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

From a New York Times article on wealthy suburbanites opposing charter schools in their districts:

Millburn offers Mandarin only in high school, fueling the arguments of those seeking the new charters. “Kids are like sponges,” said Yanbin Ma, a Hanyu founder. “There are so many things they can absorb and become good at, and I feel that our public schools haven’t done enough to take advantage of that.”

But to Mr. Stewart, a leader in a growing opposition that includes Livingston mothers who have helped collect more than 800 petition signatures, this sounds “selfish.”

“Public education is basically a social contract — we all pool our money, so I don’t think I should be able to custom-design it to my needs,” he said, noting that he pays $15,000 a year in property taxes. “With these charter schools, people are trying to say, ‘I want a custom-tailored education for my children, and I want you, as my neighbor, to pay for it.’ ”

Could there be a philosophy of education any less compatible with a free society — or any society composed of unique individuals — than the one-size-must-fit-all, communal model championed by Mr. Stewart ? No way — yet that is exactly what we’ve got.

The Frightening Philosophy of Public Schooling, in a Nutshell is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Pennsylvania state House has just passed an expansion of its existing k-12 scholarship-donation tax credit program. The vote was a deafening 190 to 7 in a state that has voted Democratic in every one of the last five presidential elections.

Nevertheless, there is serious opposition to this expansion of education tax credits in the Senate, where several prominent lawmakers prefer a voucher bill. It’s not clear which path the legislature will ultimately take, but there seems to be considerable agreement on the goal: giving parents true freedom of choice in education.

A key point to consider, then, is which type of program is most likely to preserve the freedom and diversity of the education marketplace, thereby giving families a meaningful range of alternatives to choose from. I ran a regression study on precisely this question last fall (now forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of School Choice). What I found is that vouchers impose a large and statistically highly significant burden of additional regulation on private schools while tax credits do not.

This is not the only advantage of the tax credit program, but it is a compelling one.

Educational Freedom in Pennsylvania 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

A new voucher program in Indiana looks likely to be signed by Gov. Daniels soon, but without a slight modification it may not have the benign budgetary impact that is expected.

As written, the program could have a significant negative impact on state finances if families claim both the vouchers and funds from the state’s existing education tax credits.

There is nothing that precludes children who receive a voucher from also topping off that amount with private funds from the existing education tax credit program. That means a voucher student could accept, for example, $4,500 in government funds and then apply for a tax credit scholarship that reduces state revenue by, say, $2,000. The voucher student would cost the state $6,500, not the $4,500 that would be counted on the books. If state funding is 100 percent sensitive to enrollment, the state would save $5,000 on that student switching, and the net impact on state finances would be a $1,500 loss. In other words, the program could have a negative net impact on state finances due to double-dipping.

From a fiscal standpoint, the state would show an apparent “savings” based on the $4,500 voucher, but this would fail to take into account the reduced revenue due to the credit. And the law requires these on-paper-only savings to be passed out to public schools districts. The result? The state government could be out $7,000 on the student in this example, not the $4,500 it paid out in a voucher. The net impact wouldn’t be neutral, it would be a $2,000 loss.

This scenario looks only at how the vouchers might impact state finances. At the local level, the program is likely to have a strongly positive impact on the resources available for each student. But a school choice program’s impact on state finances — ensuring financial transparency, certainty, and a neutral or positive impact — is a critical concern in its own right.

Critics of expanding educational freedom always claim, incorrectly, that school choice programs are a drain on public resources. But the double-dipping that is allowed under this program could inadvertently prove them right — it would also make Indiana’s existing education tax credit program a mere appendage to the new government voucher system. In short, it’s an unforced error, and worth fixing.

Ensuring that Indiana’s New Voucher Program Lives up to Budgetary Expectations is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

After House Republicans’ weak first attempt at offering cuts to gargantuan federal spending — a proposal that included nary a flick at education-related outlays — and the Obama administration’s hinting that it would leave education totally untouched, there is a tiny bit of good news: Both the GOP and the administration are apparently willing to trim funding putatively intended to help educate people. But these are just tiny bones they’re throwing to people who know that the federal government likely does zero net good when it comes to actually educating people, and that there is no acceptable excuse not to make big cuts to federal “education” programs.

House Republicans, for their part, scheduled lots of education programs for shaves in their second attempt at making a reasonable budget proposal. All told, though, the cuts would amount to only about $4.9 billion out of a total Department of Education budget of about $63 billion. For those keeping track at home, that’s just a 7.7 percent cut.

