I have long thought, as progressive blogger Anthony Cody discussed a couple of days ago, that libertarian types might form some sort of alliance with progressive educators against national curriculum standards. By and large progressives dislike the rigid standards and testing regimes that have been turning education into a clone assembly line, while libertarians want freedom, which is, of course, utterly incompatible with top-down standardization. But just because we have a common enemy will not necessarily make us policy friends.

As I’ve written before, it is pretty clear that many progressives don’t want educational freedom, they want local monopolies controlled by progressive educators who, often, eschew standards and testing not because all kids and families are different and standardization kills innovation, but because standardization curbs teacher power. Writes Cody:

While there are areas of agreement, there are some areas where progressives clearly part company with some conservatives. Progressives generally do not want public funds going to schools that promote religion. It seems reasonable to have a set of education standards that guides schools as to the focus of instruction at each grade and in each discipline. These standards should be developed by educators, in consultation with academic experts, and should reflect current scientific understanding. Democratic processes matter, so we support public schools overseen by elected school boards, and collective bargaining for teachers.

This doesn’t describe true community control of education, much less freedom. This is a system in which employees – especially teachers – have a huge political upper-hand. Teachers and their associations have greater motivation to be involved in education politics because their livelihoods are at stake, and are better able to organize than both parents, who have full-time jobs, and other citizens, who don’t even have the motivation of having a child in the schools. This is why teacher associations often dominate local school boards.

Note also that there would be standards in Cody’s ideal, but developed by “educators, in consultation with academic experts,” and designed “to reflect current scientific understanding.” So not only would citizens – who are supposed to ultimately control public schooling – apparently have no say in standards-setting, the standards would be based in “current scientific understanding,” as if there were scientific certainty about major educational issues. But there isn’t: From how best to teach reading, to what grade to cover Algebra, disagreements abound and the science is in dispute.

Finally, Cody offers the feel-good assumption that public schools are institutions that bring diverse people together and unite them. But as I often discuss – and we debated at Cato just last week – this doesn’t comport with the reality of public schooling, which was long based in homogeneous communities, systematically excluded out-groups, and today foments constant conflict. And frankly, the demand that those who want religion in their children’s education pay twice for schooling – once for government schools and again for the education they desire – is a gross violation of the basic American principal of equal treatment under the law.

All that said, it would be better to have local monopolies than state or federal. At least you could move to another monopolist if your present one were particularly horrible. But that would be cold comfort, because all government monopolies are heavily inclined toward curbing freedom, and toward serving the people who are supposed to serve the citizens.

I’ll be as happy as anyone if progressives start seriously challenging federally driven, national curriculum standards. But just because we share a common enemy won’t necessarily make us friends.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has delivered a lot of money for ideas to make higher education more affordable. One of the many papers it funded came out of the New America Foundation last week, and the report contains lots of proposals for Gates to work with. Unfortunately, its backbone — making the Pell Grant an entitlement program — is a complete nonstarter. Not only does Washington need a new entitlement like the Super Bowl needed a sudden spike in hair dryer use, the Pell Grant is utterly unjust, taking from Peter and giving to Paul so that Paul can make a million extra bucks.

The first point should be self-evident. Entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security are already gigantic fiscal asteroids hurtling directly at us. Indeed, at their present rate of growth, by 2050 entitlements will likely eat up every single cent the federal government brings in, leaving not a dime for defense and other discretionary spending.

A Pell entitlement would certainly be small compared to, say, Medicare. If I’m reading NAF’s report right, the total Pell cost in 2022, after all their recommended reforms, would be about $53.3 billion. (NAF says its plan would cost $94.4 billion over the next ten years “compared to current policy.” For simplicity, dividing $94.4 by ten and adding the resulting $9.4 billion to the CBO-projected 2022 Pell cost of $43.9 billion yields $53.3 billion.) In contrast to that $53.3 billion, Medicare is expected to cost about $1 trillion in 2022. But while the cost would be relatively tiny, the root pathology would be the same: a program with funding put on autopilot.

And don’t think Pell won’t sneak up to include increasingly higher-income people. No one likes seeing others get free taxpayer money, and no politician will let the “middle-class” — whoever that is — get “squeezed.” Indeed, NAF tries to soften the blow for those who would lose tax deductions and credits under their plan (very good proposals, by the way) by noting that “some of the aid that these benefits provide to families with middle incomes will be replaced with the significant increases to the maximum Pell Grant that are proposed in this paper.”

