I did the above interview recently with ChoiceMedia.tv on the subject of education tax credits and vouchers, in which I argued that credits are a better way of ensuring universal access to the education marketplace. Credits can either directly reduce the taxes owed by families who pay for their own children’s education (as in Illinois and Iowa), or they can offset donations taxpayers make to non-profit k-12 scholarship programs that provide tuition assistance to the poor (as in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and several other states).

The interview elicited an important question from a commenter: If financial assistance for the poor comes from scholarship programs, isn’t there a risk that those programs will impose restrictions on how the scholarships can be used, thereby curtailing poor families’ educational options?

Minimizing that problem is actually one of the many reasons to prefer education tax credits over vouchers. Any time someone other than the parents is footing the bill for a child’s education, there is the risk that this third party is going to limit parents’ choices. The worst case, historically, has been when that third party is the government. When governments pay for schooling, there is a single set of regulations on what choices parents can make, and there is no way to avoid those regulations short of rejecting the financial assistance altogether—which the poorest families have difficulty doing. Vouchers bring with them this single set of government rules (and it is often an extensive one as I discovered in this study).

By contrast, scholarship tax credit programs, like the one in Pennsylvania, give rise to a multitude of different organizations that provide tuition assistance to poor families. If any one of those organizations decides to impose a particular set of restrictions on the use of its scholarships, it has no effect on any of the other organizations. Parents looking for financial assistance are thus free to seek it from a scholarship organization that aligns with their needs and values. The multiplicity of different sources of funding is instrumental—in fact it is essential—in ensuring that poor parents’ choices are not curtailed.

I’ve made this argument in a variety of places, most recently in a U.S. Supreme Court brief in the Arizona tax credit case ACSTO v. Winn.

Government, Education, and Freedom is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The center-right consensus is that in order to balance the budget and improve health care, Congress needs to overhaul Medicare using some form of voucher or premium support.  Whereas the current program offers an essentially unlimited subsidy for medical care, under these options Congress would give each enrollee a fixed subsidy with which they could purchase private health insurance.  But how should Congress determine the size of these fixed subsidies?

The House GOP approved a budget under which Congress would pick the amount.  Beginning in 2022, all new enrollees would receive a voucher.  The average voucher amount would be equal to the average amount Medicare currently spends per enrollee in 2011, adjusted for overall inflation.  Congress would adjust the actual voucher amount for each enrollee based on health status and income, so some enrollees would receive larger and some would receive smaller vouchers.  But since the average voucher would grow at the rate of inflation (i.e., about 2.5 percentage points slower than per-enrollee Medicare spending currently grows), this approach would reduce Medicare spending over time.

A drawback of this approach is that opponents can (and do) demagogue it, claiming that the vouchers would be insufficient and seniors would die for lack of medical care.  This demagoguery ignores two important factors.

First, as Peter Orszag and President Obama themselves loved reminding us during the ObamaCare debate, there is lots of wasteful spending in the Medicare program.  Orszag frequently cites the Dartmouth Atlas, which estimates that one third of Medicare spending is pure waste.  Since the amount of the House GOP’s vouchers would be based on per-enrollee Medicare spending, they would essentially give Medicare enrollees 50 percent more money than they would need to purchase all the beneficial medical care that Medicare currently provides.  The vast amount of wasteful Medicare spending is a disgrace.  But when converting to a voucher system it’s an absolute boon, because it provides a huge margin of safety.  It means that enrollees could reduce their medical consumption by one third without harming their health.

Second, the anti-reform demagogues presume that vouchers would do absolutely nothing to make health care more efficient.  Vouchers would make the nation’s 50 million heaviest consumers of medical care cost-conscious in a way they have never been before.  Like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli, they will force providers to cut costs and thereby make their vouchers go farther.

