A popular measure proposed to produce better educational outcomes in public schools today is to reduce class size. The Wichita, Kansas public school district is currently proposing a bond issue with a partial goal of reducing class size. At least some of the recently-mandated increase in school spending in Kansas was used to reduce class size.

It seems that smaller class sizes should be great for students. Research, however, doesn't always verify this assumption. The Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby, now at Stanford, has stated this about her research into class size:

I have a study in which I examined every change in class size at every elementary school in Connecticut over a 20-year period. In schools, class size varies from year to year because enrollment varies. Therefore, with 20 years and 800-some schools, there is a tremendous amount of variation in class size to examine.

I found there was no effect of class size on achievement at all, even when children were in small classes for all six years of elementary school.

There is, however, one study that shows increased student performance with smaller class sizes: the Tennessee STAR experiment. It is probably the study cited most often by education bureaucrats, so learning a little about it is useful. In this experiment, students were assigned to either a regular class with about 24 students, a class of the same size but with a teacher's aide to assist the teacher, or a smaller class of about 15 students.

Jay Greene has written about the problems with the STAR experiment. The first problem he finds is that "students were not tested when they entered the program. Such point-of-entry tests would establish a baseline for each student's performance as it stood before the experiment began. Without this baseline measurement, we cannot confirm that the STAR project's random assignment method was successfully carried out."

Second: "[there is] an anomaly in the research findings: the improvement in test scores was a one-time benefit. ... This is an unusual and unexpected finding, because if smaller classes really do improve student performance we would generally expect to see these benefits accrue over time."

The STAR program produced a one-time improvement in tests scores that are the equivalent of a student in the 50th percentile moving to about the 58th percentile. Greene says this increase "may not amount to an educational revolution, but it is not trivial."

One interesting aspect of the STAR program is that participants, particularly the teachers, knew they were part of an experiment. Caroline Hoxby describes the implications of this:

More importantly, in the Tennessee STAR experiment, everyone involved knew that if the class-size reduction didn't affect achievement, the experimental classes would return to their normal size and a general class-size reduction would not be funded by the legislature. In other words, principals and teachers had strong incentives to make the reduction work. Unfortunately, class-size reductions are never accompanied by such incentives when they are enacted as a policy.

Education bureaucrats and teachers often claim that schools are not like a business or other areas of human endeavor, so incentives don't work. Education, they say, is somehow different. But it appears in the STAR program that teachers had a powerful incentive to make the small class sizes work, and they responded to that.

Reducing class size is a very expensive measure to implement. The STAR program reduced class sizes by a large amount: from 24 to 15 students, a reduction of 38%. Many more teachers and classrooms are needed to implement reductions of this scope, and that's why it is so expensive.

That leads to an aspect of the problem that's not often mentioned. Right now Wichita has a teacher shortage. The district can't hire and retain enough teachers. Implementing class size reduction programs requires more teachers and makes the shortage even more acute.

Compounding this problem is that research shows that teacher quality is a very important factor in the success of students. If we can assume that the most highly-qualified teachers are hired first, then increasing the number of classrooms means hiring more less-qualified teachers. So some students will be taught by poor teachers, and since class sizes are smaller, fewer students will be in the classrooms led by good teachers.

There is no doubt that teachers and the education establishment like smaller class sizes. Smaller classes mean an easier workload for teachers, larger budgets for school district administrators and politicians, and more teachers union members paying dues. The local board of education can tell parents that they have "saved the children" and the parents will believe them. The research, however, is not settled on the benefits of smaller class sizes, and the unintended consequence of more students being taught by less-qualified teachers is a large negative effect.

Wichitans for Effective Education wish to remind the residents of USD 259 (the Wichita, Kansas public school district) that on February 11, 2008, the board of USD 259 passed a resolution declaring that a special election was to be held today, May 6. That resolution asked the citizens of this community to approve a $350 million school bond proposal. On April 7, on the advice of an allied citizens group, the board decided the election should be delayed until some yet-to-be-known date.

The board originally argued that it was imperative to vote as soon as possible instead of waiting for the August primary or November general elections, even though the special election would cost $75,000. As evidence, Chief Operations Officer (now interim superintendent) Martin Libhart delivered to the board on January 28 a presentation titled "Time Is Money" which explained that if the bond issue election were delayed until November, the cost of building just one high school would increase by $360,000 -– far more than the cost of the special election.

The district also argued that if the election were delayed until August or later, the opening of the new high school would be delayed by one full school year.

Nevertheless, on April 7, the board abandoned these arguments.

Much effort went into preparation for the May special election. News outlets devoted extensive coverage. Three citizens groups formed to campaign for and against the bond issue. Expenses were incurred.

Opposition groups have had to deal with a shifting landscape of facts emerging from USD 259. We relied on figures supplied by USD 259 regarding the costs of building safe rooms, only to be told we didn't understand the true situation. We relied on figures published by USD 259 in its most recent Comprehensive Annual Financial Report reporting school capacity and enrollment, only to be told those numbers are out-of-date.

Sometimes getting any information from USD 259 is difficult. We asked for a count of classrooms and portables for the last two school years and were told that information is available at a cost of $860, with most of that cost paying for 40 hours of staff time. Since school overcrowding is one of the reasons given by USD 259 as the need for this bond issue, we wonder why these figures are not readily available.

The changing schedule of the bond issue election as well as the unreliable facts provided by USD 259 make it difficult to thoughtfully consider the merits of any proposal at this time. With the possibility of looming economic recession and the lack of a permanent superintendent in place to lead the Wichita schools, perhaps the best idea yet is to pull the question altogether. This would give the district time to research and locate all significant data, and then both opposing and supporting groups could base their decisions on accurate and timely information.

From our friends at the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy in Wichita, Kansas.

Universal Preschool Wastes Money, Imperils the Good Society
Short-term benefits, politicization of childhood await public funding

(WICHITA) - If K-12 schools fail to graduate one in four students on time, does it make much sense to enroll children in public programs at an even younger age? That's one problem with proposals for universal, taxpayer-funded preschool, as outlined by a new report issued by the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy. Read "Plato's Republic on the Plains: Should Kansas Really Embrace State-Financed Early Childhood Education?" at www.flinthills.org.

