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

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed an expansive new voucher law today. It’s a disaster for educational freedom. Read the full explanation here.

The voucher program has been widely praised as a momentous victory for school choice and Gov. Mitch Daniels on the brink of his long-awaited presidential campaign announcement. In reality, the voucher program is a tactical victory for highly constrained choice won at the price of a broad strategic defeat for educational freedom. This program will greatly expand state regulation of and authority over participating private schools.

In our efforts to expand educational choice across the country, we can’t lose sight of what makes that choice valuable: educational freedom and the diversity of choices it allows to develop. School choice is meaningless if all the choices are the same.

Just a teaser . . . ever heard of Chief Seattle? Private schools in Indiana will know him well if they take a voucher.

Read the piece for these and other shocking details!

Indiana Voucher Law a Defeat for Educational Freedom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today, the Supreme Court of the United States issued the Zelman decision for education tax credits. More than that, it’s Super-Zelman.

The findings in Zelman apply just as well to education tax credit programs, but only credit programs allow taxpayers to spend their own money on education.

As Andrew Coulson explained in detail earlier, the Court ruled that education tax credits are not government funds, and the plaintiffs therefore have no standing to bring suit in the first place. They were not harmed because none of their money was collected and then disburse by the state.

Children are rightly our primary concern, but taxpayers deserve more consideration than they often get in debates over education reform.

Education tax credit programs can expand educational choice and freedom while respecting the preferences and values of the individual taxpayers who earned that money in the first place.

Voucher programs simply cannot provide this kind of accountability to both parents and taxpayers.

SCOTUS Issues a Super-Zelman Decision on Education Tax Credits is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” website is once again hosting a forum on education, to which I have contributed some thoughts. The topic: whether there should be federal tax credits for home schoolers.

I won’t rehash my contribution — obviously, you can read it right on the site — but I wanted to respond quickly to two other entries.

The first is from Chester Finn, president of our favorite conservative sparring partner in education, the Thomas B. Fordham Instititute. I just want to thank him for substantiating a warning I offer in my contribution: Create federal home-schooling credits and don’t be surprised if you also get requirements that home schoolers be judged on stultifying standardized tests.  It’s exactly what Finn calls for:

In return for the financial help, however, home-schooled students should be required to take state tests, just as they would do in regular school, charter school or virtual schools. And if they don’t pass those tests, either the subsidy vanishes or the kids must enroll in some sort of school with a decent academic track record.

The second person I want to respond to is former Bush II official Susan Neuman, who generally offers the right advice by warning even more starkly than I did that home schoolers demanding tax credits are making a deal with the regulatory devil. That’s fine, as is her reporting that by what indications we have “children who have been home-schooled do remarkably well, attending well-respected colleges and universities and going on to successful careers.” Unfortunately, all that was preceded by the Reductio ad Hitlerum of education debates: Smearing any effort to even the playing field between public schools and other educational arrangements as an “attempt … to destroy public education.”

I know that this will never catch on with people determined to preserve public schools’ near-monopoly on tax dollars no matter how well other arrangements actually educate children (not to mention serve taxpayers and society overall), but it is time to stop treating public education as if it is synonymous with public schools! Indeed, you demonstrate more dedication to public education if you fight to get kids access to the best education wherever it is offered than if you make your ultimate goal preserving government schools. Yet the monopoly defenders insist on smearing choice advocates as being at war with public education.

Stop with this trashy tactic. Wanna say supporters of educational choice are at war with public schools? Fine. But with public education? Sorry — if anything, they’re the ones truly fighting to get the best possible education for all.

We Must Protect This Failing House! (And To Heck With the Kids In It) is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday, FoxNews.com posted a story on what appears to be a growing problem for public school systems across the country: accommodating Muslim holidays. Unfortunately, the report didn’t contain the solution to the problem. It did, though, contain a very succinct discussion of the root of the problem; an example of the good intent that causes people to ignore the problem; and the kind of “solution” that is ultimately at odds with the most basic of American values.

A quote from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg captured the essence of the problem:

One of the problems you have with a diverse city is that if you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school.

There you have the basic conundrum in a nutshell: Whenever you have a diverse population — whether in a hamlet, city, state, or nation — and everyone has to support a single system of government schools, you cannot possibly treat all people – or even most of them — equally. Either there are winners and losers, or nobody gets anything.

Understanding why public schooling  can’t handle diversity — why, simply, one size can’t fit all — is really basic common sense. So why isn’t there more outrage over, or even just recognition of, the utter illogic of our education system? Mohamed Elibiary, President and CEO of the Freedom and Justice Foundation, illustrated the attitude that likely causes lots of Americans to wear blinders:

I’m a little torn. I want Muslims to be getting the same recognition as other Americans, but at the same time I don’t want to see public education systems be a battleground between religious identities, because then we’re missing the point of why we have a public education system to begin with.

No doubt many people truly believe as Elibiary does: that a major purpose of public schooling is to bring diverse people together and, by doing so, unify them. It’s a fine intention, but also a classic case of intent not matching reality. Indeed, the reality is often very much the opposite. Rather than unifying people, public schooling has repeatedly forced religious conflict (as well as conflict over race, ethnicity, political philosophy, curriculum, and on and on).

