In an encouraging step for New Jersey children, the state’s Senate Economic Growth Committee has approved a K-12 scholarship donation tax credit bill like the ones already operating in Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Iowa, and Rhode Island. It would allow businesses to make donations to nonprofit scholarship funds that would in turn bring the option of private schooling within reach of low-income families.

Needless to say, the bill has earned the “intense opposition” of New Jersey’s large and powerful public school employees union. The last time somebody offered Jersey’s poor kids an escape from the union-dominated public schools, the union made that somebody an offer that was difficult to refuse.

The “somebody” in question was PepsiCo. As I wrote in Market Education:

In late October of 1995, officials of the Pepsi company announced at Jersey City Hall that their corporation would donate thousands of dollars in scholarships to help low-income children attend the private school of their choice. The immediate response of the local public school teachers’ union was to threaten that a statewide boycott of all Pepsi products could not be ruled out. Pepsi vending machines around the city were vandalized and jammed. Three weeks later, company officials regretfully withdrew their offer.

And you thought the Sopranos were nice.

It’s an all-too-common tactic employed by opponents of educational freedom to demonize school-choice advocates as hell-bent ideologues rather than actually tackling their arguments and evidence. One suspects that this occurs for two primary reasons: (1) smearing is easier than debating, and (2) too many choice opponents don’t have the evidentiary ammunition they need to defend their arguments.

Well, on Jay Greene’s blog today, at least one ardent supporter of school choice — the Friedman Foundation’s Greg Forster — fires a huge shot across the bow of choice detractors especially on the right, letting them know that he’s had it with their ignoring empirical evidence and resorting to playground name-calling. (In fairness to the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern, Forster’s primary target, he did come to Cato to debate his recent critique of choice — more than others on his side seem willing to do — though that doesn’t mean he isn’t still dodging inconvenient evidence).

With a little luck, Forster’s essay will help ignite a rational debate on market education reform that’s long overdue, and this time conservative choice detractors won’t just hide behind “ideological” smoke.

The president of West Virginia University, Michael Garrison, is hanging on after the school’s faculty voted 77 to 19 to demand his resignation. Faculty members are outraged that Garrison retroactively awarded an MBA to a friend, who is the daughter of Gov. Joe Manchin III. The Washington Post reports:

Garrison’s critics note that he is a former classmate of Bresch’s. He once worked as a lobbyist for Mylan Inc., where Bresch is an executive and whose chairman is one of WVU’s biggest donors. They also note that Garrison was chief of staff for former West Virginia governor Bob Wise (D).

The Post failed to add the detail that Garrison served on Manchin’s transition team when he succeeded Wise. So yes, when you hire a lobbyist and political operator to run a university, you can expect some favors for politically connected friends.

Everyone knows that our public schools are underfunded, right? So why do they keep blowing easy money?

You might recall that last week the Miami-Dade School District turned down a principal’s offer to work for a single dollar on the grounds that the district would have to put his salary in the budget anyway. Good bye, $119,999! Today, The Seattle Times reports that the state of Washington is forfeiting a $13.2 million grant for Advanced Placement teachers because the people running the grant program want to pay teachers directly for participating in their training. The problem? “Washington’s collective-bargaining laws require that teacher pay be negotiated between unions and school districts.”

Our public schools, no matter what bureaucrats and unions tell us, are not underfunded. If they were, though, the whiners would largely have themselves to blame.

Florida lawmakers struck a deal (.pdf) to raise the cap on the state’s scholarship donation tax credit program by $30 million dollars last Friday, the last day of the legislative session. Under the program, businesses that donate to nonprofit scholarship organizations for poor children can claim a tax credit for the value of the donation. For the past seven years, these scholarships have been bringing private schooling within reach of families that couldn’t otherwise afford it.

But while the legislature has raised the cap on donations, that doesn’t meant the program will expand automatically. In order for the program to grow, more low income parents have to ask for the scholarships, and more businesses have to choose to make donations. The program is completely voluntary. So far, the interest definitely seems to be there: the program doubled in size over the past three years, to nearly 20,000 children.

Scholarship tax credits are a tremendous boon to low income families, businesses, and taxpayers all over the state. They broaden educational options for poor kids, let businesses directly help their communities, and for every student who chooses a private instead of a public school, they save taxpayers thousands of dollars. The maximum scholarship size allowed under the program will now be $3,950 (up from $3,750) – less than one third of total per pupil spending in Florida public schools (which was $12,263 in 2006-07, according to Richard Harbin of the Florida Dept. of Ed. — hat tip to my research assistant, Elizabeth Li).

