On the day of the second presidential debate, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion at debate-host Hofstra University. The topic was “defusing the student loan debt bomb,” and I was the lone voice calling for an end to inflation-fueling federal student aid. My co-panelists were Tamara Draut of the think tank Demos, Above the Law blog co-editor Elie Mystal, and U.S. PIRG’s Ed Mierzwinski.

I had perhaps the best interaction with Mystal, with whom I had interesting chats throughout the day. Mystal’s response to my proposal was basically that poor and minority students need help, and phasing out federal aid would disproportionately hurt them. It was an argument with which I could sympathize, and it made more sense than just proclaiming “college education is a public good and should basically be free.” Unfortunately, writing on his blog post-debate, Mystal said that my “view makes a certain kind of sense” but nonetheless smacks of “the classic, Republican ‘f**k ’em approach that disproportionately screws the poor and minorities.”

Um, ouch. Ascribing callousness or cruelty to either me or Republicans because we don’t like the negative effects of aid is, frankly, precisely why we can’t have a reasoned debate about these things. Maybe I’m an exceptionally gifted multi-tasker, or maybe I’ve just contemplated some important logic and facts, but I can be against mega-inflation without being indifferent to the poor. Indeed, quite the opposite.

First, much aid goes to people with little regard to their income. Pell Grants might be pretty well targeted — though they’re getting less so by the minute — but “unsubsidized” federal loans, which are backed by taxpayers, are available irrespective of need. Tax-based aid also skews high-income. The American Opportunity Tax Credit, for instance, can be claimed by joint filers making up to $180,000. And the well-to-do are best positioned to maximize their aid because they can afford financial planners to tell them how to hide wealth, or temporarily reduce income to optimize their eligibility. The cumulative effect of all this is to push up college prices.

Then there’s the psychological effect of hugely inflated sticker prices. If the message “college is astonishingly expensive” is repeated often enough, who do you think will more often be deterred from attending college, the rich or the poor? Probably the latter.

Next, the poor and minorities are no doubt disproportionately burdened by debt. Data indicate that’s definitely the case for African-Americans, and is likely the case for the poor considering that even debt loads that are small compared to some totals might be huge relative to a poor student’s wealth.

Finally, while people of all income levels and races spend too much time and treasure on higher education, the poor and minorities are probably the most snookered by “college for all.” The unfortunate reality is that those groups tend to be the least prepared to do college-level work or pay mammoth, inflated bills, and as a result tend to most readily pursue degrees without completing them. Among first-time, full-time students entering college in 2004, a weak 58.3 percent that didn’t transfer schools completed a four-year program within six years. Much worse, only 39.5 percent of African-Americans completed their degrees, and 50.1 percent of Hispanics. In large part this is the fault of factors preceding higher education — including our moribund K‑12 system — but the dismal college completion reality remains.

In light of all this, is it really fair to proclaim that those who want to phase out inflationary, consumption-driving aid don’t care about the poor and minorities? Or is it long past time to give them a full and fair hearing?

Cross-posted from SeeThruE​du​.com

The President and Governor Romney have dueling op-eds in Time Magazine that are nominally about higher education. Neither really is. Governor Romney’s piece, in fact, doesn’t seem to be about anything at all, its vagueness evoking Isaac Asimov’s Lord Dorwin. The President’s piece does offer a few concretes, but mostly about K‑12 and entirely wrongheaded. On the principle that bad specifics are worse than no specifics at all, let’s start with President Obama. He writes:

We know that a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by more than $250,000. A great teacher can change the trajectory of a child’s life. That’s why, even as we faced one of the worst economic crises in history, I fought to keep teachers in the classroom.

The President conflates the quantity of teachers with their quality. At best, these two factors are uncorrelated. At worst—in those few states and districts which pay teachers based on performance—the two factors are negatively correlated: employing more teachers leaves less money to pay suitable salaries to excellent ones.

We have already doubled the public school workforce over the past 40 years despite having only 8.5% more students today than we did in 1970. Put another way, employment has grown 11 times faster than enrollment. What good did it do? See the charts here. After hiring 3 million additional public school employees—two million of them teachers or teachers’ aides—student performance at the end of high school is essentially flat. The cost of this public school employment bloat is about $210 billion annually—roughly double the combined state budget shortfalls for 2012.

The President knows all this, but can safely assume that most American voters don’t. Thanks to decades of misreporting by the media, most Americans think public school class sizes have been growing and spending has been declining, when in fact the complete opposite is true.

Next, President Obama claims to have spurred states “to raise standards for teaching and learning.” Even if we grant the President’s unjustified assumption that high government standards improve student performance, he is ignoring the reality that his administration’s policy of conditionally waiving requirements of the federal NCLB law have caused some states to lower their standards. A recent and notorious case is Florida, which, thanks to an Obama administration NCLB waiver, has introduced new standards for educational achievement by race and ethnicity: black students will be held to a lower standard than Hispanics, who will be held to a lower standard than whites, who will be held to a lower standard than Asians. Had this happened under a previous administration, the national media would have assailed it as institutional racism and pilloried the President for pursuing the policy that precipitated it.

In a sensible world, each and every child would be helped and encouraged to fulfill his or her individual potential. Children are not interchangeable widgets to be sorted by color—or, for that matter, by age. Proclivity to learn differs not only between kids, but even within them, from one subject to the next.

We live at a time when it is easy to tailor instruction to each child, individually; grouping them—when group instruction is advantageous—based on where they are in the material in each subject, not purely on their age or some other arbitrary measure. The Jesuits started doing this in 1599, for heaven’s sake, we should certainly be doing it in 2012.

Indeed, the private tutoring sector already functions this way all over the world, because it seeks to provide the most educational value for parents’ dollars. Such individually-tailored instruction is unlikely to ever dominate the government-run approach to schooling championed by President Obama.

Imagine that it’s the 21st century, and that at least a handful of people in the education business have realized this. Putting their insight to good use, a few of them create an online service called “Coursera” that offers free lectures from some of the top universities in the nation (Stanford, Johns Hopkins, etc.). Then imagine that the state of Minnesota has decided that it is illegal for Coursera to offer these free lectures to its citizens.

I know, it’s hard to imagine. Unfortunately, you don’t have to, you can just read about how it’s actually happening.

One of the classes you can take at Coursera is “Principles of Macroeconomics.” Maybe the folks who lobbied for and enacted the state’s education regulations are afraid that free learning and economic literacy would threaten their phony-baloney jobs.

Let’s say that you are a newly-elected French president and you have a lot on your plate. The unemployment rate is 10.2 percent and youth unemployment hovers around 23 percent. The budget deficit is 4.5 percent of the GDP and the explicit national debt 90 percent of the GDP. Your economy is at a standstill and your currency is on the verge of collapse. Many of your most productive people wonder if they should pack up and leave, because you have just asked them to fork over 75 percent of their earnings to the taxman. Your popularity is shrinking faster than you can say sacre bleu! So, what do you do?

Easy. You switch the subject and start talking about something completely different … even if it is, well, a little crazy.

Thus, “French President François Hollande has said he will end homework as part of a series of reforms to overhaul the country’s education system. He doesn’t think it is fair that some kids get help from their parents at home while children who come from disadvantaged families don’t.”

Better that all children suffer, so long as they suffer equally. Equality of misery—that pretty much sums up socialist mentality everywhere.

The latest Nobel Prize in economics has been awarded to Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley. They’ve done brilliant work on algorithms for optimally matching pairs of things (such as job vacancies and job seekers), but at least one prominent application of their work should produce a deafening roar of foreheads hitting desktops: public school choice.

As the Nobel organization’s website explains, the original algorithm was developed by Shapley and David Gale to optimally match pairs of individuals who could only each be matched with one other person. For instance, optimally marrying-off 10 men and 10 women based on their relative levels of interest in one another. Over the past decade, it has come to be used to match students to places in local public schools (by Roth).

The problem is that this approach to “school choice” correctly assumes that the better public schools have a fixed number of places and cannot expand to meet increased demand. So it’s about finding the least-awful allocation of students to a static set of schools—a process that does nothing to improve school quality.

Meanwhile, there is something called a “market” which not only allows consumers and producers to connect, it creates the freedoms and incentives necessary for the best providers to grow in response to rising demand and crowd-out the inferior ones. It also provides incentives for innovation and efficiency. But instead of advocating the use of market freedoms and incentives to improve education, some of our top economists are spending their skill and energy tinkering with the increasingly inefficient, pedagogically stagnant status quo.

Forehead… meet desk.

Is the national curriculum standards debate about to go nuclear?

Proponents of national standards, as I’ve pointed out many times, have made a concerted effort to avoid attention as they’ve insidiously—and successfully—pushed the so-called Common Core on states. They’ve insisted the effort is “state led,” even though states didn’t create the standards and Washington coerced adoption through Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind waivers. They’ve called adoption “voluntary,” even with the heavy hand of the Feds behind them. And they’ve assiduously avoided what blew up past efforts to impose national standards: concrete content such as required readings or history lessons that were guaranteed to make people angry.

Well, with a recent unveiling of sample items for federally funded tests that go with the standards, all that might be about to change, and the whole thing could become radioactive to the public.

A couple of days ago the HechingerEd blog—from the education-centric Hechinger Report—published a post looking at preliminary testing items from the two consortia hand-picked by the Obama administration to create the national tests. Included in the post were links to sample items. I didn’t hit every one, but those I did check out contained, among other things, confusing readings, poor questions, and lame functionality (in some cases the reading material on which questions were based didn’t even show up). And here’s one for the grammarians: A video-based item about the effect of weightlessness on astronauts’ bodies asked how weightlessness is like “lying” on a bed. The astronaut being interviewed, however, said it’s like “laying on a bed.” A small matter, perhaps, but one among many matters both small and big.

And here’s a really big one:

Smarter Balanced officials gave an example of a multi-part question in which high school students are asked to imagine they are the chief of staff for a congresswoman. Before they start working on the test, their teacher is supposed to lead a classroom activity about nuclear power. The students are then asked to come up with a list of pros and cons about nuclear power. Finally, they must write up a presentation for the congresswoman to give at a press conference later that day.… Questions like the one about nuclear power are more expensive, because they will likely require a trained evaluator to score them.

So much for avoiding controversy! Not only do we discover that the tests will have students take on hot-button topics like nuclear power, but scores will be meted out by human evaluators.

The fears and problems are clear: What should students be told about nuclear power—or any other contentious issue—that the tests address? Who decides? Will evaluators really just grade students on the structure of their presentations, or whether students write things with which the evaluators agree? How will scoring be consistent among evaluators? Even if consistent, how will students and parents be assured of that?

This day had to arrive sooner or later. Eventually, something substantive had to come from the Common Core crowd. The question now is whether it will cause the whole, dubious undertaking to suddenly melt down.

Jay Greene has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal this week revealing that the teacher workforce has grown dramatically over the past forty years—and at enormous cost—without improving student achievement by the end of high school. And he rightly disparages President Obama for arguing that even more teachers would somehow do the trick. Even better, Greene notes that American education will not reverse its productivity collapse and become efficient until we allow it to benefit from the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace.

But then Jay cites Governor Romney’s goal of “voucherizing federal education funds so that parents can take those resources and use them to send their children to schools of their choice,” and he does so with apparent approbation. Even ignoring the fact that the Constitution does not empower Congress to run education programs, this is a very dangerous idea.

There has been no civilization in the history of humanity in which governments have paid for private schooling without ultimately controlling what was taught and who could teach, erecting barriers to entry and thereby crippling market forces.

For that reason, I recommended against a federal voucher program under the Bush administration. Since then, additional evidence has come to light. When I studied the regulatory impact of U.S. private school choice programs last year I found that even the small existing U.S. voucher programs do indeed impose a heavy and very statistically significant additional burden of regulation on participating private schools.

Perhaps a way will be found to enact and maintain minimally regulated voucher programs in the coming years. Until that time comes, it would be the height of folly to introduce a federal voucher program whose regulations would suffocate educational freedom from coast to coast.

In my statistical study of choice program regulation, I found that K‑12 tax credit programs do not impose a statistically significant extra burden of regulation on private schools. But even a national K‑12 tax credit program would be far too dangerous. By leaving education policy to the states and the people, we can see which programs flourish and which become sclerotic. We must encourage and learn from that policy diversity, not squelch it with federal programs or mandates.