Voice For Liberty

Category: Education

  • A Monopoly by Any Other Name

    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

  • Adjusting the Testing Gap

    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

  • Curious Logic

    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.

  • Bureaucracy vs. something that works

    Here’s how the education bureaucracy and teachers unions won out over students in the creation of the No Child Left Behind Act:

    The federal No Child Left Behind Act is set for renewal this year, and the big news so far is that President Bush is resurrecting the voucher proposal from his first term. “We can lift student achievement even higher by giving local leaders flexibility to turn around failing schools,” Mr. Bush said in his State of the Union address, “and by giving families with children stuck in failing schools the right to choose something better.”

    The President campaigned on this concept in 2000, too, only to throw NCLB’s choice provisions over the side to cut a bipartisan deal with Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative George Miller. Both Democrats carry water for the teachers unions, and so it’s no surprise that both men quickly denounced the new Bush proposal last week. Let’s hope Mr. Bush isn’t merely using “choice” again as a negotiating ploy to be tossed out once talks on Capitol Hill get going.

    NCLB’s testing provisions have been useful in bringing more transparency to achievement gaps among schools, and among certain types of students within schools. But the most effective way to hold public schools accountable is by arming parents with more education choices. Nothing motivates teachers, principals and administrators like the threat of losing their charges (and the attendant funding) to “something better.” Mr. Bush could pick worse fights than arguing that poor kids should be able to escape failing schools.

    — The Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2007

  • Market forces and teacher (mis)-education

    From Dan Mitchell: “In a system governed by market forces, teacher pay would be based on how well students learn, not how many superfluous degrees teachers accumulate:”

    …scores of studies show no ties between graduate studies and teacher effectiveness. Even among researchers who see some value in some master’s programs, many urge dramatic reforms and an end to automatic stipends. “If we pay for credentials, teachers have an incentive to seek and schools have an incentive to provide easy credentials,” said Arthur Levine, a researcher who once headed Columbia University’s Teachers College. “If, on the other hand, we only pay for performance, teachers have an incentive to seek and schools have an incentive to provide excellent training.” …A roundup published in 2003 by The Economic Journal, a publication of the international Royal Economic Society, unearthed 170 relevant studies. Of those, 15 concluded that master’s programs helped teachers, nine found they hurt them, and 146 found no effect. One of the largest such studies began a decade ago, when the Texas Education Agency and the University of Texas at Dallas began offering researchers continuing access to millions of student records. That effort, a part of the Texas Schools Project, has found no correlation between master’s degrees and student achievement. “They’re worthless. Case closed. Next question,” said Eric Hanushek, a senior project researcher who also works at Stanford University. …school districts have long paid premiums for teachers with master’s degrees. And the premiums have led to a large increase in the share of American teachers with the degrees, from 26 percent in 1960 to 56 percent in 1995. In much of the nation, salary premiums for master’s degrees exceed $5,000 a year… that money could make a tangible impact elsewhere, buying student laptops, tutoring sessions, field trips or additional courses. …”America has 3.2 million teachers who together make up the nation’s most powerful political lobby, and more than half of them hold master’s degrees. They’ll fight for that money,” said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based nonprofit that funds and reviews education research. “The universities will fight, too,” she said. “Master’s programs are cash cows. Schools charge thousands a year in tuition for programs that cost little to run. Ever wonder why ed schools don’t publicize this research?”

    — Dallas Morning News

  • Minimum wage price controls hurt Kansas

    This article presents compelling evidence that raising the minimum wage is not in the best interests of low-wage workers.

    An issue that the very existence of a minimum wage reveals, one that no one seems to talk about is this: Why are so many workers capable only of doing work valued so low? We should be asking why we spend so much on public schools and education, only to have groups of workers with so little skill that their work output is valued so little.

    Minimum Wage Price Controls Hurts Kansas
    By Karl Peterjohn

    The minimum wage is going to rise. That is the consensus from both political parties out of Washington. Raising the minimum wage is at the top of the rather thin 2007 public policy agenda for the new Democratic majority in Congress. The new GOP senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that senate Republicans will not stop this price control expansion from being enacted.

    The federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour and has been for the last nine years. The new increase is likely to be $7.25 an hour and this could be very bad news in Kansas. Federal labor data indicates that Kansas is one of four states with the highest percentage of the workforce getting paid between $5.15 and $7.25 per hour. Over 10 percent of working Kansans are getting paid $7.25 or less. The other three states over 10 percent are South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

    Raising the minimum wage to $7.25 won’t have much of an impact in the coastal areas of the U.S. where hour wages already easily exceed these levels. In low income Kansas, the impact is likely to be substantial and highly negative. One senior Kansas legislator discussed this new price control expansion with this pithy comment: “Look for a lot of small town restaurants to close.”

    The recent death of Nobel Laureate and free market economist Milton Friedman ties into this return to government expansion of price controls, in this case over labor. “Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail,” Friedman said. Numerous examples of the negative results of price controls are cited in his classic “Free To Choose.”

    Friedman warned against the negative impact of price controls hurting job hunters. People looking for work will be banned from working at less than the new legally mandated minimum. A surplus of labor in the form of increased unemployment will appear next year.

    Since these minimum wage workers are at the lower end of the job scales, they will be disproportionately the under-educated, low-skilled, and least employable workers losing their jobs. This will create a demand for more government spending to aid the newly unemployed.

    If raising wages was as simple as having the government wave a wand and pass a law, why stop at $7.25 per hour? How about $1,000 an hour? If government price controls on labor are a good thing, why not? There would be lots of folks willing to work at that wage. However, there would not be many willing employers. Government created labor surpluses in the form or massive unemployment would soar. The economy would collapse.

    Everyone knows that setting this type of extreme price control is bad. Why are folks so willing to make this mistake to a smaller degree? Unions benefit since the minimum helps to serve as a floor underneath their contractual efforts. This union tie explains the Democratic Party’s adamant support for expanding this price control. This still harms low income people by destroying their jobs and, with it, opportunity for something better.

    Government price controls also weaken the economy by sending incorrect signals, mis-allocating both capital and labor. This hurts the economy by misallocating resources. Price controls remove necessary incentives for efficiency. Economic misallocation occurs when signals from market pricing are replaced with government edicts.

    The most pernicious impact of this price control is removing the first step for people entering the labor market. While most folks make a lot more than the minimum wage, these entry level jobs are important to first time workers, low skill level workers, and poorly educated workers. Price controls that destroy the jobs these folks perform are pernicious to society and destructive to individuals striving to get their first step into the job market. A large number of Kansas jobs will be destroyed by a $7.25 minimum wage. Look for more unemployment ahead in 2007.

    Why won’t Republican senators filibuster against government mandated job destruction? The only accomplishment for the Democrats during the last two years in the U.S. Senate has been their filibusters. The Democrats won their majority with their filibusters.

  • Adjusting the testing gap

    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.

    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 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.

  • Even the New York Times recognizes testing fraud

    A July 2, 2006 New York Times editorial titled “The School Testing Dodge” realizes that nearly all states report student achievement scores, as measured by their own tests, that are much higher than what the same students do on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress exam. An extended quotation from the editorial:

    Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a research institute run jointly by Stanford and the University of California, showed that in many states students who performed brilliantly on state tests scored dismally on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is currently the strongest, most well-respected test in the country.

    The study analyzed state-level testing practices from 1992 to 2005. It found that many states were dumbing down their tests or shifting the proficiency targets in math and reading, creating a fraudulent appearance of progress and making it impossible to tell how well students were actually performing.

    Not all states have tried to evade the truth. The tests in Massachusetts, for example, yield performance results that are reasonably close to the federal standard. Not so for states like Oklahoma, where the score gap between state and federal tests has averaged 48 points in reading and 60 points in math, according to the PACE report. The states that want to mislead the government — and their own residents — use a variety of dodges, including setting passing scores low, using weak tests and switching tests from year to year to prevent unflattering comparisons over time. These strategies become transparent when the same students who perform so well on state tests do poorly on the more rigorous federal exam. Most alarming of all, the PACE study finds that the gap between student reading performance on the state and federal tests has actually grown wider over time — which suggests that claims of reading progress in many states are in fact phony.

    I have written in the past about the discrepancies between state test results and NAEP test results (see No Child Left Behind Leaving Many Behind, Schoolchildren Will Be Basically Proficient, and Every State Left Behind). What is the solution to this problem? Most families don’t have much choice except to accept and use the existing public schools in their state and their fraudulent test results. With school choice implemented through meaningful vouchers, parents will have an alternative to the public school monopoly. If parents do not believe the test results the public schools report, they will be able to do something meaningful: move their children to a different school. As of now, parents have little choice and few weapons to use against the public school bureaucracy — except for the NAEP test results.

  • No Child Left Behind Leaving Many Behind

    Recently an Associated Press article reported how the test scores of some two million children aren’t being counted, due to a loophole in the No Child Left Behind Act. (See ‘No Child’ loophole misses millions of scores at CNN, April 18, 2006.) The Wall Street Journal (“No Child Left Behind” April 29, 2006) editorializes on this as follows:

    … Last month we reported that parents and children in failing schools nationwide aren’t being notified of their school-choice transfer and tutoring options, even though notification is a requirement under NCLB. The news that [Secretary of Education] Ms. Spellings is also letting states slide on even reporting the math and reading test scores of minorities is especially disturbing because accountability is the heart of the federal law.

    NCLB makes allowances for schools that have racial groups too small to be statistically significant. But states have been abusing their freedom under the law to determine when a group is too small to count. And Washington is letting them get away with it. According to the AP, nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the Education Department “for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories.” Today about one in 14 test scores overall go uncounted. Minorities, whose test scores on average lag those of white students, are seven times as likely to have their test results ignored. That’s an odd way to enforce a law called No Child Left Behind.

    Has Kansas asked for exemptions from these reporting requirements? I spoke to an official at the Kansas Department of Education, and it appears that Kansas is not asking for exemptions like the ones reported above. That’s good news.

    But Kansas school officials, like those in nearly every other state, continue to paint a prettier picture than the actual reality. This article Every State Left Behind explains how state education officials report student proficiency rates far in excess of what the National Assessment of Educational Progress test reveals.

    The public education establishment tells us they are willing to be held accountable. As it turns out, being held accountable to a government agency may not mean very much.

    There is a simple way to hold public schools accountable to those who matter most: simply give parents meaningful school choice. Open public schools to market competition. Give parents, through vouchers, meaningful opportunities to choose schools for their children.

    With all the attention paid to schools this year in Kansas government, with all the new money about to be spent, accountability is still lacking. The education establishment insists on retaining their government-sponsored monopoly on education spending. In a few years when the impact of the increased education spending in Kansas is assessed — if we are able to get an honest evaluation — we should not be surprised to find that no progress has been made.