As Georgia’s legislature considers a bill to expand the state’s scholarship tax credit (STC) program and increase transparency, some are calling for additional regulations. Writing in yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Adam Emerson of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute argued that the Peach State should require private schools that accept scholarship students to administer standardized tests. That would be a mistake.

Emerson argues that parents, educators, and policymakers “deserve to compare the gains that students make in different school environments.” Test scores can be a useful, albeit limited and incomplete, method of comparing the academic effectiveness of different schools. Under the current system, parents are free to choose private schools that administer standardized tests and avoid those that do not or vice-versa. Likewise, donors are free to direct their money to scholarship organizations that only fund schools that do or do not administer standardized tests.

By contrast, a testing mandate would severely limit or even eliminate these choices. Parents who are concerned about the “teach to the test” phenomenon or whose child reacts negatively to testing, and educators who believe that standardized testing gets in the way of real learning will have little to no choice but to participate in the standardized testing regime, as even Emerson agrees.

Emerson argues that the vast majority of private schools would still participate in the STC program even with a standardized testing mandate. He cites a recent Fordham study of the impact of regulation in school choice programs showing that “only 3 percent of non-participating schools cited governmental regulations as the most important reason to opt out.” That’s exactly the problem. The mandate would force private schools to choose between eschewing both the tests and all the students who need school choice scholarships to attend their school, or accepting both. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of schools succumb to the financial pressure.

Researchers tend to support testing mandates because they allow them to evaluate the effectiveness of certain reforms, at least to an extent. But the very act of measurement itself can distort the very thing they are trying to measure. Even aside from the cheating scandals, the tests create strong incentives for teachers to teach differently in order that their students perform well on the test.

Of course, some will argue, “that’s not a bug, that’s a feature!” They support standardized tests as a means of increasing accountability. “If you want to move something, you have to measure it,” they argue, and they have a point. But standardized tests are not the only way to measure learning. Supporters of standardized testing know that, but they want a uniform measures so that they can compare apples to apples. The problem is that uniform measures create a powerful incentive to move toward uniform behavior. As James Shuls of the Show-Me Institute wrote recently:

The fact is that curriculum standards don’t tell teachers how to teach in the same way that a high jump bar doesn’t tell a jumper how to jump. You could theoretically jump over a high jump bar in whatever way you would like; but because of how the jump is structured there is a clear advantage to doing the old Fosbury Flop.

While standardized tests are not as imposing as curriculum standards, what’s on the test can drive what is taught in the classroom, when it is taught, and how it is taught. Professor Jay P. Greene argued along similar lines regarding national standards:

Such uniformity would only make sense if: 1) there was a single best way for all students to learn; 2) we knew what it was; 3) we could be sure the people running this nationalized education system would adopt that correct approach; and 4) they would remain in charge far into the future. But that isn’t how things are. There is no consensus on what all students need to know. Different students can best be taught and assessed in different ways.

Standardized tests create an incentive for uniformity when we should be fostering a diversity of traditional and innovative pedagogical methods. To the extent that researchers, policymakers and some educators believe that standardized tests are useful, they should make their case in the free marketplace of ideas and encourage parents to choose the schools that administer them. What they shouldn’t do is use the coercive power of government to fashion a top-down system of testing that could squelch diversity and innovation. 

Somehow, election results continue to trickle in, and David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report continues to update his spreadsheet of the national popular vote. At this point, he shows President Obama reelected with 50.86 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney’s 47.43 percent. For whatever reason, the late-arriving results all seem to widen Obama’s lead.

The total vote appears to be down by almost 4 million votes from 2008, and Obama has received about 4.7 million fewer votes than he did in his first campaign. Romney received slightly more votes than John McCain did.

Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson received 1,265,000 votes, according to Wikipedia, whose mysterious editors show the votes for every candidate. That’s the most any Libertarian presidential candidate has ever received. It amounts to 0.99 percent, just shy of Ed Clark’s 1.06 percent in 1980. If Johnson had been on the ballot in Michigan and Oklahoma, he would surely have broken 1 percent, though he still probably wouldn’t have exceeded Clark’s percentage. (Michigan and Oklahoma haven’t been very good states for Libertarian candidates.) Johnson’s best states were New Mexico, where he served two terms as governor, followed by Montana and Alaska.

The Libertarian Party reports that seven Libertarian statewide candidates in Texas and Georgia received more than a million votes.

Don’t forget to read the new ebook The Libertarian Vote: Swing Voters, Tea Parties, and the Fiscally Conservative, Socially Liberal Center, which discusses how the millions of libertarian-leaning voters in America tend to vote. (It does not have 2012 results.)

The NATO summit starts Sunday in Chicago and will be the largest gathering ever held by the alliance. This is fitting given NATO’s desire to act around the globe. While U.S. officials say no decisions on further expanding membership will be made at the meeting, they explain that the door remains open. Adding additional security commitments in this way would be a mistake.  

The United States has always been and will continue to be the guarantor of NATO’s military promises. In reality, NATO could not pay its bills without the United States, much less conduct serious military operations. American alliance policy has become a form of foreign aid. Nowhere is that more true than in Europe.  

America’s alliances once had a serious purpose: to increase U.S. security. NATO joined the United States and Western Europe to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating Eurasia. The alliance lost its raison d’être in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe had toppled. The Warsaw Pact soon dissolved. Ultimately the Soviet Union collapsed.

Yet 23 years later NATO labors on, attempting to remake failed societies and anoint winners in civil wars. There’s no big threat left: Russia isn’t going to revive the Red Army and conquer the European continent. Moscow was barely capable of beating up on hapless Georgia.

Moreover, the Euro zone crisis threatens to turn NATO’s military capabilities into a farce. Virtually every European state is cutting back on its military, even France and Great Britain, which traditionally had the most serious—and most deployable—forces. NATO always looked like North America and The Others. Today the only power prepared to battle even a decrepit North African dictatorship is America.

Yet like the Borg of Star Trek fame, the alliance wants to ever-expand, absorbing every country in its path. Bosnia—an artificial nation who military was cobbled together from three warring factions—hopes to join. So, too, Macedonia, which remains at odds with Greece over its very name. Georgia, which triggered a war with Russia in apparent expectation of receiving U.S. support, wants in. Montenegro, which has no military of note, is also interested.

There is even talk of adding Kosovo, another artificial country in which the majority ethnically cleansed national and religious minorities while under allied occupation. Serbia, bombed by NATO in 1999 and still resisting Kosovo’s secession, is on the long list. As is Ukraine, a country with a large Russophile population and a government that acts more Russian than Western.

Adding these countries would greatly expand America’s liabilities while adding minimal capabilities. The United States would have to further subsidize the new members to bring their militaries up to Western standards while making their disputes and controversies into America’s disputes and controversies. Worst would be expanding the alliance up to Russia’s southern border, giving further evidence to Moscow of a plan of encirclement. As Henry Kissinger once said, even paranoids have enemies. Indeed, Washington would not react well if the Warsaw Pact had included Mexico and Canada.

The United States cannot afford to take on more allies and effectively underwrite their security. It is not worth protecting Georgia at the risk of confronting Russia, for instance. Moreover, now is the time to end this foreign aid to wealthy European countries. The Europeans have a GDP ten times as large as that of Russia. Europe’s population is three times as big. The Europeans should defend themselves.  If they want to expand their alliance all around Russia, let them. But the U.S. government, bankrupt in all but name, should finally focus on defending Americans, not most everyone else in the world.