The fact that parents are clamoring for a $4,000 scholarship to help their children escape from public schools that spend over $12,000 per year says a lot about the need for expanded educational options. No single system of schools can ever serve all children well. In education, as in so many other things, one size does not fit all.

Let’s hope governor Crist signs the new bill into law.

The Goldwater Institute’s Matt Ladner has a great post over at Jay Greene’s new blog explaining how we should be delivering education — both in the sense of how we should be providing educational services, and how we should be delivering our children’s education from the shackles of monopoly.

Have you ever wondered why people marvel at the stupidity of bureaucracy? Read this if you have, and then ask yourself, is there no rainy-day fund from which the 4th largest school district in the country could pull a single dollar? Or couldn’t the district just budget the money and save it for the next year if it goes unused? Aren’t either of these almost-no-cost options worth the chance of saving $119,999?

A new report by the Georgetown Public Policy Institute finds that DC public schools did not respond to rising competition from charter schools “as expected”?

Expected by whom?

No one who has studied the behavior of monopolies, or simply stood in line at the DMV, would expect the public school bureaucracy to react with vigor and dispatch to the loss of its customers. It gets paid anyway.

The Census Bureau recently reported (.xls) that DC public schools spent $1.079 billion for 59,616 students in 2005-2006. As I reported earlier this month in the Washington Post (and in greater detail in this blog), the District is spending $1.216 billion for 49,422 students during the current 2007-2008 school year. The District lost one fifth of its students but its budget grew by 13 percent.

Where is the incentive for it to improve?

And, even if it had a strong systemic incentive to improve, how on earth could it do so? Because of the system’s design, it must hire teachers who have pedagogically worthless degrees in education; the curriculum is centrally planned district-wide, denying teachers any real professional autonomy; students are rigidly grouped by their age instead of by what they know and can do, making it much harder to teach them, etc. Even if this system had all the incentives in the world, it likely could only muster modest improvements.

Want a system that is truly responsive, efficient, diverse and constantly seeking to better serve families? Look at what sorts of school systems – and more broadly, what sorts of economic systems — already behave that way: free markets. It wouldn’t be hard to give all families access to a free educational marketplace.

The Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation has a useful new report out that assesses regulation of private schools in all fifty states, assigning letter grades according to market freedom.

Many of the criteria used are similar to those considered in the private schools section of the Cato Education Market Index (an overall ranking of educational freedom and incentives across all school types in the 50 states and 2 nations), but they’ve added a few extras (e.g., regulations on class sizes and libraries) and lent additional detail to others (e.g., a breakdown of different types of curriculum regulation). Kudos to the Foundation and author Christopher Hammons for an illuminating report.

Yesterday, Andrew Coulson wrote a detailed response to an attack on libertarian education reformers by Chester E. “Checker” Finn, Jr., President of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Finn declared, among other things, that libertarian support of universal school choice, unfettered by government-imposed standards, typified how libertarians “never let their vision of how the world ought to work be distorted by any realities about how it actually works.”

As Andrew made clear, we have often explained, based on empirical research and political reality, why universal school choice is the key to powerful standards and accountability—not to mention efficiency and innovation—while government-controlled education is routinely corrupted by accountability-loathing special interests like teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats. We’ve shown, using historical and political analyses, how increasingly centralized control over education has frozen out parents and good pedagogy, and have explained why proposals for national standards, including Fordham’s, would be educational suicide. Yet we have been dismissed by Fordham folks as naïve and heartless.

Fortunately, not everyone at Fordham seems to have tuned us out. Today, after reading a Washington Post article on how good education research fails to translate into good policy, Coby Loup, a Fordham policy analyst, declares that government education is essentially doomed to failure. Why? Because of the very political realities that we at Cato have been lamenting for years:

What’s surprising is that so many people continue to believe that these embarrassments stem from a failure of political will, rather than the inherent obstacles posed by, as the Post puts it, the “turbulent forces of politics, policy and public opinion.” We always think we’ll do better next time around, when our guys or gals are in office.
      

