New Jersey is broke. In an effort to get the state back on its financial feet, governor Chris Christie has made across-the-board cuts–including cuts to public school spending. This week, a judge ruled that his school cuts are unconstitutional, in light of state supreme court precedents dating back decades.

Basically, New Jersey’s highest court has ruled that the state must spend a fantastically large sum of money in order to meet its constitutional requirement of providing a “thorough and efficient” school system.

Slight problem: by definition, a system that spends outrageous sums of money for outcomes that are merely “thorough” cannot also be “efficient.” The courts seem to have resolved this logical contradiction by ignoring the word efficient. So now they just demand that the state spend more money on public schools, while acknowledging how futile that is. In Judge Doyne’s words:

Despite spending levels that meet or exceed virtually every state in the country, and that saw a significant increase… from 2000 to 2008, our “at-risk” children are now moving further from proficiency.

Spending more on public schools will do one thing for the state, though: bankrupt it. Unless something changes soon, we could well see the Detroitification of New Jersey: an exodus of residents fleeing failed government services and rising taxes, creating a death spiral as the shrinking tax base exacerbates the fiscal problems and perpetuates the exodus.

The only way that I can see for New Jersey to survive the court-mandated burden of its public school systems is to provide families and taxpayers with an alternative to them.

The state legislature is currently considering a k-12 school choice program that would subsidize private school tuition for poor kids by giving businesses a tax break if they donate to non-profit scholarship organizations. Florida has a program like this and it saves taxpayers $1.49 for every dollar it reduces tax revenues. That’s because monopoly public schooling is so much less efficient (there’s that word again) than parent-chosen private schooling.

If the state doesn’t enact this program–and make it large enough to make a difference… fogettaboutit

New Jersey Canceled for Lack of Funds is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New Jersey Office of Legislative Services, which estimates the budgetary impact of proposed laws, has just released its analysis of a private school choice bill called the “Opportunity Scholarship Act.” The most remarkable thing about its report is the amount of money it assumes that districts would save for each student they no longer have to teach: $0.

On that assumption, if every student were to leave for the private sector tomorrow, districts would keep right on spending exactly the same amount they spend today. Inefficient though it is, not even state-run monopoly schooling is that bad.

The OLS report does not explain why it assumes that the per pupil savings for students leaving public schools (the “marginal cost”) would be $0. It states that this figure is “indeterminate,” but by not counting it at all is effectively treating it as zero.

In fact, the marginal cost of public schooling is not “indeterminate” at all. Economists “determine” it all the time, and it’s quite easy to do. You simply observe how district spending actually rises and falls with enrollment, using a time-series regression, as I did in 2009 to calculate the marginal cost of public schooling in Nevada (see Appendix A).

Even if the NJ OLS does not conduct a marginal cost estimate specific to New Jersey, they could have done–and should still do–the next best thing: take the marginal cost estimates for other states as a rough guide and estimate the NJ district savings from them. I estimated that Nevada district spending falls by 85% of average per-pupil spending when a student leaves, and Grecu and Lindsay, a couple of years earlier, estimated the figure at 80% for South Carolina.

If they want to be conservative, the NJ OLS could use the lower of these figures, and perhaps also run the numbers for estimates 10% higher and 10% lower.

Any of the above options is preferable to the logical impossibility of their current analysis, which effectively treats the marginal cost of public schooling as $0.

What if We Ran a Public School System… and No-One Came? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

With print media players disappearing faster than mosasaurs in the late Cretaceous, one would expect the last papers standing to be extra careful with their fact checking for fear of being blogged into extinction. One’s expectations would be mistaken.

Yesterday’s LA Times editorial on charter schools combined errors of fact and omission with a misrepresentation of the economic research on public school spending. First, the Times claims that KIPP charter public schools spend “significantly more per student than the public school system.” Not so, says the KIPP website. But why rely on KIPP’s testimony, when we can look at the raw data? LA’s KIPP Academy of Opportunity, for instance, spent just over $3 million in 2007-08, for 345 students, for a total per pupil expenditure of $8,917. The most recent Dept. of Ed. data for LAUSD(2006-07) put that district’s comparable figure at $13,481 (which, as Cato’s Adam Schaeffer will show in a forthcoming paper, is far below what it currently spends). Nationwide, the median school district spends 24 percent more than the median charter school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Next, in summarizing the charter research, the Times’ editors omitted the most recent and sophisticated study, by Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby. It finds a significant academic advantage to charters using a randomized assignment experimental model that blows the methodological doors off most of the earlier charter research. The Times also neglects to mention Hoxby’s damning critique of the CREDO study it does cite.

Finally, the Times’ editors are mistaken in claiming that district operating costs “do not necessarily go down” as large numbers of students migrate to charters. Economists find that districts reap significant cost savings as students leave — e.g., by cutting staff and consolidating buildings. The Times is claiming that the marginal cost of public schooling is essentially zero — that it neither costs more to educate one additional student nor less to educate one fewer student. In reality, the marginal cost of public schooling is generally found in the empirical literature to be near or above 80 percent of the total cost.

There are certainly reasons to lament the performance of the charter sector, and the Times’ editors even came close to citing one of them: its inability to scale up excellence as rapidly and routinely as is the case in virtually every field outside of education. Before getting into such policy issues, however, the Times should make a greater effort to marshal the basic facts.

LA Times Hastens Toward the Light is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The final guidelines for the Administration’s “Race to the Top” education reform program have now been released. It’s a system that stimulates competition between the states to produce results that the customer (Secretary Duncan) wants, using financial incentives. Déjà vu, anyone?

It’s as though Arne Duncan recognizes the merits of free market forces, but rather than faithfully reproducing them in the field of education, he’s decided to give us his own reimagining of them.

Here’s the problem. There are already 25 years of scientific research comparing real free education markets to traditional public school systems. It overwhelmingly finds that markets do a better job of serving families. But we have no evidence at all that Secretary Duncan’s newly invented system will do anyone any good.

So why go to all this trouble to reinvent the wheel, when the Secretary’s own Department of Education has found that an on-going federal private school choice program—which gets much closer to a genuine education marketplace—is raising students’ reading ability by two grade levels after just 3 years of participation?

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Wheel Reinvention 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

Tomorrow morning, the president’s Council of Economic Advisers will release a report assessing the short and long-term effects of the stimulus bill on the U.S. economy. As with previous iterations, this report will attempt to forecast overall effects of the stimulus across its many different components and the different economic sectors it targets. In doing so, it ignores the clearest research findings available pertaining to a key portion of the stimulus: k-12 education.

The president has committed $100 billion in new money to the nation’s public school systems, and required that states accepting the funds promise not to reduce their own k-12 spending. The official argument for this measure is that higher school spending will accelerate U.S. economic growth. But a July 2008 study in the Journal of Policy Sciences finds that, to the authors’ own surprise, higher spending on public schooling is associated with lower subsequent economic growth. Spending more on public schools hurts the U.S. economy.

How is that possible? There is little debate in academic circles that raising human capital — improving the skills and knowledge of workers — boosts productivity. So an obvious interpretation of the JPS study is that raising public school spending must not increase human capital. While this possibility surprised study authors Norman Baldwin and Stephen Borrelli, it is consistent with the data on U.S. educational productivity over the past two generations.

Since 1970, inflation adjusted public school spending has more than doubled. Over the same period, achievement of students at the end of high school has stagnated according to the Department of Education’s own long term National Assessment of Educational Progress. Meanwhile, the high school graduation rate has declined by 4 or 5%, according to Nobel laureate economist James Heckman. So the only thing higher public school spending has accomplished is to raise taxes by about $300 billion annually, without improving outcomes.

The fact that more schooling without more learning is not a recipe for economic growth is confirmed by the independent empirical work of economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann. Their key finding is that academic achievement, not schooling per se, is what matters to economic growth.

Based on this body of research, the president’s decision to pump $100 billion into existing public school systems is likely slowing the U.S. economic recovery.

Research Shows $100 Billion Ed. Stimulus Likely Hurting Economy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Some well-known bloggers are being terrible bullies, beating up on private schools.

Felix Salmon kicks things off by hoping the government tightens the definition of a “charitable” organization and begins taxing private schools who don’t “do a bit more to earn it.” Matt Yglesias agrees that private schools are mooching deadbeats and ups the ante, calling them actively harmful as well. Finally, Conor Clarke at The Atlantic agrees, but makes the other two look like panty-waists by proposing the government radically narrow what is considered a charity in the first place.

Yglesias even has the temerity to indict private schools for the failure of NYC public schools:

And as best one can tell, their main impact on the common weal is negative, drawing parents with resources and social capital out of the public school system and contributing to its neglect. You’d have to believe that New York City’s public schools would be both better funded and free of this kind of nonsense if a larger portion of the city’s elite were sending their kids to them.

Really? Would we have to believe what Yglesias says? No, it’s not “the best one can tell.” According to the evidence, Yglesias’ breezy, offhand accusation is demonstrably wrong. Increased competition from private schools actually improves public school performance.

And the more kids who leave public to go private, the more money the schools have for the kids who remain.

What ingrates. They complain about the lost tax revenue while dismissing out of hand the billions of dollars that parents and donors spend every year to educate children outside the government system. They dismiss the fact that these parents and donors are saving taxpayers in the neighborhood of $60 Billion a year based on current-dollar public school spending and the number of kids in private schools.

Finally, if this is all about rich people getting a free ride, why aren’t these guys screaming about means-testing public schools? Why shouldn’t we charge rich parents tuition to attend public schools? If a charitable deduction for private schools is so bad, why isn’t a free public education even worse?

I Would Rather You Just Said “Thank You, Private Schools,” and Went on Your Way… 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

Congress and the Obama administration issued a death sentence for the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program. That means more than 1,700 students could be forced out of good schools into the dangerous, failing, and expensive DC public school system.

Everyone who cares about these children and school choice should head to Freedom Plaza this coming Wednesday, May 6th from 1:00 – 2:00 pm for a rally to demonstrate support for these children and educational freedom. Hundreds of parents and children are coming to stand up and be heard, and they need all the support we can provide . . .

Rally for School Choice in the District is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yesterday on Fox News’ Special Report, Juan Williams had this to say about Obama’s silence and Duncan’s hostility to the DC voucher program, recently put on the chopping block by Democrats in Congress:

This is an outrage to me. … This is so important that you give young people a chance to have an education in America and especially in a failing public school system like you have in the District of Columbia. This voucher system is a direct threat to the unions. And so I think everybody on Capitol Hill, that’s getting money from the NEA or AFT, they should be called on the table. They should ask them, ‘where do you send your kids to school? And are you willing to say these kids getting the vouchers…and doing better than the rest of the kids, that these kids aren’t deserving of an opportunity to succeed in America?’ You just want to scream. Why Duncan and Obama aren’t in the forefront of education reform is an outrage and an insult to the very base that voted for them.

But we don’t have to ask President Obama where he sends his kids to school, do we? We already know he sends them to the prestigious private Sidwell Friends school also attended by several of the poor DC voucher students. But those voucher students will only remain classmates of Sasha and Malia for another year or so. After that, they’re out… because Barack Obama lacks the courage, the wisdom, or both to get his own party behind this program — a program that his own education department has shown is a success. Better results at a quarter the cost, and the reaction of our unified Democratic government ranges from outright opposition to malign neglect.

Future generations will look back on these politicians and bureaucrats as the Oral Faubuses of the 21st century. Like Faubus, they will ultimately fail.

Like Faubus, their names will live in infamy.

Juan Williams Blasts Obama, Duncan on Vouchers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Andrew Coulson noted earlier, the Arizona Supreme Court struck down two voucher programs today that serve special needs and foster children.

I think some of his points deserve an additional emphasis; this is a tragedy for many of the state’s most needy and vulnerable children but it can be easily fixed. (See who school choice opponents are so determined to send back to an inadequate public school system here).

These children can be quickly and seamlessly supported in their school of choice through an immediate expansion of the state’s two existing education tax credit programs, which have been ruled constitutional.

These children are in desperate need of the education they currently receive at private schools, and lawmakers must ensure that they can continue to attend their school of choice.

More on the AZ Supreme Court Ruling is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Democratic Congress recently signed a death warrant for the DC voucher program and we witnessed some in the center-left media come out swinging in defense of the policy.

Support for school choice is mainstreaming. And while we have seen serious setbacks on voucher policy in recent years, supporters of private schools choice should not be discouraged.

Education tax credits are making huge strides, with new programs multiplying and old ones expanding. And the support is increasingly bipartisan.

So congratulations and thanks to South Carolina State Sen. Robert Ford, the latest high-profile Democrat to support education tax credits:

State Sen. Robert Ford is lending his voice — a black voice rooted in the African-American struggle for equal rights — to the S.C. fight over school choice. To the dismay of his African-American Senate colleagues, the Charleston Democrat is hawking a bill that would give students [an education tax credit or scholarship supported by credits] to go to a private school.

Ford, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor . . . is making the case that the students who would benefit most from a [tax credit] program in South Carolina are African-Americans who attend poorly performing schools.

“All of us have been defending the system,” Ford said. “It’s time to stop. I’m not pussyfooting with this anymore.”

Ford might be a bit lonely at first in South Carolina, but he stands in good company across the nation.

Florida’s donation tax-credit program became law in 2001 with the vote of a single Democratic legislator. Last year, a third of statehouse Democrats, half the black caucus and the entire Hispanic caucus voted to expand that program.

New or expanded tax-credit initiatives were signed into law by Democratic governors in Arizona, Iowa and Pennsylvania in 2006. That same year a Democrat-controlled legislature in Rhode Island passed a donation tax credit and a Democratic governor and legislature in Iowa expanded the tax-credit dollar cap by 50 percent in 2007.

Last year six states moved a school choice bill through both chambers and five more passed a bill through one chamber. Georgia passed a universal donation tax credit program, and Louisiana passed both a voucher program and an education tax deduction.

Ford is right that the public school system has failed children and taxpayers for decades. Now the system is failing to maintain the only thing that matters to it; political support.

This Is System Failure . . . is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This weekend, the Washington Post took education secretary Arne Duncan to task for claiming that DC’s public school system has ”had more money than God for a long time.” Post education reporter Bill Turque notes a January 2009 study showing “that D.C., ranked against the 50 states, is 13th in per-pupil expenditures ($11,193).” The study he cites is the January 2009 edition of Education Week’s Quality Counts publication, which used “Department of Education data from 2005-06 (the latest year available).”

Is this finally an example of the investigative journalism I recently noted has been sorely lacking in education? Not exactly. The Post and Ed Week are reporting a figure that is less that half of what DC is actually spending on k-12 education this year.

Their first error is to imagine that the Dept. of Ed.’s 3-year-old data are the most recent available. As a few seconds of Googling demonstrate, the current year education budgets for the District are available on the website of DC’s Chief Financial Officer: here, here, and here.

What difference do 3 years make? Consider that total spending on education in DC has gone up in real terms over that period while enrollment has fallen from about 59,000 to fewer than 49,000 students. That alone has led to a dramatic rise in per pupil spending.

Next consider that Ed Week appears to have ignored capital spending (e.g., on building renovation and construction) from its calculations. So its “per pupil expenditures” are not the total per pupil figures that readers would naturally assume, they only cover part of the district’s spending (the part normally referred to as “current operating expenditures”). What difference does that make? Nearly $5,000 worth.

As I noted last year, “current operating expenditures” for DC were $13,466 in 2005-06 (Ed Week‘s figure is lower because they applied a regional cost-of-living adjustment). DC’s total per pupil spending in that same year was $18,098. [Note that we have to infer that Ed Week excluded capital spending based on the numbers they report, because their table inexplicably fails to say what figures it is reporting.]

And finally, reporting old figures without adjusting for inflation understates how much was actually spent unless readers know to perform the inflation adjustment themselves.

So what happens when you add up this year’s total spending on k-12 education in DC and divide by this year’s actual enrollment? You end up with the real per pupil spending figure of $26,555.

So, secretary Duncan: you were right all along.

Any journalist or public official wishing an explanation of the current-year total per pupil spending figure cited above for Washington, DC  is welcome to contact me at acoulson(at) cato.org

Education Journalism. Another Epic Failure is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Dana Goldstein of the American Prospect blogs that “research clearly shows that students using vouchers perform no better academically than their socio-economically similar peers in public schools.” This is flamboyantly false.

I recently reviewed the literature comparing public, private, and truly free market school systems, and an expanded version of that study is forthcoming in the Journal of School Choice. The JSC version tabulates the findings of 65 scientific studies (including every U.S. and foreign voucher study I am aware of), collectively reporting 156 comparisons of educational outcomes. What does the research “clearly show”? It shows this:

Summary of Findings Comparing Private and Government Schooling,
by Result and Outcome Category

The above table summarizes the results of the scientific literature, showing the number of findings favoring the private sector by a statistically significant margin, the number that are insignificant, and the number favoring the public sector by a statistically significant margin. It does this for all eight available outcome measures: academic achievement, efficiency (achievement per dollar spent per pupil), parental satisfaction, the orderliness of classrooms, the condition in which facilities are maintained, the later earnings of graduates, the highest school grade or degree completed, and effect on measured intelligence. And it incontrovertably shows that private sector outperforms the public sector in education across all of those measures.

But there’s more. As I note in the conclusion: “It is in fact the least regulated market school systems that show the greatest margin of superiority over state schooling.” When the above results are winnowed down so that we compare only free markets of private schools that are funded at least in part directly by parents to public school monopolies like those of the United States, the findings are even more starkly divided:

Note the staggering overall results. Findings favoring free market school systems outnumber contrary findings by a margin of 15 to 1. They also outnumber the combined insignificant findings and the findings favoring monopolies by more than 3 to 1. Most tellingly, when we look at efficiency we find that there are NO results in the literature that favor government schooling and NO results that are statistically insignificant. EVERY study that compares academic achievement per dollar spent per pupil between market school systems and public school systems finds a significant market advantage.

Goldstein and The American Prospect should obviously print a retraction. But if they are interested in the truth, they might want to do something more. They might want to ask themselves why they continue to cling to a monopoly system that has been overwhelmingly discredited in the scientific literature….

American Prospect Strikes Mother Lode of Falsehood is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Education secretary Arne Duncan testified before Congress today on the president’s 2010 budget for the Department of Education. One of the first things he said was this:

We also plan to work very hard at scaling up success in our education system. Under our 2010 budget, the Department would continue to use the Innovation Fund created by the Recovery Act to identify and replicate successful models and strategies that raise student achievement. We know that there are many school systems and non-profit organizations across the country with demonstrated track records of success in raising student achievement, and our 2010 request would help bring their success to scale.

Duncan and President Obama are so, so right to focus on this challenge. Sadly, their efforts will so, so utterly fail, just as those of all their predecessors. Here’s why:

For a long time, observers of U.S. public schooling have wrung their hands over a pernicious problem: there are many isolated and transitory examples of excellence within the system (think “Stand and Deliver“), but efforts to scale these models up on a lasting, nationwide basis have always failed.

One early and notorious example was the federal Follow Through experiment of the late 1960s and early ’70s. At a cost of over a billion dollars, it demonstrated that one instruction method, “Distar,” clearly outperformed 21 others. Distar was #1 not just overall, but in each of the subcategories of reading, arithmetic, spelling and language. It placed a close second in promoting advanced conceptual skills, and was even the most effective at boosting students’ self-esteem and responsibility toward their work. Nothing else came close.

So what happened? The public school system failed to follow through on Follow Through. Not only was Distar NOT widely adopted around the country, most of the schools that had used it during the experimental phase subsequently dropped it. Their performance dropped commensurately. End of story.

Then there was the billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge of the 1990s, which was meant to identify and replicate successful education models around the country. The project was funded by TV Guide mogul Walter H. Annenberg, launched by then-president Bill Clinton, and overseen, in its Chicago operations, by Barack Obama. And it was another utter failure. Some good schools were created here and there, but the lasting, system-wide improvements that Annenberg had been hoping for never materialized. Why?

The reason is simple: the incredible progress we’ve witnessed in virtually every aspect of life for the past two centuries is the product of freedoms and incentives that do not exist in public schooling.  After spending most of their adult lives writing an awe-inspiring 11 volume history of the world, Will and Ariel Durant remarked that:

The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive or too transient. (The Lessons of History, 1968, p. 54-55).

And while the Durants learned this lesson from their study of history, others learned it from personal experience. Michael Manley, leader of the People’s National Party and Vice President of the Socialist International, looked back on his time as Prime Minister of Jamaica and observed in New Perspectives Quarterly:

The fact is we all seriously miscalculated the capacity of the state to intervene effectively. Despite the enormous sincerity we brought to the task, our nationalist and statist approach didn’t work… When one tries to use the state as a major instrument of production, one quickly exhausts the managerial talent that can be mobilized in the name of patriotism. Absent the profit motive, it was truly amazing how few managers one could find that were motivated solely by love of their country, and how quickly these noble souls burned out. I call this idea the “Guevarist myth.” (1992, p. 46-47).

The automatic process by which useful innovations are encouraged, identified, disseminated, perpetuated, and finally superseded relies on innovators being free to do whatever they think is best for their customers, and having powerful incentives to constantly improve on the state of the art. That is why dramatic progress has been the norm under the free-enterprise system over the past 40 years, while public school productivity has plummeted.

Great educators and great schools can and do appear within the public school system, but they do so in spite of that system, not because of it. They never scale up in the way that Google, iPods, or the Kumon tutoring chain have scaled up, because they lack the combination of freedoms and incentives essential to doing so. Trying to get a bureaucracy with a state-protected funding monopoly to reliably scale up excellence in the way that markets do is like trying to reinvent the wheel with an alternative value of pi. It simply cannot be done.

True education markets are the ONLY system that will do what Secretary Duncan, President Obama, and the American people wish.

Ed. Feds to Reinvent Wheel, Ignoring Pi is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Through his press secretary Robert Gibbs, president Obama has declared that he will reverse congressional Democrats’ phase-out of the DC Opportunity Scholarships program. The scholarships make private schooling affordable for 1,700 poor DC children, most of whom would be forced back into the District’s broken public school system if it were to end.

However — yes, there’s always a however — there’s every indication that president Obama will do the minimum necessary to keep the program going at its current size, and will not help to expand it.

This is nevertheless a crucial milestone. There is finally a major national Democratic leader who is beginning to catch up to his state-level peers. Democrats all around the country have been supporting and signing small education tax credit programs because they realize that these programs are win-win: good for their constituents and good for their long-term political futures.

The old guard of the Democratic party — typified by congressional leaders — still imagines that school choice is bad for them. They still think that they can roll back time to a period when the public school monopoly was inviolate. That time has passed. Real educational freedom is spreading — slowly — around the country. That is not going to stop.

The last Democrats to be found jamming their fingers into the dike, hoping to stop the flight to educational freedom, will find their political careers swept away when that dike finally crumbles.

Obama First Dem President to Support Vouchers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog