Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Lindsey Burke)

Second grader Nathan is the beneficiary of the new frontier of school choice: education savings accounts. “Two years ago, before the ESA program, Nathan spoke with a lot of jargon and mixed responses,” says his mother Amanda. “Two years ago we weren’t even sure if we were ever going to have a conversation with him. The only reason this is possible is because we could find programs that meet his needs with ESA funds.”

Thanks to Arizona’s pioneering Empowerment Scholarship Account program, which began in 2011, children with special needs like Nathan, as well as children from active duty military families, foster care, and children in underperforming schools can exit the public system and have 90 percent of what the state would have spent on their education deposited into an education savings account. Funds are deposited onto a restricted-use debit card, and parents are then able to direct spending to any education-related service or provider of choice.

Parents can use ESA funds, deposited into their accounts quarterly, to pay for a variety of education services and providers, including private-school tuition, private tutoring, special education services, homeschooling expenses, textbooks, and virtual education. Parents may also roll over funds from year to year, and can use the money to invest in a college savings plan to pay for college tuition in the future.

I recently evaluated Arizona’s ESA program for the Friedman Foundation to determine the extent to which parents were using their ESAs to actually customize their children’s educational experience. Using data provided by the Arizona Department of Education, I found that more than one third of families used their ESAs to tailor their child’s education, purchasing multiple services and products.

Families use their ESAs to finance a variety of education-related services from a range of providers. One family used roughly 60 percent of their ESA funds for educational therapy, 30 percent for private tutoring, and the remainder of their ESA for curricula. Another family put three-quarters of their ESA dollars toward private school tuition and invested the remaining 25 percent in a college savings fund. A third family divvied up their ESA spending on private school tuition, tutoring, curricula, and online learning.

While most families use their ESAs like a school voucher to attend a single private institution that they have chosen, approximately 34 percent use their ESAs to finance multiple education options in a given day. ESAs move beyond the worthwhile goal of choice among schools to choice among education service providers, courses, teachers, and methods—not limited to one brick-and-mortar location.

ESAs are unique in another way: whereas traditional school vouchers must be spent in their entirety, ESAs foster demand-side pressure for education providers to offer more cost-efficient educational services by creating an incentive for parents to shop for education services based in part on cost. Parents are taking opportunity costs into account, saving ESA funds in anticipation of future education-related expenses, including college tuition. During the first quarter of the 2012-13 school year, parents rolled-over 26 percent of their ESA funds.

Arizona has created a model that other states should consider: funding children instead of physical school buildings and allowing funds to follow children to any educational provider of choice. Jonathan Butcher and I also recently detailed how state policymakers could transition more traditional voucher and tuition tax credit programs into flexible education savings accounts. They could:

• Create public school education savings accounts. Parents could use a public school education savings account for traditional school classes, public charter school offerings, public virtual schools such as the Florida Virtual School, community colleges, or state universities.
• Shift existing school voucher or scholarship tax credit funds to an education savings account. States with existing voucher programs or scholarship tax credit programs should allow parents to deposit voucher or scholarship funds into an education savings account in order to gain more flexibility with their child’s funds.
• Expand the approved expenses covered by a voucher or private school scholarship. This would include expanding the uses of a school voucher or scholarship, transitioning the program into an education savings account.

We are entering a new frontier of school choice. Education savings accounts represent an advance and refinement of Friedman’s original voucher concept. Through ESAs, Arizona is moving beyond school choice to education choice.  Kym Wilber, whose son Zach is an ESA recipient, explains:

“I use Zach’s ESA funds for other things than just tuition.  Because Zach is more on the moderate to severe functioning level [in terms of special needs], his funding can be used more broadly. I have a private tutor for Zach, and I can use the (ESA) funds for that. With the ESA, I can actually go out and buy things for our home program, such as additional speech tools.”

Providing that level of customization to every child would bring American K-12 education into the 21st century and ensure no child is relegated to the existing monopolistic system in which limited effectiveness is all too prevalent in states across the country.

Alex Rodriguez is one of the highest paid athletes of all time.  He also has to be one of the most despised.  But this is precisely why the Yankees and MLB officials are getting away with a blatant effort to cheat A-Rod out of money for activities from which they benefited financially.

Yes, it is obvious that A-Rod has used performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) that are banned by baseball.  Yes, A-Rod often behaves like a jerk.  But being a jerk who cheats with drugs does not explain why the MLB is seeking much higher punishment of A-Rod than other baseball players who are also PED-using jerks.

The explanation is money.  If A-Rod is suspended for using banned substances the Yankees do not have to pay him during his suspension.  Given A-Rod’s sky-high salary, that saves the Yankees a large chunk of change.  It also lowers the Yankee’s payroll enough to avoid the “luxury tax” imposed on big spending teams.  And given that A-Rod has been injured and a sub-par player recently, losing his availability is a minor inconvenience to the Yankees relative to their enormous potential savings.  The Yankees are rooting for a big penalty.

I know that it is hard to feel bad for A-Rod.  He gets paid so much and has been such a disappointing player.  But the Yankees were dumb enough to sign a contract for his outrageous salary.  They shouldn’t be able to sneak out it by exploiting A-Rod’s unpopularity.  Justice is not achieved by cheating the disliked.  Justice requires that people get what they are owed, even if they are unpopular.

And for all those fans who despise A-Rod and other professional athletes for their high salaries, remember that the owners have even higher salaries and are making profits off of the players even after promising them enormous sums.  The professional athletes have extraordinary talents for which we, the fans, voluntarily pay large amounts of money to team owners who voluntarily offer high salaries to players.  Those players deserve every penny they are promised.  Hating talented people who earn large amounts of money is nothing but petty jealousy.

A system where team owners don’t have to pay players who are caught using PEDs unreasonably benefits the owners and encourages cheating.  Owners offer enormous salaries for higher-performing players, which provides incentives to players to use PEDs.  The owners benefit from those cheating players because of their higher performance.  If the players are caught, only the player suffers.  The owner, who benefited from the cheating, is off the hook financially and experiences no other loss from the cheating other than the loss of the availability of that player.

A better system of incentives would require owners to pay players even if they are suspended for PEDs.  This would provide a strong incentive to owners to avoid signing players who they strongly suspect to be cheating.  In turn, it would discourage players from using PEDs in the hopes of getting a better contract.  And it would encourage teams to monitor their own players more tightly to make sure they were not using PEDs.  If we want to drastically reduce the use of PEDs in baseball we can’t let the owners off the hook financially when players are caught.

In the TV series Lost some of the characters believed that a set of six numbers had to be entered into a computer every 108 minutes or something terrible would happen.  At least initially, it was unclear whether this compulsion to type The Numbers really would save the world from destruction or was just a manifestation of madness.

Typing 6 numbers into a computer every 108 minutes comes to mind when I think about the role that Twitter plays in education policy debates.  Some people feel the urgent need to type fewer than 140 characters into Twitter on a very frequent basis.  Are they saving the world from something terrible or are they suffering from a form of madness?

Judging by the high status of many of these manic Tweeters you might think they are saving the world.  They include respected academics, think tank leaders, and foundation officials, so it would seem that they really must engage in these compulsive acts to prevent something terrible from happening.

Unfortunately, I think they are suffering from a form of madness.  Issuing dozens of 140 character messages every day has no real impact on making the world better.  It just encourages shallow thinking and petty sniping.  In the history of the Universe it is highly unlikely that any Tweet influenced or helped anyone.  Yes, maybe an occasional link to an interesting article was influential, but how many interesting articles can one link to each day? It is virtually certain that dozens of Tweets per day have never done anything beyond soothe the Tweeter’s manic anxiety.

Yet, we see that many seemingly respectable education policy analysts feel the compulsion to type 140 characters more frequently than every 108 minutes.  And millions of Foundation dollars are being allocated to organizations based on “metrics” that include Twitter counts.  What a remarkable waste of Foundation money, not to mention the time of highly educated individuals who could be engaged in productive tasks.  Even worse, manic Twittering has coarsened education policy discussions by substituting superficial slogans and snark for actual thought.  It has electronically lobotomized people into thinking that “tight-loose” is actually an argument.

To gauge the extent to which this madness has overtaken education policy analysts I’ve updated my Narcissus Index to see how frequently people are Tweeting.  When I published the Narcissus Index on April 2 I recorded how many Tweets people had issued as of that date.  I collected information on how many Tweets they had sent as of this morning to calculate the number of Tweets people have sent over the last 134 days.  In the table below you can see the number of Tweets issued over the last 134 days as well as the average number of Tweets per day, rounded to the closest whole number.

I also calculated how many minutes, on average, went by during every waking hour between Tweets.  I assumed that people slept 8 hours per day, so there have been 2,144 waking hours since April 2.  That works out to 128,640 waking minutes.  Dividing that number of minutes by the number of Tweets since April 2, we can see how frequently people Tweet.  Of the 81 people for whom I had information as of April 2, 3 have discontinued use of Twitter. (Good for them!)  The results for the remaining 78 are listed below.  I’m sorry I can’t easily add new people because I only have the April 2 info for these people.

Of those 78 people, 22 send out a Tweet more often, on average, than every 108 minutes.  They meet the Lost threshold for saving the world from destruction.  Larry Ferlazzo manages to Tweet every 16 minutes of every waking hour over the last 134 days.  Sara Goldrick-Rab is not far behind at one Tweet every 18 minutes.  And RiShawn Biddle manages one Tweet every 23 minutes.  Diane Ravitch may be slacking as she only Tweets every 46 minutes of every waking hour over the last four months.

Keep in mind that these people must also shower, eat, go shopping, talk with family and friends, etc…  It’s summer, so maybe they went on vacation or took a day at the beach.  Just think of the number of available minutes consumed with Tweeting.  Presumably they also have jobs.

As long as Foundations continue to allocate funds based partially on Twitter “metrics” and as long as the rest of us continue to treat this manic behavior as not only normal, but something to be admired, we will continue to encourage it.  Folks may even rightly think of it as an important part of their jobs, even though it does virtually nothing productive in the world.  Or does it save the world?

Wait, I have to type 4 8 15 16 23 42…  Phew!  Disaster averted.

(Edited to correct typos)