It is because of this second factor that Yuval Levin proposes a different way of setting the voucher amount(s).  Levin proposes to use a competitive-bidding process.  Under this approach, everyone in Medicare would receive a voucher equal to the second-lowest bid that health plans submit to provide a standard package of benefits.  Enrollees could then apply their voucher to any private plan or even a government-run plan.  Under this approach, enrollees would still be cost-conscious: if the health insurance policies they choose cost more than the voucher amount, they would have to make up the difference; if the policies cost less, they would keep the savings.  Levin argues that this cost-consciousness would also lead enrollees to put pressure on providers to cut costs, and therefore the amount of the second-lowest bid would automatically grow at a slower rate than per-enrollee spending under the current Medicare program.  ”In such a system,” Levin writes, “the premium-support benefit would grow exactly as quickly as required to provide a comprehensive insurance benefit, since the growth rate would be determined by a market process rather than a preset formula. ” Voila!  The competitive forces of the market would cut Medicare spending.

The best evidence that competitive bidding will reduce Medicare spending is that the durable medical equipment manufacturers have fought efforts to impose it on them.  So while I’m not hostile to the idea, I don’t think it’s an improvement over the House GOP plan.

First, Levin calls competitive-bidding “the Confident Market Solution” because he is confident that markets will reduce the cost of health care.  I’m confident of that too.  But I’m also confident that rent-seeking will be present in Medicare, no matter what reforms Congress enacts.  I am far less confident that markets will reduce costs faster than rent-seeking will increase them.  My sense is that politicians will be much more likely to hold the line on rent-seeking if they actually draw one.

Second, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) crafted a House budget that proposed to reduce the growth of Medicare spending using hard, score-able numbers.  Hundreds of House members likewise stuck their necks out by voting for it.  The Confident Market Solution essentially undercuts those folks by telling them they should not have done something so bold and courageous.  Levin is no doubt correct that a competitive-bidding process that doesn’t specifically commit Congress to reducing Medicare spending growth is more politically feasible than a voucher plan that does.  When politicians choose the more politically perilous option, however, reformers should tell the world why that was the right thing to do.

Third, Levin would include a public option in the competitive-bidding system.  I am also confident that the government would heavily subsidize that health plan until it drove private insurers (and any hope of cost-cutting innovations) out of the market.

I’ve discussed what I think is a better approach to Medicare reform here and here.

Let the Market Cut Medicare? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The federal government, four states, and a whistleblower have extracted a $154 million settlement from Par Pharmaceuticals for fraudulently inflating the prices it charges Medicaid, according to the Associated Press.

With Medicare and Medicaid losing roughly $100 billion each year to fraud and other improper payments, however, the fact that a paltry $154 million settlement is news can only mean that federal and state governments are not even trying to combat fraud in any serious way.   As I explain in this video, that’s because politicians have almost zero incentive to do so — which makes massive amounts of fraud an inherent part of these programs:

Under ObamaCare, Medicare and Medicaid fraud will only get worse.

$154 Million Medicaid Fraud Settlement a Sign of Govt Failure, Not Success is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I was tied up when the massive Atlanta School District cheating scandal broke last month, and so didn’t get around to blogging it. [Recap: nearly 200 teachers and principals in half of the district's 100 schools were involved]. But, with other large-scale cheating investigations still on-going, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan was asked about the problem yesterday during a video-taped “Twitter town hall” (minute 12:00). Specifically, he was asked if the high-stakes tests mandated by NCLB are to blame (minute 16:50). Though Duncan made an off-hand comment that high-stakes NCLB-required tests may have contributed to the pressure that lead to the cheating, he repeatedly blamed the cheating on a uniquely “morally bankrupt culture” in Atlanta’s public schools. That didn’t convince interviewer John Merrow, who cited several other cities where cheating investigations are underway—nor should it convince you.

