You probably have heard about the University of California Regents voting yesterday for a 32-percent tuition hike over the next two years. Not surprisingly, many students are angry, some enough that they were arrested protesting outside the Regents’ meeting.

Now, a 32 percent hike over two years isn’t small. But here’s the thing: California has typically charged students very little relative to both state taxpayer funding and national averages. As you can see in the chart below, which uses data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, net per-pupil tuition revenue (meaning revenue from tuition minus any state financial aid) in California has hovered around $1,200 over the last 25 years, and has only gone up about $18 per year. Meanwhile, state taxpayers have been shelling out around $7,300 per pupil per year. So state taxpayers have been furnishing the vast majority of funding for California college students, and students have done very little to make up the vast gulf between what they pay and what taxpayers shell out.

How does California compare to the rest of the nation? On average for all states, net per-pupil revenue from students has risen from just about $2,000 to $4,000, putting the ever-growing average around $3,000, or close to three times what Golden State students have been furnishing. Funding from state and local taxpayers, meanwhile, has been just slightly lower nationally than in California.

So California students have been getting a heck of a deal, which is no doubt one among many reasons the state is on fiscal life support. Sooner or later bills come due, and that has left the state little choice but to make students pay more for the education of which they are by far the biggest beneficiaries.

Naturally — but still shamelessly — students are acting like victims now that the decrepit gravy train is slowing down a bit.  Unfortunately, the adults in charge of California colleges are also naturally — but perhaps even more shamelessly — stoking student anger so that they don’t have to do things that make their jobs less pleasant.

Despite the utterly unsustainable taxpayer funding for higher education that California has doled out for decades, for instance, UC president Mark Yudof had no qualms about declaring that:

We’re being forced to impose a user tax on our students and their families. This is a tax necessary because our political leaders have failed to adequately fund public higher education.

Last I checked, what a customer pays for a service is called a “price” not a “tax.” A tax is what has been used to make taxpayers bear by far the biggest part of California’s higher education burden while students have furnished but a token amount. And please don’t give us the “failed to adequately fund” line. UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has been happily trotting out that disproven dreck in a grab for federal taxpayer dollars at the same time it has been discovered that he’s been pushing millions of dollars intended for academics and other purposes to Berkeley athletics.

It’s hard enough to accept the underfunding bit when the data clearly show it not to be the case. It’s even harder when college leaders spend their precious dollars on water polo and golf.

It’s time in California for the adults to stop acting like kids, and for the kids to start paying their share. But don’t get your hopes up, at least in higher education. It seems that no one there is without a shameless sense of entitlement.

The GAO’s findings are consistent with the longstanding pattern: for forty years, Americans have steadily increased spending on public schools without any resulting improvement in student performance by the end of high school (see the figures here and here).

The Obama administration has touted its $100 billion in education stimulus spending as a key to long term economic growth. What the data show, however, is that higher spending on public schools over the past two generations has not improved academic outcomes. And economists such as Stanford’s Eric Hanushek have shown that it is improved academic achievement, not higher public school spending, that accelerates economic growth.

So if the administration is serious in wanting education to boost the American economy, it must support reforms that are proven to significantly raise achievement, such as those that bring to bear real market freedoms and incentives — programs like the DC private school choice program that the administration has decided to kill despite its proven effectiveness.

Of course a free people deserve a free intellectual and education marketplace, in which parents choose their children’s schools without state interference. Those schools, acting in loco parentis, could decide what, if any, pledges their students recite. They could even chose the current one, if that strikes their fancy. That’s what freedom’s all about.

Except he doesn’t. Not at the K-12 level, anyway. Because Arne Duncan has advocated a slow death for the DC voucher program that his own Department of Education shows is… wait for it… significantly improving outcomes while getting government out of the business of running schools altogether.

But maybe that’s the problem. Schools work better the smaller the role government plays in them, but that means we don’t really need a secretary of education at all, do we?

Let’s put it this way: passing a college course no more indicates a human capital gain than just going to a gym indicates an improvement in physical fitness.

To get through college, many students don’t have to become better at reading, at writing, at math, at logic. Sadly, the key consideration at many colleges is not educational excellence or even modest progress, but simply enrolling and collecting tuition from as many students as possible. Therefore, course content has been watered down and expectations lowered so that even the weakest and most disengaged students can pass. As Steve Balch, founder of the National Association of Scholars says, “We don’t so much have higher education these days, as longer education.”

It all comes down to this: Bloviate all they want about the ”common good,” people in higher education are just as self-interested as anyone else, and will do whatever they can to get the most money for doing whatever makes their lives the easiest. And the best way to ensure that this yields the worst possible outcomes for everyone else? Rather than requiring schools and students to earn your money, have government just keep handing it over to them.

Now, you might think this was a joke – ONN does sometimes do a parody or two. But this segment could not have been more serious. How do I know? Because the federal government really does have a multi-million dollar, whale-based education initiative: The Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Exchange Program. And if the feds have a program for something the problem must be real, and it must be serious!

Ilwhaleracy, quite simply, threatens the future of our nation — consider just the potential devastation on our economic competitiveness with Atlantis! – and I for one am glad to see Washington tackling the threat head on!

This is much higher than the savings estimate offered by the Arizona Republic last month, as the AZ Republic story linked above is quick to point out. I deal with the reasons for the discrepancy below, but first, here’s the crucial fact that the Republic has missed yet again: if the tax credit programs were significantly expanded, such as by raising the donation caps, the state would undeniably save many hundreds of millions of dollars annually. In fact, if the share of AZ schoolchildren participating in the program rose to just 40 percent, taxpayers would save billions of dollars a year – even if the size of the individual scholarships had to triple to achieve that result.

The Republic’s failure to report that inescapable and rather important fact does it no credit.

Now, on to the reason for the discrepancy in savings numbers. The body of the story hints at it: the Republic’s estimate assumed that private school enrollment would have been flat or increasing without the tax credit program, while the latest estimate does not.

