Iowa Legislature Lines Up Another Enactment

June 30, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Last night, Iowa’s House and Senate passed a budget that expands funding for the state’s tax-credit scholarship program. If the governor signs, as expected, that will bring us to fifteen school choice enactments and officially put us not just at, but over the benchmark for Matt’s “double down challenge”  in my bet with Jay Mathews.

And from what I hear, the next question isn’t whether we’ll get to sixteen. The question is, which state will get to fifteen first, and which will have to settle for sixteen – or seventeen, or eighteen . . .

3 Comments | politics, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Stand for Children vs. Oregon Education Association

June 30, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Fantastic article on the struggle between the teacher’s union and Stand for Children in Oregon, where the NEA affiliate has suffered the first setbacks in recent memory. Too much good stuff for a mere money quote, go read the whole thing.

The struggle in Oregon is a microcosm of a greater battle going on within the Democratic Party between the Waiting for “Superman” liberals and teacher unions. Progressives can either have education progress or a lockstep alliance with education reactionaries, but they cannot have both.  The opening of the article makes this point well:

Last week, Gov. John  Kitzhaber and his allies rammed a dozen education bills through  roadblocks erected by the 48,000-member Oregon Education Association.

A coalition of  Kitzhaber, House Republicans, a few Democrats willing to buck the  teachers’ union, and newly emboldened interest groups handed the OEA its biggest policy setbacks in years.

“There is a strong  desire for real movement forward on education, and people were willing  to break a few eggs to get there,” says Rep. Chris Garrett (D-Lake  Oswego), one of three Democrats who voted “yes” on HB 2301, a  controversial online charter-school bill that catalyzed the breakthrough.

Last week I gave a well earned congratulations to Rep. Matt Wingard for his dogged pursuit of reform.  Democrats such as Governor Kitzhaber and Rep. Garrett displayed great courage in bucking a major faction of their own party, and Stand for Children is obviously winning the battle for hearts and minds.

1 Comment | politics, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Supreme Court Strikes Blow for Free Political Speech

June 29, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a resounding blow against government managed political speech by ruling the matching funds provision of the Arizona Clean Elections program unconstitutional.
Congratulations go out to the Goldwater Institute and the Institute for Justice for seeing this case through. Special credit especially goes to the Goldwater Institute’s Nick Dranias (pictured above), who recognized the opportunity to challenge this pernicious law and took extraordinary efforts to secure this victory.

Arizona established “Clean Elections” by a ballot measure in reaction to political scandals. The system went far beyond public financing for candidates, forcing candidates for Arizona offices to choose to run “clean” or “traditional.” If you ran “clean” you not only get money from the state from your campaign, the Clean Elections system would match funds raised by any traditional opponents.

In other words, the system skewed heavily against privately financed candidates, and created a huge disincentive for anyone to donate to a campaign in which a “clean” candidate had entered. More than anything else, the system worked as an incumbency protection racket. As an incumbent, you already had a certain amount of name identification. If you faced a challenger who needed in essence to spend money in order to acquire name identification, you could simply run “Clean” and quash them. As long as you hadn’t been arrested for robbing a liquor store, you were fine. If the liquor store you robbed were owned by a member of the opposite political party, you were probably still fine. Who in their right mind would donate money to a traditional candidate under such circumstances?

The scandals associated with the program, of course, were many. It didn’t take long for Republicans to dredge up some “Green Party” candidates to game the system. Teams of candidates entered elections with the real candidates running “Clean” while the dupe candidate running traditional in order to generate more “Clean” funds for the team. I kept waiting for someone to found a PAC called “Al Qaeda in Arizona” in order to make independent expenditures (also covered by Clean Elections) and trigger “Clean” money for preferred candidates.

The Clean Elections system certainly played a role in Janet Napolitano’s initial election victory, but also probably helped secure oversized Republican majorities in the legislature. Regardless of which party did a better job of using and abusing this system, by suppressing free political speech it was wrong. Over the last few years, the scales fell from the eyes of many former supporters I spoke with, who eventually gave up notions of trying to “fix” Clean Elections and quietly hoped that it would die. Some Republicans who had become expert at gaming the system privately complained about the suit.

Fortunately, the United Supreme Court struck down this free-speech suppressing nonsense. “If the matching funds provision achieves its professed goal and causes candidates to switch to public financing, . . . there will be less speech: no spending above the initial state-set amount by formerly privately financed candidates, and no associated matching funds for anyone. Not only that, the level of speech will depend on the State’s judgment of the desirable amount, an amount tethered to available (and often scarce) state resources,” the majority ruled. “The whole point of the First Amendment is to protect speakers against unjustified restrictions on speech, even when those restrictions reflect the will of the majority. When it comes to protected speech, the speaker is sovereign.”

Congrats to the Goldwater Institute and the Institute for Justice for this very important victory. Keep it up and someday political speech may enjoy as much 1st Amendment protection as pornography!

1 Comment | politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Questions for Jeb and Joel

June 28, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries my letter to the editor responding to last week’s op-ed by Jeb Bush and Joel Klein advocating national (“common”) education standards.

In my letter, I ask a few questions:

I greatly respect Jeb Bush and Joel Klein. But if Common Core is voluntary and state-driven, how do they explain the federal government repeatedly threatening states to join it or lose federal funds? Why are the testing consortia associated with this effort federally funded and controlled?

Confusingly, Messrs. Bush and Klein praise decentralization and local control for pedagogy while urging states to submit to a centralized command-and-control system for content standards. If nationalization is bad for pedagogy, why is it good for standards? Is it even possible to nationalize standards without nationalizing pedagogy?

Common Core’s standards are so mediocre that they set a “college readiness” level that is below what students need even to apply to most colleges. And they’ll get worse over time, since centralization facilitates teacher union control. What about the perpetual culture war national content standards would create? What is the upside?

Greg Forster

Foundation for Educational Choice

5 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Flawed Comparison from OECD

June 28, 2011

The OECD has a report, Education at a Glance 2010, that provides a shockingly flawed comparison of the amount of time U.S. teachers work relative to teachers in other countries.  According to the report, U.S. teachers work 1,913 hours over a 180 day school year that is 36 weeks long.  And also according to the report, the average OECD teacher only works 1,659 hours over a school year of 187 days that is 38 weeks long.

So, if we believe these OECD numbers (which the WSJ apparently did in this blog post), U.S. teachers work 15.3% more hours per year than do their colleagues in other developed countries.

But if you believe the OECD comparison I have a lovely bridge to sell to you.  According to the report’s methodological appendix, the method by which the U.S. information was collected was different (and clearly less reliable)  than how it was collected from all of the other countries.  In every country except the U.S. the hours worked was derived from teacher contracts or laws.  But in the U.S. the information was drawn from self-reported responses to a survey of teachers.  (See p. 75 of the appendix).

A valid comparison would require that the information be collected in similar ways across all countries — either we rely upon self-reports in surveys of teachers for all countries or we rely on contractual hours for everyone.  But using self-reports for the U.S. and contractual hours for everyone else produces obvious distortions.  People may be inclined to exaggerate the hours they work in a survey.  And the definition of time worked is ambiguous.  If I think about my students while I am brushing my teeth or running on the treadmill am I working during that time?

We have good reason to suspect that the self-reports from U.S. teachers are over-stated.  If teachers really worked 1,913 hours over 180 days, as the report claims, they would be working 10.63 hours per day.  And the numbers I’ve provided are just for primary school students.  For high schools, the OECD report claims U.S. teachers are working 1,998 hours over 180 days, which works out to 11.1 hours per day.  I know some teachers are very conscientious and work long hours but I simply do not believe that the average high school teacher is working 11.1 hours per day.

I know this might invite the wrath of Diane Ravitch’s Army of Angry Teachers, but I suspect that the average hours worked by U.S. teachers is significantly less than the OECD says (and the WSJ repeats).  And I know that the comparison between U.S. and other countries is flawed by collecting the information from self-reports in the U.S. but from contracts everywhere else.

24 Comments | teacher pay | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Louisiana Doubles Down

June 28, 2011

Sorry, I couldn’t find “Louisiana Hold ‘Em”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Two Wisconsin enactments while I was travelling a week ago – expanding Milwaukee vouchers and creating a new voucher program in Racine – brought my ongoing humiliation of Jay Mathews to a total of 13 school choice enactments (new programs or expansions of existing programs). And that’s not even counting Oklahoma’s “expansion” of its special ed voucher program (the program was “expanded” to include students who were eligible to participate but were being illegally denied access by rogue school districts).

Governor Jindal just doubled us down by signing into law Lousiana’s expansion of its educational tax deduction, bringing us to 14 enactments on a bet that we wouldn’t reach seven.

Here’s the tally so far:

  1. UT Carson Smith expansion
  2. Douglas County, CO new voucher
  3. AZ new ESA
  4. DC voucher expansion
  5. IN new voucher
  6. IN new tax deduction
  7. IN tax-credit scholarship expansion
  8. OK new tax-credit scholarship
  9. FL tax-credit scholarship expansion
  10. FL McKay voucher expansion
  11. GA tax-credit scholarship expansion
  12. WI Milwaukee voucher expansion
  13. WI new Racine vouchers
  14. LA tax deduction expansion

Matt wants to know if there’s a mercy rule for wonk bets. As Ned Flanders once said, “Mercy is for the weak!”

3 Comments | politics, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

The Austin Odd Couple and the Birth of a Music Scene

June 27, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Interesting article from the Austin American Statesman’s Michael Corcoran on the seemingly odd friendship between University of Texas football legend Darrell Royal and the rambling Willie Nelson, and how it helped to create the Austin music scene.

1 Comment | random pop culture | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Bloat? I Don’t See No Stinkin’ Bloat

June 27, 2011

An organization representing State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) released a report a little while ago on staffing trends in higher education.  The report never names the report Brian Kisida, Jonathan Mills, and I released last year showing how administrative staff grew much more rapidly at research universities between 1993 and 2007 than did instructional and research staff.  But it is clear that this new report is meant to be a refutation of sorts to what it describes as “similar analyses of staffing patterns,” meaning our report.

Using the same federal data source, the new report comes to what appears to be a very different conclusion:

While total staff levels grew 18 percent from 2001 to 2009, the total number of FTE students grew by 29 percent, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of staff per 100 FTE students by 8 percent. “Most institutions improved their educational efficiency by educating more students with fewer staffing resources,” the SHEEO report stated.

What explains the seemingly different conclusions?  The SHEEO report does not group staff into the same categories that we do, it looks at a different and shorter time period, and it expands its scope to include non-research Associates degree and BA granting institutions, which comprise 91% of all of the sample they observe.  We focus on the other 9% of high research universities.

The most important of these differences is the way in which staff are grouped.  The point of our report was to compare growth in administrative staffing relative to instructional and research staffing.  We defined administrative staffing as a combination of the “Executive/Administrative and Managerial” and the “Other Professionals” categories, since these represent the higher-paid professionals who provide non-instructional and non-research services to students, from Deans to student counselors.  When we compare the growth of these folks to the growth in faculty we see that universities have been devoting much more of their newly obtained resources to these non-instructional and non-research services.  That is, our leading research universities are using new resources to stray further from their core missions of teaching and research and to expand into a host of peripheral services.

The SHEEO report concludes that institutions have “improved their educational efficiency” only by combining all staff into one big category.  If you dig deeper into their report where they break the results out by category, you can see that they also find that faculty staffing ratios have declined while senior executive and professional staffing ratios have grown.  In Table 4 the total ratio of Executive and Other Professional staff to students went from 5.04 per 100 students in 2001 to 5.07 in 2009, while faculty declined from 8.41 to 8.09 during the same time period.

That is, the SHEEO report confirms our basic finding.  It only concludes that higher ed has improved its efficiency by adopting the strange idea that greater efficiency means cutting faculty while growing executive and professional staff.

It is also worth noting that the SHEEO report does not go back to 1993 as we did.  We covered the years 1993 to 2007 because they were the earliest and most recent years for which data were available at the time we wrote the report.  If SHEEO had gone further back they would not have found the improved efficiency they claim to find since 2001.  In our report we found overall staffing levels increased from 31.4 full and part time staff per 100 students to 35.5 in 2007, an increase of 13.1% in overall staffing levels.  We also observed an increase if we look only at full time staff.  SHEEO is only able to find greater overall efficiency (defined strangely by them as cutting faculty even more than growing non-faculty professionals) by starting their analysis in 2001 rather than 1993.

This spin-job by SHEEO hasn’t gained much traction, so I hadn’t even noticed it for more than a month after its release.  But I’m sure that it is being waived around in meetings of boards of trustees if they begin to ask about administrative bloat as a result of our report last year.  Trustees shouldn’t be fooled.


									


				

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 Posted by Jay P. Greene				

			

			

		
			

				
Confusion over National Standards

				June 24, 2011



				

					


(Guest post by Greg Forster)


I greatly admire both Jeb Bush and Joel Klein, so I have mixed feelings saying that I’m confused about their op-ed this morning.


The article is entitled “The Case for Common Educational Standards.” But the article does not contain any case for common educational standards.


Quite the contrary, the article emphasizes the case against common standards. As in:


And, while education is a national priority, the answer here does not appear to be a new federal program mandating national standards. States have historically had the primary responsibility for public education, and they should continue to take the lead.


So that would be an argument against common standards.


It is the states’ responsibility to foster an education system that leads to rising student achievement. State leaders, educators, teachers and parents are empowered to ensure every student has access to the best curriculum and learning environment. Governors and lawmakers across the country are acting to adopt bold education reform policies. This is the beauty of our federal system. It provides 50 testing sites for reform and innovation.


Again, a great argument against common standards.


Bush and Klein depict the Common Core standards and the two testing consortia as products of state, not federal, initiative. As regular readers of JPGB know, there’s another reality behind that superficial appearance. If Common Core and the testing consortia are really state-driven, why has the federal government spent more than a year pushing states into them, openly and explicitly threatening loss of Title I funds to states that fail to kowtow? Why are the consortia federally funded (and therefore federally controlled)? Is it even possible for these efforts to be genuinely state-driven when the federal behemoth is openly using its funding club to threaten everyone to get on board? Bush and Klein fail to mention these issues.


However, let’s leave all that to one side. Let’s pretend – even though we know it’s false – that these efforts are really state driven. Why is it valuable for states to do these things together in a single group? If states should lead the way, if what we want is a decentralized 50-state laboratory of democracy, why not actually do that instead of rounding up all the states to all do it one way?


Bush and Klein argue that standards are being set nationally (in “common”) but pedagogy isn’t. Once again, let’s leave aside the reality that you can’t have national (common) standards while preserving freedom and diversity of pedagogy. Let’s pretend you can set national standards and then let a thousand flowers bloom on pedagogy. Why do it? Why is it valuable to set a single national (common) standard? The article’s title promises an answer to that question, but the article doesn’t deliver.


If, as Bush and Klein argue, most states have woefully inadequate standards, isn’t it likely that the central bureaucracy you’re creating will gravitate to mediocrity rather than excellence? And isn’t that just what Common Core represents, given that its standards for what count as “college ready” are actually set below what you need to even apply to, much less succeed at, most colleges?


So color me confused.

									


				

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 Posted by Greg Forster				

			

			

		
			

				
Oregon Takes First Steps Towards Reform

				June 22, 2011



				

					
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)


Longtime readers of the Jayblog may recall that I have, from time to time, asked exactly what is going on in K-12 in Oregon, which is very Anglo, relatively wealthy and sports bad NAEP scores.


When the Urban District NAEP came out, I noticed that several big city districts beat the statewide average in Oregon as well.


Oregon had an interesting election in 2010, splitting control of the House evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Earlier this year I had the opportunity to testify before the House Education committee on the Florida reforms, which was an interesting experience as the committee had co-chairs.


Once I was finished, the lobbyist from the Oregon Education Association testified that she had done some “homework” over the weekend, and had calculated A-F grades for Oregon schools. She claimed that (gasp) many Oregon charter schools would get a grade of F.


I found this very interesting, as she had no access to student learning gain data for any of these schools, and learning gains make up half of a school’s grade under the Florida formula. Oh well, why let your credibility get in the way of a good  story?


Representative Matt Wingard, the Republican co-chair of the House Education committee, is a dogged supporter of education reform. Rep. Wingard discussed the Florida reforms on this newscast:



Rep. Wingard introduced the Florida reforms, and encountered the predictable wave of opposition. Rep. Wingard’s efforts were rewarded this session, however, as Oregon passed an open enrollment law, an improvement to their charter authorization process, and an improvement in their online learning laws.


While these gains are incremental rather than revolutionary, trust me when I tell you that they were not easily achieved. Many people take open enrollment laws for granted or think of them as weak tea while failing to appreciate the huge impact they have had in shrinking dysfunctional districts such as Detroit and Tucson.


Congratulations to Rep. Wingard for getting the reform ball rolling in Oregon.

									


				

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 Posted by matthewladner				

			

			

		
		

			
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