Archive for the ‘Education and Child Policy’ Category
Why Tax Credits Are Better than Vouchers
A recent post at the popular conservative blog RedState argues that government-funded school vouchers are a bad idea. It points out the merits of having people pay for their own children’s education and the problems that government funding introduces. Fair enough.
But what to do for the millions of families who cannot afford a good independent education for their kids?
The answer is a nonrefundable education tax credit system applied to state and local taxes. A complete education tax credit program has two parts: a credit for parents to use against their own expenses, and a credit for individuals and businesses that donate to private scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs). The first part helps middle-income families pay for their own children’s schooling, and the second part ensures that low-income families also have the resources they need to participate in the education marketplace.
Under this system, no one is compelled to fund anything to which they might object, and the direct financial responsibility of parents is maximized. The personal credits involve people spending their own money on themselves, and the donation credits allow taxpayers to choose the SGO that receives their donations. No government money is used, but universal access is assured.
I give an exhaustive treatment of the differences between tax credits and vouchers in a paper titled “Forging Consensus.” Two critiques of that paper, along with my responses, appear here.
It is possible to ensure universal access to the education marketplace without sacrificing the freedom that makes markets work.
Have We Learned Nothing from “SchoolHouse Rock”?
“I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill, and I’m sittin’ here on Capitol Hill…”
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and cartoons were confined to Saturday morning broadcast programming, kids learned about the separation of powers (among other things) from the ”SchoolHouse Rock” toons.
Apparently some future New Jersey lawyers weren’t tuned in.
The recent lawsuit about which Cato’s Neal McCluskey has been writing asks the court to create a school voucher program in New Jersey as a remedy to the state’s deficient public school system. Right ends, wrong means. Courts are for legal interpretation; legislation is for legislatures.
There’s little doubt that New Jersey is failing to live up to its constitutional promise to provide a “thorough and efficient” education. Should the court so rule, it will be up to the legislature to fix the problem, and introducing a universally accessible free education marketplace is certainly the best solution they could implement.
But it’s their job to implement it, not the court’s.
The Answer Is: “Public School Establishment”
Yesterday, I wrote about a New Jersey lawsuit aimed at letting parents with children in failing public schools take their children, and their share of public education funding, and send them to any institution they want, public or private. It’s a new twist on educational equity suits all over the country that have produced a ton of new funding for supposedly poor districts, but little by way of academic success.
At the end of yesterday’s post, I wondered aloud whether long-time supporters of old-style equity remedies would get behind litigation intended to empower parents, or if they would only support suits that would shower more money on “the public school establishment.” I mentioned specifically the Education Law Center, which has been the driving force behind old-school equity cases in New Jersey for decades.
This morning, in a story about the disastrous Camden, NJ, public schools, I’m afraid I got my answer:
Camden schools — despite their ongoing problems — have taken positive steps by offering preschool programs, reducing class size and other efforts, said David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center.
“It’s easy to criticize and have some silver-bullet solution that’s untested and unproven,” Sciarra said. “There’s a positive agenda that we need everyone, including the school-choice activists, to get behind.”
I suppose I could hope that when Sciarra attacked a “silver-bullet solution that’s untested and unproven” he was referring to pouring more and more money into improvement-invulnerable public schools, but that’s been tested repeatedly…and constantly found to be a failure. Unfortunately, I guess that means I have my answer.
Here’s an Idea: Sue for the Children in Failing Schools!
Tomorrow, a lawsuit that could revolutionize educational equity litigation as we know it is scheduled to be filed in Chancery Court in Newark, NJ. Instead of seeking the standard equity remedy—pushing so much new money into supposedly poor districts that a mile-long caravan of Wells Fargo trucks couldn’t carry it all—the plaintiffs in Crawford v. Davy want to give parents with kids in failing schools the right to use public funds to move their children to institutions that actually work, public or private.
Imagine that: Instead of rewarding educrats in failing district with tons of new cash, it would be the children—the people who are actually doing the suffering in the state’s broken schools—who will get the relief!
As this case unfolds, what will be particularly interesting to see is the reaction of the educational equity crowd, which so far has only clamored for ever bigger sums of money to be lavished on bad districts. Will their magnanimity now extend all the way to seeking “justice” for families, not just the public school establishment? We’re looking at you here, Education Law Center, for a sign.
Parental Pawns and Window Dressing
There’s no bigger sham in public schooling than “parental involvement,” a concept that educrats trot out whenever they want to show that they aren’t scared of parents or when they’re trying to curry parental favor. Otherwise, they avoid it like the plague.
Ordinarily, parental involvement translates into sheer window dressing; feel-good activities that let parents do fun things with their children, but that in no way interfere with a school’s daily operations.
An article in today’s Lexington Herald-Leader discusses just such fluff, profiling a Kentucky program in which teams of parents and teachers run art projects in local schools. Apparently, the initiative has hit its public relations mark:
“It’s a wonderful way to get parents and teachers working together,” one parent gushed. “I think any time parents and teachers are working together, it can only benefit children.”
A Little Student Loan Perspective
For months, college students and their advocates have decried impending increases in federal student loan rates. This past Saturday, it happened: variable interest rates on existing taxpayer-subsidized Stafford loans rose from 5.3 percent to 7.14 percent, and new loans were pegged at a fixed rate of 6.8 percent. Doomsday had arrived!
Or had it? As a new report from the National Center for Education Statistics makes clear, it wasn’t very long ago that students faced significantly higher interest rates than those that went into effect Saturday, yet for the most part borrowers were able to repay their loans without great difficulty.
According to the report, most borrowers who graduated in the 1992-93 academic year paid interest rates of 8 percent in their first four years after graduation, and between 6 and 9 percent for the remaining years. Despite that, relatively few borrowers had long-term difficulty repaying their loans, and even many who at some point defaulted eventually got back on track.
What this shows, of course, is that taxpayer-backed loans aren’t nearly the burden on students that college activists have made them out to be. But don’t expect student advocates to admit that anytime soon. After all, if they didn’t act incessantly oppressed by having to pay for some of their own education, it would be a lot harder for them to get politicians to fork over ever-more taxpayer dollars.
Breaking News: Not All Children Are the Same
An article in this morning’s Los Angeles Times reports that delaying children’s entry into kindergarten “appears to help some, harm others or have no effect at all.”
This shouldn’t be a surprise. In fact, what would have been surprising is if all children responded to delayed kindergarten in precisely the same way. After all, no two children are exactly alike, right?
Of course. Which is why American public education works so poorly: Even though all children are different, public school districts have no choice but to educate them as if they weren’t. By their very nature, uniform systems of education must do things uniformly.
Consider reading instruction: Just like their varied responses to delayed kindergarten entry, children respond in numerous ways to different reading curricula. School districts, however, can typically teach reading using only one technique, usually either whole language, phonics, or so-called “balanced” instruction. That means that if your child would benefit most from phonics-based instruction but is in a whole language district, he’s out of luck.
Or look at discipline. Some children need rigid rules and regulations, while others need freedom to thrive. School districts, however, can’t apply different disciplinary rules to different children, so a large number of children are going to get the short end of the stick (or carrot) no matter what.
The best way to ameliorate this problem is to eliminate it: Get rid of one-size-fits-all public schools, and create a system in which “the public” does nothing more than help needy parents afford the schools that best address their children’s needs. In other words, let the market go to work. Only then will all children finally get the made-to-order education they need to succeed.
Pulp Non-Fiction: The Seedy Side of Monopoly Schooling
The Detroit Free Press reported recently that the city’s schools have been ordered to repay nearly a million dollars in federal Title I funding because “there are no assurances that these [funds] did not benefit an employee personally.” The money went to flat screen TVs that are nowhere to be found, anger management classes that never occurred, and half a million dollars to, uh, pass out flyers. Did I mention that the $500,000 paper route went to an ex-con in a no-bid contract?
Critics of market-based education reform claim that it would open the door to corruption. As it happens, corruption has been living happily within the public schools for some time now, raiding the icebox and stealing kids’ lunch money — not to mention the money that is supposed to go toward their education. Cato’s Neal McCluskey published a run-down of this broken-down system last year.
Hat tip: Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Money Packs
Perhaps because it’s what most Americans grew up with, we tend to assume that “public education” must mean public entities building and controlling schools, and students going wherever they are assigned by their home address. It’s a system that has failed us for decades, yet many people can imagine nothing else. Thankfully, public education doesn’t have to be this way.
In today’s New York Daily News, Fordham University professor Bruce Cooper introduces a simple but powerful way to reinvent public education: Attach funding to children, not schools and districts, enabling parents to choose their children’s schools and forcing schools to compete for students.
Unfortunately, Professor Cooper’s proposal would only let kids take their new “backpack[s] of education funding” to different public schools. But there is no compelling educational reason for such a restriction. Instead, we should give parents maximum educational freedom by letting them send their children to any schools they want—public or private—with their new money packs attached. Do that, and we might finally have a system of public education worth keeping around for decades.
Challenging the NEA: Priceless
To quote the old Mercedes Benz airbag commercial: “Some things in life are too important not to share.”
The National Education Association’s national convention begins today at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. Outside, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (a Washington State think tank) is parking a truck with a billboard highlighting some of the expenditures the NEA listed on its 2004 federal financial disclosure forms.
The billboard is too important (and good) not to share:
Are We Reading the Same Report?
I have to disagree with Arnold Kling’s surprisingly upbeat assessment of the draft report from the Secretary of Education’s higher education commission. While some of the recommendations he likes may be tolerable in an ideal world, it’s critical to remember that we’re talking about politics here.
