Punish Me? I Didn’t Do Anything—and Johnny’s Guilty, Too!
It’s hard to pin down what’s more frustrating about Michael Petrilli’s response to my recent NRO op-ed on national standards: the rhetorical obfuscation about what Fordham and other national-standardizers really want, or the grade-school effort to escape discipline by saying that, hey, some kids are even worse!
Let’s start with the source of aggravation that by now must seem very old to regular Cato@Liberty readers, but that has to be constantly revisited because national standardizers are so darned disciplined about their message: The national-standards drive is absolutely not “state led and voluntary,” and by all indications this is totally intentional. Federal arm-twisting hasn’t just been the result of ”unforced errors,” as Petrilli suggests, but is part of a conscious strategy.
There was, of course, Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring Students Receive a World-class Education, the 2008 joint publication of Achieve, Inc., the National Governors Association, and the Council of Chief State School Officers that called for Washington to implement “tiered incentives” to push states to adopt “common core” standards. Once those organizations formed the Common Core State Standards Initiative they reissued that appeal while simultaneously — and laughably — stating that “the federal government has had no role in the development of the common core state standards and will not have a role in their implementation [italics added].”
Soon after formation of the CCSSI, the Obama administration created the “Race to the Top,” a $4.35-billion program that in accordance with the CCSSI’s request — as opposed to its hollow no-Feds “promise” — went ahead and required states to adopt national standards to be fully competitive for taxpayer dough.
The carnival of convenient contradiction has continued, and Fordham — despite Petrilli’s assertion that “nobody is proposing” that “federal funding” be linked “to state adoption of the common core standards and tests” — has been running it. Indeed, just like President Obama’s “blueprint” for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — better known as No Child Left Behind — Fordham’s ESEA “Briefing Book” proposes (see page 11) that states either adopt the Common Core or have some other federally sanctioned body certify a state’s standards as just as good in order to get federal money. So there would be an ”option” for states, but it would be six of one, half-dozen of the other, and the Feds would definitely link taxpayer dough to adoption of Common Core standards and tests.
Tight on Standards, Loose Grip on Reality
As promised (actually, a week later than promised) I have read the Fordham Institute “Briefing Book” for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act. As expected, it’s big on trumpeting national standards, and squishy on almost everything else. Perhaps most aggravating, though, is how loose it is in characterizing the views of those of us at the Cato Institute, who apparently are part of the big group of education analysts who love the idea of Washington lavishing money on education but are, presumably, too blinkered to want to get results for it:
The local controllers. These folks, led by conservative and libertarian think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, want Uncle Sam, for the most part, to butt out of education policy—but to keep sending money. They see NCLB as an aberrant overreach, an unprecedented (and perhaps unconstitutional) foray into the states’ domain. Many within this faction also favor reform, particularly greater parental choice of schools, but at day’s end their federal policy position resembles that of the system defenders. They want to keep federal dollars flowing, albeit at a much more modest rate than those on the left; but they want to remove the accountability that currently accompanies these monies. They have given up on Uncle Sam as an agent for positive change, period. And they have enormous confidence that communities, states, and parents, unfettered from and unpestered by Washington, will do right by children.
Where, exactly, has someone from Cato written that Uncle Sam should keep dropping ducats on education? Certainly not here, where I call for complete elimination of federal involvement in education save civil rights enforcement, and a return of all federal education funds to taxpayers. You won’t find it here, where Chris Edwards calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and zeroing out all its spending. And you won’t discover it here, where Andrew Coulson and I propose that “NCLB not be reauthorized and that the federal government return to its constitutional bounds by ending its involvement in elementary and secondary education.”
Sadly, reporting the truth doesn’t appear to be as important to Fordham as producing a strawman — some group that’s portrayed as totally irrational, allowing Fordham to show how ”realistic” they are by coming up with relatively reasonable sounding policy proposals. It’s a grating, superficial tactic employed by Fordham that Jay Greene and his gang have long harped on.
