There’s a rift within the U.S. school choice movement as to whether private school choice programs should cover every child or focus only on the poor. Fortunately, the cause of this disagreement is not so much that the two sides have different goals but that they have different assumptions about what will achieve those goals. And the nice thing about assumptions is that they can very often be tested against the real-world evidence. What actually works better: universal access to the education marketplace, or universal dependence on a government program? That’s the question I try to answer over at the RedefinEd blog today, in a post responding to veteran voucher campaigner Howard Fuller.
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Stop Using Slippery-Slope Arguments? Where Would that End?
Richard Thaler writes in the New York Times:
Justice Scalia is arguing that if the court lets Congress create a mandate to buy health insurance, nothing could stop Congress from passing laws requiring everyone to buy broccoli and to join a gym…Can anyone imagine Congress passing a broccoli mandate law, much less the court allowing it to take effect?
Yes annnnd…yes. Next question.
Surely, the justices have the conceptual resources to draw a distinction between the health care market and the market for broccoli. And even if they don’t, then all the briefs, the zillions of blog posts and a generation’s worth of economic literature can help them.
If drawing a constitutionally meaningful distinction between the markets for health insurance and broccoli is child’s play for Thaler, he should school all the brief- and blog-post-writers who so far have failed. That would have been a more productive use of his thousand words than his build-up to this thesis:
If you are opposed to a policy, state your case based on the merits — not on the imagined risk of what else might happen down the road. The path of that road is so unpredictable that it may even produce a U‑turn.
Good grief. Slippery-slope arguments are about principles. As in, “If you concede this principle because you don’t mind the result here, you will no longer have it to protect you against that bad result there.” Thaler’s thesis would lead, for example, to all manner of civil-liberties violations by the state because there simply isn’t enough political support to protect all the civil liberties of various minorities. But Thaler doesn’t want us to think about things like consequences or the future.
The potential for U‑turns makes no more sense as an argument against invoking slippery slopes principles, because principled arguments can help generate the U‑turn that opponents of, say, ObamaCare want to see.
I take silly arguments like this to be evidence that ObamaCare supporters are in complete panic mode.
Too Big to Manage
Yesterday I asked: If JPMorgan Chase’s loss of $2 billion shows the need for more bank regulation, what should the federal government’s $1.3 trillion deficit tell us? And Michael Cannon pointed out that in the private sector, people who make big mistakes tend to lose their jobs, unlike the public sector.
Today another theme is being heard, at the Wall Street Journal, on NPR, and many more places including even here at Cato@Liberty: banks like JPMorgan, which has annual revenue of $100 billion, are just “too big to manage.”
And again I have to wonder: if large banks are too big to manage, what should we think about the federal government? The federal government is the largest landowner, the largest insurer, the largest employer, the largest banker in the country. It operates everything from a judiciary to the most complex armed force in history to numerous health insurance programs to a retirement system to a highway system to a peanut subsidy program.
If JPMorgan is too big to manage, can we possibly expect competent management of such a massive operation that doesn’t even face the feedback of profit and loss?
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NCLB Is ‘Voluntary,’ Too
Why the big concern about the Common Core? For many it’s about the quality of the standards, which is a topic well worth delving into. But the real problem is that — continued protestations of supporters notwithstanding — adopting the standards has been anything but truly voluntary, and they are very likely to lead to complete federal control of education.
First, the sham voluntarism of today. Did your state want federal Race to the Top money? It had to adopt the Common Core to be fully competitive. Did it want out of the irrational, failed, No Child Left Behind Act? It had to have signed on to the Common Core to have a decent chance. Oh, and the tests that will go with the Common Core? The consortia creating them were selected by the federal government, which is also paying the bills.
And here’s something interesting: States didn’t technically have to sign on to NCLB, either. They “volunteered” to take federal dough and got NCLB with it. So why don’t you hear many people crowing that adopting NCLB was voluntary?
Because they know that it’s almost impossible for state policymakers to turn down hundreds-of-millions of federal dollars. It looks like a whole lot of money to state citizens, and those citizens had no choice about paying the federal taxes from which the money came. So neither signing on to NCLB nor the Common Core were truly voluntary, and the only reason the nation has fallen slightly short of Common Core unanimity is that, unlike NCLB, neither Race to the Top money nor NCLB waivers were guaranteed for every state. Nonetheless, most found it impossible not to take a gamble.
That said, the biggest threat is down the line. With almost all states having adopted the Core, there’s a huge chance that when Congress reauthorizes NCLB the Common Core — and the federal tests to go with it — will become the backbone of federal accountability, with schools rewarded or punished based on how they score on the tests. The rationale many policymakers will offer is easy to anticipate: “States have already signed on to shared standards, so it makes little sense not to base accountability on them.” Classic slippery slope.
From the vantage point of Common Core supporters, that is actually the only outcome that makes sense. As Fordham Institute folks have complained on numerous occasions, the vast majority of states will not on their own raise standards and maintain strict accountability. But if states won’t do it, the federal government – their boss — must.
But even if Common Core supporters achieve that which is the logical end of national standards and testing — federal control — it almost certainly won’t give them the educational outcomes they want.
Ultimately, the groups that have the most influence over any government policy are those most directly affected by it — they are the most motivated to be politically involved — and in education that’s the teachers and administrators whose very livelihoods come from the system. And because they are normal human brings — no better nor worse than the rest of us — what they ideally want, and fight for, is as little accountability to others as possible. That’s why so few states have ever had much success with standards and testing, and why it’s irrational to think that Washington will do any better. Indeed, at least to a limited extent states compete with each other for residents and businesses — Washington doesn’t face even that minimal upward pressure.
So what will the Common Core most likely get us? Red-tape driven federal control without rigorous standards and testing. It will also move us farther from the reform that actually makes sense: School choice for all, which would overcome disproportionate political power by forcing educators to respond to parents. And that’s not all it would do. It would also give educators new freedom to employ different pedagogies and curricula; enable children with diverse interests and needs to link up with teachers specializing in them; and unleash crucial competition and innovation. It would, basically, stop ignoring the fundamental realities that all children are different, and no one actually knows what are the ultimate, “best” curricula.
Unfortunately, not only are we moving away from what we need, we’re stuck fighting over what really isn’t even a question: Adopting the Common Core hasn’t been truly voluntary at all.
C/P from the National Journal’s “Education Experts” blog.
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J.P. Morgan and Yahoo: Market Successes
Investment giant J.P. Morgan made a bad trade that cost its owners $2 billion. The responsible parties are losing their jobs. Yahoo’s CEO evidently misled people about his qualifications. As a result, he lost his job.
If you want to know why these are market successes, consider: Medicare and Medicaid lose at least 35 times as much per year to fraud and other improper payments, and Medicare wastes even more on medical care that does nothing to make patients healthier or happier. This happens year after year after year.
Now ask yourself: when was the last time someone got fired over those losses? And yet the politicians’ first reaction to the J.P. Morgan trade was greater oversight by the political system, which tolerates much greater losses than the market system that is currently disciplining J.P. Morgan.
Here’s hoping the Yahoo incident inspires some politician to crack down on people who embellish their resumes.
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Will Smith: Socialists Just Don’t Understand
My French is rusty, but I’m pretty sure the Fresh Prince just flipped out at the idea of a 75-percent marginal tax rate like that advocated by France’s new socialist president.
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Gov. Christie Vetoes ObamaCare Exchange — ‘At This Time’
![Media Name: veto.png](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/wp-content/uploads/veto.png?itok=IxjW2H5y)
Today, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) became the latest governor to throw sand in the gears of ObamaCare, issuing an eleventh-hour veto of a bill to create an ObamaCare Exchange in New Jersey. An excerpt from his veto message:
While I am unwilling to approve the establishment of a statewide health insurance exchange at this time, I am mindful that the requirements of the Affordable Care Act still stand today and I intend to fully oversee New Jersey’s compliance in a responsible and cost-effective manner should its constitutionality ultimately be upheld by the Supreme Court… My Administration will continue this work and stands ready to implement the Affordable Care Act if its provisions are ultimately upheld.
Christie suggests he isn’t yet convinced that Exchanges are per se harmful. He also seems to suggest that if the Supreme Court upholds the law, creating an Exchange might be the best course for the state and that refusing to do so would put the state out of compliance with federal law–neither of which is true. But the veto message contains enough wiggle room for Christie to come out hard against any future ObamaCare Exchange.
Here’s hoping the Supreme Court renders all of this moot.