New research by Harvard professor David J. Deming studied the crime rates of young adults who participated in a random lottery at the middle or high school level. The lotteries decided whether students were able to attend a school of their choice or whether they were forced to attend their assigned public school. Students who won the lottery committed significantly fewer crimes as young adults than those who lost it. So here is another in the long list of educational outcomes improved by market freedoms and incentives.

Send this to a friend who is still on the fence about the merits of educational freedom.

School Choice Lowers Crime is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Philanthropy Daily has just published the most interesting review to date of my recent charter school philanthropy study (“The Other Lottery“). Scott Walter, an expert in charitable giving in the field of education, looks not only at the central finding (that there is no link between charter networks’ performance and the amount of grant funding they’ve received) but also extrapolates to what the findings imply about the nation’s top education foundations.

I’m curious to know if anyone else shares his interest in seeing the numbers crunched to allow education foundations to be ranked in terms of the performance of the charter school networks they have backed. Ping me on Facebook if you’d like to see that.

School Reform’s Shaky Foundations? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Here’s Where Better Schools HAVE Scaled Up… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Neal wrote about earlier, Education Next has released their new poll, and there are some interesting results.

Surprisingly, the authors buried the lede in their writeup; education tax credits consistently have more support and less opposition than any other choice policy.

This year, donation tax credits pulled in a 29-point margin of support (that’s total favor minus total oppose). In contrast, charter schools had a 25-point margin of support.

The authors added a new, less neutral voucher question that boosted the margin of support to 20 points. They couched the policy in terms of “wider choice” for kids in public schools, and the implication was that it was universal. All three of these additional considerations tend to have a positive impact on support for choice policies.

The standard low-income voucher question showed a big jump this year from a -12 in 2010 to a 1-point margin of support. The last time Education Next asked a low-income tax credit question, it garnered a 19-point margin of support.

Last year, tax credits had a 28-point margin of support (that’s total favor minus total oppose). In contrast, charter schools had a 22-point margin of support and vouchers for low-income kids went -12 points (more respondents opposed).

Public opinion is consistently and strongly in favor of education tax credits over vouchers and even charter schools. And thankfully, they’re a much better policy as well.

Education Tax Credits More Popular Than Vouchers & Charters is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The brass ring of education reform is to find a way to ensure that the best schools routinely scale-up to serve large audiences, crowding out the mediocre and bad ones. Over the past twenty years, the United States and Sweden have taken two very different approaches to achieving that goal, which I wrote about in a recent op-ed.

In the U.S., our main strategy has been for philanthropists to fund the replication of what they deem to be the academically highest-performing networks of charter schools. In a recent statistical analysis of California, the state with the most charter schools, I discovered that this is not working out particularly well for us. There is no correlation between charter school networks’ academic performance and the philanthropic funding they’ve raised. And, at any rate, charter schools still enroll less than 3 percent of the nation’s students.

In 1992, Sweden introduced a nation-wide public and private school choice program. Private schools went from enrolling virtually no one to enrolling about 11 percent of the entire student population–a figure that continues to grow with each passing year. Moreover, recent research finds that these new private schools outperform the public schools. And which private schools are growing the fastest? The chains of for-profit schools that are in greatest demand, and that have an incentive to respond to that demand by opening new locations. The popular non-profit private schools tend not to expand much over time.

Given that Sweden is universally regarded as a liberal nation, and the U.S. is seen as a bastion of capitalism, one wonders why they got to the brass ring first, and why it is taking us so very long to get there now that they’ve shown us the way.

How Sweden Profits from For-Profit Schools is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A Washington Post story from a couple of days ago touts survey results showing a majority of DC parents — 53 percent — finally giving the DC public schools a decent grade. That is, to be fair, a big story. But it certainly isn’t the most overwhelming finding in the survey. That you find mentioned deep in the article:

This year, Congress approved an extension of a federal program that provides vouchers to help students from some low-income D.C. families attend private or parochial schools. The survey found that nearly 70 percent of parents with children in the system support such tuition aid. Overall, nearly two-thirds of residents back vouchers, with positive sentiment higher among African Americans.

Perhaps even more interesting is that support for charter schools — the “it” choice reform because charters are still public schools — is downright tepid in comparison:

Residents remain ambivalent about the rapidly growing public charter sector, which serves 28,000 students. Forty-one percent consider the independently operated charters better than regular public schools; 42 percent say they are about the same. The favorable rating rises to a slight majority, however, among residents younger than 30.