The problem is not that Atlanta is the Sodom and Gomorrah of public schooling. The problem is that state schooling separates payment from consumption. The accountability mechanism of competitive markets—the only such mechanism that actually works—requires the payer to also be the consumer, because the central incentive for any service provider is to please the payer. So if the consumer isn’t paying, he or she is rendered relatively unimportant in the eyes of the provider. Atlanta parents want their children to be well educated, but a lot of work is required to meet that goal. State and federal bureaucrats just want high scores on NCLB-mandated tests—that’s much easier to achieve by cheating than by doing an excellent job teaching. So there is an incentive for school officials to cheat because they are paid by the bureaucrats, not by the parents. Not every teacher succumbs to this incentive, of course, but the incentive is very clearly putting pressure in the wrong direction.

Now consider the incentive structure of schools paid directly by parents in tuition. The incentive in that scenario is to give parents what they want, which is usually a high quality education for their children. Certainly schools could try to lie to parents about how well their children are doing, but this is much harder than lying to bureaucrats. A great many parents will notice a discrepancy if their illiterate children are awarded A’s. And parents considering a school will notice a discrepancy if the “A”-graded graduates of that school somehow cannot gain admission to, or often drop out of, the next higher level of education. Word of mouth—and now word-of-social-networking-apps—is a powerful thing. So it’s much harder for parent-funded schools to get away with cheating, even if they were predisposed to use that strategy.

This is why no system of education that relies exclusively on third-party payment will ever match the quality and progress that we have come to expect in every other field. Indeed, it argues for finding ways of ensuring universal access to education that rely, as much as possible, on direct payment of tuition by parents. Of all the currently viable education policies, the one that fits that description best is the education tax credit—particularly direct credits for families’ own education expenses. And, among third-party payment methods, scholarship tax credits also have advantages over the alternatives.

This is a reality many folks will not want to hear or accept, but reality is not optional.

The Sodom and Gomorrah of Public Schooling? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Neal wrote about earlier, Education Next has released their new poll, and there are some interesting results.

Surprisingly, the authors buried the lede in their writeup; education tax credits consistently have more support and less opposition than any other choice policy.

This year, donation tax credits pulled in a 29-point margin of support (that’s total favor minus total oppose). In contrast, charter schools had a 25-point margin of support.

The authors added a new, less neutral voucher question that boosted the margin of support to 20 points. They couched the policy in terms of “wider choice” for kids in public schools, and the implication was that it was universal. All three of these additional considerations tend to have a positive impact on support for choice policies.

The standard low-income voucher question showed a big jump this year from a -12 in 2010 to a 1-point margin of support. The last time Education Next asked a low-income tax credit question, it garnered a 19-point margin of support.

Last year, tax credits had a 28-point margin of support (that’s total favor minus total oppose). In contrast, charter schools had a 22-point margin of support and vouchers for low-income kids went -12 points (more respondents opposed).

Public opinion is consistently and strongly in favor of education tax credits over vouchers and even charter schools. And thankfully, they’re a much better policy as well.

Education Tax Credits More Popular Than Vouchers & Charters is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today the good folks at the journal Education Next released their annual survey of education opinion. What follows is a quick summary of many of the things the pollsters found, followed by a little commentary about the national-standards results.  (Adam Schaeffer, I have it on good authority, will be flogging the tax credit and voucher findings in an upcoming post.) Bottom line: The public usually has the right inclinations, but gets some answers wrong as a result.

One note: As is always the case with polls — but I won’t go into great detail with Education Next’s questions – remember that question wording can have a sizable impact on results.

So what did Education Next find?

• Almost everybody reports paying at least some attention to education issues
• 79 percent of Americans would grade the nation’s public schools no better than a “C”
• 54 percent of Americans, and 43 percent of parents, would grade their communities’ public schools no better than a “C”
• Even when told how much their district spends per pupil, 46 percent of respondents think funding should increase. But that’s down from 59 percent when the current expenditure isn’t given
• Pluralities of Americans favor charter schooling and government-funded private-school choice (without mention of the sometimes toxic word “voucher”), and a close majority supports tax-credit-based choice   
• A huge majority, even after having been given the average teacher salary, thinks teachers should get paid more or about the same as they currently do
• A plurality thinks teachers should pay 20 percent of the cost of their health-care and pension benefits
• Large pluralities – and for one question a majority – support judging and rewarding teachers based on performance, as well as easing credentialing and tenure rules
• The public is about evenly split on whether teachers’ unions are good or bad for their districts
• Big majorities support federal testing demands (without mention of the often-toxic No Child Left Behind Act) as well as states adopting the “same set” of standards and tests (without mention of federal incentives to do so)
• A plurality of Americans oppose taking income into account when assigning students to schools
• Only 16 percent of respondents think local taxes for their district should decrease

