There are few people with whom I am so much in agreement on the goals of education policy as John Kirtley. To the extent that we differ, it’s chiefly about the best ways of achieving those shared goals. With that in mind, here are my thoughts on his recent post on Education RedefinEd.

Regulation of Private Schools under Education Tax Credit Programs

I’ve no reason to think that the customary financial reporting requirements imposed on scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) are problematic, but the same cannot be said about regulations imposed on the private schools themselves. In response to an earlier post by Adam Schaeffer, John writes that “Adam is absolutely correct that you can only drive so much excellence through top-down accountability.” But Adam actually goes further, arguing that there is no evidence you can drive any excellence through “top-down accountability” (read: “government regulations”) on private schools. The purpose of noting the corruption in state schools (e.g., in Florida and Atlanta) is to show that even the vast array of government regulations imposed on public schools fails to curtail such defects. And, as I found in reviewing the worldwide literature comparing different types of government, pseudo-market, and market education systems, it is the least regulated, most market-like systems that consistently do the best job of serving families across all measured outcomes.

If there were compelling evidence that government regulations on schools could reduce corruption or boost academic achievement, there might be a case for such regulations being added to tax credit programs. But no such evidence exists to the best of my knowledge. In addition to failing to achieve its intended goals, regulation inhibits the educational freedom and diversity that are responsible for the market’s efficiency and responsiveness to families—undermining the whole purpose of a choice program.

The one and only empirically defensible argument in favor of regulations of schools under tax credit programs is political: in some states, it may not be possible to enact tax credit programs without such regulations. In that case, a judgment call has to be made on whether the regulations are so bad as to compromise the program and make it unworthy of passage, because it would fail to produce positive results and give the movement a black eye that would mistakenly be carried over to better, freer programs.

But that argument does not apply to states that have already enacted relatively free school choice programs, by definition: the bills have already passed, so the regs weren’t politically necessary.

Multi-SGO vs. Single SGO Tax Credit Program

 John also argues that a proliferation of SGOs increases the risk of a financial or other SGO scandal in any given year. It’s a plausible argument. If the probability of a scandal breaking out at any one SGO is fixed, and that probability is equal to x, then the probability of a scandal breaking out at any one of a group of SGOs would be = 1 – (1 – x)^N, where N is the number of SGOs. As N goes up, so does the likelihood of at least one scandal occurring.

On the other hand, it seems likely that the probability of a scandal breaking out at an SGO is not fixed, but rather is proportional to the number of people the SGO employs. Hiring more people raises the chance that you eventually hire someone crooked. Tempting as it is to develop a full-blown mathematical model for scandal risk based on the number and size of the SGOs, it seems sufficient to say that the two factors probably cancel each other out to a considerable extent. In other words, it is not obvious that scandal risk would be appreciably different in single SGO vs. multi-SGO environments.

But the absolutely crucial factor that the above discussion omits is that the impact of a scandal also varies with respect to the number of SGOs. If you have 200 SGOs, each of limited size, and one of them has a scandal, it’s no big deal. Donors will just stop giving to that SGO and it will go out of business unless it manages the Herculean task of convincing the public it has mended its ways. Parents that had gotten scholarships from it will then seek scholarships from one of the SGOs that is now receiving the donations that the corrupt one used to get. In fact, this is just what would have happened in the case of the errant donation that John mentions, whether or not any new regulations were imposed.

Indeed, we see this with charities in general. Charitable giving is hugely popular in the United States, but every year some charities are found to be fraudulent or mismanaged. This has had little or no effect on the popularity of charitable giving over time. The system has proven extremely resilient as former donors to the fallen charities have simply shifted their giving to better-run institutions. There has been no move to winnow down America’s charitable landscape either overtly or indirectly (such as by drastically limiting the share of donations that can be used for operational overhead, and thereby driving most institutions out of business).

John likens the probability of a scandal at an SGO in a multi-SGO tax credit program to “giving the enemy a hand grenade.” Extending that simile, the single SGO model is like giving opponents a nuclear time bomb. What happens if there is only one SGO that accepts all the donations in a state and it succumbs to a scandal? Donors have nowhere else to turn. Many will likely stop donating and poor families who were depending on those scholarships will suffer. That, in turn, will not sit well with legislators or the public, who would likely act to re-open the flow of funds to those families.