The people of DC overwhelmingly want real, private-school choice. That’s the news about DC education that everyone should know!

Resurrect DC Choice, Bury the Lede is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Gerilyn Slicker, of the Fordham Institute, offers a brief review of my study of charter school philanthropy in the latest “Education Gadfly” mailing, including the following observation:

Note, though, that this analysis is not without fault. The report doesn’t break down spending by pupil (only reporting aggregate grant-giving), nor does it account for student growth over time or for how long the charter networks have been operational.

All three of these concerns are worth raising, and the first two of them were actually addressed in the paper itself. The aggregate vs. per-pupil grant funding question is discussed in endnote 15:

Note that total grant funding, rather than grant funding per pupil, is the correct measure. That is because enrollment is endogenous—it is a product, in part, of earlier grant funding. So, controlling for enrollment (which dividing by enrollment would do) would control away some of the very characteristics we are trying to measure: the charter network’s ability to attract funding.

Student growth over time, as noted on page 5, cannot be measured using the California Standards Tests, because it reports results as averages of subgroups of students at the classroom level, not as individual student scores. And since the CST is the only source that has broad-based performance data for all charter and traditional public schools in the state, it is the only dataset that can be used to measure the performance of all California charter school networks. Fortunately, good controls for both student factors and school-wide peer effects are available, and the study’s results are consistent with earlier research, where it overlaps with that research.

The final concern, network age, is not one that I directly addressed in the study. There are a couple of reasons to expect it would not have much of an impact on the findings, however. First, a cursory look at the age of some of the top networks shows no particular pattern. American Indian and KIPP are both a decade old, and rank #1 and #7, respectively, out of 68 networks. Oakland Charter Academies and Rocketship are just a couple of years old, and rank #2 and #4, respectively. Similarly, some of low performing networks are brand new, while others, like GreenDot (ranked 42nd), are also over a decade old.

Second, in Appendix E, I show that network size and network academic performance are not significantly linked to one another. And since network age and network enrollment are likely to be strongly positively correlated with one another, it would be surprising if network age were correlated with performance when enrollment is not. That said, I’d probably include network age as a control in future, if I repeat the study, just to be on the safe side.

Fordham Institute Reviews ‘The Other Lottery’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Much of the response to the study I released last week has focused on the relative academic performance rankings of California’s charter school networks. That wasn’t the point of the study, which focuses on whether or not philanthropy + charter schooling can replace venture capital and competitive markets as a mechanism for scaling-up the best education services. Rather than try to fight the tide, I thought I’d just share the relevant rankings in an easy-to-link form, and once the debate about them dies down we can return to the larger policy point.

With that in mind, the first table below lists the top 15 charter school networks in terms of performance on the California Standards Tests, adjusted for student factors and peer effects. For comparison, two non-charter schools are included: the academically selective elite public prep schools Gretchen Whitney and Lowell–both of which feature in most lists of the top public schools in the country. There are 68 networks with the necessary data, but the lowest grant rank is 61 because eight of the networks received no philanthropic funding at all.

Next is a list of the charter networks that philanthropists have invested-in most heavily, with a view to replicating their models. Notice the minimal overlap? I repeat this comparison in the study with Advanced Placement test performance, and find the same pattern (it’s just slightly worse).

Every one of the above networks received substantially more grant funding individually than the top three highest achieving networks… combined.

Ranking the Charter School Networks is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In December of 1993, Bill Clinton remarked that figuring out how to consistently replicate great schools was the central education policy problem of our age. A generation later, it still is.

As someone obsessed with solving that problem, I wanted to know how well our current strategies for achieving it are working. One strategy in particular has attracted the bulk of the funding and attention over the past decade: philanthropists teaming up with what they consider to be the best networks of charter schools, and funding their growth. To find out how well they’ve been picking the winners, I compared the total amount of grant funding received by each of 68 California charter school networks over the past 8 years to the academic performance of those networks. The study is available here.

The correlation between grant funding and performance on the California Standards Tests turns out to be negligible (0.1). In fact, it’s half the size of the correlation between performance and the length of the networks’ names. As a check on those findings, I also ran the numbers on AP test performance. Those results are slightly worse: though the correlations are also negligible in magnitude, they’re actually negative in sign—more grant funding is associated with minutely worse AP performance.

In a nutshell, it’s as if philanthropists have been doling out funding to charter school networks by the same random lottery process by which oversubscribed charters are obliged to accept new students. While this will of course be viewed as a great disappointment by a great many people, it is better to have this information than to continue to labor in ignorance. There are places where excellence in education does routinely scale-up, and documenting them is the subject of my next project….

New Cato Study: Philanthropists Are Replicating Charter Schools…at Random is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times recently ran a story portraying the Gates Foundation as the puppeteer of American education policy, bribing or bullying scholars and politicians into dancing as it desires. Rick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, feels that the story misrepresented his position on the potentially corrupting influence of foundations, making it sound as though he were referring to the Gates Foundation in particular when in fact he was referring to the impact of foundations generally.

Hess told the Times, among other things, that

As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct. There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation. We’re all implicated.

Next Monday, the Cato Institute will publish a study titled: “The Other Lottery: Are Philanthropists Backing the Best Charter Schools?” In it, I empirically answer the titular question by comparing the academic performance of California’s charter school networks to the level of grant funding they have received from donors over the past decade. The results tell us how much we should rely on the pairing of philanthropy and charter schools to identify and replicate the best educational models. Considerable care went into the data collection and regression model. As for the description of the findings, it’s as simple and precise as I could make it. I doubt it will be hailed as exquisite.

Does Scholar Self-Interest Corrupt Policy Research? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Brookings Institution released a new study today on charter schooling—assessing how well it’s working and what the federal government should do about it. One of the recommendations reads as follows:

Student participation in lotteries for admissions to any public [charter] school and the results of such lotteries should be a required student data element in state or district longitudinal data systems supported with federal funds.

Why? Because it would make it a lot easier to measure relative school quality, by permitting more widespread use of randomized, control group experiments. Experiments are certainly great from a researcher’s standpoint, but mandating that schools must admit students on a random basis has a catch:

an observer effect as subtle as an 80-foot fire-breathing robot. One of the reasons markets work is that exchanges are mutually voluntary, and producers and consumers don’t enter into an exchange unless each perceives it to be beneficial. If you eliminate the mutually voluntary character of an exchange in the process of trying to observe how beneficial it is to one of the parties, you’re affecting the very thing you’re trying to measure. It becomes more likely that you will have students assigned to schools that are not well equipped to serve their particular needs, injuring such students’ educational prospects.

Lottery admission to oversubscribed charter schools appeals to people’s desire for fairness, but a much better solution is to adopt a true market approach to education in which oversubscribed schools have not only the freedom but the incentives to expand as demand increases. For-profit enterprises, schools among them, do not generally ignore rising demand for their services. Kumon, the for-profit tutoring service, does not turn students away when it reaches capacity at a given location, it grows that location or opens a new one. As a result, it now serves about four million students in 42 countries.

Rather than figuring out how to ration good schools, why don’t we just unleash the market forces that will grow and replicate them?

Random Assignment is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

To help kick off “Education Nation” — what NBC is calling an education-intensive week of news programming — Matt Lauer sat down with President Obama on this morning’s Today show. As expected, it was all talk, no real reform.

The interview started with a discussion of “Race to the Top,” the President’s $4.35 billion mechanical rabbit designed to make states run to implement ”reforms” the President likes. Lift caps on charter schools. Adopt national curriculum standards. Things like that. As his administration has done for months, the President spared no superlative prasing the thing, saying it is “the most powerful tool for reform that we’ve seen in decades.”

Uggh. RTTT did very little of substance, and even if the reforms seemed promising in theory we have absolutely no evidence of actual, positive effects on learning.

But the reforms don’t seem promising. Sure, RTTT got some states to lift caps on charter schools and eliminate some barriers to evaluating teachers using student test scores. For the most part, though, RTTT just prodded states to promise to plan to make reforms, and even things like lifting charter caps do little good when the problems go much deeper. Indeed, the only thing of real substance RTTT has done is coerce states into adopting national curriculum standards, pushing us a big step closer to complete federal domination of our schools. That’s especially problematic because special interests like teacher unions love nothing more than one-stop shopping.

But isn’t the President taking on the unions?

Hardly. While he has lightly scolded unions for protecting bad teachers, he has given them huge money-hugs to sooth their hurt feelings. Moreover, perhaps to further heal their emotional ouchies, on Today he offered union-hack rhetoric about teachers, going on about how they should be “honored” above almost all other professions, and how selfless and hard working they are.

