American Prospect Strikes Mother Lode of Falsehood
Dana Goldstein of the American Prospect blogs that “research clearly shows that students using vouchers perform no better academically than their socio-economically similar peers in public schools.” This is flamboyantly false.
I recently reviewed the literature comparing public, private, and truly free market school systems, and an expanded version of that study is forthcoming in the Journal of School Choice. The JSC version tabulates the findings of 65 scientific studies (including every U.S. and foreign voucher study I am aware of), collectively reporting 156 comparisons of educational outcomes. What does the research “clearly show”? It shows this:
Summary of Findings Comparing Private and Government Schooling,
by Result and Outcome Category
|
|
Total |
Ach |
Eff |
Sat |
Ord |
Fac |
Ear |
Att |
Int |
|
Sig Priv. Advantage |
106 |
46 |
25 |
11 |
5 |
2 |
5 |
11 |
1 |
|
Insignificant |
37 |
28 |
1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
5 |
3 |
0 |
|
Sig. Gov’t Adv. |
13 |
10 |
3 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
The above table summarizes the results of the scientific literature, showing the number of findings favoring the private sector by a statistically significant margin, the number that are insignificant, and the number favoring the public sector by a statistically significant margin. It does this for all eight available outcome measures: academic achievement, efficiency (achievement per dollar spent per pupil), parental satisfaction, the orderliness of classrooms, the condition in which facilities are maintained, the later earnings of graduates, the highest school grade or degree completed, and effect on measured intelligence. And it incontrovertably shows that private sector outperforms the public sector in education across all of those measures.
But there’s more. As I note in the conclusion: “It is in fact the least regulated market school systems that show the greatest margin of superiority over state schooling.” When the above results are winnowed down so that we compare only free markets of private schools that are funded at least in part directly by parents to public school monopolies like those of the United States, the findings are even more starkly divided:
by Result and Outcome Category
|
|
Total |
Ach |
Eff |
Sat |
Ord |
Fac |
Ear |
Att |
|
Sig Mkt Adv. |
59 |
20 |
17 |
6 |
4 |
1 |
3 |
8 |
|
Insignificant |
13 |
7 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
3 |
3 |
|
Sig. Gov’t Adv. |
4 |
4 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
Note the staggering overall results. Findings favoring free market school systems outnumber contrary findings by a margin of 15 to 1. They also outnumber the combined insignificant findings and the findings favoring monopolies by more than 3 to 1. Most tellingly, when we look at efficiency we find that there are NO results in the literature that favor government schooling and NO results that are statistically insignificant. EVERY study that compares academic achievement per dollar spent per pupil between market school systems and public school systems finds a significant market advantage.
Goldstein and The American Prospect should obviously print a retraction. But if they are interested in the truth, they might want to do something more. They might want to ask themselves why they continue to cling to a monopoly system that has been overwhelmingly discredited in the scientific literature….
Ed. Dept. Advisor Wary of Politicizing the Curriculum
Mike Smith, a senior education advisor to Ed. Secretary Duncan, expressed concern yesterday about the possible ill effects of federal government standards. In a Library of Congress presentation, Smith told the crowd that if common national standards are funded by the federal government, “you can’t keep ideology or politics out of the ball game.”
This is a pearl of empirically validated wisdom. The problem is that it has been empirically validated at the state and district levels as well as the national level, as Neal McCluskey demonstrated in “Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict.” And the U.S. is not alone in finding that official government schools cause social conflict over what is taught.
What can we do about it? How about real educational freedom that gives choice to both parents and taxpayers, eliminating the source of the problem?
Why Vouchers?
Yesterday a universal voucher bill heavily promoted by state Sen. Eric Johnson died in the Georgia legislature.
I can’t understand why anyone continues to push for a brand-new voucher program when they already have a universal education tax credit.
Tax credits are more popular and pose less of a threat to private schools and homeschoolers than vouchers, and Georgia already has a tax credit program. All they need to do is lift the cap on available tax credits, which is set at $50 million.
School choice programs actually save money — billions of dollars in fact — so there is no sense in capping the program, especially during an economic downturn.
And there is no sense in pushing for a new, inferior policy when you can focus your efforts on increasing funding for an existing law.
Ed. Feds to Reinvent Wheel, Ignoring Pi
Education secretary Arne Duncan testified before Congress today on the president’s 2010 budget for the Department of Education. One of the first things he said was this:
We also plan to work very hard at scaling up success in our education system. Under our 2010 budget, the Department would continue to use the Innovation Fund created by the Recovery Act to identify and replicate successful models and strategies that raise student achievement. We know that there are many school systems and non-profit organizations across the country with demonstrated track records of success in raising student achievement, and our 2010 request would help bring their success to scale.
Duncan and President Obama are so, so right to focus on this challenge. Sadly, their efforts will so, so utterly fail, just as those of all their predecessors. Here’s why:
For a long time, observers of U.S. public schooling have wrung their hands over a pernicious problem: there are many isolated and transitory examples of excellence within the system (think “Stand and Deliver“), but efforts to scale these models up on a lasting, nationwide basis have always failed.
One early and notorious example was the federal Follow Through experiment of the late 1960s and early ’70s. At a cost of over a billion dollars, it demonstrated that one instruction method, “Distar,” clearly outperformed 21 others. Distar was #1 not just overall, but in each of the subcategories of reading, arithmetic, spelling and language. It placed a close second in promoting advanced conceptual skills, and was even the most effective at boosting students’ self-esteem and responsibility toward their work. Nothing else came close.
Tax Credits, Courts, and Cabers
As Adam Schaeffer notes on this blog today, education tax credits have won in court, again. This time in Arizona.
I’ve long argued that their superior resistance to court challenge is one of many reasons to favor tax credits over other approaches to school choice. But there’s one court that even credits are likely to run into trouble with: the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The 9th Circuit is the most statist appellate court in the nation, and it has been sitting on an education tax credit case, Winn v. Garriott, for more than a year. For the record, I expect it to rule against the program sometime in 2009. If it does, that ruling will be appealed and almost certainly overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Supporters of educational freedom should both brace themselves for this setback and also put it in perspective. The 9th Circuit is overturned more often than a caber at the Highland games.
Education Tax Credits Upheld, Again
The decision by the Arizona court of Appeals today upholding the constitutionality of the business tax credit program should put to bed once and for all these frivolous lawsuits against tax credits. Opponents are wasting their money.
Education tax credits are taxpayer funds and therefore cannot run afoul of state constitutional provisions regarding the use of government funds. It really is just that simple.
Some school choice supporters have given up on vouchers because of recent disappointments and think that means the end for private school choice. They forget the most successful school choice policy in recent years is education tax credits.
Not only have tax credit programs been passed and expanded with regularity (GA just passed a $50 million, universal program last year), education tax credits have proven bullet-proof in court.
Education tax credits are the future for school choice, and it’s looking pretty bright.
Obama First Dem President to Support Vouchers
Through his press secretary Robert Gibbs, president Obama has declared that he will reverse congressional Democrats’ phase-out of the DC Opportunity Scholarships program. The scholarships make private schooling affordable for 1,700 poor DC children, most of whom would be forced back into the District’s broken public school system if it were to end.
However — yes, there’s always a however — there’s every indication that president Obama will do the minimum necessary to keep the program going at its current size, and will not help to expand it.
This is nevertheless a crucial milestone. There is finally a major national Democratic leader who is beginning to catch up to his state-level peers. Democrats all around the country have been supporting and signing small education tax credit programs because they realize that these programs are win-win: good for their constituents and good for their long-term political futures.
The old guard of the Democratic party — typified by congressional leaders — still imagines that school choice is bad for them. They still think that they can roll back time to a period when the public school monopoly was inviolate. That time has passed. Real educational freedom is spreading — slowly — around the country. That is not going to stop.
The last Democrats to be found jamming their fingers into the dike, hoping to stop the flight to educational freedom, will find their political careers swept away when that dike finally crumbles.
Where Are the Muckrakers?
In the mythology of journalism, investigative reporters fall somewhere between archangels and demigods. They protect the public by exposing political deceit and corruption, burrowing relentlessly into the words and deeds of those in power, in search of the truth. And in the field of education, they are as numerous as leprechauns and unicorns.
In education, “muckrakers,” as Teddy Roosevelt called them, are few and far between. There are, however, legions of mucksailors — reporters who glide over the surface of a story, seldom probing beneath the public statements of those in power to determine their truth or falsehood. Through my web browser window I can watch the sails of a vast muck navy.
Consider the coverage of the battle over DC’s school voucher program. Democrats inserted language into the $410 billion omnibus spending bill that would sunset funding for the program after next year, instead of simply reauthorizing it for another full five-year term. The vouchers could still be reauthorized when they come up again, but since House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey ( D-Wis.) has already told DC public schools to prepare for the return of voucher students, that seems highly unlikely.
So here we have Democrats working to shut down a program serving 1,700 poor kids in the nation’s capital — kids who are so desperate to stay in their chosen private schools that they’ve made YouTube videos beseeching Congress and president Obama to save it. Given that most people are not inherently so cruel, why would Democrats want to kill this program? They say it’s because it robs money from needy public schools and gives it to private schools that are already flush from lavish tuition fees. But. Is. That. TRUE?
Is DC’s government-run k-12 system financially needy? Are the independent schools serving voucher students making a Madoff-style killing?
No. And… No.
These claims are rubbish. They are, in fact, MUCK. I have run the numbers on DC government k-12 education spending for the current school year and it is $26,555 per pupil. According to the government’s own published study of the voucher program, the average tuition charged by participating schools is $5,928. Furthermore, the voucher program actually added an extra $13 million a year to the DC public school budget, as a “sweetener” to elicit local and Democratic support.
But most Americans will never learn any of that. Because we have no muckrakers in the mainstream education media. We have mucksailors.
This is not entirely the journalists’ fault. Media businesses have been hit very hard in recent years, and are understaffed compared to earlier generations. Reporters are stretched very thin. But I ask the editorial establishment, what is more valuable to your readers: A dozen stories that merely regurgitate the official muck, or a single top notch investigative piece that demonstrates how our political leaders are flagrantly misleading the American people and exposes their real motives?
Speak truth to power? Anyone?
Anyone?
The Early-Ed Big Lie
In a speech on education this morning at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama repeats questionable statistics in support of his bid to expand the government’s monopoly on education back to the womb, asserting that “$1 of early education leads to $10 in saved social services.”
Unfortunately he’s referring to small-scale programs that involved extensive and often intensive total-family intervention rather than simple “early education.”
In contrast to the– real-world school choice programs have been tested extensively with solid, random-assignment studies. Nine out of ten of these studies find statistically significant improvement in academic achievement for at least one subgroup.
Obama should follow the scientific evidence on what works in education; school choice, not “early education.”
Mr. President, If You’re Involved It’s Already Politicized
Yesterday, President Obama coupled his lifting of an executive order banning federal funding for embryonic stem cell research with the signing of a memorandum directing “the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making.” In other words, at the very moment he was directly injecting politics into science by forcing taxpayers to fund research that many find immoral – and that could be funded privately – Obama declared that he wouldn’t politicize science.
Don’t insult our intelligence. When government pays for scientific work that science is politicized. Yes, it could be argued that government not funding something is also political, but which is inherently more politicized, government forcing people to fund research, or leaving it to private individuals to voluntarily support scientific endeavors they believe of value?
You don’t have to be a scientist to grasp the obvious answer to that one. And as I’ve laid out very clearly regarding education, this kind of compelled support ultimately leads not only to ugly politicization, but social conflict and division.
Culture wars, anyone?
The rhetoric supporting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research – and lots of other science – may sound noble, but the means-ends calculations are anything but. They are divisive incursions on liberty, and make political conflict inevitable.
Vouchers vs. the District with ‘More Money than God’
Editor’s Note: This post was updated on March 9, 2009.
This week, education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with “more money than God.” Perhaps he was thinking of the $24,600 total per-pupil spending figure I reported last year in the Washington Post and on this blog. If so, he’s low-balling the number. With the invaluable help of my research assistant Elizabeth Li, I’ve just calculated the figure for the current school year. It is $26,555 per pupil.
In his address to Congress and his just-released budget, the president repeatedly called for efficiency in government education spending. At the same time, the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have been trying to sunset funding for the DC voucher program that serves 1,700 poor kids in the nation’s capital. So it seems relevant to compare the efficiencies of these programs.
According to the official study of the DC voucher program, the average voucher amount is less than $6,000. That is less than ONE QUARTER what DC is spending per pupil on education. And yet, academic achievement in the voucher program is at least as good as in the District schools, and voucher parents are much happier with the program than are public school parents.
In fact, since the average income of participating voucher families is about $23,000, DC is currently spending almost as much per pupil on education as the vouchers plus the family income of the voucher recipients COMBINED.
So Mr. President and Secretary Duncan, could you please sit down with Democratic leaders in the Senate before next Monday’s vote on an amendment to keep funding the DC voucher program, and reassert to them your desire for efficiency and your opposition to kicking these children out of a program that they depend on?
Ed Secretary: DC Schools Have ‘More Money than God,’ But They’re Still Lousy
You know, I might not agree with federal education secretary Arne Duncan on a lot of things, but I could really get to like this guy if he keeps talking like this:
History has shown that money alone does not drive school improvement, Duncan said, pointing to the District of Columbia, where public school students consistently score near the bottom on national reading and math tests even though the school system spends more per pupil than its suburban counterparts do.
“D.C. has had more money than God for a long time, but the outcomes are still disastrous,” Duncan said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters.
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