Archive for the ‘Education and Child Policy’ Category
The Irony of the President’s STEM Initiatives
The media tide of the past two days has carried in a great flood of stories on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. ABC, NBC, AP, Reuters, the Christian Science Monitor, Politico, the Detroit News, and others joined in. This torrent of attention is due to a White House science fair at which the president announced several initiatives to boost student achievement in those fields. Details are scant, but based on the administration’s press release it seems that $100 million or so would go to encourage particular kinds of teacher’s college programs. Various extracurricular STEM programs funded by non-profit foundations were also touted in the release.
The obvious irony in the president’s plan to tweak teachers’ college programs is that those programs are themselves a key part of the problem. The nation’s state school monopolies typically require most or all of their teachers to either have a degree from a government-approved college of education or to be pursuing such a degree during evenings and weekends. Few of those studying or working in STEM fields are willing to sit through a teachers’ college program—with good reason. Not only are these programs often pointless according to their own graduates, they are not associated with improved student performance. They are a requirement without a function–at least without a function that benefits students. The one thing they do accomplish is to erect a barrier to entry that protects incumbent teachers from competition, allows the specter of “teacher shortages” to be floated at regular intervals, and thus to justify above market wages [state school teachers receive compensation that is roughly $17,000 per year higher than their private sector counterparts].
As a result, many of the most promising teaching candidates in these fields are weeded out from the start. President Obama’s plans to “improve” this barrier to entry into the profession amounts to reupholstering the deck chairs on the sunken Titanic.
But how to ensure that only effective teachers lead the nation’s classrooms given that the government certification process is not just useless but counterproductive? Here, again, there is irony. Somehow, in the thousands of different fields in which scientists and engineers work every day, the competent are distinguished from the incompetent. And somehow, those who underperform are either helped to improve or cut loose to seek work in a field (or with an employer) to which their talents are better suited. It is ludicrous to suggest that managers can effectively evaluate the work of the scientists and engineers they employ in every field _except_ education.
The media would do us all a favor if they would look past the Obama administration’s marshmallow launcher for a moment and contemplate the effect that our massive barrier to entry into the teaching profession has on recruiting scientists and engineers.
Catholic Schools and the Common Good
One of the first things you learn when you start to study the comparative performance of school systems is this: on average, Catholic schools are much more educationally effective and vastly more efficient than state-run schools. And then you learn that their impact goes beyond the three R’s. I wrote a little about these facts a few years ago, while I was with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and my Mackinac friends have resurrected the post for Catholic Schools Week. I’ve appended an excerpt below, but you can read the whole thing here.
When state-run public schooling was first championed in Massachusetts in the early 1800s, it was under the banner of “the common school,” and it was touted more for its predicted social benefits than its impact on mathematical or literary skills. The leading common school reformer of the time, Horace Mann, promised, “Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged.”
Having experienced more than a century-and-a-half of a vigorously expanding public school system, Americans are no longer quite as sanguine about the institution’s capabilities. Nevertheless, there is still a widespread belief that government schools promote the common good in a way independent private schools never could.
Is that belief justified? Scores of researchers have compared the social characteristics and effects of public and private schooling. They have found little evidence of any public-sector advantage. On the contrary, private schools almost always demonstrate comparable or superior contributions to political tolerance, civic knowledge and civic engagement. One group of private schools stands out as particularly effective in this regard: those run by the Catholic Church.
Sports Authority
Home schooling is the most dynamic and innovative segment of K-12 education. But even with technological advances, co-ops and hybrid schooling, taking on that level of individual responsibility for a child’s education is difficult.
One particularly difficult problem for home school families in Virginia and elsewhere is competitive sports, particularly in high school.
A private non-profit organization, the Virginia High School League, governs high school sports for public schools in Virginia and determines eligibility for participation. Home-school and private-school parents pay taxes for the public schools, but their kids are banned from participating in local high school sports run through the government schools.
For private school kids, that’s not typically a major problem; they have enough students to field teams and schools for their own league. But home-schoolers, especially in rural areas, don’t have those numbers. And that means they are out of luck.
There’s a bill being heard today (HB 947) that would prohibit public schools from joining an association with a blanket ban on home school student participation, and let each school district decide whether to allow them to try out for a team.
The Virginia PTA seems horrified that the home-school rabble might be included, proclaiming that “participation on athletic teams is a privilege that should be reserved for the public school students.” They have told members to call their representatives to say, “public school is your choice and team sports are a privilege you earned and expect them to protect.” Funny, I thought government school were supposed to be open to everyone . . . we certainly all pay a lot of money for them.
