Archive for the ‘Education and Child Policy’ Category
Why College Should Be Given Away for Free
The editor of The Nation thinks college should be given away for free. She’s probably right, but perhaps not in the sense she intends. So many college degrees today are intrinsically worthless that it should really not be possible to find people willing to pay for them. As I wrote in a recent New York Times “Room for Debate” commentary:
Barely half of students at four-year public institutions graduate in six years — and many learn very little along the way. Nearly half of all college students made no significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or written communication after two full years of study, according to research by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Even among the more elite subset of students who stick around for four full years of college, a third made no significant gains in these areas.
So what’s the alternative if you’re a high school senior seeking higher education? How about this: instead of handing control over that education to someone else, decide what it is you would like to learn over those four years and then… learn it. Thanks to the Web, the material covered in virtually every undergraduate program is readily available at little cost—and the same is true for many advanced programs. And, having learned it, spend a few hundred dollars to create a website or even simply a YouTube channel on which you demonstrate your new skills/understanding. Conduct research. Write it up. Build something. Translate Cyrano into English, maintaining the Alexandrine meter and rhyme. Whatever it is. Then, when you’re ready to apply for work, submit your resume with a link to this portfolio of relevant work.
Employers, ask yourself this question: Would you rather hire someone with a portfolio such as the one described above, visibly demonstrating competency and personal initiative, or someone with a degree that is generally supposed to signal that competency, but that you can’t readily assess for yourself?
[And since "resume" and "curriculum vitae" are both foreign language terms, why don't we call these portfolios-in-lieu-of-college-degrees the student's savoir-faire. Literally: "know how to do."]
11-Year-Old Entrepreneur Discovers Business Can Be a Picnic
In my home province of Quebec, an 11-year-old boy is building children’s picnic tables in his garage (using jigs his father built for him) and selling them at a very reasonable price at local home stores. You won’t need to speak French to get the gist of it. What he’s learning is surely invaluable, and it seems as though, in a sane world, this sort of activity would be readily available to all children who enjoy working with their hands.
Thanks to the rapid productivity growth enjoyed by earlier generations of North Americans, families in this part of the world no longer have to rely on the income generating capacity of their children for survival. But does it make any sense to divorce work and entrepreneurship from education as thoroughly as we currently do? In the places where co-op work experiences are being offered to high school students, the practice seems popular. And in a truly free education marketplace, there would be an incentive for educators to meet that demand wherever it exists.
If Only Politicians Were More Like Good Parents
Sometimes I wish politicians were more like good parents. I know that doesn’t sound very libertarian — the last thing we want is for politicians to become humanity’s moms and dads — but there’s at least one thing good parents do that most politicians constantly avoid: saying “no.”
When kids want their food pyramids to have a base of candy, center of ice cream, and peak of ice cream with candy sprinkles, good parents say “no.”
When young ‘uns want to show off their mumblety-peg skills with the Bowie knife they found in dad’s old camping gear, good parents say “no.”
And when the children want to borrow the family sedan for a little off-road speed competition, good parents say “no.”
Of course, saying no all the time doesn’t make life with the kiddos easy or fun. The kids get angry. Mom and dad fume. “I hate you” may even be uttered. But refusing to help the children seriously endanger their arteries, digits, or worse – even if it makes the parents’ life tougher – is what good parenting is all about.
If only our politicians would exercise the same restraint. But they don’t, with the latest case-in-point being the drive to keep interest rates on subsidized federal student loans at super-low levels. It will be the centerpiece of a three-state presidential tour beginning today.
Currently, interest rates on subsidized loans — loans on which Washington pays the interest while a borrower is in school and for a six-month period after graduation — are at 3.4 percent, a surface-skimming level reached after the College Cost Reduction and Access Act of 2007 cut rates in half over a five year period. Rates are scheduled to return to 6.8 percent in July.
The argument proffered for keeping the rates at 3.4 percent is that interest rates generally are at historic lows, and 6.8 percent would simply be too high. Much more important, though, seems to be the political reality: President Obama appears intent on currying favor with both college students and, frankly, any voters looking at exorbitant college prices and asking “how the heck am I going to pay for that?”