Now, maybe that would be reasonable if ED-administered programs worked, but as we at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom have laid out repeatedly, they do not. Overall, they pour money into already cash-bloated K-12 and higher education systems; insulate public elementary and secondary schools from ever having to compete for and earn their money; and fuel rampant college tuition inflation by constantly increasing aid that lets schools raise their prices with impunity. Perhaps the most telling sign that the House GOP is not serious about really cutting Washington down to size, though, is that the laughable Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners program is not on their chopping block. If you won’t pick off this ridiculous, almost-on-the-ground-it’s-hanging-so-low fruit, you simply aren’t really trying.

For the Obama administration, while the details of their proposed cuts aren’t yet out, early Fox News reporting says the administration will propose cutting Pell-Grant spending by $100 billion over ten years. That’s a bit surprising, because President Obama has made getting as many people to graduate college as possible — regardless, sadly, of whether that means there’s actually greater learning – a key education goal. Moreover, constantly growing Pell has long been a way for federal politicians to demonstrate that they ”care” about educating all Americans. So, maybe, one cheer for the administration.

Unfortunately, as is often the case when it comes to budgeting, this might be a trick. An unnamed administration official reportedly told Fox that the administration will propose keeping the maximum Pell at $5,550 a year and would realize savings by ending year-round Pell eligibility. With year-round Pell, a student could get two grants in a calendar year for taking a regular academic-year load as well as summer school. According to the Fox News story, the ”official said the costs” of year-round Pell ”exceeded expectations and there was little evidence that students earn their degrees any faster.”

So why’s this potentially a trick? The budget experts could no doubt give you lots of reasons, but knowing education policy I can safely say one thing: It is far too early to say whether or not the year-round Pell would help students earn their degrees any faster. Why? Because year-round Pell was only instituted in 2008, much too recently to have any useful empirical data about its effect on graduation rates. It also seems likely that this will produce no savings regardless because students will still take Pell grants for the same number of total credit hours.

Of course, the main problem with Pell is that it enables schools to ratchet up their tuition rates, capturing all the aid and not making students any better off. Even bigger than this, though, is that almost certainly because spending on education plays so well politically, the administration is ignoring the same screaming reality as the House GOP: Federal spending on education does little if any educational good! Add to that the unconstitutionality of federal involvement and there is simply no acceptable argument – including a desire to “win the future” — for not eliminating federal spending done in the name of “education.”  Indeed, if we want to win the future, ending bankrupting spending we know does zero good is absolutely imperative.

A Bone Is Nice. Actually, No. is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

At one time or another over the past two decades, most school choice supporters have felt like the subject of the “Friends” theme song; that it hasn’t been their day, their week, their month, or even their year.

Things are different now. For one thing, choice programs have proliferated and grown over time, more are being introduced this year than perhaps ever before. And for another, well, this IS their week: the first national School Choice Week.

Events are being held all over the country to celebrate the idea that families should be able to easily choose the best schools for their kids, and that schools should have to compete for the privilege of serving them.

Here at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, we’re dipping into the future to see what it holds. How are large scale public/private school choice programs working out in countries that have had them for two or three decades? To find out, we’ve invited the founder of the largest private school chain in Sweden and a Chilean economist researching his own nation’s program to share their experiences and findings on Friday at noon.

Given how alien for-profit k-12 schooling appears to most Americans, imagine the reaction Peje Emilsson got in 1999 when he proposed founding a chain of for-profit schools in Sweden. Already the founder of a multinational communications firm, Peje broached the idea with some of his nation’s top entrepreneurs and economists. If you’d like to find out what they had to say, and how his idea has turned out in practice, you won’t get another chance any time soon. Hope you can join us on Friday — to register for free, click here!

“… your month, or even your year” 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

NRO editor Robert VerBruggen has weighed in a couple of times this week on the relative merits of school vouchers and education tax credits, raising interesting and important issues.

In response to my earlier post today about an education tax credit case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, VerBruggen writes:

If the Supreme Court buys this logic — which I suppose is sound on its face — it could lead to some very interesting programs. Any time it’s illegal for a government to fund something directly, it could simply make a dollar-for-dollar “tax credit” program for it, allowing sympathetic taxpayers to technically “donate” — but actually just redirect the taxes they’d otherwise have to pay — to the cause.

This is actually an argument presented by critics of the program in their brief asking the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal that it… just decided to hear. The fact that this argument is fallacious is no doubt one reason that the Supreme Court decided to reject critics’ request. Here’s where it goes wrong:

Under a constitutional tax credit program such as Arizona’s, the state has no power to pressure/encourage taxpayers to do anything that the state could not do directly. Taxpayers can choose to give no money to religious charities, or to give all their money to them. The state is unable to affect their decisions in any way.

As Ilya Shapiro and I pointed out in Cato’s amicus brief in this case, this is identical to the law pertaining to federal charitable tax deductions. Religious charities get more tax deductible donations than any other kind of entity, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld their constitutionality because the decisions regarding such donations are left entirely to the unfettered choices of private citizens.

While it would be unconstitutional for a tax credit program to only allow donations to religious charities, it is perfectly consistent with the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court precedent for a tax credit program to be religiously neutral, leaving the donating decisions to private citizens.

But there’s much more to it than this. Credits are not just constitutional, they offer an important advantage over vouchers. Under voucher programs, all taxpayers must support every kind of schooling, which can be a source of social conflict in a diverse society. [Think liberals being forced to fund religious-conservative-capitalist schooling; or conservatives being forced to fund schools supporting homosexuality as natural and without any inherent moral implications]. While this doesn’t violate the U.S. constitution (see Zelman v. Simmons Harris), it’s still a less-than-ideal outcome, as was observed in all three dissents in the Zelman case.

Tax credits, as I explained in the last section of our amicus brief (p. 21), avoid this source of social conflict. Not just families but taxpayers enjoy the benefits of free choice and voluntary association. Tax credits are thus a way to ensure universal access to a free educational marketplace without putting citizens into conflict with one another on matters of conscience. For this and many other reasons, they are the best realistic policy for advancing educational freedom yet devised.

School Vouchers vs. Tax Credits 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

Voiceover: Are you tired of trying to use private school choice policy to remove mediocre, incompetent or just plain dangerous teachers from public schools? Just look at how clumsy that can be!

This poor school choice supporter is struggling just to get enough kids into private schools so that the public schools notice and start firing bad teachers! What a waste!!! Fordham Industries pitch-man extra-ordinaire Public-Mad Mike Petrilli has a better way!

Petrilli: “Rather than use choice to set in motion a chain reaction that ends with the removal of bad teachers from the classroom, why not go right at the bad teachers themselves?”!

Voiceover: Don’t waste your time with systemic reforms helping some kids today and all kids tomorrow! Just buy in to Teacher-B-Gone Safety System® and see your public school systems shine!!!*

*Fordham Industries makes no claims as to political feasibility, impact on educational freedom, immediate assistance to children in failing schools, parental rights, religious educational options, pedagogical diversity, educational innovation, public value conflicts, size of the tax burden, fairness to private school families, student achievement, or civic values. Offer not valid in any states.

Behold the Astoundingly Amazing Brand-New Teacher-B-Gone Safety System® from Fordham Industries! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“…a little better all the time.”

Some school choice supporters and philanthropists began to suffer burnout a few years ago, disappointed that private school choice programs had not yet scaled up massively a decade-and-a-half after the first modern program was launched in Milwaukee. That disappointment is likely to give way in the coming years to new hope, and looking back a generation from now, 2010 may well be seen as a turning point in the history of educational freedom.

Last week, a private school choice bill sponsored by a Democrat (the Rev. James Meeks), passed the Democratic-controlled Illinois Senate. Even if this particular bill isn’t enacted into law, the impact of its passage in the Senate will reverberate around the country. Also in the past week, the Florida Senate passed a major expansion of its education tax credit program that would allow that program to expand every year in which demand for it has grown. Should current trends continue, that would allow it to become the biggest private school choice program in the country in a matter of years. It, too, was defended on the Senate floor by African American Democrats. And just a few weeks before that, a Democratic filmmaker saw his pro-school-choice education documentary picked up by Paramount Pictures.

It’s not even April yet!

2010 is shaping up to be a very good year indeed.

“You’ve Got to Admit It’s Getting Better…” 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

Illinois state senator James Meeks, an African American Democrat and long-time opponent of school choice, just switched sides.

In doing so, he swells the small but growing ranks of Democrats in Florida, New Jersey, and the nation’s capital, among others, who support giving parents an easy choice between public and private schools.

Like Wile E. Coyote, national Democrats have run off a political cliff in their reflexive opposition to educational freedom.  And like Wile,  they’re experiencing a temporary suspension of the law of gravity — not yet suffering for their mistake.

