Archive for the ‘Education and Child Policy’ Category
Public Schools Are Modern Monuments to Profligacy
It’s the hot new public-sector trend; massively expensive K-12 school buildings.
Christina Hoag of the AP writes that LA takes the prize for conspicuous public consumption with the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools:
With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever. The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of “Taj Mahal” schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities.
Gone are the days when great emperors gave expression to love and grief in spires and domes of white marble. No longer do poor parishioners and wealthy kings construct cathedrals of awe and glory.
Today, we build monuments to government schooling; vast money-pit monstrosities made of matte aluminum flashing and a bureaucrat-chic modern aesthetic.
“Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning,” says Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal.
Indeed, an impressively expensive environment that is completely unrelated to student achievement. Students only need good lighting, ventilation and protection from the elements to learn. Now we have massive buildings and mini Olympic villages with aquatic centers and professional-grade sports fields. It’s no wonder LA budgeted close to $30,000 per student in 2008.
All of this overbuilding has upfront and long-term costs. Big, expensive and complicated facilities cost more to run and maintain, and the bonds that fund much of this spending leave taxpayers strapped with an increasingly heavy debt burden.
These modern Taj Mahal Schools seem to be a nation-wide phenomenon. National Center for Education Statistics data show that spending on facilities and construction has been increasing at a much faster pace than it has for classroom instruction.
From 1989 to 2008 spending on facilities acquisition and construction has increased a stunning 445% while instructional spending increased 198 percent. The number of students, meanwhile, increased just 7 percent.
Not only is government education spending out of control, much of the increase is being sunk into hugely expensive and unnecessary building projects.
We need to put more money in the hands of parents and taxpayers. We need to invest more effectively and efficiently with education tax credits.
Arne Duncan Tortures Facts on School Spending
During a recent media conference call, the education secretary made this outlandish claim:
The vast majority of districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh, and into bone…. [M]any folks in the American public don’t understand how tough these cuts have been for a number of years in a row.
Somebody definitely doesn’t understand public school spending trends, and that somebody is Arne Duncan. How many of America’s 14,000 odd public school districts have cut spending for seven years in a row? Seven. How many have cut spending for even five years in a row? 87… out of 14,000. You do not need to be wearing a pocket-protector while calculating satellite orbital velocities on your shiny new Droid X to see that neither of these numbers represents even one percent of the nation’s school districts. And yet, somehow, the United States Secretary of Education is under the impression that they represent “the vast majority of districts.” Um… NO. [These figures were computed by my intrepid research assistant Ian Hinsdale. Merci Ian].
What would possess Arne Duncan to depart so extravagantly from reality? Perhaps he has been duped by the chicanery that passes itself off as public school district budgeting. Clearly, only a tiny percentage of districts have actually cut spending for even five years in a row. But when public school districts make claims about “budget cuts” they are not using that term in the way that you, or I, or perhaps even the Secretary of Education expect. They are not comparing current year spending to the previous year’s spending. What they’re doing is comparing the approved current year budget to the budget that they initially dreamed about having in an idealized, make-believe world. Unicorn-per-pupil ratios in these initial budgets have been known to exceed one. It is considered impolite when drafting them to draw attention to such niceties as the actual amount of taxpayer dollars available.
Back in the real world, a k-12 public education costs 4 times as much as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation: $150,000 versus the $38,000 it cost four decades ago (in constant 2009 dollars). The extra $10 billion that secretary Duncan, the Obama administration, and the congressional majority just threw at the public school monopoly did not serve children or the U.S. economy. They must dearly be hoping that the American public never hears the real story.
Take Off the Blinders: Diversity Demands Educational Freedom
Yesterday, FoxNews.com posted a story on what appears to be a growing problem for public school systems across the country: accommodating Muslim holidays. Unfortunately, the report didn’t contain the solution to the problem. It did, though, contain a very succinct discussion of the root of the problem; an example of the good intent that causes people to ignore the problem; and the kind of “solution” that is ultimately at odds with the most basic of American values.
A quote from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg captured the essence of the problem:
One of the problems you have with a diverse city is that if you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school.
There you have the basic conundrum in a nutshell: Whenever you have a diverse population — whether in a hamlet, city, state, or nation — and everyone has to support a single system of government schools, you cannot possibly treat all people – or even most of them — equally. Either there are winners and losers, or nobody gets anything.
