Archive for the ‘Education and Child Policy’ Category
Education Standards at Work — the NY Debacle
President Obama today touted his Race to the Top program, which pressures states to, among other things, adopt national education standards. Also today, the New York Board of Regents revealed that it had been misleading its citizens for years, giving them an inflated notion of how well their children were performing academically. Last year 77 percent of students were ”proficient” in English according to NY state standards. This year it’s 53 percent.
So what’s to stop this from happening at a national level? In fact, what’s to stop an endless cycle of setting high standards that produce low scores, gradually dumbing the standards down to give the illusion of progress, and then resetting them to a high level again when the deceit is discovered?
At any stage of this cycle, officials can claim that students are showing improvement or that steps are being taken to raise standards — without any need to, you know, improve the schools.
Instead, we could just adopt in education the same system of freedom and incentives that’s been responsible for actual progress in every other area of human activity for the past two centuries. Or is that just too obvious?
Foundations Need to Invest More in Private Education and Choice
Charter schools are the hot new thing.
OK, they aren’t all that new. But many people who used to have blanket objections to any increase in school choice now support (some form of) charter schools. President Obama, and even AFT President Randi Weingarten, say they support “charter” schools. The guy who made Al Gore’s documentary, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Planet, will soon release a film about choice and charter schools.
In the midst of the charter school hype, we need to remember that the private school system has been educating low-income kids longer, better, and more efficiently than charter schools. And charter schools are now sapping this tiny remaining redoubt of civil-society success and freedom in education.
Philanthropists who care about long-term, sustainable and dynamic improvement in the education system need to refocus. They need to pull back from the charter school mirage and invest in private school choice programs and private schools that are a proven, established success with at-risk children.
Fortunately, many philanthropists see the need to save private, often Catholic, schools for the poor:
Among his many achievements, [Robert W.] Wilson is the single largest benefactor of Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of New York. Since 2007, he has donated over $30 million to inner-city Catholic education. He is also an atheist… Wilson belongs to an elite order: non-Catholic donors who are the patron saints of inner-city Catholic schools.
Read the whole article by Christopher Levenick in Philanthropy magazine. Public charter schools are often better than the regular ones. But charter systems are a pale government reflection of the legacy and possibilities found in private education.
Quiet but Deadly
Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the nineteen finalist states in the federal “Race to the Top.” In his announcement speech, Duncan was unrestrained in the glory he heaped on the $4.35-billion program (and a few others), declaring that ”as we look at the last 18 months, it is absolutely stunning to see how much change has happened at the state and local levels, unleashed in part by these incentive programs.” It was, he said, all part of a “quiet revolution” underway in education.
He was right and wrong.
Concerning the “stunning change” wrought by RTTT, we’ve heard such stratospheric hyperbole before and it is no more warranted today than it was a few months ago. Yes, RTTT has produced a fair number of paper changes, but it has yet to accomplish anything discernible when it comes to actual educational outcomes.
Get back to us in a few years, Mr. Secretary, when maybe you’ll be able to justify your horn-tooting. Maybe…
Where Duncan was right was in pointing out that there has been a quiet revolution underway orchestrated largely by Washington, but not a good one. It is the insidious spread of national standards that are unsupported by research, incompatible with great education, and most certainly federal. But those standards – and the federal tests that will be connected to them – may be laying low no longer. Tomorrow, President Obama is scheduled to give a speech to the National Urban League that will emphasize:
how his signature Race to the Top program and other initiatives are driving education reform across the country and focusing the nation on the goal of preparing students for college and careers. He will highlight the unprecedented support for and adoption of common standards by a majority of states already, and the Administration’s commitment to develop the next generation of high-quality assessments benchmarked to common standards.
With so many states having fallen to national standards, the administration seems to think it’s time to acknowledge the revolution. Hopefully, it’s not too late for a counterrevolution to succeed.
