Topic: Education and Child Policy

TED Comes to Television and Goes to School

By
Andrew J. Coulson

The great popularity of TED talks is one of the most encouraging signs that, despite our fossilized school systems, humanity still wants to learn. No one is assigned to watch TED talks. We watch them because they often present a compelling learning experience that excites and entertains. While such experiences sometimes occur in “the dominant education culture” of modern schooling, they occur “in spite of that culture, and not because of it.”

Those quotes are from the final segment of a series of TED talks on education that aired this week on PBS thanks to the New York member station, WNET. The speaker was Ken Robinson, and if you’ve never seen one of his lectures, you’re missing out.

Some highlights of the show:

Management consultant, turned teacher, turned research psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth on the prime importance of Grit in academic and life success. Duckworth explains that Grit is in fact a stronger predictor of such success than IQ—which is interesting because it echoes some very old and it seems mostly forgotten research by Edward Webb, a doctoral student of the intelligence measurement pioneer Charles Spearman. Spearman coined the term “g factor” for the strong intercorrelation that each individual shows across a diverse range of mental tests. It is this g that IQ tests attempt to measure. To make a long story short, Webb went looking for a bunch of personality traits that were also correlated with g. He failed. Instead, he found a completely separate set of intercorrelated traits, which he called w (for “Will”), that basically amount to what Duckworth refers to as Grit. Four of the those w traits were: perseverance, kindness on principle, trustworthiness, and conscientiousness. [For more on this, see Arthur Jensen’s “The g Factor”.] Duckworth’s segment begins at 13:30.

Geoffrey Canada is eloquent about the need to simultaneously encourage innovation and abandon failed approaches; and Ken Robinson is equally so on the failure of the dominant approach to schooling to promote a diversity of methods and curricula, or to stimulate curiosity and creativity, due to its excessive reliance on centralized command-and-control. Of course both of the preceding observations are consistent with the fact that markets are better than monopolies in providing products and services, in education as in other fields, but it’s not clear that either speaker would put the matter in those terms.

And for the artistically inclined, there’s a quite good young poet, 19-year-old Malcolm London, at the 35 minute mark, and a lovely rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” by the host, singer John Legend, at 41:58.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Despite Court Ruling, Louisiana Still Has School Choice

By
Jason Bedrick

The Louisiana Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s nascent school voucher program today. There were about 5,000 LA students already receiving vouchers and about 8,000 were approved to receive vouchers in the next school year. The court ruled that once public funds are allocated to the state’s Minimum Foundation Program (MFP), the constitution prohibits reallocating those funds for other purposes.

Fortunately, there is another school choice program that rests on much firmer constitutional ground. Louisiana’s scholarship tax credit program avoids the voucher program’s constitutional troubles because its funds never enter the MFP. Indeed, they actually never enter the state treasury at all. Instead, taxpayers receive a credit for donations to nonprofit “school tuition organizations” that fund low-income students attending the schools of their choice. The program gives priority to students living in districts with failing government schools.

While Governor Jindal and school choice supporters across the Pelican State are disappointed with the decision, they need not despair. Instead, they should channel their efforts toward expanding the scholarship tax credit program. 

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

School Funding System Not Broken… It Just Doesn’t Work

By
Andrew J. Coulson

We do not claim that the school funding system… is fundamentally flawed, only that there is no correlation at all between the level of per pupil funding and educational outcomes. —Deloitte

Hahahahaha! Ha! Haha! Haaaaaah. Okay. Now a little context.

Last November, the British government “published” a study of its state school system that it had commissioned from the accounting firm Deloitte. Maybe “published” is too strong a word, since there was apparently no press release, no news conference, no effort of any kind to make the public or the media aware of its existence. Perhaps that’s because the study found no correlation between spending and achievement in Britain’s state schools, and the current government’s policy is to increase spending on state schools in an effort to be seen to be doing something.

The sad thing is, the same fundamentally flawed funding systems and dysfunctional political incentives exist in the United States, too… and with much the same effect:

Chart of trends in U.S. public schooling

Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Pushed into Common Core? Thanks For Volunteering!

By
Neal McCluskey

If someone pushed you into a wall, would you turn around – after you regained consciousness, of course – and say, “it’s fine. I totally smashed my face voluntarily”? No, you  wouldn’t, but it seems Chester Finn, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, would. After all, he just wrote the following about how state adoption of Common Core national curriculum standards has been “totally voluntary”:

This was—and remains—totally voluntary, but decisions grew more complicated when the Obama administration started pushing states toward such adoptions by jawboning, hectoring, and luring them with dollars and regulatory waivers.

Doesn’t sound truly voluntary at all, does it? And let’s not forget, taxpayers – who live in states – had no choice about sending their dollars to Washington in the first place.

Wait. I take that back. It was totally voluntary. They’d just go to jail if they refused to pay up.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

How to Engage with Cato on Social Media

By
Zach Graves

In case you haven’t been following what the Cato Institute has been doing lately on social media, here’s an accessible list of all of Cato’s current projects across different social media platforms:

Facebook

Twitter

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Education and Child Policy, Foreign Policy and National Security, General, Government and Politics, Political Philosophy, Tax and Budget Policy

Teachers Union Calls For Divestment From Education Reform Supporters

By
Jason Bedrick

Last week, the American Federation of Teachers released a blacklist of financial asset managers that fund organizations supporting education reform and/or switching from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension systems, such as StudentsFirst, the Show-Me Institute and the Manhattan Institute. The report urges AFT affiliates to pressure pension fiduciaries not to invest their money with such asset managers. The AFT also makes a not-so-subtle threat to go after the donors to other think tanks and education reform groups:

This report is not intended as a one-time publication. Future versions will incorporate additional political organizations and their donors. The AFT is committed to shining a bright light on organizations that harm public sector workers, especially when those organizations are financed by individuals who earn their money from the deferred wages of our teachers.

This isn’t the first time the AFT has employed strong-arm tactics, but I find it hard to muster any outrage. As this report makes clear, the AFT’s mission is not about providing the best education for children, it’s about protecting the jobs of its members. It makes perfect sense that they wouldn’t want their money going to organizations that they perceive as working against their interests (whether that perception is accurate or not). If they would rather have lower returns on their investments, that’s their prerogative.

That said, if the AFT is going to be consistent and principled, they should support public-sector “right to work” legislation so that no one who wants to teach in public schools is forced to join a union and have their mandatory dues go toward a cause that they oppose. Moreover, the unions should end the practice of having state and local governments collect dues for them, essentially using state power and tax dollars to fund causes that some taxpayers, parents, and even teachers perceive as against their interests.

Of course, they’ll never do that. Without the use of coercion, the entire machine would fall apart.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

School Choice Works

By
Jason Bedrick

The evidence is in: school choice works. Yesterday, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released their third edition of their report “A Win-Win Solution: The Empirical Evidence on School Choice.” The report provides a literature review of dozens of high-quality studies of school choice programs around the country, including studies from scholars at Harvard University, Stanford University, Cornell University, the University of Arkansas, the Brookings Institution, and the Federal Reserve Bank. The studies examine the impact of school choice programs on the academic performance of participants and public school students, the fiscal impact on taxpayers, racial segregation, and civic values.

The report’s key findings included the following:

  • Twelve empirical studies have examined academic outcomes for school choice participants using random assignment, the “gold standard” of social science. Of these, 11 find that choice improves student outcomes—six that all students benefit and five that some benefit and some are not affected. One study finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found a negative impact.
  • Twenty-three empirical studies (including all methods) have examined school choice’s impact on academic outcomes in public schools. Of these, 22 find that choice improves public schools and one finds no visible impact. No empirical study has found that choice harms public schools.
  • Six empirical studies have examined school choice’s fiscal impact on taxpayers. All six find that school choice saves money for taxpayers. No empirical study has found a negative fiscal impact.
  • Eight empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools. Of these, seven find that school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools. One finds no net effect on segregation from school choice. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.
  • Seven empirical studies have examined school choice’s impact on civic values and practices such as respect for the rights of others and civic knowledge. Of these, five find that school choice improves civic values and practices. Two find no visible impact from school choice. No empirical study has found that school choice has a negative impact on civic values and practices.

On the same day, a new study from researchers at Harvard University and the Brookings Institution found that a school choice program boosted college enrollment among African-American participants by 24 percent.

While many of the findings show only modest improvement, they consistently show that school choice programs produce the same or superior results across a gamut of measures. Moreover, not all the benefits of choice are easily measurable. Some families are looking for a school that better meets a student’s special needs, instills the parents’ values, inspires a lifelong love of learning, or where a student is safe from bullying. These outcomes are sometimes difficult if not impossible to measure in the aggregate, but parents are in the best position to tell the difference for their own children.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

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