…Apparently, when you are the District of Columbia public school system. The Washington Times reports today on a candle-light vigil beseeching the federal government for extra cash for new computers. The group organizing the vigil, OurDC, shares this “horror story” from former technology teacher Toval Rolston:

I’ve been in D.C. schools where the computers are so antiquated that you can’t even download a basic pdf file; our children don’t have the tools to compete in today’s high tech world.

The twin implications of this plea are that DC schools are underfunded and that more money will actually be spent wisely. The first statement is false and the second is decidedly unlikely. The last time I calculated total spending on K‑12 education in DC, from the official budget documents, it came out to over $28,000 per pupil (the linked post points to a spreadsheet with all the numbers).

How do you manage to spend $28,000 per pupil and not manage to keep your computer hardware up to date? Or, for that matter, manage to have among the worst academic performance in the country? Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with not being capable, or perhaps even inclined, to spend the money on what works.

The Washington Times, by the way, points out that OurDC is headquartered at the same address as the Service Employees International Union. Go figure.

Yesterday, the Michigan Senate passed anti-bullying legislation that has anti-bullying legislators, activists, and sympathizers outraged. Why? Because at the insistence of some in the legislature, it includes a provision protecting religious speech.

A video of State Senator Gretchen Whitmer (D‑East Lansing) has already gone viral, with the senator railing that “as passed today, bullying kids is okay if a student, parent, teacher or school employee can come up with a moral or religious reason for doing it.” Similarly, Time columnist Amy Sullivan asks “why does Michigan’s anti-bullying bill protect religious tormentors?”

I’ll tell you why: because as odious as one might find the religious beliefs of many people, they are entitled to freedom of speech the same as anyone else. That is a basic American right, and all the desire in the world to protect kids from hearing things that might make them feel badly must not change that. Abridge that right, and any speech becomes imperiled if a majority simply deems it unacceptable. And the legislation in question does not protect bullying—if that is defined as physical assaults or threats of such assaults—for religious reasons. It only states that the legislation “does not prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil, or a pupil’s parent or guardian.”

Of course, being on the receiving end of constant pronouncements that you are doomed to Hell or something similarly hideous would almost certainly become difficult, if not impossible, to bear. It shouldn’t be something that any child is subjected to in school. But how do you balance protecting children against people’s fundamental right to speak?

The answer is that despite all the lofty talk of “democracy” and other empty rhetoric behind public schooling, you cannot protect everyone equally in a government school. No matter what policy a public school or district adopts, government will pick winners and losers. That’s why the only solution to a quandary such as this is educational freedom: Give control of education funding to parents, let them choose among independent schools run by free educators, and enable people to choose schools that share their values. Then all people can select educations for their children that comport with their values and needs, and without government deciding who is more, or less, equal than whom.

I’m accustomed to a standard response when I propose removing government from some part of education: it’s not gonna happen, so forget about it. Often, a popular counter-proposal is then offered: Have government require “transparency” from schools, either of the k‑12 or higher variety. Transparency, apprently, is something we can get.

Except, it seems, we almost never do.

A couple of weeks ago I provided numbers exposing the likely failure of transparency in elementary and secondary education. Today, in a surprising twist, someone else reveals transparency futility in higher ed: Education Sector’s Kevin Carey, in a joint report with AEI’s Andrew Kelly. It’s surprising because Carey is one of the people who has dismissed my arguments for removing government as unrealisitc, and instead championed transparency as an achievable solution. In light of this, all credit to him for publishing his study.

The paper, The Truth Behind Higher Education Disclosure Laws, is awfully clear: Transparency requirements in the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act have led to either rampant evasion or deception in reporting everything from Pell-recipient graduation rates to employment placement info. Indeed, the report says that “by creating an illusion of transparency and disclosure” the requirements are worse than having no reporting at all.

Sound familiar?

Based on what we know about transparency mandates in education, it seems at least as quixotic to expect regulations to work as to expect that we can begin to remove govenment funding. The reality is that regulations are often far too convoluted and endless for the regulated to comply with even a small fraction of them; they often stymie enforcement for the same reasons; and they are regularly ignored because those who would be regulated have a lot more political sway on their issues than the public.

Unfortunately, repeated failure doesn’t seem to deter those with an abiding faith in regulation, including Carey and Kelly, whose report largely recommends tougher rule enforcement. But go from regular push ups to those hand-clapping ones and you still won’t budge the Earth.

Or maybe I’m wrong (it’s theoretically possible). Maybe government actually can make colleges change for the better. Maybe it’s just that transparency isn’t the answer. Indeed, whether government can move colleges for the better will the subject of a terrific, full-day conference Cato will be hosting on November 18th with the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Speakers will include CCAP founder and economist Richard Vedder; George Washington University President Emertius Stephen Joel Trachtenberg; Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein; and many more powerful analysts of the ivory tower. And the discussion, I assure you, won’t just be more regulation versus less taxpayer aid. There will be a wide variety of perspectives offered, and no doubt many surprising debates. I hope you’ll join us, and you can register here!

Today’s big news is that the Obama administration — thanks to those crisis-ignorin’ creeps in Congress — is going off on its own to reduce purportedly devastating student loan burdens. Well, that’s the message. The reality is that the proposals just tinker around the edges, meaning debtors are getting little relief while the notion that it’s okay to stick taxpayers with other people’s obligations is advanced.

What would the administration’s proposals do? There are several little wrinkles, but basically this: New, income-based repayment rules will be hurried a bit so that borrowers’ payments are capped at 10 percent of discretionary income (likely meaning income above 150 percent of the poverty line) rather than 15 percent, and remaining debt would be forgiven after 20 years rather than 25. In addition, borrowers with loans from both the now-defunct guaranteed loan program — loans through banks that are almost completely backed with federal money — and loans that come directly from Uncle Sam can consolidate those loans and get an interest rate reduction. In point of fact they could do the same thing before, only the administration is offering a .25 point interest reduction in addition to the .25 points that were previously offered.

Here, though, is the really miraculous part: According to the U.S. Department of Education, “these changes carry no additional cost to taxpayers.” Don’t ask how that can be — they don’t say — just rest assured!

For what it’s worth, these changes probably won’t cost taxpayers a whole lot, at least in Washington spending terms. Many borrowers don’t have both guaranteed and direct loans, and a normal federal loan has a ten-year term, meaning most borrowers probably aren’t still paying back twenty years down the line. Finally, while college prices are without question out of control, the average debt for a student graduating with any debt is still only around $27,000. That’s a heck of a lot closer to a car loan than a mortgage.

That said, the idea that any of this won’t cost taxpayers is bunk. They ultimately back all federal student loans, so unless Washington intends to send in the 82nd Airborne to force lenders with remaining guaranteed loans to write them off — which maybe I shouldn’t put past the feds — lenders will get paid. And any direct loans that get less money returned are immediate taxpayer losses. And yes, direct loans probably do make money for the federal government, but those receipts were pledged to Obamacare and deficit reduction when the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act was rolled into the health care bill to make the CBO numbers come out right. Change the revenue, and it means you’ve saddled taxpayers with more health care costs, or less supposed deficit reduction, than had been promised with Obamacare. And don’t even get me started on how any reduction or forgiveness of debt encourages students to borrow more and pay even higher tuition prices.

In light of all this, it looks like everyone is being sold a bill of goods by the administration: borrowers won’t get much relief, and taxpayers will indeed get saddled with additional costs.

I did the above interview recently with Choice​Me​dia​.tv on the subject of education tax credits and vouchers, in which I argued that credits are a better way of ensuring universal access to the education marketplace. Credits can either directly reduce the taxes owed by families who pay for their own children’s education (as in Illinois and Iowa), or they can offset donations taxpayers make to non-profit k‑12 scholarship programs that provide tuition assistance to the poor (as in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and several other states).

The interview elicited an important question from a commenter: If financial assistance for the poor comes from scholarship programs, isn’t there a risk that those programs will impose restrictions on how the scholarships can be used, thereby curtailing poor families’ educational options?

Minimizing that problem is actually one of the many reasons to prefer education tax credits over vouchers. Any time someone other than the parents is footing the bill for a child’s education, there is the risk that this third party is going to limit parents’ choices. The worst case, historically, has been when that third party is the government. When governments pay for schooling, there is a single set of regulations on what choices parents can make, and there is no way to avoid those regulations short of rejecting the financial assistance altogether—which the poorest families have difficulty doing. Vouchers bring with them this single set of government rules (and it is often an extensive one as I discovered in this study).

By contrast, scholarship tax credit programs, like the one in Pennsylvania, give rise to a multitude of different organizations that provide tuition assistance to poor families. If any one of those organizations decides to impose a particular set of restrictions on the use of its scholarships, it has no effect on any of the other organizations. Parents looking for financial assistance are thus free to seek it from a scholarship organization that aligns with their needs and values. The multiplicity of different sources of funding is instrumental—in fact it is essential—in ensuring that poor parents’ choices are not curtailed.

I’ve made this argument in a variety of places, most recently in a U.S. Supreme Court brief in the Arizona tax credit case ACSTO v. Winn.

Suddenly, student loans are nearing the top of the nation’s public policy debate. Indeed, President Obama is expected to make a big speech about them on Wednesday. Why the sudden ascendance? Probably because the burden of student loans is one of the few things OWSers are clearly angry about, and that has raised questions ranging from whether such loans should be dischargable in bankruptcy, to whether they help fuel the Saturn V rocket of college price inflation. And last Sunday GOP presidential contender Ron Paul jumped into the fray, suggesting we eliminate the federal student loan program entirely.

Paul is right about phasing out federal student loans. Unfortunately, that’s likely the last thing President Obama will propose.

The first reaction to hearing such a proposal is that it’s Grinch-level heartlessness, stealing a better future from low-income kids. That is almost certainly what the president would say, and such a reaction would likely poll well. That’s why he’s expected to propose lowering interest rates, easing repayment, and other borrower-friendly measures. But as I lay out in a Cato Policy Analysis to be released imminently, by most indications federal student aid and other taxpayer-fueled subsidies aren’t good for anyone. (Well, anyone not employed by a college or university, the ultimate receiving end of all the forced largesse). By artificially—and hugely—boosting consumption, they ultimately lead to massive tuition inflation, encourage millions of unprepared people to take on studies they never finish, and pour H2O into already watered-down degrees. In other words, student aid—including federal lending—is likely a net loss to both students and society.

But I’ve already said too much. If you want to get a lot more on this—and more on the many unintended evils of federal college policies—stand by for the release of my study. And if you’re in DC, come to Capitol Hill Thursday for a briefing on the subject with me and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R‑NC). It should give OWSers, libertarians, conservatives, liberals, and anyone else lots to think about.

Neal McCluskey gutted the President’s new “Save the Teachers” American Jobs Act sales pitch a good while back, as did Andrew Coulson here. Thankfully, it seems a lot of senators agree it’s a bad idea.

Last week, a $35 Billion piece of the president’s new “stimulus” plan, which included $30 Billion to bail out government schools—again—went down in the Senate:

Our public education problem is huge; we’re spending far too much and getting way too little. But most people don’t know the basic details. They still think we need to spend more on education.

So, for all of you who want to get the details but don’t have much time, or have family and friends who need to be introduced to reality, I present to you … Everything you need to know about public school spending in less than 2½ minutes.

Watch it, “like” it, post it on Facebook, email it around, comment, and generally get the word out … because we really do need to get the word out.