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Jay Greene and Marcus Winters have just authored a new Manhattan Institute study on Florida’s McKay voucher program for disabled students. According to Greene and Winters, the academic performance of mildly disabled students (the vast majority of all special needs students) who remain in public schools was positively affected by the proximity of their schools to private schools participating in the McKay program.

Haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but looks interesting.

The Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn recently responded to Neal McCluskey’s review of his new book. Let’s compare what Finn has to say with reality:

Finn: “You gotta give it to purebred libertarians, they never let their vision of how the world ought to work be distorted by any realities about how it actually works.”

Reality: Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom publishes and summarizes an extensive body of empirical research from the U.S. and abroad (.pdf). We also eschew animal breeding terms when describing those with whom we disagree.

Finn: “the CATO crowd [is] indistinguishable nowadays from the ’separation of school and state crowd’”

Reality: Cato’s Center for Educational freedom recently published the Public Education Tax Credit model legislation. The Alliance for Separation of School and State opposes all state involvement in education.

Finn: “the CATO crowd… basically doesn’t believe in any form of public education”

Reality: As explained in Adam Schaeffer’s Public Education Tax Credit paper, we distinguish between the institution of state-run public schooling and the ideals of public education (universal access to good schools, preparation for both participation in public life and success in private life, that schools should encourage harmonious relations among different ethnic and religious groups). We are ardent critics of “public schooling” precisely because it has proven itself so disastrously incapable of delivering public education.

Finn: “They believe in…”

Reality: We are not in the belief business. Our policy recommendations are grounded in domestic, international, and historical evidence regarding the best ways of meeting the public’s educational needs and aspirations.

Finn: “… private education, purchased in the marketplace by parents who want and can afford it for their kids from schools that are not accountable to anybody for anything except keeping those tuition payments rolling in the door.”

Reality: If Finn were familiar with the international evidence on the operation of education markets, he would know that fee-paying parents hold schools more effectively accountable for the quality of educational services than do government bureaucrats.

Finn: “They believe… [t]he heck with everybody else’s kids. The heck with an educated polity or transmitted common culture. Check out Neil [sic] McCluskey’s review of my book.”

Reality: Our model Public Education Tax Credit legislation would ensure universal access to the education marketplace while delivering a far higher quality and far more individually personalized education. And as I pointed out in my book Market Education, education markets have proven themselves perfectly capable of transmitting common culture. The classical Athenians, who not only transmitted but invented much of the Western culture Mr. Finn values, had no government education standards or government schools. Surely Mr. Finn’s alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy, taught him something of classical Greece? And even if Mr. Finn was absent during such lessons, surely he has come across a few of the 120 million McGuffey’s Readers printed during the 19th century while browsing New England’s used bookstores? Long before the rise of vast state school bureaucracies, the private sector was busily transmitting common culture all by itself. More than that, we have documented how state-run schooling Balkanizes American communities by forcing everyone to support a single official education system — a problem that Finn’s national standards would worsen.

And, finally, it is precisely because we do care about everyone’s kids that we recommend real market reform in education, and urge Americans to move past the calcified school monopoly that has so cruelly shortchanged so many children.

Any time that Mr. Finn would care to publicly debate these issues, either in person or in print, we will be happy to dispel his misapprehensions more thoroughly. Given that he recently declined just such an invitation from us, his acceptance of this one would be a pleasant surprise.

Matt Yglesias points to an article in Sunday’s Washington Post by economist Robert Frank that makes a strong case for school choice. Well, OK, he doesn’t explicitly talk about school choice, but he certainly does a good job explaining the problems caused by the absence of choice:

In the 1950s, as now, families tried to buy houses in the best school districts they could afford. But strict credit limits held the bidding in check. Lenders typically required down payments of 20 percent or more and would not issue loans for more than three times a borrower’s annual income.

In a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided move to help more families enter the housing market, borrowing restrictions were relaxed during the intervening decades. Down payment requirements fell steadily, and in recent years, many houses were bought with no money down. Adjustable-rate mortgages and balloon payments further boosted families’ ability to bid for housing.

The result was a painful dilemma for any family determined not to borrow beyond its means. No one would fault a middle-income family for aspiring to send its children to schools of at least average quality. (How could a family aspire to less?) But if a family stood by while others exploited more liberal credit terms, it would consign its children to below-average schools. Even financially conservative families might have reluctantly concluded that their best option was to borrow up.