It’s always messy when the government runs things they shouldn’t – there is never a perfect solution – but it does seem odd and unfair for a private organization to ban a segment of Virginia’s children from joining a team in the local public school their parents support with their taxes.
Team sports shouldn’t be run through government schools in the first place, but if they are, they shouldn’t exclude children because their parents have taken full responsibility for their child’s education and shouldered its full cost.
Obama Is Avoiding the Tough College Course
College prices truly are ridiculous. But someone needs to tell President Obama that the root problem isn’t the colleges, which he is expected to announce today will be the targets of proposed sanctions should they raise prices too fast. No, the problem, Mr. President, is a federal government that wants to play Santa Claus by giving everybody, no matter how poorly qualified or unmotivated, money for college.
As I itemized in How Much Ivory Does This Tower Need? What We Spend on, and Get from, Higher Education, total aid in the form of federal grants and loans (I didn’t even get into tax credits and deductions) ballooned from inflation-adjusted $29.6 billion in 1985 to $139.7 billion in 2010. That is mammoth, and it probably helped not just colleges to enrich themselves, but enrollment to expand from 8.9 million full-time equivalent students in 1985 to 15.5 million in 2010.
But that latter part is good, right? Doesn’t that giant enrollment increase mean we’ve been “educating ourselves to a better economy,” to steal a favorite Obama administration catch phrase?
It might, if all those people were attaining important skills and graduating. But they haven’t been. You can get more details in my paper — and yes, some of the following stats are probably somewhat low because they’re for first-time, full-time students — but the higher ed outcomes appear dismal no matter what:
- The most recent six-year graduation rate for students in four-year programs was 57.3 percent
- The most recent three-year graduation rate for students in two-year programs was a minute 27.5 percent
- Roughly a third of people who manage to get bachelor’s degrees are in jobs that don’t require them, up from about 11 percent in 1967
- According to recent research by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, 45 percent of students learn nothing in their first two years of college, and 36 percent nothing in four years
- Between 1992 and 2003, the percentage of bachelor’s holders proficient in prose literacy dropped from 40 to 31 percent, and in document literacy from 37 to 25 percent, on the National Assessment of Adult Literacy
What does all this — and more that’s in the paper — tell us? That millions of the people taxpayers are sending to college are getting little if anything out of it, while the colleges rake in heavy dough. But that means the root problem isn’t the colleges — they are just taking the people government sends them — it is the federally dominated funding system that insists on giving dollars to almost any warm body that declares it wants to experience ivy-covered walls and frat parties.
In light of this depressing reality, if the president really wants to rein in costs he will call for significanlty reducing student aid, both the amount available to individual students, and the numbers of students eligible.
That, though, will probably not happen. Not only did the president talk up keeping aid cheap and casting an even wider net in his State of the Union, but taking the right course — cutting aid — means taking the politically tough course. And neither this president, nor almost anyone else in Washington, has ever signalled real willingness to do that. It’s just much easier to keep giving money away.
The School Buildings Are Crumbling!!!!!!!!
From the-more-things-change-the-more-they-don’t files, I bring you alarming claims that our nation’s school buildings are crumbling and will soon crush the educational aspirations and physical bodies of children everywhere if more money is not spent, NOW.
In March of 1997, Education Week reported on the growing crisis in the condition of school facilities and inadequate spending:
The stories are familiar to school administrators: gaping holes in school roofs, crumbling walls etched with lead paint, heating systems that don’t work, and other serious structural problems that have become commonplace in many districts. . .
These stories certainly are familiar! Why, President Obama advanced the same tired line in his remarkably forgettable “jobs” plan of late last summer:
And there are schools throughout this country that desperately need renovating. How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart? This is America. Every child deserves a great school – and we can give it to them, if we act now. The American Jobs Act will repair and modernize at least 35,000 schools. It will put people to work right now fixing roofs and windows; installing science labs and high-speed internet in classrooms all across this country.
Education Week gives voice to fears for the future in 1997:
Unless school leaders can persuade wary voters to pass bond referendums or raise local taxes, there’s often little hope of change . . . Some education leaders say it is getting tougher to pass bond issues when local residents, many of whom do not have school-age children, want lower taxes and are wary of how districts will manage the funds. . . And even if a bond passes, it rarely provides enough money to meet the needs of districts with fast-growing populations, said Carole Kennedy, the president of the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
The funny thing is, spending on school facilities increased at a rapid rate before 1997 and continued on afterward, increasing more than 150 percent in constant dollars from 1989 to 2008.