The funny thing is, in the end there isn’t anything particularly realistic about Fordham’s proposal. Basically, Fordham would have the federal government force all states to adopt the Common Core standards — while adding science and history standards — to get back money that came from their citizens to begin with, or adopt standards that some state-federal hybrid panel of “experts” deemed “just as rigorous as the Common Core.” This would somehow prevent “an unwarranted intrusion by the federal government in state matters.” Because, of course, it is much less intrusive to have an option of having some federally mandated Frankenstein’s panel tell you if the standards you came up with are as good as the federal standards, or just having the feds set one standard.
Then there’s Fordham’s accountability — er, “transparency” — proposal, which would force states to annually spit out “reams” of data on outcomes “sliced and diced in every way imaginable.” Once the tons of data confetti are dumped, Fordham would rely on public pressure from seeing the mess to force reform. And how would the public force said reform? Don’t worry about it — “realism” dictates that all we need are national curriculum standards, testing, and data, data, data!
So, sadly, Fordham’s “realism” fails where it always seems to fail: In ignoring actual reality. Thanks to the phenomenon of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs that is a basic part of representative government, the people who benefit most directly from specific government policies will be most heavily involved in the politics behind those policies, and will bend them to serve themselves, not the “public good.” In the case of education, the people employed by the schools — the teachers, administrators, bureaucrats, etc. — have the most power, and will gut anything used to hold them accountable, just as they have for decades. And there is nothing — nothing — in the Fordham proposal that will keep this from happening again, no matter how centralized the standards or humongous the data dumps. Indeed, centralized standards provide one-stop shopping for special interests!
Only one thing breaks the concentrated benefits, diffuse costs conundrum, and it is taking government out of the equation and forcing educators to earn the money of customers. But for Fordham and others who, ultimately, seem to want to dictate what every child must learn, that is a bit of realism much too far.
Let’s Not Lose Sight of a Real Education Market
Over the last few days Jay Greene, the Fordham Institute’s Kathleen Porter-Magee, and several other edu-thinkers have been arguing about whether national curriculum standards would destroy a competitive market in education, and a market that already provides the uniform standards Fordham wants Washington to impose. But let’s be very clear: We haven’t had a real market — a free market — in education for a long time.
Sadly, I’m afraid Jay started this whole mess, though he certainly knows what a free market in education would look like and I don’t think he intended to confuse the issue. Indeed, he doesn’t use the term “free market,” but mainly writes about the “competitive market between communities.” His argument is that Americans over time picked standardized curricula and schools by moving to districts that provided such things. He is no doubt at least partially right, though the case is hardly open and shut. Indeed, there is strong historical evidence that district consolidation and uniformity was often pushed on small districts from outside, especially in urban areas. It is also quite possible that many people moved to districts with uniform offerings not in search of such offerings, but in search of something else that happened to coincide with them. Most notably, industrialization brought many people to cities in search of employment, and school uniformity often came with that. Finally, the economist whose work inspired Jay’s post notes that while he believes small rural districts died largely due to residents abandoning them, he concedes that there is a “lack of direct evidence connecting rural property values with local decisions about consolidation.”
Those caveats aside, Jay’s point is a still good one that I have made before, most notably when discussing schooling and social cohesion: People will tend to have their children learn many ”common” things because that is the key to personal success. People will learn what they need to in order to work effectively and successfully in society. Moreover, people will simply tend to gravitate toward things that work.
So the main problem in the Greene-Fordham debate is not that Jay’s points are necessarily wrong, it’s that “competitive market between communities” is too easily misconstrued as “free market,” and it fails to acknowledge the gigantic inefficiencies that come from government monopolies, whether controlled at the district, state, or federal level. Those include the massive, expensive waste that fills the pockets of special interests employed by the system; constant conflict over what the schools will teach; and at-best very ponderous competition — if you want a better school you have to buy a new house — that quashes crucial innovation and specialization. Worse yet, it leads to the following kind of crucial, damaging misunderstanding by Porter-Magee:
For more than a decade we have been conducting a natural experiment where we let market forces drive standards setting at the state level. The result? A swift and sure race to the bottom. A majority of states had failed to set rigorous standards for their students—and had failed to create effective assessments that could be used to track student mastery of that content. In fact, the whole impetus behind the Common Core State Standards Initiative was to address what was essentially a market failure in education.
This is wrong, as they say, on so many levels!
Not Possible in This Dimension
Over at the Fordham Institute, Senior Fellow Peter Meyer continues the assault on logic that Fordham has insisted on perpetrating when it comes to national curriculum standards. Writing about a New York Times story on the deceptive curriculum “guidelines” manifesto released by a number of national-standards supporters earlier this week, Meyer declares that:
Contrary to popular belief (especially in some Tea Party circles), a national curriculum, done properly, does not threaten local control. As we learn in this story, plenty of folks, including Randi Weingarten and our own Checker Finn, have signed on to a “common curriculum,” which its proponents say will constitute only about half of a school’s “academic time.”
Maybe I’m missing some very small but incredibly powerful wrinkle in the logic here, but it seems to me that by definition forcing local districts to use national standards must threaten local control. Indeed, it must not only threaten it, it must actually defeat it. And this is in no way changed by the curriculum having to account for “only about half” of a school’s time: Hours formerly controlled locally are now controlled nationally, which is inescapably a major incursion on local control.
Maybe in some dimension white is black, black is white, and ants are really walruses. But in this dimension, as far as I know, the laws of reality and logic must still apply — even to national curriculum standards.
Hooray for Fordham — Oooh, Wait
On many, many occasions I have taken the Fordham Institute to task for its big-government conservatism. Well, for about 90 percent of my time reading the latest from Fordham president Chester Finn, I was preparing to celebrate a conversion story of timeless proportions. It seemed Finn had finally gotten it, as he railed against the myriad failures of Washington and the foolishness of looking to government to solve our problems. I thought Finn had finally grasped that life and society are far too complicated for any puppet master of group or puppet masters to micromanage. I thought, at last, he’d fully appreciated the huge problem of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, which give special interests so much power. I thought maybe he’d read that copy of Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice I’d sent to Fordham VP Michael Petrilli a few years ago.
And then I read Finn’s concluding paragraphs:
Even modest-seeming promises don’t get kept. Arne Duncan sensibly wants us to focus on turning around the lowest-performing 5 percent of U.S. schools. Seems far more doable than NCLB’s labeling more than half our schools as needing surgery. Yet who really believes that the Education Department’s program of School Improvement Grants will yield this result? Nobody from Washington is flying out to turn around individual schools—as if any of them knew how—yet practically nobody outside the Beltway has a clue how to do it, either. Another dashed hope and unkept promise? Another issue for the Tea Party? Part of the reason for the (idiotic) calls to eliminate the Education Department altogether?
Government, in short, finds it difficult to fulfill its current responsibilities, coordinate its various parts, and honor its core obligations, many of which are vital just to keep us healthy, safe, and alive. How many more things should it try to do? Are not more promises by government a formula for failure and disappointment? A boost to libertarians who would have government cease and desist from just about everything? What if we just settled for scrambled eggs that don’t make us ill?
So let me get this straight: In light of constant, failed, bankrupting federal overreaching. In light of seemingly non-stop federal power-grabbing. In light of the Constitution’s very clear limits on federal authority that proscribe federal meddling in education – but, as most libertarians will tell you, rightly empower Washington to do some things – it is libertarians whom Finn implies are a bit crazy, and it is calling for elimination of the Department of Education that he concludes is “idiotic”?
Unfortunately — and amazingly — you read that right.
Fordham Feeds the Paranoia
You might recall several weeks back when Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called people like me “paranoid” for seeing federal money driving states to adopt national education standards as cause for serious concern that (a) the feds will take over schools’ curricula, and (b) the new federal curriculum will be taken over by potent special interests like teachers’ unions. (You know, the kinds of special interests that can get Democrats to give them $10 billion by cutting food stamps.) Well, in last week’s Education Gadfly, Fordham published a piece by Eugenia Kemble, president of the union-dedicated Albert Shanker Institute, saying that national standards demand a national curriculum.
This interesting little happening — Fordham publishing a piece by a union stalwart arguing that a national curriculum must go with national standards — didn’t go unnoticed by fellow paranoiac Greg Forster, who is now in a blog dispute with Kemble. It makes for telling reading, especially Kemble’s rejoinder. It features an all-too-casual use of the charged term “balkanization” to seemingly describe anything not centralized, and utterly fails to mention federal funding when implying that the common standards push is state led and voluntary.
Unfortunately, Kemble mainly just sidesteps Forster’s primary point: Fordham has provided yet more evidence that national standards funded by the feds will lead to a national curriculum that could very well be controlled by special interests. Heck, Fordham is in league with at least one component of the teachers’ unions here, which is fine if they share the same goals. All Forster is trying to emphasize is that it is ridiculous to call people crazy when they simply point out what so much evidence seems to show.
Fordham Criticized Again
Great stuff by Jay Greene this morning on yesterday’s Fordham Institute victory dance. Greene rips into the notion that conservatives should support standardization of every American kid, and even dares attack Fordham’s calculation that on “the right” only about six government-loathing libertarians have fought national standards.
Perhaps most important, while I explained (yet again) why the Fordham folks and other big-government conservatives will never get the sustained high standards they want out of a government monopoly, Jay nailed the even more fundamental point:
The real divide here is between people who think that policies are best when decisions are decentralized and choice and competition are enhanced versus people who think that there is a “right way” that should be imposed centrally and should constrain choice and competition.
Unfortunately for Fordham, whether we’re comparing the U.S. to the Soviet economy, or educational freedom to government schooling, choice and competition win every time. Every time, that is, except in political decisions like adopting national standards.
Fordham Institute 1, Education 0
On NRO today, the Fordham Institute’s Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli take a little time to gloat about the continuing spread of national education standards. In addition, as is their wont, they furnish hollow pronouncements about the Common Core being good as far as standards go, and ”a big, modernized country on a competitive planet” needing national standards. Oh, and apparently having counted the opponents of national standards on “the right,” they note that there are just “a half-dozen libertarians who don’t much care for government to start with.”
Now, there are more than six conservatives and libertarians who have fought national standards. But Finn and Petrilli are sadly correct that most conservatives haven’t raised a finger to stop a federal education takeover — and this is a federal takeover – that they would have screamed bloody murder about ten years ago. There are many reasons for this, but no doubt a big one is that too many conservatives really are big-government conservatives committed, not to constitutionally constrained government, but controlling government themselves. If they think they can write the national standards, then national standards there should be.
These kinds of conservatives just never learn. As I have explained more times than I care to remember, government schooling will ultimately be controlled by the people it employs because they are the most motivated to engage in education politics. And naturally, their goal will be to stay as free of outside accountability as possible!
This is not theoretical. It is the clear lesson to be learned from the failure of state-set standards and accountability across the country — not to mention decades of federal education impotence – that Fordhamites constantly bewail. Indeed, Finn and Petrilli lament it again in their NRO piece, complaining that “until now…the vast majority of states have failed to adopt rigorous standards, much less to take actions geared to boosting pupil achievement.” And why is this? Politics! As they explained in their 2006 publication To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests for America’s Schools:
The state standards movement has been in place for almost fifteen years. For almost ten of those years, we…have reviewed the quality of state standards. Most were mediocre-to-bad ten years ago, and most are mediocre-to-bad today. They are generally vague, politicized, and awash in wrongheaded fads and nostrums.
At this point, I really have nothing new to say. That political reality will gut national standards while making the public schooling monopoly even worse is clear if you’re willing to acknowledge it. Regretably, the folks at Fordham — and many conservatives — just aren’t. So congratulations on your victory, Fordham. To everyone else, my deepest condolences.
Plowing Through the Defenses of National Education Standards
Arguably the most troubling aspect of the push for national education standards has been the failure — maybe intentional, maybe not — of standards supporters to be up front about what they want and openly debate the pros and cons of their plans. Unfortunately, as Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios laments today, supporters are using the same stealthy approach to implement their plans on an unsuspecting public.
Standing in stark contrast to most of his national-standards brethren is the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli, who graciously came to Cato last week to debate national standards and is now in a terrific blog exchange with the University of Arkansas’s Jay Greene. Petrilli deserves a lot of credit for at least trying to answer such crucial questions as whether adopting the standards is truly voluntary, and if there are superior alternatives to national standards. You can read Jay’s initial post here, Mike’s subsequent response here, and Jay’s most recent reply right here.
