Archive for the ‘Education and Child Policy’ Category
Wisconsin: Post-Mortem & Predictions
Last night’s vote by the Wisconsin-based portion of the Wisconsin Senate has received enormous attention. The scope of collective bargaining by school district and other government employees has been narrowed, and the state will no longer automatically garnish workers’ wages to pay union dues.
This was the right thing to do. But how much of a difference will these changes actually make to the state’s bottom line? As I’ve noted, the presence or absence of collective bargaining is not strongly correlated with school district spending. Instead, unions have won their massively (42%) above- market compensation through well-funded political action; which brings us to the question of automatic paycheck deduction of union dues.
Without automatic dues withdrawals, will public school unions still be able to afford their fantastically successful political activities? There’s no reason to doubt it. Given the huge compensation premium public school employees enjoy over their private sector counterparts, they have a powerful incentive to voluntarily keep funding the political action that helped win it.
Indeed, we can see this already in right-to-work states like South Carolina. Public school employees there have no collective bargaining rights and there is no automatic union dues withdrawal, but the Palmetto State nevertheless has a teachers’ union and an administrators’ association that have spent large sums of money on political action. It’s worked. Despite not being the wealthiest of states, South Carolina still spends roughly $12,000 per pupil on its public schools, and its public school teachers earn more than the state’s median household income. The teacher and administrator groups have also successfully defeated every legislative effort thus far to open up the state’s education system to private sector competition and parental choice.
The only way to rein-in out-of-control public school spending is thus to give both families and taxpayers an alternative to the government monopoly status quo. Cut taxes on folks who pay for their own children’s education, or who donate to non-profit scholarship organizations that subsidize private school tuition for the poor. Many states are doing this already on a small scale. By so doing so on a larger scale, families will have much greater choices and taxpayers will reap enormous savings.
Unions and Kids
Over at Think Progress, a bevy of commenters dispute an anecdote shared in my book Market Education. Here’s what I wrote, in the teaser to chapter 8:
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.
What are government school teachers’ unions so afraid of?
The source article for this episode is of course cited in the book, but here is the link to that article on the Education Week newspaper’s website.
Some of the commenters made the point that policy should not be driven by anecdotes. I agree, which is why I already blogged the evidence that only private sector competition can control skyrocketing public school spending.
Not Possible in This Dimension
Over at the Fordham Institute, Senior Fellow Peter Meyer continues the assault on logic that Fordham has insisted on perpetrating when it comes to national curriculum standards. Writing about a New York Times story on the deceptive curriculum “guidelines” manifesto released by a number of national-standards supporters earlier this week, Meyer declares that:
Contrary to popular belief (especially in some Tea Party circles), a national curriculum, done properly, does not threaten local control. As we learn in this story, plenty of folks, including Randi Weingarten and our own Checker Finn, have signed on to a “common curriculum,” which its proponents say will constitute only about half of a school’s “academic time.”
Maybe I’m missing some very small but incredibly powerful wrinkle in the logic here, but it seems to me that by definition forcing local districts to use national standards must threaten local control. Indeed, it must not only threaten it, it must actually defeat it. And this is in no way changed by the curriculum having to account for “only about half” of a school’s time: Hours formerly controlled locally are now controlled nationally, which is inescapably a major incursion on local control.
Maybe in some dimension white is black, black is white, and ants are really walruses. But in this dimension, as far as I know, the laws of reality and logic must still apply — even to national curriculum standards.
High Schools to the President: What Thrill?
A couple of years ago, I was highly critical of President Obama’s first, it turns out annual, televised school-year kickoff address to America’s students. At the time I got a lot of emails telling me how outrageous my stance was, and how anyone, of any political persuasion, should be thrilled to have the President of the United States talk to their kids.
Apparently, the thrill is gone when you actually have to do a little work to get the President. According to internal White House memos, the President’s “Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge” – in which schools compete for a chance to get the Prez as their graduation speaker — had generated only 68 applications as of February 28, which was after the original application deadline of Feburary 25. (The White House has extended the deadline to March 11.) To put that in perspective, the nation had over 24,000 public secondary schools as of the 2007-08 school year, meaning only about 0.3 percent of public high schools have expressed any serious desire to have the President send their charges off to adulthood. (Well, or college.)
So have our high schools suddenly discovered the Constitution, which gives the President no authority to meddle in education? Probably not, but it certainly does undermine the argument that it is a super-terrific thing anytime the Commander in Chief can take to the podium to tell kids to work hard and stay in school. Apparently, it’s only super-terrific if you don’t have to lift a finger — well, other than to work your TV remote — to get the President to talk to your kids.
Should We Spend More on Failed Programs?
Last month, I testified before the House Education & the Workforce Committee. The most startling part of that experience was the response to my testimony offered by ranking Democrat George Miller (who had chaired the committee in the previous Congress.) The archived web-cast is now available, and Rep. Miller’s response begins at 42:29.
To set things up: I reported that the federal government has spent $2 trillion dollars on k-12 schooling over the past two generations, and failed to achieve either of its avowed goals (raising overall achievement, and narrowing the gaps by family income and minority status). To this, Rep. Miller replied:
I think when you look at student performance and you look at money and you want to say that somehow there should be some correlation there I think that’s wrong-headed.
Really? I know that Democrats support higher government spending than libertarians and conservatives, but it’s always been my understanding that they do this because they imagine the extra spending will actually accomplish something. I have never before heard anyone suggest that we should spend more taxpayer money without any expectation that spending is correlated with outcomes. I can’t believe that Rep. Miller’s view is widely shared by American voters—even by those who voted for him.
The congressman also made what I took to be an effort to undermine the test data I had presented, saying that “After No Child Left Behind, millions of people were added to the test pool that were left out before.”
With respect to the National Assessment of Educational Progress test score trends I presented during my testimony, this statement is incorrect. The NAEP Long Term Trends results have always been based on nationally representative samples of students and to my knowledge NCLB did not affect those sampling procedures in any way. I can only guess that Rep. Miller was referring to the NCLB’S effect on student participation in state tests, but if so his comment is not germane.
Congress really has spent 2 trillion taxpayer dollars and achieved neither of its avowed k-12 goals. Cutting these ineffective programs would save scores of billions annually.
Hey, National Curriculum Standardizers: Stop Lying to Us!
Today, a group of seventy-five national-standards crusaders released a manifesto calling for “shared curriculum guidelines” to accompany the Common Core State Standards. But don’t worry, the petitioners assure us, “use of the kinds of curriculum guidelines that we advocate in the core academic subjects would be purely voluntary.”
Oh please, please – stop lying to us!
Here’s the only absolutely clear thing that we’ve learned so far from the national standards push: Leading national standardizers do not want adoption of their plans to be truly voluntary.
Sure, they talk about creating mere “guidelines,” and states being free to choose what they’ll use, but they know reality full well: Whatever Washington connects to federal money becomes de facto mandatory, and they most certainly want their guidelines riveted to federal bucks.
Don’t believe me? Look no further than the federal Race to the Top program, which required that states adopt what for much of the time were unpublished national standards in order to meaningfully compete for part of $4.35 billion in federal dough.
“But wait”, standards mavens assert. “We didn’t ask for that and we really regret that the administration federalized our warm-and-fuzzy voluntary effort.”
Sorry, no dice. Many of these same people had been calling for federal funds to push national standards before there ever was a Race to the Top, or even an official Obama administration. In December 2008, national standards advocates put out Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring Students Receive a World-class Education, which among other things called for Washington to “offer a range of tiered incentives to make the next stage of the journey [toward national standards] easier.”
In this latest assault on honesty, the national standards crowd has done it again. You have to read their entire statement, but at the bottom you’ll find words that make it clear that “the undersigned” have no intention of having adoption of their guidelines be truly voluntary. They want Washington forcing states to eat the new curricula if states want back some of the money that came involuntarily from their citizens. The last of their ”recommendations” calls for:
7. Increasing federal investments in implementation support, in comparative international studies related to curriculum and instruction, and in evaluations aimed at finding the most effective curriculum sequences, curriculum materials, curricular designs, and instructional strategies.
You want this to be truly voluntary? Then you’d better keep federal money, especially for such things as “implementation support,” out of it. But by all indications national standardizers don’t want this to be truly voluntary. They just want us thinking they do.
The Other For-Profit College Scandal
Because the evidence of wrongdoing and evasion is so clear, and the effect has been so damaging, I have devoted a lot of pixels to the GAO’s horrendous ”secret shopper” report on for-profit colleges, as well as the stonewalling about what caused the initial report to be so biased. A potentially even bigger story, though, is what appears to be the machinations of an unholy alliance of Department of Education officials, Senate HELP Committee chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA), and Wall Street short-sellers hoping to make big bucks off the demise of for-profit schools. This Daily Caller article, and the connected video of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), are good places to start learning more about this, as is the website of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The problems with understanding scandals like this, of course, are trying to get the truth about things that have gone on almost entirely in real or virtual back rooms; knowing what is legal and what isn’t; and just figuring out who’s who. Such scandals also reveal little about whether for-profit schools are actually more or less effective than other higher ed sectors, arguably the main public policy concern.
What this sort of thing does start to reveal, though, is just how far out of public view policy is often made, as well as how people try to profit directly from government action. In other words, it’s a great case study in public-choice theory, and just how un-Schoolhouse Rock Washington really is.
So I can’t tell you everything about who said what to whom. However, at the very least it is clear, for instance, that famed short seller Steve Eisman had a huge amount to gain by testifying that for-profits are bad and there is a “bubble” in proprietary higher ed about to burst. After all, were either the Education Department or Senator Harkin — or both — to use his testimony to attack for profits, as indeed they have, Eisman would have a highly profitable self-fulfilling prophecy on his hands.
No matter how you feel about for-profit colleges – and my feelings are decidedly mixed– learning about how policy is really made can be a very unsettling thing. In fact, it can make you feel more than just a little sick.
Sen. DeMint Taking the Lead on Education Reform In South Carolina
South Carolina is one of the few states where school choice supporters have been working to pass a great education tax credit program that’s broad-based and well-structured (please excuse me if I sound like a cattle-breeder or wine-taster).
Senator Jim DeMint has been a real champion of choice for SC and the country, and he has a great new video promoting education tax credits (brought to you by South Carolinians for Responsible Government, the guys in the trenches for good policy there).
The lead-in hits it perfectly; school choice is about self government, and public education means an educated public, not government-run schools.
But I’m a sucker for the fiscal stuff. And with the economy and government budgets in the state they’re in, citizens want to know first and foremost whether any new program is going to cost them more money. Jump to 7:23 in the video for a great take on how education tax credits save money.
Have a look, like it on YouTube, pass it around, post it on Facebook . . . spread the word . . .
Corruption from Sea to Glistening Sea
Last night, the Seattle Public School Board fired the district’s superintendent as well as its chief financial and operations officer after the local media uncovered a multimillion dollar fraud spree that had gone unchecked for years. In the opposite corner of the nation, a grand jury has just found that the Broward County Public School Board “wasted hundreds of millions” while “doing the bidding of a select group of contractors and lobbyists.” The grand jury’s preferred recommendation would have been to “abolish the… School Board altogether,” but Florida’s constitution mandates its existence.