It started almost on Day One, when Horace Mann, a Unitarian, was locked in conflict with Calvinists over what kind of Protestantism the state’s nascent “common schools” would teach. When Roman Catholics began arriving in America in large numbers, battles — sometimes deadly – erupted over who would get what kind of Christianity in the public schools. When Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” fired the first big blast in the war over the teaching of human origins, a fight we are still very much in. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the fighting moved to what, if any, religious expression is permissible in public schools. And now, we’re getting fired up over whose holidays will get the most deference from government schools. It almost seems like war without end.

Finally, the article gropes at – but doesn’t grab — the solution to our education and diversity problem. Says Georgetown University professor Bradley Blakeman:

That’s the beauty of having a school district responsive to the localities as opposed to blanket rules that affect multiple jurisdictions, states or even countries. One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to these kinds of rules and regulations. We’re not a homogeneous nation, which makes us so great.

Blakeman is heading in the right direction (even as federal policy pushes us the opposite way): The closer that control of education gets to individual people, the more easily it can be tailored to unique needs, values, and desires. Unfortunately, Blakeman fails to identify the obvious last step: completely decoupling government funding from provision of education. In other words, instituting universal educational choice. Making matters worse, Blakeman for all intents and purposes concludes that as long as decisions are made at the local level, and the majority gets its way, everything is fine:

A school should reflect the beliefs and practices of the community that they serve. And if school boards are sensitive to their populations, that’s fine, provided the decisions of the board reflect the majority opinion of its community.

It may sound harsh, but one way to describe this is simply ”tyranny of the majority” — whatever the majority wants, it gets, as long as it is the local majority. It’s a solution that completely ignores that ours is not supposed to be a nation of majority rule, but rule of law that protects individual freedom. And, of course, one of the most basic protections is the prohibition on government tipping the scales in favor of one religion, two religions, or no religion at all. 

This solution also fails, by the way, to address the problem at hand: School districts — not states or Washington — having to accommodate diverse populations. In other words, ”local control” is ultimately no solution at all.

Universal choice is, quite simply, the only system of education compatible with the most basic of American values — individual liberty – and the only way to avoid constant, divisive battles over who will get what out of the schools. Hopefully, people will come to realize that before our conflicts get even worse.

Take Off the Blinders: Diversity Demands Educational Freedom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The SCOTUS Blog reports this morning that the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in the Arizona k-12 scholarship tax credit case. This is great news, and paves the way for the Court to ultimately overturn the 9th Circuit’s credulity-straining legal misadventure.

For the details, see the Cato brief in this case, which was joined by the American Federation for Children and Foundation for Educational Choice.

Supreme Court Will Hear Appeal of School Choice Case is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

HHS has finally released the second installment of its series of studies on the persistence of Head Start effects. Its finding (see page xiv): virtually all academic effects disappear by the end of 1st grade. There is only one positive statistically significant finding out of eleven academic outcomes measured, the size of that effect is minuscule by recognized standards (it’s half way between zero and what most social scientists consider “small”), and the confidence in the finding is low by recognized standards. (Many authors would categorize it as “insignificant” rather than “significant” — it’s only significant at a 90% confidence interval, not the more common 95% confidence interval).

We have spent more than $100 billion on the program to date (ballpark estimate from Table 375 here) and HHS’s own research shows that its results diminish to essentially nothing by the end of the first grade.

There are other government education programs whose effects actually grow substantially over time, and that are comparatively economical. Consider the federal DC voucher program. Just a year or two after switching from public to private schools, the effect of the private schooling was not big enough to rise to the level of statistical significance. But by their third year in private schools, the evidence was clear that voucher-receiving students were reading more than two grade levels above a randomized control group that stayed in public schools.  This program, as I’ve previously documented, costs 1/4 as much per pupil as DC spends on public education: about $6,600 vs. $28,000.

But Congress, and particularly Democrats, have defunded the DC voucher program while raising spending on Head Start. President Obama is at the forefront of this travesty. If you weren’t already jaded and disgusted by education politics and its domination by employee unions opposed to educational choice, start now.

Head Start’s Impact Evanescent — HHS Study is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Despite the economy and the dogged opposition of powerful Big Ed, education tax credits are surviving and thriving. The latest state to jump into k-12 tax credits is Indiana. From the Friedman Foundation yesterday:

Indiana lawmakers today approved a $2.5 million scholarship tax credit program in the home state of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. The new scholarship program was inserted into the state’s budget and won approval in the late hours of the special legislative session. The bill, which passed the Senate 34-16 and the House 61-36, now goes to the governor who is anticipated to sign it in the coming days.

Unfortunately, the credit is only 50% for each dollar donated, unlike the more powerful ones in PA, FL, and AZ. But I know Friedman, School Choice Indiana and their allies will be fighting hard in coming years to increase the credit amount and program cap.

Sounds like Governor Mitch Daniels deserves kudos for keeping the bill in his budget and pushing for the program. And the word is that around 27 percent of the House Democrats voted for the budget despite the tax credit and virtual charter school programs that the teachers unions opposed. Big Ed ain’t what he used to be.

Education Tax Credits Pass in Indiana is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog