Earlier this week, the Show-Me Institute released my study “Live Free and Learn,” the first analysis of New Hampshire’s trailblazing scholarship tax credit program, which is the first in the nation to include homeschoolers. The study found that participants in the program were overwhelmingly low-income and nearly universally satisfied. Some of the key findings include:

• 97 percent of parents of scholarship recipients are satisfied with their chosen private or home school.

• 68 percent of parents reported that they noticed measurable academic improvement in their child since receiving the scholarship.

• 91 percent of scholarship recipients had a household income that would qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch program under the federal National School Lunch program (185 percent of the federal poverty line, or $43,568 for a family of four).

• 74 percent of private school parents reported that they would have been unable to afford tuition without the scholarship.

I discuss the findings of the study in greater detail at the Education Next blog.

The Obama administration’s proposed budget for 2015 would continue unsustainable spending growth at more than twice the rate of inflation and hike taxes by more than $1 trillion. It also includes $69 billion in education spending, much of it on programs that are unconstitutional, proven to be ineffective, or both.

And yet, in one area where the federal government has the constitutional authority to fund and manage education policy—the District of Columbia school system—the Obama administration’s budget cuts all funding to the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP), which has proven to be much more effective than the government-run school monopoly.

The administration’s proposal is particularly puzzling in the wake of the president’s announcement last week that he is launching a $200 million charitable initiative called My Brother’s Keeper to help young, male minorities. As Dr. Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas points out today at the Choice Words blog, there is solid evidence that school choice programs tremendously aid exactly that population:

Three evaluations of private-school choice programs have followed enough students for sufficiently long to determine their effects on the rates of high-school graduation, college enrollment, or both. A 2010 evaluation of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program that I led for the U.S. Department of Education found that students offered private-school choice by winning a random lottery graduated from high school at the rate of 82 percent, compared with 70 percent for the control group. The impact of actually using an Opportunity Scholarship was to increase the likelihood of graduation by 21 percentage points, from 70 percent to 91 percent. Over 90 percent of the participants in the study were African American, and almost all of the rest were Latino American.

A similarly rigorous experimental study of the impact of privately funded partial-tuition K–12 scholarships on college-enrollment rates was conducted by Paul Peterson of Harvard University and Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution. They followed a large group of low-income elementary students in New York City for over a decade after half of them were awarded private-school scholarships by lottery, while the other half were randomly assigned to the control group. They determined that the impact of using a private-school scholarship was to raise the college enrollment rate for African Americans in the study from 36 percent to 45 percent, a gain of 9 percentage points that represented nearly a 25 percent improvement over the control-group rate. As with the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program evaluation, President Obama’s very own Department of Education assigned this study its highest rating for scientific rigor.

Finally, I worked with a large team of researchers to evaluate the effect of the nation’s oldest and largest urban school-voucher program, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, on student educational attainment in the form of high-school graduation, college enrollment, and college persistence. Over two-thirds of the students in our study were African American, and almost all the rest were Latino American. We found that low-income students who used a voucher to enroll in a private school in ninth grade subsequently graduated from high school, enrolled in a four-year college, and persisted in college at rates that were 4–7 percentage points higher than statistically similar Milwaukee students who started in public schools in ninth grade. These higher rates of educational attainment due to the Milwaukee voucher program represent improvements of 15–20 percent over the rates obtained by the comparison group of public-school students—nearly as large as those for the African-American students in the New York City study.

Given the results of these three studies, one which was overseen by the U.S. Department of Education and two which were recognized with the Department’s highest award for rigor, we might expect President Obama to receive a swift response regarding his call for the federal government to search for programs that boost educational outcomes for African American men. The U.S. Department of Education need not search far and wide for such initiatives: they have already found one. Research shows that private-school choice through vouchers or scholarships is one of our nation’s most effective dropout-prevention programs for African Americans. It should be number one on the list of programs that President Obama encourages My Brother’s Keeper to support. But, apparently, it isn’t.

Not long ago, President Obama woefully misstated the research on school choice programs. The most charitable explanation is that he hasn’t seen the research from his own Department of Education. Fortunately, a few highly respected education policy gurus cut a short video to remedy that oversight:

Let’s hope the president gets YouTube on his Blackberry.

[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post included the statement: “This cut does not even save the taxpayers a dime, since the OSP only spends up to about $8,250 for elementary school students and $12,400 for high school students each year compared to the $30,000 per pupil per year that the government-run schools spend to produce some of the worst educational outcomes in the nation.” Actually, the OSP relies entirely on federal funds but the D.C. public schools are primarily funded locally, so a transfer of students out of the public schools in D.C. would not reduce spending as it would in other school choice programs where states fund schools on a per pupil basis.] 

For far too long a big part of the Common Core debate has been about establishing simple fact: the federal government provided serious coercion to get states to adopt the Core, and the Core’s creators asked for such arm twisting. Indeed, just yesterday, Andy Smarick at the Core-supporting Thomas B. Fordham Institute lamented that the write-up for President Obama’s education budget proposal gives the administration credit for widespread Core adoption. Wrote Smarick: “The anti-Common Core forces will likely use this language as evidence that Common Core was federally driven.” Of course it was federally driven, by Race to the Top (RTTT) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers! But the budget proposal tells us far more than that.

The big story in the proposal is — or, at least, should be — that the president almost certainly wants to make the Core permanent by attaching annual federal funding to its use, and to performance on related tests. Just as the administration called for in its 2010 NCLB reauthorization proposal, POTUS wants to employ more than a one-time program, or temporary waivers, to impose “college and career-ready standards,” which–thanks to RTTT and waivers–is essentially synonymous with Common Core. In fact, President Obama proposes changing Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act — of which NCLB is just the most recent reauthorization — to a program called “College- and Career-Ready Students,” with an annual appropriation of over $14 billion. 

This was utterly predictable. Core opponents, who are so often smeared as conspiracy mongers, know full well both what the President has proposed in the past, and how government accumulates power over time. RTTT was the foot in the door, and once most states were using the same standards and tests, there was little question what Washington would eventually say: “Since everyone’s using the same tests and standards anyway, might as well make federal policy based on that.” Perhaps given the scorching heat the Common Core has been taking lately, most people didn’t expect the administration to make the move so soon, but rational people knew it would eventually come. Indeed, the “tripod” of standards, tests, and accountability that many Core-ites believe is needed to make “standards-based reform” function, logically demands federal control. After all, a major lesson of NCLB is that states will not hold themselves accountable for setting and clearing high academic bars.

While it’s a crucial fact, the full story on the Common Core isn’t that the feds coerced adoption. It is that the end game is almost certainly complete federal control by connecting national standards and tests to annual federal funding. And that, it is now quite clear, is no conspiracy theory. 

It seems mind-boggling. Minnesota public school staff forced a barefoot teenage girl in a wet bathing suit to stand outside in sub-zero weather until she developed frostbite. 

It happened around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday at Como Park High School in St. Paul. Fourteen-year-old Kayona Hagen-Tietz says she was in the school’s pool when the fire alarm went off.

While other students had gotten out earlier and were able to put on dry clothes, Hagen-Tietz said she was rushed out with just her towel.

On Wednesday morning, the temperature was 5 below, and the wind chill was 25 below.

A teacher prevented her from getting her clothes from her locker because the rules stipulate that everyone must immediately leave the building in the event of a fire alarm. Shivering, the student pleaded to be allowed to go inside a car or another building but her request was denied.

Hagen-Tietz asked to wait inside an employee’s car, or at the elementary school across the street. But administrators believed that this would violate official policy, and could get the school in trouble, so they opted to simply let the girl freeze.

Students huddled around her and a teacher gave her a coat, but she stood barefoot for ten minutes before obtaining permission to sit in a vehicle. By that point, she had already developed frostbite.

How can something like this happen? Public choice theory offers an important insight: even in the public sector, people tend to act in their own self-interest and respond to incentives.

In this case, each of the rules makes perfect sense in the abstract. The fire alarm may signal a real danger so exiting the building with alacrity is essential. Likewise, rules about keeping students on school property and out of adults’ vehicles reflect legitimate concerns about student safety. And yet, in enforcing these safety rules rigidly in an extreme case where they should not apply, the teachers and administrators violated the rules’ very intention. 

Government schools and their employees are not held accountable to parents, but to bureaucrats and their top-down rules. No doubt the school staff were well-intentioned—they recognized the harm this girl was suffering and almost certainly wanted to help her—but they were more afraid of violating the rules. Though the rules were written to protect students, in this case the rules were inimical to a student’s well-being, yet the staff still chose compliance over common sense.

No school is perfect—no human institution is—but incidences like these are much less likely to occur when schools are held directly accountable to parents. The only way to make government schools directly accountable to parents, as their private counter-parts already are, is to enact educational choice programs that empower parents to vote with their (non-frostbitten) feet.

There’s an old legal proverb about how to win a court case: “If the law is on your side, pound the law. If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If neither is on your side, pound the table.” In this factually-challenged attack on school choice, two lawyers at the UNC Center for Civil Rights do a great deal of table pounding.

Despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, the lawyers charge that school choice programs don’t work and that they increase racial segregation. For example, they claim: 

…in states with [school choice] programs, student achievement at the private schools is no better, and often worse, than in the public schools. In fact, in Milwaukee and Cleveland, whose voucher programs are the country’s longest running, traditional public school students outperform voucher students on available proficiency measures.

Even read in the most charitable light, the lawyers misleadingly compare apples and orangutans. Participants in school choice programs are generally more disadvantaged than the general population, so it is absurd to compare their average performance against the general population, which includes all the students in wealthy “public” school districts (where low-income parents have been arrested for trying to enroll their kids). Government school advocates rightly object when someone compares average private school performance to average government school performance. The private schools outperform government schools on average, but because both parents and the private schools select each other, the comparison breaks down. The same is true here.

A meaningful comparison requires a randomized-controlled trial, which is the gold standard of social science research because the process of randomization allows researchers to compare like against like and to isolate the effect of the “treatment” (in this case, the offer of a school choice scholarship). Fortunately, there have been 12 such studies addressing this very question from highly-respected institutions like Harvard University and the Brookings Institution. Eleven found that school choice programs lead to positive student outcomes, including higher academic performance and higher rates of high school graduation and college matriculation. One study found no statistically significant difference and none found a negative impact.

These studies include evaluations of the Milwaukee and Cleveland school voucher programs that the lawyers falsely claimed were underperforming vis-a-vis government schools. In fact, a longitudinal study of the Milwaukee program found that it increased academic performance, graduation rates, and college enrollment (and did so at about half the cost per pupil):

“Students enrolled in the Milwaukee voucher program are more likely to graduate from high school and go to college than their public school counterparts, boast significantly improved reading scores, represent a more diverse cross-section of the city, and are improving the results of traditional public school students,” said the study’s press release.

“Among the new findings are that students enrolled in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP)—the nation’s oldest private school choice program currently in operation—not only graduate from high school on time by seven percentage points more than students enrolled in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), but they are also more likely to enroll in a four-year college and persist in college.”

In other words, the lawyers’ assertion that the achievement of school choice students is “is no better, and often worse” is flat out false. It’s not possible to state with any certainty where they’re getting their faulty information (quite possibly the usual suspects), but President Obama made similarly false claims in a recent TV interview, prompting prominent researchers including of Paul E. Peterson of Harvard University and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas to correct the record:

The faulty empirical claims about the effectiveness of school choice programs were bad enough, but the lawyers’ greater offense was cynically raising the specter of racial segregation:

We also know the historical links between racism and private schools. In 1964, 83 private schools enrolled approximately 9,500 students in N.C. But from 1968 to 1972 – when advocates and the federal government began to enforce meaningful school desegregation – the state jumped from 174 private schools and 18,000 students, to 263 schools and over 50,000 students. Surging enrollment in non-public schools was often concentrated in areas with high concentrations of African-American students , and the segregative legacy of these private schools and academies continues to this day:

Bertie County is 62 percent African American. Lawrence Academy was founded in Bertie County in 1968. Its student body is 98 percent white.

Halifax County is 53 percent African-American. Halifax Academy and Hobgood Academy were both founded in 1969. Halifax Academy is 98 percent white; Hobgood Academy is 95 percent white.

Hertford County is over 60 percent African-American. Ridgecroft School, founded in 1968, is 97 percent white.

Northampton County is 58 percent African-American, but Northeast Academy, established in 1966, is 99 percent white. 

First, it’s absurd to link the history of segregation solely to private schools when the public schools were segregated for over a century. This is especially absurd since inter-district segregation is now higher among government schools than 50 years ago.

Second, these anecdotes tell us absolutely nothing without context. It’s possible that these schools are illegally discriminating on the basis of race, but it’s also possible that this merely reflects the fact that, under the status quo, wealthier whites are better able to afford private school than less wealthy blacks, which is exactly the inequity that NC’s school voucher program seeks to address.

It’s telling that the lawyers refrained from citing any of the empirical evidence on the matter:

Eight empirical studies have examined school choice and racial segregation in schools. Of these, seven find that school choice moves students from more segregated schools into less segregated schools. One finds no net effect on segregation from school choice. No empirical study has found that choice increases racial segregation.

Additionally, a recent study from the Louisiana Department of Education also found that the state’s school voucher program improves racial integration. More than 85 percent of the scholarship recipients in Louisiana are black. Likewise, school choice programs in other states disproportionately benefit minority students, including 81 percent of scholarship students in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and 78 percent in Florida.

The lawyers concluded that it is “a twisted irony that the leaders of the voucher movement claim a racial justice rationale for their scheme.” In fact, the twisted irony is that an organization with the words “civil rights” in their title would work so hard to deprive minorities of the ability to choose the schools that work best for their own kids. They’re joined by other defenders of the government school monopoly who are suing to block North Carolina’s nascent school choice program. If these self-proclaimed “civil rights” lawyers really cared about racial justice, they would stop standing in the school house door.

The Common Core is slowly but surely becoming a big national issue, and three things in today’s news tell us a lot about what’s going on.

• It is a major story – it was a lead Politico article this morning – that the National Education Association, after steadily, if quietly, backing the Core, yesterday slugged it. At least, President Dennis Van Roekel came out with guns blazing against the implementation of the Core, saying that in many states “implementation has been completely botched,” and calling for a slowdown in the Core rollout. To be sure, Van Roekel didn’t suddenly say the Core is poor-quality standards, but implementation is absolutely key, and it is there that experts across the spectrum have long been crushing the Core.

• With the tide increasingly turning against them, Core advocates are no longer napping, feeling secure in the fact that Washington got a large majority of states to sign on to the Core before anyone really knew what was happening. This morning, news came out about survey results from the Core-supporting 50CAN. A big takeaway, according to 50CAN? Most people don’t know much about the Common Core, but would like it if they did: a sizeable majority support the idea of uniform standards. That’s probably accurate – in the abstract, one standard sounds nice – but what is more telling is the response to whether people trust policymakers in DC “to determine what is best for improving schools.” Only 17 percent either “strongly” or “somewhat” trust Washington. Eighty percent “do not trust” DC. Maybe that’s why Core-ites seem hell-bent on ignoring the crucial role Washington had, through the Race to the Top contest and No Child Left Behind waivers, in coercing Core adoption. So uniform standards may seem nice, but federally driven? Ick! Which brings us to our last story…

• It was reported today that Missouri State Representative Mike Lair put an $8 provision into an appropriations bill to purchase “two rolls of high density aluminum to create headgear designed to deflect drone and/​or black helicopter mind reading and control technology.” This was meant to be a riproarious slap at Common Core opponents, whom Core advocates insist on tarring as kooks for fearing stuff like nationalization of school curricula. And they may, indeed, seem crazy to you if you refuse to acknowledge that the federal government, at the behest of the “state” groups that created the Core, coerced adoption. And if you ignore that Washington selected and funded two consortia to create tests to go with the Core. And if you are unaware that the U.S. Department of Education has a “technical review” panel for those tests that meets behind closed doors. And if you forgot that the federal government still requires, though it has loosened the rules, that schools be judged in part on state test performance. Yes, if you ignore reality, you could conclude that Core opponents are bonkers. But if you know and accept reality, then you know that far from being crazy, opposition to the Core is based, to a large degree, on logic and facts. Which means few at whom Rep. Lair is aiming his little joke are going to be making a chapeau with the free foil. At most, they’re going to put it to good use and make a burrito wrapper, or a solar oven, or are just going to throw it back at Rep. Lair, yelling, “stop calling me crazy, and stop wasting my eight bucks!”

Need an outrage to carry you through the weekend? If you’re the parent of a school-aged child, some lawmakers in New York state think your parenting skills could use “enhancement”—and want to force you to attend a series of “parenting workshops” as a condition of your kid’s progress to seventh grade.

“Requires parents to attend support programs designed to enhance parenting skills,” reads the official description of Bill S142-2013. The bill would direct New York’s education bureaucracy to develop guidelines for the content and distribution of a series of four or more workshops, of which one would be devoted to issues of abuse. (Why a state bureaucracy would know more about “parenting skills” than parents themselves is not explained.) Not only would parents have to attend, but for good measure the bill would require employers to bestow a paid day off each year for employees who are parents to do so. 

The bill has provoked a bit of a public outcry in recent weeks. Among the comments at the official state site: “How about letting us raise our own children?” “An insult and serves no purpose”; “Please keep your noses out of my home”; “The only people that will benefit from this are the ones who will charge for the classes.”

Who’d sponsor such a mind-bending assault on individual rights and the integrity of the family? The bill’s main sponsor is Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. (D‑South Bronx), with co-sponsorship from Sens. Adraino Espaillat (D‑Washington Heights) and John Sampson (D‑Brooklyn). 

Senator Diaz—not to be confused with his son, Ruben Diaz Jr., who serves as Bronx borough president—is a well-known figure in New York City politics who has served in the State Senate for more than a decade. Like most of his New York City Democratic colleagues, he readily votes to approve big government programs; unlike most of them, he also ardently pursues social-conservative causes such as opposition to same-sex marriage (he’s an evangelical minister as well as a politician). In the latter capacity, he regularly wins praise from national groups claiming to speak for “pro-family” positions. One must wonder, are they aware of his scheme for mandatory parenting workshops, and is that something they consider “pro-family”?