Why are waste and fraud so common in the nation’s public school systems, and what can we do about it? One of the most compelling answers I’ve ever seen to those questions can be found in a letter written by… a corruption prosecutor. He was born in the early sixties, and the tiny town where he grew up still didn’t have its own high school—so he decided to found one himself. Rich guy. He could have afforded to not only build it, but also to fully endow it so that tuition would be free. Instead, he decided to cover only a third of the operating costs. In a letter to a friend, he explained his decision:
I would promise the whole amount were I not afraid that someday my gift might be abused for someone’s selfish purposes, as I see happen in many places where teachers’ salaries are paid from public funds. There is only one remedy to meet this evil: if the appointment of teachers is left entirely to the parents, and they are conscientious about making a wise choice through their obligation to contribute to the cost. People who may be careless about another person’s money are sure to be careful about their own, and they will see that only a suitable recipient shall be found for my money if he is also to have their own… I am leaving everything open for the parents: the decision and choice are to be theirs—all I want is to make the arrangements and pay my share.
What’s particularly interesting about this letter is that its author was born in the early sixties…. Not the 1960s… or the 1860s… the early 60′s of the first century A.D. The author was Pliny the Younger, and he was writing to his friend Tacitus.
Though Pliny was basing his analysis on his personal and professional experiences, it is born out by a wealth of modern econometric research. Schools paid for at least in part directly by parents are consistently more efficient and responsive to their demands.
Hate the Deception, Not the Teacher
This morning the New York Times ran one of those stories that just drives me nuts. You know, one of those articles that’s packed full of anecdote; sad, beleaguered victims of societal cruelty; and a gaping vacuum where balancing facts should be found.
I’m referring to “Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?” which suggests that broad, angry swaths of Americans hate teachers. Of course, it offers almost no actual evidence of that save an angry email one teacher received. Indeed, the article cites polling data that greatly belies the point.
Worse than this is that the article contains incredibly deceptive — but all too standard — reporting on teachers’ compensation, ignoring that teachers’ salaries are based on much shorter working hours than are those of most other professionals. And this is to say nothing of public-school teachers’ typically very nice benefits packages — the main concern when it comes to crumbling state budgets. So we read with a tear in our eyes of the situation of Erin Parker, a second-year teacher in Madison, WI earning $36,000 a year plus benefits. Her situation is so desperate, we’re told, that she is contemplating moving back to Colorado so she can live, presumably rent-free, with her parents.
So what does Ms. Parker make per hour, the best assessment of her pay? (We’ll leave aside the very big, but harder to calculate, matter of benefits.) According to the Madison CBA, Ms. Parker is required to work 182 days (the requirement after the first year of teaching). She also is required to be at school from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm — slightly longer than most teachers typically work, including time spent working outside of contracted hours. A recent “time diary” analysis pegged total working hours per school-week at slightly less than 40.
So, multiply 8 by 182 and you get 1,456 hours per year. Divide $36,000 by that and Ms. Parker’s hourly wage is $24.73.
What would that look like for a standard, 2,000 hours worked per year (40 hours per week for 50 weeks)? $49,460. That’s certainly not riches, but it comes very close to Wisconsin’s 2008 median household income of $52,103. That’s not too bad for a single person, which is probably something many taxpayers intuit when they rightly note how much time teachers have off.
Of course, we are also told that Ms. Parker has $26,000 in student loans. We’re not told how she got them, but the amount exceeds the 2010 average debt of $23,186, and we don’t know what school(s) she attended, how she spent her time, etc. At least as important as knowing the “why” of her debt, the article also ignores that paying it back is quite possible given her salary and hours. I won’t go into the details of that here, but I lay it out in this 2008 Policy Analysis.
Now, is any of this to say some teachers aren’t paid too little? Absolutely not, but you need a market to determine who should get paid what because value ultimately depends on what people are voluntarily willing to pay for your services. Unfortunately, in large part at the behest of the unions — and it is the unions, not the teachers, who are most often held in contempt – teachers generally all get paid on the same schedule. So if Ms. Parker is a great teacher – and I have no reason to believe she isn’t – she might very well deserve to get paid more. But she shouldn’t blame the public for her pay — she should blame her union.
Keep Moving, There’s Still Nothing to See Here
In dribs and drabs the plot thickens in the quiet little saga surrounding the GAO’s brutal and broken August report on for-profit colleges. The latest development is the near-silent transformation of the GAO office that produced the knee-capping report that was later quietly reissued with lots of new, for-profit-exonerating material.
I say “near-silent transformation” because word about it somehow got to the Coalition for Educational Success, a career college advocacy group. Yesterday, CES issued a press release on the matter, and this morning I contacted GAO’s public affairs office about it. To the GAO’s credit, their public affairs folks quickly sent me a copy of a memo announcing the end of the Forensic Audits and Special Investigations (FSI) team. Sadly, it was clear that there would be no public announcement of the change, which is utterly consistent with the behind-your-back way GAO has handled every development in this story. Well, every development save the very public release of the original, fatally flawed report.
Especially concerning is the following passage in the memo, which suggests that the for-profit college report provided the ultimate impetus for giving the FSI a new identity. This despite the FSI having done investigations in numerous other areas:
Since the Forensic Audits and Special Investigations team was formed in 2005 the team’s body of work has resulted in numerous accomplishments and benefits to the Congress and the public. To ensure good work continues and to bring greater management attention to the group and more seamlessly integrate its work with GAO’s program teams as well as the audit and investigative sides of the unit, today I am announcing several changes. These enhancements will also ensure greater attention to the issues that led to the need to produce the errata to the for-profit schools report and by the subsequent inspection.
So why does the group need “greater management attention”? And what exactly are “the issues that led to the need to produce the errata” to the August report?
As a member of the public it sure would be nice to know the answers to these questions, especially since these are the guys who are supposed to be holding the rest of the federal government ”accountable.” For proprietary schools’ employees and investors — the people who were most hurt by the dubious August report — these are thing they absolutely should know. But the GAO insists on telling us that nothing major went wrong while refusing to share information we’d need to confirm that. It’s not only totally unsatisfactory, it only makes you even more suspicious.
Ditching Collective Bargaining Won’t Control Public School Costs. Here’s What Will…
Lawmakers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are seeking to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public school employees as a means of controlling runaway spending (it has tripled in real terms since 1970, despite stagnation or decline in student achievement at the end of high school–see the last chart in this post). But even if collective bargaining is forbidden to state school employees, the savings will likely be negligible.
Surprising as it may seem, that conclusion follows directly from the research on school employee unions, which I reviewed last year for the Cato Journal. Differences in spending between school districts with and without collective bargaining are modest to non-existent. Does this mean that the unions are impotent and that their members have been wasting their $600 annual dues payments? Not quite.
Though employee compensation varies little from one school district to the next, based on the presence or absence of collective bargaining, public school employees enjoy far better compensation than their private sector counterparts. The combined salary and retirement benefits of public school teachers are 42 percent larger than those of private school teachers (see link above).
Public school employees win this generous compensation premium through political action backed by monumental campaign contributions. Democrats receive the overwhelming share of these contributions (93% from the NEA; 99% from the AFT, see Cato Journal link), but many Republican lawmakers are also swayed, fearful that the unions will finance their primary opponents the next time they face voters.
To further increase their clout, union leaders have sought to grow their membership. More members mean more dues revenue with which to influence legislators. In this regard, too, they have been enormously successful: the number of public school employees has grown ten times faster than the number of students for two generations—a major factor in the system’s exploding cost and collapsing productivity (see figure below).
Public school employees clearly understand that union membership has benefitted them handsomely in both compensation and job security. Over the past forty years, union membership as a share of the public school workforce has increased from 42 percent to 70 percent. Even if collective bargaining were eliminated tomorrow, school employees would have every reason to continue funding the self-interested political action that has served them so well in the past.
So what would provide a counterbalance to unsustainable union demands?
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