of funneling more and more taxpayer dollars into the ivory tower, whether in the form of student aid or state subsidies. Hopefully, students and their advocates will soon come to realize that, end their constant demands for free higher education, and stop snickering about what they’re doing to taxpayers.

Private Schools Will Always Bail Out Public Schools

Posted by Neal McCluskey

Picking up on a Washington Post article I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, in today’s New York Times columnist Brent Staples calls for public schools to get on the ball and provide a decent education for disabled kids. He also notes, though, that even if the public schools do markedly improve, “some severely disabled children will always need to be educated outside the public system.”

To many people, such a statement is practically heresy: Not only doesn’t Staples buy the rubbish dispensed by public schooling apologists that government schools must take all comers, he writes that public institutions will always need a private safety net to catch the most needy children.

This kind of reality-based heresy could easily get Mr. Staples rhetorically stoned by public school zealots. It’s also the kind of heresy that needs to be repeated over, and over, and over again.

Public Education: Social Napalm

Posted by Neal McCluskey

Perhaps the most pernicious myth about American public education is that it is the “foundation of our democracy,” the great unifying force that has taken millions of diverse peoples and shaped them into a cohesive, happy whole.

It’s a fantasy. The ugly truth is that our one-size-fits-all public school system, for which everyone must pay but only the most politically powerful can control, has been forcing American communities into ruinous social conflict for almost two centuries. The latest casualty is Miami, where efforts to ban school library books that portray post-communist revolution Cuba in a flattering light have set the community ablaze. From the Miami Herald:

The emotional and political storm surrounding the debate became impossible to ignore in a community so deeply steeped in Cuban culture. It bared the exile community’s considerable political heft as well as persistent suspicion that other groups remain ignorant of — or even hostile to — the deep sensitivity toward Cuba’s image and struggles….

Board member Robert Ingram voted for the ban, but only to invite the ACLU’s lawsuit so the issue could be resolved by the courts, he said. In an impassioned speech, he said threats from the exile community left him thinking board members “might find a bomb under their automobiles” if they voted to keep the book.

“There’s a passion of hate,” Ingram said. “I can’t vote my conscience without feeling threatened — that should never happen in this community any more.”

Tragically, all across the country conflicts like Miami’s occur constantly. Battles over Intelligent Design, school budgets, dress codes, student speech rights, race, and sex education all are symptoms of the same problem: Monolithic systems of public education will only reflect the values of those people with enough political strength to impose their will. This results in either nonstop political warfare or subjugation of the politically weak, neither of which is the foundation of any kind of desirable society. Only freedom, which in education means school choice, can form such a foundation.

Tipping Credulity on Student Aid

Posted by Neal McCluskey

Yesterday, USA Today ran a front page article on the arrival of six-figure student debt, highlighting especially the $116,000 in debt accumulated by a Rutgers University master’s student.

Now, the article didn’t say whether the scholar in question was an in-state student or had been a Rutgers undergraduate, but if both were applicable his would be a Guinness-worthy borrowing feat, especially since the article said that Rutgers paid the young man’s tuition for his final year of grad school.

Let’s go to the numbers: In the 2005-06 academic year, the cost of tuition, fees, room and board for an in-state undergraduate at Rutgers was $17,800. If the student had paid that for four years—which he obviously didn’t since he must have graduated before 2005-06—his entire undergraduate education would only have cost $71,200. As a graduate student, if we assume he lived in university housing and had the biggest possible meal plan, he would have paid about $20,000 a year. The grand total for both his undergraduate and graduate education, then, would have come to approximately $111,200—$4,800 less than his total accumulated debt! Oh yeah, and Rutgers paid the young man’s tuition in his final year—about $10,000—so he actually owes $14,800 more than the entire cost of his education. Amazing!

Asserting that students have no option but to go into six-figure hock to attend college is, of course, ridiculous. But, predictably, that hasn’t stopped student advocates and interest groups from celebrating USA Today’s story. Indeed, Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt, even dubbed the article a “tipping point” in the battle to convince America that its students are impoverished and need more taxpayer-funded student aid. Sadly, when it comes to her assessment of the article, Kamenetz might be right.