Now, lots of teachers work hard and care very much about kids, but shouldn’t individual Americans get to decide how much they want to honor a profession, and how much they are willing to pay for the services of a given professional? Of course they should — who’s to say definitively whether a good teacher is more valuable than, say, a good architect?  – but when government controls education, it decides what teachers “should” get paid.

Unfortunately, the President chose to seriously inflate how long and intensively teachers work, saying they work so hard they are downright “heroic.” No doubt many do work very long hours, but research shows that the average teacher does not. A recent “time diary” study found that during the school year teachers work only only about 7.3 hours on weekdays– including work on and off campus — and 2 hours on weekends. That’s 18 fewer minutes per day than the average person in a less “heroic” professional job. Oh, and on an hourly basis teachers get paid more than accountants, nurses, and insurance unerwriters.

Most troubling in the Today interview, though, was the President’s failure to even mention school choice – giving parents, not politicians, control of education money — as even a potential means for reforming education.  He did, though, fully embrace his own educational freedom: When asked whether the DC public schools were good enough for his kids, he said no. That’s why they go to private school.

Here’s where we see the injustice of Obama’s  and other like-minded people’s “reform” offerings. Rather than giving real power to the parents and kids public education is supposed to serve, they insist on keeping them subject to the authority of politicians and politically potent special interests. They refuse to let all parents make the same choice the President has made, and they continue to force all Americans to hand huge sums of money over to government schools. Indeed, at the same time the President’s kids were heading off to private school, he was letting die an effective, popular, school-choice program in DC, a program that enabled poor families to make the same kinds of choices the President did.

But educational freedom isn’t just — or even mainly — about equality. It is the key to unleashing systemic accountability and innovation, two essential things the President at least says he likes. Unfortunately, he has embraced at best a third-measure for getting these critical things, throwing his support behind charter schools.

The root problems with charter schools are that they are still public schools, and they are largely under the control of the districts with which they want to compete. So if they ever start taking big chunks of kids from the traditional public schools — if they ever impose real accountability by providing real competition — they’ll just be crippled or crushed.

The President suggested, though, that the main value of charters is not accountability, but that they can test new things. But letting a few government schools be a little different from the others won’t produce meaningful, constant, powerful innovation, especially if charters are kept from truly competing for students.  Let parents take their education dollars to any school they wish, with no government thumbs on the scale, in contrast, and soon all schools will either have to get better, or go out of business. 

Unfortunately, it seems that freeing all parents to pursue the education that’s best for their kids is a reform much too far for this President. Nothing, it appears, can be allowed to truly challenge the government schools.

Educational Freedom for Me but Not Thee, Says Obama on Today is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ten years ago, the American Indian Charter School scored last among Oakland’s public middle schools. Today it’s the top-scoring public middle school in all of California, according to the state’s own Academic Performance Index ranking.

What changed? It wasn’t the school’s demographics. American Indian’s enrollment is still almost all low income and minority, and contrary to almost everyone’s expectations, these inner-city kids now outperform their age-mates in even the wealthiest districts in California. And the school accepts all applicants, so, no, they don’t cherry-pick. The only cherry-picking that happens at American Indian is when elite East-Coast boarding schools recruit their middle-school graduates, offering them full board and tuition–perhaps a way of diversifying their socio-economic makeup while also raising their academic performance.

The success of American Indian is due to the no-holds-barred management and academic culture created by its former principal, Ben Chavis, and now perpetuated by the principals to whom he passed the baton following his retirement in 2007. Ben brought this school from last in Oakland to 4th in the state, and his successors have raised it to #1.

There are no cell-phones, no jewelry, no pants-saggin’. Show up late and you have to come to school on Saturday… and you’ll be expected to WORK. Assiduous effort is expected always and from every student, and the teachers and principals will do everything conceivable to encourage that effort.

The students come to feel–rightly–that they belong to something exceptional and important. They develop ties to one another and to the school, and work not only for their own success but to ensure they don’t let down their comrades. It’s impossible to really describe this in a blog post, but the story is powerfully-captured in the book Crazy Like a Fox.

It is a model that is replicable, but one that will only be replicated on a massive scale if we allow the free enterprise system to take hold in American education. When entrepreneurs have the freedoms and incentives to scale-up great schools, just as they now have the freedoms and incentives to scale up great coffee shops and cell-phones, we will see educational greatness proliferate. Until then, most of the children who would thrive in schools like Ben’s won’t have access to them. And that’s a tragedy.