I’m not going to leap into most of Jay and Mike’s debate , though it covers a lot of the same ground we hit in our forum last week, which you can check out here. I do want to note two things, though: (1) While I truly do appreciate Mike’s openly grappling with objections to what might be Fordham’s biggest reform push ever, I think his arguments don’t stand up to Jay’s, and (2) I think Mike’s identifying national media scrutiny as what will prevent special-interest capture of national standards is about as encouraging as BP telling Gulf-staters ”we’ve got a plan!”
Let’s delve into #2.
For starters, how much scrutiny does the national media give to legislating generally? Reporters might hit the big stuff and whatever is highly contentious, but even then how much of the important details do they offer? Think about the huge health care debate that just dominated the nation’s attention. How many details on the various bills debated did anybody get through the major media? How much clarity? Heck, sometimes legislators were debating bills that even they hadn’t seen, much less reporters. Of course, the health care bill was much bigger than, say, the No Child Left Behind Act, but remember how long after passage of NCLB it was before the Department of Education, much less the media, was able to nail down all of its important parts?
Which brings us to a whole different layer of policy making, one major media wade into even less often than legislating: writing regulations. How many stories have you read, or watched on TV news, about the writing of regulations for implementing anything, education or otherwise? I’d imagine precious few, yet this is where often vaguely written statutes are transformed into on-the-ground operations. It’s also where the special interests are almost always represented — after all, they’re the ones who will be regulated — but average taxpayers and citizens? Don’t go looking for them.
Run Away from ‘Common’ Education Standards
A couple of days ago, Fordham Institute president Chester Finn declared on NRO that conservatives should embrace new, national education standards from the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Today I respond to him on The Corner, and let’s just say it’s clear that neither conservatives, nor anybody else, should embrace national standards.
Oh, one more thing: I shouldn’t have to keep saying this to savvy Washington insiders like the folks at Fordham, but when the federal government bribes states with their own citizens’ tax money to do something, doing that thing is hardly voluntary, at least in any reasonable sense.
For more wise thoughts on the national standards issue, check out this interview with Jay Greene, and this Sacramento Bee piece by Ben Boychuk. Oh, and this interview with yours truly.
The Paucity of Poor Kids in Many Public Schools
There’s a widespread belief that public schools are homogeneous and all inclusive while private schools are bastions of the elite. This was proven to be a myth decades ago by the renowned sociologist James Coleman, and as far as I know, that pattern of findings hasn’t changed in recent years.
Nevertheless, the myth continues. A new Fordham Institute paper provides a partial antidote, pointing out that quite a few public schools enroll virtually no low-income kids, making them bastions of the elite. Where the Fordham paper trips up a bit is in calling these elite public schools “private public schools.” As already noted above, private schools are, on average, better economically integrated than their government counterparts, so this phrase is exactly backwards and, as Sara Mead points out, is quite a slap in the face to the many private schools that do yeoman’s work serving large numbers of low-income students. Still, good to have folks taking note of these data.
National Standards Defector
Liam Julian used to work for the Evil Empire: the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, leader of the freedom-crushing, national-curricular-standards movement. (Actually, Fordham’s not really evil, supporting much school choice, but I’m determined to use this metaphor.) But in grand, Soviet-dissident style, Julian has turned against his former masters. The co-editor of Fordham’s 2006 report To Dream the Impossible Dream: Four Approaches to National Standards and Tests for America’s Schools, Julian has since become the managing editor at Policy Review, and in a recent Weekly Standard article made clear that he’s seen the light on national standards. Sounding a lot like, well, me, Julian wrote:
America’s current system of state-based educational standards isn’t great–far from it. But the very factors that contribute to the shoddiness of so many state standards are compounded at the national level, where every interest group from the textbook manufacturers to the national teachers’ unions to the Springfield Elementary School Herodotus Society will want to have its say.
Needless to say, this turn of events hasn’t made the Fordham folks very happy. But sooner or later, just like communism, an idea clearly divorced from reality simply cannot be sustained.
And so I say: Welcome to the (educationally) free world, Liam Julian! We’re glad to have you with us!
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