Whether or not the underlying data is sound (by which I’m guessing you mean usuable by researchers (?)) is secondary to whether parents are getting reliable information about whether their children are actually grade level proficient or not.

Most state tests are too easy to do that, and then on top of that, many states lack internally consistent standards. While I think matters have improved from the days when real estate agents were the only source for school data, it’s not as though we’ve entered into a transparency nirvana.

In my study on Florida vouchers earlier this year, the only reason I was able to control for LEP status is because the LEP data were available in NCLB reports. They weren’t available anywhere else.

Take a look at the Proficiency Illusion study by Fordham. It really is sobering-much of the “data” that we have is highly dubious, and much of what we have we would have had anyway without NCLB. Granted, the state of school transparency is better now than it used to be and some of that can be attributed to NCLB. Both the Bushie 2014 utopians and the allegedly “less powerful on Mount Olympus” unions are actively putting these limited gains at risk.

The reasonable assumption to make, in my view, is that the whatever progress we see in coming years will be driven by state policymakers regardless of what happens in DC. DC might hinder them somewhat, and they are not likely to help much either.

In the end, the 8 percent of K-12 spending main result is paperwork, and that won’t change. The feds apparently cannot leverage their 8 percent into summoning the moral courage required to do real education reform at the state level.

Regardless, as you say, we don’t know what we woud have gotten without NCLB. And the important thing, of course, is that we agree on the primacy of school choice.

Just how much of the additional spending in 2001 is really attributable to NCLB we’ll never know, of course. But I have a high estimate of the benefits of the transparency and data produced by NCLB so I’m inclined to think we probably got a good deal compared to what we would have gotten if we had just gotten spending growth.

As far as the costs and data go, it is wrong to assume we’d always have the costs. Yes, the feds spent a lot on K-12 before NCLB, but they spend much more now, and allowing them to do so was a political necessity to get NCLB passed (and I think we can expect the next president to spend even more). And I don’t think the data is much better now than if the feds had simply said that if you want federal money, you must particpate in NAEP. Yes, we have state tests, but they have largely been a moving target since NCLB was passed, making it hard to get consistent longitudinal data for many states. And for the people who are supposed to ultimately be using the data–parents–the difference between scores and reality can be very can be very hard to know.

You argue that the benefits of NCLB don’t outweigh the costs. Once again, I reiterate my point that we’re going to have the costs anyway. The only real question is whether we’re going to have the costs and the benefits or just the costs.

I’m not sure I agree that the recent improvement in elementary-level scores on NAEP can’t be attributed to NCLB. But it’s a difficult question and I don’t think it has been well studied yet. The good news is, thanks to NCLB there are tons of data out there and I expect good studies will emerge over time.

To your point about top-down control, as long as we have a government monopoly we’re going to have top-down control and all its delightful side effects. The only difference I can see is whether that “top” consists exclusively of the teachers’ unions and their lackies on school boards, or whether it will also include other influences – influences which may not be all good, but will certainly be less baneful than the unions.

Thankfully, we can at least agree that there will be no real end to the dysfunctions until we get an education market!

As for NCLB, I don’t think the benefits of, essentially, more data, have outweighed either the additional dollar costs or the continued centralization of power. We have not seen gains that can be attributed to NCLB on NAEP (indeed, it seems likely that gains were being made faster before NCLB), there are clear examples of states lowering standards as a direct result of NCLB (Michigan comes immediately to mind), and for the most part, the law has done nothing to encourage states to raise standards. Indeed, if anything, NCLB may have made finding the truth even more of a trip through a house of mirrors for parents. They have to know what has changed on standards, tests, and cut scores in order to know if their kids are really making progress, and NCLB essentially assures them that if their kids are deemed proficient, everything is OK.

Of course, the same things could happen at the state level, so all that said, I think top-down control at any level is bad to just slightly different degrees. Which is why, ultimately, funding must run through consumers who bring it to autonomous schools.

See here for a brief review of the value NCLB has produced.

If getting the feds out of education were a live possibility, this would be a much more complicated issue. Since it isn’t, the issue is simple: are we just going to throw money down the rathole, or are we going to throw money down the rathole while at least getting improvements in transparent data collection and testing?

I’m sure the badness of federal involvement in education outweighs the good. But the question before the house seems to me to be whether we’re going to get both the bad and the good, or just the bad.