Nobody wants to be the guy — especially the Congress-guy — who says that we need to cut education spending. Nobody wants to be the target of attacks from both the well-intentioned and politically opportunistic that they hate children, only care about “the rich,” or any of the other deviousness  that long ago snuck up behind reasoned debate, threw a rope around its neck,  and pulled it backwards.

That’s been proven again today.

If you address it honestly, it’s nearly impossible to deny that federal education meddling has been not just a failure, but a failure with all sorts of bizzaro tendencies. Just look at today’s big edu-news story: Several months ago, Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned that this year 82 percent of the nation’s public schools would be identified as failing under the No Child left Behind Act.  A lot of people smelled pure politics behind the pronouncement — the administration wanted to unilaterally issue waivers from the law in exchange for states adopting POTUS-dictated policies — and today the Center on Education Policy released a report finding that only about 48 percent of schools “need improvement” under NCLB.

Wait, 48 percent? Isn’t that still really high?

It certainly seems so, but who the heck even knows? Every state sets its own standards-and-testing regime and most appear to have gamed the system wildly to stay out of trouble. So are all our schools failing? Half? And what even constitutes failing? No one knows, and few politicians appear willing to talk straight about it. (Of course, most probably have no idea what should constitute math and reading “proficiency” — the law’s goal — to begin with. Indeed, it’s an extremely subjective designation for anyone to make, though some in Washington act like they pretty much know what it is.)

Obviously, no sane individual would ever construct a system like this. But politically, all this illusion and contortion makes sense: Every politician wants to be seen as the savior of our children, but never wants the abuse that would come with creating and enforcing high standards, or being honest about progress made — or not made — under his or her watch. So we get all this sound, fury, and when you compare spending to test scores, educational nothing: 

Now, you’d think just the sheer lunacy of federal education policy making would make it clear to all that Washington should get out of education. And if that didn’t do it, the abysmal track record absolutely would. But no: Today the U.S. House of Representatives – the legislative body supposedly full of angry, tea-guzzling Republicans — produced their FY 2012 appropriations bill. And by how much did they cut the U.S. Department of Education budget? 20 percent? 2 percent? No, a microscopic 0.2 percent! A $153 million quark out of a $71.3 billion whale!

While office holders are wrongly considered our leaders by some — they are, in fact, our employees — you’d hope they’d lead a bit by ignoring short-term political consequences and cutting utterly failed programs. But that would be the triumph of hope over reality; politicians are as self-interested as anyone else, and will generally do only those things that help them keep or gain votes. So what must happen is that the public gets intimately familiar with the sick reality of federal education policy and votes based on it. And that means those of us at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, and others who know the truth, must do a better job of getting that word out and helping education policy to finally meet reality.

Reality, Meet Education Policy. Education Policy, Please, Meet Reality! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Senator Marco Rubio has just written to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, requesting that he not break the law. At issue is the administration’s plan to offer states waivers from the No Child Left Behind act if they agree to adopt national standards or pursue other educational goals of the administration. Rubio states that these conditional waivers violate the U.S. Constitution, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the No Child Left Behind Act. He’s right.

As my Cato colleagues and I have noted many times, the Constitution mentions neither the word “school” nor the word “education,” and so, under the 10th Amendment, reserves power over those concerns to the states and the people.

The Act creating the Department of Education is equally clear:

No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system… .[Section 3403(b)]

Nor is the NCLB particularly ambiguous:

‘Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school’s specific instructional content, academic achievement standards and assessments, curriculum, or program of instruction. [Section 1905]

The Secretary’s conditional waivers from NCLB mandates, in return for dancing as he desires on national standards, seem to violate all of the above. I wonder if any education reporter will have the temerity to ask Arne Duncan on what grounds he believes he is entitled to ignore these laws? Senator Rubio’s letter certainly gives them a golden opportunity to do so.

Sen. Rubio to Sec. Duncan: Dear Sir, Obey the Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

To my astonishment, Arne Duncan went after Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry yesterday on the grounds that Perry hasn’t done enough to improve the schools under his jurisdiction. According to Bloomberg News, Duncan said public schools have “really struggled” under Perry and that “Far too few of [the state's] high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college.”

I was never a huge Michael Jackson fan, but for some reason his “Man in the Mirror” track just popped into my head as I read this. You see, once upon a time, Arne Duncan was “CEO” of the Chicago Public Schools. During and for some time after his tenure, he was celebrated as having presided over “The Chicago Miracle,” in which local students’ test results had improved dramatically. That fact turns out to have been fake, but accurate. The state test results did improve, but not because students had learned more; they appear to have improved because the tests were dumbed-down.

When this charge was first leveled, I decided to look into it myself, and found that it was indeed justified. There was no “Chicago Miracle.” Arne Duncan ascended to the throne of U.S. secretary of education, at least in part, on a myth. The academic achievement of the children under his care stagnated at or slightly below the level of students in other large central cities during his time at the helm. Seems an opportune occasion for someone to “start with the man in the mirror, asking him to change his ways.”

Rick Perry, Arne Duncan, and Michael Jackson is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Next month, the Obama Administration will begin granting waivers to states that are not on track to meet proficiency requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will be granting these waivers selectively, based mostly on states’ willingness to abide by new executive branch mandates not included in NCLB, likely including adopting national curriculum standards.

Duncan has the authority under NCLB to grant waivers, but not to compel states to jump through administration hoops in order to earn them, as Neal McCluskey has documented clearly.

As Neal notes in today’s Cato Daily Podcast, essentially imposing national standards – as well as other potential waiver demands – represents a large-scale assertion of federal executive power over local education:

We’ve broken any semblance of a Constitutional balance of power between the executive and the legislative branch. Now the President is just going to dictate to every school what they’re going to teach. And that is a giant threat to freedom and to the American education system.

A broader recognition that the Constitution grants neither Congress nor the President any role in education would go a long way toward fixing these problems. NCLB may be, to quote Arne Duncan, “a slow-motion train wreck,” but using that law to transfer power away from parents, states and Congress is easily a solution worse than the problem.

Imposing National Standards is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush cares about education. He made major education reforms in the Sunshine State, including many centered on private school choice. He has established the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and dedicates much of his time to education reform. Unfortunately, when it comes to national curriculum standards, it seems his genuine caring has led him to avoid—and now attempt to quash—critical debate on both the dubious merits of national standards, and the huge threats to federalism posed by Washington driving the standards train.

As I’ve complained on numerous occasions, it’s clear that supporters of national standards have employed a stealth strategy to get their way: back-room drafting of standards, content-free Language Arts, and, especially, employing the maddening mantra that national standardization is “state-led and voluntary.” Sadly, you can now add quashing debate to that, even among conservatives and libertarians with longstanding and crucial federalism and efficacy concerns. And according to Education Week, it appears that Jeb Bush—whose foundation just a couple of years ago invited me to participate in a panel discussion on national standards—is taking point on the smothering strategy:

In this space, we’ve been telling you about a few efforts in state legislatures to complicate adoption or implementation of common standards … A move that had the potential to involve many states unfolded last week in New Orleans, but was stopped in its tracks. And none other than former Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush, revered by many conservatives, was involved in stopping it.

The Education Week report links to a letter that Mr. Bush sent to a subcommittee of the American Legislative Exchange Council that was slated to simply take up discussion of model legislation opposing national standards. Mr. Bush urged members to table the proposal. In other words, he urged them to not even talk about it, because apparently even considering that the Common Core might have dangerous downsides should be avoided, even among people who believe in individualism and liberty.

Unfortunately, quashing debate arguably wasn’t the worst aspect of Mr. Bush’s letter. No, that was the fundamentally flawed pretenses he offered for why Common Core should be embraced without debate. 

For starters, the letter assumes that Common Core represents “rigorous academic standards,” an assumption challenged by several curriculum experts. Underlying that are the illogical  assumptions that there can be a monolithic standard that is best for all children no matter how un-monolithic children are, and that the creators of the Common Core know what the “best” standards are. Add to these things that there is no meaningful empirical support for the notion that national standards lead to better outcomes, and from a purely pragmatic standpoint not only should there be strong, public debate over national standards, there must be.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of Bush’s letter, though, is that he repeats the ”state-led and voluntary” falsehood, and does so just as the Obama administration is preparing to force states to adopt national standards if they want relief from the disastrous No Child Left Behind Act. Writes Bush:

There is concern that this initiative will result in Washington dictating what standards, assessments and curriculum states may use. But these voluntarily adopted standards define what students need to know without defining how teachers should teach or students should learn.

Adoption of the Common Core is not ”voluntary,” any more than is handing over your wallet to a mugger. The federal government takes tax dollars from taxpayers whether they like it or not, and tells states that if they want to get any of it back they must “voluntarily” adopt federal rules. It’s what the $4 billion Race to the Top did for national standards. It’s what U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he, for all intents and purposes, will do with NCLB waivers. And it is how failed, bankrupting  federal education policy has been imposed for decades.  And lest we forget, Washington is spending $350 million on national tests to go with the Common Core, which the Obama administration wants to make the accountability backbone of a reauthorized NCLB.

So no, this is not voluntary. Nor is it state-led: state legislatures represent their people, but the groups that ran the Common Core State Standards Initiative were unelected professional associations—the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers.

I have no doubt that Jeb Bush has the best interests of children at heart. But even the best of intentions don’t countenance avoiding or snuffing out open debate over public policy, especially a policy as riddled with holes as national curriculum standards. Add to that our standing on the verge of unprecedented, unconstitutional federal control of our schools, and this debate must be had now, and it must be had so that all may hear it.  

From Avoiding the National Curriculum Debate, to Smothering It, Just When We Need It Most is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has followed in the footsteps of President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, choosing to send his kids to the elite private UC Lab School. It’s a very good school by all accounts, so it’s probably an excellent choice. So why did Rahm get so grouchy when asked about it?

I think it might have something to do with the obvious hypocrisy of cherishing and exercising educational choice for one’s own kids while advocating a one-size fits-few state monopoly school system that makes private schooling unaffordable to the majority of your fellow citizens. Just a thought.

Rahm Emanuel Practices School Choice… Grouchily is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There’s a lot of consternation over Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s threat that if Congress doesn’t quickly create and pass a new No Child Left Behind Act he will do it himself, issuing waivers galore for states that adopt as-yet unspecified, administration-dictated reforms. As Andy Rotherham writes in Time, everyone from AEI’s Rick Hess, to angry-teachers’ hero Diane Ravitch, seems to be outraged over the notion that the executive branch would simply bypass Congress because it thinks the legislators are moving too slowly.

What did they expect when they ignored the Constitution to begin with, forgetting that it gives Washington just a few, enumerated powers, and that meddling in education (save prohibiting discrimination and controlling the District of Columbia) is not among them? When they pushed for, or acquiesced to, Washington doing all sorts of things that it has no constitutional authority to do? When they essentially accepted that the Federal Government has unlimited powers? Did they expect federal politicians to suddenly remember they are supposed to be constrained only when they want to do things the educationists don’t like?

Unfortunately, most people in education policy pick and choose when they’ll invoke the Constitution based on whether or not they like what the Feds are doing or are proposing to do. In contrast, if in their presence you consistently state that education policymaking is not among Washington’s few and defined powers, and that the Feds must get out of education, they typically either ignore you; dismiss you with a rhetorical pat and smile like you are a cute, idealistic child; or condemn you as someone who hates children, the poor, teachers, enlightenment, the nation’s economic future, progress, or some combination thereof.

Well here’s the reality: Far too many educationists have helped let the dragon out of its cage. They have only themselves to blame when it burns down their village.

Sorry About Your Burning Village, But You Released the Dragon is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

…but not this one.

According to Education Week, yesterday U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told an audience at the National Center on Education and the Economy that “we have not and will not prescribe a national curriculum.” Many in attendance got a good laugh out of that one.

Smart audience.

You Can Fool Some of the Audiences Some of the Time… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation has a good post today dissecting Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s recent press release on DC school vouchers.

If anything, Burke goes a little easy on Rep. Pelosi, comparing the maximum value of the vouchers  ($7,500) with the published figure for DC public school spending ($17,600). As it happens, the public school spending figures published by the Department of Education (and the Bureau of the Census) are always badly out of date. That means they don’t take into account the continuing trends of rising overall spending and falling enrollment in DC public schools (let alone inflation). When you break down the DC K-12 education budget for the 2008-2009 school year, as I did in this Excel spreadsheet, it comes out to just over $28,000 per pupil. It’s almost certainly higher today.

What’s more, the average voucher amount is closer to $7,000, so DC schools are underperforming the private voucher schools while spending four times as much per pupil.

Despite this, Rep. Pelosi, President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and over 90% of Democrats in the House and Senate oppose the DC voucher program. It’s almost as if politicians care more about special interests and ideology than they do about kids and reality.

Burke v. Pelosi is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The big schooling story is U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s assertion that this year 82 percent of public schools could be identified as failing under No Child Left Behind. That’s a huge percentage, and also hugely disputed. But the real story here, as always, is that government control of schooling is all about politics, not education.

Start with the 82 percent figure. It’s a consequence of NCLB’s demand that all students be “proficient” in mathematics and reading by 2014. That’s a severely reality-challenged goal, especially if proficient is supposed to mean having mastered fairly tough material. But the law largely wasn’t driven by reality — it was driven by politicians wanting voters to see them as uncompromising on bad schools.

Now the controversy. People who track NCLB results — including many Democrats — say the 82 percent figure is ridiculously inflated. Reports the Washington Post:

“I find it hard to believe,” said Jack Jennings, a former Democratic congressional aide who is president of the Center on Education Policy, an independent think tank that tracks the law. “I think they really stretched it for dramatic effect.”

And why the possible prioritization of “dramatic effect” over “reality”? Because the Obama administration is pushing to get the law rewritten along lines it likes, and might very well feel the need to scare the bejeepers out of the public to get momentum behind it:

Charles Barone, a former congressional aide who helped draft the 2002 law, called Duncan’s projection “fiction.” Barone tracks federal policy for a group called Democrats for Education Reform, which is generally in accord with Obama’s policies on education changes.

“He’s creating a bogeyman that doesn’t exist,” Barone said of Duncan. “Our fear is that they are taking it to a new level of actually manufacturing a new statistic – a ‘Chicken Little’ statistic that is not true – just to get a law passed. It severely threatens their credibility.”

