We don’t know for certain that controversial DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee will depart DC when her boss’s term ends — and it will end soon — but it seems very likely. Assuming she does leave, there is a big education lesson to be learned from Adrian Fenty’s re-election loss: Relying on crusading politicians to successfully and permanently reform a government schooling monopoly is a recipe for crushed hopes. Politics is simply too volatile — and enacting tough reforms too politically risky — for even good reforms to be sustained. It’s just another reason that the key to truly sustainable reform is school choice, in which parents control education funds, educators have to compete and perform for business, and children are no longer buffeted back and forth by the ever-changing winds of politics.

In the Washington Post, columnist Courtland Milloy praises the “profound egalitarian insights” and “radical oneness” of D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee (and billionaire Warren Buffett):

“I believe we can solve the problems of urban education in our lifetimes and actualize education’s power to reverse generational poverty,” Rhee wrote. “But I am learning that it is a radical concept to even suggest this. Warren Buffett [the billionaire investor] framed the problem for me once in a way that clarified how basic our most stubborn obstacles are. He said it would be easy to solve today’s problems in urban education. ‘Make private schools illegal,’ he said, ‘and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.’ ”

Milloy’s not satisfied that Rhee is taking on entrenched interests, firing principals and teachers who aren’t doing a good job, and apparently actually improving the schools in the District of Columbia. No, he’s attracted to the “radical concept” of outlawing private schools and forcing everyone in the District into the same schools, with no hope of escape. There would be one method of escape, of course: moving to the suburbs. And you can bet that lots more people would do that if Milloy and Rhee got their way.

I wonder what a total government monopoly on education would look like. Are Buffett and Rhee right that a government monopoly forced on every citizen would work well? Would work so well that it would “solve the problems of urban education … and reverse generational poverty”?

Well, one answer might be glimpsed on the same page B3 where part of Milloy’s column appeared. In an adjacent column, columnist John Kelly discussed his “Kafkaesque” five-hour visit to the state of Maryland’s Motor Vehicle Administration:

I was at the MVA. I was in Hell.

I know that complaining about the MVA or the DMV is the last refuge of a scoundrel columnist, but I don’t care. You don’t know what it was like. You weren’t there, man. I spent five hours at the Beltsville MVA on Thursday. Five hours. I could have driven to New York in that time.…

I thought: Can this really be happening? Can I really have stepped into a Kafka story? Shouldn’t every counter be filled with employees working as fast as possible? Shouldn’t management be out there helping, and Maryland state troopers, too? This is the Katrina of waiting, people.

The MVA, of course, is a monopoly government bureaucracy. Everyone must go there — CEOs, diplomats, even Washington Post columnists. And yet, somehow, that has not led to the MVA equivalent of solving problems and reversing poverty. Five hours to get a drivers’ license just might be worse performance than that of the public schools.

It’s the system, Mr. Milloy and Ms. Rhee. Monopolies don’t have much incentive to improve. Give everyone the chance to go to a different supplier, and then you’ll see improvement. Giant Food wouldn’t last long if it took five hours to buy your groceries — because it has competitors. But as long as the schools are a near-monopoly, and the MVA or DMV is a total monopoly, don’t expect real improvement.

As predicted, President Obama’s second annual back to school address – yes, the address is now “annual” — was relatively uncontroversial. It did give the President a caring, motivator-in-chief photo-op, which is certainly to his politicial benefit, but this time around there were no inappropriate study guides to go with the speech, nor did the president belittle profit-making endeavors. It was pretty much just trite, “work hard and be nice” fluff.

Unfortunately, the address has given some members of the media the chance to whitewash last year’s speech controversy, again working in the political favor of the President. Noting the absence of rancor this time around, some reporters portrayed last year’s brouhaha as if it were just the result of petty Republican partisanship, not mentioning at all the U.S. Department of Education lesson plans that kicked the whole thing off. It’s been a bit like reporting on World War I without mentioning the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

More disheartening is the “annual” part of all this, because it seems the nation has quietly resigned itself to yet another chip being taken out of federalism. It doesn’t matter that the president has no constitutional authority to kick off each new school year with an address to the nation’s kids, or that it opens up the very real possibility of serious politicization as the address becomes increasingly ensconsed. Right now the speech seems to do no harm, so no one wants to fight it.

There is one final reason this is discouraging. As a writer over at Pileus Blog laments, the speech is yet further evidence of “the way in which politics creeps into every nook and cranny of our world, leaving little space for us to breathe the fresh air of private life.” Indeed, now not even our children are able to breathe free.

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Education released the latest student-loan default data, and along with it offered some good ol’ fashioned profit-bashing. Meanwhile, politically favored schools got off with nary a negative word.

The FY 2008 default rates certainly aren’t good. Overall, 7 percent of borrowers whose first payments were due between October 1, 2007, and September 30, 2008, had defaulted by September 30, 2009. And yes, for-profit schools had the highest rate out of non-profit private, public, and for-profit schools, which came in at 4 percent, 6 percent, and 11.6 percent, respectively.

To what did Secretary of Education Arne Duncan attribute these results? The overall default rate, he suggested, was but the sad consequence of “many students…struggling to pay back their student loans during very difficult economic times.” The for-profit rate, however, had a very different cause: “[F]or-profit schools have profited and prospered thanks to federal dollars” and many have saddled “students with debt they cannot afford in exchange for degrees and certificates they cannot use.”

Already, you can see that for-profits are largely just an easy political target: All defaulting borrowers are portrayed as victims; wasteful, money-hoarding, non-profit institutions get no mention; and for-profits are painted as predators.

Of course, for-profits do have higher default rates, so maybe they really are predators. But there’s more from yesterday…

At roughly the same time Duncan was dumping on for-profit schools, his boss was feting another subset of higher education: historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Indeed, he was kicking off National HBCU Week, and lauding the schools’ work. But guess what? While the Education Department doesn’t release default rates for HBCUs as a group, quickly pulling those schools’ data together and averaging their default rates indicates a rate even higher than for-profit schools: almost 12 percent. Moreover, for four-year, private, non-profit HBCUs — which like for-profit colleges don’t get big state subsidies to help keep tuition artificially low — the default rate is nearly 13 percent.

So why no criticism by Duncan of HBCUs? Heck, why was his boss celebrating them?

Because they are politically favored, that’s why. Of course, this is in part because of their very important historical mission to furnish higher education to long-oppressed African Americans. It is also, though, because like all “non-profit” colleges and universities, HBCUs act as if their employees have no interest in higher salaries, nicer facilities, easier workloads — all the rewards that the people in not-for-profit schools give themselves instead of paying profits out to shareholders. But there’s no evidence that people in HBCUs or other non-profit schools are any less self-interested than people working or investing in for-profit institutions. 

Why do I point this out? Not to pick on HBCUs, but to further illustrate the point that the attack on for-profit schools isn’t really about saving taxpayer dollars or protecting students, but going after the easiest target to demagogue — people honest about trying to benefit themselves as much as “the students.” It is also to illustrate, once again, that when we let government fund something, it is political calculus — not educational benefits, economic effectiveness, or what’s best for taxpayers — that ultimately drives the policies. Which is why government needs to get out of the higher ed business that it has made both bloated and, ultimately, a net drain on the economy.

A story yesterday on CNN​Money​.com describes the plight of Jenny Frank, who is young and eager to begin a career in teaching but hasn’t been able to land a job. It’s always sad to hear of people failing to find work in their chosen field, but the article in question completely misses a staggeringly important national story. As I mentioned this morning on Fox ‘n’ Friends: we have about 1.5 million too many teachers already!

Since 1970, public school enrollment has barely budged–up just 9 percent. Over the same period, employment has doubled. We’ve added 3 million new government school jobs. Half of those are teachers, another quarter are teachers’ aides, and the rest are service personnel and bureaucrats. This hiring binge has contributed to a quadrupling in the real, inflation-adjusted cost of a k‑12 education: from $38,000 to $150,000 (constant 2009 dollars). It has not contributed to improved student achievement which, at best, has been flat at the end of high-school over that entire period.

If we went back to the staff-to-pupil ratio of 1970, we’d save something like $200 billion annually. And since achievement didn’t go up with the hiring boom, there’s no reason to expect it would fall if we pared back the government school rolls. And if staff reductions were focused on the lowest-performers, we would likely see student learning gains as kids were pulled out of the classes of bad teachers and placed into the classes of better ones. Our classes are currently much smaller than those of other nations that outperform us anyway (about 22 to 24 students per class in the US, versus an international average of 29).

Alas, none of that is going to happen while the education of American children remains focused on serving the adults employed by the system rather than kids. But imagine if education were part of the free enterprise system, in which quality and efficiency are handsomely rewarded and failure is penalized. The right-sizing of America’s education labor force would happen automatically, as parents shunned inneffective, expensive, overstaffed schools in favor of those that hired and retained only competent teachers–and only as many as are actually required to effectively reach children.

Isn’t education important enough to do what actually works?

Over at Public​Square​.net — a nifty debate site — you can catch another installment of the ongoing McCluskey-Petrilli national curriculum tussle. As always, I think the argument against imposing national standards — and, soon, tests – rules the day, but listen to the exchange and decide for yourself. Once you’ve done that, make sure to leave a note explaining why you think national standards offer no hope for improving American education.

Matt Yglesias thinks my assertion that we would be better off economically if education money stayed with taxpayers rather than going to public schools and universities is “totally insane.” Ouch!

Now, I can actually understand this, because many people have difficulty envisioning things other than what they’ve always known. But have I really gone all Crazy Eddie? If government didn’t spend taxpayer dough on education, would the poor be much worse off than they are today? Can we never over-invest in schooling because education is just so important? Does the college wage premium mean we should never ratchet down subsidies for college education? And is it at least possible that spending more and more public dough doesn’t lead to more or better education — by which I mean actual, valuable learning — as much as more waste?

Unfortunately, it seems Ygelsias didn’t follow any of the links I provided in the post containing the line he objected to, which furnished some valuable data answering these important questions. And, by the way, it really was just one line he seemed to dislike — the point of the post was to argue against spending yet more taxpayer dough on an education-centered stimulus, not for complete separation of school and state. And, of course, tax-credit-based school choice leaves taxpayers in control of their money without eliminating support for education.

But let’s start answering our questions in more depth so that Mr. Yglesias and others can start to think outside of the “how we’ve always done it” box.

First, let’s hit one critical point: Spending taxpayer money on government schooling does not actually mean you get better education. Let’s look at that graphically:

Here you can see nearly four decades of precipitously increasing expenditures on K‑12 education plotted against student performance. And what does it reveal? No correlation between the Death Valley of academic achievement and the Everest of spending. Ever-more taxpayer dollars have gone into the government education system, but the system hasn’t improved at all. Why? Because the educators receiving the money have no need to get better — they’ve gotten ever-more dough no matter what, in large part because many people simply assume that increased government spending on education equals better education. But if you spend hugely greater amounts and get no better results, that seems like it would be an economic drain, no? Which was exactly what I was arguing.

How about higher education?

On a per-pupil basis, over the last quarter-century spending on public colleges and universities has been steady overall, while aid per student at all schools has gone way up. And what do we have to show for that?

The first thing is incredible tuition inflation — the bane of American higher education. On a per-pupil basis, since 1988 real aid per student has risen 144 percent, while prices have inflated 81 percent at four-year-private schools and 145 percent at four-year publics. It seems, at least in part, that colleges and universities raise their prices because, well, the aid makes sure they can.

Surely, though, the schools use that money to provide more people with ever-better educations? Maybe, but much of the new money seems to have gone just to hiring more administrators, freeing professors from teaching so they can conduct research, and erecting ever more fabulous amenities. Which brings us back to the economic point: Maybe taking money from taxpayers to subsidize all this empire-building and waste might be an economic loss because taxpayers would otherwise spend the money more wisely. Maybe they’d invest in companies that provide better, cheaper products; give money to charities; buy education from stripped-down — but more educationally effective — schools; or use it for countless other things they need or want.

But what if all this subsidizing — even with its attendant waste — resulted in impressive educational outcomes? Then maybe, just maybe, it would be an economic net gain. But things look pretty bad: The six-year graduation rate for bachelor’s degree seekers is just 57 percent; roughly one-third of first-year students need to take remedial courses; and literacy dropped (see p. 38) roughly ten percentage points for Americans with at least a bachelor’s degree between 1992 and 2003. Oh, and that wage premium? It could very well include massive credentialism: It might be that you now need a bachelor’s degree for jobs that require only skills or abilities you could have attained on the job or in relatively brief specialized training. But at this point even half-way decent prospective employees would be expected to have gone to a four-year college.

Enough conjecture, though. Let’s go to the videotape — an actual effort to isolate the effect of government higher-ed spending on economic growth. Economist Richard Vedder has done this, and what he has found is that the more a state spends on higher education, the lower its rate of economic growth. Why? Among other possible things, it seems that when education is largely funded by third parties — especially third parties who have no choice in the matter — it decreases schools’ and students’ motivation to act efficiently. So sure, build that on-campus water park — I ain’t really paying for it!

Looking at things this way — contemplating the myriad costs, not just the assumed benefits, of taxpayer funding of education — it seems maybe my ideas shouldn’t be assigned a cell between the Joker and the Riddler quite so quickly.

But what about the equalitarian argument? Forget about economic efficiency — what about justice for the poor?

First off, I’d note that freer, more efficient economic systems tend to be better for everyone, rich and poor alike. You can read all about that here. But we need look no further than American history to see that people — including the poor — will get educated without government help. Before there was widespread government schooling there was widespread education. Indeed, by 1840 — when Mann’s common-school movement was still in diapers — it is estimated that 90 percent of adult whites in America were literate, a very high level relative to Europe. And the nation was hardly the Monopoly Man at the time. In other words, poor people got educated on their own.

But how could this be? Certainly part of the answer was that many poor people emphasized education, and much education occurred in the home. It was also provided by religious institutions, as well as philanthropists. And, of course, poor communities sometimes got together to establish their own schools.

But that was then and this is now, right? Education is much more complex because the world is much more complex. How could poor people get an education today if government didn’t provide it?

Well, for one thing, education need not be nearly as complex and expensive as it is. All those computers and other bells and whistles? There is hardly overwhelming evidence that they do any good — they may just be a huge waste of money. Meanwhile, many relatively barebones private schools seem to do just as good a job or better at educating students. Oh, and there’s that charity thing again: Religious schools provide low-cost education to millions of kids, and it could be lower if they didn’t have to compete with “free” public schools. And despite massive government subsidies to higher ed, private philanthropists give tens-of-billions of dollars to colleges and universities every year — imagine how much they might give if government didn’t say it would do the job! In other words, there is absolutely no overwhelming argument — to say the least — that just because the world is more complicated government must run schools and pay for education. Indeed, huge, bureaucratic, plodding government is about the least well-equipped entity to handle complication and fast change.

And guess what? There is a profit-motive to furnish education to poor students with demonstrated academic aptitude: If someone lends money to a poor student to go to college so she can get an education that enables her to increase her future earnings, both parties will end up profiting. And let’s not overlook India and numerous other developing countries, where many of the poorest people in the world, using their own money, attend for-profit schools that outperform the free public schools. And why is that? Because the parents whose valuable money is being spent have huge incentives to hold schools accountable, and schools have to respond to parents to stay in business.

But maybe all that’s not enough for Mr. Yglesias. Maybe he needs to also be reminded of what he himself noted:

The current state of schooling in America is already bad enough in terms of ill-serving poor people.

That’s for sure! Currently, wealthy people can choose schools: they do it by buying a house in a good district or paying for private schools. Meanwhile, poor parents are often trapped in awful schools because they can’t afford to buy a McMansion for tuition. In higher education, flagship public colleges and universities have disproportionately middle- and high-income student bodies. And student aid? With creation of tax credit programs you have to have sufficient taxable income to use, as well as loans like PLUS that have no income maximums, aid has been targeted higher and higher up income scales. Meanwhile, the tuition inflation that all that fuels appears likely to scare low-income people away from higher education more than any other group.

Finally, let’s not forget that it was government that for centuries prohibited millions of people — especially African-Americans — from receiving either an equal education, or any education at all. Without question during those times many private Americans would have discriminated in the provision of education, but government required discrimination by both bigot and good man alike.

So the current education system — which tends to be bent toward the will of the large, voting, middle- and upper-income blocs — already massively underserves the poor, and quite possibly makes it much harder for low-income Americans to compete with rich people than if everyone paid for schooling themselves. The system also injects huge distortions and inefficiencies into education, hurting overall economic progress. Of course, this is not an open-and-shut case — few things are in public policy — but you sure need to do more than just call removing government from education “insane” to counter it. Unfortunately, that’s not something it seems too many people — including Mr. Yglesias — are prepared to do.