Here’s Where Better Schools HAVE Scaled Up…
Earlier this summer, I released a study comparing the performance of California’s charter school networks with the amount of philanthropic grant funding they have received. The purpose was to find out if this model for replicating excellence was consistently effective. The answer, regrettably, was no.
But a new study we are releasing today finds that there is at least one place where better schools HAVE consistently scaled-up: Chile. Thanks to that nation’s public and private school choice program, chains of private schools have arisen, and they not only outperform the public schools, they also outperform the independent “mom-and-pop” private schools.
For anyone interested in replicating educational excellence, this study by a team of Chilean scholars is worth a look.
Are Unions Really Good for Democrats?
Charles Krauthammer’s latest column is titled “The Union-Owned Democrats.” In it, he recounts a litany of economically ruinous actions being pursued by unions around the country, from blocking free trade agreements to hobbling Boeing’s efforts to compete with Airbus. He writes that “unions need Democrats — who deliver quite faithfully,” and that “Democrats need unions.”
Like a hole in the head.
Yes, it’s been a politically and financially symbiotic relationship for many decades. Unions get rents, Democrats get elected. But, as I argue in a cover story for The American Spectator this month (now on-line: “A Less Perfect Union“), it can’t last.
The biggest unions of all are the public school employee unions—the AFT and the NEA—with well over 4 million members between them. As I point out in my Spectator piece, these unions have become too successful for their own good—and for the good of the Democratic party.
In their game of Monopoly with American kids and taxpayers they have created staggering bloat in public school employment (which has grown 10 times faster than student enrollment over the past 40 years), and they have wheedled total compensation packages worth $17,000 more per year than those of their private sector counterparts (who, according to most of the research, outperform them in the classroom).
But the union-led public school spending spree has nearly bankrupted states all over the country. If California’s public schools had just maintained the same level of efficiency they’d had in 1970 (not gotten better, as other fields have, just stagnated), it would turn the state’s $26 billion deficit hole into a surplus.
Americans are rapidly running out of money to pay for their states’ school monopolies, and they are rapidly introducing school choice bills (42 states have done so this year), to give families alternatives. But as families escape the highly unionized monopoly and send their kids to school in the largely non-unionized private sector, teachers union power will implode. And resentment at having been gored for so long by the now bankrupt and discredited system will focus on the party that fought to preserve it until the bitter end… Democrats.
In my Spectator piece, I explain why that would be a bad thing, and what Democrats could do to avoid that fate. “Public schooling” is just a tool, and an ineffective, unaffordable one at that. Public education is a set of goals and ideals that can be advanced much more effectively by other policy mechanisms. The sooner Democrats realize that, the less likely they are to be dragged to the bottom of the political sea by the sinking union-helmed school monopoly.
Jay Greene’s Great New Manifesto
Education scholar Jay Greene has a great new pamphlet called Why America Needs School Choice. Concise and very readable, it does a fine job of introducing the general public to the arguments and evidence in favor of market forces in education. In the process, it debunks six “canards” put forward by defenders of the status quo school monopoly.
Of particular value is Jay’s explanation of why existing “school choice” policies, while often producing positive results, have not yet transformed American education. He notes that these existing programs are hobbled by enrollment limits and regulations, and thus represent only dim shadows of what truly free and competitive education marketplaces would offer. I couldn’t agree more! In fact, the manifesto might more precisely be called Why America Needs a Competitive Education Marketplace, though perhaps that would have narrowed its appeal.
One minor quibble: On page 46, Jay writes that:
No private school choice program has been eliminated legislatively. Aside from a few adverse state court decisions, every choice victory is permanent, and every defeat is temporary.
The implication is that legislative and court action are the only avenues by which choice programs can be overturned. A third, public referendum, exists–and was responsible for the repeal of a Utah school voucher program in 2007. Would-be reformers should remember that lesson: unless the public understands and accepts the value of a policy, it may well overturn it before the first student ever participates. Manifestos like Jay’s are a good way to help spread that understanding.
A more significant problem with this particular passage is that it seems to imply that every “choice” program is a victory, and it asserts every victory is permanent. There is good reason to conclude that neither is the case.
Family Friendly DISCO Moves
I like the nightlife, and I’ve got to boogie, so I’m pleased to hear of a new organization called DISCO: Democrats Impatient for School Choice Organization.
There are many ways to shake, shake, shake that education policy booty, however, and if DISCO really wants to be family friendly, they would be better off skipping the voucher element of their choreography.
The organization’s goal is to extend real school choice to low income families. A crucial element in achieving that goal is to ensure that parents, not influential lobby groups or entrenched interests, get to decide the kinds of education they can choose. Based on both my review of the historical evidence and my recent regression study of modern school choice programs, vouchers are prone to regulatory proliferation. They centralize authority over what a voucher can buy, so that parents who need financial assistance cannot escape whatever limits the politically powerful wish to impose on them.
Tax credits are different. Scholarship donation tax credit programs, such as the one that already exists in Pennsylvania (and which the state House has voted 190 to 7 to expand) create a proliferation of different sources of financial assistance for low-income families. So if one of those sources decides to impose a particular set of rules on how the money is used, it doesn’t affect any of the others. Parents can choose to seek financial assistance from whichever scholarship granting organization most closely matches their own values and preferences, thereby preventing them from being forced into a particular set of choices.
I made this argument in a little more detail in Cato’s amicus brief in the ACSTO v. Winn case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld Arizona’s scholarship donation tax credit program.
Don’t Let the Aphorism Be the Enemy of Thought
I am often told that pointing out the serious shortcomings of government-funded school vouchers and the relative superiority of education tax credits is a case of “making the perfect the enemy of the good.”
It’s isn’t.
That is a misapplication of Voltaire’s famous aphorism. What the aphorism exhorts is that we not pursue an unattainable perfection when a good alternative is within reach. Education tax credits are not only attainable, they are usually easier to obtain than vouchers. Consider a recent example: Pennsylvania’s state House has voted 190 to 7 to expand its existing EITC tax credit program while the state Senate has been deadlocked for weeks looking for the bare minimum of votes to pass a voucher bill.
On top of that, it is dubious to cast vouchers as “the good” when they will expand the scope of compulsion of taxpayers to funding many new types of schooling to which they might well object, impose heavy new regulations on private schools (homogenizing the available “choices”), and more pervasively curtail direct payment by consumers in favor of third party government payment.
Even those who may not be fully convinced that vouchers are inferior should pause before trying to enact them in states that already have education tax credit programs with good growth prospects. Why make the dubious the enemy of the pretty darned good?
Indiana Voucher Law a Defeat for Educational Freedom
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed an expansive new voucher law today. It’s a disaster for educational freedom. Read the full explanation here.
The voucher program has been widely praised as a momentous victory for school choice and Gov. Mitch Daniels on the brink of his long-awaited presidential campaign announcement. In reality, the voucher program is a tactical victory for highly constrained choice won at the price of a broad strategic defeat for educational freedom. This program will greatly expand state regulation of and authority over participating private schools.
In our efforts to expand educational choice across the country, we can’t lose sight of what makes that choice valuable: educational freedom and the diversity of choices it allows to develop. School choice is meaningless if all the choices are the same.
Just a teaser . . . ever heard of Chief Seattle? Private schools in Indiana will know him well if they take a voucher.
Read the piece for these and other shocking details!
Foundations Need to Invest More in Private Education and Choice
Charter schools are the hot new thing.
OK, they aren’t all that new. But many people who used to have blanket objections to any increase in school choice now support (some form of) charter schools. President Obama, and even AFT President Randi Weingarten, say they support “charter” schools. The guy who made Al Gore’s documentary, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Planet, will soon release a film about choice and charter schools.
In the midst of the charter school hype, we need to remember that the private school system has been educating low-income kids longer, better, and more efficiently than charter schools. And charter schools are now sapping this tiny remaining redoubt of civil-society success and freedom in education.
Philanthropists who care about long-term, sustainable and dynamic improvement in the education system need to refocus. They need to pull back from the charter school mirage and invest in private school choice programs and private schools that are a proven, established success with at-risk children.
Fortunately, many philanthropists see the need to save private, often Catholic, schools for the poor:
Among his many achievements, [Robert W.] Wilson is the single largest benefactor of Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of New York. Since 2007, he has donated over $30 million to inner-city Catholic education. He is also an atheist… Wilson belongs to an elite order: non-Catholic donors who are the patron saints of inner-city Catholic schools.
Read the whole article by Christopher Levenick in Philanthropy magazine. Public charter schools are often better than the regular ones. But charter systems are a pale government reflection of the legacy and possibilities found in private education.
Charters Kill Private Schools and Add to Taxpayer Burden
Tradeoffs are an incurable part of reality. Unfortunately, many school choice supporters like to believe that there are no tradeoffs between school choice policies; public and private school choice, targeted or restricted, big or small, voucher or tax credits, it’s all choice and it’s all good. But some good things are better than others. And most things have some mix of positive and negative effects.
Charter schools often provide a safer, better alternative to traditional public schools. That’s good. Charter schools also destroy private schools, decrease educational options, pull private-school students into the government education system and thereby add significant new costs to taxpayers. These are all very bad things. And they are not at all balanced by theories of long-term shifts in how citizens conceive of choice in education.
Here’s the latest on how government charter schools are killing what’s left of the private sector in education:
The number of students enrolled in these public, independently run schools has risen dramatically in this decade. Philadelphia school district officials estimate that 73 percent of the children now in charters came from district schools and 27 percent from other schools. That 27 percent amounts to about 9,000 students, and Catholic-school educators believe that most of them came from Catholic schools.
Charter schools have one distinct advantage over Catholic schools. They do not charge tuition.
Charters are NO substitute for private school choice. In fact, by destroying private schools, they seriously erode the total range of educational options.
We need to be clear-headed about this; charter school laws, in the absence of robust private school choice programs, destroy educational freedom and choice.
Absent private choice, charters are a long-term setback for education reform.
Failures in Ed. Policy Analysis—Misunderstanding Milwaukee
To the extent education policy commentary actually affects policy, it has the potential to do great good or great harm. Several recent commentaries in this field fall into the latter camp, and it’s important to understand why — so that we can avoid similar mistakes in future.
The one I’ll discuss here is this blog post by Matthew Yglesias, in which he draws broad conclusions about the functioning of education markets from a recent study of a tiny school choice program in Milwaukee as well as from some older unspecified research [for the latter, Yglesias linked here, but the body of that page doesn't discuss school choice]. The Milwaukee study is part of a vast literature. Over the past quarter century at least sixty-five studies have compared outcomes in public and private schools around the world, reporting 156 separate statistical findings.
The evidence of this literature is starkly one-sided. The vast preponderance of findings show private schools outperforming public schools after all the normal controls. What’s more, when we focus on the research comparing truly market-like systems to state-run school monopolies, the market advantage is found to be even more dramatic (see Figure 2 in the paper linked above). To draw policy opinions from a small, selective handful of those studies while ignoring the rest is policy malpractice, and it is dangerous to children.
Even the recent Milwaukee result described by Yglesias as a failure shows voucher students in private schools performing as well as public school students who receive roughly 50% more government funding. How is a program that produces similar academic results to the status quo at a much lower cost to taxpayers a failure? And what of the research suggesting that students in the Milwaukee voucher program graduate at higher rates than those in public schools?
More importantly from a long term policy perspective, how is a program limited to 20,000 or so children in a single city, being served almost entirely by non-profit entities, a test of market education? Would Apple have spent hundreds of millions developing the iPhone or the iPad if its market were limited to the same customer base? Of course not. The dynamism, diversity and innovation we have come to expect from competitive markets in other fields relies on the prospect of ultimately scaling up to serve mass audiences. Without the prospect of a large-scale return on investment, there is no incentive to invest in the first place.
DC Vouchers, Democrats and Teachers Unions
The Washington Post ran an incisive op-ed yesterday by Kelly Amis and Joseph Robert on the DC voucher program. As they noted, Sen. Joseph Lieberman is calling on the Senate to restore funding for the program which was terminated on a nearly party-line vote by Congress last December.
A few Democrats (Dianne Feinstein and Robert Byrd) have joined with Lieberman, but the rest of the party has apparently decided that producing better educational outcomes for poor kids at one quarter the cost of public schooling is not politically advantageous.
As Amis and Robert point out, private schools are far less unionized than the public school sector, so giving families an easier choice between the two will likely eat into to union revenues. And teachers union revenues end up disproportionately in the political piggy banks of Democrats.
The only thing that will change this situation is if voters decide they’ve had enough of such craven, Machiavellian politics, and vote the bums out. And some Democrats do indeed already seem to have had enough.
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.
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.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
