Topic: Education and Child Policy

Separate Schooling Part of Peace, Not Problem?

By
Neal McCluskey

Peace DovePresident Obama’s speech in Northern Ireland a few days ago has generated some unexpected controversy. Unfortunately, most of it seems to be along the lines of “Obama attacked the Catholic Church again” because he critiqued religiously separate, Northern-Irish schooling. And Obama certainly was on shaky ground blaming segregated schooling for exacerbating social divisions, but not because he was attacking the Catholic Church. No, his error is that educational freedom may be crucial to peace, not anathema to it.

From what he said, it certainly doesn’t seem that Mr. Obama was trying to single out Catholic schools as a problem. He clearly stated that the presence of both Catholic and Protestant schools was what troubled him: “If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs—if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear and resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation.” The president’s point was that Protestants and Catholics should go to school together to break down barriers, a seemingly reasonable belief that has driven much of school policy in this country. If we put diverse people together, the thinking goes, they will learn to get along.

But neither deeper logic nor the historical evidence supports that idea particularly well. We absolutely had to end legally mandated segregation, but efforts to force integration often resulted not just in maintained division, but hotter conflict. Why? Because people don’t just check their differing values or identities at the school-room—or school-board—door, and having to support one system of schools forces people to fight over whose values and identities will be taught.

Look at our own religious history. For over a century many of our public schools were de facto Protestant institutions, reading Protestant versions of the Bible and teaching generally Protestant religion. Efforts to make the schools accommodate both Protestants and Catholics often failed—and in Philadelphia led to days of bloodshed—ultimately resulting in the founding of a massive Catholic school system, which by 1965 enrolled 12 percent of all school-aged children.

Our more recent experience with forced integration has been based on race, as we’ve tried to overcome our long and shameful history of legally mandated racial segregation. Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed forced segregation, was a necessary ruling, and one that has had very powerful benefits. But subsequent federal court rulings mandating physical integration ignited many open, charged conflicts, and quite likely made race relations worse than they’d have been had people been able to freely choose whether to go to school together. It takes time to overcome centuries of division, suspicion, and alienation, and imposing physical togetherness often seemed to breed resentment and even greater hostility. That may very well be why, today, surveys indicate that while most people support integration in the abstract, they widely dislike busing or other forced integration measures.

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Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

South Carolina Adopts School Choice

By
Jason Bedrick

When South Carolina’s legislature narrowly rejected a school choice proposal last month, it seemed that the education reform movement would have to wait another year to make any progress in the Palmetto State. That changed yeseterday when both legislative chambers approved the conference committee’s state budget, which includes a scholarship tax credit (STC) program for students with special needs.

South Carolina’s legislation is only the latest sign of the increasing popularity of school choice. Last week, Arizona’s legislature voted to expand the types of corporate donors that could participate in its STC program. Earlier this year, Iowa and Georgia expanded their STC programs so that more students could receive scholarships and Alabama enacted a new STC program.

As with Alabama’s STC program, South Carolina’s program is very limited in scope relative to STC programs in other states, particularly New Hampshire. According to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice:

Under the proposal, taxpayers can receive a credit worth no more than 60 percent of their state tax liability when donating to nonprofits that distribute private school scholarships to children with special needs. Scholarships cannot exceed $10,000 per pupil. The statewide limit on tax credits distributed is $8 million. According to 2011-12 data, more than 12 percent of South Carolina students are identified as having a disability that would qualify them for the program.

A cap on donations makes fundraising more difficult for scholarship organizations while a cap on the total amount of tax credits limits the number of students who can participate. And while it is understandable that policymakers would prioritize students with special needs, they are far from the only students who would benefit from expanded educational options. Despite these limitations, South Carolina’s decision yesterday is a great step toward an education system that meets the individual needs of every child.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Committee Issues Excuse to Keep Doing Wrong Thing

By
Neal McCluskey

Today, the Democratic staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report which seems mainly to be an excuse to keep doing the wrong things.

The basic tenets of the report certainly feel sensible: People with more education tend to have greater skills and earn more, but the ever-inflating price of college saddles people pursuing education with bigger and bigger debts. The solutions? Keep subsidized federal loan rates frozen at 3.4 percent, greatly expand loan forgiveness, and convert private loans into federal loans. Basically, more cheap aid—exactly the wrong thing.

The fundamental problem with the report is the fundamental problem with federal aid in microcosm: It ignores the crippling, self-defeating, unintended consequences of aid. You know: The downsides of federal “help.”

First and foremost, federal aid furnishes jet fuel for tuition inflation, both by allowing people to demand more than they otherwise would, and by enabling schools to raise prices knowing students will be able to pay them. It also encourages millions of people to enroll in college who, for many reasons, have little prospect of finishing. That’s why roughly one out of every two people who enter a postsecondary program don’t finish. Finally, it powers over-credentialing, with about a third of people with bachelor’s degrees in jobs not requiring them, and many jobs that require the degree likely doing so for basic signaling reasons—e.g., the person has some basic stick-to-it-iveness—rather than indicating that they possess useful skills or abilities they obtained in college.

A reasonable reading of the data forces one to conclude that Washington should markedly reduce its presence in college—indeed, get out altogether—rather than perpetuate bad policy. Which is likely why policymakers seem to assiduously avoid reasonable readings—or any readings at all—of important data.

Cross-posted at seethruedu.com

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

Paying to Learn Nothing = Legal
Paying Nothing to Learn = Illegal

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Last week, a NY district court ruled unpaid internships illegal. Note that if you voluntarily choose to take such an internship, it’s because you think you’ll acquire job skills that will advance your career—and if you decide you aren’t learning such skills you can leave any time.

Contrast this with college. Researchers Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that almost half of all college students made no significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or written communication after two full years of study. Even after four full years of college “education” a third of students made no significant gains in these areas—areas long thought to be core skills imparted by higher education. Despite college’s dubious educational value, social convention and a desire to signal employability pressure young people into pursuing a four year degree. Many emerge with little to show for the ordeal beyond a pile of debt (pushing $1 trillion nationally).

So the NY district court is saying that it’s perfectly legal to go into serious debt though you may well learn nothing of value, but it is illegal to learn practical job skills at no cost except your time. 

And for that reason, I’m with Mr. Bumble.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Scratching the Surface Until We Bleed

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a poignant, ably-written piece on the plight of DC’s high school graduates. Even the city’s top students struggle with college-level work because they’re so ill prepared. The story is heavy on “heart interest” but bereft of “head interest.” It will sadden or even anger most readers, but won’t enlighten them as to potential solutions.

If the writer had dug deep into this story, instead of just scratching at its emotional surface, she would have discovered a wealth of relevant research. Private schools, it turns out, not only have higher graduation rates than public schools (controlling for student and family characteristics), but also higher college acceptance rates and much higher college completion rates. In other words, there is a proven solution to the outrageously poor education children are offered in DC and elsewhere. Derek Neal, Jay Greene (2004), and J.R. Warren (2011) all find that private schools significantly increase the graduation rates of urban (especially minority) children over the rates of similar students attending public schools. Those studies that looked at college completion rates find very strong effects there as well. A very recent journal paper on the subject confirms the earlier findings. And DC’s own private school choice program has a beneficial effect on educational attainment according to federal government research.

But instead of offering solutions, the story merely tugs at our heart strings. Journalism could be—should be—so much more than this.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, General

NH Court: You Can Choose a School So Long as It’s Secular

By
Jason Bedrick

Earlier today, a New Hampshire district court upheld the “Live Free or Die” state’s nascent scholarship tax credit (STC) program, but limited the use of scholarships to non-religious private schools.

Earlier this year, the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit claiming that New Hampshire’s school choice law was unconstitutional under the state’s Blaine Amendment, which prohibits the public funding of religious schools. The law grants tax credits to corporations in return for contributions to non-profit scholarship organizations that fund low-and-middle-income students attending the schools of their choice.

The decision hinged on whether or not tax credits constitute “public money.” Previously, the U.S. Supreme Court held that they do not, noting that when “taxpayers choose to contribute to [scholarship organizaions], they spend their own money, not money the State has collected from respondents or from other taxpayers.”

Likewise, the Arizona state supreme court upheld the constitutionality of Arizona’s STC program, forcefully rejecting the “public money” argument:

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, “public money” is “[r]evenue received from federal, state, and local governments from taxes, fees, fines, etc.” Black’s Law Dictionary 1005 (6th ed.1990). As respondents note, however, no money ever enters the state’s control as a result of this tax credit. Nothing is deposited in the state treasury or other accounts under the management or possession of governmental agencies or public officials. Thus, under any common understanding of the words, we are not here dealing with “public money.”

While neither the Arizona supreme court nor U.S. Supreme Court serve as binding precedent for how a New Hampshire court may interpret the New Hampshire state constitution, their reasoning should have carried great weight as the question before the court was the same. Nevertheless, the NH trial court rejected this traditional understanding of “public money” in favor of the plaintiff’s “all your money are belong to us” argument. In the words of the trial court judge:

This Court concludes that the program uses “public funds,” or “money raised by taxation” … Money that would otherwise be flowing to the government is diverted for the very specific purpose of providing scholarships to students.

This is precisely the understanding of “public money” that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected: 

Respondents’ contrary position assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector’s hands. Private bank accounts cannot be equated with the … State Treasury.

The U.S. Supreme Court held, in essence, that your money is your own whether or not it qualifies for a tax deduction of some kind. A taxpayer’s money only becomes “public money” once the government actually collects it in the form of taxes. The NH trial court judge, by contrast, holds that any taxpayer’s income on which the government might have a claim is instantly “public money,” even before collection, and it remains so even if the existence of a tax credit or deduction means that government will never collect it.

Unfortunately, the legal theater of the absurd doesn’t end there. Charlie Arlinghaus, President of the Josiah Bartlett Center, which advised legislators on crafting the law, noted that the trial court’s logic leads to another absurd conclusion:

This ruling is particularly odd. The entire program is fine unless a parent by their own choice chooses a religious school. By this logic a program is illegal if neutral and only legal if actively hostile to religion. 

The Institute for Justice, which intervened on behalf of the Network for Education, the state’s first scholarship organization, will be appealing the decision to the state supreme court. IJ Senior Attorney Richard D. Komer stated:

The court’s ruling inflicts again the blatant discrimination that motivated New Hampshire’s bigoted Blaine Amendment in the first place.  We will immediately seek a stay of the court’s decision so that parents receiving scholarships can choose the educational options that best suit their child’s unique educational needs, regardless of whether that is a religious or secular school.

The trial court’s order halting the program is wrong on both the facts and the law. As a factual matter, the program is funded with private, not public dollars.  As a legal matter, the federal Constitution prohibits states from preferring non-religious schools over religious schools, which is precisely what the court’s ruling does.

We can only hope that the Granite State’s supreme court will exercise better judgment.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Bad Arguments About Public Goods

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Get a good education and you’ll probably lead a more fulfilling, more successful life than you would have without it. Since those benefits accrue directly to you, education is partly what economists call a “private good.” But while you’re busy earning a living and paying taxes, you aren’t dependent on government handouts or (probably) holding up liquor stores. So your whole community benefits, indirectly, from your education (especially the liquor stores). As a result, education is also partly a “public good.”

The thing about public goods is that the beneficiaries don’t have to pay for them. Economists fear that if the public doesn’t have to pay for something, it won’t; and that if something isn’t paid for, it won’t be produced in the first place. As a result, some economists theorize that government must step in to ensure that education delivers the public goods, either by operating schools of its own or by subsidizing and regulating the kind and quantity of schooling that teachers are allowed to offer and that families are allowed to consume.

This is the dominant economic argument for the existence of a major government role in K-12 education, and it is based on a pair of unstated assumptions, both of which are testable and false.

The first assumption is that, left to their own devices, families would consume insufficient education, or the wrong kind of education, to produce the sought-after public benefits. If that’s true, it seems that we’d be most likely to see it in times and places where most parents had low levels of education themselves—places like early 19th century Britain and America. And, indeed, these are widely viewed as cases in which government education spending and mandatory attendance laws brought universal literacy and school attendance to a previously benighted populace.

Widely, but wrongly. As far back as 1965, economist E.G. West demonstrated that growing 19th century government education expenditures in the U.K. did not so much increase the consumption of schooling as displace pre-existing sources of private funding—in his phrase: “jumping in to the saddle of an already-galloping horse.”

In the 1994 update of his book Education and the State, West did much the same thing for the U.S. case, showing that the elementary enrollment rate was close to 90 percent and still rising in early 19th century New England, at a time when no state board of education yet existed, the majority of students attended private or home schools, and tax-funding made up only a small portion of total education spending—even in the semi-public “common” schools (which charged most families tuition).

Echoing this pattern, I pointed out in a chapter for the book Liberty and Learning (p. 105) that U.S. compulsory attendance laws had no noticeable effect on enrollment rates over the decades (1852 to 1918) in which they were introduced.

In modern times education researcher James Tooley has repeatedly shown that destitute families living in slums of the developing world are increasingly paying for ultra-low-cost private schooling themselves, despite the availability of better-funded “free” public schooling. They do this, they tell Tooley, because they feel the public schooling is inferior or even worthless. Tooley’s careful studies of these schools, reported in academic journals and his wonderful book The Beautiful Tree, confirms the parents’ view.

The second assumption of the public good argument is two-fold: first, that government is a better judge of how to create the public benefits of education than are families acting individually; and second, that government provision and/or regulation are capable of producing the outcomes which they nominally seek. Both are contradicted by the evidence.

One of the single most consistent lessons of the history of education from classical Greece to the present, which I chronicled in Market Education: The Unknown History, is that parents have tended to make better decisions for their own children than elected or appointed bureaucrats have made on their behalf. Since its publication, I have reviewed the world-wide, within-country statistical research comparing alternative school systems and found that the most parent-driven, market-like, least regulated school systems do the best job of serving families across all outcomes measured.

The one outcome area which that literature review does not cover is civic-mindedness—the sort of tolerance and desire to engage with one’s fellow citizens that is perhaps the most public of education’s public goods. That area, however, has been studied by others and the results are much the same: they compellingly favor the private, minimally regulated provision of education as more effective in creating these social virtues. See, for instance, the work of Patrick Wolf and David E. Campbell.

And if all this is not enough to bury the public good argument for a major government role in education, there’s more: state control over the content of education actually has demonstrable negative social effects: “public bads,” if you will. As I chronicled in Market Education: The Unknown History, ceding control over learning to the state forces people of diverse beliefs into conflict over the content of that officially-sanctioned education. My colleague Neal McCluskey has documented this ongoing effect in his paper titled “Why We Fight,” and on an interactive “battle map,” of public-schooling-induced social conflicts around the United States.

Education does indeed have spillover benefits to society at large, but these benefits are best secured through free and voluntary association. The best policies are those that move us in that direction.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Government and Politics, Political Philosophy

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