And the Last Shall Be First is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The new PDK/Gallup education poll for 2010 is out, with the standard problems we can expect from this pro-government school/anti-choice outfit. Randi Weingarten even gets some column space! Oh Randi, you proud yet humble teacher. The “Commentary” sidebars in general were cringe-inducingly hackish and treacly.

It is interesting that there was a big spike in the percentage of people saying the biggest problem schools must deal with is a lack of funds. They’ve done a great job convincing folks there’s no money.

Of course, the way the question is worded, it encourages respondents to think about the difficulties schools are facing, which despite their flush accounts probably is dealing with funding issues. I’d like to see the answers to “What do you think are the biggest problems preventing the public schools of your community from increasing student achievement?” or some such question. And they certainly should ask how much people think is being spent. “The Research Organization formerly known as Friedman Foundation,” or TROFKAFF, has some great state polls showing how horribly misinformed most people are about the spending issue.

PDK is still boycotting the voucher question for a few years running.

But what is really indefensible is that they haven’t asked about education tax credits since 1999, just when the policy took off. There are now 12 credit programs in 9 states. Maybe support was far too high for their taste? In 1999 support was in the high 60′s, even after a battery of questions about vouchers and pitting public reform against private choice.

Good news for charter schools, which have finally pulled ahead of the support credits enjoyed during the Clinton administration, thanks no doubt to an increase in support among Dems/liberals courtesy of Obama lip-service. PDK; update please.

PDK: Charter Schools Finally As Popular as Education Tax Credits Have Been Since Before Clinton’s Impeachment is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Charter schools are the hot new thing.

OK, they aren’t all that new. But many people who used to have blanket objections to any increase in school choice now support (some form of) charter schools. President Obama, and even AFT President Randi Weingarten, say they support “charter” schools. The guy who made Al Gore’s documentary, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Planet, will soon release a film about choice and charter schools.

In the midst of the charter school hype, we need to remember that the private school system has been educating low-income kids longer, better, and more efficiently than charter schools. And charter schools are now sapping this tiny remaining redoubt of civil-society success and freedom in education.

Philanthropists who care about long-term, sustainable and dynamic improvement in the education system need to refocus. They need to pull back from the charter school mirage and invest in private school choice programs and private schools that are a proven, established success with at-risk children.

Fortunately, many philanthropists see the need to save private, often Catholic, schools for the poor:

Among his many achievements, [Robert W.] Wilson is the single largest benefactor of Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of New York. Since 2007, he has donated over $30 million to inner-city Catholic education. He is also an atheist… Wilson belongs to an elite order: non-Catholic donors who are the patron saints of inner-city Catholic schools.

Read the whole article by Christopher Levenick in Philanthropy magazine. Public charter schools are often better than the regular ones. But charter systems are a pale government reflection of the legacy and possibilities found in private education.

Foundations Need to Invest More in Private Education and Choice is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Tradeoffs are an incurable part of reality. Unfortunately, many school choice supporters like to believe that there are no tradeoffs between school choice policies; public and private school choice, targeted or restricted, big or small, voucher or tax credits, it’s all choice and it’s all good. But some good things are better than others. And most things have some mix of positive and negative effects.

Charter schools often provide a safer, better alternative to traditional public schools. That’s good. Charter schools also destroy private schools, decrease educational options, pull private-school students into the government education system and thereby add significant new costs to taxpayers. These are all very bad things. And they are not at all balanced by theories of long-term shifts in how citizens conceive of choice in education.

Here’s the latest on how government charter schools are killing what’s left of the private sector in education:

The number of students enrolled in these public, independently run schools has risen dramatically in this decade. Philadelphia school district officials estimate that 73 percent of the children now in charters came from district schools and 27 percent from other schools. That 27 percent amounts to about 9,000 students, and Catholic-school educators believe that most of them came from Catholic schools.

Charter schools have one distinct advantage over Catholic schools. They do not charge tuition.

Charters are NO substitute for private school choice. In fact, by destroying private schools, they seriously erode the total range of educational options.

We need to be clear-headed about this; charter school laws, in the absence of robust private school choice programs, destroy educational freedom and choice.

Absent private choice, charters are a long-term setback for education reform.

Charters Kill Private Schools and Add to Taxpayer Burden is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, Bill Gates addressed 4,100 charter school leaders and activists and told them that their movement “is the only place innovation will come from.”

Certainly there are innovative charter schools–and others that deploy traditional methods with such skill and dedication as to achieve results far above the norm (think Ben Chavis’ American Indian Charter Schools in Oakland). But of course charters are not the only source of educational innovation, and, much more importantly, they are unlikely to drive the process of mass replication and scale-up of innovations responsible for the stunning economic progress of the past several hundred years.

Pick any field in which a brilliant innovation has been capitalized on and brought to the masses and you will likely find that it is capitalist–part of the profit-and-loss, free enterprise system.

There are occasional exceptions. The Jesuits introduced performance-based grouping in 1599, promoting students to the next grade whenever they had mastered the material of the current one, and managed to scale-up that policy internationally. But only free markets have created an ever-repeating cycle of innovation, replication, and dissemination that continues decade after decade, seldom pausing or reversing except due to some external calamity.

There are efforts afoot by business and financial leaders to emulate that cycle within the charter school framework. We should wish them well, but it’s a daunting task. As Friedrich Hayek explains in The Fatal Conceit, the web of freedoms, customs, and incentives we call free markets was not designed by earlier generations, but rather evolved inexorably over time. It is not a product of human planning, but of human nature.

Trying to reproduce the innovation, replication, dissemination cycle outside the free market system is like trying to make a wheel more round by increasing or decreasing the value of pi–and it’s just as unnecessary. We already have a system for accomplishing what Gates and the American public desire, why not use it? Why don’t we simply ensure that all children, regardless of family wealth, can afford access to a free education marketplace? The innovation and dissemination process will then take care of itself, as it does in every other field.

“The Only Place Innovation Will Come From” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

First to the “Top” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I wrote about this private school in South Carolina last year. The Voice for School Choice has a new video highlighting the great work of the Eagle Military Academy, which works with many kids the public schools cannot or will not educate.

There’s a lot of talk lately about the transformative power of some charter schools, and it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that many secular and religious private schools have been saving kids all along with no public funds and little or no recognition from the elite opinion class.

We need to open up choice to these schools as well, not just public charter schools that cannot provide the breadth and depth of experiences offered by private schools.

Public charter schools are no substitute for full school choice through education tax credits.

Charters No Substitute for Private Innovation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today’s the day that states must submit their applications to the U.S. Department of Education to compete for round-one “Race to the Top” grants. But no worries if your state’s a little behind: Not only will there be another application round for the $4.35-billion dash-for-cash, but as President Obama announced today, he wants a $1.35-billion sequel to what was supposed to be a one-time, stimulus-funded contest.

The important question, of course, is whether sponsoring this race is worthwhile for federal taxpayers. The clear answer is no.

Sure, in response to RttT states have been raising charter-school caps, allowing teachers to be evaluated using student performance, and instituting other changes, but they’ve done little of real substance. Just raising caps won’t make it much easier to get good, competitive charter schools since most of the charter-supply problem revolves around over-regulation and painful authorization processes. And while states have eliminated prohibitions on using student test results to evaluate teachers, they haven’t done much to actually base teacher evaluations on student performance or other meaningful metrics.

What has RttT done that is of substance? Unfortunately, push yet more power into federal hands, forcing  states and districts to jump through all manner of hoops for a chance to get back some of their citizens’ money. Indeed, it is becoming painfully clear that President Obama intends to put Washington firmly above the states in the hierarchy of education power.

For his $1.35 billion RttT expansion, President Obama plans to allow districts to directly compete for federal funding, bypassing states completely. And then there’s his crusade for national curricular standards. His administration has been talking up “common” standards since almost day one, and in the ”fact sheet“ accompanying the RttT expansion announcement the first bullet states that RttT emphasizes “designing and implementing rigorous standards and high-quality assessments, by encouraging states to work jointly toward a system of common academic standards.” 

Don’t be fooled, by the way, by the “states” working “jointly” thing, or utterly unbelievable administration denials. If the feds are paying states to adopt common standards then those standards will be de facto federal. Either that, or the feds will let states adopt any old joint standards and still get paid. Six of one bad thing, half dozen of the other…

Thankfully, there is resistance to Obama’s bribe-to-the-top scheme. Texas, most notably, has refused to participate in RttT, with Gov. Rick Perry declaring that ”we would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington.” And Texas is not alone: According to a New York Times article appearing yesterday, states and districts around the country are refusing to put on their track shoes and run for the federal funds. 

Still, federal money — taxpayer money — can be a tough thing for any elected offical to turn down. Sooner or later, if we let him, Obama will almost certainly find an amount that no state or district can resist.

Race to Domination is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog