Topic: Education and Child Policy

Public Schools Cost More Than Americans Think

By
Jason Bedrick

Imagine your business trying to decide whether to increase or decrease spending on marketing without knowing how much your company currently spends on marketing. Worse, imagine making that decision under the false impression that your company spends nearly half as much as it actually does. Sadly, that’s the state of the education funding debate nationwide, and the media often exacerbate the problem.

For example, in a news segment on Colorado’s NBC affiliate earlier this month, the reporter acts as though the amount of money spent per child in the public schools is a matter of political opinion to be legitimately debated rather than an empirical fact:

Like any good political debate, there are two sides to every single answer. When it comes to school funding, people have been wondering how much schools get to spend per student. That answer depends on who you ask.

The first person the reporter asked was Kathleen Gebhardt, the lead attorney in Colorado’s education adequacy lawsuit, who claimed that the public schools “receive an average of $6,474 per pupil in tax dollars.” How does that compare with other states? According to Gebhardt, “We’re in the top 10 for wealth and in the bottom 10 for funding our students.”

The reporter then gets a second opinion from Ben DeGrow, senior education policy analyst at the Independence Institute, who claimed that education funding is actually “closer to $10,000 per student.”

The media segment doesn’t give DeGrow an opportunity to explain how he reached that figure, instead turning to a laughing Gebhardt who chortles, “Oh, $10,000-a-year would be unimaginable for almost anybody in Colorado! It would be a nice problem to have, but it’s not one we currently have.”

So who was telling the truth? According to the reporter, no one can really know. He concludes the segment: “Like any good political debate, much of the issue will be addressed at the polls.”

After the segment aired, DeGrow explained how he and his counterpart arrived at their figures. Gebhardt’s figure didn’t account for all sources of tax revenue. In DeGrow’s words, “It is equivalent to counting only the primary breadwinner’s earnings as household income, even though about half as much more money comes in through a side job, home business and investment earnings.”

Moreover, the reporter was asking the wrong question. He wanted to know the amount of state tax dollars that public school districts receive per pupil. The more relevant question is what is actually spent per pupil, including local and federal sources of funding. Not surprisingly, that figure is even higher. According to a report from the Colorado Department of Education, Colorado’s average per-pupil expenditures total $12,181, nearly double the misleading figure given by Gebhardt.

But why mislead the public about how much public schools actually cost? The penultimate paragraph provides a clue:

On Election Day, voters in 31 school districts around the state will decide whether to raise property taxes to pump an additional $1 billion into the school system in the form of bond issues for buildings or mill levy overrides for operating budgets.

And what did voters decide?

Tuesday’s election saw voters in 29 Colorado schools districts approve 34 bond issues and operating revenue increases – plus one sales tax hike – worth just over $1 billion.

Would voters have decided as they did had they known how much money was actually spent per pupil? That’s impossible to know. But it’s also impossible to legitimately debate what the right level of public school funding should be when bureaucrats misinform the public about what public school funding currently is. A 2008 survey by Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance found that voters greatly underestimate how much public schools cost and that their funding preferences vary depending on whether they are accurately informed or not:

The average per-pupil spending estimate from respondents to the 2008 Education Next/PEPG survey was $4,231, and the median response was just $2,000; but for these respondents, local average spending per pupil at the time exceeded $10,000. When told how much the local schools were spending, support for increased spending dropped by 10 percentage points, from 61 percent to a bare majority of 51 percent.

Likewise, in PEPG’s 2011 survey, only 46% of informed respondents wanted to increase funding compared with 59% of uninformed (read: misinformed) respondents.

A part of the media’s job is looking at every claim with a gimlet eye. Sadly, this is far from the only case of the media replacing their self-proclaimed “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out” skepticism with “Rekab Street” credulity.

 

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

How the CFPB Distorts the Facts about College Loans

By
Neal McCluskey

Last month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – a rogue creation of Dodd-Frank – released the first annual report from its private student loan “ombudsman.” And boy, does the report illustrate how far off the rails government has gotten.

Start with the focus: private student loans. These and for-profit colleges have gotten huge, damning attention from Washington – and much of the higher ed commentariat – over the last few years. But even if they were true devil’s spawn, private loans are absolutely not the main problems in higher ed.

