Here’s Where Better Schools HAVE Scaled Up…
Earlier this summer, I released a study comparing the performance of California’s charter school networks with the amount of philanthropic grant funding they have received. The purpose was to find out if this model for replicating excellence was consistently effective. The answer, regrettably, was no.
But a new study we are releasing today finds that there is at least one place where better schools HAVE consistently scaled-up: Chile. Thanks to that nation’s public and private school choice program, chains of private schools have arisen, and they not only outperform the public schools, they also outperform the independent “mom-and-pop” private schools.
For anyone interested in replicating educational excellence, this study by a team of Chilean scholars is worth a look.
Is an Education Free Market Really ‘Totally Insane’
Matt Yglesias thinks my assertion that we would be better off economically if education money stayed with taxpayers rather than going to public schools and universities is “totally insane.” Ouch!
Now, I can actually understand this, because many people have difficulty envisioning things other than what they’ve always known. But have I really gone all Crazy Eddie? If government didn’t spend taxpayer dough on education, would the poor be much worse off than they are today? Can we never over-invest in schooling because education is just so important? Does the college wage premium mean we should never ratchet down subsidies for college education? And is it at least possible that spending more and more public dough doesn’t lead to more or better education — by which I mean actual, valuable learning — as much as more waste?
Unfortunately, it seems Ygelsias didn’t follow any of the links I provided in the post containing the line he objected to, which furnished some valuable data answering these important questions. And, by the way, it really was just one line he seemed to dislike – the point of the post was to argue against spending yet more taxpayer dough on an education-centered stimulus, not for complete separation of school and state. And, of course, tax-credit-based school choice leaves taxpayers in control of their money without eliminating support for education.
But let’s start answering our questions in more depth so that Mr. Yglesias and others can start to think outside of the “how we’ve always done it” box.
First to the “Top”
Congratulations Delaware and Tennessee — you’ve won the Race to the Top beauty contest! Of course, the grading was subjective and will be disputed by lots of states that haven’t won. Well, haven’t won yet — there’s a second round to this, remember.
So what do the victories for Delaware and Tennessee mean? The edu-pundits will no doubt be reading deep into the results over the coming days, trying to determine what they portend for the future of RttT, federal education policy generally, and politicians across the country. And there are some juicy political leads worth following, including the possibility that the winning states were chosen because they have Republican congress members who could be pivotal in getting bipartisan support for the administration’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization plans.
All of this, though, will ultimately miss by far the biggest point about RttT: The most beautiful promises and laws mean nothing unless they are implemented, and history offers little reason to believe that even the finest parts of the RttT winners’ applications will be brought to bear.
Despite over forty years of federal education interventions, and nearly two decades of state-level standards-and-accountability reforms, academic achievement has stagnated. Long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in mathematics and reading for our schools’ “final products” — high-school seniors — have been almost completely flat since the early 1970s, and fourth and eighth-grade “main NAEP” reading scores released just last week demonstrate the same awful trend since the early 1990s. This despite a 123-percent increase in real, per-pupil funding since 1970.
Quite simply, no degree of legislative tinkering within the system has produced lasting improvements because those who would be held to high standards — teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats — have by far the most political clout in education, and they’ve hollowed out anything “tough” that’s been tried. The only thing that will move us powerfully forward — as extensive research on educational freedom demonstrates – is empowering parents to bypass education politics by freely choosing schools that have the autonomy needed to compete and innovate.
Unfortunately, that kind of reform wouldn’t gain a state so much as a point in the Race to the Top. And the limited choice — charter schools – that could get a state some points? According to the Center for Education Reform, Delaware only gets a B for its charter school law — a grade based generally on how free and competitive charter schools can be – while Tennessee gets an atrocious mark of D.
There’s nothing beautiful about that.
Diane Ravitch: Expert Historian, Policy Tyro
Diane Ravitch is a leading education historian. Her work in that field is characteristically thorough and well-researched, and her books The Troubled Crusade and The Great School Wars, in particular, made significant contributions to our understanding of U.S. education history.
On the presumption that Ravitch is as much an expert on policy as she is on history, her latest book, recounting her change of heart on certain policy questions, has garnered enormous media attention. I suggest, with all due respect, that this presumption is a mistake. Unlike her thorough and rigorous historical writing, Ravitch’s policy opinions were never grounded in a systematic and comprehensive review of the relevant evidence. They should never have been given credence in the first place.
Consider Ravitch’s 1995 book National Standards in American Education, which endorsed the policy. When I was reviewing evidence on education standards for a chapter in my 1999 book Market Education, Ravitch’s book was still the preeminent source on the subject. After her historical work, it was a disappointment. Quoting Ravitch (p. 25), I wrote the following:
The most common claim made in support of government curricula is that: “Standards can improve academic achievement by clearly defining what is to be taught and what kind of performance is expected.” Unless readers are willing to accept this claim on faith, they can safely ignore it, because there is no compelling evidence that it is true. In her book National Standards in American Education, respected education historian and government standards advocate Diane Ravitch discusses many arguments pro and con, but does not demonstrate that government curriculum guidelines raise student achievement.
So far as I know, Ravitch never conducted a systematic review of the empirical evidence for national standards. Nor has she ever systematically and comprehensively reviewed the research comparing different kinds of public and private schools systems. She is not an authority on these matters.
If I’m mistaken on this point, I would appreciate a reference to any such works. If not, the media and policymakers would do well to stop according her opinions in these areas a weight they do not merit.
GAO: Dept. of Ed. Suffers Oversight Deficiencies
A report released today by the federal government’s non-partisan General Accounting Office finds deficits in the Department of Education’s financial and program oversight. According to the GAO, “These shortcomings can lead to weaknesses in program implementation that ultimately result in failure to effectively serve the students, parents, teachers, and administrators those programs were designed to help.”
The GAO’s findings are consistent with the longstanding pattern: for forty years, Americans have steadily increased spending on public schools without any resulting improvement in student performance by the end of high school (see the figures here and here).
The Obama administration has touted its $100 billion in education stimulus spending as a key to long term economic growth. What the data show, however, is that higher spending on public schools over the past two generations has not improved academic outcomes. And economists such as Stanford’s Eric Hanushek have shown that it is improved academic achievement, not higher public school spending, that accelerates economic growth.
So if the administration is serious in wanting education to boost the American economy, it must support reforms that are proven to significantly raise achievement, such as those that bring to bear real market freedoms and incentives — programs like the DC private school choice program that the administration has decided to kill despite its proven effectiveness.
Paul Krugman vs. The Daily Show
In a recent New York Times column (“The Uneducated American”), Paul Krugman writes that, “for the past 30 years our political scene has been dominated by the view that any and all government spending is a waste of taxpayer dollars.” As a result, Krugman continues, U.S. education has been “neglected” and “has inevitably suffered.”
Readers who put their trust in Krugman might thus conclude that per pupil spending has stagnated or declined. In reality, as the chart below reveals, it has more than doubled since 1970, after adjusting for inflation.
Paul Krugman may not be an “uneducated American,” but he’s certainly a badly misinformed one.
Much more troubling is the fact that Krugman and the Times are spreading this misinformation on a grand scale. And that got me thinking about Jon Stewart. When Time magazine recently asked Americans to name their most trusted newscaster, the comic and Daily Show host won in a landslide. Many pundits have taken this as a sign of the Apocalypse, worrying that so many Americans are getting their facts from a presumptively unreliable source. But is the Daily Show really less reliable than Paul Krugman and the New York Times?
To find out how they stack up on this particular question, I Googled the Daily Show’s website for any discussion of education spending. The most relevant hit was an exchange in the show’s on-line forum. In it, a commenter claims that spending per pupil has risen by a factor of 10 since 1945, after adjusting for inflation. That’s not too far off the mark. The actual multiple is just under 8. So folks who get their facts from the Daily Show’s website will be better informed on this subject than those who trust the Nobel Prize winning New York Times economist.
Not only is Krugman wrong to claim that public schools have been financially “neglected,” he is wrong to imagine that higher public school spending spurs economic growth – which is the central point of his column. Better academic achievement does help the economy – but, as the chart above illustrates and many scholarly studies have demonstrated, higher public school spending does not improve achievement. And by raising taxes without improving achievement, it may actually slow economic growth.
Media elites have been wringing their hands over the collapse in public demand for their products, over the two thirds of Americans who now doubt their credibility, and over the fact that more people now get their information from the Daily Show‘s website than the New York Times‘s.
Perhaps the media might attract more readers and rebuild trust if they were to stop publishing material less reliable than the blog discussions on a comedy show’s website. Just a thought.
Throwdown with Charles Murray
In a response to my post this morning, Charles Murray remains unconvinced that changes to our school system could result in dramatic improvements in educational outcomes.
He asks to see the scholarly study showing that a school has miraculously boosted achievement above the norm. In one way, this hurdle is too low, and in another it’s too high.
If we could only point to a single study of a single school, it wouldn’t instill much confidence in the generalizability of the phenomenon. A consistent pattern of scholarly results is necessary for that. On the other hand, asking for “miraculous” improvement is a needlessly high standard. My disagreement is with Murray’s earlier, lower threshold claim that: ”reforms of the schools can never do more than produce score improvements at the margin.”
Let’s call a marginal improvement an increase of less than .15 standard deviations above the current mean (typically considered a “small” effect in the social sciences). Taking that as our litmus test, is there a consistent pattern of scholarly evidence that better school system design can boost achievement by more than .15 standard deviations? Yes.
That pattern is presented in the figure above, drawn from my recent review of the global econometric literature comparing educational outcomes across different types of school systems. The figure relates the number of statistically significant findings favoring free education markets over state school monopolies (in white), significant findings of the reverse (in light grey), and insignificant findings (in dark grey). Markets beat monopolies by a ratio of 15 significant findings to 1, across the seven educational measures for which data are available.
We Are not Seeing the Bell Curve’s Toll
Last week, I posted a chart on this blog showing the percent change in federal education spending and student achievement since 1970 (achievement has been flat while federal education spending has nearly tripled).
After laughing out loud when he saw it, IQ expert and Bell Curve author Charles Murray mused that “such a huge proportion of a child’s educational prospects are determined by things other than school (genes and the non-school environment) that reforms of the schools can never do more than produce score improvements at the margin.”
But consider the accomplishments of Ben Chavis, who spoke at Cato last Friday. When he took over the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland in 2001, it was the worst school in the district. Under his leadership (imagine a hybrid of Socrates and Dirty Harry), the school’s scores rose dramatically year after year. Within seven years, it had become the fifth highest-scoring middle school in the state — though continuing to enroll a student population that is overwhelmingly poor and minority.
It was not a freak occurrence. Chavis did it again, and again: creating a second AIPCS middle school as well as a high school, both of which are also among the top schools in the state, and both of which also enroll chiefly low income minority students.
Murray has made a compelling case over the years that IQ is real, strongly tied to academic achievement, and determined in significant measure by nature and home environment. But academic achievement is also powerfully determined by schooling. Typical U.S. test score data camouflage the significance of schooling because so many schools are so amazingly bad at maximizing academic achievement — especially for poor minority students.
But Chavis — and others before him and alongside him today — have shown how to do it: instill in the school environment those cultural characteristics necessary for academic success that are missing in the home.
In a free enterprise school system that would automatically disseminate and perpetuate great schools like Ben’s, average test scores would rise dramatically above their current levels. The Bell Curve would be shifted dramatically to the right.
The Early-Ed Big Lie
In a speech on education this morning at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama repeats questionable statistics in support of his bid to expand the government’s monopoly on education back to the womb, asserting that “$1 of early education leads to $10 in saved social services.”
Unfortunately he’s referring to small-scale programs that involved extensive and often intensive total-family intervention rather than simple “early education.”
In contrast to the– real-world school choice programs have been tested extensively with solid, random-assignment studies. Nine out of ten of these studies find statistically significant improvement in academic achievement for at least one subgroup.
Obama should follow the scientific evidence on what works in education; school choice, not “early education.”
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