Charter Chatter

February 10, 2010

Readers of JPGB have already seen the working paper, but Education Next now has the peer-reviewed and published version of Booker, Sass, Gill, and Zimmer’s study of the effect of charter high school on graduation and college attendance.  Since you are way ahead of the curve you already knew that attending a charter high school increases the probability that a student will graduate high school and go to college.

The study is so clever because it focuses on students who attended charter middle schools.  Some went on to charter high school and some did not.  By comparing the two groups Booker, et al reduce the selection bias of choice, since all of the students chose charter schools at least for middle school.  But there may still be some selection bias in who chooses to continue in charter high school, so Booker, et al address that with a neato instrumental variable.  Some students don’t go on to charter high school because there isn’t one available nearby.  Their analysis predicts whether students continue to a charter high school based on the availability of nearby charter options.

Check out the highly readable Ed Next article for yourself.  Also watch the podcast interview with Brian Gill.

5 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Sacred Cow Says MOOOOOO!!!!

February 10, 2010

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

When Arizona Governor Jan Brewer announced her proposed budget, she established a benchmark in calling for the termination of a state program that currently serves 17,400 seriously mentally ill adults to save $37 million, the Arizona Republic reported. The governor’s budget chief, John Arnold, said this spending reduction is especially hard for the governor because she has been a strong advocate for mental-health causes.

“That benchmark means that anyone who seeks more funding from the state must first make the case why the cause is more important than providing services to 17,400 mentally-ill adults,” Arnold told the Republic.

Arizona is spending far, far more money than it is bringing in and lawmakers must make difficult choices. The concept of a benchmark to justify any new spending is therefore a good one. But it cuts both ways. What about continuing to spend in areas that are nowhere near as worthy as services to the mentally ill?

Consider administrators in the K-12 public educational system. The National Center for Education Statistics reveals that of the 104,630 employees at Arizona school districts in 2007-08, only 54,032 of them were teachers. What is more worthy of funding: maintaining an almost 1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio or maintaining services for the mentally ill?

Here’s another example: community colleges. The Maricopa County Community College District has a current operating budget of more than $683 million. The total budget from all sources is almost $1.5 billion. The district will spend only $276 million on instruction, making it around only 40 percent of its operating budget and only 18.6 percent of its total budget. MCCCD spends more than three times as much for administration and academic support as the state spends on the mentally ill, and the district’s three-year student completion rate is 11 percent. It is not clear what MCCCD is doing with that additional $130 million, but it does not seem to involve quality administration or academic support.

Defenders of the education status-quo will be quick to point out the federal government’s “maintenance of effort” requirements for using stimulus funds. However, there are waivers for such requirements, and Governor Brewer should seek them immediately. When we are cutting services for the mentally ill, we can hardly afford to maintain wasteful spending as a sacred cow.

1 Comment | school funding | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

No one else will do it, but…Goldwater is Hiring!

February 9, 2010

 

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

We are looking to fill five openings at the Goldwater Institute: a vice president of finance and administration, a director of development, an administrative assistant, a development assistant and a staff attorney. We are seeking mid- to senior-level applicants and have some flexibility in responsibilities and salaries depending on the qualifications of the candidates. Information on the positions and how to apply are on our website at: http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/jobopportunities

Or contact Berry Nelson at bnelson@goldwaterinstitute.org.

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Bad Politics

February 9, 2010

As I’ve written several times before, I don’t believe that the various federal government stimulus efforts did anything to help the economy.  In fact, they’ve done quite a lot of economic damage by distorting a more efficient allocation of capital and by encouraging the moral hazard where private actors who take unreasonable and large risks get to keep the profits if their bet works and get bailed out by taxpayers if it doesn’t. 

However, plenty of smart people, including a whole lot of folks at market-oriented think tanks, thought large-scale federal intervention in the economy was necessary to stave off an economic collapse. 

Whatever you think of the economic merits of federal stimulus efforts, one thing is very clear — giant federal stimulus efforts were bad politics for President Obama.  It may have made some political sense for an outgoing President Bush to do whatever he could to avoid being cast as the next Herbert Hoover.  But Obama’s political interests should have been different.  He entered office in the midst of a severe economic downturn that had started under his predecessor.  If he had followed the smart political example of Ronald Reagan he would have basically let the downturn run its course and then have rapid economic growth following.  Instead, Obama (and Bush’s) stimulus efforts essentially borrowed consumption from the recovery to soften the severity of the downturn.  The downturn may not have been as bad as it would have been, but the recovery is also much weaker than it would have been.

Reagan’s example may or may not be good policy, but it is certainly good politics.  As any student of Machiavelli learns, you should have all of the bad at the beginning and then let the benefits roll in over time.

3 Comments | economics, politics | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Lost Change

February 8, 2010

No, not that kind of change. 

I’m talking about whether the course of time has really been changed on Lost when they detonated a nuke on the Island.  In the first episode of this season we are led to believe that things have changed.  We see the Losties back on their Oceanic flight but this time it doesn’t crash.  Maybe it worked!

But we also see the Losties on the Island after Esau (Smokey) has killed Jacob and nothing has appeared to change.  Which one is the real timeline?

The answer, I suspect, is that they are still part of the same timeline and nothing was fundamentally changed by the nuke.  Yes, Oceanic landed safely in LA, but I’ll bet that all of the Losties will make their way back to the Island over the next few episodes and the two timelines will merge.  You can’t change time.

This seems to be the major dispute between Jacob and Esau.  When the two of them were sitting on the beach watching the ship, Esau said that it always ends the same way.  Jacob agrees but says that the process is always different and that is progress.  We’ll somehow learn that Jacob is right about this.  We’ll see that there has been progress even if the ending is the same.

Some evidence for this theory is that Juliet seems to be dangling between the two timelines as she is dying.  She talks about going to get coffee and wants to tell Sawyer that it worked.  Also, Desmond appears and disappears on the flight.  I bet things are changing in the alternate timeline to course-correct already.

Some other questions to ponder:  Where is home for Esau (Smokey)?  he tells us that he finally wants to go home and I’ll bet that is the Temple from which he has been banished and will now attempt to recapture. 

Also, is Jacob inside Sayed?  It seems like Jacob gave Hurley the guitar case as an insurance policy.  He knew that he could visit Hurley even after he was killed and deliver the message to his followers at the Temple.  The message may well have been to use the pool to transfer Jacob into Sayed so that Jacob could help defend the Temple against Esau.

Even though Jacob seems like the good guy and Essau as the bad one, I’ll bet that they are both actually mixed in character.  Each has done good and bad things.  We will somehow learn that both are correct — fate cannot be changed but there is still room for free will and human progress.

2 Comments | Lost | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

UCLA Civil Rights Project Gets It Wrong

February 4, 2010

My friends over at Mid-Riffs take apart the new report from Gary Orfield’s UCLA Civil Rights Project claiming that charters produce segregation:

“The report finds:

…that charter schools, particularly those in the western United States are havens for white re-segregation from public schools; requirements for providing essential equity data to the federal government go unmet across the nation; and magnet schools are overlooked, in spite of showing greater levels of integration and academic achievement than charters.

It looks like, based on a quick pass through the report, their main finding is based on demographic comparisons  between charter schools and traditional public schools at the state level. This method of comparison likely leads to inaccurate conclusions due to the fact that charter schools are overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon. The correct comparison is between charters and the demographics of their immediate geographic area. We have discussed this topic as it relates to Little Rock at length here.

The Economist’s take on this report is concise, to-the-point, and spot on.

In plain English, there are a lot of black kids in charter schools. This is because charter schools tend to get set up in neighbourhoods where the public schools are terrible, such as south-eastern Washington DC or the rougher parts of New Orleans. These neighbourhoods are disproportionately African-American. Charter schools are popular with poor black parents because their other choices are so awful. There are very few charter schools in rich white suburbs with nice public schools, because there is no call for them.

The important question about charter schools is: do they give kids a better education than they would otherwise have received? The answer is yes. Nothing else matters.”

6 Comments | charter schools | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

DC Vouchers Will Not Go Quietly

February 4, 2010

Obama, Duncan, and Durbin would love this issue to just go away but it won’t.  From the Washington Post editorial page today:

SENS. JOSEPH I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) haven’t given up on their bid to save the federally funded voucher program that allows low-income families in the District to send their children to private schools. We would like to see them succeed, but it’s clear that President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have already written the epilogue to this worthy program. Their disregard for how vouchers have helped children is so complete that it seems that the best chance, perhaps the only chance, for the program’s survival is for local officials to step in….

The best solution, of course, is the one sought by a bipartisan coalition lead by Mr. Lieberman for Congress to reauthorize the program. He is set to announce plans Thursday to offer the reauthorization as an amendment to legislation moving in the Senate, and he’s hoping for help from Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), majority whip and chairman of the subcommittee that funds the program. Mr. Durbin gave lip service to his possible support but has been content for Congress to let the program go down the tubes.

And from the Washington Times this week:

A letter sent to the White House on Wednesday was appropriately circumspect, but in effect, it boiled down to this: “Dear Mr. President, when it comes to educating America’s children, please, just this once, live up to your own words.”

The subject was the popular and successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. The letter writers were Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, and Rep. John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader.

The president touched on education during his State of the Union address last week. “The idea here is simple: Instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success,” he said. “Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform. … In this country, the success of our children cannot depend more on where they live than on their potential.”

Mr. Obama’s words sound nice, but in public education today, the reality is that most children are assigned a school based on where they live. Most families don’t have the opportunity to choose their children’s schools. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarships – which are funded by Congress – change all that without taking a dime from the public school system by helping children (more than 3,000 so far) attend non-public schools that are safer and more effective.

Mr. Boehner and Mr. Lieberman say the program works and that young lives will be lost if educational opportunity is sacrificed for political expedience. “According to Patrick Wolf, the principal investigator for the study conducted under the auspices of the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, this program has met a tough standard for efficacy,” the lawmakers wrote. “Dr. Wolf found that ‘the D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.’ ” Based on Mr. Obama’s own words about investing in reform and rewarding success, Mr. Boehner and Mr. Lieberman argue that D.C. Opportunity Scholarships should not only be reauthorized but expanded to serve additional students.

The program is wildly popular in the District, including among Democrats who are strong supporters of Mr. Obama. According to the letter, the scholarships enjoy “the overwhelming support of D.C. residents, parents, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, [D.C. Public Schools] Chancellor [Michelle] Rhee, former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and a majority of the D.C. City Council.”

Instead of listening to those closest to D.C. students and their challenges, the Obama administration has backed plans to pull the plug on the scholarship program. This is transparent pandering to school workers unions that don’t want the competition provided by such scholarships.

While Mr. Obama sends his daughters Sasha and Malia to private school, he ignores heartfelt pleas from parents and children to allow more youngsters a chance for a quality education. The scholarship program is an unambiguous test of whether or not this president means what he says. If he allows the program to die, the hopes of many D.C. children will die with it.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

UPDATE — Andy Smarick agrees over at Flypaper.

3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Robert Enlow on Vouchers and School Safety

February 3, 2010

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Robert Enlow, my boss at the Foundation for Educational Choice, writes in this morning’s Chicago Sun-Times that school vouchers are a safety issue:

When Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan visited the community in October, Holder said the Albert murder was “a call to action” and that youth violence had to come to an end…

In October, Holder said, “We are not going to protect any sacred cows. The status quo is not acceptable.” If that is truly the case, if Chicago parents, community leaders and politicians have had enough bloodshed, justice will no longer be delayed.

If you’re in Chicago Friday morning, or can be, don’t miss the big event the Illinois Policy Institute will be putting on. Rev. Senator James Meeks will be giving a barn-burner of a speech, from what I’m told. You’ll want to hear it.

(Oh, and yours truly will be on stage as well, to talk about this. But come anyway.)

Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Brookings School Choice Task Force

February 3, 2010

I’m a co-author on the Brookings School Choice Task Force report that was released yesterday in DC, following briefings on the Hill.  Andrew Coulson has already raised concerns about the report because he fears expanding the federal role in education even if it is in expanding choice.

I’m sympathetic to Andrew’s position but I should note that he wrote his post prior to the release of the report.  After reading it he might have a lot less to be concerned about.  The Task Force did not recommend a large federal program on school choice.  Instead, we emphasized improving the quality of information and providing incentives for states and localities to expand choice.  And we conceived of choice broadly, including vouchers, charters, virtual learning, magnets, inter-district, etc…

These measures are nowhere near the kind of choice that Andrew and I would ultimately like to see, but we have to understand political realities and embrace incrementalism.  I think there are a lot of sensible ideas in the report but you should read it and judge for yourself.  It can be found here.

3 Comments | charter schools, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Op-Ed on Head Start and DC Vouchers

February 3, 2010

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Examiner that will also be on City Journal’s web site on how the Obama administration has betrayed its pledge to do what the evidence says works in education.  It starts:

Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

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