Even at their very brief peak in 2007-08, private student loans constituted only 12.5 percent of total student aid. In 2011-12 they were just 2.6 percent. The vast majority of funds have always come from other sources, first and foremost the federal government. Yes, it is primarily “aid” from Washington that lets colleges raise their prices with impunity, and enables students to take on substantial debt for often less-than-substantial studies.

Government, not private lending, is the Lex Luthor here. But to be fair, private lending is the CFPB’s bailiwick, so you can’t blame the agency for putting out the report. You can sure as heck, though, blame politicians for creating a bureau whose job seems simply to be pointing fingers at private companies.

You can also blame the CFPB for the content of its report, which is simply a summary of complaints the bureau has received from disgruntled borrowers. Fairly early on it even states that “the report does not attempt to present a statistically significant picture of issues faced by borrowers” (as if its findings are empirical at all). Unfortunately, it goes on to say that the report “can help to illustrate where there is a mismatch between borrower expectations and actual service delivered.”

Actually, no it can’t. At least not reliably. All it can tell you is what people complained to the CFPB about. It can’t tell you if the complaints had bases in fact. It can’t tell you if complaint-lodgers were really just motivated by a desire not to pay. And it can’t tell you what the lenders’ sides of the stories are.

Okay, it probably could do the last thing, but it seems the ombudsman chose not to. There is not an ounce of response from any lender to the anecdotes that essentially are this report. In other words, the report seems to be doing exactly what the bureau’s opponents feared CFPB would do: functioning as an unaccountable propaganda machine against private companies. And don’t be surprised to hear this report invoked repeatedly by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and other profit-haranguers as damning proof that private student lenders are out of control.

Sadly, the prominent role of government in student lending is ignored even when it is obvious from data on private lending. As one table shows, 46 percent of complaints received were about loans connected to Sallie Mae, and 12 percent about loans from American Education Services, an offshoot of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA).

Sallie Mae, of course, is the student-loan cousin of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal creations at the heart of bad mortgage lending. And PHEAA? “Created in 1963 by the Pennsylvania General Assembly, PHEAA has evolved into one of the nation’s leading student aid organizations.”

Yup, more than half of the complaints about ostensibly private lending were really about government-created lenders. But don’t expect to find even a footnote in the report hinting that government might be the real problem.

It’s hard not to conclude that the major goal of the CFPB is to bash private companies, and in so doing justify more and more government control of the economy. If that’s the case, and if this report is any indication, then the CFPB is doing its job. Too bad that job serves the public so poorly.

Cross-posted from SeeThruEdu.com

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

Taking Education Policy from Quackery to Science

By
Andrew J. Coulson

I recently bewailed the peddling of education policy snake-oil – advocacy based on non-sequiturs and false/misleading/incomplete data. At the end of it, I teased a forthcoming piece suggesting how the field could be kicked up a notch in seriousness and value. It ran today on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.

Feel free to ping me on Twitter or Facebook if you have comments.

 

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, General, Government and Politics

Uh… the ‘Quality Controlled’ Schools Are Worse

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Sunday’s Washington Post ran a story titled “Quality controls lacking for D.C. schools accepting federal vouchers.” These are the particular failings chosen for the story’s lede:

schools that are unaccredited or are in unconventional settings, such as a family-run K-12 school operating out of a storefront, a Nation of Islam school based in a converted Deanwood residence, and a school built around the philosophy of a Bulgarian psychotherapist.

It is remarkable that more serious transgressions were omitted. Why not mention the schools in which current and former staff brawl in the parking lot, or students start vicious fights at sporting events? Why not discuss the schools spending nearly $30,000 per pupil annually and yet graduating barely half of their students on time?

The reason the WaPo didn’t mention them is that they are not voucher schools. These are District of Columbia public schools and they already have in place all the “quality controls” that the Washington Post seems to prize—on fiscal disclosure, testing, teacher certification, etc.

But though it appeared on the news pages, the WaPo story is really an opinion piece, and one whose central opinion—that government regulations can guarantee educational quality and efficiency—is demonstrably false. Modern public school districts are as heavily regulated, “quality controlled,” and overseen by government as any school system in history. And yet they have suffered a productivity collapse unparalleled in any other field of human enterprise. A complete K-through-12 public education costs nearly three times as much today as it did in 1970, adjusting for inflation, but achievement at the end of high school has stagnated or declined.

If journalists really want to improve the quality and efficiency of education available in DC and around the nation, they might start by recognizing the clear futility of their preferred solution and turn instead to the international research on what works, what doesn’t, and why. In the unlikely event that they take the trouble to do so, they will discover that direct accountability to parents and competition among schools succeed where bureaucratic red tape fails.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

Lies My History Teacher Told Me About the War on Terror

By
Julian Sanchez

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf gives us a disturbing glimpse of what American schoolchildren are being taught about the War on Terror, in the form of excerpts from a widely-used high school history textbook. The whole piece is a disturbing catalog of hilarious propaganda presented as fact to kids who are increasingly too young to remember much about the immediate aftermath the 9/11 attacks, but  I figured I’d focus on the paragraph dealing with the Patriot Act, which manages to get a truly impressive number of things wrong in a short space.

The President also asked Congress to pass legislation to help law enforcement agencies track down terrorist suspects. Drafting the legislation took time. Congress had to balance Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure with the need to increase security.

I suppose in some strict sense all events “take time,” but this is a very strange way to describe a 342-page piece of legislation amending more than 15 complex federal statutes, the first version of which was introduced on October 2, and which had been signed into law by October 26. The reason it could be done done so quickly, of course, was that most of the reforms in the bill had long been on the intelligence community’s wish list, and were waiting in a desk drawer for an opportune moment. Last minute substitutions of the draft language meant that few if any legislators had actually read the law they ultimately passed, which makes it hard to argue with a straight face that they were seriously engaged in “balancing” anything.

President Bush signed the new antiterrorist bill - known as the USA Patriot Act - into law in October 2001. The new law allowed secret searches to avoid tipping off suspects in terrorism cases.

Well, that was the sales pitch, anyway. In reality, the FBI already had authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to conduct covert searches in counterterrorism investigations. It should have come as no surprise, then, that this expanded “sneak and peak” authority was almost never used for terrorism cases. In 2008, government investigators sought 763 “sneak and peak” warrants, of which exactly three involved terrorism. The vast majority—65 percent—were drug cases.

It also allowed authorities to obtain a single nationwide search warrant that could be used anywhere. The law also made it easier to wiretap suspects, and it allowed authorities to track e-mail and seize voicemail.

This is a bit weird, because one of the few things the Patriot Act didn’t do was substantially alter the standards for obtaining a wiretap—except that looser FISA warrants could now be obtained in cases where a “significant” rather than “primary” purpose was to acquire foreign intelligence information. The Bush Administration did consider asking Congress to expand wiretap authority, but fearing refusal, decided to simply ignore the law and order the National Security Agency to launch its now-infamous program of warrantless wiretaps. The wording here also, somewhat bizarrely, implies that authorities had no ability to track email or seize voicemail until late 2001. It would be more accurate to say that the act lowered the standard police had to meet to obtain voicemail somewhat, and clarified that certain surveillance tools initially designed for telephone networks could also be used for digital communications, which was more a codification of existing practice than a real change.

Meanwhile, some of the most controversial elements of the Patriot Act go unmentioned. Nothing about “John Doe” roving wiretaps. Nothing about the incredible expansion of National Security Letter authorities. Nothing about Section 215 “tangible thing” orders. It sounds so benign that you’d wonder why anyone was ever opposed to the legislation—except there’s nothing any of the passages Friedersdorf quotes to indicate that anyone did oppose it. I guess Congress did such a good and careful job “balancing” privacy  and security that everyone applauded the wise president’s efforts to help track down terrorists.

To borrow the former president’s famous query: Is our children learning? Maybe—but they don’t seem to be learning much that will prepare them to be critical thinkers about security policy, or good stewards of cherished liberties.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Law and Civil Liberties

This Month’s Cato Unbound: The Online Education Revolution

By
Jason Kuznicki

As Joseph Schumpeter famously wrote, markets are agents of “creative destruction”: when market forces are free to operate, and when entrepreneurs are free to act on their ideas, the old must often give way to the new.

Innovation and cultural dynamism are the hallmarks of a free economy. This state of constant flux is to our way of thinking a welcome and valued thing. Only an economy that is constantly in transition can hope to approximate the changing needs and wants of a robust and flourishing society.

Our love of dynamism is one reason why libertarians aren’t really conservatives, and why we might even wish that we could claim the label “progressive” for ourselves—if it hadn’t been taken, long ago, by individuals whose beliefs differ sharply from our own.

At Cato Unbound this month we are discussing what may prove to be a remarkable example of creative destruction. Within the last few years, Massive Online Open Courses—MOOCs, for short—have become one of the most important trends in higher education. As our lead essayist Alex Tabarrok argues, traditional higher education hasn’t changed substantially for centuries. Yet there is no good reason why this should be, not with all of the new information technology that the market has put at our disposal.

Together with his colleague Tyler Cowen, Tabarrok has founded Marginal Revolution University, which is planned as a growing series of free, online courses that anyone can take. The lectures are brief, watchable on your own schedule, viewable on mobile devices, and replayable. You can ask questions of the professors and receive detailed, personalized feedback. You can study in a group or entirely on your own, and students are invited to create supplemental videos that might be included in future class sessions.

MR University, as it’s called for short, hopes to deliver flexible, inexpensive higher education to the masses, in a way that Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard—for all their tradition—never could. And it’s just one small player in a burgeoning new educational sector. So how should educators and policymakers think about these developments?

To answer that question, we have recruited a panel of distinguished commentators: Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor in Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia; Alan Ryan is the former Warden of New College, Oxford, and a frequent commentator on developments in liberal education; and Kevin Carey is director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation.

As always, Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes, and enter into the conversation on their own websites and blogs, or on other venues. We also welcome your letters. Send them to jkuznicki at cato dot org. Selections may be published at the editors’ option.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Education and Child Policy

A Quick Round-Up on Education Policy and the 2012 Elections

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Californians approved Prop 30, a $6 trillion dollar tax hike intended to save public schools from “devastating” cuts. In fact, the state is already spending around $30 billion more today on public schooling than it did in the early 1970s, after controlling for both enrollment growth and inflation—and SAT scores, the only academic outcome measure going back that far, are down. Prediction: this $6 billion will have little impact on children’s education even if it does make it to the school level. Instead, it will further slow California’s economy and drive a few more businesses out of the state.

Georgia approved a new charter school authorizer, which should lead to more rapid growth of charter schools in that state. Based on recent research published by the Cato Institute, this will increase generally mediocre options within the public school sector by, in part, cannibalizing generally better options in the private sector. Georgia can avoid a net reduction in educational diversity, freedom, and quality by expanding its existing education tax credit program.

Washington becomes the 43rd state to adopt charter schools. Initiative 1240 caps the state-wide charter school count at 40 over the next five years, however, so it will have little short term impact. If the charter cap is expanded before Washington state levels the financial playing field for private schooling through a tax credit program like Georgia’s, the existing independent education sector in the state will be largely consumed by the competition from new “free” charter schools.

High profile Indiana state schools superintendent Tony Bennett has been defeated by his rival Glenda Ritz. Ritz not only opposes the statewide voucher program championed by Bennett, she is among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit to overturn it. Indiana’s voucher legislation accords the state department of education the power to adopt rules and regulations pertaining to its implementation, including determination of students’ eligibility to receive vouchers. If Ritz does not use these powers in an attempt to hobble and curtail the program, I will be shocked.

The political balance in New Hampshire’s legislature has shifted toward Democrats strongly supportive of the educational status quo. This raises the possibility that there will be efforts to cripple or repeal a K-12 scholarship donation education tax credit in that state. Though the program is quite small, it was among the best-designed in the country and it would be an unfortunate turn of events for low-income children in that state if the program is killed.

None of these developments or possible developments are likely to derail the growing interest in expanding educational freedom in America as a whole, but they do suggest that reformers have more work to do in educating themselves and the public about what works and what doesn’t in education policy.

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy

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