Last night’s vote by the Wisconsin-based portion of the Wisconsin Senate has received enormous attention. The scope of collective bargaining by school district and other government employees has been narrowed, and the state will no longer automatically garnish workers’ wages to pay union dues.

This was the right thing to do. But how much of a difference will these changes actually make to the state’s bottom line? As I’ve noted, the presence or absence of collective bargaining is not strongly correlated with school district spending. Instead, unions have won their massively (42%) above- market compensation through well-funded political action; which brings us to the question of automatic paycheck deduction of union dues.

Without automatic dues withdrawals, will public school unions still be able to afford their fantastically successful political activities? There’s no reason to doubt it. Given the huge compensation premium public school employees enjoy over their private sector counterparts, they have a powerful incentive to voluntarily keep funding the political action that helped win it.

Indeed, we can see this already in right-to-work states like South Carolina. Public school employees there have no collective bargaining rights and there is no automatic union dues withdrawal, but the Palmetto State nevertheless has a teachers’ union and an administrators’ association that have spent large sums of money on political action. It’s worked. Despite not being the wealthiest of states, South Carolina still spends roughly $12,000  per pupil on its public schools, and its public school teachers earn more than the state’s median household income. The teacher and administrator groups have also successfully defeated every legislative effort thus far to open up the state’s education system to private sector competition and parental choice.

The only way to rein-in out-of-control public school spending is thus to give both families and taxpayers an alternative to the government monopoly status quo. Cut taxes on folks who pay for their own children’s education, or who donate to non-profit scholarship organizations that subsidize private school tuition for the poor. Many states are doing this already on a small scale. By so doing so on a larger scale, families will have much greater choices and taxpayers will reap enormous savings.

Wisconsin: Post-Mortem & Predictions is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Finished with my woman
‘Cause she couldn’t help me with my mind
People think I’m insane
Because I am frowning all the time

- Black Sabbath, “Paranoid”

According to the Fordham Institute’s Chester Finn, I and others like me are “paranoid.” So why, like Ozzy Osbourne, am I “frowning all the time?” Because I look at decades of public schooling reality and, unlike Finn, see the tiny odds that “common” curriculum standards won’t become federal standards, gutted, and our crummy education system made even worse.

Finn’s rebuttal to my NRO piece skewering the push for national standards, unfortunately, takes the same tack he’s used for months: Assert that the standards proposed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative are better than what most states have produced on their own; say that adopting them is “voluntary;” and note that we’ve got to do something to improve the schools.

Let’s go one by one:

First, as Jay Greene has pointed out again and again, the objection to national standards is not that the proposed CCSSI standards are of poor quality (though not everyone, certainly, agrees with Finn’s glowing assessment of them). The objection is that once money is attached to them — once the “accountability” part of “standards and accountability” is activated — they will either be dumbed down or just rendered moot by a gamed-to-death accountability system. 

This kind of objection, by the way, is called “thinking a few steps ahead,” not “paranoia.”

It’s also called “learning from history.” By Fordham’s own, constant admission, most states have cruddy standards, and one major reason for this is that special interests like teachers’ unions — the groups most motivated to control public schooling politics because their members’ livelihoods come from the public schools — get them neutered. 

But if centralized, government control of standards at the state level almost never works, there is simply no good reason to believe that centralizing at the national level will be effective. Indeed, it will likely be worse with the federal government, whose money is driving this, in charge instead of states, and parents unable even to move to one of the handful of states that once had decent standards to get an acceptable education.

Next, let’s hit the the “voluntary” adoption assertion. Could we puh-leaze stop with this one! Yes, as I note in my NRO piece, adoption of the CCSSI standards is technically voluntary, just as states don’t have to follow the No Child Left Behind Act or, as Ben Boychuk points out in a terrific display of paranoia, the 21-year-old legal drinking age. All that states have to do to be free is “voluntarily” give up billions of federal dollars that came from their taxpaying citizens whether those citizens liked it or not! 

So right now, if states don’t want to sign on to national standards, they just have to give up on getting part of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund. And very likely in the near future, if President Obama has his way, they’ll just have to accept not getting part of about $14.5 billion in Elementary and Secondary Education Act money.

Some voluntarism….

Finally, there’s the “we’ve got to do something to fix the schools” argument. I certainly agree that the education system needs fixing. My point is that it makes absolutely no sense to look at fifty centralized, government systems, see that they don’t work, and then conclude that things would be better if we had just one centralized, government system. And no, that other nations have national standards proves nothing: Both those nations that beat us and those that we beat have such standards.

The crystal clear lesson for those who are willing to see it is that we need to decentralize control of education, especially by giving parents control over education funding, giving schools autonomy, and letting proven, market-based standards and accountability go to work. 

Oh, right.  All this using evidence and logic is probably just my paranoia kicking in again.

Unfortunately, One Man’s “Paranoia” Is Everyone Else’s “Reality” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This can’t be happening.  Teachers suspended from their posts for showing students a film about the Constitution!  I can understand the initial parental inquiry–if a student did say “I was taught how to hide drugs.”  There are such films on the market and those would certainly not be appropriate for school.  But instead of gathering the facts, the school authorities seem to have made a terrible and unjust decision to suspend these teachers.  The Busted film is about constitutional law and police encounters–showing people that they can lawfully stand up to the police and decline to approve a search of their home and belongings, and decline to answer police questions.  Hopefully, the ACLU or FIRE will come to the defense of these teachers and get them reinstated fast.

Flex Your Rights, which produced the Busted film, recently released an even better film called 10 Rules for Dealing with Police.  Cato hosted the premiere screening here in DC.

Teachers Suspended for Class about Constitution is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Tonya Craft is the school teacher accused of molesting children left in her care.  Until this morning, William Anderson was almost alone in scrutinizing the case, but the Today Show took a look this morning.  Here’s the segment.

I wish there had been a little more emphasis on the actions of the trial judge.  Child molestation is monstrous.  To be falsely accused of child molestation must be galling.  And to be falsely accused and then go to trial where the presiding judge is making lousy decisions left and right has to be terrifying.

It happens more often than most people want to believe.  For more, go here and here.

Today Show Looks at the Tonya Craft Trial is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This morning the National Center for Education Statistics released a new report, Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scores: 2005-2007.  What the results make clear (for about the billionth time) is that government control of education has put us on a road straight to failure. Still, many of those who insist on living in denial about constant government failure in education will yet again refuse to acknowledge reality, and will actually point to this report as a reason to go down many more miles of bad road.

According to the report, almost no state has set its “proficiency” levels on par with those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the so-called “Nation’s Report Card.” (Recall that under No Child Left Behind all children are supposed to be “proficient” in reading and math by 2014.) Most, in fact, have set “proficiency” at or below NAEP’s “basic” level. Moreover, while some states that changed their standards between 2005 and 2007 appeared to make them a bit tougher, most did the opposite. Indeed, in eighth grade all seven states that changed their reading assessments lowered their expectations, as did nine of the twelve states that changed their math assessments.

Many education wonks will almost certainly argue that these results demonstrate clearly why we need national curricular standards, such as those being drafted by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. If there were a national definition of “proficiency,” they’ll argue, states couldn’t call donkeys stallions. But not only does the existence of this new report refute their most basic assumption – obviously, we already have a national metric — the report once again screams what we already know:  Politicians and bureaucrats will always do what’s in their best interest — keep standards low and easy to meet – and will do so as long as politics, not parental choice, is how educators are supposed to be held accountable. National standards would only make this root problem worse, centralizing poisonous political control and taking influence even further from the people the schools are supposed to serve. 

Rather than continuing to drive headlong toward national standards — the ultimate destination of the pothole ridden, deadly, government schooling road – we need to exit right now. We need to take education power away from government and give it to parents. Only if we do that will we end hopeless political control of schooling and get on a highway that actually takes us toward excellent education.

Another Education Road Sign Screaming “Stop!” 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

H. L. Mencken described puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

The new puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere, may be learning.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a story today in which public school educationalists wring their hands over the fear that suburban whites may be getting a good education in charter schools. This, somehow, is perceived to be a bad thing for urban minority kids.

Um. No.

What is bad for any child is a paucity of high quality education options from which to choose. The focus of policymakers should be on ensuring that more and better education options are constantly coming within reach of all children, regardless of the contents of their parents’ wallets, the pigmentation of their skin, or their ethnic background. This, the research shows, can most reliably be achieved by harnessing the freedoms and incentives of a competitive education marketplace.

Can the charter school system create such a marketplace? Can it relentlessly spawn new excellent schools and scale up the established ones to reach a mass audience? For a discussion of those questions, drop by Cato on October 2nd.

The New Puritanism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has a helpful column on the WaPo‘s “Answer Sheet” blog. In it, he notes that DC Public Schools advises its employees to teach to students’ ”diverse learning styles” (e.g. “auditory learners,” “visual learners,” etc.) despite the fact that research shows these categories are pedagogically meaningless.

But what really grabbed my attention was this comment: “a misunderstanding of a pretty basic issue of cognition is a mistake that one does not expect from a major school system. It indicates that the people running the show at DCPS are getting bad advice about the science on which to base policy.”

As cognitive scientists have been collecting and analyzing evidence on “learning styles” for generations, social scientists and education historians been doing the same for school systems. What these latter groups find is that it is perfectly normal for public school districts to be unaware of or even indifferent to relevant research and to make major pedagogical errors as a result. Furthermore, there is no evidence that large districts are any better at avoiding these pitfalls than smaller ones. If anything, the reverse is true.

Not only are such errors to be expected of public school systems, we can actually say why that is the case with a good degree of confidence: public schooling lacks the freedoms and incentives that, in other fields, both allow and encourage institutions to acquire and effectively exploit expert knowledge.

Districts such as Washington DC can persist year after year with abysmal test scores, abysmal graduation rates, and astronomical costs. That is because they have a monopoly on a vast trove of  government k-12 spending. In the free enterprise system, behavior like that usually results in the failure of a business and its disappearance from the marketplace. So, in the free enterprise sector, it is indeed rare to see large institutions behaving in such a dysfunctional manner, because it would be difficult if not impossible for them to grow that big in the first place. Long before they could scale up on that level, they would lose their customers to more efficient, higher quality competitors.

So if we want to see the adoption and effective implementation of the best research become the norm in education, we have to organize schooling the same way we organize other fields: as a parent-driven competitive marketplace.

Actually, Big Mistakes Are to Be Expected… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Any City Council members who aren’t vocally supporting the DC voucher program need to take a good long look at these numbers:

Nearly 75 percent of District residents support the city’s federally funded school voucher program, according to a rigorous, independent poll released today. Widespread support for the program crosses party lines—with 74 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Independents backing the program—and extends across each of the District’s eight wards. . .

Two previous polls have demonstrated local support for the program; in 2007, a Greater Washington Urban League poll demonstrated almost 70 percent support for the federal funding creating the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. A 2008 poll by the national nonprofit Education Reform Now demonstrated equally strong support for the voucher initiative, with 63 percent of D.C. residents supporting school vouchers in general and 77 percent voicing supporting for parental choice in education.

It’s Dangerous For Pols to be on the Wrong Side of Overwhelming Support 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

First, the Democrats in Washington for all intents and purposes killed the District of Columbia’s proven voucher program, but did it with Ninja-like stealth. The weapons: Nearly impossible reauthorization requirements, late Friday announcements, and politically expedient promises to keep kids currently attending good schools from being very publicly booted.

Now it’s Milwaukee’s turn. The new Democratic majority in Madison is on its way to cutting the value of individual vouchers while raising public school per-pupil expenditures, and even worse, is larding new regulations on private schools participating in the choice program. Perhaps the most ridiculous proposed reg: Requiring all participating private schools with student bodies that are more than 10 percent limited English proficient to provide  a “bilingual-bicultural education program.” As if one of the major benefits of choice isn’t that parents can choose such programs if they think they are best for their kids, and can select something else if they don’t! But, of course, political decisions aren’t primarily about what parents want and kids need.

Thankfully, there is a resistance forming to the assault in Milwaukee, with choice advocates now refusing to remain quiet after naively doing so when they were told that fighting back would only make things worse. The choice-supporting national media is also speaking up. But one can’t help but fear that it may be too little, too late.

The Quiet War against School Choice is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Daniel Hauser standoff, in which a child’s parents are refusing chemotherapy to treat their son’s cancer,  is a classic case pitting the right of parents to oversee the religious practices of the family against the interest of the state in the well-being of children.

The presumption is with parents, but it is not irrebuttable. Just as the state may interfere in family matters in the case of spousal or child abuse, so too it may in a case like this, where the scientific evidence is overwhelming that the long-term interests of the child are being ignored by a parent.

Will there be close calls in such cases? Of course. But on the facts presented here, this case does not appear to be a close call.

The Courts Are Right to Intervene is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’ve been reading the debate between our own Andrew Coulson and Rev. Joseph Darby with interest, not least because it is an extreme rarity to find an opponent of school choice with the courage and good faith to engage in such a public debate on the topic.

That said, something Rev. Darby wrote in his response caught my attention because of its parallels with the modern fight over school choice:

The first schools established for African-Americans following the Civil War were private schools. They sometimes, however, exclusively accepted the children of the black upper and middle economic classes while excluding the children of former slaves who struggled economically to survive. Public schools for African-Americans were decidedly and intentionally inferior, and the irony is that the opponents of quality public education in Charleston, South Carolina in that era included affluent African-Americans who saw good public schools as a threat to their private schools.

Too little is said about an uncomfortable contemporary truth: the irony is that the opponents of school choice across this country include affluent African-Americans who see good private schools as a threat to their public schools, their livelihoods, and their political and economic power.

There is a class divide in the African American community. If you take a look at the economics of urban areas, you will find that schools provide a large percentage of good middle and upper-middle class jobs for African Americans. If you look at the polling data, it is low-income blacks who are most supportive of school choice. And yet black elected officials are overwhelmingly opposed to choice.

And if you look at the black leadership class that runs our cities and failing public schools, you will find that many send their children to schools other than those in which they teach or those in the city they lead. I hold up as the most prominent example our first black president, Barrack Obama, who opposes private school choice policies and yet has always sent his own children to private schools.

Rev. Darby suggests, “a mass exodus to private schools will weaken public schools by leaving behind parents who have the least ability to advocate for or assist their children, and remove positive peer role models from struggling students.” If this is indeed true then the greatest damage has already been done to public schools by the likes of President Obama and other parents with the means to choose private schools for their children.

Why do Rev. Darby and other government school advocates not excoriate President Obama and other school choice opponents who patronize private education? Why are Rev. Darby and others not working assiduously to ban private schools altogether?

Why, in the final analysis, does Rev. Darby’s logic hold for the poor but not for the wealthy?

Below the fold I have more on these claims.

The self-interest-driven divisions among urban African Americans are real and serious. Much of the following comes from a great paper written by Patrick McGuinn, professor of political science at Drew University.

Marion Orr, in “The Challenge of Reform in Baltimore,” notes that “because a significant proportion of the school system’s employment base is African-American workers, the interplay between race and jobs hinders reform efforts. The school bureaucracy is an employment regime for blacks . . .”

Similarly, Jeffrey Henig recognizes in “The Color of School Reform,” that “there is a kind of ‘holy communion’ between prominent black clergy and the members of their churches whose livelihood is schooling and for whom the school system is a source of wages, professional development, and economic advancement.”

Paul Hill and Mary Beth Celio note in Fixing Urban Schools, “the public school systems have become the principal employers of African-American and immigrant middle class professionals in big cities.” And Julian Bond, as chairman of the NAACP, admitted that “the black teacher class is solidly entrenched in the African-American community and that teacher unions occupy an important political position in the black community.”

So it should come as no surprise to find that Terry Moe finds in his survey work that 79% of the inner city poor support vouchers. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that focuses on African American issues, found that black leaders are wildly out of step with their constituency on this issue, with Black elected officials 70 percent opposed to vouchers while “in the black population, there was what can accurately be described as overwhelming support for vouchers (approximately 70 percent) in the three youngest age cohorts” under age 50.

It’s far past time we recognize that black public opinion and interests are not monolithic.

The Black Divide on School Choice is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Tomorrow afternoon at 1pm, supporters of Washington DC Opportunity Scholarships will be rallying in Freedom Plaza to save the school voucher program. Why? That’s easy: Because a federal Department of Education study shows that parents are overwhelmingly more satisfied with it than they are with DC’s public schools. Because the same study shows that the program is raising student achievement above the level in the public schools. Because the children participating in it feel it is giving them a chance to realize their full potential in life — a chance that will disappear if the program is allowed to die, as they have attested in numerous YouTube videos.

The harder question is why Congress — particularly congressional Democrats led by Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) — want to kill the vouchers. Their stated reason is that it robs money from needy public schools and gives it to private schools that are already flush from lavish tuition fees.

But the voucher program not only does not take money away from DC public schools, the language of the law actually includes an extra $13 million annually for DC public schools, above their normal funding stream. As for lavish vs. needy schools, it’s true that there’s a huge gap between what is spent per pupil on public education in DC and the average tuition charged at the voucher-accepting private schools: a yawning $20,000 gap. The current year budget for the District of Columbia allocates $26,555 per pupil for k-12 education — up from $24,600 last year. Meanwhile, the Department of Education study linked to above puts the average tuition at voucher schools at $6,620. So vouchers are getting better results at one quarter the cost.

Clearly, Democrats have other reasons for opposing the voucher program, and this letter from the NEA might have a little something to do with it.

Rally to Save DC Vouchers Tomorrow. Why? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There were many compelling speakers in South Carolina last week making the case for school choice. This man, Colonel Nathaniel Green, was one of the best. In about two 1/2 minutes, he explains better than I ever could why a top-down system doesn’t work for many children. I liked it so much, I’ve also transcribed most of it below.

“Failing schools” are not failing schools, they’re failing students. Failing students is failing America.

I started out working in the system. The system is broken. I was frustrated. I started a program . . . The young men that are standing behind me, they represent kids that the system kicked out who are now achieving.

The gentleman in the black shirt, he came from Brentwood Middle School. His parents couldn’t afford [our school]. Contrary to popular opinion [of those who keep saying that private schools are only for the rich], he came for free for six years because we were concerned about him. We sacrificed for him. Get that straight.

When he came to our school, he tested below the fourth and fifth grade level in the sixth grade. When he graduated from Eagle [Military Academy] six years later, he had a 1300 on the SAT, it’s documented. He got a Life Scholarship through the state of South Carolina, and he carriers a 3.4 average in college right now at Trident University.

I can repeat this story over and over again [for other students]. By the way, I went to the public schools to show them my program. They weren’t interested. I went to Dr. Rex [, South Carolina’s state Superintendent of Education]. He wouldn’t call me.

I went to the people to try to get them to work with me to help our young men because we’re losing our young men in our state. And I think it’s time to put aside our partisan politics, it’s time to stop playing games, and it’s time to start helping our young people in this state. Vote for this [school choice bill].

Private Schools Save Children Rejected by the System is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

You Just Can’t Say That is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A new poll released today reveals that 43 percent of African Americans in South Carolina support private school choice while only 40 percent oppose it. What’s even more interesting, however, is that 53 percent said that “giving parents a tax credit or scholarship to choose the best school for their children — public or private — would improve the state’s dismal high school graduation rate.”

So an additional 10 percent of respondents think the program will work but don’t currently support it. Why? Perhaps because many black religious and political leaders in South Carolina have criticized the concept for years.

Take, for instance, the Rev. Joe Darby, a Charleston Minister I had the pleasure of communicating with a few years ago. Very pleasant guy. Absolutely opposes the education tax credit bill currently before the state legislature, and the whole idea of all parents getting to easily choose between public and private schools.

Why? Well, let’s ask him. I’ve just invited Joe to have a conversation about it on this website. I hope he will agree, because SC is racking up dropouts faster than almost any other state in the nation, and these kids need access to schools that can help them stick it through to graduation and better prepare them for life and work.

What do you say, Joe?

Plurality of Blacks in SC Support School Choice is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’m a bit ashamed to admit it: I just finished reading The Beautiful Tree, Professor James Tooley’s new book recounting his remarkable travels through some of the world’s poorest slums discovering for-profit private school after for-profit private school. I’m ashamed because The Beautiful Tree is a Cato book and I should have read it long before it became publicly available. Fortunately, it seems many people outside of Cato caught on to the importance of Tooley’s work the moment they heard about it.

Yesterday, the Atlantic‘s Clive Crook blogged about Tooley’s book, calling Tooley “an unsung hero of development policy” for bringing to light — and refusing to let others blot that light out — how mutual self-interest between entrepreneurs and poor families brings education to the world’s poorest children. And there’s the companion story: How billions of government dollars have erected some relatively nice public school buildings but have created an utterly dilapidated public school system, one that enriches government employees while leaving children — sometimes literally — to fend for themselves.

In addition to the blogosphere, the national airwaves have begun carrying the uplifting story of Tooley’s findings. On Wednesday, ABC News NOW ran a lengthy interview with Prof. Tooley in which he laid out many of the book’s major themes. And the book was only released, for all intents and purposes, that same day; much more coverage is no doubt forthcoming.

It needs to be.

The Beautiful Tree, quite simply, contains lessons applicable not only to slums or developing nations, but to all people everywhere, and they need to be learned. In the United States, whether the subject is  government-driven academic standards or the desirability of for-profit education, this book offers essential insights. But many readers will find the overall lesson tough to take: The cure for what ails us is not more government schooling — providing education the way we think it’s always been done — but embracing freedom for both schools and parents.

Whether or not this lesson is tough to stomach, it must be acknowledged by all who honestly seek what is best for our children. For as Tooley’s work makes abundantly clear, denying reality — no matter how unexpected or politically inconvenient it may be — only ends up hurting the people we most want to help.

People Are Discovering A Beautiful Read is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

How does U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan live with what must be some of the most painful cognitive dissonance in the history of mankind? I mean how, fresh off of doing all he could to make even more untimely the untimely death of the D.C. voucher program — and opposing private school choice generally — could Duncan say this in a new Time interview:

I’m a big fan of choice and competition, and in our country, historically, wealthy families have had a lot of options as to where to send their children. And families that didn’t come from a lot of money had one option — and usually that option wasn’t a good one. The more options available, the more we give parents a chance to figure out what the best learning environment is for their child.

How could Duncan say all this great stuff about competition and maximizing choice right after what he’s done to private school choice – which maximizes options for the very poor who have typically had none – in the nation’s capital? It is simply impossible to reconcile the words and actions.

Unless, that is, the words don’t really mean what the words, to a normal person, really mean. And to Duncan — like lots of political creatures – they don’t. He offered those gushing words of love for choice and competition in response to a question about charter schools, and in continuing to answer the question went right into this:

To me it’s not about letting a thousand flowers bloom. You need to have a really high bar about whom you let open the charter school. [You need] a really rigorous front-end competitive process. If not, you just get mediocrity. Once you let them in, you need to have two things. You need to give those charter operators great autonomy — to really free them from the education bureaucracy. You have to couple that with very strong accountability.

And finally, it is clear how Duncan twistedly reconciles both killing school choice and competition, and loving school choice and competition: It is all about who is doing the choosing. If schools and potential schools have to compete for the approval of government — of the same smarter-than-thou, bureaucratic apparatchiks who have given us atrocious public schools for decades — then that’s competition Duncan can embrace. But compete based on the approval and demands of the people the schools are actually supposed to serve, the people most interested in schools performing to high standards? In other words, compete for the approval and business of parents, especially without the choices first being fully vetted and approved by parents’ government betters? Well, that just shouldn’t be any choice at all!

Duncan: “I’m a big fan of choice and competition” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

ABC reports, “The Los Angeles Board of Education voted Tuesday to lay off as many as 5,400 teachers and support personnel for the upcoming school year” in order to help close “a roughly $718 million deficit.”

Ok, that’s a start. But the number of public school employees in the US has doubled since 1970, while the number of students has increased by just 9 percent.

The bloated, inefficient and ineffective LA District now spends nearly $13 billion a year –- over $20,000 per student –- so they might want to keep on cutting.

Considering the fact that the median private school tuition is around $4,800, maybe they could just let parents and taxpayers keep, say, a third of that money to spend on education themselves.

Presto, no budget problem! Although there would be a huge increase in unemployed school bureaucrats and ineffective teachers . . . I think it’s a good trade.

Why So Shy With The Hatchet? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog