I’m no theologian, but when a religious group asks God to bless something, I’m pretty sure that’s a sign they like it. So if some other folks show up and say they love that same thing, we’ve got a clear case of mutual agreement. They’re not going to fight over whether the thing in question needs a blessing or a loving—unless the setting is a public school.

Stall Brook Elementary School, outside Boston, recently told parents that they were editing the song “God Bless the U.S.A.” for an upcoming student assembly, and that their children would instead sing it as “We Love the U.S.A.” A furor ensued, and it wasn’t over the loss of assonance in the refrain. After a great sound and fury the school has relented and will allow, but not require, children to sing the words “God Bless.” Other children and parents, it seems, will be free to sing “We Love” if they prefer. So that will sound nice.

This captures, in small, a great problem with public schooling: compelled conformity. In every community in the country, there is only one public school district. It is the official education organ of the state. As such, it cannot engage in devotional religious activities under the First Amendment. More than that, it cannot possibly reflect the diverse values and preferences of every family. It just can’t. And that’s why we encounter these endless battles over the place of religion in the classroom and in plays, pageants, and ceremonies. It’s why the teaching of history and even of reading and math are fraught with conflicts over content or methodology. And it’s unnecessary. Totally unnecessary.

A truly free society needs a well-educated citizenry. It does not need a government monopoly on k‑12 schooling. In fact, it needs to not have a government monopoly on schooling. Fortunately, there is a wonderful alternative to the monopoly status quo—a system that can ensure universal access to a quality education without forcing parents or taxpayers to violate their convictions. That alternative is education tax credit programs that cut taxes on families who pay for their own children’s education and on donations to nonprofits that subsidize tuition for the poor. These programs exist, they work, and they won’t make us fight over blessing or loving the U.S.A.

“Sometimes people just want to hear a confident person with shiny teeth tell them appealing stories about the secrets to success.”

So writes Jay Greene in his debunking of Marc Tucker’s education reform book Surpassing Shanghai. Jay’s whole review is worth reading, but the basic point is simple: you can’t learn much about the systemic causes of success if you only look at a single success story or even at a small handful of them. You need to cast a wide net to detect meaningful patterns. Having spent a lot of time casting wide nets, into both the historical and modern evidence, I couldn’t agree more. But maybe Jay would just tell me that’s confirmation bias ;-)

[HT: Bill Evers]

In a recent WSJ op-ed, Peter Beinart calls on American Jews to ease up on their concerns about freedom of conscience and freedom of religion and embrace school vouchers. Beinart notes that,

Outside the Orthodox community, American Jewish organizations have for decades opposed government funding for religious schools. The most common objection is that by intertwining church and state, such funding threatens religious liberty

Fortunately, Beinart’s Solomonic choice between freedom of conscience and educational freedom is unnecessary. It is not only possible to achieve both, it is easily done thanks to education tax credits.

A problem with school vouchers is that they channel state spending to families and thence to religious schools. This compels every taxpayer to support every kind of education, including varieties they may find deeply objectionable–violating their freedom of conscience in a way that Thomas Jefferson called “sinful and tyrannical” in his 1786 Act Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia.

But under education tax credit programs, no taxpayer is compelled to pay for any sort of private schooling at all, and those who chose to do so get to determine the kind of schooling they support. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this distinction in its ACSTO v. Winn decision last year, upholding a scholarship donation tax credit program in Arizona.

Here’s how scholarship donation tax credits work: taxpayers can choose to make a donation to a non-profit organization that subsidizes tuition for families who need it. When they make that contribution, their taxes are cut—usually dollar for dollar. If they do not make any such contribution, their income is taxed as it always was in the past, and cannot be used for the support of any private school.

“Direct” or “personal use” tax credits are even simpler: they cut the taxes of parents who shoulder the cost of their own children’s education. Here again, no one is forced to pay for any sort of education to which they might object.

Not only are tax credits superior to vouchers from the standpoint of freedom of conscience, they are also superior to the status quo public school system, which forces all taxpayers to support a single official organ of education that cannot possibly reflect everyone’s values.

So, rather than abandoning their principles, defenders of freedom of conscience can pursue them far more effectively by advocating education tax credits than by propping up the status quo or by advocating alternative school choice policies.

In his latest weekly radio address, President Obama featured what will no doubt be a mainstay of his reelection campaign: the “Buffett Rule,” which says that rich people should pay at least the same tax rate as middle-class folks. It’s named after mega-investor Warren Buffett, who famously declared that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. President Obama and his supporters have run with that, and are employing it to convince the public that such is the norm for the despised “rich.”

Of course that’s not the norm: Buffett is the rare taxpayer who makes almost all his income through investments, and top earners have much higher tax rates than people earning $200,000 and below. So this is clearly not about fairness — it’s about politics.

Two, though, can play at this game. If the President can engage in class warfare he’s also a fair target of it. So why not implement something called the “Obama Rule,” which demands that lower-income people get at least the same educational options as the President? That only seems fair, right, like the Buffett Rule? Indeed, the President himself noted in his weekly address that ” we…have to pay for investments that will help our economy grow and keep our country safe [such as] education.” So why, then, does the President’s 2013 budget zero-out funding for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program while his daughters go to Sidwell Friends? Shouldn’t other kids in Washington have access to the same excellent private schools as the President’s daughters?

Class envy is hardly the right reason to demand school choice — the right reasons are freedom, competition, innovation, and specialization – but of course all kids should have the same options as President Obama’s daughters! As the President concluded in his weekly address (though, obviously, he wasn’t talking about school choice): “That’s how we’ll make this country a little fairer, a little more just, and a whole lot stronger.” So let’s invoke the Obama Rule, and give lower-income families the same educational choices as the President! It’s simply the fair thing to do.

Economist Rick Hanushek argues today that there is no evidence to suggest “weighted student funding” will improve public school outcomes as its bipartisan backers hope. He contends that simply tying school-level funding to students, and thereby bypassing some of the budgetary role of districts, will create no systemic incentive for improvement and will not advance more substantive reforms.

He’s almost certainly right. Instead, Rick contends that districts should be financially rewarded based on their performance, borrowing a key aspect of the free enterprise system. But just that one aspect… and that’s a problem. There is no reason to believe that slapping a single isolated aspect of the market system on to the side of our state school monopoly will transmogrify it into a model of efficiency and responsiveness. Any more that strapping feathers to a brick can make it fly.

Rick is of course right that no system can produce the outcomes we need and want unless excellence is rewarded and failure penalized. But much more is needed to achieve those ends than simply funding successful schools or districts at a higher level. In the free enterprise system, the entrepreneurs who create successful products and services are personally rewarded for that success. They are free to enter the marketplace with their new ideas and to risk their own and their investors’ money in the hope that those ideas are sound–losing it if they are mistaken. If successful, they can raise capital for expansion by being able to offer a return on that investment, and grow organically or by taking over and turning around failing competitors. None of that is possible within a monopoly school system.

A great deal of empirical evidence exists indicating which education policies work, which don’t and why. The clear conclusion is that market freedoms and incentives are the answer to our education woes. But these freedoms and incentives cannot be retrofit, piecemeal, into our creaking, ossified, Rube Goldbergian school monopoly.

The mission statement of the Hoover Institution reads, in part, as follows:

This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its Bill of Rights and its method of representative government. Both our social and economic systems are based on private enterprise from which springs initiative and ingenuity.… the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social or economic action, except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves.…

Hoover’s Koret Task Force on Education has just released a report calling for various changes to federal K‑12 policy, but nonetheless preserving a significant role.

I have great respect for many of the members of this task force, and agree with their stated goals, but the U.S. Constitution delegates no education policy powers to the federal government, and the 10th Amendment reserves such unmentioned powers to the states and the people. So in keeping with its mission statement, no Hoover task force should be recommending a continued federal role in education policy.

No loophole is provided by the exception for cases where “local government, or the people, cannot undertake” the given actions for themselves. There are at least 15 states that are already moving in the direction of private school choice that the task force is suggesting. Clearly states can undertake such actions.

Of course Hoover is not alone in making recommendations unmoored from its stated mission and from the sound constitutional principles that mission embraces. But given its many brilliant and capable members, perhaps it is one of the few that can recognize it is adrift and still see the light of its principles on the horizon.

Right now the nation is fixated on the Supreme Court and health care, as well it should be. If the Court rules the wrong way and the individual mandate is upheld, seemingly the last limit to federal power—Washington can’t make you buy stuff—will be gone. So yes, please, let’s focus on ObamaCare.

When the arguments end and the health fight abates for a while, however, let’s pay some much needed attention to another federal takeover, one that is constantly being overshadowed by bigger things like wars, ObamaCare, and budget blowouts: looming federal domination of education.

There’s actually an immediate ObamaCare connection to education, though few will likely recall it. To make the CBO cost estimates come out right, Democrats attached the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) to the already immense legislation. SAFRA eliminated guaranteed college loans—loans originated through private lenders but completely backed by taxpayer money—and made almost all lending direct from the Treasury. It wasn’t a sudden takeover as many Republicans framed it—the guaranteed program already represented massive federal control—but it did push the private sector even farther to the student-lending fringes.

Much more insidious is what Washington has been doing in K‑12 schooling.

The real sea change was No Child Left Behind, when the Feds went from primarily doling out money, to dictating that every state have standards and tests in math, reading, and science, and schools and districts make yearly “proficiency” progress. It was a huge ramping-up of already unconstitutional federal involvement.

At least NCLB, though, was enacted through the proper legislative process: Congress debated the law, voted on it, and the president signed it. These days, that’s just too much of a bother.

The Obama administration started unilaterally making education policy with the “Race to the Top,” a contest in which states competed for $4 billion in “stimulus” money. Among the administration-specified things states essentially had to adopt to win? National curriculum standards, better known as the “Common Core,” which we are told repeatedly are voluntary for states to adopt.

But wait. Didn’t I used to write that Race to the Top was $4.35 billion? What happened to the other $350 million?

It wasn’t part of the purse states competed for. Instead, the administration is using it to pay for the development of national (read: “federal”) tests to go with the Common Core.

In case all that weren’t enough, the Obama Administration has decided it’s tired of waiting for Congress to rework NCLB and is issuing waivers to states that promise to implement administration-approved reforms. Included in those is adopting “college- and career-ready” standards, a euphemism for the Common Core. In other words, the federal government is on the precipice of dictating the basic curriculum for every public school in America, and doing so without even the semblance of following the constitutional, legislative process. It’s not just a federal takeover, but an executive branch takeover.

Why hasn’t this gotten the sort of attention that’s been showered on health care?

Unfortunately, a large part of the problem is that people are simply accustomed to a government education monopoly. Historically such a monopoly hasn’t been the norm, but in our lifetimes it has, and government schooling advocates would have us believe that it is the cornerstone of our society. Not so with health care: lots of people want others to pay for their care, but the default has never been government assigning you a doctor and hospital based exclusively on your home address.

The other part of the problem is people simply don’t know about the federal edu-coup. This is especially the case with national standards, which advocates have purposely soft pedaled to avoid the fate of open and honest—but disastrous—federal standards efforts in the 1990s. And when the topic has come up in public discussion, classic propaganda techniques have been employed: repeat enough that the effort is completely “state-led and voluntary,” and people will believe you.

Thankfully, it’s not too late to reverse this. There’s no historic Supreme Court showdown on the horizon, but some states have started to resist federal control, and groups like the Pioneer Institute and Pacific Research Institute have undertaken concerted efforts to expose the Common Core. The biggest problem is that the public is largely oblivious to what’s going on. Which is why, after the ObamaCare Supreme Court arguments are over, we need to turn our attention to the other, almost complete, federal takeover: education.