No Compelling Evidence ‘No Child’ Worked
Over the last few days the Wall Street Journal has run two articles suggesting that the No Child Left Behind Act has been somewhat successful. But that’s not supported by the federal government’s own measure, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The WSJ’s first article appeared on Saturday, and while focusing on the stagnation of high-achieving students, it asserts that NAEP exams show “dramatic progress—sometimes double-digit increases—for the lowest achievers over the last two decades, especially after No Child Left Behind.”
Last month I debunked the idea that historically struggling groups have seen dramatic improvements under NCLB, laying out the data from numerous NAEP tests. Quite simply, looking at score gains per year, there were many periods before NCLB that saw faster improvements. Below are two more tables from the latest NAEP scores, released a couple of weeks ago. These are for the so-called “main” NAEP, which is not nearly as valuable as the long-term trends exam for seeing historical patterns, but the WSJ cites it and it does contain new information. The results are for the bottom 10 percent of performers.
As always, at what year one could start crediting results to NCLB is debatable. (Actually, you can never simply look at NAEP scores and attribute them to one factor because so many variables influence outcomes.) That date cannot be earlier than 2002, the year the law was enacted, and probably should be 2003, by which time most of the regulations were written and the law began to take real effect. To deal with this problem, the tables include only years that fully include NCLB or do not include it at all. Also note that there are two pre-NCLB time bands for reading because there are no 2000 8th grade reading scores.
Mathematics, 10th Percentile
Reading, 10th Percentile
Once again, there is is no pattern of faster improvement under NCLB than before it. Highlighting periods with greater growth than under NCLB, you can see that in 4th grade math improvements were faster before NCLB than after. In 8th grade math, it’s essentially a dead heat. In 4th grade reading, there’s sizable improvement under NCLB, and in 8th grade reading there’s an appreciable advantage before NCLB.
The second WSJ piece that gives NCLB undue credit is an op-ed from Kevin Chavous. Chavous, a tremendous advocate for school choice, implies that NCLB supplies “accountability” needed to make American kids competitive with their international peers. But as we’ve seen, there’s precious little evidence that NCLB has done anything to improve educational outcomes. Meanwhile, it has cost us a mint, with Department of Education k-12 spending rising from $27.3 billion in 2001 to $37.9 billion in 2011.
Unfortunately, Chavous’s piece seems more aspirational than reality-based, as is often the case in education policy. “We must try to make schools and teachers accountable,” he seems to be saying. “Heaven knows the states won’t do it!”
The need to deal in reality is why Mr. Chavous’ main concern—getting school choice—is so crucial. Government schooling will never be fundamentally changed because those who would be held accountable—teachers, administrators, bureaucrats—have by far the most motivation to be involved in education politics, the greatest ability to organize, and hence the biggest store of political power. Their livelihoods, after all, are at stake. And what do they want? What we’d all probably like: as much pay as possible with as little accountability.
The only way to end employee domination of education is to fundamentally change the system: instead of having politics control schooling, let parents control education money so they can take their children out of schools they don’t like and put them into those they do. Don’t force them to undertake the endless, hopeless warfare of having to form coalitions, try to get politicians’ ears, spur politicians to move and, if they can ever get decent changes, then force them to constantly fight to keep the reforms against opponents with full-time lobbyists and political machines. No, let them vote with their feet, right away, and get their children the education they need.
NCLB is, by most indications, an abject failure, and the very nature of government schooling doomed it to be so.
The Euro Crisis in Prose and Poetry
The European debt crisis is inspiring public radio to literary analysis. Last week NPR’s Planet Money put the French-German relationship into a “threepenny opera”:
All
Everyone is counting on you
You’ve got the money
We’ve got the debt (Oh yes, we’ve got a lot of debt!)
And do we need a bailout—you betGermany
Zat’s it, I’ve had enough
Looks like it’s time now for me to leave…France
Oh?
Germany
Vhy is ze door locked? You must let me out.
France
Dear when the times are tough
It’s better to give zan to receive
Then Monday Marketplace Radio turned to classics professor Emily Allen Hornblower and economist Bill Lastrapes to discuss Greek debt as classical tragedy—Oedipus? The ant and the grasshopper?
Loyal Cato readers will recognize Bill Lastrapes as the coauthor of the much-discussed Cato Working Paper “Has the Fed Been a Failure?”