Duncan: One Size Fits All = Bad;
Uniform National Standards = Good
Touting the latest states to make the finals for Race-to-the-Top funding at the National Press Club today, education secretary Arne Duncan declared that:
We are a very long way from the classroom in Washington and if we have learned one thing from NCLB, it’s that one-size-fits-all remedies generally don’t work.
While secretary Duncan claims to recognize the futility of one-size-fits-all policies in education, his and the president’s own ”Race to the Top” program extorts states into adopting the mother of all such policies: uniform national curriculum standards. Signing on to such standards is one of the key criteria by which the RTT funding was doled out.
As anyone who has ever met more than a handful of children might be expected to know: kids differ from one another. This creates problems when you try to teach them all the same things at the same time. Here’s how I put it earlier this year:
Any single set of age-based standards, no matter how thoughtfully conceived, will necessarily be too slow or too fast for most children. Consider a concrete example. The new CCSSI math standards place trigonometric functions (sine, cosine, etc.) well into the high school curriculum. Students would be taught this material in their mid teens. What good would that do for someone like Dick, who wrote this:
[W]hen I was eleven or twelve, I had read a book on trigonometry that I had checked out from the library. … A few years later, when we studied trigonometry in school, I still had my notes and I saw that my [theorem proofs] were often different from those in the book. Sometimes, for a thing where I didn’t notice a simple way to do it, I went all over the place till I got it. Other times, my way was most clever — the standard demonstration in the book was much more complicated! So sometimes I had ‘em beat, and sometimes it was the other way around.
Dick — Richard P. Feynmann — told many other entertaining stories in his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmann … like the time he asked a Time magazine reporter if he could refuse the Nobel Prize in Physics (“no”).
How does teaching (or re-teaching) trigonometry to all children at the same age help math whizzes like Feynmann? How does it help kids who find mathematics rough going, and lag behind their peers no matter how much support they receive from parents and teachers? The answer is obvious: it doesn’t.
Anyone who follows politics will be used to a certain level of ambient hypocrisy, but it is nevertheless staggering to see Duncan acknowledge the futility of one-size-fits-all solutions at an event celebrating his policy for deliberality orchestrating one-size-fits-all standards for 50 million kids.
Who Said That about National Standards and Tests!?
There are lots of reasons to be very concerned about the national standards and tests barreling in silence toward education domination. Below, I offer several of those reasons — and one possible standards alternative – along with links to material expanding on the big concerns. Give ‘em a read, and as you do play a little game: See if you can guess who is quoted in each point:
- “[T]he Department of Education — without explicit congressional authority — would use discretionary dollars to launch the test-development process….Congress should have something to say about the arrangements for so momentous a shift in American educational federalism.”
- “The Education Department has been rushing to put the…plan into operation….Critics have been ignored.”
- “The main contract so far is with the Council of Chief State School Officers….’The chiefs,’ as they are known in educator-land, are the Washington-based association of state superintendents, and they form one of the establishment’s most change averse crews.”
- “It doesn’t judge certain information to be important and certain books to be best, but, rather, partakes of fashionable academic relativism.”
- “[T]he whole idea might be privatized [see page 20], turned into a commercial (or philanthropic) testing program…with no government entanglement or federal funds.”
So who said these things? Me? Jay Greene? Jennifer Marshall and Lindsey Burke? The folks at the Pioneer Institute?
No, it wasn’t any of those national-standards opponents. It was, in fact, none other than Chester Finn: president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute; leading standards-and-testing proponent; and diagnoser of paranoia among those who worry about the same sorts of things he complains about above!
So what’s going on here? Does Finn support national standards and testing rushed into place by the Department of Education, without Congressional approval, and driven largely by “The Chiefs,” or doesn’t he? Should we, as Finn wrote in the same piece that produced the quotes above, “apply the brakes” to this “before a wreck occurs”? Are private standards and tests really a preferable option?
What I can say to help shed light on these questions is that the quotes above come not from something new, but a 1997 Weekly Standard article by Finn opposing Clinton administration efforts to get states to adopt national standards and tests. (You can find the article here but have to subscribe to read it). These are not comments directed at the current national standards effort.