But how would they go about trying to do that on short notice? One way would be for the state to take over the corrupt SGO and promise to set it aright. As we’ve seen, state control of education does not prevent scandals, so that won’t work—but it would destroy the independence of the program. Another alternative would be for the state to create its own SGO alongside the corrupt one, with much the same effect. Yet another option would be for the state to impose a passel of new regulations on the corrupt SGO, promising that these would solve the problem—which, as we’ve seen, they’d be highly unlikely to do. And finally, the state could simply shut the program down entirely, forcing all those families back into the state school monopoly, which they had deliberately chosen to flee. Every one of those outcomes is far worse than the outcome in a state with many SGOs. Indeed, even without a scandal, a single-SGO system represents a vastly easier and more tempting target for a state takeover than a distributed, multi-SGO system.

I am both very happy and very relieved to grant that John’s organization, Step Up for Students, is impeccably run and is not likely to suffer a scandal in the foreseeable future. But, as Adam asks, what happens if/​when John and the organization’s current top executives are gone? And similarly, what happens in states that don’t have a John Kirtley to create and brilliantly staff and oversee their one and only SGO? I’ve been around long enough to know that John Kirtleys do not grow on trees. The school choice movement is astonishingly lucky to have him as one of its leading lights. And because of the rarity of his invaluable qualities, it is unwise to design a policy that relies on similarly exceptional individuals to lead every SGO in every state in perpetuity.

Some SGOs will inevitably be overseen by less experienced, capable and honorable people (just as some public school districts are today) and so our education policies must systematically minimize the damage that mismanagement and corruption can do. Giving donors real choice among a panoply of different SGOs is the only mechanism yet suggested to accomplish this task, and one that has proven its value for generations in the broader charitable sector.

Preserving Parental Choice

There is another important reason to prefer the multi-SGO model, a goal that John and I deeply share: preserving real parental choice. A central conclusion of my journey through education history from classical Greece to modern America, England, Canada and Japan was that parents generally make better choices for their own children than even “expert” third parties make on their behalf. That is true whether the third parties are government bureaucracies or private institutions. And in my reading of that history I failed to find a single education system in which third parties who were paying for children’s education indefinitely restrained themselves from shaping what or how those children were taught. Ultimately, the money came with strings attached. (The G.I. Bill, sometimes presented as a counterfactual to this observation, is actually not relevant, since the pattern I’m describing is for elementary and secondary education. It is when children are young and their minds most malleable that the temptation is greatest to shape them in whatever image the third party wishes.)

We’d be wise to expect that pattern to continue. But if all third party payment ultimately comes with strings, how do you preserve the maximum level of parental choice? You prevent any single individual or organization from gaining a monopoly in third party education subsidies. By ensuring that a multiplicity of funding sources exists, you make it possible for parents to seek assistance from whichever organization most closely comports with their needs and preferences.

The freedom of donors to give to different SGOs that match their different educational ideals thus offers unique protection to families against being forced to accept strings they object to.

The alternative John suggests, legislatively forbidding SGOs from attaching any conditions to their scholarships, is unlikely to achieve its intended aim in the long run. Certainly there is no precedent for it, and it is easy to think of cases that would undermine it. What happens when schools begin to open that refuse to serve gay students? Or that exclusively serve them? What about Wiccan schools? What about “Marx’s Manifesto Middle School”? What about “Hayek High”? For each one of these schools, there is a distinct and sizable constituency that would deeply object to funding it. So what happens if all SGOs have to fund all of them? Do angry, coerced donor/​taxpayers roll over and go gently into that good night of compulsion? No. They demand that their representatives impose restrictions on the eligibility criteria for private schools. But since we live in a pluralistic society, that ultimately will result in a gradual accretion of homogenizing restrictions on the kinds of education schools can offer, winnowing down the range of choices available to families—precisely the opposite of the intended goal.

Nor is this merely a hypothetical. I suspected this phenomenon would exist based on my research for Market Education: The Unknown History, but recently tested it statistically by comparing the level of regulation imposed on private schools under voucher versus education tax credit programs. Under vouchers, every taxpayer is compelled to pay for every government-approved private school. Under tax credit programs (with the partial exception of Florida’s) donors have very broad latitude in choosing the kind of SGO they will support, and SGOs have similar latitude. So, based on my theory, we would expect vouchers programs to result in more heavily regulated private schools than tax credit programs because of the compulsion that vouchers perpetuate but tax credits avoid. After crunching the numbers using two different statistical methods and allowing for thousands of different randomized ways of measuring regulatory burden, I found that vouchers do impose a large and statistically significant extra burden of regulation on private schools that tax credits do not. This evidence is not dispositive, but it is consistent with the analysis outlined above, and it’s the only evidence we have. I suggest that we ignore it not so much at our own peril as at the peril of the children we seek to serve.

One Model to Rule Them All?

In any discussion of the “best” policy, I think it’s wise to consider the possibility that any one of us (or even all of us) could be wrong. Education policy is hard. We can of course do our best to collect the widest possible body of relevant evidence, and to test our recommendations empirically whenever possible. We can and should have more discussions like this one, which are hugely valuable. But after all that, we could still be missing something.

Given that reality, there is one other step we can consider to maximize our chances of getting education policy right: we can let different models coexist side by side for a few decades and watch how well they perform, rather than trying to homogenize them up front. If one program doesn’t work quite as well as another, we will see that and be able to learn from it. But if we insist on conformity in the short term, we may never learn those important lessons. And if we settle on a fundamentally flawed model, the results could fall very far short of our hopes and expectations.

Of course, in any state that is just adopting a school choice program for the first time, there has to be a decision as to which program is best. But in states where programs have already been implemented, it seems far wiser to allow them to mature independently rather than to try to “fix” them or even supplant them with new and different programs simply because we believe that they may suffer shortcomings in the future.

Almost anything is better than the status quo monopoly, and yet we’ve had this awful monopoly for a century and a half. It’s hard to correct mistakes once a policy monoculture has established itself and crowded out the alternatives.

Stephanie Saul’s anecdote-driven smear piece in yesterday’s NYT has perhaps had one positive effect; a serious discussion of good education tax credit bill design.

John Kirtley, chairman of the only active scholarship organization in Florida and father of the state’s credit program, used the NYT piece as a jumping-off point for legislative guidelines. Kirtley has done tremendous things in Florida for low income children and educational choice, but several of his policy recommendations (shared by others) are either unsupported or contradicted by the evidence.

I’ll use Saul’s brief description of the positive aspects of Florida’s credit program (which Kirtley praises) and his own guidelines as a structure for discussion. (See here for legislative guidelines and model legislation.)

Academic and Fiscal “Accountability”

This is the area in which the guidelines proposed by Kirtley and organizations such as the American Federation for Children are most at odds with research on education markets and government regulation. For decades, policymakers have desperately tried to improve education through accountability to the government. Their efforts have clearly failed. And it would be disastrous to involve the government, which has failed so dismally for so long, more directly in the private education sector and the private decisions of families and taxpayers. As Neal McCluskey showed for Florida specifically, fraud, waste and abuse in the public education system is much more widespread and pervasive than in private school choice programs.

Below are the reasons it is unnecessary and harmful to increase government regulation on education decisions made by families and taxpayers.

Education tax credits automatically impose three layers of accountability; 1) The parents who choose the school, 2) the scholarship organization that provides funds to parents, and 3) the taxpayer who donates or directly spends their own money on education. Additional government regulations are therefore unnecessary and interfere with the choices of those directly affected by the program.

Andrew Coulson’s international literature review of the school choice/​education market research shows that the least regulated education markets had the greatest margin of superiority over state school systems.

The use of vouchers, as government funds, can only be held accountable to the taxpayers whose money is used through the government, which disburses those funds. By contrast, credit funds are private funds, disbursed to students or scholarship organizations directly by the taxpayers who earned them. There is already direct accountability to the taxpayers who fund the credit program.

In short, no new requirements for or regulations on private schools or home schooling should be imposed. If accreditation is not required for existing private educational options, then none should be imposed on private choices backed by private credit funds.

Scholarships are strictly controlled to make sure they go to poor families.

All other donation credit programs besides Georgia are means-tested.

However, there are serious problems with hard income cut-offs for any program meant to help those who need help. What about the family that has a child with special needs, perhaps not rising to the level of an IEP, but requires more resources than a typical child? Or the family that loses one income earner, but can’t qualify because of their most recent tax return?

In a decentralized credit scholarship system, such flexibility can be built into means-testing regulation. In New Hampshire, scholarship organizations are allowed to use up to 20 percent of their funds for families who fall outside the strict income cutoff.

Strict, hard income cutoffs may be easy for governments and large organizations to process, but they come at a serious cost in flexibility and responsiveness to the diverse needs of individual children and families.

Only corporations are eligible for the tax credits.

Individual-level tax credits are relatively difficult in Florida because there is no individual income tax. However, sales tax credits can be allowed for individuals at the point of sale.

From a larger perspective, however, this is an unfortunate flaw, not a feature, and including individual taxpayers is a huge positive for any program.

Corporate tax liabilities are subject to very large fluctuations year-to-year, there are far fewer corporate than individual taxpayers, and decisions must be made within an often-complex and time-consuming process.

All of this means that corporate-only credit programs are more volatile, uncertain, and costly.

Donations from individual taxpayers broaden and stabilize the revenue stream for credits, invest real human beings in supporting education with their personal funds, and thereby create greater accountability to a more diverse and attentive donors base.

Eliminating the chance of parents donating for their own benefit.

The problem of parents donating for the benefit of their own child is an issue created by poor policy design in the first instance.

What sense does it make to force parents with a tax liability, who also need assistance for their child, to 1) donate to a scholarship fund and then 2) apply to that non-profit for a scholarship funded with the money that they earned and donated in the first place?

This absurd circular-donation system can be easily fixed by allowing parents to claim a credit for their own child’s education—as is already done in Illinois and Iowa. It can be made even better by allowing grandparents, uncles, aunts, friends, and neighbors to claim a credit for money they spend on a specific child they know and want to help. Allowing those with a direct personal interest in the success of a child to help support their education creates yet more accountability and more direct involvement in education from extended families and communities.

All scholarships are handled by one nonprofit organization, and its fees are limited to 3 percent of donations.

Florida’s education tax credit program is run entirely by a single non-profit organization largely due to the fact that scholarship organizations are not able to use any credits funds for the significant overhead involved in running such an organization for the first three years, and then only 3 percent thereafter, which is inadequate for meeting reasonable costs.

This hyper-centralization is the single most concerning flaw in Florida’s education tax credit program.

Taxpayers have no choice among scholarship organizations, and therefore their only choice if they are unhappy with the current SO is to not donate money to support needy children at all.

By all accounts, the single SO in Florida is a model non-profit. However, what happens should the current leadership move on or pass away? The character and performance of large organizations does not continue in perpetuity, and the evidence on the performance of monopolies long-term is grim indeed.

In the case of malfeasance or even an innocent but serious mistake at this single scholarship organization, the results could be devastating. Without other SOs to turn to, allowing donors to immediately de-fund the underperforming SO in favor of better ones, there will be intense political pressure to shut down or take over the system. Indeed, even absent a scandal, the centralization of all scholarships in one SGO makes it a tempting and easy target for state takeover.

Furthermore, is it wise or right in a larger sense for a single, private non-profit to control and administer hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially more than $1 billion within seven years, on behalf of tens of thousands of children and all the taxpayer who want to help them?

A diverse array of scholarship organizations ensures beneficial competition among non-profits, provides choices to families and taxpayers, and allows the development of organizations more intimately connected with and integrated into local communities and more flexible and responsive to the needs of individual families and children.

Parents – not individual schools or scholarship organizations – should own the decision of where their children attend school. In Florida, the scholarship can be used at any one of the 1,350 private schools whose participation has been approved by the state.

The centralized bureaucracy of Florida’s education tax credit program means that taxpayers have no choices in directing their money where they think it will do the most good, and families have no choices of scholarships organizations to which they apply.

In this situation, there is little choice but to standardize the process and ensure equal access with no regard to the quality of the school or need of the child beyond the statutory minimum. Indeed, should the sole scholarship organization decide to make distinctions – even reasonable, well-intentioned distinctions – among schools or applicants, they would be vulnerable to charges of unfair treatment because there is literally no alternative in the state.

The diversity of scholarship organizations in other states means that taxpayers and families can choose to work with organizations and schools they think perform well and comport with their values. Taxpayers and families in Florida are not afforded those options, and taxpayers are forced to fund all schools chosen by families, from good to bad and from fundamentalist Christian to Catholic to secular liberal if they wish to participate in the program at all.

Parents and taxpayers should have a diverse array of choices, and a large and diverse collection of scholarship organizations is essential for achieving that.

In a speech today, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will lay out the foundations of his education platform. Based on an outline of his proposals released by Education Week this morning, Gov. Romney seems just a little less disinterested in the Constitution — and the 40-plus years of proven federal education failure — than the man he seeks to replace. And no, calling what you want federal “incentives” neither absolves them of being unacceptable federal intrusions, nor makes them any less coercive.

The heart of what Mr. Romney wants in elementary and secondary education is federal enticements to get states to implement everything from “open-enrollment” policies for schools, to individual school “report cards,” to encouraging “talented individuals to become teachers.”

As I wrote last week, while “incentive” sounds kinda harmless, an incentive program is really all that No Child Left Behind is. No state has to do anything in NCLB. It only has to follow the law if it wants the federal money attached to it. The funding is only an incentive, but it is so big an incentive it is irresistible, even with the law being a huge millstone around the neck of American education. And, of course, taxpayers had no choice about furnishing the ducats to begin with. (Well, I suppose they were incentivized by a trip to prison…)

Where Romney’s K‑12 offering is most enticing is his proposal that federal money be attached to low-income and special-needs children and made portable even to private schools. (Portable, that is, “in accordance with state guidelines,” a proviso the outline doesn’t flesh out.) But the very real threat, as with all federal funding , is federal control. What Washington funds it will regulate — though usually for political show, not efficiency or effectiveness — and that is something we should strenuously avoid for private schools when states can implement more varied — and less regulation prone — choice mechanisms such as education tax credits. And, of course, the Constitution gives the federal government no more authority to deliver school choice than to dictate curricula. That is, except in Washington itself, and to his credit Mr. Romney is proposing to save the D.C. voucher program that Mr. Obama, for whatever shoddy reason, seems determined to suffocate.

The good news about Gov. Romney’s outline is that it directly addresses the primary problem in higher education, and one of its primary causes: insane tuition inflation fueled by massive federal student aid. Indeed, though he will no doubt get flayed for it by the higher ed establishment, who will publically deny it like so many naked emperors, Mr. Romney’s outline is refreshingly straightforward in identifying the root problem:

Governor Romney realizes that more spending will not solve the problem of tuition increases – to the contrary, it has helped fuel the problem. When Washington puts more money into student aid programs to help families and individuals pay for higher education, colleges and universities raise tuition rates.

So what grade does Mr. Romney get on education, at least from this initial outline? About a 30 percent for K‑12, and a 90 percent for higher ed. That works out to 60 percent — a woeful D‑minus — but that’s probably a tad bit better than most presidents would have gotten since the 1960s.

America’s growing school choice movement is a bridge to educational freedom—an escape from our failing state school monopolies. And with all the tenacity (and veracity) of Monty Python’s Black Knight, the New York Times stands athwart that bridge, declaring: “None shall pass.”

The Times’ latest attempt to parry the thrust for educational freedom is this story attacking education tax credit school choice programs: “Public Money Finds Back Door to Private Schools.” No doubt this story has legs…but not for long.

Let’s begin with the title, which claims that private donations to private scholarship organizations are “public money” because they qualify for a tax credit. It’s a simple claim that is simply not true. As has been recently reported:

the genius of [tax credit programs] was that the money would never go into public accounts, making it less susceptible to court challenges…. As predicted, tax credits have thus far withstood legal challenges, most recently when the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s program last year.

Perhaps the editors of the NYT were simply unaware of the report above—and unaware of the Supreme Court decision it cites (ACSTO v. Winn) explicitly stating that tax credited donations are not public money. But here’s the thing, the quote above is actually from the same story on which the Times slapped the “Public Money…” headline. So either the NYT’s editors don’t read their own stories, or they’re knowingly presenting a false statement to their readers in big, bold type. I can understand someone not wanting to read the NYT every day, but surely they’ve managed to find editors willing to do so?

Next, let’s talk about the story’s lede.…

This is where a paper puts the bit that they expect to rouse the most reader interest or indignation. What we have is an anecdote about a single Georgia scholarship granting organization (SGO) that just might be allocating donations in a way that donors would not approve of. But here’s the thing: there are a lot of different SGOs. If you decide that you don’t like the way one SGO is using your donations… you can stop donating to it. You can then look at other SGOs to find one you think is well run. You can even stop donating to SGOs entirely if you don’t find a single one that meets your standards. The system is quite responsive to the donor/taxpayer’s concerns.

Now let’s compare that to the status quo in America, under which every taxpayer must pay for the state school monopoly in their area regardless of its performance, efficiency, or institutional ethics. How’s that workin’ out? Since we’re talking about Georgia, surely it’s relevant to bring up the epic cheating scandal that exploded in the Atlanta Public School District less than a year ago. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation found that 178 teachers and administrators had systematically defrauded children of an education by falsifying the students’ state test sheets to make it look as though they were really learning. Can taxpayers cut off their funding to the district? No. Can they expect swift and complete justice? Nope. Even though 82 of the perps had already confessed last July, only one had been fired as of 8 weeks ago.

So which system is better equipped to deal with inevitable human frailties; the one that lets donors pull funding as soon as they have the first hint of concern, or the one that they have to keep funding no matter how suffused with corruption it becomes? Hmm?

Next, the Times demonstrates remarkable cruelty to animals by trotting out the rhetorical jade that we live in a “time of deep cutbacks in public schools.” Perhaps they felt safe making this claim knowing that the federal government’s education statistics are usually 3 or more years out of date, and hence don’t cover the most recent years of our economic downturn. If so, they must have thought no one would give credence to the up-to-date numbers published by a well-known private organization: nominal public school spending increased every single year between 2001-02 and 2011–12—both in the aggregate and per-pupil. Even after the Great Recession, even after adjusting for inflation, we’re still spending 10.6% more per pupil than we were when we had just crested the tech boom back in 2001-02. What right-wing group came up with these astonishing numbers? Was it the left’s current bête-noire, ALEC? Actually, it was the N. E. A.

Finally, some paragraphs into the piece, the Times comes up with a concern that almost has merit: some private schools that serve scholarship-receiving students have a pedagogical emphasis that some taxpayers might disagree with. The examples offered are sports and religion, but many others could no doubt be suggested. And a strong case could be made that taxpayers in a free society should not be compelled to pay for the teaching of ideas they find objectionable. In fact, such a case was already made over two hundred years ago by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves… is sinful and tyrannical.” That quote comes from the Virginia Act Establishing Religious Freedom, enacted in 1786 and subsequently used as the model for state constitutional clauses all over the country banning such “compelled support.”

So why do I say that the Times’ concern “almost” has merit? Because it doesn’t apply to education tax credits. No one is compelled to support any SGO, and those who do choose to make a donation get to select the SGO that receives their money. What the Times seems not to have realized is that this concern actually does apply to… the public school system it is trying so ineptly to defend. Taxpayers’ options under state schooling are to keep funding the system or go to jail, but it is not hard to imagine that some taxpayers may disbelieve the ideas taught by public schooling. Consider the story from just a few days ago about the public school teacher who taught her students that they could be arrested for speaking ill of the President. Or consider the Times’ evident disdain for private schools that focus on sports to the perceived detriment of academics. No one has to fund such schools under an education tax credit system, but we all have to fund them under the government monopoly status quo. Is this news (that didn’t fit) to the New York Times?

Next, the Times laments that SGOs cost money to operate. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars… in some cases”! Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you are a fiscal hawk just like the New York Times, and that you’re desperately concerned about the efficiency with which your education dollars are spent. Which system should you prefer, tax credits or the public school monopoly? As it happens, Florida’s k‑12 scholarship tax credit is raising academic achievement at less than half the per pupil cost of the traditional state-run schools.

According to a statistical study commissioned by the Florida legislature and authored by David Figlio, students accepting scholarships to attend private schools under the state’s tax credit program enjoy improved academic achievement. According to a second study co-authored by Figlio and Cassandra Hart, the program also improves achievement of students who remain in public schools [see previous link].

Of course the Times story mentions that Figlio has studied Florida’s tax credit program… but it doesn’t report what he found. Apparently, a significant positive academic impact is not relevant to a NYT education story if it comes from a program outside the control of the state monopoly school system. Print readers are left entirely in the dark about these facts. The online NYT version of the article links to a .pdf file of one of the studies without comment, but even the subset of Web readers who take the time to click through and read it will only get half the story. Those who read the Times’ story on other on-line sites that lack links won’t get even that.

But what of the charge that “some of the programs have become enmeshed in politics.” Even coming from the NYT this line of argument is difficult to believe. Has it not occurred to them that state schooling has been soaking in politics since its inception? Are they unaware that the public school employee unions—whose funding comes entirely from compulsory taxation—spend more on federal politics than Chevron, Exxon Mobil, the NRA, and Lockheed Martin combined? Or that between 93 and 99 percent of those political contributions have gone to Democrats? Surely they must be aware of news coverage like this:

If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country. Teachers are the best field troops in local elections. Ten percent of the delegates to the 2008 Democratic National Convention were teachers’ union members.

But then again, maybe they haven’t read it. After all, it ran in the New York Times Magazine.

Against public schooling’s multi-generation legacy of arch political partisanship, the Times complains that businesses might endear themselves to politicians by… helping poor kids get a good education. They present no evidence of an illegal quid pro quo—just the haunting specter that someone in political office might be gratified if a business helps kids learn. They have it precisely backwards. The real problem is that there are so many in political office who would not be gratified by such an act, because their own political lives depend on teachers’ union donations coercively squeezed out of taxpayers thanks to the government-protected monopoly on k‑12 schooling.

Years ago, we were told that the legacy media were distinguished by their “multiple layers of fact checking”. This NYT article, like most NYT articles on education, is certainly comprised of multiple layers of something… but it doesn’t smell like fact checking.

Matt Ladner does a good job of explaining how his beliefs shape his education policy recommendations. It’s a quality that he shares with Horace Mann, who persuaded the people of Massachusetts to adopt a fully tax-funded state school system based on his own beliefs about how a just society should educate its children.

More than a century and a half later, we are still struggling to replace Mann’s unresponsive, divisive, ineffective, wasteful, and often cruel system with one that actually works. So, as we reflect on exactly what to replace Mann’s system with, we have to ask: how did he get it so very, very wrong, and how can we avoid the same fate?

I suggest that Mann’s great mistake was to base his policy recommendations on his belief system. To avoid sentencing future generations to a similarly dysfunctional education, we must base our conclusions on a broad and systematic analysis of the evidence. We should study school systems historically and internationally to understand what works, what doesn’t, and why. We should make predictions about how different policies will unfold and then try to test those predictions empirically. We should observe how different policies play out across states rather than rushing to homogenize them before their effects can be compared.

At least that seems to me our greatest hope of avoiding Mann’s tragic mistake. And if the policy conclusions we reach do not happen to be the easiest to implement, we can take comfort in the fact that Mann succeeded in promoting a system that had no basis in reason or evidence despite strong and longstanding opposition. If a radical bad idea could triumph, why not a radical good one?

The New Hampshire House and Senate approved a a path-breaking education tax credit bill yesterday with an overwhelming 70 percent support in each chamber. The Governor must now decide whether to sign up with reform on the right side of history or face a veto-override battle.

The program includes home school expenses and allows the program to grow 25 percent each year if donations equal 80 percent or more of the program cap. It is income-limited, but scholarship organizations can use 20 percent of their funds for children who would otherwise not qualify, giving flexibility instead of a hard cut-off. It allows up to 30 percent of students to be currently enrolled in private school. It imposes no new regulations on private education beyond basic reporting to the department of taxation.

I provided analysis and advice on education tax credit policy structure to individuals in New Hampshire over the past year, but a policy analyst can only explain why certain structures are better or worse for accomplishing particular goals.

The New Hampshire legislators who pushed this education tax credit perseverance, principle and thoughtfulness deserve the highest praise … it is not often that we are fortunate enough to see a critical mass of true leadership in politics.

Legislators in other states should take note of what can be accomplished when lawmakers take principles and policy seriously.

Note: Follow these links for model legislation, tax credit legislative guidelines, and an explanation of why credit percentages are so important. Due to the peculiarities of New Hampshire tax law, which makes it difficult or impossible to back out deductions if a taxpayer claims a credit, the credit is set at 85 percent of the donation. But with New Hampshire’s flat 8.5 percent business tax, a donor’s tax liability is reduced by over 93 percent. Since New Hampshire has no standard individual income tax, next up should be property tax credits to ensure even greater participation in education. Other states without these restrictions should pass 100 percent credits for both businesses and individuals, and for both personal use and donations.

There’s a rift within the U.S. school choice movement as to whether private school choice programs should cover every child or focus only on the poor. Fortunately, the cause of this disagreement is not so much that the two sides have different goals but that they have different assumptions about what will achieve those goals. And the nice thing about assumptions is that they can very often be tested against the real-world evidence. What actually works better: universal access to the education marketplace, or universal dependence on a government program? That’s the question I try to answer over at the RedefinEd blog today, in a post responding to veteran voucher campaigner Howard Fuller.