Government school lobbyists like Carole Kennedy, President Clinton, and President Obama have been successfully squeezing money out of taxpayers for decades based on false claims of crises. And not just for construction. Take a look at this video for everything you need to know about public school spending:
ALEC’s New Education Report
The American Legislative Exchange Council has just released its latest Report Card on American Education, and will be hosting an event to launch it in Washington, DC, tomorrow, at the Heritage Foundation. I haven’t had a chance to get very far into it yet, but it was established on Monday of this week that ALEC can predict the future, so it’s certainly worth a look.
No Common Schools, No Peace?
Today is the mid-point of National School Choice Week, and we’re once again rockin’ to the oldies of prognostication. This time we’re going all the way back to the Mann. That’s Horace Mann, the “Father of the Common School” himself.
It is Mann who, among many things, is probably most responsible for introducing one of the deepest underlying sentiments supporting government schooling: that public schools will unify us and give us peace. As he waxed eloquent in his first annual report as Secretary of the newly-constituted Massachusetts State Board of Education:
Amongst any people, sufficiently advanced in intelligence, to perceive, that hereditary opinions on religious subjects are not always coincident with truth, it cannot be overlooked, that the tendency of the private school system is to assimilate our modes of education to those of England, where churchmen and dissenters, —each sect according to its own creed,—maintain separate schools, in which children are taught, from their tenderest years to wield the sword of polemics with fatal dexterity; and where the gospel, instead of being a temple of peace, is converted into an armory of deadly weapons, for social, interminable warfare. Of such disastrous consequences, there is but one remedy and one preventive. It is the elevation of the common schools.
How wrong Mann was.
Keep in mind that as of 1837, the year Mann gave his first address, some pretty impressive unifying things had happened in America despite education being grounded in families, private schools, and yes, churches. We’d established unified colonies; penned and ratified a Declaration of Independence that enunciated foundational American values; fought and won a war against the greatest military power on Earth; established a new nation; and created a national government based on a Constitution that – though it’s legs are under constant assault — still stands.
But let’s get to Mann’s prediction: Did “elevation of the common schools” end “social, interminable warfare”?
Not on your life. Indeed, by attempting to force diverse people into a monolithic system of government schools, it most likely exacerbated social tensions and sparked otherwise avoidable wars. To name just a few school-stoked conflagrations (both real and rhetorical):
- The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844, sparked by a dispute over whose version of the Bible — Roman Catholic, Protestant, or neither — would be allowed in the public schools. By the conclusion of the rioting hundreds of people had been killed or injured and millions of dollars of property damage inflicted. Similar conflict — though not as physically destructive — occurred in many other American towns, with social strife largely only lessened when Catholics established their own school system.
- The Scopes “Monkey” Trial, a sensational case that grabbed the attention of the entire nation as a Tennessee court ruled whether or not it was acceptable to teach evolution in public schools. It is a topic that continues to rip communities apart today, and is so hot that, even where state standards mandate evolution be taught, most biology teachers avoid it. They simply don’t want to deal with the acrimony that would ensue.
- In 1974, Kanawha County, West Virginia, was plunged into a state of near-civil war over books selected by the county school district that many residents perceived to be anti-Christian and anti-American. Before the strife subsided commerce had ground to a halt, at least one person had been shot, and schools had been dynamited.
These are just some of the most well known or violent of the battles in the “interminable warfare” sparked not by private schooling, but the public schools Mann promised would bring peace if they became ascendant. Indeed, as I itemized in an analysis of just the 2005-06 school year, values-based skirmishes are fought all around us, all the time, whether over prayer in the schools, reading assignments, bullying and student speech, ethnic studies, and on and on. But that is exactly what we should expect when people of widely diverse religions, ethnicity, and philosophies are all required to support a single system of government schools. They won’t just give up the things that are often at the very heart of their lives — they will fight to have them taught.