What I can’t say — and what is, of course, most important — is what has caused Finn’s tune on national standards and tests to change. Why such concern in 1997 about so many things that seem to bother him little today? Why, for instance, was it a terrible idea in 1997 to rush implementation of national standards and tests, but it’s not a deal-breaker today? Why was it troubling that CCSSO had a central role in 1997, but it’s apparently hunky-dory in 2010? Why was it a bad thing to blow off critics in 1997, but alright today?
No doubt Finn can offer many decent reasons why numerous things that troubled him in 1997 don’t do so today, but I for one can’t think of any. And before we go any further along the perilous road to nationalization, I’d sure like to know what those reasons are.
Washington State Considers Privatizing the System
Washington state legislators will reportedly have to cut billions from the budget when they reconvene next session, and governor Christine Gregoire has commissioned a privatization study to see if taking the big step makes economic sense. Washington’s public schools spend about $13 billion annually (around $13,000/pupil — see Table 8 here), so increasing the system’s efficiency has the potential to solve the state’s budget crisis….
…which is why many Washington taxpayers will be disappointed to learn that the governor’s privatization study is only for the ferry system, not the schools. Since ferry-travelers pick up about two thirds of the system’s operating costs, its total burden on taxpayers is 26 times smaller than that of the public schools. Even if ferry operations could magically be made entirely free, it wouldn’t solve WA’s budget problems.
Of course there’s a widespread belief that schools have to be run by the state to build social harmony and preserve the republic, but these beliefs, though deeply held, have no basis in reality. The civic-mindedness of independent school students/graduates is typically equal to or greater than that of public school students/graduates, and having a single official system of state schools actually creates social conflict over the curriculum — conflict that increased parental choice would lessen.
So not only would liberating Washington education from the shackles of monopoly help to control costs, it would better realize the ideals that a public education system is meant to advance.
Gov. Gregoire?
Fordham Criticized Again
Great stuff by Jay Greene this morning on yesterday’s Fordham Institute victory dance. Greene rips into the notion that conservatives should support standardization of every American kid, and even dares attack Fordham’s calculation that on “the right” only about six government-loathing libertarians have fought national standards.
Perhaps most important, while I explained (yet again) why the Fordham folks and other big-government conservatives will never get the sustained high standards they want out of a government monopoly, Jay nailed the even more fundamental point:
The real divide here is between people who think that policies are best when decisions are decentralized and choice and competition are enhanced versus people who think that there is a “right way” that should be imposed centrally and should constrain choice and competition.
Unfortunately for Fordham, whether we’re comparing the U.S. to the Soviet economy, or educational freedom to government schooling, choice and competition win every time. Every time, that is, except in political decisions like adopting national standards.
Fordham Institute 1, Education 0
On NRO today, the Fordham Institute’s Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli take a little time to gloat about the continuing spread of national education standards. In addition, as is their wont, they furnish hollow pronouncements about the Common Core being good as far as standards go, and ”a big, modernized country on a competitive planet” needing national standards. Oh, and apparently having counted the opponents of national standards on “the right,” they note that there are just “a half-dozen libertarians who don’t much care for government to start with.”
Now, there are more than six conservatives and libertarians who have fought national standards. But Finn and Petrilli are sadly correct that most conservatives haven’t raised a finger to stop a federal education takeover — and this is a federal takeover – that they would have screamed bloody murder about ten years ago. There are many reasons for this, but no doubt a big one is that too many conservatives really are big-government conservatives committed, not to constitutionally constrained government, but controlling government themselves. If they think they can write the national standards, then national standards there should be.
These kinds of conservatives just never learn. As I have explained more times than I care to remember, government schooling will ultimately be controlled by the people it employs because they are the most motivated to engage in education politics. And naturally, their goal will be to stay as free of outside accountability as possible!
This is not theoretical. It is the clear lesson to be learned from the failure of state-set standards and accountability across the country — not to mention decades of federal education impotence – that Fordhamites constantly bewail. Indeed, Finn and Petrilli lament it again in their NRO piece, complaining that “until now…the vast majority of states have failed to adopt rigorous standards, much less to take actions geared to boosting pupil achievement.” And why is this? Politics! As they explained in their 2006 publication To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests for America’s Schools:
The state standards movement has been in place for almost fifteen years. For almost ten of those years, we…have reviewed the quality of state standards. Most were mediocre-to-bad ten years ago, and most are mediocre-to-bad today. They are generally vague, politicized, and awash in wrongheaded fads and nostrums.
At this point, I really have nothing new to say. That political reality will gut national standards while making the public schooling monopoly even worse is clear if you’re willing to acknowledge it. Regretably, the folks at Fordham — and many conservatives — just aren’t. So congratulations on your victory, Fordham. To everyone else, my deepest condolences.
No Cheers for Title IX
For supporters of Title IX, it’s time to put down the pom-poms.
From the start, Title IX has been an unnecessary and destructive imposition of government and bureaucracy into college sports, substituting regulation and litigation for the free choices of women and men. But yesterday’s ruling that competitive cheerleading isn’t a sport — a decision worth reading just for its brilliant illustration of the torturous athlete-accounting and word-parsing Title IX demands – highlights how truly absurd it has become.
For one thing, tell the women (and men) in competitive cheer that it isn’t a sport – most would probably beg to differ. Much more important, when we have judges ruling what does or does not constitute a sport we have clearly given up way too much freedom in our supposedly free society. Finally, the very basis for Title IX – the notion that women will be systematically and unfairly barred from various activities by misogynistic colleges — just makes no sense, especially today. The fact is, women make up the very large majority of college students, and hence can dictate terms to schools. At least, they can dictate terms if schools want to keep competing in the sport we call “staying in business.”
Which brings us to what probably really scares Title IX fans: Women almost certainly don’t want to participate in intercollegiate athletics as much as men do, a likelihood evidenced by everything from hugely greater male participation in open-access intramural sports, to men choosing ESPN and women choosing Facebook while on the Web. The problem, of course, is that to admit that would be to lose the ability to push schools around with the big ol’ federal government.
Thoughts on NYT National Standards Debate
While national education standards have been advancing largely under the radar, they have at least generated enough attention — probably because there has been a modicum of controversy in Massachusetts — to inspire a New York Times “Room for Debate” installment. I bring this up because (a) such attention is a pretty rare thing, and (b) I’m a contributor and want to critique my “opponents.”
I’ll take my co-discussants one at a time and just pick whatever nits I think need picking. I do so noting that our arguments were supposed to be very short, so it is quite possible that my adversaries have good replies to my complaints and simply couldn’t include the relevant information in their posts.
Here we go:
Richard Kahlenberg: This must seem like Rip Kahlenberg Day, but I assure you it’s not intentional. I just go where the news takes me.
I find Kahlenberg’s response the least persuasive of the entries. He ignores almost all the evidence on national standards, and essentially asserts that such standards make sense because former AFT president — and Kahlenberg biography subject – Albert Shanker wanted them. Oh, and Shanker noted that “virtually all the nations that beat us on international assessments had in place uniform standards.”
National standards don’t make sense because they ignore the political reality in which they would be implemented (not to mention the fact that all kids are different). Taking fifty government monopolies and casting them aside for a single monopoly does nothing to change the crippling problems inherent to monopolies. (The most notable being their utter lack of incentive to perform well.) And could we please dispense with the “all countries that beat us” factoid? As Alfie Kohn thankfully pointed out in his entry, “while most high-scoring countries have centralized education systems, so do most of the lowest-scoring countries.” It is a point, by the way, I fleshed out in my recent analysis Behind the Curtain: Assessing the Case for National Curriculum Standards.
