Michelle Malkin beat me to this story, but it bears repeating. So too does the accompanying video, especially at about the 3:15 mark. This is almost certainly not analogous to what the president will ask for in his address to students, but as you read the guidance given to schools by the U.S. Department of Education, it seems a heck of a lot closer than anyone should ever be comfortable with.

It’s one thing for a president to encourage kids to work hard and stay in school – that’s a reasonable use of the bully pulpit. It’s another thing entirely, however, to have the U.S. Department of Education send detailed instructions to schools nationwide on how to glorify the president and presidency, and prod schools to drive social change. Yet as Andrew Coulson has already begun to discuss, the latter is what President Obama, audaciously, has done.

This is, of course, a very troubling turn of events, giving rise to very legitimate fears of political and social indoctrination even if it turns out that those aren’t at all the President’s motives. Perhaps, though, this is also a blessing in disguise. As many liberals and conservatives push for national academic standards and other centralizing education reforms, this situation brilliantly illustrates why government schooling is totally antithetical to a free society, and why the more centralized the power, the greater the danger.

Some background: In anticipation of the president’s planned September 8 address to students nationwide, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter and detailed “classroom activities” with all sorts of alarming buzzwords and guidance to schools across the country. In his letter, Duncan asserts that the work of educators is “critical to…our social progress.” It’s a statement that suggests – as many educators have held and continue to hold – that it is the job of public schools to impose values, often collectivist, on students. Fear that this might be the case is reinforced by suggested classroom activities in the department’s guidance for pre-K‑6 students that encourage children to make posters setting out “community and country” goals. Perhaps even more frightening is the lesson being pushed that it is important to listen to “the President and other elected officials.” Possibly most distressing of all, though, is guidance that appears explicitly designed to glorify both the presidency and President Obama himself, encouraging schools to prepare for the speech “by reading books about presidents and Barack Obama.” Finally, schools are told to ask students how president Obama will “inspire” them in his speech before he gives it, and how they were inspired after Obama has spoken.

This is very disturbing, making crystal clear the huge dangers that attend government-controlled education. Ultimately, politicians will use power over education for their own ends, something fully at odds with a free society. And this is just the most stark manifestation of the inherent incompatibility of freedom and government education. As I have emphasized constantly since publication of my paper Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict, every day free people are pitted against one another, forced to defend their freedom and basic values because they all have to support a single system of government schools. Evolution vs. creationism. Prayer in – or not in – schools. Books with offensive material in libraries. Decisions over whose history will be taught, and whose won’t. The curtailment of freedom goes on and on when government takes everyone’s money and provides schools with it. And the more we centralize education – the more diverse people we force to support one system of schools – the greater the cost to liberty.

All of which makes one thing obvious: The only system of learning compatible with a truly free society is not one of government domination, but one rooted in educational choice – public education, not schooling – in which the public assures that all people can access education, but parents are free to choose their children’s schools and educators are free to educate how they wish.

For too long we have ignored freedom when it’s come to education, sacrificing liberty for “test scores” or “efficiency.” As a result, we’ve gotten neither good test scores nor efficiency while fomenting constant social conflict and building increasingly dangerous government control over our children and our lives. But hopefully some good will come of this troubling Obama administration initiative, issuing a desperately needed wakeup call to all Americans about the great damage government education can inflict on otherwise free people.

There’s been much interest in the blogosphere recently over spiraling college costs. Niraj Chokshi kicked things off at the Atlantic, and the discussion was picked up by Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein, among others.

We’ll be hosting a debate on the causes of and solutions to this problem at Cato on the 6th of October, but in the meantime, it’s worth noting what the blogosphere has thus far overlooked: the epic productivity collapse in k‑12 schooling over the past 40 years.

As I noted in Investors’ Business Daily last month, k‑12 spending has risen by a factor of 2.3 since 1969, while achievement at the end of high-school is flat. The scary details can be found here.

If public school productivity had merely stayed where it was in 1970, instead of collapsing as it did, Americans would enjoy a permanent $300+ billion annual tax cut.

State-run schooling has become so profligate and inefficient, in fact, that one recent study finds higher public school spending is associated with LOWER subsequent economic growth.

Oh, and regarding the education vs. health care debate that started all this: k‑12 productivity trends seem worse than those in health care.

President Obama will address every public school student in the nation next Tuesday, and is expected to exhort them to stay in school and work hard. This is such an a‑political message that even the popular conservative blogger Ace of Spades (who “cuts like a hammer”) found the planned speech largely unobjectionable so long as it doesn’t drift into demagoguery or an effort to boost the president’s faltering cult of personality.

My colleague Neal McCluskey is concerned that it may do just that, noting that the curriculum materials tied to the speech and sent out by education secretary Arne Duncan prompt students to “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president,” and ask how the president inspires them. If the president is trying to avoid raising concerns about his speech among supporters of limited government, he’s doing a double-plus ungood job of it.

But what incenses me is not that the president’s face will be filling every public school classroom in the nation in Orwellian fashion. Or the likelihood that the Democratic public school establishment (95+ % of the NEA’s political donations go to Democrats) will no doubt use his speech as an opportunity to advance a partisan ideological agenda.

What incenses me is that while the president will be saying nice things about kids staying in school and graduating, his own actions and policies are having the opposite effect!

There is copious scientific research showing that private schools have higher graduation rates than public schools, and that their graduates are more likely to go on to college and complete college. And that is after controls for student and family characteristics that may differ between the public and private sectors. There is research from the president’s own Department of Education that the DC voucher program is producing significantly better academic results than DC public schools (and at a quarter of the cost). But the president has chosen to kill the DC voucher program rather than grow it, and he opposes private school choice programs at the state level that would bring these better educational outcomes within reach of all children.

So kids, here’s your lesson for next Tuesday: the guy talking at you from the television set may say a lot of nice sounding things, but he is not doing what is best for you. He is letting some combination of ideology and political self-interest trump what is best for you. That’s politics. And that’s one reason why we need limited government and educational freedom.

Probably because it’s back-to-school time, there are lots of interesting higher education related items worth checking out today. Here are a few:

1. I have a new op-ed on the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsbility Act, the bill that we’re told will save taxpayer money but will almost certainly cost us tens of billions. Meanwhile, the Associated Press published a big article on “spin” about the legislation that ignores supporters’ extremely dubious assertions about SAFRA’s true costs — the AP repeats the supposed savings line without question — but instead focuses on whether Pell Grant increases will be as large as some people hope .
2. Over at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, they’re running a three-part series that’s really a lengthy email exchange among numerous experts, including myself, on controlling college costs. The central question is whether more government “transparency” requirements hold the key to containing skyrocketing college prices, or whether what we really need is to cut third-party payments. I think I’ve made it clear where I stand, but if you’re not sure (or even for some reason want other opinions) definitely take in the Pope series. Also, mark your calendars for a debate we’ll be having on this subject right here at Cato on October 6!
3. William McGurn has an excellent commentary in the Wall Street Journal explaining that — shocker! — you can make a very good living without getting a college degree.
4. I haven’t read it yet but have seen a summary, and if the summary is accurate a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that colleges and universities contribute no more to their local economies than “other forms of economic activity.” This puts another serious hole in the highly suspect argument that more public money for higher education is good because enriching colleges is better for everyone.

And that’s the ivy-ensconsed news for today!

Bruce Baker, author of the study of private school spending about which I blogged yesterday, has responded to my critique. Dr. Baker thinks I should “learn to read.”

He takes special exception to my statement that he “makes no serious attempt to determine the extent of the bias [in his chosen sample of private schools], or to control for it.” Baker then points to the following one paragraph discussion in his 51 page paper that deals with sample bias, which I reproduce here in full [the corresponding table appears on a later page]:

The representativeness of the sample analyzed here can be roughly considered by comparing the pupil-teacher ratios to known national averages. For CAS and independent schools, the pupil-teacher ratio is similar between sample and national (see Figure 21, later in this report). Hebrew/​Jewish day schools for which financial data were available had somewhat smaller ratios (suggesting smaller class sizes) than all Hebrew/​Jewish day schools, indicating that the mean estimated expenditures for this group might be high. The differential, in the same direction, was even larger for the small group of Catholic schools for which financial data were available. For Montessori schools, however, ratios in the schools for which financial data were available were higher than for the group as a whole, suggesting that estimated mean expenditures might be low.

Even with my admittedly imperfect reading ability, I was able to navigate this paragraph. I did not consider it a serious attempt at dealing with the sample’s selection bias. I still don’t. In fact, it entirely misses the main source of bias. That bias does not stem chiefly from class size differences, it stems from the fact that religious schools need not file spending data with the IRS, and that the relatively few that do file IRS Form 990 (0.5% of Catholic schools!) have a very good reason for doing so: they’re trying harder to raise money from donors. This is not just my own analysis, but also the analysis of a knowledgeable source within Guidestar (the organization from which Baker obtained the data), whose name and contact information I will share with Dr. Baker off-line if he would like to follow-up.

Obviously, schools that are trying harder to raise non-tuition revenue are likely to… raise more non-tuition revenue. That is the 800 pound flaming pink chihuahua in the middle of this dataset. According to the NCES, 80 percent of private school students are enrolled in religious schools (see p. 7), and this sample is extremely likely to suffer upward bias on spending by that overwhelming majority of private schools. They may spend the extra money on facilities, salaries, equipment, field trips, materials, or any number of other things apart from, or in addition to, smaller classes.

Baker’s study does not address this source of bias, and so can tell us nothing reliable about religious schools, or private schools in general, either nationally or in the regions it identifies. The only thing that the study tells us with any degree of confidence is that elite independent private schools, which make up a small share of the private education marketplace, are expensive. An uncontroversial finding.

It is surprising to me that this seemingly obvious point was also missed by several other scholars whose names appear in the frontmatter of the paper. This is yet another reminder to journalists: when you get a new and interesting paper, send it to a few other experts for comment (embargoed if you like) before writing it up. Doing so will usually lead to a much more interesting, and accurate, story.

I know, it’s a bit of a dog-bites-man headline, but bear with me. A new study by a Rutgers University ed. professor purports to tell us about “Private Schooling in the U.S.: Expenditures, Supply, and Policy Implications.” The trouble is, the study presents no data that are representative of private schooling in the U.S.

Author and ed school professor Bruce Baker analyzed per pupil expenditures of private schools that had registered with Guidestar​.org. Based on its mission statement, Guidestar is a service brings together charities seeking donations with would-be donors, in an effort to encourage philanthropy. Only a fraction of the nation’s private schools participate, and they are self-selected into that group. It is reasonable to think that the schools that self-select into Guidestar are the ones most avidly seeking donations. According to a PowerPoint presentation on Guidestar’s site, its top five types of users are:

• Non-Profit Development Directors
• Non-Profit Fundraising Directors
• Grant Writers
• Foundation Grants Administrators and Donor Services Managers
• Corporate Foundation Giving Program Managers

Quite possibly, the private schools most actively seeking non-tuition revenue are the ones… receiving the most non-tuition revenue. So not only is the Guidestar population of private schools not randomly selected, and non-representative of private schools nationally, there is reason to believe it is biased in the direction that its author and funders favor.

This would be bad enough, but it gets worse. The author makes no serious attempt to determine the extent of the bias, or to control for it. In fact, he consciously makes it worse: he choses to eliminate from consideration any private schools reporting revenues or expenditures under $500,000, thereby excluding smaller, less expensive schools.

I have literally NEVER seen a serious academic study that starts from a sample that is known to be biased in the direction favored by its funders and then consciously makes matters worse by actively skewing it even further!

An example of the kind of analysis that is supposed to accompany the presentation of a non-random sample to ascertain extent and direction of bias appears in my own 2006 study of Arizona private schools, available here. I dedicate five pages (beginning on page 14) to an assessment of whether and to what extent my survey respondents differed from the universe of all Arizona private schools. Significant effort was expended on that section of the study, because it is both necessary and expected. I was disappointed, though not surprised, by the absence of such a section in the Baker study.

Not only can the Baker study not tell you how much U.S. private schools really spend, it seems to have a little difficulty getting the public school spending figures right, too. For instance, there is a line on page 42 implying that DC public schools were spending $14,000 in 2007. Federally-reported data show that DC was already spending over $18,000 per pupil in 2005-06. And I’ve shown that it spent $28,000/pupil in 2008-09.

Finally, did I mention that Baker’s study was funded by the NEA-bankrolled “Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice”? As Ed Sector pointed out a couple of years ago: “The Great Lakes Center and the NEA’s Michigan affiliate are also linked on a personal level: [the Center’s director] Teri Battaglieri is married to Michigan Education Association Executive Director Lou Battaglieri.”

***

Update: Note that the reason Guidestar only has financial information for a small fraction of the nation’s private schools is that the vast majority of U.S. private schools are religious, and religious schools are not required to file IRS Form 990 (from which Guidestar gets its financial data). The religious private schools that do file Form 990 are thus a small self-selected group that is presumably seeking to maximize its revenue from charitable donations, and hence very likely biased toward higher spending schools.