But it’s not just the current president who appears to be playing politics. Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP challenger to Mr. Obama, yesterday also urged Congress to freeze the rate at 3.4 percent.
Cato Scholar Defends Teachers Unions … from Democrats
Since man bites dog stories are all the rage lately, I thought it might be a good time for me to point out that the rising Democratic attacks on teachers unions are largely misdirected.
College Scholars, Mindless Borrowers?
A few days ago Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chairwoman of the House higher education subcommittee, had the audacity to say in a radio interview that she didn’t have a lot of sympathy for students who racked up $80,000 to $200,000 in college debt. Opportunists have leapt at the chance to attack her, branding her as either mean, or out of touch because what led to her discussion of college debt was retelling how she grew up poor and paid her way through school.
Now let’s be clear: Foxx wasn’t deriding bachelor’s grads holding average debt — about $25,000 for the two-thirds of students with debt — but people with big multiples of that. You know, the ones seemingly featured in every news story or congressional hearing dealing with higher education. And it is, often, very hard to sympathize with such people if you are able to track down crucial information about them such as what they’ve studied, where they’ve chosen to go to school, and what they spend their money on. This CBS News piece is a classic of the Woe-is-Huge-Student-Debtor genre, which Radley Balko and I took apart at the time of its airing.
There’s no question that the price of higher education has been rising at breathtaking rates, and profit-maximizing schools – and politicians who fuel the maximization – bear a good chunk of the blame. But is it really beyond the pale to suggest that maybe some students, who seem to accumulate debt without a care in the world until payment comes due, bear some responsibility for their predicament? Indeed, aren’t these supposed to be pretty smart people — you know, “college material” — who should at a minimum be capable of estimating costs, loan burdens, and potential earnings? Of course, but try bringing that up in the higher education cost debate. You’ll instantly become the Dean Wormer of the group, reviled for killing all the fun of poverty-crying students.
And here’s the thing: Giving the impression that students face an even greater burden than they do — which is exactly the effect of repeatedly focusing on fringe debtors — only encourages Washington politicians to pour even more money into student aid, letting schools raise prices even faster.
The vitriolic response to Rep. Foxx is exactly why so little progress is made in politics generally, and higher ed specifically. There are just some things you can’t talk about, no matter how important than may be, and if you dare bring them up you can expect anything but an honest discussion. You can expect only cheap shots and smears.
My Advice? Don’t Blame State Taxpayers
I don’t have any great advice to offer those going through the college acceptance wringer, other than to make sure that going to college—and doing college-level work—is really what you want to do. If it’s not, don’t waste your time and money; like so many who’ve gone before you, you’ll likely end up with no degree, a degree you don’t want to use, and quite possibly lots of debt.
That gets me to my main point: Blaming high tuition prices on state legislatures, as University of South Florida education professor Sherman Dorn—but hardly just Mr. Dorn—does is simply wrong. State and local appropriations to public colleges and universities have risen substantially over the last 25 years.
According to the latest data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, inflation-adjusted state and local outlays to colleges for general operations rose from $57.7 billion in 1986 to $74.2 billion in 2011, a 29 percent increase. That’s “increase,” not “decrease.”
The one way you could characterize state and local funding as decreasing is on a per-pupil basis, but that doesn’t reflect the heartless budget cutting Mr. Dorn implicates. It reflects huge enrollment increases—enrollment that often ends with no degree or appreciable learning. And even on a per-pupil basis it would be wrong to write as if we’ve seen decades of constant cuts: Spending tends to go up and down with the business cycle, and 2001 saw record high state and local spending per pupil for the 25-year period.
I hope students waiting to hear from colleges have to sweat things out as little as possible. I also hope people will stop wrongly turning up the heat on state and local taxpayers. When you look at the data, high prices clearly aren’t their fault
C/P from the National Journal’s “Education Experts” blog.
Pretty Sure It’s Already Divisive
When you’ve been fighting over the same thing for well-nigh 90 years, there’s a good chance some new policy won’t suddenly make it divisive. Nonetheless, that’s what an L.A. Times article, citing critics, suggests about a new law in Tennessee allowing in-class discussions critical of evolutionary theory and other scientific topics:
The measure will allow classroom debates over evolution, permitting discussions of creationism alongside evolutionary teachings about the origins of life. Critics say the law, disparagingly called “The Monkey Bill,” will plunge Tennessee back to the divisive days of the notorious Scopes “Monkey Trial’’ in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925.
