Just when you’re ready to feel sorry about the terrible treament colleges and their students receive at the hands of cheapskate legislators and economic downturns, you see the pampering they’re receiving from other hands. It almost makes you not want to send them your hard-earned cash.
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Education
School Choice Saves Money and Children
State governments are facing declining tax revenues and increasing budgetary demands. So lawmakers should take note of a state report from Florida released today that concludes Florida is saving millions of dollars with school choice.
School choice is the only policy that means huge returns for state governments, school districts, taxpayers, and children all at the same time.
The Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability found that taxpayers saved about $39 million, close to 50 cents for ever dollar donated through Florida’s education tax credit program last year. The report concludes much more could be saved if politicians expand the program and give families more choice.
Florida’s education tax credit program allows businesses to take dollar-for-dollar tax credits on money they donate to scholarship organizations that help kids attend private schools. Instead of sending a portion of their tax bill to the state, businesses can choose to support alternative education options for needy children and save taxpayers a bundle as well.
This is one more in a long line of research showing that school choice saves money while savings kids.
Florida needs to expand their program and other states need to catch up with the seven that already have education tax credit programs.
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Professorial Feeding Frenzy
Just as predicted, more and more ivory-tower sharks are gathering for the taxpayer bloodlet…er…stimulus. But what choice do they have? Even Harvard’s had to cut back:
Even holiday parties for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have been scaled back.
On Thursday, Harvard deans and administrators will gather in the faculty room in University Hall for one bash instead of two, normally held off-site. No spouses or other guests. Only wine, beer, soda; no hard liquor.
But the festivities will not entirely lose their glow. Harvard being Harvard, the faculty room is plush — adorned with crystal chandeliers, Oriental carpets, and marble busts and oil paintings of Harvard’s presidents and famous alumni. The mint-green walls are accented with Greek columns. Revelers will feast on puff pastries, canapes, and other hors d’oeuvres as a student plays seasonal music from the grand piano in the corner.
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Arne Duncan
I don’t know much about Arne Duncan, President-elect Obama’s choice to be Secretary of Education. But I do note this: In seven years running the Chicago public schools, this longtime friend of Obama was apparently not able to produce a single public school that Obama considered good enough for his own children.
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Bye Bye, Budget Witch!
Thanks to all the bailouts and stimuli, higher ed folks are singing “Hail, hail, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The Budget Witch!”
Yesterday, a whole slew of ivory-tower advocacy groups called on Congress to furnish big increases in Pell Grants and work-study as part of any upcoming stimulus package. And that’s probably just the beginning of the rampant Treasury-looting (or is it looting future generations?) in which they intend to partake.
Explained Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers:
“I think everybody is going to fight for their fair share,” Nassirian says of the current budget climate.
As a result, long-time concerns about deficit spending and limited resources have all but vanished. “The budget always has checkmated many policy ideas we presented in the past,” Nassirian says. Of the abrupt shift in tone in Washington, he says, “It’s extraordinary.”
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
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When Are “Poor Choices” a Good Thing?
When they are the educational choices made by the world’s poorest people.
By now, most people working in international development and education have heard that some of poorest people on the planet have given up on their failed government schools and started paying for ultra-low-cost private schooling out of their own nearly-empty pockets. But the experts have usually ignored the phenomenon, or deprecated these private schools and the parents choosing them. In the past few years, however, researchers like James Tooley have blow this story wide open, revealing that fee-charging private schools are enrolling the majority of students in many Third World slums and villages, and that they are significantly outperforming the much higher-spending “free” government schools.
In a new Forbes commentary, former U.S. assisitant secretary of education Chester Finn tells how he went from skeptic to convert by seeing these schools for himself in the impoverished Old City of Hyderabad.
Want to visit these schools, too, but are a little apprehensive about the air fare? Just stay tuned until next April when Cato publishes The Beautiful Tree, James Tooley’s first-person narrative account of his research, adventures, and discoveries from the shanty towns of Africa to the remote mountain villages of Gansu, China.
If the free education marketplace can more effectively serve families in some of the most disadvantaged corners of the globe, imagine what it could do in far wealthier nations such as our own.
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Automakers Should Learn from Public Schools
The Big Three automakers seem ready to settle for a $15 billion bailout that will probably do very little good and considerable harm.
They’re thinking too small. Much too small.
If they model themselves on the public school system, as I suggest in a new Cato Commentary, they will have a truly risk-free business model in which they will be well protected from the rigors of competition and fickle consumers.
Update: It seems I’m not the only one to see the merits of modeling the auto industry on our famously efficient and successful school monopoly. Jay Greene proposes an NCLB act tailored to the automakers.