As I pointed out at the time, the Republic’s assumption is demonstrably mistaken. Official AZ statistics show that enrollment in private schools peaked before the tax credit program had gotten under way, and had begun to decline as a result of rapid growth in the (tuition-free) charter school sector. So the Republic’s savings estimate was almost certainly too low.

As the author of the latest study admits, his assumptions about the true number of students who have migrated to private schools as a result of the program are speculative, but at least they are reasonable and not obviously erroneous, as the Republic’s were. In any event, the savings from a much larger migration to the private sector are not in doubt.

Even more interesting is the stability of support for donation tax credits across party identification. A stunning 64 percent of Democrats support credits, with only 21 percent opposed. Independents support credits 65 percent to 22 percent.

Charters are supposed to be the poster child for policies targeting Independent voters. And yet charters draw 59 percent of support from independents and 23 percent opposition.

That’s a swing from a 43 percent margin of support for credits to a 36 percent margin for charters. And vouchers run even further behind with a 22 percent margin of support from Independent voters.

Smart politicians looking for cost-saving and effective education reform would do well to take note of these numbers.

More to come . . .

1. Vouchers
2. Charter Schools
3. Education Tax Credits

Conventional wisdom says go with charter schools, because they are a bipartisan, moderate compromise reform that will get you the largest number of Independents and the least opposition. Vouchers are too hot to touch. And what’s an education tax credit . . . oh, right, they’re too controversial as well

Conventional wisdom is WRONG.

The Friedman Foundation has released another in their invaluable series of state education polls, this time for once-purple Virginia. Their findings are consistent with other polls, and the pattern is worth highlighting.

Charter schools draw 59 percent in support and 26 percent in opposition. Vouchers find 57 percent in support and 35 percent in opposition. Personal-use credits get the support of 59 percent and are opposed by 32 percent.

Donation tax credits are supported by 65 percent of voters and opposed by 23 percent.

Charters, vouchers, and personal-use credits, in other words, are equally popular, with credits and vouchers drawing a bit more fire.  And donation credits are wildly popular with only a rump of opposition.

To qualify for Fund dollars, states have to make hardly any meaningful changes to their education systems. For the most part they just have to submit plans for how they could conceivably do good stuff. Moreover, the same “stimulus” that furnished the $4.35 billion for Race to The Top supplied roughly 20 times that amount to protect the abysmal, obese education status quo from recessionary pressures. Nonetheless, many conservatives, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, are going out of their way to lionize Obama & co. for their reform efforts.

Why the cross-spectrum adulation? One problem is certainly that some conservatives have given up on real reform — universal school choice and getting the feds out of education — in favor of being seen as “doing something” from Washington. Probably more important, though, is that Race to the Top is constantly being festooned in brash, combative rhetoric about pushing what are actually relatively minor — but still disliked by teacher union — improvements such as linking educator pay to student performance and increasing charter schools. (For a taste of the hyperbole, check out Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s opening commentary from Sunday’s Meet the Press.) That Race to the Top falls far short of actually doing even these very limited things seems not to matter.

That leads to a very familiar, but nonetheless dispiriting, conclusion: in education, a blizzard of rhetoric is all it takes to blind people to reality.

In a speech last Wednesday, Obama lamented that "people have seen schools as sort of a political spoil having to do with jobs" and declared that "we are putting our resources behind the kinds of reforms that are going to make a difference."

What "reforms" was he talking about? The ones states are encouraged to make to get part of the $4.35-billion "Race to the Top" Fund, a kitty of stimulus cash controlled by the U.S. secretary of education, for which official guidelines were announced this week.

To compete, the administration has said states must end prohibitions on using student achievement data to evaluate teachers. They should also eliminate caps on charter schools, adopt "internationally benchmarked" curricular standards and prepare to "turn around" bad schools.

It's these seemingly tough stipulations that have education reformers on both the left and right applauding. Even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called Obama "courageous" for taking these positions.

The only problem is, there's no there there.

Consider teacher evaluations. While states are being told they can't prohibit the use of achievement data in evaluating teachers, there's nothing pushing schools to go ahead and actually use the data. But shouldn't that be the ultimate goal? Of course, but it's also what teacher unions really want to avoid, so Race to the Top avoids it, too.

How about lifting charter caps? It's certainly a good idea, but a lot more than that goes into getting good charter schools. Unfortunately, points out Jeanne Allen, president of the charter-advocating Center for Education Reform, "the president and his education secretary are...giving states credit for talking about charter schools rather than actually changing laws to improve the likelihood that children will have real school choice."

So Race to the Top is great talk but little substance. But at least it isn't making matters worse. The same can't be said for the one substantive thing that Obama has done in education: Deliver a gargantuan $100 billion in direct stimulus to schools.

The stated rationale for doing this was to save schools from financial devastation, including deep cuts to the most fundamental educational functions. But few public schools were likely facing such a dire scenario.

According to the most recent federal data, inflation-adjusted, per-pupil expenditures in public schools nearly doubled between the 1975-76 and 2005-06 school years. Similarly, in 1990 there were 9.2 students per public-school employee. By 2006 there were only 8.

The schools have been anything but starving. They've also been anything but improving: According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- the so-called "nation's report card"--academic outcomes have stagnated since the 1970s.

The situation in higher education is no different. Obama's announced goal for the United States is to have the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. This has translated into colleges getting their own part of the stimulus windfall, as well as creation of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, a bill that would funnel yet more money into tuition-inflating student aid and other bankrupting federal programs.

Like K-12 resources, the evidence shows that we already push college too much, not too little.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 25 percent of all jobs in 2006 required at least a bachelor's degree, but as of March 2007 roughly 29 percent of Americans had one. And most new jobs in the coming years will require not a college education, but on-the-job training.

But don't we have to keep up with the Chinese? Hardly. China has certainly been pushing higher education, but to its detriment. According to a September report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China has such a glut of degree holders that college grads are earning wages on par with migrant workers.

There's no valid reason to emulate that.

Okay, there's one, and it's been serving Obama well since his campaign: Talking about great education--but doing little to actually get it--appears to be a surefire political winner. But that's hardly change we should believe in.

They are too weak because they don’t require states to actually do anything of substance. Have plans for reform? Sure. Break down a few barriers that could stand in the way of decent changes? That’s in there, too. But that’s about it. And the money is supposed to be a one-shot deal – once paper promises are accepted and the dough delivered, the race is supposed to be over.

In light of those things, how is this more appropriately labeled the Over the Top Fund than the Race to the Top Fund? Because while not requiring anything, it tries to push unprecedented centralization of education power.It calls for state data systems to track students from preschool to college graduation. It calls for states to sign onto “common” – meaning, ultimately, federal – standards. It tries to influence state budgeting.

In other words, it attempts to further centralize power in the hands of ever-more distant, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than leaving it with the communities, and especially parents, the schools are supposed to serve — exactly what’s plagued American education for decades. And, of course, it does this with huge  gobs of federal money taxpayers have no choice but to supply.

It’s as though Arne Duncan recognizes the merits of free market forces, but rather than faithfully reproducing them in the field of education, he’s decided to give us his own reimagining of them.

Here’s the problem. There are already 25 years of scientific research comparing real free education markets to traditional public school systems. It overwhelmingly finds that markets do a better job of serving families. But we have no evidence at all that Secretary Duncan’s newly invented system will do anyone any good.

So why go to all this trouble to reinvent the wheel, when the Secretary’s own Department of Education has found that an on-going federal private school choice program—which gets much closer to a genuine education marketplace—is raising students’ reading ability by two grade levels after just 3 years of participation?

The Trustees delves into the political affiliations of board of trustee members of the “ten most prestigious private schools that support the  D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.” Based on trustees’ total donation amounts to the two major presidential candidates in 2008, or to candidates, party committees, and parties themselves, the report suggests that trustees lean Democratic by a ratio of roughly 9 to 1.

Importantly, only about 37 percent of trustees were found to have made any contributions, so the 9-to-1 ratio doesn’t necessarily mean that trustees overall are similarly skewed. In addition, the underlying assumption seems to be that if the schools participate in the voucher program their trustees support school choice, which doesn’t necessarily follow. A trustee may very well think a school should take some voucher kids but also think the program ought not to exist. And, of course, trustees almost certainly don’t all agree one way or the other.

Those things said, this is yet more evidence supporting an increasingly inescapable conclusion: Democrats — who have historically opposed school choice much more so than Republicans — are finding that they just can’t do it anymore. There is no justification for consigning kids to awful schools.

Of course, members of both parties — or no party at all — who support only small, hamstrung programs still have a lot of thinking to do…

Community groups and Los Angeles Unified officials on Tuesday condemned an anonymous flyer handed to Latino parents that threatened them with deportation if they supported plans to convert their neighborhood school to a charter.

Calling it an escalation in a series of “scare tactics,” district officials and community advocates said distribution of the flyer was timed to weaken one of LAUSD’s boldest efforts to reform public education in Los Angeles.

A generation or two from now, when children are studying how school choice began to spread throughout America, they will read of such incidents and marvel at the depths to which opponents sunk.

If you’re a policymaker or opinion leader, on which side of that history will you want your name to appear?

Here are three good reasons why we need to have that conversation:

First, we have little to show for the nearly $2 trillion dollars spent on federal education programs since 1965. As the chart demonstrates, federal education spending per pupil has nearly tripled since 1970 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars — but achievement has barely budged. In fact, the only subject in which achievement at the end of high school has changed by more than 1 percent is science, and it has gotten worse.

This overall average masks some tiny gains for minority children, such as a 3 to 5 percent rise in the scores of African American 17-year-olds. But even these modest improvements can't be attributed to federal spending. Almost all of the gain occurred between 1980 and 1988, a period during which federal spending per pupil actually fell. And the scores of African American 17-year-olds have declined in the twenty years since, even as federal spending has shot through the roof.

The second reason we should seriously consider getting Congress and the White House out of America's classrooms is that they are likely to make matters worse rather than better if we let their involvement continue. Consider this comment made by education secretary Arne Duncan in his recent speech about NCLB reauthorization:

"The biggest problem with NCLB is that it doesn't encourage high learning standards. In fact, it inadvertently encourages states to lower them.... Low standards also contribute to the nation's high school dropout rate."

Duncan is mistaken. NCLB did lower academic standards, but it also lowered the dropout rate. Unfortunately, it appears to have done that by pressuring schools to graduate more unprepared students who haven't mastered high school material. One of President Obama's favorite economists, Noble laureate James Heckman, has shown that graduation rates declined steadily from the late 1960s until 2002, when NCLB was enacted. Then, suddenly, they ticked upward.

Why is that apparent improvement worrisome? Heckman explains: "NCLB gives schools strong incentives to raise graduation rates by any means possible." He notes that as soon as the law was passed, schools started flunking far fewer kids and graduating more of them. Heckman isn't absolutely sure if these sudden gains are real "or are an indication of schools cheating the system in the face of political pressure." But he concludes that the timing suggests schools are cheating. And it's not "the system" that's being cheated, it's the kids.

It's troubling that Duncan seems unaware of this, because his proposed changes to NCLB would likely encourage the apparent cheating revealed by Heckman. Duncan wants to be tighter on the goals and looser on the means for meeting them. In other words, he wants to put even more pressure on districts to show results, and leave them even freer in the way they get them. If schools were already scamming the system when they had less freedom and pressure, Duncan's recommendation seems bound to make matters worse.

Finally, unless American families and educators send Washington packing, federal involvement will become even more intrusive. A key goal of this administration is to homogenize standards and testing nationwide. Is your son or daughter really identical to every other child you've ever met? Does he or she learn math, reading, biology, and history at the same pace as every other 9, 12, or 15 year old? If not, it makes no sense to place all children on a national education conveyor belt that drags them through the curriculum at a fixed pace.

Wouldn't it be better to make schools adapt to the needs of individual kids instead of trying to forcibly fit the kids into a single bureaucratic learning schedule? Wouldn't it be better to give teachers the professional freedom to do their jobs, and then make it easier for families to pick the best schools for their children — public, private, or parochial?

Unless we tell Congress and the administration to butt out of the nation's schools we may never find out.

An explosive report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in September said earnings of graduates were now at par and even lower than those of migrant laborers [italics added].

Wow! If this report is accurate, until now I have had no idea how truly ridiculous Washington’s obsession with pumping out more degrees to keep up with the Chinese has been — and I’ve been pretty sure it’s ridiculous! Much more troubling, if I’ve had little clue about the true extent of the absurdity, imagine how far from grasping it our government-loving federal politicians have been! Of course, as I wrote yesterday, even if they did know it, they probably wouldn’t let on.

In the face of such evidence, one would expect the government’s performance in the field of education to be questioned, at the least, [but] the growing failures of the educational establishment are followed by the appropriation of larger and larger sums. There is, however, a practical alternative: tax credits for education.

The essentials of the idea (in my version) are as follows: an individual citizen would be given tax credits for the money he spends on education, whether his own education, his children’s, or any person’s he wants to put through a bona fide school of his own choice (including primary, secondary, and higher education).

Rand’s support for credits is interesting for a number of reasons, not least the fact that she explicitly endorses credits, not vouchers. I’ve had numerous and largely fruitless arguments over which policy is most “free-market” or least distorting. To me it is obvious that credits are the most “free-market” education reform. Now I can skip the arguments and yell, “Ayn Rand!”

Rand’s essay also highlights the fact that education tax credits were, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent private school policy on the scene. Federal tax credits were a live issue under Nixon and Carter. Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party gave strong and explicit support for education tax credits throughout the 1980’s – with tax credits, but not vouchers, mentioned specifically in the Republican Party platforms of 1980, 1984, and 1988.

The largely forgotten history of education tax credits . . . interesting . . .

The president, I suspect, thought that Duncan, the former chief of the Chicago public schools, could use all he had learned there to raise achievement for students across the country.

It sounds great, but it was the same thought that led previous presidents to appoint those previous fine education secretaries to their posts. How much good did that do? Test scores for elementary and middle school students have come up a bit in the last couple of decades, but not enough to get excited about. High school scores are still flat. If national education policy had made a big jump forward, I would say we should continue to fill this job, but that hasn’t happened either. I think the No Child Left Behind law, supported by both parties, was an improvement over previous federal policies, but it was only copying what several states had already done to make schools accountable and identify schools that needed extra help.

Other than the “fine” secretaries part and the (sorta) nice words for NCLB, that sounds like something we at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom might have written. Bottom line: Washington doesn’t add any value to education, and at best just picks up on things states are already doing.

Unfortunately, after dropping the “ed sec must go” bombshell and furnishing ironclad evidence why the position is worthless, Mathews retreats from the obvious, ultimate implication of his argument: We should abolish the department the secretary leads!

The evidence screams this and, from a technical standpoint, you can’t keep a cabinet-level department and not have a secretary to head it. But in what smells a lot like a cop out, Mathews asserts that the department should stay (though in a smaller form). After all, someone has to be in charge of doling out all of the taxpayer cash that isn’t doing a damn bit of good:

Keep in mind I am NOT saying we should abolish the education department. That old Reagan campaign platform died a natural death long ago. We need the department to intelligently distribute federal money to the most promising schools in our cities and states. Cut back the number of people rumbling around that big building on Maryland Avenue—many of them are going crazy from boredom anyway—and put it under the control of a savvy civil service administrator who knows how to keep the checks and the useful data rolling out.

Too bad Mathews wasn’t willing to go all the way on this. But just for proposing that we put the position of U.S. Secretary of Education out to pasture, he deserves some hearty applause.

As President Obama proclaimed when introducing his American Graduation Initiative, which is now part of the ironically titled Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act:

By 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world….Already we’ve increased Pell grants by $500. We’ve created a $2,500 tax credit for four years of college tuition. We’ve simplified student aid applications….A new GI Bill of Rights…is beginning to help soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan to begin a new life — in a new economy.  And the recovery plan has helped close state budget shortfalls…at the same time making historic investments in school libraries and classrooms and facilities all across America.  So we’ve already taken some steps that are building the foundation for a 21st century education system…one that will allow us to compete with China and India and everybody else all around the world. 

Now, while a college education could furnish important learning that helps drive innovation and economic development, it could also be as worthless as conferring a bachelor’s degree on a dog. What’s important is that people actually learn things of value, not simply that they get degrees. But a funny thing happened in China…

Yesterday, news broke that China’s top education official has been sacked. Reports the New York Times:

Facing rising criticism over the quality of schools and a crush of jobless college graduates, China’s legislature announced Monday that it had removed the minister of education after six years on the job and replaced him with a deputy.

China has been cranking out college graduates at a breakneak pace, but the quality of the education has become highly suspect and, perhaps more importantly, there haven’t been nearly enough jobs to employ all the newly credentialed. In other words, simply producing more graduates — no matter how much it has frightened some people in America – has largely been a waste.

The obvious lesson from this should be that it’s foolish to simply make massively expanding the ranks of degree holders a national goal. But that doesn’t compute for many U.S. politicians, despite abundant evidence that we don’t need heaps more graduates anymore than China does. It’s getting elected that matters most to politicians, and as long as voters keep believing that government is opening the door to the middle class simply by pushing more and more people to college, politicians will keep wasting taxpayer dollars on unnecessary degrees.

So let’s hope that both voters and politicians will learn China’s clear college lesson: Fixating on degrees is not very smart. Failing that, let’s hope that we at least don’t have any rioting… 

Ben Chavis, founding principal of Oakland’s extremely high scoring American Indian Public Charter Schools, has invited Charles to put his skepticism to the test, and perform research to validate or refute the achievements of Ben’s inner-city students. But Charles believes he’d find only a modest (< 0.25 std. dev.) test score effect to AIPCS attendance, that would, moreover, be evanescent. Charles grants that Ben has created a very good school, he’s just convinced that even very good schools cannot have large or lasting academic effects.

