I’m having an interesting discussion with attorney Joshua Thompson of the Pacific Legal Foundation, sparked by my recent op-ed in the Philly Inquirer about vouchers and tax credits. Did the op-ed offer useful evidence and analysis, advancing educational freedom, or was it ultimately counterproductive? Feel free to chime-in in the comments if you check it out.

The most recent, comprehensive Pew higher education survey has gotten a lot of coverage for its findings on how important the public thinks college is, its financial payoff for grads, etc. For some reason, though, by far the most interesting statistic in the report has gotten roughly zero play, either from Pew itself or media coverage of the report: “Among all college graduates, 33% say they are in a job that does not require a college degree.”

Wait. One-third of all college graduates are in jobs that don’t call for a college education? So one-third of all college degrees are quite possibly total economic wastes? (To be fair, no doubt some of those grads are looking for jobs requiring a degree, mitigating this somewhat. On the flip side, many jobs probably require a degree without actually requiring college-level skills, counterbalancing that.)

In light of this, can someone please tell me why President Obama wants the United States to lead the world in the precentage of its population with a college degree by 2020? And please, explain why Washington furnished over $113 billion in student aid in the 2009-10 academic year? I’d really like to know.

Two years ago, when there was major controversy over President Obama’s first national address to America’s school children, it was clear that the televised spectacle was about more than just telling kids to work hard and stay in school. It was about President Obama, his inspirational personal story, and displaying just how much he cares about education. It was, in other words, free campaigning with our children as props.

At the time, unfortunately, people who dared to suggest this were roundly accused of hating President Obama, or the presidency, or just being cracked. Well, in the President’s most recent education photo-op — his second annual address to the winners of the administration’s “Race to the Top Commencement Challenge” — Mr. Obama blatantly infused campaigning into commencement, using several variants of his “Yes we can” campaign slogan while talking up the challenges he had to overcome in his life. And doing that got him just what he’d want from a campaigning perspective, at least from NBC News: A nice, long clip of his talk showing him, presumably, inspiring the kids, and hopefully the voters. Oh, and that far fewer schools than the administration had hoped for competed to get the President to their graduation? Well, there’s no mention of that.

Oklahoma has just joined the ranks of a half-dozen other states by enacting a K‑12 education tax credit program. Under the new program, individuals or businesses that donate to non-profit School Tuition Organizations receive a tax cut worth 50 percent of the donation. STOs then use the funds to help low income families afford private schooling.

Journalists for the Associated Press and countless other media outlets routinely refer to donations made under education tax credit programs as “state money.” According to the United States Supreme Court’s recent ACSTO v. Winn decision, “that is incorrect.” This is a matter of settled law. To call these private donations “state money” is to misrepresent the facts and mislead readers.

It would be bad enough if the journalists and wire services misrepresenting these programs were simply unaware that they were distorting the facts, but in at least some cases they continue to do so even after having been apprized of their error. Brandon Dutcher, vice president for policy at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, wrote to the AP last week to correct their earlier erroneous coverage. He received no reply and the errors continue.

I never cease to be amazed by this kind of behavior from an industry that is clinging for its life. The purpose of journalism is to apprize customers of the facts. Demonstrating indifference to the facts cannot be good for business.

Educational freedom is nothing to trifle with, all the more so because we have so little of it left. And yet there is little serious discussion about it among school choice policy researchers and activists. All that seems to matter is the expansion of “choice” at nearly any cost.

A blog response, of sorts, to my recent piece explaining why the Indiana voucher law is a defeat for educational freedom, just came to my attention (curse ye, fickle gods of googlealerts). If it weren’t written by a respected researcher, Greg Forster, posted on Jay Greene’s blog, I’d ignore the bullet-point simulacrum of an argument.

We need more serious debate. Argument makes for better thinking and better policy. There are valid points on many sides of this issue, and everyone makes errors in fact or logic. So please, I encourage someone to tear into all of the arguments against the new Indiana voucher law and explain why my concerns are misplaced. Chief Seattle, as all good schoolchildren in Indiana know, proves that wise words can change the world.

On Forster’s Point 1, he and the Indiana Non-Public Education Association are simply incorrect … less than 40% of known private schools are accredited, and they remain less than a majority even when you remove the Amish ones. This is not an opinion, it is a fact based on good data available on the state DOE website, and I have found a number of very friendly and helpful DOE employees (they don’t all respond like the finance folks) who can give further context and slight revisions to these published numbers. Beyond that fact, Indiana’s voucher law actually imposes some regulations not currently imposed even on accredited schools.

On Point 2, Forster doesn’t even attempt to engage the point I make in my article for why the freedom not to participate is no argument against the destructiveness of the regulatory framework. Because participating schools will have a significant financial advantage over non-participating schools, lightly regulated schools will face increasing financial pressure to participate. Over time, many of those who refuse to submit to state control will be driven out of business by competition from the highly regulated, but voucher-funded schools. Andrew Coulson has demonstrated this process of expanding state control with voucher programs outside the US, and regulatory burden and creep here at home.

In Point 3, Forster dismisses the slew of new private school regulations as unimportant without, apparently, knowing precisely what they entail. You can read through the bill that was signed here. The most concerning requirements are not a part of state accreditation, they are new to schools participating in the Indiana voucher program. For instance, voucher schools in Indiana are required to stress the importance of “respecting the rights of others to have their own views and religious beliefs.” What does this mean for religious private schools teaching that one can only be saved by belief in Jesus Christ? Would a school wherein a teacher discusses the recent federal healthcare legislation violate the provision mandating respect for authority should she criticize the law, or perhaps violate a respect for property if she speaks favorably of the individual insurance mandate in that law?

And the law expects enforcement, reading, “The department shall, at a minimum, annually visit each eligible school and charter school to verify that the eligible school or charter school complies with the provisions of [the voucher law].” Furthermore, “Each eligible school, public school, and charter school shall grant the department full access to its premises, including access to any points of ingress to and egress from the school’s grounds, buildings, and property for observing classroom instruction and reviewing any instructional materials and curriculum.”

There is more to mull over in my article and in Indiana’s new voucher law.

Forster’s Point 4 is a ridiculous non sequitur. The state can regulate curriculum in any way it wants to, therefore it doesn’t matter if it does so or not. Here is in full:

“The state already has virtually unlimited authority to regulate private school curricula, especially in the name of ‘good citizenship.’ The Supreme Court has given states more or less a blank check to control private school curricula, and the state has especially strong authority to require, and control the content of, “citizenship” education. The existence of a voucher program changes little in this regard.”

I wonder if Forster feels the same way about healthcare; “The state can require whatever it wants for health insurance, so it doesn’t matter whether or not they have a state agency review them for adequacy or impose detailed coverage requirements.” What’s the big fuss?

It would be wonderful if everyone who pays lip service to concerns regarding educational freedom and the expansion of state control would take the matter seriously enough to familiarize themselves with the basic, relevant facts. We might just have a good and productive argument.

I blogged a few days ago about the school choice policy deadlock in Pennsylvania—between the House, which favors expanding the existing k‑12 scholarship-donation tax credit program, and the Senate, which favors introducing a new voucher program. Today I have an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer elaborating on that blog post.

One thing I didn’t mention in the op-ed is that the Protestant George Washington helped pay for the construction of the Catholic church that was burned to the ground in the Bible Riots of 1844. It is telling that the Bible Riots were not over what was preached in St. Augustine’s church, but rather over what was taught in Philly’s public schools. America has seen comparatively little religious conflict surrounding our places of worship, but an endless series of battles over the religious (and other) content of our public schools. The reason is simple: no American has to pay to build another man’s temple, shrine, church, mosque, synagogue, or coffee-shop; but we all have to pay for the public schools.

Vouchers extend to private schooling the flaw that has precipitated our endless “public school wars”: compulsion. Under a voucher program, all taxpayers must pay for every type of schooling, including varieties that might violate their deeply held convictions.

As I explain in the op-ed, and also in this commentary on the recent ACSTO v. Winn Supreme Court decision, tax credits avoid that compulsion. Participation in them is truly voluntary, and donors get to choose the scholarship organizations that receive their funds. In the case of direct education tax credits, they simply get to keep more of their own money to spend on their own children. Credits are thus a way to secure both freedom of choice for parents and freedom of conscience for taxpayers.

People are starting to fight back against the sneaky push for nationalized curricula, and folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are revealing their true colors in response.

Yesterday, Fordham President Chester Finn and Executive VP Michael Petrilli responded to the national standards “counter-manifesto” released on Monday, and they were none too happy with its signatories, accusing them of peddling “half truths, mischaracterizations, and straw men.” What seemed to aggravate them most of all was the assertion that “common” standards would lead to de facto federal curricula, something they say neither they nor their national-standards loving friends — including the Obama administration — want.

At this point, who’s buying this? True, it’s possible that Fordham and friends might really not want a federal curriculum — I can’t read minds — but the federal government through Race to the Top has already bribed states into adopting the Common Core standards; Washington is paying for the development of national tests; and the Obama administration’s “blueprint” for reauthorizing No Child Left Behind would make national standards the law’s accountability backbone. So even if you don’t want this to lead to a federal curriculum, that is exactly what you are going to get. If the feds use money taken from taxpayers to force states to adopt national standards and tests, and if Washington rewards or punishes states based on those tests, then you have a federal curriculum. I mean, if it walks like a duck…

The good news in Fordham’s response, perhaps, is that they appear to have responded to my challenge to loudly renounce any federal funding for national standards and related material if they really want this to be voluntary. Unfortunately, they’ve responded with a resounding “no”: Finn and Petrilli write that “we have no particular concern with the federal government…helping to pay” for the creation of curricular guides and other material and activities to go with national standards.

This happiness to keep the feds paying pretty much puts the final rip in the tissue-thin “voluntarism” ruse. But if you’re not satisfied with my analysis, try this post over at Jay Greene’s blog, in which Jay reproduces a terrific fill-in-the-blanks analysis of Fordham’s tricky prose by Charles Miller, former chair of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas and a very astute observer of education politics. Let’s just say, he writes what I suspect everyone who is familiar with the federal government — and Fordham — is thinking.

One last thing bears mentioning. In defense of Finn and Petrilli, they do get one thing right: they take a lot of the counter-manifesto signatories to task for having pushed hard for state-level centralization while decrying such top-down control at the federal level. Of course, Fordham ignores little things like “federalism” and the “Constitution” with this argument, but it is true that a government monopoly is likely to be dreadful whether at the state or national level. Then again, they don’t actually make that argument either, so they’re actually just trying to score lame hypocrisy points. And they follow that with this cheapest of shots at libertarians and, well, any Americans who would like to have control over what their children learn:

Some libertarian signers of the counter-manifesto may indeed believe that we should let schools, districts, and parents make every single educational decision no matter how irresponsible, hare-brained, or even harmful to kids.

Why, that’s exactly what libertarians think! When contemplating policy, we’ve given no consideration to whether individuals will overall make better decisions than special-interest dominated government, or looked at the empirical evidence that education is better the more decentralized control is, or considered the value of freedom in society, or anything like that. We’re just mindlessly wedded to liberty and don’t care who gets hurt.

At last, the leaders of the national-standards-driving Fordham Institute have demonstrated — if not fully said — exactly what they think. It is not a very comforting vision.