But we all know that the cloud at Wile’s feet eventually dissipates, and he realizes that he’s no longer on solid ground. By then, it’s too late.

As someone much happier under divided government than one party rule, I hope national Democratic leaders get a clue, and notice that the’ve left solid ground on education. There is still time for Obama and company to make it back to the cliff’s edge, calling for the expansion rather than the termination of DC’s K-12 scholarship program, and voicing support for education tax credits at the state level, as many of the party’s state leaders have already done. 

States are going to continue passing and expanding private school choice programs with or without the support of national Democrats. If president Obama and friends continue clinging to the anvil of government schooling while that happens, we all know how it’s going to turn out.

Beep. Beep.

(HT: Alexander Russo)

Why National Democrats are Like Wile E. Coyote is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

When both the New York Times and Fox News poke fun at a school district it’s a good guess that district has done something pretty silly. That seems to be the case in Newark, Delaware, where the Christina School District just suspended a 6-year-old boy for 45 days because he brought a dreaded knife-fork-spoon combo tool to school. District officials, in their defense, say they had no choice — the state’s “zero tolerance” law demanded the punishment.

Now, the first thing I’ll say is that I was very fortunate there were no zero-tolerance laws  — at least that I knew of — when I was a kid. Like most boys, I took a pocket knife to school from time to time, and like most boys I never hurt a soul with it. (I’m pretty sure, though, that I was stabbed by a pencil at least once.) I also played a lot of games involving tackling, delivered and received countless “dead arm” punches in the shoulder, and brought in Star Wars figures armed with…brace yourself!…laser guns! I can only imagine how many suspension days I’d have received had current disciplinary regimes been in place back then.

Before completely trashing little ol’ Delaware and all the other places without tolerance, however, there is a flip side to this story: Some kids really are immediate threats to their teachers and fellow students. And as the recent stomach-wrenching violence in Chicago has vividly illustrated, there are some schools where no one is safe. In other words, there are cases and situations where zero tolerance is warranted.

So how do you balance these things? How do you have zero-tolerance for those who need it, while letting discretion and reason reign for everyone else?  And how do you do that when there is no clear line dividing what is too dangerous to tolerate and what is not?

The answer is educational freedom, as it is with all of the things that diverse people are forced to fight over because they all have to support a single system of government schools! Let parents who are not especially concerned about danger, or who value freedom even if it engenders a little more risk, choose schools with discipline policies that give them what they want.  Likewise, let parents who want their kids in a zero-tolerance institution do the same.

Ultimately, let parents and schools make their own decisions, and no child will be subjected to disciplinary codes with which his parents disagree; strictness will be much better correlated with the needs of individual children; and perhaps most importantly, discipline policies will make a lot more sense for everyone involved.

Zero Tolerance for Difference is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A millennium or so ago, Steve Martin played a stadium with his stand-up act. He got the crowd of tens of thousands to repeat a series of statements in unison. My favorite, for sheer irony: “We Are all Individuals.”

But, the thing is, we are.

This is why I never cease to be amazed by disagreements like the one currently playing out between the curriculum groups “Common Core,” and “Partnership for 21st Century Skills.”

Is there really one curriculum that is right for every child in this nation of 300 million people? Really?

Rather than fighting a winner-take-all Shootout at the O.K. Curriculum, which is what our illustrious leaders seem to want, how about this peace-loving alternative: we let teachers teach whatever and however they want, and we let families choose and pay for whichever schools they think are best for their kids (with financial aid for those who need it).

‘Cause the thing is, a quarter century of econometric research is repeating, in Steve-Martin-Like unison that: educational freedom works.

Repeat after Me: “We Are All Individuals” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

After all of the rancor last week over his planned back-to-school address, it was predictable that in the end President Obama would offer a largely non-controversial speech about working hard and staying in school. If he sticks to the text released today, that is pretty much what he will do. Unfortunately, whether or not that was his original intent – and no one knows for sure but the President and his advisors – many Obama supporters will likely use the relatively staid final product as grounds to smear people concerned about the speech as right-wing kooks or out-of-control partisans. At the very least, such an outcome would be in keeping with a lot of the email I’ve gotten since the story first broke. But it will miss several critical points:

• No matter how innocuous the content of the speech, this could certainly be an address with very political goals, intended to cast the president in the warm glow of a man who just cares about kids. From kissing babies, to photo-op reading sessions featuring cute tikes on classroom floors, this could be just another instance of the old practice of using children as props for political gain. And how presumptuous of the president to make himself – rather than the children, their teachers, and their schools – the center of attention on what is the first day of school for millions of kids. Finally, add the parts of the speech that sound like the President patting himself on the back for overcoming difficulties as a youth, and the speech could easily have political aims.

• Many people feared, thanks to politically and ideologically suggestive lesson guides created by the U.S. Department of Education, that the speech would be an effort at indoctrination. Critically, it was only after very loud, initial outrage that the Department made changes to the guides and the White House announced it would release the text of the speech ahead of time. Yet administration defenders act like everyone knew from the outset that the speech would just be about working hard and staying in school. And who knows what the speech might have looked like had there not been so negative an initial reaction.

• Despite its generally innocuous tone, the speech does contain some controversial political and ideological assertions, including that “setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools” is the job of the federal government. Also, the things the President highlights as worthy aspirations are disproportionately government and non-profit work. And then there’s this self-aggrandizing assertion: “Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn.”

• Ultimately, no matter what happens now that the speech has been published, one thing cannot be ignored or spun: When government controls education, wrenching political and social conflict is inevitable. Americans are very diverse – ideologically, ethnically, morally, religiously – but they all have to support a single system of government schools. As a result, they are constantly forced to fight to have their values and desires respected, and the losers inevitably have their liberty infringed. In this case, reasonable people who want their children to hear the President must fight it out with  equally reasonable people who do not want their children to watch the speech in school. It’s a situation completely at odds with a free society, but as we have seen not just with the current conflict, but seemingly endless battles over history textbooks, the teaching of human origins, sex education, and on and on, it is inevitable when government runs the schools. Which is why the most important lesson to be learned from this presidential-address donnybrook is that Americans need educational freedom. We need universal school choice or crippling conflicts like this will keep on coming, liberty will continue to be compromised, and our society will be ripped farther and farther apart.

Staid Speech Is Cold Comfort is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Appearing on Fox News last night, Cato scholar Neal McCluskey weighed in on Obama’s upcoming address to students:

Obama in the Classroom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Blogging for the Newark, N.J. Star-Ledger, politicial science prof. Thurman Hart presents this objection to school vouchers:

[T]he effect of it would be that state, and maybe federal funds, would be used for the expressed [sic] purpose of teaching Catholic dogma. My opposition to that has nothing to do with my status as an Episcopalian – I don’t want All Saints Episcopalian Day School in Hoboken to get state funds to teach Episcopalian dogma

There is merit to his concern. Many of this nation’s early immigrants had fled compelled support for religion and other infrigements on their freedom of belief in their mother countries. But there is a way to avoid these problems while simultaneously ensuring educational freedom and choice for all: education tax credits.

These programs cut taxes on families who cover the cost of their own children’s education, and on individuals and businesses who donate to non-profit scholarship funds for lower-income students. If you choose to participate, you also choose the institution that gets your money — either the school you send your own children to or the scholarship orgnization that receives your contribution. In the latter case, you simply pick the scholarship fund you think is doing the best job helping low-income families.

If you don’t want to fund a religious education for Catholics or Muslims, you don’t have to. You can choose a secular scholarship fund or one serving Episcopalians, Jews or Hindus. For those not particularly sensitive to the religiosity of other families’ schooling, there are scholarship funds that make no religious distinctions at all.

This is a way to unite like-minded donors and parents without the use of compulsion, and without inhibiting the very freedom and clear sense of mission that are the entire raison-d’etre of school choice. It is also in the best spirit of individual liberty and cooperation among free people that we will be celebrating early next month…

An Education Solution that’s Beyond Belief is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Christopher J. Christie just decisively won New Jersey’s Republican gubernatorial primary, but had to veer away from his middle-of-the-road plan and venture into some traditionally conservative territory to do it, according to news accounts. Will that be a problem for him in the general election? Not necessarily. As NorthJersey.com’s Charles Stile observes, Christie’s ardent support for private school choice is not the polarizing stance it once was: these programs “once championed by conservative ideologues, are being embraced by urban Democrats.”

As we’ve been saying at the Center for Educational Freedom for some time now, the post-partisan age of school choice is well within sight, and draws closer every day. The last politicos to see that will find themselves on the wrong side of history, and the wrong side of voters in both parties.

No Longer among the “Usual Left-Right Battles” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog