Topic: Education and Child Policy

President’s Budget Lacks Seriousness, Vision

By
Andrew J. Coulson

The measure of our seriousness in helping children learn is not simply the number of dollars we spend, but rather the care and thought we invest in allocating them, and our openness to changing course when the evidence demands it. The education provisions of the President’s budget, released today, lack both seriousness and vision.

The FY 2014 budget overview emphasizes three educational initiatives: preschool for all, STEM and innovation, and school infrastructure.

As foreshadowed in his State of the Union address, President Obama proposes to federally subsidize statewide preschool programs. This approach seems designed to deal with the mounting evidence that the federal government’s own preschool programs, Head Start and Early Head Start, have essentially no lasting benefits. Though candidate Obama once said he would terminate ineffective programs, his latest budget retains them both, and actually grows Early Head Start. Additionally, the new budget would subsidize PreK programs like those in Oklahoma and Georgia that advocates have long touted as “high quality.” The evidence on those programs is, however, rather mixed. Relative to the national average, Oklahoma has seen modest declines on the 4th grade NAEP tests while Georgia has seen modest gains—and the declines are larger than the gains. A broader review of the evidence by early education expert Russ Whitehurst of Brookings finds the same lackluster results overall. 

Not only are these statewide programs failing to show a pattern of lasting and substantial benefits thus far, the addition of federal subsidies will likely impede efforts to improve them. Federal education dollars at the pre-college level always come with strings attached—strings that accumulate over time. That is likely to exert a homogenizing pressure on state pre-K offerings, eliminating variation and thereby preventing us from learning which approaches are effective and which are not.

On STEM, the President is keen to fund the hiring of 100,000 new Science, Technology, and Math teachers. But America does not have a teacher quantity problem, we have a teacher effectiveness problem. Over the past 40 years, we’ve grown the number of public school employees 11 times faster than enrollment [i.e., we’ve doubled the number of staff to serve only 8.5 percent more students]. This has added $200 billion annually to the cost of American public schooling, and two million of the three million new hires were instructional staff, so it’s not simply a problem of bureaucratic bloat. And yet, despite all those new teachers and teachers’ aides, achievement at the end of high school is largely flat as are real graduation rates.

In other words, our public schools have shown themselves incapable of harnessing the talents of these millions of additional educators. The solution is not to hire yet more teachers into that system, it is to liberalize the education sector, bringing it back within the free enterprise system. Only when schools have both the freedoms and incentives to make the most of their teaching staffs, will we see educators’ talents marshaled effectively.

Finally, President Obama’s proposed new infrastructure spending focuses only on the symptom (crumbling school facilities) and ignores its cause (mismanagement). I’ve analyzed school survey data on the condition of facilities and found that public schools are in a much worse state of repair than private schools, despite the fact that private schools spend far less per pupil, on average. The question is WHY are public schools in a worse state of repair, given that they spend more? According to a federal government report, it’s because districts repeatedly defer necessary routine maintenance. These deferrals increase the cost of maintaining school facilities and accelerate the deterioration of buildings and equipment. In other words, they postpone the ounce of prevention until the pound of cure becomes unavoidable—and they do this because they don’t have to pay for the cure. Once again, bringing schools back within the free enterprise system would provide administrators with the incentives to maintain their facilities so as to avoid the financial hit of costly repairs and replacements—a hit that they can now pass on to taxpayers at no cost to themselves or their careers.

Regrettably, seeing the root causes underlying our educational woes is beyond the vision of the present administration.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Tax and Budget Policy

Bad Stuff in Obama Ed Budget

By
Neal McCluskey

Details are still emerging about the Obama Administration’s 2014 education budget proposal, but from the overview there seems to be a lot of bad stuff. Here are the hi – or low – lights, and links to some important context:

  • Increase Department of Education spending to $71.2 billion, up 4.6 percent from 2012 enacted level: This is neither constitutional nor effective.
  • “Invests” in preschool: Head Start, Early Head Start, and state programs either are shown to fail, or have little to no good evidence supporting them.
  • $12.5 billion in mandatory funds to “prevent additional teacher layoffs and hire teachers”: We’ve been getting fat on staff – including teachers – for decades, and it hasn’t helped.
  • $1.3 billion for 21st Century Community Learning Centers: Federal studies have found these have negative effects.
  • Race to the Top for higher education: So far, RTTT has been big on promises, small on outcomes, and huge on coercion to adopt national curriculum standards.
  • $260 million to scale up higher education innovation: MOOCS and other innovations have been developing pretty well without federal “help.”
  • Maintain “strong” Pell Grant program: Pell is part of the tuition hyperinflation problem, not the solution.

There will no doubt be more-detailed analyses of specific education proposals to come. Stay tuned!

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Tax and Budget Policy

“Lockdown High”: Brought to You by the NRA

By
Gene Healy

Yesterday, the “National School Shield Task Force,” a 12-member study group commissioned by the National Rifle Association, released its recommendations [.pdf] for heightened school security in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. The Washington Post’s coverage quotes the head of Children’s Defense Fund, who accuses the NRA of “prey[ing] on America’s fears” and trying to turn the nation’s schools “into armed fortresses.” 

Not long ago, I’d have been shocked to find myself agreeing with Marian Wright Edelman over Wayne LaPierre, but in this case, the lady has a point. Since  last December, the NRA leader has outdone left-leaning “children’s advocates” in fomenting legislative hysteria “for the children.” As I noted in Tuesday’s Washington Examiner:  

The NRA head opposes new gun laws, but he’s otherwise been [President Obama’s] partner in panic, breathlessly demanding an “armed good guy” in every school—a federally funded expansion of “America’s police force.” 

The Post notes that the National School Shield Task Force is “ostensibly independent” of NRA direction, and for what it’s worth, the report’s tone is less hysterical, the recommendations somewhat less sweeping, than LaPierre’s. But, like LaPierre’s public statements, it lacks any intelligent assessment of relative risks, instead making the very possibility of harm to children a rallying cry for opening the checkbook and summoning the security consultants. The entire project seems designed to enhance the paramilitarization of public institutions, allowing the Homeland Security mentality of institutionalized overreaction free rein in American schools.

Five of the twelve task-force members work for “Phoenix RBT Solutions,” a security consulting firm that “offer[s] schools vulnerability assessments, innovative security solutions, and reality-based training for security personnel”–and so just might have some skin in the game.  

Among the remaining members are a former Secret Service director, a former top military security official, a Department of Homeland Security veteran, and, for good measure, a “Former Assistant Administrator of U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA).”  Woe betide the poor parent who just wants to drop off her kid’s lunch. 

“Prior to the Sandy Hook incident,” the National School Shield Report chides, “most schools took the view that ‘it probably won’t happen here.’”  “Most schools” is too broad a generalization, given that, as documented in Annette Fuentes’ excellent Lockdown High, the trend toward the TSA-ification of American schools long predated the Newtown massacre.  

Still, for any particular school, “it probably won’t happen here” is an accurate assessment of the risk. One estimate, published in the journal Educational Researcher (“What Can Be Done About School Shootings?” January 2010), is that any given school in the United States can expect a school shooting every 6,000 years.  

To put “armed police officers in every school,” as LaPierre has frantically demanded that Congress do, would require hiring over 100,000 new cops. But if your goal is to prevent kids from getting murdered, the schools are about the last place you’d put new police, since 98 percent of youth homicides occur off school grounds.

 

[Source: “Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2011,” National Center for Education Statistics.]

Rough estimates of what LaPierre’s proposal would cost range from $5.5 billion to $34 billion a year. How can we justify that sort of expense in what’s supposed to be an era of belt-tightening? “You justify it because it’s necessary,” says Asa Hutchinson, the former DEA chief and Homeland Security official who’s heading up the NRA’s school safety initiative. But it’s not necessary, and it’s not wise.

The National School Shield Task Force is less bullish on federal funding than is NRA’s leadership (in December LaPierre called on Congress “to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary … and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place.” Though the NSS Report calls for making federal Homeland Security grants available for school security programs, it states that “federal funding has proved unreliable as a long-term solution to the school safety and security needs of our nation” and concedes that “Local school authorities are in the best position” to determine “whether an armed security guard is necessary.”

That’s an improvement over what NRA’s leadership has recommended. Unfortunately, as I’ll discuss in a separate post, I can’t say the same for what the rest of the report has to say about school safety.  

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Government and Politics, Law and Civil Liberties

Look at No Child Left Behind. See, No Federal Control. Wait…

By
Neal McCluskey

In what is either a case of blinders-wearing or just poor timing, today the Fordham Institute’s Kathleen Porter-Magee has an article on NRO, co-written with the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern, in which she and Stern take to task national curriculum standards critics who assert, among other things, that the Common Core is being pushed by President Obama. Yes, that’s the same Kathleen Porter-Magee whom it was announced a couple of days ago would be on a federal “technical review” panel to evaluate federally funded tests that go with the Common Core.

The ironic timing of the article alone is probably sufficient to rebut arguments suggesting that the Common Core isn’t very much a federal child. Still, let’s take apart a few of the specifics Porter-Magee and Stern offer on the federal aspect. (Other Core critics, I believe, will be addressing contentions about Common Core content).

Some argue that states were coerced into adopting Common Core by the Obama administration as a requirement for applying for its Race to the Top grant competition (and No Child Left Behind waiver program). But the administration has stated that adoption of “college and career readiness standards” doesn’t necessarily mean adoption of Common Core. At least a handful of states had K–12 content standards that were equally good, and the administration would have been hard-pressed to argue otherwise.

Ah, the power of parsing. While it is technically correct that in the Race to the Top regulations the administration did not write that states must specifically adopt the Common Core, it required that states adopt a “common set of K-12 standards,” and defined that as “a set of content standards that define what students must know and be able to do and that are substantially identical across all States in a consortium.” How many consortia met that definition at the time of RTTT? Aside, perhaps, from the New England Common Assessment Program, only one: the Common Core.

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Joke Continues, But…

By
Neal McCluskey

Yesterday, I wrote about a new “technical review process” the Feds have created to scrutinize “item design and validation” for national tests that go with new national curriculum standards. In that post, while noting that “in-depth” information on the review process was as-yet unavailable, I wrote that creation of the process “most likely” means federal reviewers will be “reviewing the specific questions that will go on the tests” [emphasis in the original]. I have since been cautioned by Ted Rebarber, CEO of Accountability Works and an expert on standards and testing, against making too firm a statement on this. While it is possible the review will consider test questions, it’s also quite possible the process will only examine the methodologies the consortia have employed to create and validate their measures.

Rebarber is no doubt correct about the potentially limited scope of the review, and right to caution against overstating what it might involve. That said, with very limited information available, it is hard to know what the review will ultimately encompass. But assume it doesn’t examine actual questions at all. Still, it will have the money-supplying federal government judging the technical merits of something that we are incessantly told only nutty people would think could become federally controlled. In other words, my main point – and root concern – remains: The technical review is yet more evidence substantiating the incredibly sane concern that “national standards” will ultimately mean “federal control.” It’s a very real possibility that, it seems, many Common Core fans just don’t want you thinking about.

 

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Saying Common Core Not Federal a Joke, but Joke’s on Us

By
Neal McCluskey

Last week I posted video from an American Enterprise Institute conference featuring supporters of national curriculum standards—the Common Core—dismissing concerns that implementing the standards might cost lots of taxpayer arms and legs, and laughingly brushing aside concerns that the Common Core might lead to federal control of school curricula. The latter emanated largely from Chester “Checker” Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, whose organization is a leading national standards supporter.

Yesterday news came out that made clear just how serious—and unfunny—concerns about a federal takeover are. According to Education Week, the U.S. Department of Education will start a “technical review process” for the Department-selected consortia creating the national tests to go with the standards. And what will that review look at? Not compliance with accounting standards or something administrative, but test “item design and validation.” That means, most likely (in-depth information from the Department was off-line as of this writing) reviewing the specific questions that will go on the tests. And what is tested, of course, ultimately dictates what is taught, at least if the test results are to have any concrete impact, ranging from whether students advance to the next grade, to whether schools gain or lose funding. Since the ultimate point of uniform standards is to have essentially uniform accountability from state to state, they will have to have some concrete impact, rendering this a clear next step in a major Federal incursion into curricula.

Now, maybe Finn wasn’t aware of any of this last week when he blew me off with knee-slapping zingers about the U.N. taking over the Common Core, but I doubt it: according to Education Week, one of Fordham’s employees, Kathleen Porter-Magee, will be on the federal review team, as will frequent Fordham collaborator William Schmidt of Michigan State University. So either Finn is an extremely hands-off manager, or as he summoned his inner Don Rickles last week he knew very well that federal tentacles were inching even deeper into America’s schools.

Ha, ha, America. Joke’s on you.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

School Choice Expands in Georgia

By
Jason Bedrick

Shortly before midnight last night, the Georgia House of Representatives voted 168–3 to pass legislation that expands the Peach State’s scholarship tax credit program. The legislation also increases the program’s transparency and accountability while mostly resisting demands for unnecessary new regulations like mandatory standardized testing.

The total credit cap was raised from just over $52 million to $58 million—a good thing, but less than the $65 million that was in an earlier version of the bill. The increase came at the expense of the program’s annual adjustment for inflation, which is unfortunate beause, without additional legislative intervention to expand the program, the credits will be worth less with each passing year.

Most of the transparency and accountability provisions are narrowly tailored and greatly improve the program. The bill requires that scholarship organizations file an independent audit with the Georgia Department of Revenue to ensure that they are complying with the program’s regulations. The department must post information about the scholarship organizations’ contribution and award activities on its website. The bill also forbids the “earmarking” of donations for specific students, including the children of donors.

Some of the new regulations are counterproductive, such as the requirement that students spend at least six weeks in a public school before participating in the program. The requirement is essentially an accounting gimmick to inflate the program’s perceived savings by transforming almost all scholarship recipients into “switchers” from the public school system. Though there are some exceptions for students who are assigned to low-performing public schools, subject of bullying, or who have homeschooled for a year, the requirement is an unnecessary impediment to many families who would like to participate in the program. Moreover, critics see through the gimmick. There are other ways to demonstrate savings, as Florida has done, without creating needless hurdles for families to jump.

That said, Georgia’s school choice expansion is an impressive achievement.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

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