Understanding why public schooling can’t handle diversity — why, simply, one size can’t fit all — is really basic common sense. So why isn’t there more outrage over, or even just recognition of, the utter illogic of our education system? Mohamed Elibiary, President and CEO of the Freedom and Justice Foundation, illustrated the attitude that likely causes lots of Americans to wear blinders:
I’m a little torn. I want Muslims to be getting the same recognition as other Americans, but at the same time I don’t want to see public education systems be a battleground between religious identities, because then we’re missing the point of why we have a public education system to begin with.
No doubt many people truly believe as Elibiary does: that a major purpose of public schooling is to bring diverse people together and, by doing so, unify them. It’s a fine intention, but also a classic case of intent not matching reality. Indeed, the reality is often very much the opposite. Rather than unifying people, public schooling has repeatedly forced religious conflict (as well as conflict over race, ethnicity, political philosophy, curriculum, and on and on).
Weakonomics
An anonymous contributor to the NY Times Freakonomics blog asks “How much does school choice matter?” And answers in much the way you might expect:
Probably less than you think, as [economist Stephen] Levitt has previously argued. Now, in an analysis of seven years of test-score data from 6,000 Los Angeles teachers, the L.A. Times and the Rand Corp. have found teacher effectiveness to be three times more influential than [choice of] school… on student performance.
The author of this posting makes no effort to differentiate between “public school choice” and actual free education markets, and in the process grossly misrepresents what is known and has been repeatedly shown: that the freest and most market-like education systems overwhelmingly outperform monopolisitic school systems such as we have in the United States.
To his credit, Stephen Levitt did make this distinction in the 2007 posting linked in the blockquote above. But even Levitt refered to the evidence on this subject as “hard to find.” Should anyone else be experiencing difficulty in finding this evidence, they are encouraged to click on the link immediately above, where they will find a peer-reviewed paper digesting the results of 65 studies on this subject.
Why I Love, and Hate, American Higher Education
Today, the annual U.S. News and World Report “Best Colleges” guide came out, and as always it is a slightly celebratory occasion for me. Though I agree with many people who critique the guide for its debatable methodology and implicit assumption that all schools can be cleanly ranked from best to worst, the simple fact that the issue exists makes me happy. When you spend the bulk of your time analyzing moribund, monopolistic, K-12 schooling, it’s just refreshing to dive into an education ocean where guides are abundant because consumers have plentiful, powerful choice. It also doesn’t hurt that, in stark contrast to elementary and secondary schooling, the United States seems to be the envy of the world in higher ed.
Unfortunately, my higher ed enthusiasm always ebbs fast, and aggravation quickly slips in, because there is copious, taxpayer-funded rot under America’s abundant ivy. The reality is, while being much more dynamic and consumer-driven than socialized K-12 schooling isn’t a bad thing, it’s hardly a major accomplishment. And as a new report from the Goldwater Institute reminds me, while college students are empowered to choose, they are empowered with massive taxpayer subsidies, both in the form of aid directly to students and government funding directly to schools. The result is major, painful distortions of the market, including the ever-growing administrative bloat detailed in Goldwater’s new paper:
Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.
So today, celebrate that we have a major sector of education that is at least partially market based. And then, like me, get aggravated by all the government funding and control that renders so much of it a waste.
Fordham Feeds the Paranoia
You might recall several weeks back when Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called people like me “paranoid” for seeing federal money driving states to adopt national education standards as cause for serious concern that (a) the feds will take over schools’ curricula, and (b) the new federal curriculum will be taken over by potent special interests like teachers’ unions. (You know, the kinds of special interests that can get Democrats to give them $10 billion by cutting food stamps.) Well, in last week’s Education Gadfly, Fordham published a piece by Eugenia Kemble, president of the union-dedicated Albert Shanker Institute, saying that national standards demand a national curriculum.
This interesting little happening — Fordham publishing a piece by a union stalwart arguing that a national curriculum must go with national standards — didn’t go unnoticed by fellow paranoiac Greg Forster, who is now in a blog dispute with Kemble. It makes for telling reading, especially Kemble’s rejoinder. It features an all-too-casual use of the charged term “balkanization” to seemingly describe anything not centralized, and utterly fails to mention federal funding when implying that the common standards push is state led and voluntary.
Unfortunately, Kemble mainly just sidesteps Forster’s primary point: Fordham has provided yet more evidence that national standards funded by the feds will lead to a national curriculum that could very well be controlled by special interests. Heck, Fordham is in league with at least one component of the teachers’ unions here, which is fine if they share the same goals. All Forster is trying to emphasize is that it is ridiculous to call people crazy when they simply point out what so much evidence seems to show.
Not Just a ‘Special Interest,’ A Super Special Interest
In the gag-inducing tradition of National Education Association propaganda, President Obama’s “Organizing for America” has released the video below taking issue with House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) calling teachers a “special interest.” Watch…and wince.
Now, certainly many teachers want nothing more than to teach and do a good job. Some might even do it as much “for the kids” as their own personal satisfaction. But teachers, at least as represented by the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, sure as heck are a special interest. Indeed, they might be called a super-special interest, with unparalled sway over Democrats especially, and an incredible ability to get money out of taxpayers.
But what about teachers’ saintliness?
Certainly many teachers work hard and spend some money out of their own pockets for the kids. But no public-school teacher is so poor that, unlike the no doubt intentionally bedgraggled-looking Jeff in the video, he or she can’t afford anything other than an undershirt to wear. Indeed, as I made clear in my PA Unbearable Burden? Living and Paying Student Loans as a First-Year Teacher, even the lowest-paid public school teachers can afford nice apartments, good food, and much beyond life’s essentials. And the average teacher, on an hourly basis, earns more than the average accountant, nurse, or insurance unerwriter.
Ah, but teachers work “twelve, thirteen hours” a day, right? I mean, isn’t that what destitute Jeff said?
Again, maybe some do, but the vast majority do not. Indeed, according to time-diary research done a few years ago, during the months when teachers are actually working as teachers — so not including lengthy summer and other vacations — the average teacher only does about 7.3 hours of education work inside or outside the school on weekdays, and about two hours on weekends. That’s 18 minutes less per day than the average person in a comparable, full-time professional job. And again, that doesn’t account for teachers’ long, built-in vacations.
So get off it, teacher unionists and apologists. Teacher unions are a gigantic special interest, and all the super-earnest-sounding, unkempt video subjects in the world aren’t going to change that.
Dear Bill: Why the Distinction Between College and K-12?
At the Techonomy conference last week, Bill Gates declared that going to school would soon be obsolete, and that ”five years from now, on the web, for free, you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world.” What’s interesting is that Bill was quick to note that he was talking only of higher education. K-12 education should still be tied to physical schools, he is reported to have added.
Certainly there’s a custodial aspect to the education of young children, but there’s no reason that electronic learning options cannot be combined with custodial supervision — and much more affordably than traditional schooling. Homeschooling already consists of hybrids of parent lessons, lessons taught by paid tutors and guest lecturers, web classes, etc. This flexible format could be generalized to serve a much broader range of students. So why not encourage the exploration of these new possibilities at the k-12 level, just as at the higher education level?
What Part of “Nonrepresentative” Don’t Profit-Haters Get?
For the last few days, for-profit colleges and universities have been suffering an even worse hammering than usual, both in the media and their pocketbooks. The proximate cause: a GAO report released Wednesday that has been portrayed as revealing “systemic” and “pervasive” fraud — and otherwise just seamy behavior — by the for-profit sector.
No doubt there is some bad stuff going on in proprietary postsecondary education. But the assault on for-profits reeks of political bullying of the unpopular kid — the kid who’s just different — as well as the never-ending Washington demonization of anyone who honestly pursues a profit. The waving of the bloody GAO report is case-in-point, and one need look no further than the following statement contained on the report’s very first page:
Results of the undercover tests and tuition comparisons cannot be projected to all for-profit colleges.
You mean, GAO investigators went to 15 non-randomly selected schools in six states and Washington, DC, and the results cannot be construed to be representative of the whole sector? And the GAO also, apparently, meant it when it wrote on page two of the report that “we investigated a nonrepresentative selection” of schools? But, then, how could Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, have stated in a show-trial hearing that “GAO’s findings make it disturbingly clear that abuses in for-profit recruiting are not limited to a few rogue recruiters or even a few schools with lax oversight”?
Oh, right: Truth doesn’t matter to Harkin — only scoring political points. That not only explains how Harkin could say such a thing, but why he has targeted for-profits rather than seeking truth and purity in all sectors of higher education, including the coolest of the cool kids, public colleges. With dismal program completion rates of their own, and their imposition of huge burdens on taxpayers, you’d think they’d be worth some investigating, too.
I encourage you to read the GAO report, and you’ll see that it in no way supports a blanket condemnation of for-profit higher ed. And it’s not just because its findings can in no reasonable way be extrapolated to the whole of proprietary schooling. It’s also because many of the supposedly terrible things it discovers, while perhaps distasteful, are hardly abhorent, such as telling prospective students that they ”can” — not “will” — earn a lot of money in a profession even if that amount is well above the average. And then there’s the report’s worthless comparisons of tuition at for-profit and nearby public instituions. Once again: public colleges are heavily subsidized by taxpayers, so of course their tuition is lower. And these comparisons were also not randomly selected.
After you’ve read the GAO report, you should take in a new paper from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, For-Profit Higher Education: Growth, Innovation and Regulation. It might be a bit too fond of the for-profit sector, which like all of higher education lives far too much off the sweat of taxpayers, but it furnishes lots of terrific data and insights about proprietary higher ed to balance out the ongoing truth-eschewing assaults the sector keeps on suffering.
School Bailout Is Intergenerational Warfare
Neal McCluskey’s latest post on the “Grigori Rasputin” public school employee bailout caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal this morning. As the House gets set to pass the legislation next week, here’s another under-appreciated angle: it is merciless intergenerational warfare.
Supporters of the bailout like to claim that it’s for the kids. In reality, it will only saddle the next generation with a bigger debt, without actually improving their education so that they are better-equipped to pay it off. After adding millions of extra public school employees and hundreds of billions in extra spending, achievement at the end of high school has remained flat (see the charts in Neal’s post).
So why perpetuate this litany of failure with another bailout?
The only possible reason is to curry favor with the public school employee unions, who are stalwart supporters of the Democratic Party. This bailout is meant to score political points on the backs of kids’ education and kids’ economic futures.
Anyone who really cared about the next generation would be enacting policies that actually improve educational outcomes and lower the debt. Policies like this, for instance….
Grigori Rasputin Bailout
Sending billions of federal taxpayer dollars to teachers and other public school employees is the bailout that just won’t die. It’s been sliced, shot up in a firefight between Democrats, and even had a battle with food stamps, but it just can’t be killed!
Now, let’s be clear: This is not some wonderful crusade all about helping ”the children.” It is pure political evil, a naked ploy to appease teachers’ unions and other public school employees that Democrats need motivated for the mid-term elections. It has to be, because the data are crystal clear: We’ve been adding staff by the truckload for decades without improving achievement one bit. Since 1970 (see the charts below) public school employment has increased 10 times faster than enrollment, while test scores have stagnated.
But suppose there were some rational reason to believe that we need to keep staffing levels sky-high despite getting no value for it. Lots of teachers’ jobs could be saved without a bailout if unions would just accept pay concessions like millions of the Americans who fund their salaries. But all too often, they won’t.
Sadly, this is all just part of the one education race that Washington is always running, and it absolutely isn’t to the top. It is the incessant race to buy votes. And guess what? Despite its reputation even among some conservatives, the Obama administration, just like Congress, is running this race at record speeds.
Taxpayer Choice + Parental Choice = Good, Constitutional Education Reform
Arizona grants income tax credits for contributions made to school tuition organizations (“STOs”). STOs must use these donations for scholarships that allow students to attend private schools. This statutory scheme broadens the educational opportunities for thousands of students by enabling them to attend schools they would otherwise lack the means to attend. Still, several taxpayers filed a lawsuit challenging the program as creating a state establishment of religion.
Although the Ninth Circuit acknowledged that increasing educational opportunities is a valid secular purpose for a legislative act, it found that the tax credit program nonetheless violates the Establishment Clause because many of the STOs—as it happens, a decreasing majority—provide scholarships for students to attend parochial schools. Earlier this year, Cato filed a brief supporting the request for Supreme Court review filed by the various parties defending the program. The Court granted cert.
Now Cato (led by Andrew Coulson and myself) has filed another brief, joined by four education reform groups, urging the Supreme Court to overturn the Ninth Circuit’s decision because it was based on faulty reasoning: It equated the private and voluntary choices of individuals who donate to religious STOs with state sponsorship of religion. The lower court also made the dubious assertion that Arizona parents feel pressured to accept scholarships to religious schools, in spite of the fact that the share of STO scholarships available for use at secular schools is almost twice as large as the share of families actually choosing secular schools. Moreover, the tax credit scheme is indistinguishable from similar charitable tax deduction programs that the Court has previously held to pass constitutional muster.
We urge the Court to reaffirm its longstanding jurisprudence—especially the 2002 school-choice case, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris—whereby instances of “genuine and independent choice” are insulated from Establishment Clause challenge. Far from being an impediment to parental freedom, the autonomy Arizona grants to taxpayers and STOs is ultimately essential to it. More generally, should the lower court’s opinion be allowed to stand, the progress made to broaden the educational opportunities of students across the country will be stifled.
The case of Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn will be heard by the Court this fall, probably in November.
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