Neither Standards Nor Shame Can Do the Job
Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews has done it again: lifted my hopes up just to drop them right back down.
In November, you might recall, Mathews called for the elimination of the office of U.S. Secretary of Education. There just isn’t evidence that the Ed Sec has done much good, he wrote.
My reaction to that, of course: “Right on!”
Only sentences later, however, Mathews went on to declare that we should keep the U.S. Department of Education.
Huh?
Today, Mathews is calling for the eradication of something else that has done little demonstrable good — and has likely been a big loss – for American education: the No Child Left Behind Act. Mathews thinks that the law has run its course, and laments that under NCLB state tests — which are crucial to standards-and-accountability-based reforms — “started soft and have gotten softer.”
The reason for this ever-squishier trend, of course, is that under NCLB states and schools are judged by test results, leading state politicians and educrats to do all they can to make good results as easy to get as possible. And no, that has not meant educating kids better — it’s meant making the tests easier to pass.
Unfortunately, despite again seeing its major failures, Mathews still can’t let go of federal education involvement. After calling for NCLB’s end, he declares that we instead need a national, federal test to judge how all states and schools are doing.
To his credit, Mathews does not propose that the feds write in-depth standards in multiple subjects, and he explicitly states that Washington should not be in the business of punishing or rewarding schools for test performance.
“Let’s let the states decide what do to with struggling schools,” he writes.
What’s especially important about this is that when there’s no money attached to test performance there’s little reason for teachers unions, administrators associations, and myriad other education interests to expend political capital gaming the tests, a major problem under NCLB.
Way To Go (Almost All the Way), Jay!
This morning Washington Post education columnist — and terrific Cato forum panelist – Jay Mathews called for abolition of the office of the U.S. Secretary of Education! Why? Because it has proven itself worthless, that’s why:
The president, I suspect, thought that Duncan, the former chief of the Chicago public schools, could use all he had learned there to raise achievement for students across the country.
It sounds great, but it was the same thought that led previous presidents to appoint those previous fine education secretaries to their posts. How much good did that do? Test scores for elementary and middle school students have come up a bit in the last couple of decades, but not enough to get excited about. High school scores are still flat. If national education policy had made a big jump forward, I would say we should continue to fill this job, but that hasn’t happened either. I think the No Child Left Behind law, supported by both parties, was an improvement over previous federal policies, but it was only copying what several states had already done to make schools accountable and identify schools that needed extra help.
Other than the “fine” secretaries part and the (sorta) nice words for NCLB, that sounds like something we at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom might have written. Bottom line: Washington doesn’t add any value to education, and at best just picks up on things states are already doing.
Unfortunately, after dropping the “ed sec must go” bombshell and furnishing ironclad evidence why the position is worthless, Mathews retreats from the obvious, ultimate implication of his argument: We should abolish the department the secretary leads!
The evidence screams this and, from a technical standpoint, you can’t keep a cabinet-level department and not have a secretary to head it. But in what smells a lot like a cop out, Mathews asserts that the department should stay (though in a smaller form). After all, someone has to be in charge of doling out all of the taxpayer cash that isn’t doing a damn bit of good:
Keep in mind I am NOT saying we should abolish the education department. That old Reagan campaign platform died a natural death long ago. We need the department to intelligently distribute federal money to the most promising schools in our cities and states. Cut back the number of people rumbling around that big building on Maryland Avenue—many of them are going crazy from boredom anyway—and put it under the control of a savvy civil service administrator who knows how to keep the checks and the useful data rolling out.
Too bad Mathews wasn’t willing to go all the way on this. But just for proposing that we put the position of U.S. Secretary of Education out to pasture, he deserves some hearty applause.
NAEP Math Scores, NCLB, and the Federal Government
I’m surprised anyone was surprised by the recent flat-lining of scores on the NAEP 4th grade math test. The rate of improvement in NAEP scores has been declining since No Child Left Behind was passed, and the recent results are consistent with that trend.
But what really amazes me is that so many people think the solution is just to tweak NCLB! The unstated assumption here is that federal policy is a key determinant of educational achievement. That’s rubbish.
We’ve spent $1.8 trillion on hundreds of different federal education programs since 1965, and guess what: at the end of high school, test scores are flat in both reading and math since 1970, and have actually declined slightly in science. (Charted for your viewing pleasure here).
If we’ve proved anything in the past 40 years, it is that federal involvement in education is a staggering waste of money.
Meanwhile, education economists have spent the last several decades finding out what actually does work in education. They’ve compared different kinds of school systems and it turns out that parent-driven, competitive education markets consistently outperform state monopoly school systems like ours. I tabulated the results in a recent peer-reviewed paper and they favor education markets over monopolies by a margin of 15 to 1.
So policymakers who actually care about improving educational outcomes should be spending their time and resources enacting laws that will bring free and competitive education markets within reach of all families. And they should be ignoring the education technocrats who — like Soviet central planners — just want to keep spending other people’s money tweaking their fruitless five year plans.
Chart of the Day — Federal Ed Spending
The debate over No Child Left Behind re-authorization is upon us.
Except it isn’t.
In his recent speech kicking off the discussion, education secretary Arne Duncan asked not whether the central federal education law should be reauthorized, he merely asked how.
Let’s step back a bit, and examine why we should end federal intervention in (and spending on) our nation’s schools… in one thousand words or less:
While the flat trend lines for overall achievement at the end of high school mask slight upticks for minority students (black students’ scores, for instance, rose by 3-5 percent of the 500 point NAEP score scale), even those modest gains aren’t attributable to federal spending. Almost that entire gain happened between 1980 and 1988, when federal spending per pupil declined.
And, in the twenty years since, the scores of African American students have drifted downard while federal spending has risen stratospherically.
Duncan’s NCLB Reauthorization Push Shows Extreme Tunnel Vision
In a major speech to be delivered today, education secretary Arne Duncan will call for an end to ”‘tired arguments’ about education reform” and ask for input in crafting a ”sweeping reauthorization” of the federal No Child Left Behind act. His decision not to openly debate the merits of reauthorization — to simply assume it — guarantees the tiredness and futility of the discussion.
Americans have spent $1.85 trillion on federal education programs since 1965, and yet student achievement at the end of high school has stagnated while spending per pupil has more than doubled — after adjusting for inflation. The U.S. high school graduation rate and adult literacy rates have been declining for decades. The gap in achievement between children of high school dropouts and those of college graduates hasn’t budged by more than a percent or two despite countless federal programs aimed at closing it.
The secretary himself acknowledges that after more than half a century of direct and increasing federal involvement in schools, “we are still waiting for the day when every child in America has a high quality education that prepares him or her for the future.
In light of the abject and expensive failure of federal intrusion in America’s classrooms, it is irresponsible for the Secretary of Education to assume without debate that this intrusion should continue. Cutting all federal k-12 education programs would result in a permanent $70 billion annual tax cut. Given the stimulative benefits of such a tax cut it is also fiscally irresponsible for the Obama administration to ignore the option of ending Congress’ fruitless meddling in American schools.
Captain Louis Renault Award: Politics in Government Schools?!*
As Neal and Andrew have already covered extensively, President Obama is set to address the nation’s school children, and the Secretary of Education has sent out marching orders to government teachers and lesson plans for the kids.
The administration has now backpedaled from a classic political gaffe and cleaned up the most offensive aspects; asking kids to write about how they can help, explain why its important to listen to political leaders, etc.
But I think a couple of points deserve repeating.
From a push for vastly expanding federal involvement in preschool and early education to home visitations in the health care bills, the government remains intent on expanding its dominion (And hot on the heels of President Bush’s massive expansion of federal involvement in schools).
But this problem didn’t begin with Obama and won’t end with him. Politics in the schools is what we get when the government runs our schools.
Don’t want your kids indoctrinated by government bureaucrats, special interests, or the President?
Private school choice is the only remedy, and education tax credits are the increasingly popular and successful way to deliver it.
When will a critical mass of the people realize that it is dangerous and destructive to allow the government to control the education of our children and finally do something about it?
* Captain Louis Renault reference
Evidence-based for Thee, But Not for Me
One of the things that strikes me as curious about supporters of the No Child Left Behind Act is that they talk regularly about “evidence” and having everything be “research-based,” yet they often ignore or distort evidence in order to portray NCLB as a success. Case in point, an op-ed in today’s New York Times by the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless and the Fordham Foundation’s Michael Petrilli.
Truth be told, the piece doesn’t lionize NCLB, criticizing the law for encouraging schools to neglect high-performing students because its primary goal is to improve the performance of low achievers. Fair enough. The problem is, Loveless and Petrilli assert with great confidence that the law is definitely doing the job it was intended to do. “It is clear,” they write, “that No Child Left Behind is helping low-achieving students.”
As you shall see in a moment, that is an utterly unsustainable assertion according to the best available evidence we have: results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which carries no consequences for schools or states and, hence, is subject to very little gaming. Ironically, Loveless and Petrilli make their indefensible pronouncement while criticizing a study for failing to use NAEP in reaching its own conclusions about NCLB.
So what’s wrong with stating that NCLB is clearly helping low-achieving students? Let me count the ways (as I have done before):
- Numerous reforms, ranging from class-size reduction, to school choice, to new nutritional standards, have been occurring at the same time as NCLB. It is impossible to isolate which achievement changes are attributable to NCLB, and which to myriad other reforms
- As you will see in a moment, few NAEP score intervals start cleanly at the beginning of NCLB – which is itself a difficult thing to pinpoint – making it impossible to definitively attribute trends to the law
- When we look at gains on NAEP in many periods before NCLB, they were greater on a per-year basis than during NCLB. That means other things going on in education before NCLB were working just as well or better than things since the law’s enactment.
So let’s go to the scores. Below I have reproduced score trends for both the long-term and regular NAEP mathematics and reading exams. (The former is supposed to be an unchanging test and the latter subject to revision, though in practice both have been pretty consistent measures.) I have posted the per-year score increase or decreases above the segments that include NCLB (but that might also include years without NCLB). I have also posted score increases in pre-NCLB segments that saw greater improvements than segments including NCLB. (Note that on 8th-grade reading I didn’t highlight pre-NCLB segments with smaller score decreases than seen under NCLB. I didn’t want to celebrate backward movement in any era.)
For context, NCLB was signed into law in January 2002 but it took at least a year to get all the regulations written and more than that for the law to be fully implemented. As a result, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether 2002, 2003, or even 2004 should be the law’s starting point, noting only that this problem alone makes it impossible to say that NCLB clearly caused anything. In addition, notice that some of the biggest gains under NCLB are in periods that also include many non-NCLB years, making it impossible to confidently attribute those gains to NCLB.
Please note that I calculated per-year changes based on having data collected in the same way from start to end. So some lines are dashed and others solid (denoting changes in how some students were counted); I calculated changes based on start and end points for the type of line used for the period. I also rounded to one decimal point to save space. Finally, I apologize if this is hard to read—I’m no computer graphics wizard—and would direct you to NAEP’s website to check out the data for yourself.
Checker Finn Is 99.44 Percent Right
Fordham Foundation president Checker Finn notes today that recent upticks on the National Assessment of Educational Progress cannot be reasonably credited to the No Child Left Behind act (hat tip to Bill Evers). The NCLB, President Bush’s signature education initiative, was supposed to improve student achievement through bureaucratic accountability measures.
But after noting that NCLB’s proponents can’t back up their claims that the law is working, Finn suggests that we need an “education-achievement ‘audit agency’ to sort out the claims and counterclaims about student performance.”
Maybe. But Amazon.com didn’t have to be told by a federal product quality audit czar to allow its customers to rate the products it sells. They’ve done it because it’s good business. In fact, no matter what product or service you’re interested in, there are resources on the Web to find out virtually anything you could possibly want to know about it. Reviews by users, professional reviews, criticism from competitors…. As a result, consumers are better informed than ever before. Except in education, which operates outside the free enterprise system.
Sure, we could add a bureaucratic audit agency and hope that it will make our bureaucratic education accountability law accountable, and that that, in turn, will make our bureaucratic education system efficient and innovative.
Or we could just do what we know already works in every other sector of the economy: let consumers choose, and make it easy for a diversity of public and private schools compete to serve them.
Feels Like Old Times
This morning, former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings does exactly what I showed last week cannot reasonably be done: She looked at the latest NAEP scores and gave No Child Left Behind (as well as similar state reforms) credit for what have been, frankly, at-best marginal improvements. And check out the long-term trend lines; you’ll see that there were periods with increases just as good as those between 1999 and 2008 that predated NCLB and most state standards-and-testing reforms. You’ll also note a few liberties taken by the former Secretary, such as the assertion that we’ve just had ”nine straight years of increasing scores for elementary school students.” Yes, the scores have gone up, but we don’t know that they’ve gone up every year for nine years. We only know the trend has been up, but scores are only available for 1999, 2004, and 2008 — things could easily have fluctuated from year to year. And let’s not forget that NCLB was only enacted in 2002, took at least a year to meaningfully implement, and was pushed in large part because states weren’t reforming themselves. That alone makes it impossible to support Spellings’ rosy conclusions.
Of course, we’ve seen this sort of thing before. Thanks for the blast from the past, Secretary Spellings.
You Just Can’t Say That
Let’s get one thing straight: As I’ve noted on numerous occasions, you can’t look just at National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results – especially only between two years – and attribute gains or losses to specific laws or programs. There are simply too many variables at play in education – federal laws, state laws, school choice, child nutrition, teacher quality, parents’ attitudes, the weather – to confidently assert that any one is responsible for changing scores. Indeed, it is possible that nothing government has done has had any effect, and every trend just reflects changing attitudes toward education among students themselves.
And yet, some reporters identify something akin to a god variable anyway, as the Associated Press did in its coverage of the new NAEP long-term-trends report:
The biggest gains came from low-achieving students. That is probably not an accident — the federal No Child Left Behind law and similar state laws have focused on improving the performance of minority and poor children, who struggle the most.
Now, there are a lot of problems with this statement, including that several of the lowest-achieving percentiles by age and subject saw no statistically significant changes in scores between 2004 and 2008; many groups had periods of faster gains before NCLB (though we don’t even have clear before and after-NCLB data points); and NAEP offers no income-based score breakdowns, only the proxy of parents’ education – and that just for 13 and 17-year-olds in mathematics. But the biggest problem is that, all of these factual problems aside, there is no way to ascribe score changes to specific laws or government policies. The data just aren’t there.
Fortunately, most of the coverage of the NAEP report has been pretty reasonable, including from the Washington Post and New York Times. But the AP reaches a lot of people, and that means many Americans are going to get “news” about the latest NAEP findings that is little more than unsupportable conjecture.
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