All that said, the root objection to Pell applies, whether it is an entitlement or not: There is no just reason for taking money from Paul and giving it to Peter so that Peter can get much wealthier. But that is precisely what Pell is intended to do: Take money from taxpayers and give it to other people so that they can get degrees and earn “$1 million more over their lifetimes.” If any entity other than government were to do that, we’d call it “stealing.”

The Pell Grant program absolutely should not be an entitlement — we have way too many of those as it is. Even more important, though, Pell shouldn’t exist at all. It is, essentially, legalized theft.

Cross-posted at seethrue​du​.com

This past Friday, a federal jury in Atlanta sent a powerful message to university administrators across the nation: you cannot violate students’ free speech and due process rights with impunity. The jury found Valdosta State University president Ronald Zaccari personally liable for $50,000 in damages for expelling former VSU student Hayden Barnes, who peacefully protested a planned $30-million campus parking garage. The trial and award followed a ruling last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit that Zaccarri could not claim the immunity given to public officials acting in their official capacities because he should have known that Barnes was entitled to notice and a hearing before being expelled.

Barnes’s saga began in 2007, when Zaccarri announced, and Barnes protested, the proposed garage construction. Barnes’s activities included sending emails to student and faculty governing bodies, writing letters to the editor of the VSU student newspaper, and composing a satirical collage on Facebook. In retaliation for these acts, Zaccari ordered that Barnes be “administratively withdrawn” from VSU, without any hearing before his expulsion in May 2007.

Barnes sued Zaccarri in 2010, and the federal district court quickly ruled that that Zaccarri had violated Barnes’ constitutional right to due process and that the administrator could not avail himself of qualified immunity because he had ignored “clearly established” law. When Zaccarri appealed to the Eleventh Circuit, Cato joined an amicus brief filed on behalf of 15 organizations, successfully asking the court to affirm on both First Amendment and due process grounds.

As stated in the brief, the “desire of some administrators to censor unwanted, unpopular, or merely inconvenient speech on campus is matched by a willingness to seize upon developments in the law that grant them greater leeway to do so.” The immense importance of constitutional rights on public university campus is due in no small part to the reluctance of school administrators to abide by clearly established law protecting student rights. 

Qualified immunity is intended to protect public officials who sincerely believe their actions are reasonable and constitutional, not those who willfully and maliciously ignore well known law in a determined effort to deprive another of constitutional rights. In this case, Zaccarri even rejected the advice of in-house counsel concerning the process required before Barnes could be deprived of his enrollment at VSU and neglected to abide by the procedures set forth in the VSU Student Handbook.

This verdict is cause for celebration for those concerned with individual rights. It will encourage students to exercise and defend their freedom of speech and due process, serving as a warning to administrators that they may not willfully disregard those rights. Perhaps most importantly, it vindicates Hayden Barnes, who has endured a grueling three years of litigation in order to earn, in his own words, “a victory for students everywhere.”

Thanks to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for orchestrating this case, including finding longtime Cato ally Robert Corn-Revere to be Barnes’s counsel and asking Cato to join its amicus brief. Read FIRE’s press release on Barnes v. Zaccari.

Every year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates drafts a letter charting the course for the foundation he created with his wife, Melinda. This year, the focus is on the value of precise measurement in driving innovation and progress. His inspiration was the book The Most Powerful Idea in the World, “a brilliant chronicle by William Rosen of the many innovations it took to harness steam power.”

Certainly mensuration was important to the development of the steam engine, but there was a much more crucial ingredient, and unless we understand the role that it played, solutions to the world’s most pernicious problems will remain elusive. The key to grasping this missing ingredient is the aeolipile. As shown in the accompanying video, the aeolipile is a hollow metal reservoir with multiple radial “exhaust pipes,” all of whose spouts point off tangentially from the hub. To make it work, you simply suspend it, fill it with water, and light a candle under it. And… Voila! You’ve harnessed steam power to generate rotary motion.

This device is also known as Hero’s Engine, after Hero of Alexandria—who invented it over two thousand years ago…. Despite its seemingly obvious practical applications, Hero’s Engine was never more than a party favor. It had not the slightest impact on the course of human history. Why not?

The ultimate causes are contentious (Deirdre McCloskey will give you one answer), but the proximate one is obvious: the aeolipile was never commercialized. There wasn’t a sufficient network of entrepreneurs and investors toiling away in ancient Alexandria to relentlessly seek out, capitalize, and commercialize new technologies and innovations. The steam engine was refined and widely deployed during the Industrial Revolution only because such an entrepreneurial network had come into existence by the late 18^th century, first in England and soon thereafter, elsewhere.

And that’s the real key to massively disseminating the benefits of innovation: enlisting the assistance of the free enterprise system. It is not a coincidence that the productivity of elementary and secondary education has collapsed while productivity in virtually every other field has steadily improved. Education has been largely excluded from the free enterprise system for the past 150 years.

So, while precise measurement certainly has its role to play, I hope someday to read an annual letter from Bill Gates that focuses on the need to harness all the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace for the betterment of education the world over.

I’ve finally had a chance to look over a book published last year by the London-based Institute for Economic Affiars: The Profit Motive in Education–Continuing the Revolution. It turns out to be a great overview of current developments from all over the world, and has a particularly useful chapter by its editor James B. Stanfield, development director at the E. G. West Centre at the University of Newcastle, founded by James Tooley.

I highly recommend it to anyone interested in better understanding how genuine markets can and do work in elementary and secondary education. Delightfully, the whole thing is available on-line as a .pdf file (see link above). E‑mail it to your Kindle!

This is National School Choice Week, and that’s great. Having the ability to choose a school is certainly better than being assigned to a single, government institution. But just being able to choose a school must not be the ultimate goal. That must be total educational freedom, both because freedom is the most basic of human rights, and because freedom best provides education for the whole of society.

Unfortunately, when you’re stuck in day-to-day ed policy grappling – Which studies show what about test scores? How much did New York City spend on rubber rooms? – you can easily lose sight of the major, broad reasons that educational freedom is so crucial. In honor of National School Choice Week, here’s a quick refresher:

Freedom involves choice, but a little choice is hardly freedom

You can have choice without having freedom. You don’t have freedom if you can choose between Wendy’s and McDonald’s for a burger, but are forbidden from having any other food. Or if you can select between the local Methodist and Lutheran churches, but nothing else that might satisfy your beliefs or spiritual needs.

Freedom means being able to choose from any options that others are freely willing to provide and that don’t force harm on others. We’re not particularly close to that, for any meaningful number of people, in any school choice program.

No one is omniscient

People make bad choices all the time. But guess what? That includes the people who presume to know what is “best” for each and every child. It is the inescapable reality of humanity that no person or group is even close to omniscient, which is why the argument so often proffered against choice – we can’t let people make bad choices for their kids – is utterly backwards. Because human beings are so limited, it is far safer that power reside in voluntary agreements between educators and parents than with central authorities. When bad decisions are, inevitably, made in the former, only small numbers are hurt. When in the latter, everyone goes down.

Unintended consequences

There’s been a lot of coverage lately of Rice University student Zack Kopplin’s crusade against voucher programs, which allow people to choose schools that teach creationism. Were Kopplin’s argument fundamentally that taxpayers should not have their money taken against their will to schools with which they might disagree, it would be one thing: vouchers do transfer taxpayer money, though they provide far more overall freedom than does public schooling. But Kopplin’s argument – like the arguments of so many people on numerous education issues – isn’t ultimately about freedom. It’s about prohibiting others from learning something he doesn’t like.

This is first an omniscience problem – Kopplin is so sure he is right about creationism that he’d keep people from freely choosing it. But assume Kopplin is right and creationism is entirely wrong. That hardly makes his demand one that, if met, would necessarily produce net educational good. No, potentially serious, negative, unintended consequences could accompany freezing people out of religiously based education. For instance, traditional Christian morality calls for married, two-parent families, and one of the few things in social science that one would call pretty firmly established is that coming from such a family gives a child a significant leg up. Religious people also tend to have much greater stocks of social capital than the nonreligious, also generally a plus.

In light of those things, would it be worth undermining religion because you think creationism is nonsense? Maybe, maybe not – like most matters, there are far too many caveats, unanswered questions, and variables surrounding religiosity to make an absolutely conclusive determination. But those who attack choice because they don’t like what some might choose often don’t contemplate the potential negative consequences of their actions at all. And without freedom, if those negative consequences prove real, it inflicts harm on everyone.

Special-interest capture

“Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs,” and “everyone is self-interested.” Put those together, and you quickly grasp why the systems that serve society best tend strongly to be the ones in which people interact voluntarily, not those in which government is in charge.

When I want to buy a computer, I am almost guaranteed to get one with terrific functionality and reliability. Why? Because the people who make and sell computers – selfish, profit-seeking corporations – have to produce something good or I, and countless other selfish, profit-seeking customers, will go somewhere else.

Not so with public schools. They take my money no matter how they perform, and my only hope for satisfaction is to vote in politicians who will reform them. But I also want the politicians to provide strong defense, transportation, fiscal discipline, etc., and I can’t focus just on the politics of education. In contrast, teachers unions, administrator associations, and other edu-employee groups can and do focus on education, and will do so more than anyone else because their very livelihoods are at stake. And what do these self-interested people want? More money and less accountability, the opposite of my interest. But the politicians will tend to pay much more attention to the employees on education then to me because they are single-issue and highly motivated, while I am highly divided.

In stark contrast to buying a computer, I lose, the producer wins, and that is how the system is designed.

Competition, innovation, and specialization

A free market is really just the economic outcome of having free people, and these three things – competition, innovation, and specialization – are what drive the success of free markets. Providers in a free market compete for customers, and two keys to winning that competition are providing the best product at the best price. Do that, and customers will leave the other guy and come to you. And how do you make better products at better prices? Innovation!

Of course, not all customers want or need the same thing; some may need a big flatbed for haulin’ stuff, others a tiny hatchback to save on gas. Given that, free markets also feature specialization, where customers with different needs can get products well suited to them because there is money to be made in catering to smaller groups. In contrast, and despite the fact that all children are unique individuals, what do we get from public schooling? One set of standards and tests, because, generally, money can only go to the single, government system of schools.

We need freedom, which is the most basic human right and the key to delivering the best education for the entire society. As we pursue school choice, we must never lose sight of this much bigger goal.

A Fordham Institute paper released today seeks to answer the question: do private schools really refuse to participate in heavily regulated school choice programs? Its authors tell us that “many proponents of private school choice… take [this] for granted,” citing two examples—one of them being the Cato Institute, whose Center for Educational Freedom I direct. The authors even cite a relevant commentary by former Cato policy analyst Adam Schaeffer.

The only problem is that the cited commentary says precisely the opposite. Describing Indiana’s voucher program, Schaeffer writes: “Because participating schools will have a significant financial advantage over non-participating schools, lightly regulated [non-participating] schools will face increasing financial pressure to participate.” This captures Schaeffer’s concern as well as my own (which I expressed over a decade ago in the political economy journal Independent Review): We do not fear that private schools will refuse to participate in heavily regulated school choice programs. We know that they ultimately will participate, or be driven out of business by their subsidized counterparts.

We know this because there is extensive evidence to that effect from all over the world and across history. Everywhere that private elementary and secondary schools are eligible for government subsidies, the share of unsubsidized school enrollment falls. The higher the subsidy and the longer it has been in place, the more the unsubsidized sector is generally diminished. The Dutch enacted a heavily regulated nationwide voucher program nearly a century ago. Unsubsidized private schooling remains legal, but has been reduced to a statistical asterisk—now making up less than one percent of enrollment, compared to roughly 70 percent for subsidized private schools.

Our reason for concern over this pattern is also grounded in empirical evidence: it is the least regulated, most market-like private schools that do the best job of serving families. That is the consensus of the worldwide within-country research, which I reviewed and tabulated for a 2009 paper in the Journal of School Choice. The Fordham paper does not discuss this evidence.

Despite imputing to Cato scholars the exact opposite of the view we hold, the paper does include some interesting data. In particular, it offers a new corroboration that voucher programs are more heavily regulated than tax credit programs (a difference whose magnitude and statistical significance was previously established here). This will make it even harder for objective observers to cling to the notion that vouchers and credits are functionally equivalent.