You don’t have to be Charles Darwin—or God—to figure this one out: the law was passed because the topic is already divisive. Government-schooling defenders might not want to acknowledge that, and they have been able to keep it slightly hidden by having discussion of creationism de jure forbidden in public schools, but hard evidence reveals that Americans are mightily torn.
Time after time, surveys expose the deep split. Most recently, a 2010 Gallup poll found that 40 percent of Americans believe that “God created humans in present form”; 38 percent accept that ”humans evolved, with God guiding”; and 16 percent believe that “humans evolved, but God had no part in the process.” Those numbers have stayed pretty consistent since 1982, the first year for which Gallup has data.
Clearly, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, Americans are already very divided on evolution, and have been for quite some time.
How has what peace we’ve had been kept? Generally, by avoiding evolution in the schools. As Berkman and Plutzer have found, about 60 percent of high school biology teachers either completely avoid or soft-pedal evolution so as not to stir up controversy.
Public schools haven’t been happily chugging along, teaching rigorous evolutionary theory and eschewing any alternative explanations for human origins. A large number have been either teaching evolutionary pap, or nothing.
One of the major arguments government schooling defenders employ against school choice is that choice would lead to a balkanized, divided America. To make that argument, they have to ignore the history of American education—it was largely government-free for about two centuries, and public schools were long grounded in homogeneous communities—and assume that if you force diverse people together they will give up their conflicting values and ultimately engage in a gigantic, society-wide group hug.
Our endless battling over evolution—not to mention incessant fighting over countless other matters—reveals that that just doesn’t happen. You cannot force conscience uniformity, and you can’t have peace or rigor without educational freedom. Tennessee is just helping to make that clear.
TED Goes to School
In this new TEDx video, University of Newcastle (England) lecturer Pauline Dixon takes viewers on a tour of schools serving some of the poorest people on Earth. Private schools … that charge fees … that are paid for by the poor parents themselves … and that outperform local government schools spending far more per pupil. I know. You’ll just have to watch it.
If your curiosity is piqued afterwards, check out her colleague James Tooley’s wonderful book, The Beautiful Tree, which tells the story of their travels and research. It will blow your mind.
Bush or Obama: Can We Tell Who Shuffles the Edu-Chairs Better?
I’m a Paul Peterson fan, and I sure don’t think President Obama’s education grade should be very high, but I’m afraid Peterson is offering some pretty weak stuff in this op-ed hoisting President George W. Bush above the current POTUS in education policy.
The main problem is that Peterson is using broad National Assessment of Educational Progress data as his main evidence of Bush’s success and Obama’s failure. But not only are these data far too blunt to tell us much about a single administration’s policies—myriad forces are at work in education beyond federal rules and regulations—it’s a serious stretch to suggest that we should expect to see big testing gains from any policy within a year or two of its enactment. Peterson even hints as much late in his treatment of Obama, noting that “NAEP data are available for just the first two years of his administration, [but] the early returns are not pretty.”
“Early returns” is right, considering that President Obama only took office in 2009, the first winners of Race to the Top—Obama’s main “reform” driver—weren’t declared until late August 2010, and the NAEP exams were administered between January and March of 2011.
More troubling, though, is the praise Peterson heaps on President Bush and No Child Left Behind. I’ve broken down NAEP scores six ways from Sunday and won’t rehash it all again, but based on improvement rates the NCLB era hasn’t been all that special. More important for this discussion, again considering policy implementation lags, it is a big leap to look at NAEP scores and crown Bush the edu-winner.
Let’s break down Peterson’s biggest advantage-Bush claim: “Overall, the annual growth rate in fourth- and eighth-grade math was twice as rapid under the Bush administration as under his successor’s.” (Actually, his biggest claim is that Bush’s fourth-grade reading performance is “infinitely” better than Obama’s, but that’s because there’s been no gain under Obama, not because under Bush scores were numerically much better.)
How to Make ‘Bless’ and ‘Love’ Fighting Words
I’m no theologian, but when a religious group asks God to bless something, I’m pretty sure that’s a sign they like it. So if some other folks show up and say they love that same thing, we’ve got a clear case of mutual agreement. They’re not going to fight over whether the thing in question needs a blessing or a loving—unless the setting is a public school.
