Jay Greene heads up the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, which has gotten federal research grants in the past. Here’s why he’s now telling the feds to get out of the education research business entirely.

A few months ago I highlighted a report about growing college-student “activism” focused not on lofty ideals like ending war or oppression, but on taking money out of taxpayers’ wallets and putting it into students’. Well today I apologize for doubting the high-minded idealism of at least some of our crusading college kids. Yes, recent student rioting in Berkeley, California was partially animated by outrage over moves to have students pay more for their massively subsidized educations, but the property destruction was about much, MUCH more than that:

Crowds outside the building continued to swell, and by about 1:30 a.m., people began to clash with police, throwing bottles, setting trash ablaze and breaking several windows on Telegraph, including the plate-glass front windows of a Subway sandwich shop, police said. Protesters lit a large garbage container on fire, then rolled it into the street…

A protest leader, UC Berkeley student Callie Maidhof, defended the vandalism and said rioters targeted the sandwich shop because a second Subway is scheduled to open on campus, just across Bancroft Way.

“There will be two Subways within 100 feet of each other,” she said.

The Vietnam War. Crushing racial segregation. A glut of hoagie shops! The student battle for justice clearly goes on! And Californians have much more to look forward to: Thursday will be a statewide “Day of Action,” and in addition to deafening demands for continued taking from taxpayers, students will no doubt also give Fuddruckers, or maybe even Starbucks, it’s long-deserved comeuppance.

The day of liberation — and really amped-up rent-seeking — is finally at hand!

When you erase a test score and write in a new one for your own benefit, that’s cheating, right? So what is it when you do this several thousand times?

Ofqual, the British education standards regulator, “secretly downgraded the GCSE [General Certificate of Secondary Education test] results of thousands of pupils to avoid public fury over dumbed-down tests,” reports the Daily Mail. “Fearing a row over inflated results, Ofqual’s chief executive ordered all exam boards to cut the number of pupils getting top scores just two days before marks were finalized.”

The argument for national education standards is based on a host of unexamined and incorrect assumptions. One is the belief that the authorities overseeing such standards (and associated testing) will have truth and transparency as their only motivations. As the above example illustrates, that’s rubbish. Bureaucrats and politicians are as self-interested as the rest of humanity, and they do, in practice, consult their own interests in the execution of their duties.

The way to deal with this reality is not to ignore it — as national standards advocates and other statists are wont to do — but rather to adopt systems for structuring human action that take it into consideration. In the context of education standards, that means leaving the standards-setting process to the competitive marketplace: make it easy for all families to choose whatever schools they deem best, allow schools to administer whatever curriculum and whatever tests they want, and allow higher ed and employers to weigh the value of the various standards and certifications that arise. Lousy standards that don’t reflect real achievement won’t be valued, good ones that do will be.

National standards advocates are right that children should be encouraged to do their best and that every child’s diploma should really mean something. But that doesn’t mean that every diploma has to mean the same thing. A competitive marketplace for education standards and testing would ensure both quality and relevance, while also allowing for the fact that very different students heading toward very different futures may want to strive to excel in different areas.

For a detailed account of the evidence on national standards and its alternatives, see Neal McCluskey’s excellent recent policy analysis on the subject, linked here.

On the heels of exploiting the name of perhaps the world’s all-time greatest free-marketeer, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has decided to cut right to the chase and abuse the term “free market” itself. Writing in the Washington Post as part of his ongoing effort to demonize banks and push the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act over the finish line, Duncan offers the following:

The president’s plan actually creates jobs and draws on free-market principles by selecting private companies through a competitive process to service student loans issued directly by the Education Department. These private companies, including Sallie Mae, compete for our business and are evaluated on the quality of their customer service and their default rates.

Got it? When the federal government decides which companies get to service loans that it completely controls, those are “free-market principles” at work.

Right. And the legislation Duncan is trying to sell us really is fiscally “responsible.”

Yesterday, Andrew Coulson and I wrote a bit on President Obama’s little talk with the nation’s governors about potential changes to federal education policy. The root of the President’s proposal — and we’ve probably only seen fragments of what will eventually come out — is a requirement that states adopt common “college- and career-readiness standards” to qualify for large chunks of federal money.

This certainly puts in place the “standards” part of “standards and accountability” reform, which has dominated education for roughly the last fifteen years. But where’s the “accountability” part?

So far, nowhere. Yes, a state would have to adopt common standards — or, interestingly, somehow work with universities to certify its standards as college- and career-ready — but the administration has offered nothing by way of accountabilty for academic outcomes. Indeed, it has emphasized a move away from the “corrective” actions that No Child Left Behind imposes on laggard schools and has instead pushed getting extra resources (of course!) to those institutions.

This must be alarming to reformers who think the only way to fix education is to have government “get tough” on its schools. And the no-accountability approach certainly doesn’t make much intuitive sense. Without potential punishments or rewards for outcomes, what incentives do districts and schools have to meet standards, national or otherwise?

The answer, of course, is none. But don’t fret: Whether there are accountability measures for performance or not, in government-run schooling the outcome will be the same. Unfortunately, “the same” always means “poor.”

Why inevitably poor? Because the people employed in education — teachers, school administrators, bureaucrats — have hugely disproportionate power over education politics, and hence a tremendous ability to bend the system to their will. And what do they prefer from the system? The same thing you or I would ideally get from our jobs: as much money as possible with no accountability for what we produce. The impotence of NCLB is exhibit A of this.

With that political reality firmly in mind, the final result for any potential combination of standards and accountability becomes clear: No meaningful improvement. The handy matrix below lays it out:

So let’s give this to President Obama: His move to further federalize education authority is very troubling, but at least he doesn’t see the need for the accountability charade. Or so, anyway, it seems for the moment.

And when we say
Yeeow! Ayipioeeay!
We’re only sayin’
You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma O.K. — Oscar Hammerstein, Oklahoma

And when you’re not doing fine?

I was asked recently by Brandon Dutcher of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs to investigate the relationship between spending and student achievement in his state, and to chart the results as I’ve done for U.S. school spending and student achievement. Here it is:

For reasons I’ve never understood, the NAEP test results for students at the end of high-school have never been broken down by state–they’re only reported nationwide–so for the achievement measure I used the ACT. Oklahoma’s participation rate in the ACT is high (between the mid 60s and low 70s), hasn’t fluctuated wildly over time, and is not significantly correlated with its actual scores (I ran a regression to find out), so it’s a reasonable measure. I’ve only carried it back to 1990 because the ACT was redesigned in that year, making the scores discontinuous.

When they see the chart, maybe Oklahoma taxpayers can say: “Owwww! AiYaiYai!”

Andrew already blogged about it a bit, but overshadowed by the release of President Obama’s price-controlling health-insurance proposal was his speech to the National Governors Association promoting the federal takeover of elementary and secondary school curricula. True, the White House would only require states to adopt some sort of “common” — not national and certainly not federal — standards to get federal funds, but don’t accept the semantic dodge: If the feds are paying, the standards will not only be national, but federal.

Implicit in the President’s proposal, as well as the rhetoric of many national-standards supporters, is that national standards will necessarily be high standards that push improved academic achievement. Unfortunately, these people have chosen to ignore actual tests of that proposition.

They can no longer: My latest Policy Analysis — Behind the Curtain: Assessing the Case for National Curriculum Standards – reviews the theoretical and empirical literature and shows that there is simply no convincing evidence that national standards drive higher academic achievement. Couple that with federal meddling in education being clearly unconstitutional, and the next critical battle in the war against Leviathan seems to be shaping up. And this time, we could very well be fighting for our children’s minds.