The evidence simply does not support Charles’ skepticism.

I’ve already noted that there are average effect sizes for market education systems that are much greater than Charles’ threshold. Just a few months ago, it was reported that three years in private schools under DC’s voucher program raises reading achievement by two grade levels (0.42 std. dev.), and effect sizes of even 2/3ds of a std. dev. are not unheard of.

Those are average effect sizes of competitive education markets over public school monopolies. Since we agree that Ben’s school is quite special, there is every reason to expect his school’s effect size to be on the high end of the range already identified in the research.

And what of Charles’ assumption that school effects are necessarily evanescent, fading to insignificance within a few years after students leave the school? This, too, is contradicted by the evidence. Numerous studies have looked at long term effects of consuming market schooling instead of monopoly schooling – particularly on students’ eventual success in college and their earnings once they’ve entered the labor market. Economist Derek Neal has found that urban blacks attending Catholic schools are twice as likely to graduate from college as similar students attending public schools. That is a large effect several years out, and it, in turn, will have an enduring positive effect on students earnings. In fact, of 17 research findings comparing the eventual educational attainment and earnings of market school graduates to public school graduates, 11 find statistically significant positive effects, and none find significant negative effects (see Table 3 in the previously linked paper).

The evidence is clear that competitive education markets have significant, lasting, and often quite substantial positive effects over government school monopolies. So I can see no empirical basis for Charles’ skepticism.

What’s more, this should be intuitively obvious. The current mean of the bell curve of educational achievement is not some inescapable fact of nature, like the value of pi. It is a symptom of the monopoly school systems that have stifled educational efficiency and innovation for more than a century. Just as establishing the rule of law and liberating economies from the thrall of central planning have led to dramatic economic growth around the world, so would liberating education from the thrall of government school monopolies shift the bell curve to the right.

“Here we go again,” said Patterson, a former council member and chairwoman of its education committee. It looked as if another attempt at public school reform was disintegrating in a hail of recriminations and rhetoric.

Casey Lartigue wrote about the decades-long efforts to improve the D.C. schools for Cato back in 2002.

Well now we know where much of the precious investment in Cal was going — to subsidize sports. According to Inside Higher Ed, over just the past few years Berkeley has provided tens-of-millions of dollars in subsidies and loan forgiveness to its sports programs, which are supposed to be self-supporting.

Now, the whole college athletics undertaking is one that deserves lots of scrutiny for its subsidies and excesses. Cal is certainly not alone in this. But for Birgeneau to take to the pages of the Washington Post, cry poverty, and call for the nation’s taxpayers to foot his school’s bills while he quietly pushes millions of dollars to water polo, rugby, golf, and sundry other sports? That takes a lot of gall. Of course, rent-seeking gall is not in short supply when it comes to higher education.

Thankfully, at least this time it looks like the arrogant aggressiveness is going to backfire. Birgeneau is scrambling, and seems doomed to be thrown for a loss.

According to the report, almost no state has set its “proficiency” levels on par with those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the so-called “Nation’s Report Card.” (Recall that under No Child Left Behind all children are supposed to be “proficient” in reading and math by 2014.) Most, in fact, have set “proficiency” at or below NAEP’s “basic” level. Moreover, while some states that changed their standards between 2005 and 2007 appeared to make them a bit tougher, most did the opposite. Indeed, in eighth grade all seven states that changed their reading assessments lowered their expectations, as did nine of the twelve states that changed their math assessments.

Many education wonks will almost certainly argue that these results demonstrate clearly why we need national curricular standards, such as those being drafted by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. If there were a national definition of “proficiency,” they’ll argue, states couldn’t call donkeys stallions. But not only does the existence of this new report refute their most basic assumption – obviously, we already have a national metric — the report once again screams what we already know:  Politicians and bureaucrats will always do what’s in their best interest — keep standards low and easy to meet – and will do so as long as politics, not parental choice, is how educators are supposed to be held accountable. National standards would only make this root problem worse, centralizing poisonous political control and taking influence even further from the people the schools are supposed to serve. 

Rather than continuing to drive headlong toward national standards — the ultimate destination of the pothole ridden, deadly, government schooling road – we need to exit right now. We need to take education power away from government and give it to parents. Only if we do that will we end hopeless political control of schooling and get on a highway that actually takes us toward excellent education.

In doing so, he swells the small but growing ranks of Democrats in Florida, New Jersey, and the nation’s capital, among others, who support giving parents an easy choice between public and private schools.

Like Wile E. Coyote, national Democrats have run off a political cliff in their reflexive opposition to educational freedom.  And like Wile,  they’re experiencing a temporary suspension of the law of gravity — not yet suffering for their mistake.

But we all know that the cloud at Wile’s feet eventually dissipates, and he realizes that he’s no longer on solid ground. By then, it’s too late.

As someone much happier under divided government than one party rule, I hope national Democratic leaders get a clue, and notice that the’ve left solid ground on education. There is still time for Obama and company to make it back to the cliff’s edge, calling for the expansion rather than the termination of DC’s K-12 scholarship program, and voicing support for education tax credits at the state level, as many of the party’s state leaders have already done. 

States are going to continue passing and expanding private school choice programs with or without the support of national Democrats. If president Obama and friends continue clinging to the anvil of government schooling while that happens, we all know how it’s going to turn out.

Beep. Beep.

(HT: Alexander Russo)

At the time, that objection was beside my point, which is that there is copious evidence that competitive market education systems yield very substantial (if not “miraculuous”) improvements over the status quo government monopoly. We don’t need miracles to prove that there is a much better way of organizing and funding schools.

But that wasn’t enough for Ben Chavis. He called yesterday to pass along a proposition to Charles: come perform the research yourself. In fact, Ben offered to put Charles up in his own house.

I don’t know if Charles will go for this, but I wish he would (or find a grad student who will). And here’s why: I think Charles is so skeptical of the results of great schools and teachers because he has not come across any mechanism in his studies that could adequately explain those results. But I contend that there is such a mechanism: a school culture so strong and conducive to academic effort that it can overcome the absence of an academically supportive culture in the home.

If you read Jay Mathews’ wonderful book Escalante, or Ben’s Crazy Like a Fox, this becomes immediately clear. The school environment in these rare cases becomes a much more powerful influence on students’ willingness to work and expectations of success than is normally the case. These great schools tap into a fundamental human desire to belong to a team that offers them support and to which they feel an obligation to be supportive in return. It’s the same impulse that leads soldiers to put their lives on the line for their buddies in combat, and that sustains the insane work ethic in high tech startups.

This is one reason why free enterprise education systems excel all others: they offer the greatest freedom and most powerful incentives for excellent schools to replicate their cultures on a grand scale.

Not surprisingly, Smarick isn’t going for that. Unfortunately, his reasoning confirms my suspicions: Rather than offering a defense based even slightly on what the Constitution says, Smarick essentially asserts that the supreme law of the land is irrelevant because it would lead to tough reforms and, I infer, the elimination of some federal efforts he might like.

While acknowledging that mine is a ”defensible argument,” Smarick writes that he disagrees with it because it “would presumably require immediately getting rid of IDEA, Title I, IES, NAEP, and much more.” He goes on to assert that I might ”argue that doing so is necessary and proper because it’s the only path that squares with our founding document, but policy-wise it is certainly implausible any time soon.” Not far after that, Smarick pushes my argument aside and addresses a question to ”those who believe that it’s within the federal government’s authority to do something in the realm of schools.”

OK. Let’s play on Smarick’s grounds. Let’s ignore what the Constitution says and see what, realistically, we could expect to do about federal intervention in education, as well as what we can realistically expect from continued federal involvement.

First off, I fully admit that getting Washington back within constitutional bounds will be tough. That said, I mapped out a path for doing so in the last chapter of Feds In The Classroom, a path that doesn’t, unlike what Smarick suggests, require immediate cessation of all federal education activities. Washington obviously couldn’t be pulled completely out of the schools overnight.

Perhaps more to Smarick’s point, cutting the feds back down to size has hardly been a legislatively dead issue. Indeed, as recently as 2007 two pieces of legislation that would have considerably withdrawn federal tentacles from education — the A-PLUS and LEARN acts – were introduced in Congress. They weren’t enacted, but they show that getting the feds out of education is hardly a pipe dream. And with tea parties, the summer of townhall discontent, and other recent signs of revolt against big government, it’s hardly out of the question that people will eventually demand that the feds get out of their schools.

Of course, there is the other side of the realism argument: How realistic is it to think that the federal government can be made into a force for good in education? It certainly hasn’t been one so far. Just look at the following chart plotting federal education spending against achievement, a chart that should be very familiar by now.

Notice anything? Of course! The federal government has spent monstrous sums on education without any corresponding improvement in outcomes!

Frankly, it’s no mystery why: Politicians, as self-interested people, care first and foremost about the next election, not long-term education outcomes. They care about what will score them immediate political points. That’s why federal politicians have thrown ever-more money at Title I without any meaningful sign it makes a difference. That’s why No Child Left Behind imposed rules that made Washington politicians look tough on bad schools while really just pushing more dough at educrats and giving states umpteen ways to avoid actual improvement. That’s why Arne Duncan vacillates between baddy and buddy at the drop of a headline. And that basic reality — as well as the reality that the people employed by the public schools will always have the greatest motivation and ability to influence government-schooling policies — is why it is delusional to expect different results from federal education interventions than what we’ve gotten for decades.

OK. But what about a law like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)? Hasn’t it helped millions of disabled kids who would otherwise have been neglected by states and local school districts?

For one thing, it is constitutional and totally appropriate under the 14th Amendment for the federal government to ensure that states don’t discriminate against disabled children in provision of education. IDEA, however, does much more than that, spending billions of federal dollars, promoting over-identification of “disabilities,” and creating a hostile, “lawyers playground” of onerous, Byzantine rules and regulations, all without any proof that the law ultimately does more good than harm. And again, this should be no surprise, because federal politicians care most about wearing how much they “care” on their reelection-seeking sleeves, no matter how negative the ultimate consequences may be.

Alright-y then. How about the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)? Isn’t it an invaluable source of national performance data?

NAEP results are used in the above chart, so obviously I have found NAEP of some value.  But does its usefulness justify ignoring the Constitution? Absolutely not. For one thing, instead of NAEP we could use extant, non-federal tests such as the SAT, ACT, PSAT, Stanford 9, Terra Nova, and many other assessments to gauge how students are doing. And as useful as NAEP may be, it sits perilously close to being as worthless as everything else that Washington has done in education. All that has kept it from being hopelessly politicized is that there is no money attached to how states and local districts do on it. And as Smarick’s boss at Fordham, Chester Finn, testified in 2000, even with that protection NAEP and other supposedly netural federal education undertakings are under constant threat of political subversion:

Unfortunately, the past decade has also shown how vulnerable these activities are to all manner of interference, manipulation, political agendas, incompetence and simple mischief. It turns out that they are nowhere near to being adequately immunized against Washington’s three great plagues:

• the pressing political agendas and evanescent policy passions of elected officials (in both executive and legislative branches)and their appointees and aides,

• the depredations and incursions of self-serving interest groups and lobbyists (of which no field has more than education), and

• plain old bureaucratic bungling and incompetence.

Based on all of this evidence, it is clear that the only realistic avenue for getting rational federal education policy is, in fact, to follow the Constitution and have no federal education policy. In other words, the very realistic Framers of the Constitution were absolutely right not to give the federal government any authority over education, and it is time, right now, for us to stop ignoring them. Doing anything else will only ensure continued, bankrupting failure.

The reported analysis finds a savings of up to $3 million for AZ taxpayers due to the education tax credits. Nevertheless, the headline tacked above the story screams "Tuition tax credits drain state money." While that's not factually incorrect, it is utterly misleading. As the story explains, the reduction in state revenues is more than offset by savings at the local level, so the headline misrepresents the story's key finding. (After all, what do you care about most as a taxpayer – the total amount of your money that you get to keep, or the distribution of the taxes you owe to state and local governments?)

Furthermore, the public school spending numbers provided to the Republic by Arizona Director of School Finance Yousef Awwad are lower than the numbers in the state's official 2007-08 financial report. The real numbers are $4,867 (state) and $3,675 (local), computed from data on pages 6 and 8 of that report.

Based on a conversation with reporter Ron Hansen, it seems that Awwad's lower numbers may be due to the unjustifiable exclusion of capital spending. An apples-to-apples comparison must look at total cost to taxpayers for both the scholarship program and the public schools, and that means including all public school costs, including capital costs. As soon as public schools stop holding their classes inside taxpayer-funded buildings, they can stop counting the money taxpayers spend constructing those buildings. Not before.

Correcting this error nearly triples the savings estimate of the Republic's analysis, raising it from $3 million to $8.3 million.

Next, the story assumes that the increase in private school enrollment since tax credits were passed is an upper limit on their effects. That would only hold true if private school enrollment would have remained constant or risen even without these programs. But that's not what the data suggest. Private school enrollment was rising rapidly until the state's strong charter school law was passed in 1994. At that point, and especially after the first charter schools were created in 1995, private sector enrollment growth slowed, stopped, and then actually declined between 1997-98 and 1999-2000. It is well known that rapidly-growing charter school sectors cannibalize private enrollment, and this appears to have happened in Arizona.

Though the first education tax credit program was passed in 1997, it was tied up in the courts until 1999, when it was finally upheld by the state Supreme Court in Kotterman v. Killian. Then, between 2000 and 2002, private enrollment reversed course and began to climb again. It seems likely that the charter school sector (now nearly twice the size of the private sector) would have further eroded private school enrollment without the tax credit program. So the actual amount of migration from public to private schools fostered by tax credits could very well be larger than the Republic's estimate; if so, the savings would be correspondingly larger.

Finally, the Republic's analysis makes no effort to project the savings from the continued growth of the tax credit program. At present, nearly two-thirds of Arizona private school students are already benefiting from credits, which means that future growth is increasingly apt to come from public school students migrating to the scholarship programs, and that's where the savings are.

The total cost of Arizona public schools in 2007-08 was about $9,500 per pupil, $8,551 of which came from state and local taxes. The average cost of a private school scholarship, including overhead, was $1,923. If just 5 percent of the state's public school students were to migrate to the scholarship program, it would save Arizona taxpayers about $331 million. In fact, even if the average scholarship had to double in order to generate such a migration, state taxpayers would still save around $238 million. If 40 percent of Arizona public school students were to migrate to the private sector, it would save the state billions of dollars every year – even if the scholarship amount had to triple to achieve that level of migration.

Anyone concerned with the welfare of state taxpayers and the desire of parents for more educational options should support Arizona's education tax credit programs. Raising the tax credit donation caps will do a great deal of good for the state's financial and educational bottom lines.

The bill is the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA), the focal point of which is elimination of the Federal Family Education Loan Program — which uses federal bucks to back student loans from private lenders — and replacement with lending straight from Uncle Sam.

But that's hardly all it would do. The bill would use the savings from the transition to fund a plethora of new or expanded federal programs. But how much will going from guaranteed to all-direct lending really save, and will it be enough to pay for the bill's new spending?

The savings figure SAFRA supporters have been using is $87 billion over 10 years, a number generated by a June Congressional Budget Office estimate. Touting that figure, the full House approved the bill a couple of weeks ago. The Senate is now working on its version of SAFRA.

But here's the thing: A series of CBO reports released after the initial estimate have indicated that the savings are likely to be much lower than advertised, and the bill's total burden on taxpayers much heavier.

CBO assessed the total cost of the bill — not just the expected savings from transitioning to all direct lending — last summer. The estimate: Rather than saving them anything, the bill would likely cost taxpayers $5.7 billion over 10 years, and that didn't include a dime for deficit reduction.

That was just the beginning. Three days after his office released its official scoring, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf answered an inquiry by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., about estimated savings were the CBO to fully account for lending risk. Elmendorf's reply: The savings would be about $33 billion less than originally predicted. Finally, in September, the CBO determined that the cost of ramping up Pell Grants, a major component of the bill, could be $11 billion greater than initially thought.

Sadly, rather than acknowledging that SAFRA would impose new burdens on taxpayers, supporters have attacked Republicans as dirty tricksters for requesting CBO's additional estimates. They also continue to imply that the entire bill would save money despite no CBO analysis showing that.

Unfortunately, the major temptation for bill opponents has been to declare that removing "private" companies from federal lending somehow undermines free enterprise — as if having Washington guarantee lenders' profits and push artificially cheap money at students is what freedom is all about.

No, the most important part of this story is that despite promises of fundamental change in Washington, we're getting bankrupting and deceitful business as usual.

If you listen to advocates of national education standards — from the Obama administration to the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute — you'll seldom hear anything about "evidence" or "research." You'll get plenty of assertions about the craziness of having 50 state standards, and how a modern nation must have one bar for all, but zilch about actual, empirical evidence.

So why are these folks — many of whom regularly decry the absence of "scientifically based" policymaking in almost every other facet of education — hawking national standards with nary a whisper about research showing that this monumental reform will actually work? Because there's hardly any such research to cite. There are very few extant studies comparing educational outcomes in countries with and without national standards — in other words, studies with "treatment" and "control" groups — and what little research does exist is, at best, ambiguous.

Much of this work has been conducted by one scholar: economist John Bishop. Even Bishop hasn't focused solely on national standards, but rather on standards coupled with curriculum-based external examinations (CBEEs), exams that have real ramifications for students (such as effects on course grades and graduation). German economist Ludger Woessmann has also conducted comparative research on national standards. And that's about it.

Using international assessments such as the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) and the International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP), both Bishop and Woessmann report that CBEEs have significant positive effects. But a handful of studies do not a conclusive body of research make, especially when they suffer from considerable deficiencies.

First, as noted, the studies haven't looked just at national standards, but at standards linked to exams with direct effects on students. Such high-stakes examinations are not contemplated under the leading U.S. national-standards effort, the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Much more problematic is that the number of nations participating in international comparisons has been quite small, and only a tiny number of those have not had CBEEs. That has rendered the results easily skewed by unique, outlying nations. Indeed, in 2004, researchers Hendrik Jürges and Kerstin Schneider found that controlling for outliers in Bishop's sample eliminated any significant positive impact of CBEEs on test scores.

Finally, there's a serious possibility that even if better achievement is correlated with centralized standards, another variable may be causing both. It's possible that specific events or cultural predispositions have driven both centralization and a culture that values academic excellence. Suggestive of the latter, Bishop has found that on the TIMSS mathematics exam, being from an East Asian nation carries a positive effect that is nearly three times more powerful than a CBEE. That's probably why he concluded that to get a better understanding of the impact of CBEEs, we need "studies which hold national culture constant."

So now we know why national-standards aficionados say so little about the scientific support for their favorite reform: There is little scientific support to discuss. Perhaps, though, some of the comparative research on U.S. states could provide strong evidence.

Alas, dear standardizers, it does not. Yes, what studies there are show "treatment" states generally outperforming "control" states, but tiny sample sizes and outliers again plague the research. Telling is a 2002 work by economists Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb, who put together an "accountability index" based on how much pressure states put on students and schools to perform. They found that, generally, the greater the pressure, the better the results. But "generally" is the operative word. Charts showing test-score changes by state revealed obvious outliers, and many states with very low accountability scores outpaced many states with high scores. And, of course, there was the problem of controlling for variables like cultural differences among states.

Overall, the only conclusive thing that national and state comparisons reveal is not that centralized standards are a magic elixir, but that nations and states are very different. The Philippines is not France. Connecticut is not California.

The same holds for children, which is why it is truly irrational to think that the key to transforming American education is a single, centralized standard for all 50 states. The key is quite the opposite: letting education work like a free market, enabling unique children to attend schools able to specialize in their needs, and instilling competition and innovation everywhere.

Free-market education has strong empirical support. Drawing on more than 25 years of research, the Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson has found that studies showing a significant advantage for free-market education outnumber those favoring government monopolies by a ratio of 17 to 1.

National-standards research, frankly, isn't within light years of that, and neither are the simplistic arguments that national-standards supporters trot out to fill the empirical vacuum. But when it comes to national standards, apparently science isn't supposed to matter.

That the president would even contemplate such a speech gives you a pretty good idea.

Depending on whom you ask, you get very different answers about the immediate cause of our national schoolyard brawl.

Many Obama supporters have been thrusting their fingers squarely at right-wingers, who, they say, hate the President and will stop at nothing to bring him down.

"We have just gone through one of the most shameful episodes of the young Obama presidency," wrote columnist E.J. Dionne. "Shameful because of the behavior of the right wing, shameful because the media played into an extremist agenda, shameful because we proved that our political system has become so dysfunctional that a president gets punished for doing the right thing."

Critics of the address point to a different culprit: U.S. Department of Education lesson plans that came out well before the speech. Among many things, they suggested that students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president," and made clear that students would be inspired by the president, no matter what. They also indicated that the speech might delve into contentious social issues, pushing "students…to discuss main ideas from the speech, i.e. citizenship, personal responsibility, civic duty." Only one of those things fit a simple, "work-hard" message.

What created the igniting spark, though, isn't nearly as important as knowing how we got to such flammable circumstances in the first place.

The answer is actually pretty simple: For decades more and more power has been concentrated in Washington, so reasonable people with legitimate disagreements have had to fight much more – and much harder – over what goes on in DC. The trend has only accelerated over the last couple of years, with bank bailouts, the stimulus, takeovers of Chrysler and GM, and potentially much greater federal involvement in health care.

Education has mirrored the trend. After more than a century-and-a-half of Washington keeping out of classrooms because the Constitution gives it no authority to go in, over the last roughly sixty years federal intrusions have built slowly, peaking with the now school-dominating No Child Left Behind Act. That means that until relatively recently no president would have even imagined giving a national, back-to-school address, and no one would have had to fight one.

But it's not just centralization that makes federal politics an increasingly explosive tinderbox. After all, concentrating power in one place wouldn't be a problem if all Americans had the exact same ideals, desires, and needs. Ours, however, is an extremely diverse nation, which has been a huge source of strength for centuries, but also dooms any centralization to conflict.

The president's speech is case in point. Reasonable public-school parents who did not want their children exposed to potentially controversial proclamations or campaigning – or taxpayers who didn't want to fund it – had no choice but to take action. Meanwhile, reasonable parents who wanted their kids to hear a potentially uplifting address on hard work and perseverance had to fight to get their districts to show it. The political upheaval inevitable.

So how do we deal with this?

One of the things that has historically saved diverse Americans from crippling education conflict has been local control of schools. Communities of often like-minded people ran their own schools and taught shared values, preventing lots of potentially disastrous confrontations.

But it was hardly perfect. Where there wasn't homogeneity, conflict often ensued. Perhaps most striking were the 1844 "Philadelphia Bible Riots," in which a heated dispute over whose version of the Bible, Protestant of Catholic, would be permitted in the public schools resulted in shocking deaths and destruction.

Today, as districts have become much bigger and power has moved up the governmental ladder, conflict is constant. Whether the flashpoint is Intelligent Design, multiculturalism, sex education, or just what day the school year will begin, perfectly decent people are regularly forced to fight.

To solve the problem, we obviously don't need more centralization, though for several mistaken reasons some liberals and conservatives are demanding just that. No, what we need is the very opposite: school choice. Let parents choose schools that best meet their kids' needs and desires and that share their values. Rather than forcing diverse people to battle over government schools, let them educate their children with the freedom that is supposed to define American life.

If we do that – if we cease forcing people to fight – we can put this ugly speech brawl behind us, and ensure that nothing like it happens again.