Perhaps the biggest irony in all this is that students who attend private schools, even after adjusting for important non-school factors, are actually more knowledgeable about civics, active in their communities, and tolerant of others than are public school students. As University of Arkansas professor Patrick Wolf discovered in reviewing the empirical literature:
The statistical record suggests that private schooling and school choice often enhance the realization of the civic values that are central to a well-functioning democracy. This seems to be the case particularly among ethnic minorities (such as Latinos) in places with great ethnic diversity (such as New York City and Texas), and when Catholic schools are the schools of choice. Choice programs targeted to such constituencies seem to hold the greatest promise of enhancing the civic values of the next generation of American citizens.
How could this be? Because, in contrast to the assumption of Mann and others, most people don’t have to be forced to embrace tolerance and responsible freedom, they choose them. Public schooling, conversely, sends the message that government, not individuals freely working together, is responsible for whatever problems communities face. Even more importantly, by forcing diverse people together, government schools drop them into a zero-sum arena and render conflict all but inevitable.
Common schools haven’t brought us peace in our day. Indeed, quite the opposite.
Status Quo Stalwarts, Meet Reality
[School Choice Week Blast from the Past, Pt. 2!]
Back in 1993, when Whitney Houston hit #1 with “I will always love you”, there was something that California-based state schooling advocates didn’t love at all: a school voucher ballot initiative. Much was written on the subject, and in 1994 a booklet was published summarizing the arguments for and against (Voices on Choice, K. L. Billingsley, ed.). In today’s School Choice Week installment, we’ll hear from those who were agin’ it.
Maxine Waters, United States Congress (D, Los Angeles):
“Contrary to claims, school choice will be devastating for urban, minority, and poor students who desperately need quality education.”Delaine Eastin, California State Representative (D, Fremont):
“Having schools without [government] standards won’t improve learning.” Private school choice “won’t teach more kids how to read and write.”
Well, actually… U.S. private school choice programs usually do improve student achievement significantly in one or more subjects, and they have never been shown to have a negative impact on student achievement. The domestic scientific evidence to that effect was collected and summarized last March by Greg Forster, for the Foundation for Educational Choice. I do have one quibble with the report (it doesn’t count the insignificant findings in studies that have at least one significant finding, as is standard practice in literature reviews) but even after addressing it the aforementioned statements would still hold true.
Heck, even the few choice programs that don’t currently seem to be raising test scores are substantially raising students’ graduation rates–and doing it at substantially less cost to taxpayers than the state schools.
What’s more, when we cast a wider net and look at scientific studies comparing government and independent schools within countries all over the world, the results are even more dramatic. In fact, it is the least regulated, most market-like schools that most consistently outperform state-run monopoly school systems such was we have in the U.S.
Delaine Eastin:
“[T]his initiative allows schools to fail. But it does nothing to protect taxpayers when they do. When public school systems go belly up as a result of the voucher initiative, the courts are likely to rule that taxpayers will be stuck with the tab—and it won’t be cheap.”
Modern private school choice programs have been operating around the country for as long as twenty years, and I know of no case in which they have been found to increase the total burden on taxpayers. In fact, the only systematic studies of the issue find that these programs save taxpayers money—sometimes quite a bit of it. Florida’s legislature has studied the fiscal impact of that state’s k-12 scholarship donation tax credit program, and found it to save $1.49 for every $1 it reduces revenues. That’s a nearly 50% return.
What’s more, the program has been found in two separate studies to both improve achievement of students who remain in public schools and to improve achievement of students who receive scholarships to attend private schools. It’s not hard to fathom why: on average, private schools spend thousands less per pupil than does the public school monopoly.
Warren Furutani, past president, Los Angeles City Board of Education:
“It is no coincidence that dollars are being pulled from our underfunded, overburdened school system at the same time our governor and the president of this nation are pushing vouchers and choice.”
Um… Yeah… About that claim that “dollars were being pulled” from “underfunded” public schools in California. I just happen to have the actual spending trend handy:
So, not only were these Status Quo Stalwarts unable to correctly predict the future, they had some difficulty accurately describing the present. Oh, and while thrifty school choice programs around the country have been improving student achievement and attainment, it’s hard to say the same for the California’s state education monopoly.
‘School Spending Predicted to Climb 50%’*
*by 2005…
Defenders of the educational status quo have long argued that we don’t need wholesale reform because our state-run school system can be fixed. If we simply raise spending, shrink classes, hire more teachers, or wait for the latest government mandate to work, they’ve promised, our problems will be solved. Reformers have predicted the opposite: that pouring more resources into the public school monopoly will only make it more expensive, not better, and so we need to inject real parental choice, get rid of the red tape that hobbles educators, and unleash market incentives. Who’s right?
My colleagues and I at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom normally answer that question with empirical research, but in honor of School Choice Week
we’re taking a different tack. We’re letting the status quo defenders and reformers speak for themselves, by dredging up their predictions of decades past to see who was a Nostradamus and who a Nostradumb—. To kick off this week-long series, here’s our first blast from the educational past:
“School Spending Predicted to Climb 50% by 2005” [Education Week, Sept. 22nd, 1994]
A report published by the American Legislative Exchange Council predicted that public school spending would climb “from nearly $262 billion in 1994 to $386 billion by 2005.” ALEC also warned that the new spending would do little to help children learn, because public schooling is a government-run monopoly and monopolies are notoriously wasteful and inefficient.
Not everyone agreed. The Ed. Week story cautioned that ALEC’s “projections do not square with [substantially lower] federal estimates, and school finance experts have questioned their methodology.”
Who was right? To find out, we first have to adjust ALEC’s prediction to account for inflation (their estimate of what spending would be in the year 2005 was, of necessity, made in 1994 dollars, which were worth a lot more than dollars in 2005). Using the BLS inflation calculator, we find that ALEC’s prediction amounts to $509 billion in 2005 dollars. That turns out to have been… too low. Real U.S. public school spending in 2005 was $529 billion, according to the 2008 federal Digest of Education Statistics.
As for student achievement, ALEC was right about that, too. Tested near the end of their k-12 schooling, students performed no better in 2005 than they did in 1994—or, for that matter, in 1970 (see chart below).
Would an Extra $27 Billion Improve CA Public School Performance?
As I explain in an op-ed in today’s Orange County Register, that’s not a theoretical question. After adjusting for inflation and enrollment growth, CA spent $27 billion more on K-12 public schooling in 2010 than it did when Jerry Brown was first elected governor back in 1974. SAT scores fell over that period (see chart below).
And if a $27 billion spending boost was associated with a decline in SAT scores, why would anyone expect Governor Brown’s proposal to raise another $7 billion in education taxes to do any good?
Note that the above version of the chart includes an extra two years of (estimated) spending data from the Brown administration’s current budget document, compared to the version than ran in the OCR. I’d left off those years because I didn’t want to include estimates, only concrete figures, but I’ve already been asked about them so I include them here. The picture’s the same either way.
Promises Unfulfilled? What Next, Federal Education Failure?
On Sunday we marked the tenth birthday of the No Child Left Behind Act by reviewing its decade of futility and explaining why federal education adventuring is basically doomed to failure. (Enjoy some of our extensive coverage here, here, and here.) This week we got yet more evidence that federal policy is always big on promises, itty-bitty on results. According to the latest reports, most of the winners of President Obama’s $4.35-billion “Race to the Top” competition are well off pace to fulfill the promises they made to get the dough. Well off schedule, that is, except for adopting the laughably dubbed “state-led and voluntary” national curriculum standards that the federal Race to the Top essentially demanded they use.
It’s just as I warned back in 2009, when Race to the Top was all the transformative rage in both left and right edu-policy circles:
Have plans for reform? Sure. Break down a few barriers that could stand in the way of decent changes? That’s in there, too. But that’s about it. And the money is supposed to be a one-shot deal – once paper promises are accepted and the dough delivered, the race is supposed to be over.
In light of those things, how is this more appropriately labeled the Over the Top Fund than the Race to the Top Fund? Because while not requiring anything, it tries to push unprecedented centralization of education power. It calls for state data systems to track students from preschool to college graduation. It calls for states to sign onto “common” – meaning, ultimately, federal – standards. It tries to influence state budgeting.
To be fair, the feds could still hold states accountable and keep the RTTT dough if and when the states break their promises. But that would still be another failure, and all the money states and Washington will have spent on RTTT will have gone for naught. But, then, spending for naught is something we should be very much used to by now.
A Decade of No Child Left Behind
Ten years later, it’s clear that the No Child Left Behind law is a failure. Instead of driving better academic performance of K-12 students, NCLB has cost many billions of dollars with no discernible positive impact on student achievement. Worse, the law has laid some of the groundwork necessary for the adoption of national standards, another step toward a fed-approved and standardized K-12 curriculum, an outcome many of the law’s former proponents explicitly oppose.
Neal McCluskey argues in this new video that the only reasonable (and Constitutional) course for the feds now is to simply bow out of K-12 education completely.
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