Speaking of Kohn…
Conflict and Class Integration in Wake County, NC
Explicit, forced racial integration of the public schools is almost completely a thing of the past, buried in part by broad distaste for it among Americans of all races who had grown tired of the conflict, coercion, and plain inconvenience it often caused, as well as numerous Supreme Court rulings sharply curtailing it. But coerced integration has not gone away: Proponents of engineering racial integration have turned to income as the basis for assigning kids to schools, with the goal of achieving greater socio-economic — and, in the process, racial – balance.
To listen to some proponents of coerced integration by class, this new focus is a clear social and educational success. To illustrate the success, in All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice, Century Foundation scholar Richard Kahlenberg highlights Wake County, North Carolina, among a few other places. Here’s his conclusion on Wake County as of about 2000, when school board candidates campaigning for “neighborhood schools” — meaning school assignment based on geography instead of racial or economic mix — were roundly defeated:
Wake County citizens knew firsthand that racial integration in the schools had worked, and now they were at the forefront in promoting a bold new version in the twenty-first century.
Apparently, much has changed in ten years: Today, the Wake County school district seems to be almost in the midst of a civil war as a new majority attempts to return the district to neighborhood schooling. Indeed, just yesterday a board meeting descended into bedlam – as previous meetings have — as protestors and school board members on all sides fought one another over the effort to return to neighborhood schooling.
What’s the lesson here? The same one we should learn every time Americans fight — and they fight a lot – over their public schools: Lots of people want myriad different things for their kids — racial diversity, schools near their homes, specific curricular focuses – and government schooling simply cannot give it to all of them. That is why if we ever want real, lasting peace in education we must end government schooling and move to a system of universal educational freedom. It’s the only way that all people can pursue the education they want without having to impose it in on everyone else.
Standards Were Higher, More Local, a Century Ago
I think it’s important to study historical trends in education, but I always chafe when people talk about how difficult high school graduation or even entrance examinations were in the mid-to-late 1800s. As late as 1890, only about one student in 10 attended high school (though the figure was higher in New England), so these tests tell us only what the best and brightest were expected to know and be able to do.
But the same is not true for the earlier grades.
There were 380,000 children between 5 and 16-years-old in New York State in 1821; 342,479 of whom–90 percent–were enrolled in school. Granting that the North Eastern states lead the nation in enrollment, it was still the case that obtaining a grammar school education was the norm in the United States by the mid 1800s. So how challenging was the content these children were taught? How does this strike you:
It was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and melancholy tarns writhing or sleeping within all–that I chanced upon a certain rivulet and island. I came upon them suddenly in the leafy June, and threw myself upon the turf, beneath the branches of an unknown odorous shrub, that I might doze as I contemplated the scene. I felt that thus only should I look upon it–such was the character of phantasm which it wore.
That’s an excerpt of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Island of the Fay,” which appeared in William Elson’s Grammar School Reader, Book Three–published in 1910. As late as a century ago, adolescent children were still taught rich and complex prose written by masters of the language. Not simplified. Not dumbed down.
Why?
It wasn’t because the federal Department of Education was pushing it; it didn’t exist yet. And it wasn’t because a consortium of governors banded together to raise standards, either. In 1910, control over the content of instruction was still chiefly local–as it had been throughout the 1800s.
After generations of centralization of authority–district consolidations, the rise of state education bureaucracies, and increasing federal intrusions in the classroom–standards are lower now than they were a century ago. Why, then, should any sane person expect that further centralization–the kind advocated by national standards advocates–would improve rather than worsen matters?
The National Standards Delusion
As Massachusetts nears decision time on adopting national education standards, the Boston Herald takes state leaders to task for their support of the Common Core standards, which some analysts say are inferior to current state standards. But fear not, says Education Secretary Paul Reville. If the national standards are inferior, the Bay State can change them. “We will continue to be in the driver’s seat.”
If only national standardizers — many of whom truly want high standards and tough accountability — would look a little further than the ends of their beaks.
Here’s the reality: Massachusetts will not be in the drivers seat in the future. Indeed, states aren’t in the driver’s seat right now, because it is federal money that is steering the car, and many more DC ducats will likely be connected to national standards when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is eventually reauthorized. And this is hardly new or novel — the feds have forced “voluntary” compliance with its education dictates for decades by holding taxpayer dollars hostage.
With that in mind, let’s stop focusing on whether the Common Core standards right now are good, bad, or indifferent, and talk about their future prospects, which is what really matters. Oh, wait: Most national standardizers avoid that discussion like the plague because they know that the overwhelming odds are the standards will end up either dismal, or at best just unenforced. Why? Because the same political forces that have smushed centralized standards and accountability in almost every state — the teacher unions, administrator associations, self-serving politicians, etc. — will just do their dirty work at the federal rather than state level. Indeed, those groups will still be the most motivated and effectively organized to control education politics, but they will have the added benefit of one-stop shopping!
The tragic flaw in the thinking of many national-standards supporters is not the desire to create high bars for students to clear, but the utter delusion, or maybe just myopia, that allows them to assume that they will control the standards in a monopoly over which, by its very nature, they almost never hold the reins. It’s fantastical thinking that would actually be pitiable were it not for the fact that, to realize their delusional dreams, they have take us all down with them.
Last Stand in Massachusetts?
As national education standards continue their hushed and rushed adoption process, there may be only one chance left to significantly slow them down: Massachusetts.
The Bay State is seen by national-standards supporters as having the toughest mathematics and language arts standards in the nation, and if Mass refuses to adopt the Common Core standards on the grounds that they’re not up to the state’s high snuff, then national standards will lose a very high profile state. It certainly wouldn’t be the end of the line for national standards — lots of federal money coercing adoption will see to that — but it would be a relatively high-profile, and maybe even attention-grabbing, loss.
Unfortunately, Massachusetts is on the same eye-blink adoption schedule as every other state trying to get Race to the Top bucks, and its Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will be voting on the standards Wednesday. That’s left almost no time for Bay Staters to imbibe the proposed standards, much less analyze them and absorb the analyses. The Pioneer Institute, though, is doing all it can to shed light on the Common Core standards despite the impossible timeline. Today, it published its analysis of the language arts standards, finding that the extant standards of Massachusetts and California are appreciably higher. Tomorrow, it will dissect mathematics.
The sad reality, though, is that Pioneer is likely fighting a stacked, losing battle. As Pioneer executive director Jim Stergios weaves together in a recent blog post, despite the appearance of objective deliberation, the powers-that-be in Massachusetts have been on the national standards bandwagon from the get-go, and they’ve got everything in line to adopt the Common Core. Real debate and deliberation, disappointingly, was probably never in the cards.
At least, though, Pioneer has been able to fire off some shots. With a little luck, maybe they’ll even get a hit on this hyper-sonic target.
For Gates and Buffett, the Deity’s in the Details
As I write in the San Jose Mercury News today:
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett want the world’s billionaires to donate half their wealth to charity. If they’re successful with just their American peers, they’ll raise about $600 billion — an amount U.S. public schools spend in a single year. And therein lies a problem.
The problem is that one of their chief goals, shared by many of their billionaire peers, is to improve American education — an institution whose ultimate outcomes have not improved in four decades despite the infusion of trillions of additional dollars.
Buffett blames some of our educational woes on a “distorted” market system that rewards great investors ”with sums reaching into the billions,” while it “rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes.”
But the problem is not that our market system is distorted, the problem is that education isn’t part of it.
If we want educational excellence to be replicated and scaled up the way it is in other fields, we have to structure it as we have structured those other fields. Make it possible for the greatest educators to become billionaires, make it necessary for the worst to find different work, and let the former be separated from the latter through the countless choices of individual families.
Schools on Film
AEI’s Rick Hess worries that school choice advocates are moving into the public messaging arena with “brazenly manipulative” flicks that rely on shallow “sound bites.” He cites the screening of five documentaries at an upcoming national conference in San Franscisco to argue his point.
