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.

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.