But hold on! With only about 37 percent of schools identified as failing last year, the leap to 82 percent certainly does seem improbable. But quietly evading the spirit of NCLB — actually improving educational outcomes – some states backloaded their improvement goals to very late in the full-proficiency game, betting NCLB would be gutted by 2014 and they’d never be held accountable. So some states really might be on the verge of having to pay the piper big time, and the failure rate perhaps could be set to rise dramatically. But you’d have to know a lot about the political machincations in every state to figure that out. 

Indeed, that’s been the biggest problem with NCLB all along. It talks tough about proficiency, but leaves it to states to write their own standards, tests, and proficiency definitions. Again, it makes perfect political — but not educational — sense. Many of the federal politicians who voted for NCLB also know Americans cherish “local control” of education, so they wanted to appear to be both zealous protectors of local control and no-excuses enforcers of excellence. The result has been an endless stream of conflicting, confusing information — like the 82 percent figure — that few parents could ever hope to have the time or ability to sort through. And yet, as reported by the Post:

many educators agree that the law’s focus on standardized testing and minority achievement gaps shined a critical spotlight on problems that public schools have long sought to avoid.

A “critical spotlight”? NCLB is more like a deranged disco ball, randomly shooting out bits of light that make it impossible to ever know what’s really going on.

And the befuddling hits just keep on coming. At the same time the Obama administration is pushing national curricular standards that have little concrete content, as well as tests to accompany those standards that won’t be available until 2014, Duncan is decrying the “one-size-fits-all” nature of NCLB. Reports CNN:

“By mandating and prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions, No Child Left Behind took away the ability of local and state educators to tailor solutions to the unique needs of their students,” Duncan said calling the concept “fundamentally flawed.”

So at the same time he’s championing the ultimate one-size-fits-all solution — national curriculum standards — he is attacking NCLB for eroding local and state control. Of course, if you want to get political credit for fixing American education you first have to demonize what’s there, even if your solution comes out of basically the same mold. Don’t, though, think national standards coupled with as-yet-unseen national tests will solve our problems by ending state obfuscation. If the administration gets its way, the games will all just be played in Washington.

Trying to understand what’s really going on in education is enough to make you pull your hair out. But that’s what you get when you put government — meaning self-interested politicians — in charge.

At Least 82 Percent of Education Is Politics is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Education released the latest student-loan default data, and along with it offered some good ol’ fashioned profit-bashing. Meanwhile, politically favored schools got off with nary a negative word.

The FY 2008 default rates certainly aren’t good. Overall, 7 percent of borrowers whose first payments were due between October 1, 2007, and September 30, 2008, had defaulted by September 30, 2009. And yes, for-profit schools had the highest rate out of non-profit private, public, and for-profit schools, which came in at 4 percent, 6 percent, and 11.6 percent, respectively.

To what did Secretary of Education Arne Duncan attribute these results? The overall default rate, he suggested, was but the sad consequence of ”many students…struggling to pay back their student loans during very difficult economic times.” The for-profit rate, however, had a very different cause: “[F]or-profit schools have profited and prospered thanks to federal dollars” and many have saddled “students with debt they cannot afford in exchange for degrees and certificates they cannot use.”

Already, you can see that for-profits are largely just an easy political target: All defaulting borrowers are portrayed as victims; wasteful, money-hoarding, non-profit institutions get no mention; and for-profits are painted as predators.

Of course, for-profits do have higher default rates, so maybe they really are predators.  But there’s more from yesterday…

At roughly the same time Duncan was dumping on for-profit schools, his boss was feting another subset of higher education: historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Indeed, he was kicking off National HBCU Week, and lauding the schools’ work. But guess what? While the Education Department doesn’t release default rates for HBCUs as a group, quickly pulling those schools’ data together and averaging their default rates indicates a rate even higher than for-profit schools:  almost 12 percent. Moreover, for four-year, private, non-profit HBCUs — which like for-profit colleges don’t get big state subsidies to help keep tuition artificially low – the default rate is nearly 13 percent.

So why no criticism by Duncan of HBCUs? Heck, why was his boss celebrating them?

Because they are politically favored, that’s why. Of course, this is in part because of their very important historical mission to furnish higher education to long-oppressed African Americans. It is also, though, because like all “non-profit” colleges and universities, HBCUs act as if their employees have no interest in higher salaries, nicer facilities, easier workloads — all the rewards that the people in not-for-profit schools give themselves instead of paying profits out to shareholders.  But there’s no evidence that people in HBCUs or other non-profit schools are any less self-interested than people working or investing in for-profit institutions. 