All of these results demonstrate good reflexes by the public. They know, for instance, that overall the public schools are performing poorly, but they are a little happier with the districts they often chose when selecting homes. They want to spend more money on schooling because education is generally a good thing, but that drops when they are told how much is actually being spent (a slippery figure few hard-working Americans have time to pin down themselves). They recognize the need for choice, something they benefit from in almost every other facet of their lives. They believe in judging and rewarding people based on their performance. They oppose forcing physical integration — in this case based on income – on students and communities. And they even, reasonably, want all states to have the same academic standards.

About that last point: Intuitively, it seems to make sense. Why should kids in Mississippi be asked to learn less than those in Massachusetts? If I didn’t get paid to analyze education policy — if I had to do other work for 40-plus hours a week — I, too, would probably support national standards because I wouldn’t have time to look at the evidence, or cogitate over the politics behind such a fair sounding proposal. But I do analyze education policy full time, and I know that (1) there is little evidence supporting calls for national standards; (2) many states have adopted national standards mainly in pursuit of federal money; (3) even if you can get initially high standards, they’ll be dumbed-down by politics; and (4) states can perhaps be standardized, but unique, individual students never can be.

Of course, the good-intentions problem is not unique to education. The huge opportunity costs — among other disincentives – that keep members of the public from being able to sufficiently analyze complicated political issues is a major problem in all public policy matters. That’s why good intentions — which the public demonstrates in spades in this poll — can often lead to bad outcomes. But we cannot blame the public for that. We must, instead, inform the public as best we can.

Public Right on Choice, Wrong on Standards, But Always Well Intentioned is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Are Unions Really Good for Democrats? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

The worldwide historical and modern evidence indicate that private schools will ultimately accept government funding no matter what strings are attached, and that such subsidized schools can consume the unsubsidized sector. This has happened in the Netherlands, for instance, which no longer has an unsubsidized private school sector after a century of government-funded private schooling. And since subsidized schools may not be operated for profit, it has no entrepreneurial chains of private schools.

So what happens if the subsidies eventually accumulate so much regulation that government-funded “private” schools become indistinguishable from today’s government schools? The result would be a move from the current 90% government monopoly to a 100% government monopoly. Not a victory at all, as the international evidence shows that the least regulated, most market-like education systems enjoy the greatest advantage over centrally planned school systems such as our own.

Last year, I ran a statistical analysis of the level of regulation imposed on private schools participating in voucher and education tax credit programs. I found that vouchers impose a large and statistically significant burden of extra regulation on private schools, whereas tax credits do not.  There are other issues with vouchers and charter schools as well. So all “choice” programs are not created equal.

Still, these concerns aside, Jay has written one of the best introductions to the case for educational freedom I’ve seen. I hope it gets a wide readership.

Jay Greene’s Great New Manifesto is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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.

Family Friendly DISCO Moves is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

On CBS’s Face the Nation, Democratic National Committee chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (FL) said this of the House Republicans’ Medicare reform plan:

Republicans have a plan to end Medicare as we know it. What they would do is they would take the people who are younger than 55 years old today and tell them ‘You know what? You’re on your own. Go and find private health insurance in the healthcare insurance market, we’re going to throw you to the wolves and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions. We’re going to give you X amount of dollars and you figure it out.

That ‘s the version of Wasserman-Shultz’s quote that the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler sent me.  Kessler also told me that the DNC cited me as a source for Wasserman-Shultz’s claims:

Michael Cannon: The Ryan Plan Would Provide More Subsidies To Seniors With Pre-Existing Conditions But Wouldn’t Guarantee Coverage. Michael Cannon, the Director of Health Policy Studies at Cato said during congressional testimony on the Ryan plan, “Thank you for the opportunity, Congressman. I think that lots of — all seniors under the chairman’s proposal, as I understand it, will be able to obtain health insurance coverage. And that’s the — that is because the payment they receive from the federal government to purchase that coverage will be adjusted for income so that lower-income people will get larger vouchers if you will. He doesn’t call them that, I’ll use the V word. And they’ll also be risk-adjusted so that people with severe illnesses will get larger vouchers and be able to purchase insurance coverage that will cover a lot of people who have a pre-existing condition. [HEARING OF THE HEALTH CARE, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, CENSUS AND THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE, 4/5/11]

The Actual Amount More Seniors With Pre-Existing Conditions Would Receive Had Not Been Set Out In The Ryan Budget. Michael Cannon, the Director of Health Policy Studies at Cato said during congressional testimony on the Ryan plan, “That would be a result of the rules, the specific risk-adjustment rule that haven’t been spelled out in his budget. But you would have sick people getting a lot more money.” [HEARING OF THE HEALTH CARE, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, CENSUS AND THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE, 4/5/11]

Empasis in original.

Kessler judged Wasserman-Shultz’s claim to be “bogus.”  FactCheck.org said it was “simply wrong.”

Kessler quoted me in his fact-check, but I think he left out the most important parts.  So here’s my entire email response to Kessler:

This is some high-octane idiocy.

Ryan’s plan says that insurance companies could not turn away seniors.  I’m not sure whether that means only (A) that insurers must issue a policy to all applicants (i.e., guaranteed issue) or whether Ryan’s plan would go further and (B) prevent insurers from charging sick enrollees more (i.e., price controls).  I hope Ryan would not include such price controls, but I see hints that that’s where he’s leaning.  If so, then the Ryan plan would include the very government guarantee that the DNC is complaining isn’t there.   It’d be a lousy guarantee, but it’d be there.

Regardless, the DNC’s attacks are still bunk.

If insurers can charge sick Medicare enrollees whatever they want, and Medicare gives sick enrollees enough money to cover those higher premiums, who needs price controls?  High premiums aren’t scary if you have the money to pay them.  A fair question would be whether the vouchers would be large enough.  The best evidence available (from the Dartmouth Atlas) suggests that one third of spending in traditional Medicare is pure waste.  That is a huge margin of safety: it means that the vouchers could be one-third less than what a Medicare enrollee would otherwise spend without reducing access to necessary care.  The quotes they took from me completely undercut their attacks on the Ryan plan.  I hope they keep quoting me.

Experts widely acknowledge that traditional Medicare exposes seniors to unnecessary and even harmful services.  And Medicare is rapidly consuming more and more of every American’s paycheck.  I can’t imagine anything more irresponsible than defending Medicare as we know it.

Medicare Reform: Throwing Wasserman-Schultz ‘to the Wolves’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

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?

Don’t Let the Aphorism Be the Enemy of Thought is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Pennsylvania state House has just passed an expansion of its existing k-12 scholarship-donation tax credit program. The vote was a deafening 190 to 7 in a state that has voted Democratic in every one of the last five presidential elections.

Nevertheless, there is serious opposition to this expansion of education tax credits in the Senate, where several prominent lawmakers prefer a voucher bill. It’s not clear which path the legislature will ultimately take, but there seems to be considerable agreement on the goal: giving parents true freedom of choice in education.

A key point to consider, then, is which type of program is most likely to preserve the freedom and diversity of the education marketplace, thereby giving families a meaningful range of alternatives to choose from. I ran a regression study on precisely this question last fall (now forthcoming in the peer-reviewed Journal of School Choice). What I found is that vouchers impose a large and statistically highly significant burden of additional regulation on private schools while tax credits do not.

