As I wrote last week, I had a bad feeling that President Obama would turn to education bribe — er — “reform” after last Tuesday’s bombshell election, and it seems I was right to be afraid — very afraid. It’s an area where Republicans have been all too happy over the last decade or so to let big government in despite its undeniable record of failure, and it will give the President a terrific chance to look like a new, “bipartisan” man. Fortunately, many progressive Democrats dislike extremely intrusive federal education laws like No Child Left Behind, so while the battle lines over what the president is likely to propose for K‑12 education will probably be different than we’ve seen over the last year, hopefully the opposition will be just as strong. And when it comes to some efforts Mr. Obama is likely to highlight in higher education — even more federal spending and a complete takeover of student lending — Republicans will likely offer much more unified resistance. In other words, fighting the awful proposals we’re likely to hear about in tonight’s State of the Union won’t be easy, but it won’t be impossible, either.

According to the Washington Post, “President Obama will propose a major increase in funding for elementary and secondary education for the coming year in Wednesday’s State of the Union address.” This, “senior White House aides said… fits into a broader effort by the administration to focus scarce resources on the nation’s long-term economic health.”

Give kids a better education and they’ll be more successful when they ultimately enter the workforce. Sounds plausible enough. And if you dig into the scholarly research you find that, lo and behold, it’s actually true. Nations that improve student achievement the most end up with faster economic growth.

But that leaves us with one important question: does higher government education spending raise academic achievement? At the risk of stepping on Ross Perot’s toes, let’s pull out the charts.

The first chart, below, shows the relationship between federal spending (adjusted for inflation) and the academic achievement of 17-year-olds since 1970. [The final years of high school are the decisive ones in this case, because we want to know how well our k‑12 system has prepared kids for college and the workforce.]

At first blush, there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship between federal spending and student achievement–and so it looks like President Obama is barking up the wrong tree from a policy standpoint. But what if state and local education spending have been falling just as federal spending has been rising, nullifying its effects? After all, we read every day in the newspaper about how public schools are starved for funds. So our next chart tooks at total expenditures per pupil and student achievement:

Hmm. As we see here, total expenditures per pupil are nearly two-and-a-half times higher today than in 1970, after adjusting for inflation, while student achievement toward the end of high school has been flat or has even declined slightly (in science).

You may be wondering: “What did we get for that huge increase in spending?” The answer is: a lot more public school employees. The next chart adds an extra trend line to the one above: the number of public school employees divided by the number of students enrolled. This ratio of staff to students has gone up by 70 percent since 1970, swelling the ranks of the public school employee unions to about 4.5 million people.

What can we conclude from the above charts? By calling for a big increase in government education spending as a way to boost the U.S. economy, the president is doubling down on a bet that has already been lost, repeatedly, by his predecessors. Love isn’t the only thing money can’t buy. It can’t buy you an improved public school system either. And by extension, higher government education spending won’t buy you a better economy.

If the president goes ahead with his plan to spend billions more on public schooling, he’ll be driving this country deeper into dept for no good reason at all… unless of course you consider swelling the ranks of the public school employee unions a good reason.

Last fall, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a lawsuit against Arizona’s K‑12 scholarship donation tax credit program. Under the program, citizens can donate to non-profit organizations that help families pay for private school tuition, and in return, the donors receive a dollar-for-dollar tax cut. The 9th Circuit, ruled that the program violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because many taxpayers choose to donate to religious scholarship-granting organizations whose scholarships are only usable at religious schools. This, in the Court’s view, meant that the program unconstitutionally favored religious scholarship-seeking parents over secular ones.

Supporters of the program will soon be appealing this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. They’re very likely to win, for a variety of reasons. Foremost among them, the Establishment Clause forbids only governments from favoring religion, but imposes no similar limit on individual citizens. It is for this reason that charitable tax deductions can be claimed for donations to both religious and secular charities without running afoul of the First Amendment — even if taxpayers overwhelmingly choose to donate to religious charities.

In rereading the original complaint, I noticed something interesting: even if the 9th Circuit’s misconstrual of the Establishment Clause were correct, plaintiffs still wouldn’t have a case. That’s because the evidence they presented did not — and still does not — support their claim that secular parents have been at a comparative disadvantage in obtaining scholarships. To see why, read on.…

The only evidence plaintiffs presented to show the claimed disadvantage of secular parents was that most of the scholarship funds have been distributed by religious organizations. That is not dispositive. To prove that secular parents were at a disadvantage in getting scholarships, plaintiffs would have to show that secular parents were being rejected by scholarship programs at a higher rate than religious parents, or that, at the very least, the share of religious-only scholarship funds was higher than the share of parents seeking religious schooling.

That, as it turns out, was not the case in the school year (1998–99) for which plaintiffs provided data, and it is not true today. In 1998–99, about 75.5 percent of private school children were in religious schools, but only 75 percent of (the very tiny amount of) scholarship funds distributed in that year were reserved for religious schooling. In 2007-08 (the most recent year for which data are available), 81.4 percent of private school students were in religious schools, but only 65 percent of the donated scholarship funds in 2008 were reserved for religious schooling.

There is thus no evidence that secular parents are any more likely to be turned away for a scholarship than are religious families, because the share of scholarship funds available for use at secular schools is now nearly twice as large as the share of children being enrolled in secular schools.

So even if plaintiffs and the 9th Circuit were right on Establishment Clause jurisprudence, which they certainly are not, the evidence still wouldn’t support their case.

For all the relevant numbers I used to reach the above conclusion (sourced from the Arizona Dept. of Revenue and the National Center for Education Statistics) see this Excel spreadsheet file.

As freedom-minded folks have been celebrating major setbacks for Obama Care, campaign-speech control, and lots of other attacks on liberty, some have been sounding the alarm over the insidious “Race to the Top” contest. A couple of siren blasts I just caught are well worth taking in yourself, one by the Heartland Institute’s Robert Holland and the other by Colorado Board of Education member Peggy Littleton. In particular, the writers think they see the handwriting on the wall in the de facto requirement that states promise to adopt as-yet-unwritten “common” (read: national) standards to compete for RTTT funds. As Littleton writes:

We already know that the federal government, or at the least consortiums of states, wants to develop assessments to assess the Common Core. The scary progression continues… National Common Core, common assessment, will inevitably lead to a national curriculum.

Is nationalizing — and thereby federalizing — the curriculum the Obama administration’s goal? RTTT sure as heck makes it seem that way, but we should have an even better idea soon: the administration wants Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act this year.

And so it may be coming to pass: Perhaps, ironically, because of this week’s revolt against Washington, we might be heading for another power grab by Washington. And this time, we shouldn’t expect anything close to unanimous Republican help fending it off. 

This morning I mused about whether yesterday’s Massachusetts miracle would curb the drive to have the feds take over K‑12 education. In particular, I wondered if the president’s new proposal to extend the “Race to the Top” — and as part of that directly connect local districts to the feds –will meet an almost immediate demise as legislators dive frantically to avoid the backlash against ever-expanding federal power.

My hope is that it will, but I’m not especially sanguine. The prospects for stemming the centralization tide are probably better today than they were yesterday, but federal education initiatives tend to have a fair amount of bipartisan support, especially if they throw money at public schools — which liberals like — as well as things like charter schools, merit pay, and “standards” that conservatives support. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama, facing hopeless prospects on health care, cap and trade, and other anger-igniters, were to propose reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act as one big Race to the Top. Incorporating both big bucks and things conservatives endorse, it would stand a pretty good chance of garnering some Republican support. And that would allow Obama to say he has learned his lesson about working with both parties while letting legislators head back home declaring that they’d done something “for the children.”

In sum, I’m not sure whether Scott Brown’s election is actually a good or bad thing at the K‑12 level. I am much more optimistic about higher education, specifically the effect Brown’s victory will have on the odious Student Aid and Fiscal Responsbility Act, a piece of legislation that supporters say will save taxpayers money but that will almost certainly cost them dearly. The House passed SAFRA in September, but Senate action has been in a holding pattern while that body has been paralyzed by health care.

Why the optimism on SAFRA and not in K‑12? Because Race to the Top is stealthy, involving relatively small amounts of money and ostensibly letting states and districts freely choose if they want to participate. Not so SAFRA, which if anything has been overly demonized as a federal takeover of the student-lending industry because it would cut “private” lenders out of massively subsidized federal-loan programs.

Of course, if the lenders are hugely subsidized they are hardly private, at least in any meaningful sense. Nonetheless, the loudest argument against SAFRA — which would consolidate some additional power at the federal level and spend like a drunken sailor — is that it’s a federal takeover. From a political standpoint that’s huge. With Brown having successfully run on a platform primarily opposing big and ever-growing government, many one-time congressional supporters of SAFRA will no doubt have to think long and hard if they really, really want to bear the label of “federalizer.”

My suspicion is that, given the new political environment, a great many will decide that they don’t.

The Brookings Institution will release a new school choice policy guide on February 2nd, and from the sound of it, children, parents, taxpayers, and the authors themselves should be concerned. The guide will provide:

a series of practical and novel recommendations for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including national chartering of virtual education providers; expanding the types of information collected on school performance; providing incentives for low-performing school districts to increase choice and competition; and creating independent school choice portals to aid parents in choosing between schools.

The goals these recommendations are meant to achieve are entirely laudable, but there are three reasons for serious concern:

1) The Constitution delegates to the federal government no power to provide or regulate education services, except in the execution of its explicitly enumerated powers. So the Supreme Court can ensure that state education programs abide by the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, but Congress cannot “charter virtual education providers.” Of course the federal government has been transgressing the limits on its education powers for more than half a century, but no one who supports the rule of law can condone that transgression, much less its expansion.

2) From a regulatory standpoint, Washington is the worst level of government at which to implement an education program. National education programs impose a single set of rules on every participating provider in the country. Get those rules wrong — either up front or down the road — and you not only hobble the effectiveness of every single provider, but you eliminate the possibility of comparing outcomes between providers operating under different sets of rules. In essence you lose the ability to distinguish between different “treatments” — to determine what helps and what is harmful to the service’s overall success.

3) We have ample evidence about the quality of education programs implemented by the federal government. For example, after 45 years and $166 billion, Head Start has just been proven entirely ineffective. (See also the NCLB paper linked to in “1)”, above). Once again, this problem is exacerbated by the all-encompassing nature of federal programs. Get them wrong and you get them wrong for every participating student, everywhere in the country. With variation in programs among states, by contrast, we not only have the ability to compare the merits of alternative approaches, we have powerful incentives for states to get their programs right. Just as tax competition drives businesses from one state or nation to another, so, too, can education policy competition. States with better policies will attract businesses and more mobile residents from states with worse ones, eventually compelling the inferior policy states to redress their errors. We’re just beginning to see the prospects for this now, as school choice programs proliferate and grow at the state level, and introducing national programs that might well interfere with this process would be a disastrous mistake.

I hope that school choice advocates, including those who have contributed to the forthcoming Brookings report, will weigh these concerns.

Yesterday, I wrote about President Obama’s proposal to extend the Race to the Top program, this time letting school districts completely bypass state governments and apply directly to the feds for funding. I pointed out that the proposal was one among several troubling signs that Obama intends to put Washington fully — and, of course, unconstitutionally — in charge of American education. At the time, I didn’t realize how right I was.

When I was writing yesterday I was basing my comments on documents from the White House’s website and hadn’t yet read the details of what went on at the President’s photo-op announcing the proposed extension. I sure wish I had: At the dog-and-pony show, the President just came right out and said that he wants to push aside states — mentioned by name was famous holdout Texas — that dared to invoke the Constitution and not participate in a program that was, Constitution or no Constitution, supposed to be voluntary. 

“Innovative districts like the one in Texas whose reform efforts are being stymied by state decision-makers will soon have the chance to earn funding to help them pursue those reforms,” intoned the President. 

Fortunately, Texas Governor Rick Perry wasn’t about to be cowed: “I will say this very slow so they will understand it in Washington, D.C.: Texas will fight any attempt by the federal government to take over our school system.”

So it’s pretty certain now, more so even than just 24 hours ago: President Obama wants to federalize American education.

Thankfully, a lot can clearly happen in 24 hours. Yesterday’s election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts could very well send shockwaves of fear through the ranks of Democratic (and maybe even Republican) legislators in DC, who might finally get the message that Americans just don’t like federal takovers. Heck, perhaps even the President will get the message. If so, then maybe even something as relatively small as a $1.35-billion scalpel designed to cut through states and get right at districts could be seen as too dangerous to handle. 

That’s speculation, of course, but we should know a lot more in just, oh, the next 24 hours.