I can’t comment on them as a whole–I haven’t seen them all–but I would like to point out that there will actually be at least eight screenings at next month’s conference. Among them will be a brief sample of a proposed six-part documentary series called School, Inc. Taking Educational Excellence from Candle to Flame. This series, inspired by James Burke’s Connections and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, would take viewers on a world-wide quest to answer one very important question: why is excellence routinely replicated and spread on a massive scale in every field except education?
The series hasn’t been shot yet, and perhaps distributors today won’t think viewers are still interested in the kind of challenging, thought-provoking documentary series that so captivated me (and millions of others) in my teen years. But the project’s advisory board includes Jay Mathews, Paul Peterson, James Tooley, and Michael Horn, my co-producers and co-writers (Patrick Prentice and Tim Baney) have more than half-a-century of documentary filmmaking experience between them, and I’ve been studying school systems around the globe and across history for the better part of two decades. We’re confident that this series will be both substantive and entertaining, and think that American (and foreign) audiences are very interested in the subject matter. As we start to pitch to distributors in the coming months, we’ll find out if they agree.
Stay tuned….
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Regulatory Studies
Return of the Principal-in-Chief
According to a Fort Worth Star-Telegram report, President Obama plans to reprise last year’s hotly debated role as Principal-in-Chief to help kick off the coming school year.
Will he have the Department of Education once again put out leading and Obama-aggrandizing study guides? Will he again take personal credit for getting computers and other goodies into your kids’ schools? Will this address look as much like a campaign event as the last one? Will he tell all the kids that the really noble thing to do is get government jobs?
We don’t know the answers to these pressing questions yet, but we do know one thing: If he really does plan to play Principal — or maybe Motivational-Speaker – in-Chief again, it will be both unconstitutional, and unacceptable to a whole lot of people.
For a refresher on last year’s spectacle, by the way, check out this terrific “Cato Weekly Video” installment on it:
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Government and Politics
Georgia on My Mind
Rick Hess has written recently about education policy in the republic of Georgia, describing it as “guaranteed to bring smiles to my friends at the Cato Institute.” Hess characterizes it as a “market-driven system,” and “a seemingly elegant market design,” that has been undermined by a lack of autonomy for schools, “incoherent governance,” and “the reluctance of state officials to keep their hands off the schools.”
Can’t say that this description has me cracking open the bubbly. To the problems Hess has already identified, we could add the fact that there is a national curriculum that even the nation’s voucherized schools must apparently use as the basis for their plan of instruction. The secondary system is also compromised by a central government test suite that determines admission to the nation’s universities. These tests, apparently having little to do with the national curriculum, have led to mass absenteeism among 11th and 12th graders — who cut most of their classes to study for them. The state also seems to require students to take 12 years of schooling before being eligible to enter college, even if they could (and wish to) pass the admissions test earlier.
We could also add to this the fact that a shadowy government agency can and does fire principles from supposedly autonomous voucher-funded schools. Even if it randomly selected the schools to be inspected and applied academic criteria in its decisions, such an agency would not be part of any “elegant market design.” As it happens, though, it does not use academic criteria in deciding whom to fire. According to a Georgian report Hess refers to, a principal could be fired for having playground trees that “are not balanced properly.” [So now we know what Adrian Monk is doing after his show wrapped....]
Georgia, it seems to me, has not yet taken a genuinely laissez-faire approach to education, but I wish them well and hope that they will eventually manage to ensure that all families have access to an unfettered education marketplace.
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NB: Ray Charles’ interpretations of “Georgia on My Mind” are wonderful, but consider giving one of Jay McShann’s a listen if you’re into that sort of thing.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; International Economics and Development
Don’t Look Around, Get the For-Profits!
Yesterday, I brought you up to date on the under-the-radar advance of federal K-12 education control. But that’s not the only education sector under largely silent assault. Most people are also probably unaware of the siege of for-profit colleges and universities, a group loathed because, well, they dare to be honest about trying to make a profit, and they do it in an industry utterly dependent on federal cash.