This is an eloquent indictment of our perverse system of linking schools to real estate. We don’t generally limit access to hospitals, libraries, or colleges by geography, and there’s no good reason children’s schools should be determined that way either. People should be able to live wherever they want, and then they should be free to send their children to any school that meets their needs. There are a variety of ways to allocate space in the most sought-after schools—academic merit, aptitude in the school’s area of focus, demographic diversity, or by lottery—that would be more reasonable than our current policy of arbitrary geographic boundaries.

And yes, some schools would choose students based on their ability to pay. What Frank’s article nicely illustrates is that our current system of geographically-based school assignment already segregates children by their parents’ income, it just does so in an unnecessarily cumbersome manner. If we had a free market in education, parents who wanted to invest in sending their children to a better school would be able to do so directly, instead of having to buy more house than they might want just so they can get a spot at a better school.

The most important thing to note, though, is that the scarcity of good schools Frank identifies is not an inherent fact about the universe, but a consequence of the public school monopoly. In a competitive education market, a shortage of good schools in a given area would spur people to either start new schools or expand the best of the existing ones. But the public school system has few mechanisms for doing either of those things (charter schools are a very limited mechanism for starting innovative public schools). Which means that the supply of good public schools is artificially limited, leading parents to bid up their price. The way to alleviate the shortage of good schools is not to re-regulate the mortgage market, but to reform the education system so that it’s easier to start and expand high-quality schools. Few things would do that as effectively as a robust program of school choice.

John Donne wrote that “no man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

Yesterday, Thomas Sowell struck a variation on this theme, reminding readers that no man is an economic island, and whatever aid government gives to college students it takes from other people, and whatever it subsidizes distorts the prices that keep us all connected:

The general thrust of human interest stories about people with economic problems, whether they are college students or people faced with mortgage foreclosures, is that the government ought to come to their rescue, presumably because the government has so much money and these individuals have so little.

Like most “deep pockets,” however, the government’s deep pockets come from vast numbers of people with much shallower pockets. In many cases, the average taxpayer has lower income than the people on whom the government lavishes its financial favors.

Costs are not just things for government to help people to pay. Costs are telling us something that is dangerous to ignore.

The inadequacy of resources to produce everything that everyone wants is the fundamental fact of life in every economy — capitalist, socialist, or feudal. This means that the real cost of anything consists of all the other things that could have been produced with those same resources.

Sowell’s is a lesson that everyone should learn who thinks that even the hint of a student-loan crunch means that government should come to students’ rescue. Perhaps even more importantly, as John Merrifield points out in his new policy analysis, prices are a crucial piece missing from our socialized K-12 education system—and many school choice programs—leaving us utterly unable to tell the relative value of any school, program, or teacher.

It’s absolutely true that no man is an island. Too bad no one in politics seems to read John Donne — or Thomas Sowell.

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings proposed a slew of regulatory changes to the No Child Left Behind Act she said would throw “families lifelines—and empower educators to create dramatic improvement.”

Reading over the proposals, one is thoroughly underwhelmed because, as is typical for federal education involvement, they’re big on paper compliance while leaving more space than exists between Mercury and Pluto for states and districts to avoid real “accountability.” Almost all the new regs rely on terms open to wide interpretation like “close scrutiny” or “significantly more rigorous,” and even if they were specific, they’d be very hard to enforce, especially if they proved politically unpopular.

This said, we are better off with the toothless regs the administration is offering than a counter proposal put forth by House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel. According to Congressional Quarterly, Emanuel said “we need bolder steps to make sure that Americans can compete. We should mandate a year of post-high school education for every American, while providing the necessary financial help. And we should institute a national policy…to suspend the driver’s licenses of teens who drop out.”

I guess things could actually be a lot worse than more regulations that no one is likely to follow. We could get laws that make everyone stay in our failing schools one year longer, and takes the keys from those who just want out.

The Washington Examiner reports on how carefully your taxpayer dollars are spent by both federal and local governments:

The District of Columbia has agreed to pay $1.75 million to head off a lawsuit alleging that the city bilked the federal government out of money to educate children who didn’t exist, The Examiner has learned.

For decades, District schools took in millions of dollars in grants to educate the children of migrant farmworkers and fishermen. But, as first reported by The Examiner in August, a 2005 audit discovered there were no such children in the system.

On Friday, I went to see Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the new Ben Stein movie about a perceived Darwinist conspiracy to crush Intelligent Design and its adherents. Of course, I went to the film because of public schooling’s tendency to amplify conflicts over hot-button issues such as ID, and no, the fact that going helped me to fulfill a life-long Ebert-wannabe dream of watching movies for “work” really had nothing to do with it. Honestly.

So what does Expelled have to say about the problem of public schooling—including public higher education—forcing all taxpayers to pay for schools which only those who can exert the most political power will ultimately control?

Not much, at least not directly. Stein and company seek to portray a Darwinist conspiracy throughout all of science, whether practiced in settings public or private, secular, or even religious. So, for instance, at the beginning of the film Stein meets with several presumptive victims of ruthless Darwinist orthodoxy, a group that got drummed out of institutions ranging from the very public Iowa State University, to private, Baptist, Baylor University, for their ID thoughts. The problem of government choosing which science to promote is touched on—one pro-ID interviewee mentions getting locked out of National Academy of Sciences grants—but barely.

Despite this inattention to the government-science nexus, there is a useful public policy lesson that can be teased out of the film. Expelled’s climax—the Luke-Darth Vader showdown, if you will—shows Stein grilling noted atheist and God Delusion author Richard Dawkins on whether he believes in a god and how he thinks life on Earth originated. The former exchange comes across as pure time-filler as Stein hectors Dawkins about whether he believes in a litany of deities and to each one Dawkins replies in the negative. The latter bit, however, shows Dawkins conceding that there is no firm conclusion about how life on earth—the very first cell—originated. It exemplifies a simple truth: There are still big, open questions in the study of human origins, just as there are mammoth open questions in all fields of science.

So what does this mean? It means that in our huge ignorance no supreme human power—no government—should ever declare one unproven answer completely unworthy and another officially correct. It means government should not demand that one unproven answer be taught in schools (though as I’ve written that is impossible as long as government runs schools), nor should it decide for all taxpayers what broad research will get funded and what won’t. Not only does that tend to put all our eggs in a single scientific basket that might turn out to have a gaping hole in the bottom, it too often makes political, not scientific, considerations supreme. Indeed, it has been politicization of science that has often allowed questionable scientific theories to survive.

But does this mean we should force all schools to teach about, and governments to fund, alternatives to evolution, like Intelligent Design, or for that matter such dubious fields as alchemy, or divining-rod theory? Of course not! Some scientific theories have much more merit—and supporting evidence—than others. But it must be scientists, along with voluntary, private backers, and parents and college students with free educational choice, who decide what science is good enough to learn and fund. In other words, it must be “natural” scientific selection—not selection driven by politics, or the slickest, most rabble-rousing documentary—that determines which theories live, and which die.

Cato Unbound is right now hosting a discussion about the legacy of A Nation at Risk, the report that 25 years ago this month famously warned that a “rising tide of mediocrity” in American education was threatening “our very future as a Nation and a people.” The report also, by the way, was invaluable in setting the political stage for the subject of a Cato forum to be held tomorrow, “Markets vs. Standards: Debating the Future of American Education.”

Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a former New York Times education columnist, penned the lead Cato Unbound essay, which is responded to by FLOW CEO Michael Strong, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Sol Stern, and the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess. I encourage you to read all the essays, and just thought I’d throw in my two cents.

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The Fordham Foundation has just released a new report documenting the closure of 1,300 Catholic schools since 1990 — shifting some 300,000 kids into the public sector at a cost to taxpayers of about $20 billion. 

It’s hard to compete when the other guy (read: state-run schools)  spends about twice as much per pupil but gives his service away for “free.”

A proper education tax credit program would level the financial playing field between government and independent schools, dramatically increasing parental choice and saving taxpayers a bundle in the process.

And wouldn’t it be nice if we gave parents the means to escape schools like this?

As I blogged a couple of weeks ago, Florida’s largest public school employee union, the Florida Education Association, is threatening a lawsuit to kill that state’s scholarship program for poor kids. Why would they choose to go down this road, mined as it obviously is with the potential for bad publicity? 

I explain that today in an Orlando Sentinel op-ed, giving the FEA a little of the bad publicity it so richly deserves in the process.

In April of 1983, the Ronald Regan-appointed National Commission on Excellence in Education released a landmark study, “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform,” which diagnosed the ills of American education and set forth a list of prescriptions for fixing what seemed to be flailing educational system. It’s been twenty-five years now since the report. So how are we doing? And what, if anything, should we be doing differently? These are the questions we’ll be asking in this month’s edition of Cato Unbound, “Can the Schools Be Fixed?”

