Cases in which parents deny their children modern medical treatment are increasingly rare. In medicine, the days of snake-oil selling quacks are mostly behind us. Sadly, the same isn’t true in education policy.

Medical researchers precisely define and test their proposed treatments. Compare that to a recent bit of education policy “analysis” in which the writer purports to assess Milton Friedman’s market-inspired proposal (minimally regulated school vouchers) by reviewing the outcomes of charter schooling. This is like testing insulin by administering Flintstones Chewables. Charter schools are opened and closed at the discretion of government authorities, lack market-determined prices, and cannot be operated for-profit or offer religious instruction. In many states, they cannot hire teachers who lack government credentials. Friedman’s voucher proposal shared none of these characteristics, and so to treat the two interchangeably is a sign of ignorance or intentional equivocation.

Even when relevant evidence is presented, the presentation is frequently inaccurate and unsystematic. To see just how serious this problem is, it helps to look at an example in detail. Consider a recent discussion of voucherizing U.S. federal education spending that drew lessons from Chile’s voucher program. Many of its facts are wrong, others are misrepresented, and key pieces of information are omitted.

The author claims that Chilean education spending as a share of GDP shrank between 1980 and today. But, according to the United Nations, it rose from 4.4 percent to 4.5 percent. And, due to the sustained growth of Chile’s economy since the mid-1980s, inflation-adjusted per pupil spending has more than doubled.

The author acknowledges that Chilean students are now the highest-performing in Latin America, but claims that his fabricated “budget cuts have led to overall decline in quality.” In fact, Chile is one of the fastest-improving nations in the entire world on international tests of academic achievement. He goes on to claim, without support, that vouchers have led to growing inequality, benefiting only upper-middle-income families, yet a Yale University study reports that the voucher program has reduced inequality in educational attainment and raised earnings equally for both the poor and the non-poor.

Finally, the author notes that lower-income students are more likely to attend public rather than private schools in Chile, but neglects to mention that public schools serving the poor receive a varying amount of additional funding that is not given to private schools serving similar students. Chilean economists Sapelli and Vial report that public schools receiving vastly higher funding per pupil outperform private schools (which explains their appeal), but in the rare cases in which the public sector’s funding advantage is 25 percent or less, it is private schools that perform better.

This is not an exhaustive list of the commentary’s errors, omissions, and misrepresentations, but it should suffice to show the level of quackery being doled out to the public by purportedly serious publications (it was published in the Washington Post’s education blog). We’re not exactly talking House or Doc Martin here.

Few parents would administer the medical equivalent of this claptrap to their children–they are generally protected from such errors by the health-care field’s comparatively careful, systematic research practices. But in education, they still suffer under the ministrations of charlatans. The result can be seen in the virtually unique productivity collapse that has beset American education for generations.

So what can we do about it? A first step would be for well-intentioned education policy analysts to make more systematic use of the high quality research that is available, and to add to that literature. But it is harder to conduct experiments on the impact of state or national policies than on the impact of drugs. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem–one that we also owe, incidentally, to the medical field. I’ll be writing about that soon, and will update this post with a link when it’s available.

Update: My article in the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.

In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama pledged to make college more affordable. President Obama kept his promises to increase grants and expand loan forgiveness, but the cost of attending college continues to rise. As the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center reports today, tuition at public universities rose 4.8% this year. While tuition didn’t grow as fast as in previous years, tuition continues to rise faster than inflation and growth in family income. And, as we know, student debt is exploding. Graduates of the class of 2011 carry an average of $26,600 in student loan debt, up 5% from the class of 2010.  Nationwide debt from student loans exceeded $1 trillion this year,  surpassing all other forms of debt that Americans carry, including credit card debt and auto loans.

The Obama administration’s plan to make college more affordable has involved a massive increase in taxpayer subsidies to students. Even after adjusting for inflation, federal subsidies to higher education have more than doubled in the last decade to over $49 billion in 2011-12. The largest increase occurred in 2009-10 when the federal government’s share of tuition aid dramatically increased from 33% to 44%, with federal spending growing 167% from $26 billion to $44 billion.

Four-year degrees are increasingly expensive but the payoffs are not guaranteed. To pay off the student-loan debt and earn a decent return on investment for the time and money spent on college, graduates expect access to more and better-paying jobs. Increasingly, this hope is in vain. The New York Times reported last year that 22.4% of college graduates under age 25 were unemployed. An additional 22% were working in jobs that did not even require a college degree where their average annual income was under $16,000. Those fortunate enough to find jobs have discovered starting salaries down 10% on average from $30,000 in 2007-2008 to $27,000 in 2009-2010. Moreover, some studies have shown that four-year college students who rank near the bottom of their class earn about the same as those graduating near the top of two-year community colleges, further calling into question the universal value of a bachelor’s degree. It is no wonder then that Pew Research finds that 57% of Americans no longer believe that college is worth the money.

So is more money the answer? Actually, it is a part of the problem since colleges raise tuition in response to increased tuition aid. As my colleague Neal McCluskey explained in his testimony before Congress:

 According to data from the College Board, between the 1981-82 and 2010-11 school years, inflation-adjusted aid per full-time equivalent student — the bulk of which came through the federal government — rose from $4,418 to $13,914, a 215 percent increase. Meanwhile, real tuition and fee costs at four-year colleges grew roughly apace. At four-year public institutions prices expanded from $2,242 in 1981-82 to $8,244 in 2011-12, a 268 percent ballooning. At four-year, nonprofit private institutions prices rose from $10,144 to $28,500, a 181 percent leap.

It is, of course, difficult to conclude definitively from simple aid and price comparisons that aid fuels price increases. But a growing body of research controlling for variables outside of aid supports the hypothesis that aid has an appreciable inflationary effect, though study results vary by type of aid and institution.

It should come as no surprise that subsidies raise prices. Fortunately, there are now a growing number of innovative alternatives to traditional four-year colleges that have the potential to dramatically reduce costs while providing a quality education. Instead of subsidizing the expensive, inefficient and too-often ineffective status quo, government should just get out of the way.

Without picking a winner in last night’s debate, it’s fair to say that Mitt Romney avoided the sort of conspicuous gaffs that can sink a campaign. He may well become the next president of the United States. Would that be a good thing for American schoolchildren?

Yesterday, I faulted an op-ed the Governor wrote for consisting chiefly of vagaries—but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Given that the federal government has spent roughly $2 trillion on k-12 education since 1965 and achieved none of its objectives, a president who talks much but does less would be a decided improvement.

But there are a few specifics in Romney’s education white paper… and some of them are deeply disconcerting. Immediately after stressing that “states and localities are best-positioned to reform their education systems” the document reverses course and declares that “the federal government cannot ignore the troubled state of American K-12 education,” and “is uniquely positioned to provide financial support for the education of our neediest students and to require states and districts to tell the truth about how their schools and students are performing.”

Certainly the federal government should not ignore America’s educational woes, having contributed to many of them for over half a century. But the subsequent claims are untrue and do not follow from the first. It is simply false that federal government funding is “uniquely positioned” to improve the education of the neediest students. In fact, one of the flagship federal programs for helping these students, Head Start, has been proven to have no lasting benefits by the federal government’s own research. More broadly, there appears to be no link between federal K-12 spending patterns and the student achievement gaps by socio-economic status or race. Nor is there any evidence that the federal oversight introduced by the No Child Left Behind law (the “telling the truth” referred to above) improved achievement overall or narrowed the gaps.

To be fair, the document acknowledges the ineffectiveness of past and current federal programs, and so the claim that federal funding is “uniquely positioned” to help disadvantaged students could be read to apply only to the Romney campaign proposal of “attaching federal funding to the students it is intended to support rather than dispersing it to districts.” The idea is essentially to voucherize federal funds, allowing them to be used even at private schools, where permitted by state law.

The benefits of increasing parental choice and competition between schools are well supported by the evidence, but here again, the federal “uniqueness” claim is simply false. Federal funding is not unique or necessary to ensuring universal school choice. The states are fully capable of doing this themselves because private schooling is, on average, about two thirds the per-pupil cost of public schooling, and so even without the roughly ten percent of education funding that comes from the federal government, state-level private choice programs could serve everyone.

Even though federal involvement in state school choice programs is not necessary it could still be a good idea. But it isn’t. As I argued when a similar idea was floated by President G. W. Bush, federal regulations would almost certainly follow federal funding of the nation’s private schools, homogenizing them from coast to coast and thereby eliminating the educational diversity upon which any choice program must rely. Since writing that piece, I have conducted a statistical study of the regulations imposed by state-level private school choice programs and found that vouchers already impose a large and highly statistically significant extra burden of regulation on participating schools. This is a grave enough problem when the regulations affect just the private schools in a single state, but that pales in comparison to the damage that would be done by such regulations at the national level.

Universal private school choice can also be achieved via personal and “scholarship donation” tax credits, and these programs do not seem to carry with them the same regulatory pall. But there is no reason to run the risk of enacting such a program at the federal level. On the contrary, the growing diversity of school choice programs at the state level is an asset, allowing us to see which state policies do the most to expand educational freedom and improve quality and efficiency. The best can then be replicated and the worst reformed.

Governor Romney says that he understands the free enterprise system, and knows that trickle-down government doesn’t work. He says that he wants to uphold our nation’s founding principles. Well, the evidence is clear that there is no need for or benefit to federal government intervention in state education policy and that there are in fact very grave risks to such intervention. And though it is unfashionable to draw attention to this fact, neither the word education nor the word school is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. So if Governor Romney becomes President Romney, American schoolchildren will be very lucky if he remembers these facts, and uses the presidential bully pulpit to promote more and better state-level school choice programs rather than opening the Pandora’s Box of federal funding and regulation of private schools.