Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

OCPA’s Perspective carries my article on ESAs as the new frontier of school choice. I point out how ESAs are an improvement on vouchers:

But vouchers have a hitch. They create a perverse incentive for private schools to jack up tuition to the maximum voucher amount. While they create a marketplace for education, they take out half the equation of any good marketplace. With vouchers, schools compete to attract students, but they compete only on quality, not on price.

That may sound good if you have romantic notions about money having no place in education. But, as Milton Friedman would be the first to tell you, prices are a critical source of information that we need to be good stewards of our resources. They tell us about the scarcity of things relative to the demand for them. High prices cry out to providers, “devote more resources to providing this service!” Low prices say, “this isn’t needed as much.”

Part of me is sad to see Milton’s idea eclipsed by something better. Milton himself, of course, would have been delighted. He knew that he didn’t know everything, and that the whole point of freedom is for better ideas to nudge out worse ones.

Still, it’s important to honor the great men of the past, and so:

It’s not every day someone outsmarts Milton Friedman; indeed, people tangled with his brains at their peril. When he argued against mandatory peacetime military service in a public hearing, he was confronted by a general who said, “I don’t want to command an army of mercenaries.” Quick as a wink, Milton replied, “Would you prefer to command an army of slaves?”

That general’s experience was not unique—in fact, it was the opposite experience that was literally unique. When Milton’s wife, Rose Friedman, died, we at the Friedman Foundation included the following sentence in our list of her accomplishments: “She is the only person ever known to have won an argument with Milton Friedman.” Rose was a formidable economist in her own right, but we all considered this her most impressive achievement.

As always, would love to hear what you think!

PS Proof that Milton would be glad!

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

Don’t miss Dmitri Mehlhorn’s wickedly funny and brilliant takedown of Rich Kahlenberg’s “opposite day” logic on mandatory union dues:

Although Richard Kahlenberg is an acclaimed progressive scholar, I had no idea of his wicked brilliance until I read his recent 5000-word opinion piece on the Supreme Court case Friedrichs v. CTA. At first, I thought he was defending the respondents, the California Teachers Association. But as I read his column, I realized that every single point he made was the opposite of reality — often in ways that would be obvious to a well-read high-school student, let alone a Century Foundation Senior Fellow.

Suddenly, it dawned on me that Kahlenberg was engaging in devilishly clever satire.

By setting forth the criteria by which the Friedrichs case should be judged, and then using “opposite day” logic, he was subversively making the strongest possible case for Rebecca Friedrichs. Since his prose is so sincere and subtle, I almost missed it. This column is a public service for those of us who are literal-minded enough to want the actual facts associated with each element of Kahlenberg’s framework.

Here’s a taste of one of the many claims Mehlhorn eviscerates:

“Schools for Democracy”

Another Kahlenberg headline, that public unions are “Schools for Democracy,” is doubly satirical. The teachers unions are well known to be antidemocratic as both models and actors.

• Only a small percentage of teachers, roughly 20% and often less, actually vote in internal union elections;
• Teachers use their political power to push for school board elections to be off-cycle from high-turnout elections, depressing voter engagement so as to ensure their members’ influence over school boards;
• The unions promulgate codes of conduct, pushing their members not to criticize union stances and often bullying pro-reform teachers;
• The California Teachers Association, in particular, is known as the 800-pound gorilla of Sacramento, bullying legislators and other interest groups.

See what Kahlenberg did there, by calling them “Schools for Democracy,” when the unions produce terrible results for democracy? They are bad schools! Get it? This guy is a genius.

This guy is a genius indeed — Mehlhorn, that is. Check out the rest of his post over at Citizen Stewart’s “Citizen Ed” blog.

And on a related note, over at The Seventy-Four, Mehlhorn provides a very thoughtful and thorough analysis of the Friedrichs v. CTA oral arguments earlier this week. In short: the unions were dejected and for good reason. The strongest argument that the pro-mandatory union dues side could marshal to peel Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Kennedy away from a pro-Friedrichs majority was that it would overturn a precedent set 40 years ago (Abood) and upon which tens or even hundreds of thousands of contracts rely. However, the Friedrichs petitioners responded convincingly that there is also a mountain of First Amendment jurisprudence that conflicts with Abood, and that siding with the unions would also entail overturning longstanding precedent.

Moreover, as Mehlhorn points out, even a pro-union lawyer conceded during oral arguments that there may be a “need to adjust” where the line is drawn between what counts as political or non-political activities (under Abood, the unions can charge non-members for the latter but not the former), and the need for such judicial tinkering further erodes the case for stare decisis.

Of course, the justices could change their minds between now and when they issue a decision, so the Friedrichs petitioners shouldn’t break out the champagne just yet, but the unions might want to start thinking seriously about how to persuade workers to financially support them in the absence of government compulsion.

(Guest Post by Jason Richwine)

The new experimental evaluation of the Louisiana voucher program poses a challenge to school-choice advocates such as myself. How do we explain the voucher students’ negative test outcomes – including a massive 0.4 SD drop in math scores – when evaluations in other cities showed neutral to mildly positive effects? Supporters have quickly coalesced around the explanation that Louisiana imposed regulations so suffocating that only the worst private schools participated in the voucher program.

I find that explanation unsatisfactory for a few reasons. First, it feels like a post-hoc excuse. Yes, choice advocates have been warning about burdensome regulation for years, including in Louisiana, but how many predicted that the state’s voucher system would go down in flames because of it? The magnitude of the score declines must surprise even the most vociferous critics of regulation.

More importantly, if the participating private schools are so bad – and other people apparently knew they were bad, given the declining enrollments – then why did the voucher recipients choose them? Did the parents fail to research their options? Do they not value academics much at all? Blaming the results on an unusually bad set of private schools is tempting, but it creates the new problem of having to explain why parents made such dubious choices.

Personally, I do not find it plausible that school quality alone could have so much impact, especially in one year. The traits that students bring with them to school – natural abilities, resilience, family support networks  – generally explain much more of the variance in student achievement than school quality. Only the absolute worst schools could have such deleterious effects, but there is no indication that the Louisiana voucher schools were the bottom of the barrel. Even if the one third of private schools that participated really were the worst third in the state, we are still talking about schools that are below average – not uniformly awful.

In trying to reconcile Louisiana with the successful experiments in DC, Milwaukee, Charlotte, etc., I suggest exploring other explanations. In particular, how well did the private schools align their curricula with the demands of the state tests? Maybe the private schools were simply teaching different material rather than teaching the state’s curriculum badly. Also worth examining is whether the randomization process, which was done within a complicated set of priority levels for admission, was conducted appropriately. Another issue is how schools adapt after the first year of statewide implementation. And, remember, it is not uncommon for studies to change significantly from the working paper phase to publication. So let’s be patient. Explaining this anomalous study will require more research.