And then, if you prefer prose and sober analysis to literary analogies, let me recommend Holman Jenkins’s perceptive column on why Europe hasn’t solved its crisis yet, which unfortunately appeared in the less-read Saturday edition of the Wall Street Journal. (OK, not less read than Cato-at-Liberty, but probably less read than the weekday Journal.)
Neither leader has an incentive to sacrifice what have become vital and divergent interests to produce a credible bailout plan for Europe. To simplify, German voters don’t want to bail out French banks, and the French government can’t afford to bail out French banks, when and if the long-awaited Greek default is allowed to happen….
There is another savior in the wings, of course, the European Central Bank. But the ECB has no incentive to betray in advance its willingness to get France and Germany off the hook by printing money to keep Europe’s heavily indebted governments afloat. Yet all know this is the outcome politicians are stalling for. This is the outcome markets are relying on, and why they haven’t crashed.
All are waiting for some market ruction hairy enough that the central bank will cast aside every political and legal restraint in order to save the euro….
And then the crisis will be over? Not by a long shot.
All these “solvent” countries and their banks will be dependent on the ECB to keep them “solvent,” a reality that can only lead to entrenched inflation across the European economy. That is, unless these governments undertake heroic reforms quickly to restore themselves to the good graces of the global bond market so they can stand up again without the ECB’s visible help.
It’s just conceivable that this might happen—that countries on the ECB life-support might put their nose to the grindstone to make good on their debts, held by ECB and others. Or they might just resume the game of chicken with German taxpayers, albeit in a new form, implicitly demanding that Germany bail out the ECB before the bank is forced thoroughly to debauch the continent’s common currency, the euro.
Arbabsiar Plot Still Makes No Sense
Manssor Arbabsiar
I was as shocked as most other people to hear Tuesday the Department of Justice unveiling charges against Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year old Iranian-American apparently linked to Iran’s Quds Force. If the facts as described in the government’s complaint [.pdf] were part of a crime novel I were editing, I’d tell the author it was far too outlandish and to do some more research. Now we’re finding out that the administration itself had “expressed concern that the plot’s cartoonish quality would invite suspicions and conspiracy theories.”
And cartoonish it was. I had figured that maybe I was the only one who thought the government’s story was shot through with gaping holes, but now I read that basically the entire roster of non-neoconservative Iran watchers can’t make sense of the plot.
For their part, reflexive hawks have taken the news in stride. James Jay Carafano explained that this is what happens when you act like Jimmy Carter, and the neocons’ Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has essentially taken over the WSJ op-ed page. (As one wag noted, the WSJ’s unsigned editorial invoked 9/11 in the first sentence.) But note the lack of critical thought in these pieces. Reuel Marc Gerecht uses the story as the latest hook for his “let’s bomb Iran” shtick, and another FDD/WSJ offering even says that “though details of the plot are still scarce,” “[t]o doubt the Iranian regime’s responsibility in the thwarted attack is to misunderstand its nature, or to somehow fall prey to the delusion that when an Iranian connection appears behind a terror plot, its perpetrators have gone rogue or are acting on behalf of some dark faction to undermine a nonexistent ‘moderate’ camp within the regime.” Well, maybe, but I like details.
I think there’s a pretty strong case for revisiting our assumptions about Iran, provided somebody can fill in the aforementioned holes. I had a bit more of a critical piece in CNN International, asking a number of questions that I’d like to see answered before deciding anything. I’ll just share with you one question I asked:
the accused seem to have believed that the [Mexican drug cartel the] Zetas would blow up [Saudi Ambassador Adel] al-Jubeir (and potentially a hundred people nearby, explicitly including possible U.S. senators) having only been fronted $100,000 of the $1.5 million payoff, and holding Arbabsiar as collateral.
There’s little evidence that the Zetas are stupid enough to cause themselves the trouble that blowing up a Washington restaurant containing the Saudi Ambassador and a hundred others would inevitably cause — especially for a potential payday of only $100,000 and a dead Iranian operative. Why did Arbabsiar or the IRGC think that the Zetas would be willing to do this deal?
To my mind, this is the biggest question out there, but I raise several others. For my provisional thoughts on the story, have a look at that piece.
Confusion over Confusion
On August 29th, I penned “Lagarde Confused, Again.” In it, I argued that Christine Lagarde, the new managing director of the International Monetary Fund, misdiagnosed Europe’s banking crisis.