This month’s lead essay comes from Richard Rothstein, a former national educational columnist for the New York Times and research associate of the Economic Policy Institute, who offers a fresh, critical assessment of “A Nation at Risk” and the lessons we can draw from its fate. The public schools aren’t as bad as many think, Rothstein argues, and the report oversold the importance of the education system for America’s economic competitiveness and success.

Today, Michael Strong, co-founder of FLOW, education entrepreneur, and former charter school principal, chimes in with a stirring brief for the freedom to innovate in education.

Stay tuned for contributions from Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who recently made waves with his article “School Choice Isn’t Enough,” and from Frederick Hess, the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

If that’s not enough for all you education reform junkies, be sure to tune in to next week’s Cato forum on “Markets vs. Standards: Debating the Future of American Education.” You’ll learn something.

A Bureau of the Census press release issued on April Fool’s day (!) bore the title: “Public Schools Spent $9,138 Per Student in 2006.” Lots of media folks fell for their gag, including the Washington Times and the Examiner.

Here’s the joke: the Census Bureau’s own Excel file reports total spending in public schools for 2006 as $526,648,505,000 (sheet “1″, cell G9). It also reports total enrollment as 48,380,507 (sheet “18″, cell E8). Are you seeing anything hinky yet? Divide the first number by the second and you get $10,886 — that is total per pupil spending for US public schools during the 2005-2006 school year.

What gives? The headline number used by the Bureau was NOT total spending per pupil, it was only “current operating spending” per pupil — that means it excluded capital spending on building upgrades and new construction as well as interest on debt (see Table 8 of their .pdf report). The word “current” in this sense refers not to the period in which the data were collected but to the categories of spending encompassed.

The case of DC is even more egregious. The Census reported, and the media picked up, the “current“ expenditure figure of $13,466, but presented it as though it encompassed all spending. In fact, if you divide the Census’s own total DC spending figure by its own total enrollment figure, you get a total per pupil spending figure of $18,098 for Washington, DC in 2005-06. 

But even this figure is a misleading understatement of per pupil spending in district schools, because it lumps district schools together with (thriftier) charter schools. Take that into account and you can begin to see how total spending in district schools has ballooned to the $24,606 I reported yesterday.

If the Bureau of the Census wants to discharge its responsibility to serve the public with accurate, meaningful statistics, it should stop misleading the media with ambiguous language hooked to ”current” spending figures and explicitly give both “current” and total spending figures. It should also offer estimates of total spending at the time of their press releases, extrapolating from historical trends, because their data are always outdated by two or more years, and hence always understate spending at the present time.

In yesterday’s Washington Post I pointed out that DC public schools are spending about $24,600 per pupil this school year – roughly $10,000 more than the average for area private schools. There wasn’t room to explain those estimates in the Post, so I provide the details here.

DC public schools receive funding from several sources: the District’s local operating budget, special supplementary operating funds from the DC City Council, capital funding for building improvements and construction, and the federal government. To arrive at the real total per pupil funding figure for the district, all of these funding sources must be added up, excluding funding aimed at charter schools or higher education, and the resulting total must be divided by the number of students enrolled. Here are those numbers, with sources:

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“Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will require all states to use one federal formula to calculate graduation and dropout rates,” reports the New York Times, as part of a campaign to keep more kids in school.

The idea that we can reduce the public school dropout rate simply by measuring it better is misguided. It’s like believing that the North Koreans could improve their economy by more accurately measuring the number of people who are starving. As with the North Korean economy, the problem with U.S. public schooling is that it is a monopoly that takes choice away from families, takes professional autonomy away from educators, and takes normal economic incentives away from everyone.

Meanwhile, there is evidence from a sophisticated nationwide study that inner city minority kids — those most at risk of dropping out — are more likely to graduate, more likely to get into college, and more likely to graduate from college if they attend private instead of public schools — and that’s true after controlling for differences in student and family background. Other small scale studies of the Milwaukee school voucher program show similar results.

We already know how to reduce the dropout rate: ensure that all families can easily afford to choose the public or private schools best suited to their children. Until that happens, expect to see millions of American kids continuing to starve for a real education.