"On the one hand, you've got to applaud the desire to 'do something' to improve education," says John R. LaPlante, Education Policy Fellow of the Kansas-based think tank. "But what we see is that the longer children stay in school, the worse off they do. We should fix the K-12 system through competition and expanded school choice rather than enroll infants and toddlers in public programs that are often run through those same schools."

The study reviews the weaknesses of reports used to justify universal preschool programs, including methodological shortcomings. The benefits seen in preschool programs tend to be focused in lower-income children and fade out in a short time-hardly a prescription for a universal program.

In addition to experimental and economic problems, universal preschool poses a moral question: Do children belong to parents or do they belong to society and the state? Plato called for some children to be reared not by parents but by the collective. The impulse to use government to fix children's lives for the societal good may have at first a moral foundation, but it violates foundational truths about American society and the meaning of limited government.

Recently a USD 259 (Wichita, Kansas public school district) board member made this statement: "I know there are kids from many Catholic schools that have come to public schools when the Catholic schools have kicked them out."

This attitude reflects a common perception or myth: that private and religious schools kick out the misbehaving students they don't want to deal with. Since the public school system, by law, must accept them, these problem students are a reason why the public schools have such a difficult task. So goes the story, anyway.

I have read that this perception is false, so I decided to do some investigation on my own. The Kansas State Department of Education website can supply the number of students expelled from schools each year, not only for the public schools, but for some private and religious schools too.

As it turns out, the average number of students expelled from the Wichita Catholic Diocese schools is a little less than five per year. The Diocese covers an area much larger than Wichita, and presumably some of these expelled students didn't live within the boundaries of USD 259. Given that, plus the fact that there just aren't very many students expelled from the Catholic schools each year, accepting them can't be much of a burden to a large school district like the Wichita public schools.

The statistics I looked at are revealing in another way: expulsions, adjusted for the number of enrolled students, are much more frequent in the Wichita public schools. For the eleven years shown in the following table, the Wichita public school system expels students at a rate nearly ten times higher than does the Wichita Catholic Diocese.

I wonder if the USD 259 board member who made the statement quoted at the beginning of this article is ignorant of these facts. Or perhaps the board member simply believes, without critical thought or investigation, the myths told about public schools. Or perhaps there is another explanation.

The arithmetic of school choice in Wichita

As the residents of USD 259, the Wichita, Kansas public school district, consider a bond issue whose purpose, partly, is to reduce overcrowding, we should consider a way to reduce overcrowding in schools that would be much less expensive.

The district is not likely to consider this method. Whenever school choice implemented through vouchers or tax credits is mentioned, district officials and the teachers union immediately claim that school choice will drain money from public schools and lead to their ruin. But is the claim that school choice drains money from public schools true? Let's sharpen the pencil and do some arithmetic and see what happens.

USD 259 receives funding from three sources: the federal government, the state of Kansas, and the tax levied on property within the boundaries of USD 259. These funding sources react differently to changes in enrollment.

According to information on the Kansas State Department of Education website, state funding for education is based on this formula: "Base state aid per pupil (BSAPP) times adjusted enrollment equals state financial aid (SFA)."

There may be subtleties in the way that state funding is calculated, but let's assume the worst case for local school districts that the formula implies: that when a student leaves a school district for any reason the district loses the entire amount of state aid per student. Similarly, let's assume the district loses the entire amount of federal funding per student.

The local district, however, won't lose the local funding. That's because the source of local funding is the property tax. The amount raised depends solely on the assessed value of the property in USD 259 and the mill levy (the rate at which property is taxed). The number of students enrolled in USD 259 schools has no effect on the amount raised locally.

The following table illustrates what happens to school funding as enrollment changes. The row "2006 - 2007 figures" shows figures obtained from the Kansas State Department of Education, and the row below that calculates the funding per student from the three sources of funding.

Now suppose that some students leave USD 259. The row "Reduction in funding" shows how much money USD 259 would lose, based on the number of students that leave. Note that the funding from federal and state sources decreases, but local funding, because it is based on property tax, does not change. The row "Remaining funding" shows how much USD 259 will receive, and the next row calculates the funding per student.

Note that as the number of students in USD 259 declines, the funding per student increases. The following chart shows what happens to available funding per student as increasing numbers of students leave USD 259. Again, it doesn't matter why the students leave USD 259. The effect on funding is the same. There is no "draining" of money. The total amount the district has available to spend will decrease, but their costs do, too.

Opponents of school choice have many arguments to refute the simple arithmetic of the financial impacts of school choice on local school districts. One important consideration is that schools, like most businesses or institutions, have both fixed costs and variable costs. Opponents of school choice often claim that the costs schools face are mostly fixed costs, so reducing enrollment leads to little cost savings.

Research, however, shows otherwise. A 2006 study in South Carolina found that fixed costs were 20 to 25 percent of per pupil costs. A study using data from New Hampshire for the 2001-2002 school year found that 73 to 87 percent of total costs of schools are variable, meaning that 13 to 27 percent of costs are fixed. So fixed costs are a relatively small part of a school district's total costs, meaning that schools can adjust their costs quickly when faced with changes in enrollment.

Furthermore, fixed costs become variable over longer periods of time. School districts can adjust their level of fixed costs as they adjust to changing enrollment levels over time.

Is the analysis really this simple? Fundamentally, it is. School districts, however, may face numerous constraints on the way they may spend the funds they receive from various sources. There may be all sorts of strings attached. That is a problem itself, as it prevents public schools from allocating their resources flexibly and effectively.

In summary, school choice does not drain money from local school districts. Yes, total funding and spending declines as students leave to attend other schools, but costs decline too. School overcrowding –- a major reason given for the need of the bond issue in the Wichita public school district -- is reduced or eliminated.

If the administration of USD 259 has information or reasoning to the contrary, let them make their case. Until then, the citizens of the Wichita public school district must wonder why the district is unwilling to consider this method of reducing school overcrowding without an expensive bond issue.

Note: Implementing school choice in Wichita funded through vouchers or tax credits would require a change in Kansas state law. If the board and superintendent of the Wichita school district were to ask the Kansas legislature for such a law, it would probably happen. Especially because one important Kansas lawmaker is a resident of the Wichita public school district. That's Jean Schodorf, Kansas state senator and chair of the senate education committee. We could hardly have a more powerful ally to help us effect meaningful reform in USD 259.

Download a printable pdf version of this article here.

Following are remarks I delivered to the Wichita City Council, asking them to not approve tax increment financing (TIF) for a project in Wichita. The council approved the financing by a vote of six to one. Thank you to council member Paul Gray for his dissenting vote.

Mr. Mayor and members of the Wichita City Council, I ask you to not approve this TIF financing request, and to cease this practice in the future.

We need to allow markets to channel capital and investment to where people value it greatest. The profit and loss system provides that guidance.

By asking for the TIF financing, developers are sending us a signal that without the special tax favor, their project would not be economically feasible. They evidently have judged that it would not be profitable. They must feel that they will not be able to sell or rent at prices that will cover their costs of developing this project.

This means that proceeding with the project is investing capital somewhere other than its most-valued use. We know that because developers build other things in Wichita without receiving a subsidy, and they are able to earn a profit.

Now this project may satisfy the political goals of some people who believe that not enough development is happening in their politically-desired part of town. But these people are not spending their own money to accomplish this goal.

If these developers want to build something in this area, they need to figure out what will appeal to people, what will fill enough of a need, that the project is profitable on its own. That's how we will know that this investment is wise. They won't have to appear before governmental bodies seeking approval for their plans. They can just do it.

That's market entrepreneurship. It is the way that wealth is created. These developers, instead, are practicing political entrepreneurship, where they seek to please various governmental bodies, rather than satisfying consumers who express their desires through the mechanism of markets.

This leads to a corrosive environment where nearly every week someone appears before this council requesting special treatment, that favor paid for by the rest of the the community. This is harmful.

Supporters of TIF explain them in a way that makes it seem as though there is no cost involved in granting the subsidy. But there is. Why would these developers want them, and why would this council not grant them to everyone if there were no cost?

I propose a pledge that this council could take that will help our community become aware of the cost of these subsidies, and will also alleviate some of the inequity. When the City of Wichita grants special tax treatment, it must reduce its spending by the same amount. By following this simple rule, the City can be reminded of the cost of granting special tax favors, and the rest of us won't have to pay for them.

USD 259 (the Wichita public school district) outgoing superintendent Winston Brooks has been receiving a supplemental salary paid for by private interests. This salary supplement, supporters say, was necessary to prevent Mr. Brooks from leaving Wichita for somewhere else where he would be paid more.

One way to look at this salary supplement is that USD 259 received the services of someone whose salary they couldn't afford. And since the salary supplement was funded by the voluntary action of citizens, how can we object? But there are problems with this type of arrangement.

If a superintendent of schools depends on the owner of, say, a car dealership to lead a group that pays a significant share of his salary, and then it comes time for the school district to purchase cars, how can we be sure there is no conflict of interest?

When it comes time for the school district to purchase cars or anything else, do we check to make sure that the selected vendor isn't a member of, or have a friend on, the committee that provides the superintendent's supplemental salary? And if so, is the district getting a good deal? Or would too many restrictions prevent the district from getting the best deal on their purchases?

Another problem is that it may be the case that the superintendent of schools is worthy of a large salary, perhaps much larger than the current salary and supplement. Someone who can effectively manage an organization with thousands of employees and an annual budget of over half a billion dollars is worth a great deal. Someone who can make a positive difference in how well Wichita's schoolchildren are educated is invaluable.

This illustrates a problem with government institutions. They do not have the flexibility to respond to events and circumstances in the way private enterprise can. If it was the case that the new incoming superintendent could save tens of millions of dollars while greatly improving student outcomes, that person would be worth a salary of, say, one million dollars or more. But as a practical matter, USD 259 could not pay anyone a salary that large. There would be too much resentment.

The main problem is that USD 259, like all government school districts, is funded not through voluntary transactions, but through taxation backed up by coercion. When taxpayers are forced to pay for things they don't agree with, resentment builds.

Further, because the Wichita public schools raise funds through taxation instead of voluntary transactions taking place in markets, we do not know, and the board of USD 259 certainly does not know, if their expenditures are wise and efficient. This applies to a superintendent's salary and every other expenditure the school district makes. Absent the test of profitability, or even the test of having to attract customers and revenue through voluntary decisions on the part of consumers, we do not know how efficiently USD 259 manages the resources they have.

Two middle schools in the Wichita school district have performed so poorly for the past six years that they must be restructured, as required by the No Child Left Behind Act. ("2 Wichita middle schools must start over," Wichita Eagle, February 29, 2008) Four other Wichita middle schools are within one year of suffering this sanction, and another is two years away. So before long, seven of the 18 middle schools in the Wichita school district could be in the most severe category of remediation as defined by NCLB.

NCLB sanctions are progressive, meaning that these troubled schools have been receiving special attention and remedial measures for several years already. These measures have, evidently, failed to produce positive results.

What does the restructuring of these schools mean? Everyone, including the principals, must reapply for their jobs. That sounds severe, but in practice, it may not mean much at all. The superintendent of the Wichita schools says "... he expects leadership teams at both schools to remain." The teachers, being members of a union, are guaranteed a job somewhere in the Wichita public schools.

Are these tough sanctions? When people fail this spectacularly in private enterprise, they usually are fired. That's not happening here. Still, the sanctions are, somehow, painful. Wichita board of education member Barbara Fuller, herself the former president of the teachers union, "is most concerned about the restructuring plan's emotional impact. 'It's going to hurt, and it's going to hurt deep,' Fuller said." I wonder how hurt the parents of children who attend these failing schools feel.

The Wichita school district, I have been told, wants to be held accountable for results. This "restructuring" of these middle schools, while perhaps an abrupt change compared to what school reform measures usually call for, will probably not produce the desired results. The system will still be the same. The same bureaucracy -- from the superintendent to the school principals -- is in place. There is still the same lack of meaningful competition, the same insulation from market accountability, and the same lack of entrepreneurial discovery process.

Market accountability is what the Wichita public schools need most. It is one thing for the school superintendent and the board of education to say they want to be held accountable. They appear noble and courageous for saying so. But if they truly want to held accountable they would allow competition through school choice funded by vouchers or tax credits.

In Kansas, most parents don't have a credible threat of sending their children to a non-public school. School choice implemented through vouchers or tax credits would give parents the ability to send their children to almost any school they want. This is accountability. Losing your customers is a sanction that really hurts.

It’s easy to say you want to be held accountable when the penalty for failure is that described above. It is an entirely different matter to actually be held accountable by parents who have the credible threat of taking their children somewhere else -- the same market accountability that private enterprise is subject to. This is the accountability that the Wichita school district will not submit to.

According to USD 259 (Wichita Public School District) officials, one of the prime reasons a bond issue is needed in 2008 is that schools are overcrowded. New classrooms and new schools must be built, according to district officials, to solve this overcrowding problem.

This is another way to reduce overcrowding, and it won't require spending any new money. In fact, the Wichita school district might even save money, and satisfaction with schools in Wichita will increase.

How can we do this? The State of Kansas and USD 259 can implement wide-spread school choice funded by vouchers and/or tax credits.

This may seem contrary to common sense at first. After all, one of the primary criticisms of school choice is that it “transfers precious tax dollars from public schools,” according to a national teachers union.

But facts don't back up this claim. In 2007, The Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation published a study titled “School Choice by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006.” According to the executive summary: “Every existing school choice program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce a substantial savings.” How can this be? The teachers union and education bureaucrats would have us believe that vouchers would kill public education.

Here's the answer, from the same study: “In nearly every school choice program, the dollar value of the voucher or scholarship is less than or equal to the state’s formula spending per student. This means states are spending the same amount or less on students in school choice programs than they would have spent on the same students if they had attended public schools, producing a fiscal savings.”

In Wichita, if the school district would loosen its monopolistic grip on the use of public tax dollars for schools, some students would take advantage of a voucher or tax credit program and go to school somewhere else. These students that left the Wichita public schools would reduce or eliminate the overcrowding problem.

Yes, the Friedman Foundation advocates for school choice. It was Milton Friedman himself who promoted school choice as a way to solve problems with public schools. It's an idea that is very popular with parents in the several places in America where school choice is in place. This is especially true with poor and minority families, as they have the most to gain from expanded choices in education.

Expanding school choice in Wichita through vouchers or tax credits would give parents greater control over their children's education, and it would solve the overcrowding problem without spending many millions on new classrooms and schools.

Listen to this article in audio form by clicking here.

The proposed USD 259 (Wichita public school district) school bond issue in 2008 is estimated to cost the owner of a $100,000 home about $40 per year in additional taxes. Proponents divide that into a monthly cost of about $3.33 per month, or sometimes a daily cost of $.11, to dramatize how little this bond issue actually costs.

Eleven cents per day per household! Who could oppose such a paltry amount? Especially when bond issue supporters make it seem as though that's all we spend on schools. But we do, in fact, spend a great deal more on our public schools.

How much more? There's another number that bond issue proponents don't publicize. In fact, I'm sure that many of them don't have an idea of the magnitude of this number. But this number gives us insight into the size and impact of the Wichita school district, and helps us view the district's spending in context.

What is that number? It's $1,749. That's what you get when you take the annual spending of USD 259 ($544,384,275) and divide it by the number of people living within the district's boundaries (311,228).

That's how much the Wichita public school district spends each year, per person living in the district. It's not the same as saying each person is taxed that amount each year by USD 259, as only 31% of district spending is paid for from local sources. The rest came from the State of Kansas (58%) and the federal government (11%). USD 259 residents, of course, pay a good share of those state and federal taxes.

That number -- $1,749 in spending by USD 259 per year for each person living in the district -- gives us an idea of the huge volume of resources that the district has at its command. It is a tremendous amount of money. Think of all the people you see each day. For each of those people, $1,749 has to be raised each year to pay for Wichita public school spending.

For a household of two adults and two children, $6,996 per year, or $19.17 per day, must be raised through a variety of taxes to support USD 259 spending. Keep this in mind as bond issue supporters ask for another increase in taxes.

Sources of data: Spending figures are for the 2006-2007 school year, from The Kansas Department of Education at http://www.ksde.org/Default.aspx?tabid=1810. The population of USD 259 is from the National Center for Education Statistics at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/acs05/index.aspx, from the 2005 American Community Survey data.

As the voters of USD 259, the Wichita public schools, consider whether to pass an expensive bondt issue in 2008 to finance more spending, consider district officials' attitudes towards spending. In 2005, USD 259 (Wichita) School Board Member Chip Gramke was asked this question, followed by his answer:

[Question:] It seems as though we keep putting more and more money into education, yet it seems we are getting less and less out of it.

[Answer:] Again I will only speak for Wichita Public Schools to answer this question. If we have been putting "more money" into USD 259, I haven't seen the check yet. As a matter of fact, Wichita Public Schools has been in the position of cutting our budget for the last 4 years. This school year is the first time in years we have received additional money.

(Source: Wichita NewsBrief, July 26, 2005, at http://www.wichitanewsbrief.com/newsletter.aspx?id=341)

Mr. Gramke's assertion that USD 259 spending is not increasing, and that the district has been cutting its budget for the four years before 2005 doesn't square with the facts as I see them. A document at the Kansas State Department of Education (http://www3.ksde.org/leaf/data_warehouse/total_expenditures/d0259exp.pdf) gives some facts about spending in USD 259. The table below shows figures from this document, along with some calculations that I performed.

For each year, the number of dollars spent increases, and so does the spending per student. Some years the increase is less than the rate of inflation, but in other years it is greater.

You can easily see that in the four years before 2005, the years for which Mr. Gramke made the claim that the budget has been cut, both total spending and spending per student increased every year. This is true even for the years in which enrollment declined.

Mr. Gramke is no longer on the Wichita school board, but his biography on the USD 259 BOE website listed his profession as accountant. Given that, I thought maybe Mr. Gramke was speaking in terms of real spending, that is, spending adjusted for the effects of inflation. So I calculated these numbers, as you can see in the table. Even after accounting for the effects of inflation, spending -- both total spending and spending per student -- increased in every year that Mr. Gramke claimed the budget was being cut.

What could be the basis of the claim that Mr. Gramke made, that the budget was being cut? Is this the way that Wichita school district officials do arithmetic?

I suspect that Mr. Gramke was simply exposing the attitude that many government bureaucrats and officials have: if the budget doesn't increase as much as they think it should, they call it a budget cut.

The combination of a rising mill levy (the rate at which property is taxed) and rising appraised values mean that property taxes paid to USD 259, the Wichita public school district, rise rapidly.

Appraised values in Wichita have risen faster than general inflation. The Consumer Price Index, a measure of the general inflation rate, rose by 24% from 1999 to 2007. Over the same time period, the Sedgwick County house price index rose by 34%. This means that district revenues -- if the mill levy didn't change -- will rise faster than the inflation rate. When the mill levy is increased, property tax revenues rise very rapidly. The following table illustrates.

As the voters of USD 259 (Wichita public school district) consider a bond issue in 2008, consider Wichita public school spending and enrollment figures. The source of these figures is the data warehouse at the Kansas Department of Education, www.ksde.org.

A larger version of this chart is here. Or, download the tables of figures and a printable chart here.

In today's Wichita Eagle (February 17, 2008), USD 259 (Wichita) school board member Lynn W. Rogers makes the case that a bond issue for the Wichita public schools will have a positive economic impact on the local community.

Many people are skeptical about the tax rebates recently passed by Congress and their ability to stimulate the economy. Why? That's because the money being sent to households is not "new" money. It had to come from somewhere. Many people realize that taking money from the pocket of one person and sending it to another doesn't add to total economic activity. And as our nation is drowning in debt at the federal level, many people are wary of borrowing money just to get a little boost now, when there is so much debt to be repaid.

It is the same at the local level. The money that will pay for the new facilities has to come from somewhere. When people pay taxes to USD 259, those tax payments represent money they can't spend somewhere else. Economic activity that might have taken place will not, because people had to spend their money on taxes.

This means that if the bond issue passes, and you drive by a construction site being funded with bond money, the workers you see will have displaced other workers in our local community.

If you see a new school building or new tennis courts, you see construction that has displaced other construction in our community.

School district officials will highlight the construction projects, just as they have in the past, as evidence of economic impact and progress. They can do that because it's easy to identify and show the new facilities. School officials will lead tours of the shiny new schools. They'll be promoted endlessly on the district's cable television channel. What is far more difficult, however, is to find the economic activity and jobs that were displaced to pay for these projects. No television or news reporters will look for them. There is no one to speak for them.

In a television news story, a teacher at an overcrowded school suggested that Wichitans forgo a couple nights out at supper to pay for the bond issue. What would be the impact on restaurants in Wichita if all families did that? How would that affect the people who work in those restaurants? I am tempted to ask what this teacher has against these people.

Mr. Rogers is correct on one thing: spending money the next few years while paying it back over 20 years does lead to more economic activity right now. He didn't mention, however, the economic activity that is not taking place this year because we're paying off the 2000 bond issue, and he doesn't mention the activity we'll lose in the future in order to pay for this bond issue.

As the residents of Wichita consider whether to vote for the $350 million school bond issue proposed by the board of USD 259 (Wichita Public Schools), be aware that the bond issue and its associated increase in property taxes is not the only tax increase the public schools in Kansas would like to have. The following article from Karl Peterjohn explains.

Tax Funds Being Spent To Push For Kansas Tax Hike
By Karl Peterjohn, Kansas Taxpayers Network. Released September 20, 2007.

Your tax dollars are being used to push for an increase in Kansas income taxes. Do you want your tax money spent on raising your taxes?

This tax hike plan was initially reported by in the Hawver’s Capitol Report (www.hawvernews.com) state capitol newsletter August 27. The Kansas Association of School Boards (KASB) is seeking another statewide income tax hike. This tax hike would be used to provide more state tax dollars to the 296 Kansas public school districts.

The Board of Education for USD 259 (Wichita Public Schools) is considering whether to hold a special election this spring. This special election would allow voters to indicate whether they support a new bond issue.

Why hold a special election in April or May when Kansas has elections scheduled in August and November?

Is the Wichita school district facing an emergency need for capital improvements that can't wait a few months? No, Wichita is not Greensburg, where the school buildings were destroyed. In fact, many of the things the proposed bond issue would pay for are things left over from the 2000 bond issue. Surely these are not emergency needs. They could wait a few months.

USD 259 will have to pay the costs of a special election, perhaps $75,000. But if the district waits until the first Tuesday in August -- just three or four months later -- the bond issue question can be added to the ballot at no cost.

So what is the reason for the rush to hold an expensive special election? We can learn the reason from an article in the Wichita Business Journal ("Brooks: Bond issue possible in spring" December 28, 2007). In this article, Wichita School Superintendent Winston Brooks is quoted as saying: "The last one was in a nonelection year. I'm superstitious so I would want to do it in the spring again."

First, the "last one" referred to was a special bond issue election held in 2000, which was an election year similar to the current year.

But the real stunner is this: Winston Brooks wants to hold an expensive special election to indulge his superstition!

Winston Brooks' superstition is not a valid reason for holding an expensive special election. If there is another reason for holding a special election, let the district make its case. Until then, let's save the money for the legitimate needs of the schools.

Writing from New Orleans, Louisiana

"The AFT supports parents' right to send their children to private or religious schools but opposes the use of public funds to do so. The main reason for this opposition is because public funding of private or religious education transfers precious tax dollars from public schools …"

This is a typical criticism of school vouchers, here expressed by one of the nation's teachers unions. But what about the reasoning behind this claim?

A common plan for vouchers calls for the school that loses a student to a voucher school to also lose the funding that accompanied that child. So it appears that the voucher critics may be correct -- if the amount lost due to the voucher was equal to per-pupil spending.

But most voucher plans call for the voucher to be just a small fraction of per-pupil spending. Most vouchers are for less than $5,000. With Wichita schools spending some $12,000 per student per year, a $5,000 voucher is only 42% of per-pupil spending.

Because the voucher is for less than per-pupil spending, the school that loses the student is actually better off, financially, than before. As long as the amount the school loses to a voucher is less than per-pupil spending, the school has more money to spend, on a per-pupil basis.

We have to wonder why the public school bureaucracy and newspaper editorial writers do not realize this. Perhaps their opposition to vouchers isn't solely financial. There is evidence from Utah is that this is true. This has been reported in the Deseret Morning News: "When a student leaves a public school [in Utah], the legislation requires the state to continue to supply that public school's district the portion of the per-pupil funding that is over and above the state-wide average voucher amount, and to continue doing so for a period of five years following the transfer or until the student was scheduled to graduate."

Even this provision does not satisfy the opponents of vouchers. It also doesn't do much to provide competition to the public schools, which is one of the positive things vouchers will do. The article realized this: "Unfortunately, this will minimize the voucher program's competitive effect that might otherwise spur innovation in the public school system."

The advocates of the public school monopoly say that education isn't about money, that it's all about the children. But when it comes time to oppose vouchers (even though the argument is false), or to sue the legislature for more funding, or to raise property taxes, or to float the idea of a bond issue, well, it turns out that it is all about money.

In a recent Wichita Eagle article, Wichita school superintendent Winston Brooks promoted accountability. But if he truly believes in being held accountable, he would advocate allowing competition through school choice funded by vouchers and/or tax credits. It’s one thing to say you want to be held accountable. But it is another thing to actually be held accountable by parents who would have the credible threat of taking their children somewhere else.

In Kansas, most parents don't have a credible threat of sending their children to a non-public school. Incremental reforms have been tried for years, and more such proposals appear every year. It is time, however, for radical change. School choice implemented through vouchers or tax credits (a better idea) would allow the magic of entrepreneurial competition -- instead of the present amalgam of education bureaucrats, self-serving politicians, paid lobbyists, and teachers unions -- to supply schools that parents really want.

Writing from New Orleans, Louisiana

This excellent article uses an amusing (but painful) anectode about service at the U.S. Post Office to drive home the point that government monopolies -- the Pittsburgh Public Schools in this case -- themselves may be starting to realize the public's poor perception of their service.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Jamie Story, the author of this article. She is a young woman who works for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and she has written many fine articles on the subject of education. An excerpt from the article:

What’s in a name? Apparently, to a government school monopoly, it’s everything.

Last month, Pittsburgh Public Schools announced the district would be dropping the word “Public” from its name in order to avoid the negative connotation often associated with public schools. A paid marketing consultant helped develop the plan, which will also result in renaming the individual schools themselves.

While a “public” outcry has caused the district to reconsider the policy, the scheme serves as a powerful reminder of the upside-down priorities of public schools -- and of government monopolies in general.

It’s no wonder why Pittsburgh’s schools suffer in public perception. While the district spends more than $12,000 per student on operating expenditures alone, only 40 percent of its high school students are proficient in mathematics. District students also perform below the national average on the SAT, ACT, and Advanced Placement tests. So one would think the best way for Pittsburgh schools to improve public perception would be to increase student’s learning, not to hire expensive consultants to rebrand the schools.

The district’s policy is reminiscent of a decision made by the United States Postal Service in 2006. Faced with customer complaints about lengthy wait times, it came up with a novel “solution” -- removing the clocks from post office walls. Rather than streamlining its processes to increase efficiency, the postal service merely tried to shield customers from the knowledge that they were receiving subpar service.

I recommend you read the entire article at this link: http://www.texaspolicy.com/commentaries_single.php?report_id=1584

On Saturday February 12, 2005 I attended a meeting of the South Central Kansas Legislative Delegation. Lynn Rogers, then the USD 259 (Wichita) School Board President, and Connie Dietz, then Vice-President of the same body, attended. There had been a proposal to spend an additional $415 million over the next three years on schools. Asked if this would be enough to meet their needs, the Wichita school board members replied, "No."

At least Mr. Rogers was not lying. More spending than that was approved, and true to his word, the Wichita Board of Education found it necessary this week to raise taxes so the public schools could have even more money.

I can't speak for Mr. Rogers, but I imagine that this tax increase is viewed as only a temporary stop-gap measure until some more substantial funding can be obtained.

By the way, do you know that the Wichita Public School System has a marketing department? I wonder why an organization that requires customers to consume its product through compulsory attendance laws, that has the ability to raise funds through the coercive force of the state, and that has a government-mandated monopoly on the use of public education funds needs such a department. Then someone told me that's where the school system's lobbyists are. (I haven't been able to verify that.) Now it made sense to me. The audience the school system is marketing to: the legislature and the governor.

And what do we get for all this? According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only one-third of Kansas eighth-graders (Wichita figures are not separately available) are considered “proficient” in mathematics, reading, and writing. (The State of Kansas, as do most states, reports much higher proficiency rates on its own tests, but these tests are subject to local pressure to show good results.)

Not much, it seems.

School choice initiatives are springing up all over the country except in Kansas, where the education bureaucracy remains entrenched, aided by one business that should have a vested interested in well-educated potential customers. Earlier this year Wichita Eagle editorialist Rhonda Holman poked fun at some school board candidates because they were interested in charter schools and vouchers. If things proceed as they have, in another generation few Kansas high schools graduates will be able to read Ms. Holman's editorials.

Does that sound far-fetched? Consider a recent study by the American Institutes for Research, which found that “over half the graduates of four-year colleges and three-quarters of the graduates of junior and community colleges could not be categorized as possessing these 'proficient' skills.” At what skills are they not proficient? Understanding newspaper editorials was one such skill.

Local school districts claim they want to be held accountable, but they strenuously resist the one way that provides true accountability. That way is the market, where people vote with their dollars and the future welfare of their children.

True accountability can be achieved in only one way: let the government of the State of Kansas relinquish its monopoly on the financing and production of schooling -- the very type of monopoly power that, if wielded by private enterprise, would be condemned as unjust and immoral.

From Dan Mitchell, Center for Freedom & Prosperity http://www.freedomandprosperity.org

John Stossel eviscerates David Brooks, the ostensibly conservative columnist for the New York Times. Brooks has argued for big new government initiatives to boost human capital. Stossel correctly notes, though, that Brooks wants to expand failed government programs when the right approach is to move in the other direction:

David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way. He continues, "Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation." Excuse me, but why is that the market's fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition. Brooks writes that Hamiltonians like him "think government should help people get the tools they need to compete." But when has government ever been good at that? He claims the state can "increase the quality of human capital" by, for example, providing "Quality preschool [to] help young children from ... disorganized homes. ... " Really? What is the chance that it would be "quality" preschool if government runs it? Even the acclaimed Head Start has not been shown to have any lasting effect on academic performance. ...When I asked Brooks why a government that performed as ineptly as FEMA did after Hurricane Katrina will be better at running preschools, he said, "Some lives are so screwed up, it's hard to make them worse." Government coercion almost always makes things worse. It discourages individual effort, and sucks capital away from more productive uses. ...America became an economic power despite, not because of, Hamiltonian intervention. Hong Kong and much of East Asia went from abject poverty to affluence in a few decades not because their governments gave people "tools they need to compete" -- they didn't -- but because they exercised limited powers.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/2007/06/27/big-government...

In the July 25, 2006 Wall Street Journal Charles Murray has a commentary titled "Acid Tests" which describes how the way that the No Child Left Behind program uses test scores is misleading. Actually, misleading is too mild a word. The subtitle of Murray's article is "No Child Left Behind is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive."

How are the performance measures that are the yardstick of the success of No Child Left Behind deceptive? By adjusting what states use to measure "proficiency," states can appear to be closing the gap between different groups of students. In Texas, the gap between the percentage of white and black students that passed a test was at one time 35 percentage points. Now it is only ten. Does that mean the gap in true student learning and performance has decreased?

The answer, Murray says, is we can't tell from the data we have. Perhaps Texas made the test easier, or changed the definition of passing, or "taught to the test." Any of these could explain the narrowing of the gap. As Mr. Murray wrote: "If there really was closure of the gap, all that Texas has to do is release the group means, as well as information about the black and white distributions of scores, and it will easy to measure it."

The fact is that these tests, administered by the individual states, are subject to manipulation that is not in the best interests of schoolchildren:

Question: Doesn't this mean that the same set of scores could be made to show a rising or falling group difference just by changing the definition of a passing score? Answer: Yes.

At stake is not some arcane statistical nuance. The federal government is doling out rewards and penalties to school systems across the country based on changes in pass percentages. It is an uninformative measure for many reasons, but when it comes to measuring one of the central outcomes sought by No Child Left Behind, the closure of the achievement gap that separates poor students from rich, Latino from white, and black from white, the measure is beyond uninformative. It is deceptive.

You can learn more about deceptive testing from a recent study performed by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University. A press release titled "Testing the NCLB: Study shows that NCLB hasn't significantly impacted national achievement scores or narrowed the racial gaps" is at http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/news/pressreleases/nclb_report06.php.

The Charles Murray article may be read here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008701

Thank you to The Wichita Eagle for printing this letter in today's newspaper.

An incumbent, a candidate endorsed by another incumbent, and a past president of the teachers union: these are three of the four endorsements by The Wichita Eagle for the Wichita Board of Education. These endorsements represent satisfaction with our schools' current condition. But what do we find when we look at our schools?

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only one-third of Kansas eighth-graders (Wichita figures are not separately available) are considered “proficient” in mathematics, reading, and writing.

A recent study of high school transcripts by the same organization found that students are taking more college-prep courses and receiving higher grades in these courses, yet math and reading test scores for these students are falling to as low as they've been since the early 1990s.

Closer to home for a newspaper, a recent study by the American Institutes for Research found that “over half the graduates of four-year colleges and three-quarters of the graduates of junior and community colleges could not be categorized as possessing these 'proficient' skills.” At what skills are they not proficient? Understanding newspaper editorials was one such skill.

Change is needed for the sake of our children. Three of the candidates the Eagle did not endorse -- Karl Peterjohn, John Stevens, and Cindy Duckett -- would, each in their own way, bring different perspectives to the Wichita Board of Education. That is something that would be truly good for Wichita schoolchildren.

As reported in the Wichita Business Journal at wichita.bizjournals.com/wichita/stories/2007/03/19/daily26.html, the Docking Institute of Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University has produced a report that seems to say that the $727 million deferred-maintenance backlog at Kansas universities is, well, really a good thing.

(The report is available to read at www.kansasregents.org/maintenance.html)

Why? Quoting from the press release that accompanies the report: “This report displays the substantial and positive economic impact that a comprehensive state university building maintenance funding solution would have on the state’s economy,” said Reginald L. Robinson, President and CEO of the Kansas Board of Regents. “University maintenance funding would produce a dramatic ripple effect through the state’s economy creating thousands of new jobs, millions of dollars in increased earnings, and billions of dollars in increased state economic output. As state policymakers continue to focus on ways to improve the state’s economy, they need not look any farther than our crumbling state universities.”

After reading this, it is tempting to wish that our universities were in even worse condition. By fixing them, we could really ramp up our state's economy!

But I am saddened to conclude that the authors of this report see only the immediate effects of the spending they promote. They fail to see the secondary effects. As Henry Hazlitt wrote in his classic work Economics in One Lesson:

This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences. (emphasis added)

It's easy to fall victim to this type of thinking. The economist Walter E. Williams summarizes the broken window fallacy that Frederic Bastiat recognized long ago:

Bastiat wrote a parable about this that has become known as the "Broken Window Fallacy." A shopkeeper's window is broken by a vandal. A crowd forms, sympathizing with the man, but pretty soon, the people start to suggest the boy wasn't guilty of vandalism; instead, he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town. After all, fixing the broken window creates employment for the glazier, who will then buy bread and benefit the baker, who will then buy shoes and benefit the cobbler, and so forth.

Those are the seen effects of the broken window. What's unseen is what the shopkeeper would have done with the money had the vandal not broken his window. He might have employed the tailor by purchasing a suit. The broken window produced at least two unseen effects. First, it shifted unemployment from the glazier, who now has a job, to the tailor, who doesn't. Second, it reduced the shopkeeper's wealth. Explicitly, had it not been for the vandalism, the shopkeeper would have had a window and a suit; now, he has just a window.

As Professor Williams also brought to our attention, even educated people such as Princeton economist Paul Krugman failed to take into account all factors -- the broken window fallacy that Bastiat recognized -- when he wrote in The New York Times that the destruction of the World Trade Center "could do some economic good."

In general, public works -- like fixing the universities -- are promoted as job-generators. It is as though the jobs generated come at no cost. But that's just not true. Here's Hazlitt discussing the building of a bridge:

… The first argument is that it will provide employment. It will provide, say, 500 jobs for a year. The implication is that these are jobs that would not otherwise have come into existence.

This is what is immediately seen. But if we have trained ourselves to look beyond immediate to secondary consequences, and beyond those who are directly benefited by a government project to others who are indirectly affected, a different picture presents itself. It is true that a particular group of bridge workers may receive more employment than otherwise. But the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes. For every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000,000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most.

Therefore for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else. We can see the men employed on the bridge. We can watch them at work. The employment argument of the government spenders becomes vivid, and probably for most people convincing. But there are other things that we do not see, because, alas, they have never been permitted to come into existence. They are the jobs destroyed by the $1,000,000 taken from the taxpayers. All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project. More bridge builders; fewer automobile workers, radio technicians, clothing workers, farmers.

There really is no free lunch. What Kansans spend on university repairs can't be spent on something else.

Should Kansas spend the money that the Regents are asking for to repair the universities? Because it fails to recognize the secondary effects of the proposed spending, the analysis put forth by the Docking Institute doesn't answer that question.

Curious Logic
Presidential hopefuls exercise school choice, but deny it to others
by Clint Bolick

There's something about our nation's capital that converts many leading Democrats to school choice. But in most cases this extends only to their own children--not to the millions of children in failing public schools.

Indeed, a nearly perfect correlation exists among Democratic presidential candidates who have exercised school choice for their own children and those who would deny such choices to other parents.

When the Clintons came to Washington, D.C. in 1993, they sent Chelsea to the private Sidwell Friends School. Two years later Mr. Clinton vetoed a bill that would have allowed low-income D.C. parents to use public funds to send their children to private schools. In a speech to the National Education Association, presidential candidate Mrs. Clinton has vowed "never to abandon our public schools" -- speaking apparently as a politician, not a parent.

John Edwards decries that "America has two school systems -- one for the affluent and one for everyone else." He should know. When he joined the U.S. Senate he sent his children to a private religious school. Mr. Edwards, however, opposes private school choice for low-income families on the curious grounds that this would "drain resources" from public schools. By such logic Mr. Edwards himself "drained" approximately $132,000 from the D.C. public schools.

There is only one candidate, Sen. Joe Biden, who has both sent his children to private school and supported school choice for others.

The mystery man is Sen. Barack Obama, who sends his child to a private school in Chicago yet once referred to school vouchers as "social Darwinism." Still, he says that on education reform, "I think a good place to start would be for both Democrats and Republicans to say ... we are willing to experiment and invest in anything that works."

Well, school choice works. Every study that has examined the effect of school choice competition has found significantly improved performance by public schools.

Given their track records it is doubtful how many candidates will agree with Sen. Obama. But as he might say, we can always have the audacity to hope.

Mr. Bolick is president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice and senior fellow at the Goldwater Institute. A longer version of this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

In 2005, Wichita School Board Member Chip Gramke was asked this question, followed by his answer:

[Question:] It seems as though we keep putting more and more money into education, yet it seems we are getting less and less out of it.

[Answer:] Again I will only speak for Wichita Public Schools to answer this question. If we have been putting "more money" into USD 259, I haven't seen the check yet. As a matter of fact, Wichita Public Schools has been in the position of cutting our budget for the last 4 years. This school year is the first time in years we have received additional money.

(Source: Wichita NewsBrief, July 26, 2005, at http://www.wichitanewsbrief.com/newsletter.aspx?id=341)

Mr. Gramke's assertion that USD 259 spending is not increasing, and that the district has been cutting its budget for the four years before 2005 doesn't square with the facts as I see them. A document at the Kansas State Department of Education (http://www3.ksde.org/leaf/data_warehouse/total_expenditures/d0259exp.pdf) gives some facts about spending in USD 259. Excerpts follow:

  Year      Total Spending  Per Student
1993-1994    257,158,097      5,741
1994-1995    257,211,100      5,882
1995-1996    268,040,066      6,195
1996-1997    276,955,477      6,297
1997-1998    292,651,092      6,615
1998-1999    304,491,202      6,778
1999-2000    335,950,608      7,456
2000-2001    342,754,035      7,532
2001-2002    383,680,515      8,393
2002-2003    391,651,615      8,604
2003-2004    421,616,834      9,278
2004-2005    427,914,830      9,457

For each year, the number of dollars spent increases, and so does the spending per student. Some years the increase is less than the rate of inflation, but in other years it is greater. From 1993 to 2004 the Consumer Price Index, a measure of general inflation, rose by 31%. For the same time period, total spending by USD 259 grew by 66%, and per student spending grew by 65%.

Mr. Gramke's biography on the USD 259 BOE website lists his profession as "Accountant." Perhaps there is some special accountant-developed method that one can use to interpret these spending figures that will make his claim of budget-cutting true. If so, I would be glad to hear of it.

Otherwise, I believe we have to seriously question the credibility of our education leaders when considering matters of finance.

This problem is not confined to our local board of education. At the state level, Kansas Families United for Public Education (KFUPE) has claimed "State aid has failed to keep pace with inflation." This was shown to be false in the article "Kansas Families United for Public Education (KFUPE) on State Aid to Schools" located at http://wichitaliberty.org/node/208.