Ms. Lagarde’s assertion that Europe’s banks “need urgent recapitalization” is based on faulty economics. While the higher capital-asset ratios that Ms. Lagarde extols are intended to strengthen banks (and economies), higher ratios destroy money and are “deflationary.” This is not what a struggling Europe needs. Indeed, higher capital-asset ratios imposed on Europe’s banks at this juncture would virtually ensure that Euroland would take another dive. In consequence, some of the banks that were made “safer” by Ms. Lagarde’s medicine would go to the wall.
Today, the Wall Street Journal‘s lead editorial “A TARP for Europe?” adds to the confusion by enthusiastically endorsing Ms. Lagarde’s prescription.
The Minefield of American Criminal Law
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent article about the problem of overcriminalization—the proliferation of criminal laws and how more and more people can find themselves on the wrong side the law without even realizing it. Here’s an excerpt:
In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land. Authorities “notified me to get a lawyer and a damn good one,” Mr. Anderson recalls.
There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.
Read the whole thing.
It’s great that this phenomenon is getting more attention. Too many people in Washington seem to think that the more laws Congress enacts, the better the job performance of the policymakers. That’s twisted. Before an elected official can take any action whatsoever, he or she must first take an oath to uphold and preserve the Constitution—and the role of the federal government in the criminal area is supposed to be quite limited. I testified before a congressional committee two summers ago on this subject. And Judge Alex Kozinski, quoted in the WSJ article above, has a terrific essay in my book, In the Name of Justice, about the score of federal criminal laws now on the books. And Cato adjunct scholar Harvey Silverglate authored a fine book on the problem, called Three Felonies a Day. More here (pdf) and here.
Does Asia Need a Larger U.S. Handout?
Yesterday, AEI scholars Dan Blumenthal and Michael Mazza authored an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with a perplexing title: “Asia Needs a Larger U.S. Defense Budget.” There are a couple of more sensible arguments you could make: For instance, that Asian countries need larger defense budgets, or that U.S. interests in Asia require larger military expenditures that Asian countries can’t or won’t make themselves . Blumenthal and Mazza gesture at both of those arguments but don’t really make either one. As such, the piece is an emblem of what’s wrong with the Asia policy discussion–to the extent it exists–in Washington today.
In the opening paragraph, the authors state that “it is…difficult to assess how much cuts [to military spending] will cost tomorrow,” but in the next sentence defy that claim by promising that “in Asia, the price will be unacceptably high.” Either it is difficult to assess how much cuts will cost tomorrow, or we know that the price of cuts in Asia will be unacceptably high, but not both. The authors also are apparently unaware of the facts when they argue that U.S. military spending has been “slashed.” It hasn’t even been cut. (For its part, the Asia studies department at AEI was last seen disseminating wildly inflated estimates of Chinese military spending and then refusing to answer queries about how they came up with the figures.)
Blumenthal and Mazza then swerve widely to avoid explaining China’s military buildup, writing that
The international trade that has fueled the region’s economic boom is dependent upon the immeasurable strategic tasks undertaken by the U.S. military–from keeping safe maritime shipping to reassuring friends and allies while deterring China and North Korea.
The reason that China is building up its military forces and narrowly targeting them at securing their sea lines of communication (and perhaps a bit further out) is that they quite rationally do not want to rely on the eternal beneficence of the United States to do it for them, particularly when prominent Asia scholars mention in the same breath deterring and containing China as a primary goal of the U.S. in Asia.
There are other contradictions. For instance, Blumenthal and Mazza assert flatly that
If America skimps on its military, China will become the regional hegemon.
That’s one possibility, but aren’t there others? One paragraph later, the authors allow that sure there are: the alternative is that
Asian countries might find ways to resist Chinese pressure themselves.
So then maybe it’s not foreordained that China will run amok in East Asia absent Washington as its balancer-of-first-resort. But that brings us back around to the weirdness of the title of the piece: saying that Asia needs a larger U.S. defense budget is like saying that Greece needs more German stabilization money. (While we’re here, AEI calling for more military spending is like rock legend Bruce Dickinson calling for more cowbell.)
These kinds of arguments ought to at least try to show why the best way to achieve German (or American) interests is to dole out more largesse to third parties. That may or may not be true, but it would be good to at least see an argument to that effect, rather than all the hand waving and then backing down from the strongest claims in the article.
Gay Marriage in New York
In the Wall Street Journal today, Cato senior fellow Walter Olson praises the New York legislature both for passing a marriage equality bill and for including guarantees of religious freedom in the bill:
For those of us who support same-sex marriage and also consider ourselves to be right of center, there were special reasons to take satisfaction in last Friday’s vote in Albany. New York expanded its marriage law not under court order but after deliberation by elected lawmakers with the signature of an elected governor. Of the key group of affluent New Yorkers said to have pushed the campaign for the bill, many self-identify as conservative or libertarian. A GOP-run state Senate gave the measure its approval….
To their credit, New York lawmakers devoted much attention to the drafting of exemptions to protect churches and religious organizations from being charged with bias for declining to assist in same-sex marriages. Exemptions of this sort are sometimes dismissed as a mere sop to placate opponents. But in fact they’re worth supporting in their own right—and an important recognition that pluralism and liberty can and should advance together as allies….
Critics have charged that same-sex marriage will constrict the free workings of religious institutions and violate the conscience of individuals who act on religious scruples. Many of the examples they give are by now familiar….
Observe, however, that it isn’t the legal status of same-sex marriage that keeps generating these troublesome cases; it’s plain old discrimination law. Thus New York’s highest court ordered Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish institution, to let same-sex couples into its married-student housing. But that ruling happened a decade ago and had nothing to do with last week’s vote in Albany. In the case of the wedding photographer ordered not to act on her scruples, New Mexico didn’t then and doesn’t now recognize same-sex marriage. While some of these rulings are to be deplored as infringements on individual liberty, they’re not consequences of the state of marriage law itself.
Also: Cato’s forum on the legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8, featuring Ted Olson, David Boies, John Podesta, and Robert Levy. And an earlier forum on gays and conservatism featuring Andrew Sullivan, Maggie Gallagher, and British Cabinet minister Nick Herbert.
Ricardo Paging Alan Blinder
I almost hesitate to suggest that anyone actually read Alan Blinder’s defense of Keynesian economics in today’s Wall Street Journal, except that the piece lays out clearly in my mind why Blinder is so wrong. The only part you really need to read is:
In sum, you may view any particular public-spending program as wasteful, inefficient, leading to “big government” or objectionable on some other grounds. But if it’s not financed with higher taxes, and if it doesn’t drive up interest rates, it’s hard to see how it can destroy jobs.
So in Blinder’s world, deficits are explicitly not future taxes, despite what I believe is a fairly strong consensus among economists that some form of Ricardian equivalence holds (see John Seater’s literature review and conclusion, “despite its nearly certain invalidity as a literal description of the role of public debt in the economy, Ricardian equivalence holds as a close approximation.”). Perhaps Blinder is blind to the fact that deficits are so much a part of the public debate today because households absolutely see those deficits as future taxes.
I also think Blinder misses that fact that crowding out can occur without raising interest rates. As Cato scholar Steve Hanke points out, the Fed’s current policies have basically killed the interbank lending market, which has encouraged banks to load up on Treasuries and Agencies, rather than lend to the productive elements of the economy. While I sadly don’t expect most mainstream macroeconomists to focus on the link between the banking sector and the macroeconomy, Blinder has no excuse; he served on the Fed board.
As I have argued elsewhere, banks are indeed lending, but to the government, not the private sector. The simplistic notion that crowding out can only occur via higher interest rates, as if price is ever the only margin along which a decision is made, has done serious harm to macroeconomics. But then if macroeconomists actually understood the mechanics of financial markets, then we might not be in this mess in the first place.
El Salvador’s Unfortunate Lesson
Two years ago in a Cato study I documented El Salvador’s remarkable liberalization process and the significant progress in economic and social indicators that resulted from those free market reforms. I also warned then about how those achievements were threatened by the likely victory of the former Marxist guerrilla group, FMLN, in the presidential election of 2009.
Even though Mauricio Funes, the then FMLN candidate now turned president, has proven to be a relatively moderate figure when compared to his radical left-wing party, El Salvador is reversing many of the gains of the past decade. Mary O’Grady’s column in the Wall Street Journal today, which describes how “the wheels came off” of the “once thriving Salvadoran economy,” is a reminder to all countries not to take progress for granted.
It’s Bigger Than the Budget
Today POLITICO Arena asks:
Do the cuts (and increases) contained in the six-month spending bill House Republicans posted overnight make sense, and do they go far enough in attacking the deficit and national debt?
My response:
Today’s Arena question captures perfectly what’s missing from our current budget debate. In listing a few of the compromises contained in the six-month spending bill House Republicans posted overnight, and asking whether those cuts (and increases) go far enough in attacking the deficit and national debt, it invites us to imagine that America is one big family, arguing over how “we” should spend “our” money.
