Topic: Education and Child Policy

6.8 Day Is Here!

By
Neal McCluskey

Washington hasn’t passed a new law to avert it, so today’s the day that all of higher education has, it seems, been dreading: The day that interest rates on subsidized federal student loans double, going from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.

Hooray?

In the long term, it might actually be good if these rates – which will only affect some federal borrowers – go up. (Congress could still lower them retroactively.) Why? Because federal aid has fueled decades of rampant price inflation, giving basically anyone whom a college would accept – and many colleges will accept anyone – the money necessary to pay sky-high prices. Perhaps the rates rising will dissuade some people from going to college who should be doing something else, or some people going to college who should be there from choosing a more expensive school that offers no better academics but lots of superfluous frills.

That said, the uptick in rates is likely to have little major effect on what people are willing to pay. And to some extent that is as it should be. The average college graduate will earn enough additional money as a result of having a degree that the additional debt is worth taking on. However, roughly half of people who enter college won’t complete their studies, and half of those will earn below the average for whatever piece of paper – some sort of certification or degree – they complete.

Perhaps the most discouraging aspect of all this isn’t the financial impact of the doubling, but that Congress couldn’t get a deal done. If you are going to have federal student loans, it makes sense to peg them to interest rates such as those of the 10-year Treasury Bond rather than having Congress fix a number for several years. At least then they will fluctuate with the overall time value of money. Indeed, that concept was sufficiently agreeable that President Obama proposed such an idea, and the Republican-controlled House passed roughly similar legislation. But, in a surprise move, President Obama threatened to veto the legislation without, it seems, any effort to negotiate with House leaders first, and Democratic Senate leaders called mainly for freezing rates at 3.4 percent until they could reauthorize the Higher Education Act. There was even a bipartisan effort in the Senate to push through a bill similar to the House measure and the president’s, but it went nowhere. 

Why the breakdown? It’s hard to know exactly, but easy to see a suspect: politicians, especially Senate Democrats and to a lesser extent the president, didn’t want to do anything that didn’t appear to give students the cheapest loans possible. That’s bad news for any future compromise, but much more importantly, a clear and troubling sign of why, barring loud public outcry, we won’t get the long-term solution we need: phasing out federal student aid to force students and colleges to demand and furnish efficient, effective higher education.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy

New NAEP Scores Extend Dismal Trend in U.S. Education Productivity

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Education released the latest results from the Long Term Trends portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The NAEP LTT was specifically designed to track changes in student performance over time, even when there aren’t any. The chart below depicts the average performance of U.S. 17-year-olds across subjects, relative to the scores of the students who took these tests 40 years ago.

There have been some slight improvements in the scores of younger children, but they don’t last. By the time students are preparing to enter higher education or the workforce, they are no better prepared academically than they were two generations ago–despite the fact that we have spent three times as much on their K-12 education as we did educating the class of 1970.

What explains this stagnation?

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Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Ed Sec to Media: Get Those Common Core Critics!

By
Neal McCluskey

In a bid to prove that Washington never tried to strong-arm states into adopting the Common Core, yesterday U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the American Society of News Editors that the media had better start attacking “fringe,” “misinformed,” Core opponents and their arguments.

Think about that for a moment.

Yup, seems like a self-defeating tactic to me, too. But it’s not the first time the secretary has launched into attack mode to show that Washington would never – ever! – get pushy on education.

Now, despite my fatigue with constantly debunking Core supporters on federal coercion, I was prepared to do a huge dismantling of Duncan’s speech. Thankfully, both for the public and my workload, one of those media types whom Duncan implied hasn’t been doing her job – Michele McNeil of Education Week – was, indeed, inspired to do some fact-checking by Duncan. Too bad for the secretary, it was on his claims. Among McNeil’s offerings:

  • “On a grading scale of 500 points, Duncan said adopting common standards and assessments was worth relatively little. ‘Did the points, and the dollars, matter to the states? Undoubtedly. But it’s not the only reason or even the most important reason why states adopted the Common Core,’ he said. In fact, adopting and implementing common standards and assessments was worth 50 points, or 10 percent. That’s the same amount of points allotted to a state’s plan for turning around low-performing schools. In a contest in which only a few points separated winners from losers, those points mattered—a lot. And it likely spurred states to actually adopt the standards; the first state adopted them in February 2010.”

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Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, General

Understanding Disappointing Charter School Results

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Here are two things that everyone interested in education should know: some of the top performing schools in the country are charter schools, and, on average, charters do not perform significantly better than traditional public schools. The former point is exemplified by the likes of the American Indian Public Charter Schools in Oakland (which the local board recently voted to shut down), and the second by the latest national report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.

There is no necessary contradiction between these two findings. It could simply be that there is higher variance in charter schools than in regular public schools, which would cause charters to be over-represented among top and bottom performers without necessarily differing from regular public schools on average. 

Charter optimists believe that to be the case, and they expect that consumer choice and the ability of low-performing charters to fail and close down will gradually raise average performance as good charter networks crowd out bad ones. There is even some evidence that things may be moving in that direction—results of the latest Stanford U. study are less bleak than those of the previous one. 

The most dedicated charter school optimists are perhaps the philanthropists who are subsidizing their growth. But this is where the problems become most visible. A couple of years ago, I studied the many dozens of California charter school networks to measure the correlation between their academic performance and the amount of philanthropic funding they had attracted. In a nutshell, there isn’t one. There is, in fact, a stronger correlation between the length of a charter network’s name and its academic performance than there is between its grant receipts and its performance.

Philanthropists are indeed helping to scale-up charter school networks, but they are doing so effectively at random—much like the lotteries by which over-subscribed charters must admit their students.

This should not be too surprising. Many philanthropists talk about getting a return on their investments, but, in practice, they lack the incentives to do so that characterize for-profit investors. Philanthropists are in the business of giving money away. Investors are in the business of bringing it in. The former do not expect a financial return on their investments; the latter do.

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Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Who’s Misinforming, Exactly?

By
Neal McCluskey

At this point I don’t want to write another word about Common Core supporters’ cheap rhetorical tactics. Unfortunately, a new op-ed by Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation demands it. And this after AEI’s Rick Hess took Core defenders to task for their excesses, then kindly offered some helpful advice on how to at least have an honest conversation. Why didn’t the Fordham folks listen to Rick? Coulda saved me a lot of trouble.

Anyway, four things particularly stick out in Fordham’s piece, published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, though many others are dubious:

    1. The piece starts off by, essentially, smearing all opponents of the Core as carpet-bagging liars. The very first line reads: “For some time now, outside groups have been vigorously spreading misinformation about the Common Core state standards.” The goal here is, presumably, to declare opponents devious right off the bat, and compound that by asserting that they are all icky non-Wisconsinites. Never mind that Finn and Petrilli, to my knowledge, aren’t from the Badger State, and have definitely lived in the Washington, DC, area for years.
    2. A major complaint of Core supporters is that critics blame things like data-mining and curricular control on the Core which aren’t, technically, in it. They are intimately connected through Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind waivers, which intentionally place the Core in broader pushes for evaluation, data collection, etc., but no, they aren’t actually in the Core. It is apparently fine, though, to proclaim that the Core by itself “demands accountability, high standards and testing,” as Finn and Petrilli do. The difference, of course, is that Finn and Petrilli favor the Common Core, and the Common Core is great!
    3. Finn and Petrilli offer a tiny, non-concession concession to people who have decried the massive federal coercion that drove Core adoption, noting that “many conservatives are justifiably angry about the inappropriate role the Obama administration has played in promoting and taking credit for these standards.” But the thing is, Obama didn’t just promote and take credit for the Common Core. He implemented concrete federal policies that essentially told states that if they didn’t adopt Common Core they couldn’t get part of a $4.35 billion pot of money, and it would be harder to get out of the absurd demands of No Child Left Behind. If Finn and Petrilli want to be forthright, they need to actually write the words “Race to the Top” and “waivers,” and explain exactly what they did. But they don’t even mention them!
    4. Finally, it is simply wrong to suggest that the Obama administration went all lone wolf on Core supporters. Why? Because, as I have discussed repeatedly, the report Benchmarking for Success, from the groups that created Common Core, came out in 2008 – before there was an Obama administration – and called on the federal government to “incentivize” adoption of common standards. In other words, they wanted the Feds to twist arms all along!

I hate it when Common Core supporters – from Wisconsin, DC, or anywhere else – misinform the public. Especially when their first move is to drop the deceiver card on their opponents.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

New Hampshire Court’s School Choice Decision Was Flawed and Unprecedented

By
Jason Bedrick

Last week, a New Hampshire trial court declared that the state’s nascent scholarship tax credit (STC) program could not fund students attending religious schools. The Granite State’s STC program grants tax credits to corporations worth 85 percent of their contributions to nonprofit scholarship organizations that aid low- and middle-income students attending the schools of their choice.

Writing on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, Professor Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado at Boulder mocked supporters of the program who criticized the decision. Welner argues that school choice advocates should have expected this decision, declaring that it was “unsurprising” that the court should find the program (partially) unconstitutional. But what Welner calls unsurprising is actually unprecedented.

Only toward the bottom of his post does Welner reveal that the only high courts to address the issue thus far—the U.S. Supreme Court and the Arizona supreme court—have ruled STC programs constitutional in their entirety. Indeed, though all but two of the remaining ten states with STC programs have similar “Blaine Amendment” provisions in their state constitutions, opponents haven’t even bothered to challenge their constitutionality. Additionally, other state courts have ruled on the question of whether tax credits constitute “public money” in a manner consistent with the previous STC cases, demonstrating that the courts’ rulings were not the aberrations that Welner imagines them to be.

If school choice supporters had a reason not to be surprised, it was because the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State shrewdly went judge shopping. That’s why they brought their lawsuit in Strafford County instead of Merrimack County, where the state capital is located. Their strategy seemed to pay off, as the judge’s decision relies heavily on the dissenting opinions in the U.S. Supreme Court and Arizona supreme court decisions, and misapplies the limited precedent from New Hampshire. Nevertheless, the final decision rests with the New Hampshire supreme court. As I detail below, logic and precedent suggest that they should overturn the lower court’s decision.

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Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Law and Civil Liberties

Judicial Deference and Affirmative Action

By
Roger Pilon

Perhaps the most important point to come out of the Supreme Court’s 7-1 affirmative action decision today is its instruction to lower courts that they may not defer to state college and university representations when deciding whether those institutions have unconstitutionally granted racial preferences in their admissions decisions.

“Strict scrutiny,” the Court said, “does not permit a court to accept a school’s assertion that its admissions process uses race in a permissible way without a court giving close analysis to the evidence of how the process works in practice.” This is a victory for more serious judicial engagement, as Cato urged in the amicus brief we filed in the case.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the Court, held in Fisher v. Texas that because the Fifth Circuit was more deferential than the Court’s Bakke and Grutter precedents permitted, the grant below of summary judgment for the University of Texas was incorrect. Thus, the Court vacated the decision below and sent the case back for further consideration, based on the more exacting standards of strict scrutiny.

As background for today’s decision, in 1997, in a successful effort to achieve racial and ethnic “diversity” in its student body, Texas instituted a race-neutral “Top Ten Percent Plan” under which any student in the top ten percent of his or her high school graduating class is automatically admitted to all state-funded universities. To fill the remaining slots, the university considered several factors, including race.

In 2008, Abigail Fisher, who is white and was the plaintiff in today’s case, just missed the cut-off for admission to the University of Texas at Austin. She was then denied admission under the alternative admissions program, even though her academic credentials exceeded those of many admitted minority applicants. In our amicus brief supporting her suit, we argued that government may treat people differently because of their race only for the most compelling reasons.

Notwithstanding the text of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the modern Court has read that restriction as allowing state colleges and universities to consider race as one among several factors to be considered in individualized reviews of each applicant. Ten years ago, in a 5-4 decision in the Grutter case, the Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s race-conscious affirmative action admissions process, even though it might favor “underrepresented minority groups,” because the program sought to achieve “class diversity” in a “multi-factored way.” But in a companion case  the Court found the university’s undergraduate admissions program unconstitutional because it was more explicit in its use of race to achieve diversity.

That uneasy compromise led many critics to charge that a university could use racial preferences as long as it was clever enough to be vague about what it was doing. That possibility still remains, because the Court did not rule preferences out categorically. Rather, racial classifications are constitutional if “essential”: quoting its opinion in Grutter, the Court today wrote “a university’s ‘educational judgment that such diversity is essential to its educational mission is one to which we defer’” – “an academic judgment to which some, but not complete, judicial deference is proper.” But,

The University must prove that the means chosen by the University to attain diversity are narrowly tailored to that goal. On this point, the University receives no deference. … The reviewing court must ultimately be satisfied that no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity.

Justices Scalia and Thomas wrote separately. Because Fisher did not ask that Grutter be overruled, they did not urge that here. But they made it clear that in their view the Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race. Justice Ginsburg dissented from today’s ruling.

On balance, then, this was a qualified win for a color-blind Constitution. It remains to be seen, however, how courts below apply the Supreme Court’s ruling, even in this case, which may yet return to the High Court. The Court’s repeated return to the issue of judicial deference, and the importance of judicial engagement, is perhaps what this decision will most stand for over time. And the implications of that reach far beyond affirmative action.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Law and Civil Liberties

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