Why do I point this out? Not to pick on HBCUs, but to further illustrate the point that the attack on for-profit schools isn’t really about saving taxpayer dollars or protecting students, but going after the easiest target to demagogue – people honest about trying to benefit themselves as much as “the students.” It is also to illustrate, once again, that when we let government fund something, it is political calculus – not educational benefits, economic effectiveness, or what’s best for taxpayers – that ultimately drives the policies. Which is why government needs to get out of the higher ed business that it has made both bloated and, ultimately, a net drain on the economy.

Oh, to Be Politically Favored! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

So U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan invited every Education Department employee to attend Rev. Al Sharpton’s Glenn Beck counter-rally. As David Boaz explained in the Examiner, it was a ”highly inappropriate” thing to do, pushing people who are supposed to serve all Americans to support one side of a “political debate.” But that’s just the most obvious problem with Duncan’s weekend doings.

Perhaps just as troubling as his rally-prodding is that Duncan declared education “the civil rights issue of our generation” at Sharpton’s event. This only about a year after helping to kill an education program widely supported by many of the people he and Sharpton insist they want to empower. I’m talking, of course, about Washington, DC’s, Opportunity Scholarship Program, a voucher program that was proven effective. But the heck with success — Duncan and President Obama let the union-hated program die.

The cause for concern, though, doesn’t end there. According to the Examiner, an Education Department spokeswoman tried to gloss over the boss’s out-of-bounds play by suggesting that Sharpton’s rally was but a mere “back-to-school event.” Sound familiar?

That’s right! As I just blogged about, last year the Obama administration scared parents and taxpayers across the country by sending politically charged material to all public schools to prepare them for the president’s planned address to the nation’s children. Only after it took serious heat for that did the administration have the most alarming material changed. And then what did it do? Declared that the address would obviously be but a simple back-to-school speech, and tried to make everyone who knew what had actually transpired seem like a partisan attack dog.

As long as politicians run education, education will be hopelessly politicized. Unfortunately, that’s the simple back-to-school lesson for today.

Duncan’s Invitation Just the Start of the Problem is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As the Obama administration continues to send mixed signals about the proposed $23 billion public-school bailout, rescue advocates are offering some very wimpy defenses of their cause. That is, except for the National Education Association, which has launched a PR blitz for the bailout in its grandest — and most shameless — tradition of using cute kids to get lots of dues-paying members:

OK, enough of the NEA. The more numerous defenses of the bailout try to offer more reasoned and less emotional arguments for the bailout than does the NEA. But not much more reasoned.

Case in point, the The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, who takes issue with an op-ed I had in the New York Post yesterday making clear that even cutting 300,000 public-school employees — the worst-case scenario – would hardly be the “catastrophe” people like U.S. Secretary of Arne Duncan say it would be. As I wrote, even that cut would only constitute a 4.8 percent reduction in the public K-12 workforce. More important, we have seen decades of huge per-pupil spending and staffing increases in education with essentially no accompanying improvement in academic achievement. In other words, even far bigger cuts than the worst-case scenario would likely have little adverse effect on achievement.

So the worst cuts wouldn’t actually be that big, and they’d likely have little negative effect on achievement. But to Thompson, they’d be akin to the suffering of cold-turkey drug rehab:

At the risk of invoking a cliche, our education system is a bit like a painkiller junkie who just had his wisdom teeth pulled. In the long term, we probably want to wean the patient off drugs. In the short term, the patient happens to be in dire need of some drugs.

Perhaps more troubling than this overwrought analogy is that Thompson dismisses my complaint that the $23 billion bailout would, in addition to being educationally worthless, add to our staggering national debt.  $23 billion, Thompson essentially says, is just too small a piece of federal change to complain about its debt implications.

“Well,” he writes, “if we’re playing the put-it-in-context game, $23 billion is ‘only’ 0.6% of the 2010 budget. An unfortunate bailout, perhaps, but hardly catastrophic…”

OK. If the game we’re supposed to be playing is the “this-expenditure-isn’t-all-that-big” game, then we can forget about ever cutting the $13 trillion debt. Heck, the Defense Department’s budget in FY 2010 was “only” about $693 billion, a mere 5.3 percent of the national debt.

Joining the bailout defense today is White House Council of Economic Advisors chair Christina Romer, who pushes for it in the Washington Post.

In addition to repeating the usual, now thoroughly debunked proclamations of impending educational disaster, Romer rolls out boilerplate about the government needing to maintain high employment in order to keep people spending and paying taxes:

Because unemployed teachers have to cut back on spending, local businesses and overall economic activity suffer. And the costs of decreased learning time and support for students will be felt not just in the next year or two but will reduce our productivity for decades to come…

Furthermore, by preventing layoffs, we would save on unemployment insurance payments, food stamps and COBRA subsidies for health insurance, and we would maintain tax revenue.

Given the at-best highly dubious short-term positive effects of the “stimulus,” it is hard to believe that too many people at this point will find these arguments persuasive. Worse yet, Romer glosses right over the fact that the mammoth debt will eventually have to be repaid, and that that will have huge negative effects for local businesses and everyone else as their money goes from useful pursuits to government debt repayment.

In light of how flaccid the arguments are for the bailout, it’s really no surprise that the Obama administration is sending mixed signals about how much it really wants the rescue. By offering some support – including having the Education Secretary appear at the launch of the NEA’s PR blitz – the administration keeps on the good side of the teachers unions. But by not going all out, the administration doesn’t end up too closely connected to a debt-be-damned expenditure that neither addresses a real emergency, nor has any meaningful connection to education quality.

Weak Defenses of Teacher Bailout is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Would you agree to sell your soul? And not just sell it, but sell it for an undisclosed prize? The states of Maryland and Kentucky would: Both have endorsed as-yet unpublished national curriculum standards for mathematics and language arts, declaring that they will relinquish their ability to set their own standards — to control their own educational souls — in those key subjects.

Alright, maybe they haven’t completely signed away their souls in exchange for what they hope will be supernaturally inspired standards. For one thing, both states could still turn away from the final standards if they end up being utterly horrific. More important, it’s not really the standards that the states are Faustian-bargaining for. As this Washington Post article makes clear, it is the federal money at stake in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top.  So Maryland isn’t about to give up control of it’s educational destiny in exchange for truly extraordinary standards, but a mere $250 million – a big chunk of change to you and me, but just 2% of the nearly $11.1 billion the state spends on K-12 education.

Unfortunately, the transparent protestations of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other national-standards supporters notwithstanding, what is making states endorse such standards is no powerful argument that the standards will improve education, but an obvious pursuit of federal ducats. But is that how we should want education run? States taking standards just to get DC dollars? Unfortunately, being bought by Washington — with no meaningful achievement improvements to show for it — is what states have been doing for decades, though never have they given up their ability to set their own standards.

With that in mind, readers are reminded that on the day that the final, proposed national standards are due to be released, we will be having a debate at Cato that will get past all the bribery and sound bites, and for once tackle the reality of national standards. What logic concludes, political realism makes clear, and the research reveals about national standards will be front and center, and national standards will finally be given the no-holds-barred vetting that states and their citizens deserve.

Sell Your Soul for What’s Behind Curtain #1? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Remember back in September, the huge hullabaloo over President Obama’s planned address to America’s students to start the new school year? Remember how concerned many people were that the speech would be heavily politicized, and perhaps even designed to “indoctrinate” kids about the President’s views on such controversial issues as health-care reform? You probably don’t remember because the media buried it and the speech ended up being fairly innocuous, but do you recall that the uproar was largely a result of U.S. Department of Education lesson plans that advised teachers to have kids talk about how they could help President Obama, and a cover letter from Education Secretary Arne Duncan that noted that schools are engines of “social progress“? Well it turns out that alarmed parents and taxpayers might have had very good reason to be concerned: In the pages of the most recent Parade magazine, the President furnishes just the sort of politics and social-change laden message to students that lots of parents and taxpayers feared.

The President begins his Parade address by expressing his regret that he “couldn’t be at every high school and college commencement this year.” This might seem uncontroversial, but it actually raises one of the most fundamental problems with any president forcing himself into a child’s schooling: Under the Constitution, the federal government has no authority to interfere in education.  With this president especially, though, it appears that among the ever-growing titles accompanying the presidency is now Principal-in-Chief. But that is most definitely not a legitimate presidential title, and at the very least taking it ensures that education — even if unintended — will constantly be wrapped up in White House level politics. So when kids should be sitting in their classes learning, they’ll be increasingly swept up in national political storms, just as happened last September.

Unfortunately, with President Obama’s address in Parade, we see exactly why people of all political stripes should demand that the president stay out of their kids’ classrooms: the president very well might push political and social ideas on their kids that they find unacceptable. In the case of President Obama, he has chosen to push his not-so-subtle campaign against Americans who dare to to earn profits — charlatans who try to produce things that others want and need, and earn a living through voluntary exchange – and to continue to elevate to sainthood those who work for nonprofits and, of course, government. Oh, and he throws a bit of alternative-energy environmentalism in there, too:

Of course, each of you has the right to take your diploma and seek the quickest path to the biggest paycheck or the highest title possible. But remember: You can choose to broaden your concerns to include your fellow citizens and country instead. By tying your ambitions to America’s, you’ll hitch your wagon to a cause larger than yourself. You can choose a career in public service or the nonprofit sector, or teach in an underserved school. If you have medical training, you can work in an understaffed clinic. Love science? You can discover new sources of clean energy or launch a business that makes the most efficient and affordable solar panels or wind turbines.

That their kids would be subjected to this sort of politicized, collectivist rhetoric from the president is exactly what numerous parents — many of whom pursue the filthy paychecks that come with manufacturing computers, building houses, keeping a company’s books, editing magazines, and myriad other things that make all Americans’ lives richer – feared in September. And it might very well be what they would have gotten had there not been a public furor well before Obama’s speech was delivered.

Perhaps, though, we owe the President a debt of gratitude for his insatiable desire to interject himself into our children’s education. Thanks to both the uproar created by his September address, and the objectionable content of his Parade message, the President has provided two terrific illustrations of why the federal government should get out of education.  He has also illustrated why overall we need to take education away from politicians and let parents freely choose among private educational options. In short, he has unwittingly cast a bright light on a huge reason we need full educational freedom: Without it, our children will at best be embroiled in repeated political conflict, and at worst truly face political indoctrination.

President Just Can’t Leave Them Kids Alone is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Oh, they’ll chew your ears off about how boldly they support and are catalyzing  real education reform, and how they won’t accept the failed status quo. Yes sir, they’ll boast nonstop about what a gigantic success their  Race to the Top initiative has been, despite having no real evidence to back that up. Without question, the Obama administration will talk the talk about transformative education reform. But walk the walk? That’s another story.

Let’s put this in perspective. Almost the entire basis for the Obama administration’s claim to school reform supremacy is Race to the Top. And what does RTTT do? It furnishes $4.35 billion to entice states into submitting sort of bold-sounding plans for education reform while requiring them to do very little when it comes to implementing those plans. At the very least, we have little reason to believe the administration can or will hold states to their promised reforms. And by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s own admission, the only winners to date won by getting lots of union and school district buy-in for their proposed reforms. So, as far as we can tell, Race to the Top itself is way more hot air than fiery reform.

But that isn’t even close to the clearest evidence that the Obama administration does little more than flap its gums about real reform while substantively supporting something very different. The clearest sign is that the so-called “stimulus” from which RTTT funding came furnished about $100 billion for education, and the vast majority of that was intended to keep as many people employed in our incredibly inefficient, labor-dominated public schooling monopoly as possible. In other words, the “stimulus” provided a gargantuan payoff for the very people who are supposed to be the subjects of tough reforms, while furnishing a relatively tiny sum for the program supposedly intended to inspire such reforms. (Of course, the Obama administration also helped kill the proven-effective D.C. school choice program, but we’ll save that for another time.) 

And the hits just keep on coming. With school districts nearing the end of their stimulus windfall, they once again face having to cut some of their copious fat. But Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has put forth the $23 billion, “Keep Our Educators Working Act” to keep that from happening, and yesterday the administration — suprise, surprise — threw its support behind the bill.  

Even the Washington Post has come out against the legislation, which if nothing else would add another $23 billion to our absolutely collosal federal deficit. Moreover, to borrow a favorite phrase of the President’s, let me be clear:  an honest accounting of even the biggest potential staffing cuts shows that those losses would constitute a relatively small cut from a system that has for decades added staff at a furious pace without producing any better outcomes.

Unfortunately, neither the shamefully irresponsible mortgaging of our future, nor the clear need to eliminate costly public-schooling jobs, seems to matter to this administration. As long as people keep letting them get away with nothing but reform-y talk, it appears they’ll willingly bankrupt the country to keep the status quo fat and happy.

Obama Administration Doesn’t Walk the Ed Reform Walk is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

…the federal government was taking over education. At least, it was moving a lot further in that direction, with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wielding billions of “stimulus” dollars to coerce states to do Washington’s bidding. And that’s not just my take. It’s also the New York Times’:

Mr. Duncan is a man in a hurry. He has far more money to dole out than any previous secretary of education, and he is using it in ways that extend the federal government’s reach into virtually every area of education, from pre-kindergarten to college.

Race to the Top. SAFRA. National standards. For well over a year, we at the Center for Educational Freedom have issued warnings about all of these escalations of utterly unconstitutional federal power in education, but it has been nearly impossible to cut through all of the huge, non-education stories to get much notice.

Unfortunately, the hits just keep on coming. While the nation is fixated on oil in the Gulf of Mexico and the supposed evils of Wall Street, the administration continues to change the constantly moving target that is the Race to the Top program, now essentially offering individual districts in California a chance to compete in RTTT round two. This despite states explicitly being identified as THE competitors in the current RTTT. It almost makes you conclude that you just can’t trust anything you’re told about RTTT by the administration, and that there is no good reason for any state to expect a fair race.

Thankfully, there is some good news to report. According to the Times, the ever-expansive Department of Education is now about as popular as the tax man — but not quite:

A new survey by the Pew Research Center found distrust of government at its highest level in 30 years. Of all federal agencies, the department of education’s approval rating had fallen most sharply, to 40 percent from 61 percent in 1998. In fact, the department got the lowest rating of any federal agency, including the Internal Revenue Service.

And that is with ED operating largely under the radar. Imagine if people actually knew what Duncan and company were doing!

While You Were Watching the Economy, Health Care, Wars… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

With the first round of the so-called “Race to the Top” having produced just two winning states — and those states appearing to have won primarily because they were able to get teachers’ unions to sign onto their reform proposals – there seems to be a growing backlash against RTTT.

For one thing, several states are not applying for the second round of RTTT grants. Apparently, many just don’t think jumping through all the RTTT hoops is worth it, especially when, as a welcome new Economic Policy Institute briefing paper illustrates, who wins and who loses is pretty arbitrary.

Perhaps the more interesting new ojection to RTTT, though, is that it is, frankly, illegal. So writes the Brookings Institutions’ Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, who asserts that nowhere in the “stimulus” legislation authorizing RTTT does it say that the U.S. Secretary of Education can award money based on states doing things he prescribes. No, the authorizing legislation, according to Whitehurst, says that the money must go to states that have already made significant reform progress.

None of this, importantly,  gets at the main problem with RTTT (in addition to its unconstitutionality): That there is just no good reason to believe that it will lead to any meaningful, lasting reform. Still, the crescendoing drumbeat against what so far has been the crown jewel of the Obama administration’s education policy is a good sign. More people, it seems, are realizing that the administration talks a great game about reform, but delivers quite the opposite.

Of course, hope still springs eternal for some folks.

More and More Caution Flags in Race to the Top is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There are some who might say that the New York Times is an unofficial press office for the Obama administration. I’m not going to say that, but a new Times editorial about the federal ”Race to the Top” education contest would certainly support such a characterization.

Today, it just so happens, I have piece on the Daily Caller pointing out how Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seems to think that just saying, constantly and unreservedly, that RTTT has worked will forestall any debate about whether that is actually the case. The Times‘ editorial uses exactly the same tactic.

First, here’s the big pronouncement that, no matter what actually ends up happening with RTTT, it is already a major success:

[E]ven if the program ended today, it already has had a huge, beneficial effect on the education reform effort, especially at the state and local levels.

Really?

To support it’s coronation of the program, the only statistic the Times offers of even slight heft is that “more than a dozen states adopted new laws intended to comply with the rules of the program.”

That is hardly impressive.

For one thing, there are fifty states — thirteen or so isn’t that many.

More importantly, as I point out in the Daily Caller and have noted previously, it appears that most of these legal changes that have been made will have scant practical impact beyond making states more competitive in the RTTT. And there is little reason to believe that even if the changes are potentially meaningful, states will enforce the changes once the states have gotten — or been turned down for — RTTT funds. After all, evasion of any real accountability has been the name of the game for decades.

But you don’t even need to find the changes that states have actually made to see what a Plastic Man-like reach the Times is making. Just look at the other evidence it cites to support its pronouncement:

To apply for grants, state political leaders and education officials had to confer with the leaders of local school districts in ways that were often new to them. Even for states that don’t get grants, the new contacts and conversations will be helpful as education reform moves forward.

Now, if this $4.35 billion program were called Network to the Top, or Chat to the Top, this might make me feel like a well-rewarded taxpayer (though I’d sure like to see some concrete evidence that it opened up myriad new channels of communication). But this is supposed to be drastically raising standards and achievement, not email volume.

Here’s the other major RTTT accomplishment:

It clearly has broadened interest in the rigorous new national standards proposed last month by the National Governors Association and a group representing state school superintendents. That atmosphere could give the new standards, which reflect what students must know to succeed at college and to find good jobs in the 21st century, a real chance of gaining broad acceptance.

Without even getting into the dubious assumption that the draft Common Core State Standards are of high quality, or the very weak empirical case that national standards are beneficial, this point is actually very damning of Race to the Top.

The only reason that RTTT has “broadened interest” in national standards, as the Times so euphemistically put it, is that states essentially had to sign onto the common standards effort to compete for RTTT dough. If they hadn’t had to, many states probably would not have suddenly developed an ”interest” in the national standards push.

This gives the lie to the logically challenged — but oft-repeated – assertion that adopting national standards is “voluntary” for states: It is voluntary only if they want to give up millions of taxpayer dollars. It also suggests that states are in RTTT for the money, which Secretary Duncan has warned they had better not be.

So has RTTT been a huge success? Absolutely not, and it seems the more its defenders insist that it has, the more clear it becomes that they are wrong.

The Race to Declare Victory is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

On the heels of exploiting the name of perhaps the world’s all-time greatest free-marketeer, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has decided to cut right to the chase and abuse the term “free market” itself. Writing in the Washington Post as part of his ongoing effort to demonize banks and push the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act over the finish line, Duncan offers the following:

The president’s plan actually creates jobs and draws on free-market principles by selecting private companies through a competitive process to service student loans issued directly by the Education Department. These private companies, including Sallie Mae, compete for our business and are evaluated on the quality of their customer service and their default rates.

Got it? When the federal government decides which companies get to service loans that it completely controls, those are “free-market principles” at work.

Right. And the legislation Duncan is trying to sell us really is fiscally “responsible.”

Does Duncan Have Any Clue What a Free Market Is? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog