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Quick Thoughts on the Damon-ized Education Debate
Last Saturday, a movement called Save Our Schools held a rally in DC. You probably wouldn’t know it, save for one thing: actor Matt Damon addressed the participants, was interviewed by Reason.TV, and suddenly cable anchors and others declared that Mr. Damon had wiped the floor with anyone who’d dare say anything negative even slightly connected to teachers. That Mr. Damon had uttered little of substance — that he had mainly delivered assertions about teachers working themselves to death for an, um, fecal-matter salary — seemed irrelevant. He had delivered his thoughts with conviction, and the matter, apparently, was settled!
This is a sad commentary on the state of the education debate. For one thing, that a rally largely objecting to top-down standards-and-testing dictates (though also school choice and “privatization”) will likely be remembered mainly for a movie star’s impassioned talk is unfortunate. There are numerous potent reasons to object to government-imposed standards and tests — reasons I’d love to see get lots more attention — but, unfortunately, many SOSers seem content to simply frame the problem as evil “corporatists” trying to attack and punish teachers. That’s some weak sauce, but the primary meme of the event was basically that anyone who’d dare critique public schooling is really assaulting Howard Hesseman. It was, essentially, an ad hominem attack on anyone who advocates reforms that some teachers don’t like, and as a result it’s a message that, sadly, deserves little attention.
Which brings me to the lack of substance in Damon’s most celebrated assertion, the one about salaries. As Nick Gillespie at Reason elucidates and I explore at length in a recent Policy Analysis, it’s not true that public school teachers, on average and based on hours worked, make small money relative to other professionals. That’s in no way to say individual teachers are making the “right” salary — that can only be determined in a free market, in which salaries are ultimately determined by the priorities of both education producers and consumers — but it is, to say the least, a stretch to describe teachers’ salaries as Damon did. Indeed, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, I found that teachers made more per-hour than accountants and auditors, registered nurses, and insurance underwriters. Even first-year teachers, as I illustrate in the PA, make enough to live quite comfortably.
Oh, and Damon’s assertion about teachers working “really long hours”? Many absolutely do, and teaching can be a very draining job. It’s one of many reasons we need to move away from rigid, union-demanded salary ladders that keep good teachers from getting rewarded for their hard work. We also, even more importantly, need a free market so that parents can direct money to schools that succeed with their children, and all their teachers can get rewarded. That said, according to a 2008 BLS “time diary” study, on average, during periods when teachers are working — so not including vacation times — teachers do not toil longer than other professionals, including work beyond contract hours.
It’s sad that it takes a contentious interview with a celebrity going viral on the Internet to get attention paid to what are real, and complex, problems in education. It is even more depressing that when attention is paid, the message one hears is so divorced from evidence and substance.
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Anoka-Hennepin “Battleground” is Government Schooling in Microcosm
The Star-Tribune has a telling article about the Anoka-Hennepin school district, Minnesota’s largest and, after a recent string of suicides, the subject of a lawsuit and federal investigation over its handling of sexual orientation-based bullying. What led to the suicides and how the district dealt with bullying remain open questions, but in the absence of concrete evidence on those matters, perhaps nothing nails Anoka-Hennepin’s root problem as squarely as this article subhead: “Diverse and large.”
Anoka-Hennepin, in other words, appears to be the nation in microcosm, and the firestorm enveloping it sadly but starkly illustrates the destructiveness of forcing diverse people to support a single system of government schools.
Beyond its succinct subhead, the Star-Tribune piece expands on its main point:
The spotlight isn’t a surprise to [Superintendent Dennis] Carlson, who recalls the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone telling him that politicos and cultural observers look to the disparate school district as a bellwether not just for the state, but the nation.
“That’s why we’ve been chosen for this political battleground,” Carlson said. “[But] it’s not a battle we want to fight. That’s not why we’re here.”
One flashpoint is the district’s 10-sentence Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy, which allows teachers to discuss sexual orientation issues but requires them to remain neutral. Two national civil rights groups sued the district this month on behalf of five current and former students, seeking removal of the policy, which they say doesn’t do enough to prevent harassment.
Meanwhile, a parents group is seeking to keep the policy in place and accuses the lawsuit sponsors of using children as pawns.
All the problems with forcing diverse people to support a single system of government schools are here: The inevitable conflict; the hopelessness of “neutrality” (which itself requires taking a stand not to act on something); and schools becoming battlegrounds when what most people presumably want is just for them to teach their children. Oh, and as usual with politically controlled schooling, there’s politics thrown in: Anoka-Hennepin is in Michele Bachmann’s district, and people are starting to connect its problems to her.
Anoka-Hennepin is, save for being the home of a major presidential candidate, not an outlier: As I laid out in a 2007 report, in just a single year battles sparked by the zero-sum contest of whose rights and morals win in government schooling raged across the nation. Subsequent to publishing that, I have collected information on hundreds more throwdowns around the country, which I hope to have posted on Cato’s website in the coming months.
This is not how education in a free country should operate — government picking rights winners and losers — yet based on fuzzy notions of all-togetherness many education thinkers and pundits blithely assert that government schooling is the “foundation of our democracy.” It’s a conclusion that simply isn’t supported by either logic or evidence, and Anoka-Hennepin exemplifies both crucial failings.
I don’t know if the Anoka-Hennepin district intentionally failed to combat bullying based on sexual orientation — if it did, that is clearly unacceptable — but from what is known, Anoka-Hennepin, like public schooling generally, is doomed to war. And there is only one way to meaningfully foster peace: Let parents control education dollars and choose schools that share their values, rather than forcing citizens to come to blows.
Public Right on Choice, Wrong on Standards, But Always Well Intentioned
Today the good folks at the journal Education Next released their annual survey of education opinion. What follows is a quick summary of many of the things the pollsters found, followed by a little commentary about the national-standards results. (Adam Schaeffer, I have it on good authority, will be flogging the tax credit and voucher findings in an upcoming post.) Bottom line: The public usually has the right inclinations, but gets some answers wrong as a result.
One note: As is always the case with polls — but I won’t go into great detail with Education Next’s questions — remember that question wording can have a sizable impact on results.
So what did Education Next find?
- Almost everybody reports paying at least some attention to education issues
- 79 percent of Americans would grade the nation’s public schools no better than a “C”
- 54 percent of Americans, and 43 percent of parents, would grade their communities’ public schools no better than a “C”
- Even when told how much their district spends per pupil, 46 percent of respondents think funding should increase. But that’s down from 59 percent when the current expenditure isn’t given
- Pluralities of Americans favor charter schooling and government-funded private-school choice (without mention of the sometimes toxic word “voucher”), and a close majority supports tax-credit-based choice
- A huge majority, even after having been given the average teacher salary, thinks teachers should get paid more or about the same as they currently do
- A plurality thinks teachers should pay 20 percent of the cost of their health-care and pension benefits
- Large pluralities — and for one question a majority — support judging and rewarding teachers based on performance, as well as easing credentialing and tenure rules
- The public is about evenly split on whether teachers’ unions are good or bad for their districts
- Big majorities support federal testing demands (without mention of the often-toxic No Child Left Behind Act) as well as states adopting the “same set” of standards and tests (without mention of federal incentives to do so)
- A plurality of Americans oppose taking income into account when assigning students to schools
- Only 16 percent of respondents think local taxes for their district should decrease
All of these results demonstrate good reflexes by the public. They know, for instance, that overall the public schools are performing poorly, but they are a little happier with the districts they often chose when selecting homes. They want to spend more money on schooling because education is generally a good thing, but that drops when they are told how much is actually being spent (a slippery figure few hard-working Americans have time to pin down themselves). They recognize the need for choice, something they benefit from in almost every other facet of their lives. They believe in judging and rewarding people based on their performance. They oppose forcing physical integration — in this case based on income — on students and communities. And they even, reasonably, want all states to have the same academic standards.
About that last point: Intuitively, it seems to make sense. Why should kids in Mississippi be asked to learn less than those in Massachusetts? If I didn’t get paid to analyze education policy — if I had to do other work for 40-plus hours a week — I, too, would probably support national standards because I wouldn’t have time to look at the evidence, or cogitate over the politics behind such a fair sounding proposal. But I do analyze education policy full time, and I know that (1) there is little evidence supporting calls for national standards; (2) many states have adopted national standards mainly in pursuit of federal money; (3) even if you can get initially high standards, they’ll be dumbed-down by politics; and (4) states can perhaps be standardized, but unique, individual students never can be.
Of course, the good-intentions problem is not unique to education. The huge opportunity costs — among other disincentives — that keep members of the public from being able to sufficiently analyze complicated political issues is a major problem in all public policy matters. That’s why good intentions — which the public demonstrates in spades in this poll — can often lead to bad outcomes. But we cannot blame the public for that. We must, instead, inform the public as best we can.
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Stop the Hate
People in Washington are hurling harsh words at other Americans: words like terrorists, Satan, suicide bombers, Hezbollah, gone off the deep end, “recklessly diminished the power and reach of the United States.” No doubt the president and the mainstream media have denounced this sort of divisive, extremist language, right?
Yes, they have, many times. Except this week the divisive, extremist language has been directed at Tea Party members, the House Republican freshmen, libertarians, and other people determined to rein in federal spending, after deficits of $4 trillion in three years. The political and media establishments just can’t believe that anybody would actually try to use a debt ceiling increase to get a commitment to fiscal responsibility in the future.
Columnist Bart Hinkle has some thoughtful words on the subject:
If there is anything The New York Times hates, it is hate.…
But as it turns out, there is one thing The New York Times hates more than hate itself: the tea-party wing of the GOP.
“Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people,” fumes columnist Joe Nocera in his Tuesday column, “Tea Party’s War on America.” Has the GOP “gone insane? … Why yes, it has,” writes Krugman several days before, going on to denounce the party’s “fanaticism” and lack of rationality: “It has gone off the deep end,” he concludes. The editorial board agrees, terming the tea-partiers an “ultraorthodox” and “extremist” group who “are not paying close attention to reality,” who are “willing to endanger the national interest” and who show no “signs of intelligent life.”
To Thomas Friedman, the tea-partiers are the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP. According to Maureen Dowd, “The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House.” They are “adamantine nihilists,” and “political suicide bombers.”…
What could possibly explain all of this “vitriolic rhetoric” — this “widespread squall of fear, anger, and intolerance” — this “gale of anger”? Not the budget deal alone. While it’s true that progressives did not get the tax hikes they wanted, it’s also true that the federal budget will continue to grow, year over year. The deal gives President Obama an immediate hike in the debt ceiling, in return for mere promises of a reduction in the rate of spending growth later.
Hmmmm. Perhaps Paul Krugman can explain what has elicited this drumbeat of hate and vituperation.
[Shuffle of papers.…]
Ah, yes — here’s what Krugman wrote seven years ago, in “Feel the Hate”:
Why are [they] so angry? One reason is that they have nothing positive to run on.… But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of [those] people … for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation’s freedom, diversity and complexity.”
Krugman was writing about the 2004 GOP convention. Funny how resonant those words sound today.
When the vice president of the United States calls his political opponents “terrorists,” when the president of the United States calls them “hostage takers,” when prominent media pundits call those same people extortionists and suicide bombers who are willing to destroy the country — isn’t that the sort of hateful language that we’ve often been told could lead to violence? As Hinkle notes, when one disturbed young man in Arizona went on a killing spree, the New York Times knew whom to blame:
“It is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger” that set the nation “on edge,” the anti-hate paper said.
Isn’t it time for a return to civility by those who so often lecture their opponents on civility?
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Saving a Baby Woodpecker: The Legal Consequences
Federal law makes it illegal to “take,” “possess,” or “transport” a migratory bird except under permit. If you worry that this sweeping language might give the federal government too much enforcement power, perhaps you are one of those horrid House Republicans who, according to Bryan Walsh in Time magazine, are in the grip of “antigreen ideology” and want to “essentially prevent” agencies like the Department of the Interior “from doing their jobs.” Who else would object to laws meant to protect Nature?
It’s a pretty safe bet that Walsh hasn’t met the Capo family of Fredericksburg, Virginia. According to a report on broadcast station WUSA, and now being picked up far and wide by other news outlets, 11-year-old Skylar Capo saved a baby woodpecker in her back yard from the family cat and decided to keep it for a day or two to make sure it wasn’t injured before letting it go. The family’s problems began when Skylar took the bird into a Lowe’s to keep it out of the hot sun and was spotted by a woman in the store who confronted her and said she was a Virginia state game officer. Two weeks later, says Skylar’s mother Alison, the woman showed up at their front door accompanied by a state trooper with the news that the family owed a fine of $535; the federal law also carries possible jail time. (The bird itself was long gone by this point, having been released the same day of the store visit, the family says.)
With publicity about the case hitting the wires, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has now announced that it has rescinded the fine—the ticket had been mistakenly issued, it insists, in spite of a decision not to pursue charges. That also presumably takes care of the worry about jail time. But really, if you’re the parent of a youngster fascinated by backyard wildlife, why take chances? Order them back indoors to play video games and watch TV. It’s much legally safer that way.
For more from Cato on overcriminalization, see posts like this, this, and this.
Debt Deal: Spending in Perspective
The following chart looks at total projected federal spending according to the Congressional Budget Office’s adjusted March baseline and its score of the debt deal. The chart only considers the reduction in outlays resulting from the deal’s cap on discretionary spending, which the CBO says will save $917 billion over the next ten years. It does not consider the $1.2-$1.5 trillion in future “deficit reduction” that Dan Mitchell discusses here.
![Total spending under debt deal](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/public/wp-content/uploads/total-spending-under-debt-deal1.jpg?itok=SURrMMbT)
Excluding outlays for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are unlikely to materialize, total spending over the next ten years would be about $43 trillion under the discretionary spending caps instead of $44 trillion. In other words, even if Congress holds to the caps — and even if the “deficit reduction” targets established in the bill are achieved — the federal government’s spending binge will continue. If this is a “win” for the limited government crowd, I’d hate to see what the Beltway establishment would consider a “loss.”