…and don’t privilege the wealthy who can pay for special access.” Well, no — those are two great myths exploded in this piece about Chicago’s public schools. Remember the article next time you hear that school choice is unacceptable because it keeps everyone from having equal access to great schools.
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Education
Diane Ravitch Is Right on Republicans and NCLB
Writing in yesterday’s WSJ, education historian Diane Ravitch laments that Republicans have abandoned their earlier defense of federalism and limited government in education, embracing vast and expanding powers for Washington over the nation’s schools. In particular, she faults the No Child Left Behind act for demanding public school improvements that have not been forthcoming and for imposing “corrective” measures that will not correct the problem.
Though I depart from Ravitch on most education policy matters — and not just on conclusions but also methodology — she is right in both of the above observations. Over the past decade, many Republicans have championed new federal powers in education that have no basis in the U.S. Constitution, no plausible empirical justification, and no evidence of success. NCLB demands higher achievement without creating the market freedoms and incentives that would actually allow it — asking, in other words, for the impossible.
With the current resurgence of public interest in limited government, Republicans have an excellent opportunity to rekindle their commitment to the limited federal role in education laid out by the U.S. Constitution. Phasing out NCLB would be a good place to start.
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Righteous Indignation vs. Profits vs. Facts
Yesterday the Education Trust — a group focused on educational equity — released the latest righteousness-dripping attack on for-profit colleges and universities. I won’t go into the whole thing, but will offer one critique as kind of a teaser for some of the insights to expect from next week’s Cato forum “Profiting from Ivory Towers.”
As seems to be standard in these kinds of reports, the authors take the worst data they can find for for-profit schools, conduct an apples-to-pears comparison to public and private nonprofit institutions, and declare for-profit schools demons of the first order. Case in point:
To start with completion rates, among first-time, fulltime, bachelor’s degree-seeking students who enroll at for-profit institutions, only 22 percent earn degrees from those institutions within six years. By contrast, students at public and private nonprofit colleges and universities graduate at rates two to three times higher—55 and 65 percent, respectively.
That looks pretty bad for for-profit schools. But here’s the thing: For profits argue — and there seems to be general agreement on this — that they take disproportionate percentages of “underserved” students, presumably deserving people other schools leave behind. Since getting such people college degrees is a central Education Trust mission, it seems that what should be important is how good a job schools do at getting those underserved students a diploma, not all students.
Unfortunately, we don’t have good income data for students, but we do have a couple of proxies to help answer this important question.
The first proxy is offered by the Education Trust itself, which gives six-year graduation rates in four-year institutions broken down by the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants at the schools. (Pell Grants are federal grants aimed at low-income students.) Looking at the stratum of schools with 67–100% of students receiving Pell Grants, the graduation rate at for-profit schools is only 1 percentage point lower than public schools, and five points higher than private nonprofits. The report doesn’t say how many schools fall into this group, importantly, but that the Education Trust’s own report gives a hint that when it comes to educating the most underserved students for-profits do no worse than other schools shouldn’t be ignored.
We can also examine federal data to get a more fair comparison. Using data from Table 5 of this recent report, we can see that if we use another rough proxy for underserved populations — in this case, minority status — graduation rate disparities are significantly different from the Education Trust’s picture.
First, when you look just at six-year graduation rates for bachelor’s seekers at four-year schools, the rates are indeed 55 percent, 65 percent, and 22 percent for public, private nonprofit, and for-profit schools, respectively. Look at African-American graduation rates, however, and, while they drop for all sectors, they drop by the smallest amount at for-profits. For African Americans, publics have just a 39 percent graduation rate, private nonprofits 45 percent, and for-profits 16 percent. Look next at Hispanic or Latino students and you’ll see something more dramatic: While Hispanic and Latino students’ graduation rates are lower than the overall rates in public and nonprofit privates, they are actually above the overall rate at for-profits.
How about two-year schools? Here for-profits appear to do much better than their competitors, both with overall and minority graduation rates. Indeed, while public schools graduate just 22 percent of their students overall, 14 percent of their African Americans, and 17 percent of their Hispanic and Latino students, for-profits graduate 60 percent, 49 percent, and 63 percent of those students, respectively. That’s really a crushing difference in the favor of for-profits, but the Education Trust authors can’t make themselves applaud the profit-makers for it. Instead, they complain that for-profit students have to go into debt to get those results. Needless to say, the fact that especially public schools are much cheaper to students because they get huge taxpayer subsidies right off the bat is not a point of emphasis for the Education Trust crusaders.
So is it the case that for-profit schools are actually really good? Hardly. While most of the data that’s been reported in the war on profits has been distorted to demonize for-profit institutions, there are lots of problems with using extent data to defend those schools. As Education Sector’s Ben Miller — who will be one of our panelists on November 30 — has rightly pointed out, federal graduation data is terrible for controlling for transfer rates and other important wrinkles. Moreover, almost no one — save, perhaps, yours truly – has pointed out what seems to be the real problem here: Not that one sector of higher education is worse than another, but that they all bring in students with thousands of ever-growing federal dollars — taxpayer dollars — attached to them, killing students’ incentives to economize and schools’ incentives to keep prices under control. In other words, almost every college and university is getting rich off of unprepared and/or overschooled students because you, not students or schools, are paying so much of the bill.
So there’s your teaser. To see how this plays out when all sides of the Ivory Tower Wars are in one place, come to Cato on November 30, or watch the forum live online!
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An Education in Bizarro Constitutional History
Last week, Rep. Mike Honda (D‑CA) published a call in The Hill for a much bigger federal role in elementary and secondary education. His plans are loaded with flaws too numerous to dissect here, so I’ll just highlight one, depressing thing about his piece: his bizarro constitutional history. Follow Honda’s narrative and you’d think for most of our history the feds stayed out of education because of the Articles of Confederation, and a jerky little state called Rhode Island:
Inequity in education has historical roots. At its inception, the Federal Government lacked the capacity and the authority to take responsibility for public education. Before the Constitution was drafted, the 13 colonies operated under the Articles of Confederation, created by the Second Continental Congress. The Articles of Confederation could only be amended by unanimous vote of the states. Any state had effective veto power over any proposed change.
In addition, the Articles gave the weak federal government no taxing power. It was entirely dependent on the states for its money and had no power to force delinquent states to pay. In fact, Rhode Island, fearing that the Convention would work to its disadvantage, boycotted the Convention in the hopes of preventing any change to the Articles. When the Constitution was subsequently presented to the Confederation, Rhode Island refused to ratify it. To placate the states, the Tenth Amendment ceded broad authority to the state governments.
Consequently, as regions of the country developed their own public education systems, disparities opened up.
That Rep. Honda published this dreck is as good as any argument for keeping Washington way out of our schools, especially our American history and civics classes.
The Articles, for one thing, were weak on purpose — Americans were extremely concerned about concentrating too much power in the hands of a central government. Mr. Honda, however, sounds almost as if Americans somehow arrived to find the Articles of Confederation already in place and just had to put up with a bad situation.
Much more egregious — but also, I’m afraid, more common — Honda writes as if the Constitution does not contain Article I, Section 8, which purposely gives the federal government only specific, enumerated powers, and automatically leaves all others to the states and people. The 10th Amendment — which Honda asserts is what long kept DC out of education — does not actually change in any way what power belongs to the feds, states, and people — it just makes it more explicit.
Finally, very few Americans in the 1770s and 1780s would have even recognized something called “public education,” much less tried to give the national government “responsibility” for it. Back then education was almost entirely a family, church, and community affair, and most people wouldn’t have imagined anything different.
Sadly, Honda’s piece is just further confirmation that many of our representatives in Washington care not one whit about what the Constitution says and permits Washington to do. That, or they really don’t know. Either way, it helps explain why the nation is in a world of hurt, and makes very clear that the obstacles to getting Washington out of education are very tall, indeed.
Why Is Bill Gates Writing Code for a Coleco Adam?
Bill Gates is addressing the Council of Chief State School Officers today. According to the NYT, he’ll tell them to bite the bullet and start making sound budgetary decisions like rewarding teachers based on merit instead of time served, and not handing out raises simply for the trappings of higher learning, but rather for demonstrated prowess in the classroom. In principle, that’s good advice.
But it’s an ultimately futile effort, and here’s why:
Bill established himself early on as a pretty sharp computer programmer, and no doubt he still is. But there’s only so much you can do when the hardware you’re writing for is a pile of junk. Public schooling is the Coleco Adam of education systems.
The Adam was a pretty cute looking machine for its time (1983), but it had some fundamental flaws. Among other things, turning the power on or off had a habit of sending out electromagnetic pulses that fried the data on its storage tapes. Oops. Now a good programmer might figure how to mitigate the damage caused by that problem (I dunno, treat the two tapes as a RAID 1 array, maybe?), but then the machine also had its power-supply located in the mandatory (and noisy, and slow) printer that came with it. So if the printer had to be serviced, you were left with a paperweight. Hard to fix that one in software.
It’s the same with public schooling. By its very design, it lacks the freedoms and incentives that relentlessly allow and pressure executives to make sound decisions in the free enterprise sector of the economy. Bill’s a sharp corporate executive as well as a sharp programmer. He’ll no doubt give the state superintendents of public instruction some reasonable advice. And ultimately it won’t matter.
If they make great decisions, these execs will at best get a pat on the back. If they make terrible ones, it likely won’t affect their compensation or careers much, because millions of families have little choice but to send their children to the official state-run schools. Given the state-run system’s monopoly on $13k / pupil of tax funding, it’s hard for most parents to pay for a better quality education for their kids.
This is a systemic problem. Without the necessary freedoms and incentives, good decisions made today will eventually be supplanted with worse ones in the future because public schooling has no built-in mechanism to consistently encourage the good over the bad.
Bill, it’s a hardware problem.
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Sweden’s Voucher-Funded ‘Nazi’ School
They told me if we have school choice, there’d be Nazi schools. And they were right! Sort of.
I’m talking with one of the teachers and I ask why she left the Swedish state school system.
“Because of the chaos,” she says. “There is no discipline. The students do what they want. They listen to their iPods and mobiles in class.”
My eyes open wide. “They have their mobiles out in lessons?”
She nods. “Yes. There is nothing the teacher can do about it. There are no punishments like detention in Sweden.…”
I frown. “But here, it’s different, yes?”
She nods. “Oh yes. Here we’re all about order. They call us the Nazi school.”
This conversation, which took place in a voucher-funded private school, is illuminating. It illustrates a problem at the core of official state schooling: the enrollment of a child in a government school is not a mutually voluntary act.
All our (legal) interactions in civil society and within the free enterprise system are mutually voluntary. People choose their own churches, grocery stores, and clubs — and those organizations choose them. Fail to abide by the code of conduct of the establishment, and you’re out. Everyone knows this, and expulsions are rare as a result. We seek out others who share common goals or values because we all benefit from our interactions.
This is not the case under official state school systems. Everyone is compelled to pay for state schooling and so there is intense economic pressure to send one’s children to the state schools. The state schools, in turn, are constrained in the extent to which they can establish rules of conduct for attendance. State school attendance is not truly voluntary for either party.
Not surprisingly, this compromises the value of the interactions. State schools often can’t do everything they think is necessary to fulfill their mission, and parents often find the schools unresponsive to their needs and demands.
Moving education back toward the mutually voluntary sector, as Sweden has done with its private school choice program, has freed up each school to establish its own clear rules of conduct and has freed up parents to choose the kinds of schools best suited to their children. Some prefer permissiveness and others order and each family can get what it’s looking for without having to impose its preferences on others. The system isn’t perfect, but its advantages over the U.S. status quo are obvious.
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New NAEP Scores Reveal Education Shell Game
Over the past two decades, the media and federal education officials have tended to focus on modestly improving test score trends of 4th and 8th graders. As my colleague Neal has mentioned, new 12th grade results were released today, and they once again call that practice into question.
Whether one looks at the fixed “Long Term Trends” series of national test results reaching back to the early 1970s, or at the ever-evolving “Nation’s Report Card” series, it seems as though student achievement has improved a little over time at the 4th and (to a lesser extent) 8th grade levels. By the same token, both of those data series show little or no improvement in achievement at the end of high-school over the past one, two, or four decades. Indeed the most recent 12th grade results show a small but statistically significant decline in reading scores since 1992.
High school graduates are no better prepared today than they were in previous generations, despite the fact that we’re spending 3 times as much on their K‑12 educations. Some of what they’re learning they may be learning a bit earlier, but when applying to college it’s the K‑12 academic destination that matters, not the journey.
And that destination suggests that the past four decades of so-called public “school reform” have done nothing to improve the academic preparation of high school seniors for college, life and work. Not ESEA. Not NCLB.
Perhaps government is not the best source of progress and innovation after all? Perhaps if we want to see progress and innovation in education we should allow it to participate in the free enterprise system that has been responsible for staggering productivity growth in every field not dominated by a government monopoly?