We Must Protect This Failing House! (And To Heck With the Kids In It)
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.
Why is Waiting for “Superman” Pushing Kryptonite?
You’ve probably heard it already, but if not, you should know that on Friday the documentary Waiting for “Superman” — from An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim — will be opening in select theaters around the country. The film, about how hard it is to access good education in America thanks to adults putting their interests first, follows several children as they hope beyond hope to get into oversubscribed charter schools. It is said by those who’ve seen it to be a tear-jerker and call to arms to substantially reform American education.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t promote real, essential reform: Taking money away from special-interest dominated government schools and letting parents control it.
The movie does flirt — from what I know, that is, without having yet seen it — with school choice, lionizing charter schools. But let’s not forget that while many charter schools and their founders have tremendous vision and drive, charters are still public schools, and as such are easily smothered by politically potent special interests like teacher unions. Moreover, while charter schools are chosen, charter schooling still keeps money — and therefore power – out of the hands of parents. Together, these things explain why there are so many heartbreaking charter lotteries to film: there is almost no ability or incentive to scale up good schooling models to meet all the desperate demand.
But isn’t the goal for no child to have to wait for Superman? If so, then why not give parents the power to choose good schools (and leave bad ones) right now by instituting widespread school choice? Indeed, we’re quickly losing room in good institutions because parochial schools – which have to charge tuition to stay in business — simply can’t compete with “free” alternatives. If we were to let parents control education funds immediately, however, they could get their kids into those disappearing seats while the seats are still around, and we would finally have the freedom and consumer-driven demand necessary to see good schools widely replicated.
Unfortunately, Waiting for “Superman” doesn’t just seem to want to make people wait for good schools by promoting charter schools and not full choice. On its “take action” website, it prominently promotes the very opposite of parent empowerment: Uniform, government-imposed, national standards for every public school in America.
Rather than let parents access the best curriculum for their unique children, the Waiting for “Superman” folks want to give the federal government power. Of course, the website doesn’t say that Washington will control “common” standards, but make no mistake: Federal money has been driving the national standards train, and what Washington funds, it ultimately controls. And there is no better way to complete the public schooling monopoly — to let the teacher unions, administrator associations, and other adult interests do one-stop shopping for domination — than to centralize power in one place.
The people behind Waiting for “Superman” are no doubt well intentioned, and their film worth seeing. But pushing kryptonite is pushing kryptonite, and it has to be stopped.
Take Off the Blinders: Diversity Demands Educational Freedom
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).
“Stimulus” = Education Funding Floor?
We were warned.
When Washington passed the so-called “stimulus” bill, with its tens-of-billions for K-12 education, we were warned that the money wouldn’t just provide a one-time infusion of supposedly economy-saving cash. No, it would furnish a towering new spending floor for already super-funded government schools and numerous other beneficiaries.
Well here come the sky lifts again. According to Education Week, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) is pushing legislation that would pile $23 billion in new federal funding into education once the stimulus cash dries up. And this money — which, of course, we don’t actually have – is intended not only to protect the jobs of teachers and other staff, but add even more employees to the obscene jobs program that is public schooling.
Would this be a good time to mention that the Constitution gives the federal government zero authority to fund or control education? Oh, who cares about that?
Obama’s Education Proposal Still a Bottomless Bag
This morning the Obama Administration officially released its proposal for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (aka, No Child Left Behind). The proposal is a mixed bag, and still one with a gaping hole in the bottom.
Among some generally positive things, the proposal would eliminate NCLB’s ridiculous annual-yearly-progress and “proficiency” requirements, which have driven states to constantly change standards and tests to avoid having to help students achieve real proficiency. It would also end many of the myriad, wasteful categorical programs that infest the ESEA, though it’s a pipedream to think members of Congress will actually give up all of their pet, vote-buying programs.
On the negative side of the register, the proposed reauthorization would force all states to either sign onto national mathematics and language-arts standards, or get a state college to certify their standards as “college and career ready.” It would also set a goal of all students being college and career ready by 2020. But setting a single, national standard makes no logical sense because all kids have different needs and abilities; no one curriculum will ever optimally serve but a tiny minority of students.
Also, on the (VERY) negative side of the register, Obama’s budget proposal would increase ESEA spending by $3 billion from last year — for a total of $28.1 billion — to pay for all of the ESEA reauthorization’s promises of incentives and rewards. That’s $3 billion more that the utterly irresponsible spenders in Washington simply do not have, and that would do nothing to improve outcomes.
Even if this proposal were loaded with nothing but smart, tough ideas, it would ultimately fail for the same reason that top-down control of government schools has failed for decades. Teachers, administrators, and education bureaucrats make their livelihoods from public schooling, and hence spend more time and money on education lobbying and politicking than anyone else. That makes them by far the most powerful forces in public schooling, and what they want for themselves is what we’d all want in their place if we could get it: lots of money and no accountability to anyone.
As long as such asymmetrical power distribution is the case — and it’s inherent to “democratic” control of education — no proposal, no matter how initially tough, is likely to make any long-term improvements. As the matrix below lays out, no matter what combination of standards and accountability you have, politics will eventually lead to poor outcomes. It’s a major reason that the history of government schooling is strewn with “get-tough” laws that ultimately spend lots of money but produce no meaningful improvements, and it’s a powerful argument for the feds complying with the Constitution and getting out of education.
When all is said and done, you can throw all the great things you want into the federal education bag, but as long as politicians are making the decisions you’ll always come up empty.
Slippery Standards Slope
The draft national curricular standards released yesterday, as I wrote earlier, will in all likelihood do little or no educational good if adopted. They’ll either be ignored or, if hard to meet, dumbed-down.
That said, the really troubling question is not whether the standards will do any good, but whether they will do much harm.
The answer: Oh, they’ll do harm. They’ll move us one step closer to complete centralization of education, which portends many potentially bad things, from total special-interest domination to even more wasteful spending.
Perhaps the most concerning possibility is that complete centralization — meaning, federalization — will lead to nationwide conflict over what the schools should teach, much as we are seeing in Texas right now and witnessed in the 1990s, the last time Washington tried to push “voluntary” national standards. Back then national standards in several subjects were proposed, and a national firestorm was set off over what they did, and did not, contain.
The Standards Themselves Are, Frankly, Irrelevant
Three days ago I reported that draft, grade-by-grade, national curricular standards would soon be released by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Yesterday, they were. (If you want to get a sense for what the proposed standards are follow the link to them. Don’t bother with the appendices, though, unless you really want to get into the weeds.)
Naturally, in the coming days lots of people will be offering heaps of commentary about what the standards do or do not contain. That’s not my main concern (though reading through the English standards I am dubious that mastery of them could be easily or consistently assessed). You see, the content of the standards is largely irrelevant because the main problem isn’t what the standards are, but standardization itself.
As I’ve blathered about on numerous occasions, it makes little sense to expect all kids to master all the same things at the same rates. All kids are different – they have different talents, desires, and abilities — and to impose one, “best” progression on them is simply illogical.
Another problem with imposing a single standard nationwide — and yes, this will be imposed, unless states suddenly decide they don’t like getting their citizen’s tax dollars back from Uncle Sam – is that it prevents competition between curricula. And that, in turn, kills innovation, the lifeblood of progress. So unless these standards have achieved perfection — and I’m pretty sure they haven’t — it’s a very dangerous thing to make them the end-all and be-all.
Finally, no matter how brilliant the draft standards, there is no reason to believe that they will drive meaningful educational improvement. Government schools will still be government schools, and the people employed by them will still have very little incentive to push kids to excellence, and every incentive to game the system to make the standards toothless. And no one yet has offered a decent proposal, other than school-choice supporters, for getting around that very inconvenient, public-schooling truth.
All of these problems help to explain why there is no convincing empirical evidence that national standards drive superior educational outcomes. Unfortunately, most national-standards advocates will talk themselves blue in the face about what’s in the standards, but avoid at all costs the question of whether standardization makes sense in the first place.
When they Give You “Anti-Lemons”…
On Tuesday, I criticized a new economic modeling paper (“Anti-Lemons”) purporting to show that unfettered education markets are bad and that government can fix them with the right regulations.
Andrew Gillen comes to the study’s defense, and I’m delighted that he’s taken the trouble to reflect on it rather than just saying “I like it.” But there are problems with his analysis. First, he faults me for dismissing the “Anti-Lemons” models for being based on false assumptions, citing Paul Krugman:
I am a strong believer in the importance of models, which are to our minds what spear-throwers were to stone age arms: they greatly extend the power and range of our insight. In particular, I have no sympathy for those people who criticize the unrealistic simplifications of model-builders.
Even if we put aside the fact that Paul Krugman is at times less reliable than the Daily Show website, there is an important difference between assumptions that are “unrealistically simplified” and those that are patently wrong. With the former, your model might still huck its intellectual spear somewhere in the general vicinity of the truth, with the latter, you’re just going to put your eye out.
“Anti-Lemons” is in the put-your-eye-out camp. Among other things, it assumes the productivity of all schools is equal. This is both totally false and highly germane — efficiency varies dramatically among schools, and private schools as a whole are consistently more efficient than government schools (as we will see below). Failing to recognize that reality will lead to incorrect results from the model, and this is just one of the false assumptions the paper adopts (see my previous post for others).
Second, Gillen writes that
going by Coulson’s numbers in figure 2 here, we would expect to find a positive impact of markets over government on achievement in slightly less than 2 out of 3 studies (with insignificant findings making up the majority of the others). If the case for free markets over government schools is really so clear cut (and I lean strongly in this direction), than why isn’t this 3 out of 3?
There are many plausible reasons for this result (lack of statistical power, omitted variable bias, other misspecification errors, etc.), but one is particularly worth raising here: government schools in many parts of the world spend several times as much per pupil as their private sector counterparts. This is true in most developing countries, from which a great deal of the inter-sectoral research hails. And when I looked at statewide data from Arizona in 2006 I found that government schools spend roughly 50 percent more than private schools. While it’s true that government school outcomes tend not to improve much as spending rises, the same cannot be said of private schools.
If this is true, you might ask, then wouldn’t the inter-sectoral research on school efficiency be more stark than the research on achievement (that fails to take spending levels into account)? The answer is yes. In fact, if you examine the efficiency bar in the same figure 2 cited by Gillen above, you will see that every single one of the efficiency comparisons between market and monopoly schools is significant and favors the market schools.
So, not only is the “Anti-Lemons” model useless, it is worse than useless: it seems to mislead even intelligent readers into believing that there is some mystery in the literature that needs to be solved by blindly waiving a spear around.
“Anti-Lemons” is neither Camelot, as I said yesterday, nor is it Sparta as Andrew implied. It’s the kid from Christmas Story who nearly puts his eye out by the cavalier application of a potentially powerful tool.
National Standardizers Just Can’t Win
I’ve been fretting for some time over the growing push for national curricular standards, standards that would be de facto federal and, whether adopted voluntarily by states or imposed by Washington, end up being worthless mush with yet more billions of dollars sunk into them. The primary thing that has kept me optimistic is that, in the end, few people can ever agree on what standards should include, which has defeated national standards thrusts in the past.
So far, the Common Core State Standards Initiative – a joint National Governors Association/Council of Chief State School Officers venture that is all-but-officially backed by Washington — has avoided being ripped apart by educationists and plain ol’ citizens angry about who’s writing the standards and what they include. But that’s largely because the CCSSI hasn’t actually produced any standards yet. Other, that is, than general, end of K-12, “college and career readiness” standards that say very little.
How to Flunk the Taliban
An interesting story in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighting how private schools are outcompeting both radical madrasas and government schools in the hearts and minds of a great many Pakistanis. Sounds a little bit like this.
Zero Tolerance for Difference
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.
New York Mayor Opposes Closing Schools for Muslim Holidays
I have been trying for years to make people understand that a single system of government schools is fundamentally at odds with American values, especially individual liberty and equal treatment under the law. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in opposing a move to let city public schools close for Muslim holidays as they do for Christian and Jewish holidays, recently made my point in one, simple sentence:
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.
Exactly. So which religions, and which people, will get to be more equal than others, Mr. Mayor?
With universal school choice, we wouldn’t have to grapple with such terrible questions.
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