Stall Brook Elementary School, outside Boston, recently told parents that they were editing the song “God Bless the U.S.A.” for an upcoming student assembly, and that their children would instead sing it as “We Love the U.S.A.” A furor ensued, and it wasn’t over the loss of assonance in the refrain. After a great sound and fury the school has relented and will allow, but not require, children to sing the words “God Bless.” Other children and parents, it seems, will be free to sing “We Love” if they prefer. So that will sound nice.
This captures, in small, a great problem with public schooling: compelled conformity. In every community in the country, there is only one public school district. It is the official education organ of the state. As such, it cannot engage in devotional religious activities under the First Amendment. More than that, it cannot possibly reflect the diverse values and preferences of every family. It just can’t. And that’s why we encounter these endless battles over the place of religion in the classroom and in plays, pageants, and ceremonies. It’s why the teaching of history and even of reading and math are fraught with conflicts over content or methodology. And it’s unnecessary. Totally unnecessary.
A truly free society needs a well-educated citizenry. It does not need a government monopoly on k-12 schooling. In fact, it needs to not have a government monopoly on schooling. Fortunately, there is a wonderful alternative to the monopoly status quo—a system that can ensure universal access to a quality education without forcing parents or taxpayers to violate their convictions. That alternative is education tax credit programs that cut taxes on families who pay for their own children’s education and on donations to nonprofits that subsidize tuition for the poor. These programs exist, they work, and they won’t make us fight over blessing or loving the U.S.A.
‘A Confident Person with Shiny Teeth’
“Sometimes people just want to hear a confident person with shiny teeth tell them appealing stories about the secrets to success.”
So writes Jay Greene in his debunking of Marc Tucker’s education reform book Surpassing Shanghai. Jay’s whole review is worth reading, but the basic point is simple: you can’t learn much about the systemic causes of success if you only look at a single success story or even at a small handful of them. You need to cast a wide net to detect meaningful patterns. Having spent a lot of time casting wide nets, into both the historical and modern evidence, I couldn’t agree more. But maybe Jay would just tell me that’s confirmation bias 
[HT: Bill Evers]
On School Choice, Jews Can Have Their Lekach and Eat it, Too
In a recent WSJ op-ed, Peter Beinart calls on American Jews to ease up on their concerns about freedom of conscience and freedom of religion and embrace school vouchers. Beinart notes that,
Outside the Orthodox community, American Jewish organizations have for decades opposed government funding for religious schools. The most common objection is that by intertwining church and state, such funding threatens religious liberty
Fortunately, Beinart’s Solomonic choice between freedom of conscience and educational freedom is unnecessary. It is not only possible to achieve both, it is easily done thanks to education tax credits.
A problem with school vouchers is that they channel state spending to families and thence to religious schools. This compels every taxpayer to support every kind of education, including varieties they may find deeply objectionable–violating their freedom of conscience in a way that Thomas Jefferson called “sinful and tyrannical” in his 1786 Act Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia.
But under education tax credit programs, no taxpayer is compelled to pay for any sort of private schooling at all, and those who chose to do so get to determine the kind of schooling they support. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this distinction in its ACSTO v. Winn decision last year, upholding a scholarship donation tax credit program in Arizona.
Here’s how scholarship donation tax credits work: taxpayers can choose to make a donation to a non-profit organization that subsidizes tuition for families who need it. When they make that contribution, their taxes are cut—usually dollar for dollar. If they do not make any such contribution, their income is taxed as it always was in the past, and cannot be used for the support of any private school.
“Direct” or “personal use” tax credits are even simpler: they cut the taxes of parents who shoulder the cost of their own children’s education. Here again, no one is forced to pay for any sort of education to which they might object.
Not only are tax credits superior to vouchers from the standpoint of freedom of conscience, they are also superior to the status quo public school system, which forces all taxpayers to support a single official organ of education that cannot possibly reflect everyone’s values.
So, rather than abandoning their principles, defenders of freedom of conscience can pursue them far more effectively by advocating education tax credits than by propping up the status quo or by advocating alternative school choice policies.
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