First, Arnold applauds the report’s call for colleges to improve data collection on student persistence in order to help inform prospective students and parents. That’s fine, and I would encourage consumers to avoid schools that wouldn’t furnish such information. Unfortunately, it’s not supply and demand that the report says should make schools publish the data. It’s government:
Federal and state policy should focus on improving persistence and sealing the leaks in the educational pipeline at all levels: K-12, post-secondary and workforce education. Colleges should be held accountable for the success of the students they admit. Improved collection of data on student persistence will allow consumers of higher education to evaluate institutional success and identify best practices.
What a terrific tool for government control! Once they collect persistence data, opportunistic politicians can declare that schools must graduate very large percentages of their students in order to receive government funds. If grade inflation seems bad now…
Next, Arnold blesses the report’s recommendation that states and schools “review and revise” their credit transfer policies. Again, this is a fine thing for consumers to require, but if government mandates it, credit transfer policies will end up being based on political calculations, not academic merits.
The same problem applies to Arnold’s next point, in which he supports reorienting student aid from “broad-based” to “need-based.” That sounds good at first, but the reality is that in order to build enough political support to give more aid to the “needy,” politicians will define “needy” to include almost everyone. Just look at the current system, which directs oodles of cash to aid programs in the name of the poor, yet somehow always ends up putting a bunch of it in the hands of upper-middle-class kids.
Finally, Arnold approves of the recommendation that all 50 states encourage “the collection of data allowing meaningful interstate comparison of student learning.”
Now, I’m not so sure I want state governments encouraging colleges to implement standards and testing regimes, which is what this would ultimately require. I’m positive, though, that I don’t want the feds doing it, because federal “encouragement” invariably leads to federal “control.” Just look at elementary and secondary education, where the No Child Left Behind Act has given Washington unprecedented control over local schools.
Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, say hello to NCLB:
The federal government should provide incentives for states, higher education associations, systems, and institutions to develop outcomes-focused accountability systems designed to be accessible and useful for students, policy makers, and the public….
In the end, like Arnold, I encourage people to read the Commission’s draft report for themselves and reach their own conclusions. As far as I’m concerned, though, one recommendation alone completely sums up the report’s frightening, command-economy thrust:
The Secretary of Education should take the lead in developing a national strategy to keep the U.S. at the forefront of the knowledge revolution, creating a system that encourages knowledge and skills to be obtained and continuously updated on a regular basis through a lifetime of learning.
I don’t know about anyone else, but that sounds like a bad thing to me.
Another Look at the Higher Ed Blueprint
I was prepared to share Neal McCluskey’s outrage at the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education preliminary draft report, but then I followed the link, and I have a different take. I’d give the report at least a B+. Of course, this sort of report this late in a President’s term is almost sure to be nothing but a dust collector regardless of what it says. But let me point out some of the good points.
Colleges should be held accountable for the success of the students they admit. Improved collection of data on student persistence will allow consumers of higher education to evaluate institutional success and identify best practices.
Good idea. Before you send your kid to a college, know whether the kid is likely to graduate.
States and institutions should review and revise standards for transfer of credit among higher education institutions to improve quality and reduce time-to-goal.
Another good idea. When the University of Maryland balked at giving my daughter credit for calculus she took at the University of Rochester, I was flabbergasted.
The present financial aid system should be replaced with a strategically oriented, results-driven consolidation of programs to serve students who need aid in order to attend college.
Again, a good idea. Need-based aid instead of broad-based aid.
At the state level, one promising approach that should be encouraged is placing increased emphasis on empowering consumers by redirecting assistance to individual students instead of institutions. The same effect could occur with a well designed expansion of the Pell Grant program.
This is a very powerful idea. Give the money to the education consumers instead of the rent-seekers.
The collection of data allowing meaningful interstate comparison of student learning should be encouraged and expanded to all 50 states. By using assessments of adult literacy, tests that many students already take for licensure and for graduate and professional school admission, and specially administered tests of general intellectual skills such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, state policymakers can make valid interstate comparisons of student learning and identify shortcomings as well as best practices.
As a parent about to help a third child choose a college, I really resent the lack of hard data on college effectiveness. It is tempting to shop on the basis of price, because we have no objective measure of quality.
Overall, this report says government should do more things that are relatively good, such as gather useful data, direct funds to needy consumers, and examine ways to encourage more entry and competition (which is why the issue of accreditation needs to be opened up–it’s a strong cartel-enforcement tool). It also says, if perhaps more implicitly than one might like, that government should do fewer things that are relatively bad, such as throw money at institutions.
I guess the bottom line is, don’t take my opinion or Neal’s opinion as gospel. If you think that the report matters (and again, I have my doubts), then read the draft yourself.
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