The complaint — which you might have heard before — is that for-profit enrollment is growing very fast; the schools are more expensive than taxpayer-subsidized public institutions or non-profit private schools; and for-profit students often struggle to graduate and pay back their mainly federal student loans. This story on NPR’s Marketplace is somewhat representative of the coverage afforded these schools, with its focus on a former for-profit employee accusing one school — but by implication the whole sector — of deceiving students about their employment and earning prospects after they’ve completed the school’s pricey program. Here’s the pretty standard stuff:
Garnett knows a lot about the value of education. She worked as director of graduate placement at for-profit Allied College in St. Louis. It’s now called Anthem College. Here’s a clip from one of its promotional videos.
Allied College video: We can help you break into that career you’ve always dreamed of, and your future starts right now!
It was Garnett’s job to help students start those careers as pharmacy technicians or dental assistants.
Garnett: We sent resumes on their behalf, we called potential employers on their behalf, we called the graduates every week, sometimes every day, to say “have you followed up on this, have you talked to anyone, what have you been doing?”
All that effort paid off. Garnett says more than 70 percent of graduates found the kinds of jobs they went to school for. But she says a lot of those jobs paid just $8 to $10 an hour. And the students often took on a lot of debt.
Garnett: A lot of it would depend on what program the student was in, how hard they were willing to work, the effort that they were willing to put in. But just being honest, if you’re making $10 an hour and you have $15,000 in student loans, that would be pretty difficult to pay back, for anyone.
You get the picture: The for-profit school deceived students so it could rake in cash for it’s owners. Well it’s stories like this — as well as some truly alarming statistics about for-profit costs and graduation rates — that are driving a series of Capitol Hill floggings of proprietary schools, as well as a drive to tighten regulation of the schools: Read the rest of this post »
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; Regulatory Studies
Ever So Quietly, National Standards Spread
Today’s advocates of national education standards certainly learned from the standards debacle of the 1990s, in which detailed standards were widely released — and widely hated. Be upfront and vocal with the public about what you are doing, they learned, and national standards will never exist. That’s why advocates have kept their efforts awfully hush-hush — no DC unveiling of final standards; a rushed, federally-coerced time line for adoption; and almost no willingness to discuss the research on standards. It also hasn’t hurt that just bigger issues — economic stagnation, wars, oil spills — have eaten all the reporting space. Unfortunately, the result is that with “little…fanfare” (registration required) 23 states have already adopted the Common Core State Standards, and several more are expected to do so before August 2 — the day they have to adopt them to stay competitive for federal Race to the Top funds.
And the slope keeps getting more slippery. Would-be national standardizers have been even more quiet about needing national tests to make their standards useful than they’ve been about the standards themselves. But those tests — federally backed, of course — are coming. In addition, the Common Core folks started with language arts and mathematics because those subjects — as long as you don’t pinpoint much reading material – are relatively uncontroversial. But guess what? The National Research Council just released preliminary material for national science standards, an effort purposely timed to coincide with Common Core.
So national standards keep slowly constricting. But there is resistance. A new assessment of the Common Core math standards suggests that, well, the standards might not really be as good as those of leading nations. (Too bad so many states gave analysts no more than a nanosecond to assess the standards before adopting them. But, then, they were just following the the feds’ adopt-now-for-big-bucks lead.) Even more hopeful — because ultimately the problem isn’t the quality of the standards, but the ruinous centralization they will bring — is that there are many candidates running for federal office who, according to Education Week, actually acknowledge the Constitution, care about good education, and are calling for the feds to get out of the nation’s classrooms. Now, they almost certainly don’t represent a mass revolt against the U.S. Department of Education, but their presence offers at least some hope that the nation is coming to realize that as it fixated on health care, Afghanistan, and bailouts, the feds were stealthily setting the groundwork to take over their schools.
Such a realization can’t come a moment too soon.
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