Every Sunday, the Washington Post lets someone bust five myths about some public-policy matter. Most recently, the buster—or shall I say dodger—was Chester E. Finn Jr., President of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, who addressed five contentious accusations about the No Child Left Behind Act. Why “dodger”? Because rather than directly address the myths, in most cases Finn offered either tangential, deceptive, or just plain inaccurate responses. Let’s look at the five myths and Finn’s answers to them, but rather than go in the order that Finn listed the myths, let’s work from the smallest dodge to the largest.

Least-dodged myth: We begin at the end of Finn’s list, with Finn attacking the notion that “certified teachers are better than non-certified teachers.” Finn argues that “there’s no solid evidence that state teacher certification ensures classroom effectiveness,” and here he’s right on the money. In fact, I wrote the same thing just a few weeks ago.

Getting a little dodgier: In his second entry, Finn disputes the assertion that “No Child Left Behind is egregiously underfunded.” Here he rightly takes issue with constant complaints that NCLB is underfunded because Washington has never spent the full amount authorized under the law. 100 percent of an authorized amount is almost never spent under any law, and Finn correctly points out that “viewed that way, nearly everything born in Washington is underfunded.”

Where Finn runs into trouble is that he fails to directly address another common underfunding complaint: NCLB requires states and districts to do things—write and implement new tests, produce report cards, comply with lots of new rules and regulations—without supplying sufficient funds to pay for them. Finn logically points out that public schools in the U.S. spend nearly $10,000 per-pupil (though it’s more like $11,500 and counting), so they have plenty of money to implement new things, but to directly bust the myth it’s necessary to show that NCLB pays for what it requires.

Mid-way dodge: The third myth Finn addresses is that “setting academic standards will fix U.S. schools.” Finn is a proponent of national standards, so it’s no surprise that he finesses this myth by acknowledging that NCLB encourages states to set low standards while simultaneously suggesting that standards-based reforms can work if “good standards” are in place.

Finn is right about NCLB’s perverse incentives—if schools and states don’t make progress toward 100-percent “proficiency” they are punished, but states define proficiency for themselves—however, its a big leap to imply that government schools will ever put “good standards” in place. Teachers, school administrators, and education bureaucrats who have a strong interest in low, easy-to-meet standards control education politics, which might be why only three states—Massachusetts, California and South Carolina—have standards Finn considers good, and two of these three might soon have their high standards go away.

The runner-up dodge: In the penultimate dodge—and the fourth myth attacked on his list—Finn addresses the belief that “standardized testing required by No Child Left Behind gets in the way of real learning.” Instead of arguing that NCLB’s standardized testing requirements truly don’t get in the way of real learning, Finn argues that if testing is “an honest measure of a solid curriculum” it doesn’t have to get in the way. But based on the “setting academic standards” myth discussed above, we know that states aren’t honestly measuring solid curricula. And then there’s what Finn himself has written: Because NCLB puts all the carrots, sticks, and tests on math and reading, it has pushed other important subjects dangerously close to the margins, most definitely jeopardizing “real learning.”

The Big Dodge: Finn started with his big dodge, and I’ll end with it. Despite all logic and evidence screaming that it is absolutely not a myth that “No Child Left Behind is an unprecedented extension of federal control over schools,” Finn says it is. Why? Because states don’t have to follow the law if they’ll just turn down federal money, and NCLB is really just the latest incarnation of the decades-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

First off, while states do “volunteer” to take federal money, their taxpayers have no choice but to pony the funds up in the first place, which means by following NCLB states are really just getting back hundreds-of-millions of their taxpayers’ dollars. And the notion that because NCLB is the latest permutation of ESEA it isn’t an unprecedented intrusion? Well, the original ESEA was only about 50 pages long, while NCLB occupies more than 600 pages! And the additional 550 sheets aren’t just filled with meaningless doodles or love notes; they contain scads of directives and programs heaped onto the law over decades of reauthorizations, including brand-new NCLB requirements for testing, teacher qualifications, “scientifically-based” reading curricula, etc. In other words, NCLB is absolutely an unprecedented extension of federal power, and no amount of myth-dodging can change that.

One of the most revolting things that a politician can do is accept a hero’s accolades for passing a law that generously spends other people’s money. So I ask Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), the other politicians honored for giving D.C. students taxpayer dollars, and the officials who run the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant Program, where’s my gold medal, and the gold medals for all the other federal taxpayers who actually fund the generous tuition grants for which politicians are being given such great adulation?