We’re not. As I wrote in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, we’re a constitutional republic, populated by discrete individuals, each with our own interests. Today’s question, perfectly understandable in the current climate, socializes us. The Framers’ Constitution freed us, to make our own individual choices.
To be sure, we have to start where we are today. But if that’s as far as we go, we’re doomed to never grasping the real problem. The Constitution was written precisely to check our appetite for “public goods.” It authorizes only a few, truly public goods. Not health care. Not education. Not most of what we spend “our” money on today. We’ve ignored the discipline it imposes, and we’re paying the price.
Schools for Misrule Reviewed
Today was a banner day for my new book on legal academia, Schools for Misrule. It was reviewed at the Wall Street Journal by John McGinnis, professor of law at Northwestern, and at the Weekly Standard by George Leef, director of research at the North Carolina-based John Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. (One or both reviews may be behind subscriber screens.) Both reviews were highly favorable.
McGinnis:
American law schools wield more social influence than any other part of the American university. In ‘Schools for Misrule,’ Walter Olson offers a fine dissection of these strangely powerful institutions. One of his themes is that law professors serve the interests of the legal profession above all else; they seek to enlarge the scope of the law, creating more work for lawyers even as the changes themselves impose more costs on society.
Leef:
At most law schools—and emphatically at elite ones such as Obama’s Harvard—students are immersed in a bath of statist theories that rationalize ever-expanding government control over nearly every aspect of life. … They learn that the concepts of limited government and federalism are outmoded antiques that merely defend unjust privilege. … Schools for Misrule explains how most of the damaging ideas that lawyers, politicians, and judges are eager to fasten upon society originate in our law schools. …
The most recent explosion of legal activism involves making the United States subject to international law. Olson notes that at a New York University Law School symposium, speakers declared that international law requires nations to guarantee all people the right to health, education, “decent” work, and freedom from “severe social exclusion.” Columbia has created a campaign called “Bring Human Rights Home,” which is intended to generate pressure to make American policies consonant with the collectivist notions of “the international community.”
For readers who’d like to hear more about the ideas in the book, I’ll be giving lunchtime talks tomorrow (Tuesday) at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. and on Thursday at the Heartland Institute in Chicago. And on Thursday night I’m scheduled to appear on one of radio’s premier discussion shows, WGN’s Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg. The book as of this afternoon had reached #1,009 in the Amazon standings, #1 in the One-L category, #2 in Legal Education (following an LSAT prep book), and #7 in Law (with only one policy-oriented book, The New Jim Crow, ahead of it; the others are true-crime and student-prep books).
Correction: Charles Mahtesian at Politico Did NOT Agree with Chris Matthews
In my recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Myth of Corporate Cash Hoarding,” I quoted Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball asking Politico‘s Charles Mahtesian an apoplectic question about businesses “sitting on their money” just to keep the economy weak and hurt Obama’s reelection chance in 2012. Then I carelessly added an erroneous superfluity −writing that “Mr. Mahtesian concurred.”
My apologies to Charles Mahtesian (and congratulations for having had the good sense to disagree with Chris Matthews).
In reality, Mahtesian wisely dodged Chris Matthews’ bizarre interrogation about corporations willfully refusing to spend idle cash until after 2012 election. Mahtesian instead switched to talking about business going “whole hog” during the 2010 congressional election (this show aired September 27).
Here is the transcript:
MATTHEWS: You know, a great question, Charles, that wasn‘t on my list to ask, but I‘m going to ask you because you seem like a sophisticated guy of many parts. Do you think business can sit on those billions and trillions of dollars for two more years after they screw Obama this time? Are they going to keep sitting on their money so they don’t invest and help the economy for two long years just to get Mr. Excitement, Mitt Romney, elected president? Would they do that to the country?
MAHTESIAN: Well, I won’t touch the first question, Chris, but…
MATTHEWS: That was all one question, bro!
MAHTESIAN: Oh! I prefer splitting the two. I’d say that I think what you’re going to see the business community do is really go whole hog at this election right now because either way, you know, I think they can envision a scenario in which they lose … because, for example, number one, if the president has a Republican House, that’s probably going to be a rough scenario for them anyway because that’s what the White House wants if they want to get elected in 2012 — re-elected. So, probably the best-case scenario for them.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
MAHTESIAN: So you know, either way, I mean, I think they — they weigh the equities, and you know, see it as a 50-50 endeavor.
MATTHEWS: Anyway, I just hope business starts spending.
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