This is not the only advantage of the tax credit program, but it is a compelling one.

Educational Freedom in Pennsylvania is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A new voucher program in Indiana looks likely to be signed by Gov. Daniels soon, but without a slight modification it may not have the benign budgetary impact that is expected.

As written, the program could have a significant negative impact on state finances if families claim both the vouchers and funds from the state’s existing education tax credits.

There is nothing that precludes children who receive a voucher from also topping off that amount with private funds from the existing education tax credit program. That means a voucher student could accept, for example, $4,500 in government funds and then apply for a tax credit scholarship that reduces state revenue by, say, $2,000. The voucher student would cost the state $6,500, not the $4,500 that would be counted on the books. If state funding is 100 percent sensitive to enrollment, the state would save $5,000 on that student switching, and the net impact on state finances would be a $1,500 loss. In other words, the program could have a negative net impact on state finances due to double-dipping.

From a fiscal standpoint, the state would show an apparent “savings” based on the $4,500 voucher, but this would fail to take into account the reduced revenue due to the credit. And the law requires these on-paper-only savings to be passed out to public schools districts. The result? The state government could be out $7,000 on the student in this example, not the $4,500 it paid out in a voucher. The net impact wouldn’t be neutral, it would be a $2,000 loss.

This scenario looks only at how the vouchers might impact state finances. At the local level, the program is likely to have a strongly positive impact on the resources available for each student. But a school choice program’s impact on state finances — ensuring financial transparency, certainty, and a neutral or positive impact — is a critical concern in its own right.

Critics of expanding educational freedom always claim, incorrectly, that school choice programs are a drain on public resources. But the double-dipping that is allowed under this program could inadvertently prove them right — it would also make Indiana’s existing education tax credit program a mere appendage to the new government voucher system. In short, it’s an unforced error, and worth fixing.

Ensuring that Indiana’s New Voucher Program Lives up to Budgetary Expectations is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A group of CEOs called on the nation’s governors this week to raise U.S. business standards. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, the CEOs declared that state governments have been misleading consumers about the quality of the goods they’re buying. One retired Fortune-500 CEO declared that:

America’s standing as the most innovative and prosperous nation on earth depends on our ability to boost business’ productivity. As business leaders, we are pledging to stand with governors who commit to high production and product quality standards in scientific and technological fields.

Even today, most readers probably recognize the preceding paragraphs as satirical (I hope!). The idea that it would be helpful to have bureaucrats set production volume and quality standards for high-tech industries is ludicrous on its face. How tragic it is, then, that this event actually took place… with one small twist: the CEOs were calling for more central planning in science and technology education.

Having spent nearly 20 years studying the relative productivity of different types of school systems, it is hard for me to understand how such brilliant business leaders could have arrived at such a profoundly mistaken conclusion. If they care at all about the goals they have set out to achieve, they would be well advised to stop listening to those who are currently advising them, and to look at the evidence on what actually does raise educational productivity. I’ve summarized that evidence in a short piece for the Washington Post, in a journal paper reviewing the past 25 years of worldwide research, and in a book surveying 20 centuries of school systems.

Distilling the findings of that work into a single sentence: it is the freest and most market-like education systems that, throughout history, have done the best and most efficient job of serving both our individual needs and our shared ideals.

Teachers, it turns out, are people. And like other people, they respond to the freedoms and incentives of their workplaces. As a result, the same structures and conditions that optimize the operation of other industries also optimize the operation of school systems. Xerox makes good copiers and Intel makes good chips because they have competitors who will eat their lunch if they don’t; because they have the freedom to explore new and better ways of serving their customers; and because they are rewarded very handsomely for innovations that successfully serve those customers.

Want education standards to rise? Give educators those same freedoms and incentives — and stand back.

CEOs to Governors: Raise Production Goals and Quality Standards is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I have an op-ed in the Huffington Post today arguing that it’s possible to ensure universal access to education without compelling anyone to support types of instruction that violate their convictions. This eliminates the central objection that the ACLU and ADL have given for their opposition to private school choice. Indeed, if those organizations really care about freedom of conscience, they should prefer the policy solution I outline to the status quo system in which every taxpayer is compelled to support a single government organ of education. Or is there some other reason why the ACLU and ADL oppose liberating American education?

Feel free to chime-in in the comments section on Huff Po.

“Winning” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Andrew and Adam have already explained, today’s decision in ACSTO v. Winn, though grounded in the technical legal doctrine of “standing,” is a big win for school choice and state flexibility in education reform.  Even more importantly, it makes clear that there is a difference between tax credits and government spending; to find that tax money was used for unconstitutional ends here would have assumed that all income is government property until the state allows taxpayers to keep a portion of it.  That is not, to put it mildly, how we think of private property.

Of course, even had the Court found that Arizona’s scholarship scheme involved the use of state funds, the program would have been insulated from Establishment Clause challenge because it offered the “genuine and independent choice” that the Court has long required in such cases (most notably the 2002 school voucher case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris). Many layers of private, individual decisionmaking separate the alleged entanglement of taxpayer funds with religious activities: the choice to set up a scholarship tuition organization (STO), the choice by an STO to provide scholarships for use at religious schools, the choice to donate to such an STO, the choice to apply for a scholarship, and the choice to award a scholarship to a particular student.  

Far from being an impediment to parental control over their children’s education or an endorsement of religious schooling, the autonomy Arizona grants taxpayers and STOs ultimately expands freedom for all concerned.  For more on that, see Cato’s amicus brief.

Also interesting about the case is that it offers us Justice Elena Kagan’s first significant opinion, for the dissenting four justices.  While not surprising that she would be in dissent here, in a “conventional” 5-4 split — although the “conservatives” adopted the position advocated by the Obama administration – there do appear to be some eyebrow-raising turns of phrase.  I won’t comment until I finish reading the opinion, but Ed Whelan offers an initial reaction at NRO’s Bench Memos blog.

Government Can Tax Your Income, But It Doesn’t Own It in the First Place is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last month I wrote a post on President Obama’s selective citation of evidence when debating which education programs to kill and which to keep. Well yesterday the administration struck again, issuing the following statement opposing a bill that would revive DC’s bleeding-out voucher program:

STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY

H.R. 471 – Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act

(Rep. Boehner, R-Ohio, and 50 cosponsors)

While the Administration appreciates that H.R. 471 would provide Federal support for improving public schools in the District of Columbia (D.C.), including expanding and improving high-quality D.C. public charter schools, the Administration opposes the creation or expansion of private school voucher programs that are authorized by this bill.  The Federal Government should focus its attention and available resources on improving the quality of public schools for all students.  Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement. The Administration strongly opposes expanding the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and opening it to new students. Rigorous evaluation over several years demonstrates that the D.C. program has not yielded improved student achievement by its scholarship recipients compared to other students in D.C.  While the President’s FY 2012 Budget requests funding to improve D.C. public schools and expand high-quality public charter schools, the Administration opposes targeting resources to help a small number of individuals attend private schools rather than creating access to great public schools for every child.

So, as I wrote last month, while the Prez. has no problem calling for heaps of dollars for such proven failures as the 21st Century Community Learning Centers — $1.27 billion, to be exact — he won’t support $20 million for something that rigorous research actually works, quoting Andrew Coulson’s recent congressional testimony:

that students attending private schools thanks to this program have equal or better academic performance than their peers in the local public schools, and have significantly higher graduation rates. This, and very high levels of parental satisfaction, com[ing] at an average per pupil cost of around $7,000. By contrast, per pupil spending on k-12 public education in the nation’s capital was roughly $28,000 during the 2008-09 school year.

And such positive results, again in contrast to the President’s statement, are not an aberration for school choice. The highest-calibre research on choice has almost always found clear benefits stemming from it, and has never found negative outcomes.

Obviously I can’t read the President’s mind — he might oppose the voucher program but otherwise love big education spending for philosophical reasons, or he might just be appeasing teachers’ unions — but one thing I do know is that a fair examination of the evidence simply cannot support killing DC vouchers while spending lavishly everywhere else.

Obama’s Little Evidence Problem is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein asks of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisc.) Medicare voucher proposal (co-authored with former Congressional Budget Office director Alice Rivlin):

Why are the cost savings in his bill possible, while the cost savings in the Affordable Care Act aren’t?…when it comes to the ACA, Ryan firmly believes that seniors will quickly and successfully force Congress to reverse any reforms that degrade their Medicare experience. That’s a fair enough concern, of course. What’s confusing is why it isn’t doubly devastating when applied to Ryan-Rivlin.

Set aside that Klein violates Cannon’s First Rule of Economic Literacy: Never say costs when you mean spending.  And that he uses the word “affordable” to describe ObamaCare.

There are two reasons why the Medicare spending restraints in the Ryan-Rivlin proposal are more likely to hold than those in ObamaCare.

First, ObamaCare’s restraints amount to nothing more than ratcheting down the price controls that traditional Medicare uses to pay health care providers.  Structuring Medicare subsidies in this way — setting the prices that Medicare pays specific providers — makes it very difficult to lower those prices, because the system itself creates huge incentives for providers to organize and lobby to undo those restraints.  As I explain more fully in this op-ed from September 2010, Medicare vouchers would change that lobbying game by reducing the incentives for provider groups to expend resources in the pursuit of higher Medicare spending.  That gives the Ryan-Rivlin restraints a much better shot at surviving.  (Seriously, it’s a pretty cool feature.)

Second, Klein predicts a backlash against Medicare vouchers because he says it amounts to “giving seniors less money to purchase more expensive private insurance.”  The notion that Medicare is less costly than private insurance is pure, uninformed nonsense.  Medicare and a “public option” are attractive to the Left precisely because such programs hide the full cost of their operations from enrollees and taxpayers.  It is a virtue of vouchers that they would reveal to Medicare enrollees the actual prices of the coverage and services they demand, because that information will spur enrollees to be more cost-conscious when selecting a health plan and consuming medical services.  That, in turn, will force insurers and providers to compete on the basis of cost to a degree never before seen in this nation, competition that will generate the sort of cost-saving innovations that Jim Capretta discusses here.

Both of these reasons boil down to the truism that nobody spends other people’s money as carefully as they spend their own.  We’ll make a lot of progress in this country when the Left realizes how much damage they’ve done by ignoring that truism.

Why Ryan-Rivlin Beats ObamaCare on Costs — and Spending is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

School Choice Week is here, and there are a lot of people trying to spread the good word about the benefits of increasing educational freedom.

But what benefit of choice is best to focus on?

You can make at most a few points in an oped or on talk radio. On TV, and even in print reporting, you’re lucky to get one point across. And with friends and family, and even politicians, you need to keep the focus where it will do the most good.

So, should you focus on how horrible inner-city schools are, how many lives are destroyed in a failing government system? Maybe. Depends on the person, certainly.

But the evidence suggests that the best message overall is one that focuses on the financial benefits of school choice (and this is even before the financial crisis). People think about vouchers and education tax credits differently. And be careful trying to pull at Democratic heart-strings with arguments that choice will increase educational equity for poor kids . . . there’s evidence that it backfires!

Take a look at this slide presentation that describes how the public thinks about private school choice, what you should emphasize, and what you should be careful with . . . it’s not just my opinion, it’s based on evidence from a unique message experiment:

How to Think & Talk About Vouchers & Ed Tax Credits is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In Douglas County, CO, a jurisdiction with 240,000 residents south of Denver, there is strong public interest in the possible implementation of a sweeping school choice program.  Here’s a blurb from the Denver Post:

Remarkable Interest in School Choice in Colorado? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog