Lieberman Gives Them Something to Cry About

September 3, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Judging from the 96 comments in this Washington Post story, Democrats were more than a little angered by Senator Lieberman’s speech last night. As Francis Urquart would say, Lieberman gave them something to cry about:

Senator Barack Obama is a gifted and eloquent young man who I think can do great things for our country in the years ahead.

But my friends, eloquence is no substitute for a record, not in these tough times for America.

In the — in the Senate, during the three-and-a-half years that Senator Obama’s been a member, he has not reached across party lines to accomplish anything significant, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party to get something done. And I just ask you to contrast that with John McCain’s record of independence and bipartisanship.

But let me go one further — and this may make history here at this Republican Convention. Let me contrast Barack Obama’s record to the record of the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who stood up to some of those same Democratic interest groups, worked with Republicans, and got some important things done like welfare reform, free trade agreements and a balanced budget.

So translating from politicalese: Obama is not ready to be President, Obama hasn’t accomplished much of anything, Obama isn’t tough enough to take on vested interests in his own party, Obama is no John McCain, nor a Bill Clinton.

There’s an old expression used in Texas politics that says you don’t scratch the king unless you are going to kill the king. In his own calm and dignified way, the Democrat’s 2000 Vice Presidential nominee went for the rhetorical kill last night.

Conventions have become stale, staged events, but you still get some drama here and there.

5 Comments | politics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Dems v. Teacher Unions: More Cracks in the Facade

August 25, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Do not miss Mickey Kaus’s firsthand account of stunning anti-teacher-union backlash from delegates at the Democratic National Convention:

I went to the Ed Challenge for Change event mainly to schmooze. I almost didn’t stay for the panels, being in no mood for what I expected would, even among these reformers, be an hour of vague EdBlob talk about “change” and “accountability” and “resources” that would tactfully ignore the elephant in the room, namely the teachers’ unions. I was so wrong.

In front of a gathering of about 500 delegates, four “smart, young, powerful, bald** black state and local elected officials” (Kaus’s description; the asterisks lead to a note conceding the presence of some hair on one guy’s head – but only on the sides) denounce teachers’ unions, explicitly and in strong terms, and recieve vigorous applause. “In a room of 500 people at the Democratic convention!” (emphasis in original)

Most satisfying line: “John Wilson, head of the NEA itself, was also there. Afterwards, he seemed a bit stunned.”

Promising signs that the facade is cracking faster than we may have thought. And my pals at the Friedman Foundation who decided to make this topic the cover story of the latest issue of the School Choice Advocate sure do look prescient.

3 Comments | politics, teacher union | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Denial Isn’t Just a River in Middle Earth

August 20, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Goldwater Institute Economist Byron Schlomach and I coauthored this piece about the need for state policy innovation in last Sunday’s East Valley Tribune:

Economy on Edge

Director Peter Jackson began his “Lord of the Rings” saga with an ominous message: “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air,” Cate Blanchett darkly says. “Much that once was … is lost.”

We have the same sense of foreboding when considering Arizona’s unresolved budget crisis, without the Hollywood ending. Arizona has been fortunate to have a vibrant economy and falling poverty rates, but a series of bad policy decisions now puts this at risk.

Arizona has seen booms and busts in state revenues before. Old Capitol hands have what some regard as a tried-and-true method for dealing with recession: borrow money, resort to accounting gimmicks, and pay back accounts on the rebound.

Lawmakers tried this again with the most recent budget, but it may not work this time. Arizona’s economy may have reached a tipping point.

HARD TIMES ARE HERE

Two important factors make the current situation different. First, the nationwide housing bust has slowed the migration of people to Arizona from other states. It is hard to move when you can’t sell your house, and it shows in the economic statistics.

University of Arizona economist Marshall J. Vest recently wrote that Arizona homebuilding is experiencing one of the sharpest corrections on record, consumer spending is in full retreat, and “measure after measure of economic activity is at recessionary levels.” With fewer new residents moving in, fewer new houses need to be built, and fewer new taxpayers are contributing to government coffers.

Second, Arizona lawmakers have spent several years increasing spending in a way that would make a drunken sailor blush. Despite a 39 percent increase between 2005 and 2007, the recent budget reduced General Fund spending by only 3 percent.

Hard times are here, and a combination of legislative actions and proposals on this year’s ballot could make matters worse. The Legislature effectively decided to raise property taxes this year by failing to extend the 2006 repeal of the state property tax. One ballot initiative seeks a 17.8 percent increase in the state’s sales tax to pay for roads, bike paths and mass transit. Raising taxes is almost always a poor economic idea, but especially so during an economic downturn.

Another ballot initiative seeks to keep the state from selling hundreds of thousands acres of state trust land. This proposal will not only cost the state future revenue, but will also kick the housing industry while it’s down.

Without land available to build new communities, homebuilding won’t have the opportunity to contribute to our economy like it has in the past.

If economic growth manages to return to historical averages despite all of this, lawmakers have already allocated the revenue. This year’s $200 million in new borrowing, along with voter-approved automatic annual program increases of $600 million, more than eat up the $700 million in annual revenue growth.

CALL FOR CREATIVITY

If we get creative, we can address these challenges. The state spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year building new schools. Charter schools, however, make up nine out of the top 10 high schools in the greater Phoenix area and receive no funding for buildings. Why not have a moratorium on new school construction, and encourage school districts to authorize new charter schools when they need additional seats?

Furthermore, Arizona has allowed thousands of private school seats to sit unused while piling up billions in district school construction debt.

Businesses would be willing to pay the state for the privilege of building new highways in exchange for the opportunity to collect tolls on those roads. Letting the private sector pick up the tab for new road building would turn a current cost into a source of revenue for the state.

State revenues boomed during the property bubble, and policymakers established new spending baselines as if this temporary boom was permanent. As this fantasy comes crashing down, they have raised taxes and added to the state’s already high debt.

The need for innovative and courageous leadership has never been greater. Unless we recognize our changed situation, much that once was great about Arizona may indeed be lost.

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

Che Studies

August 17, 2008

The Arizona Republic’s Doug MacEachern has a column today on the Raza Studies program in Tucson, Arizona.  Raza Studies is part of their Ethnic Studies program in Tucson public high schools emphasizing Latino history and pride.  But the particular way in which Tucson’s program does this has raised some critical scrutiny.  MacEachern writes:

The ethnic-studies directors make a great many claims that teeter over into the wrong side of truth.  They claim not to “teach” communism, socialism or Marxism in their classes. But they lionize Marxist revolutionaries like “Che” Guevara; they all but worship Marxist education theorist Paolo Friere; and they have developed entire lesson plans celebrating modern Marxists like Subcomandante Marcos, the southern Mexican Zapatista who considers himself a “postmodern Che.” But they don’t “teach” the stuff.

The directors of the program “humbly and respectfully welcome the scrutiny and spotlight” their program has attracted, but then denounce “the tyrannical and fascist perspectives that are held and espoused by our adversaries.”

To defend their program, the directors have produced what one local paper called nine “cohort studies,” which the school district claims show that Raza Studies has a positive effect on the high school graduation rate and state achievement test scores of the students who elect to participate in the program.  MacEachern sent the “studies” to me for my comment.  They were actually just a few bar graphs making simple comparisons between the outcomes of students who did and did not choose to participate in Raza Studies at some (but not all) of Tuscon’s high schools.  There is no way to know from a few bar graphs whether Raza Studies helped, hurt, or had no effect on student achievement since the self-selected group of students who chose to take Raza Studies may have already been higher achieving at the beginning.  A few bar graphs does not an evaluation — or nine cohort studies —  make.

3 Comments | civic values, politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Teacher Pay: Size Isn’t the Issue

August 12, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

On NRO yesterday, David Freddoso, author of The Case Against Barack Obama, launched a broadside against Obama as a faux education reformer. I have no interest in dissecting the details of Obama’s record on education, but Freddoso’s line of attack on the subject of teacher pay seems to me to miss the point.

Freddoso begins by quoting Obama asserting that schools in a Chicago neighborhood were closing early because the district couldn’t afford to pay teachers for a full day. Freddoso notes that teachers in that neighborhood are paid an average of $83,000; more than a quarter of them make over $100,000. (These figures don’t include administrators, who make even more.) Somehow, Obama managed not to mention this when bemoaning the district’s inability to pay for a full school day.

Freddoso may well be right about what’s happening that particular district; I don’t know. However, he goes on to build a more general case that Chicago teachers citywide are making big bucks while the system destroys children’s lives, and therefore Obama’s close alliance with the Chicago teachers’ union is similar in kind to his alliances with Tony Rezko, the Chicago machine, and other practitioners of “systemic corruption.”

I certainly agree with Freddoso that the government school monopoly, in Chicago as everywhere else, consumes large quantities of taxpayer money while destroying children’s lives. I’ll also agree that the teachers’ unions bear a lot of the blame. But is the size of teacher salaries a serious problem?

Freddoso says the entry level salary for a Chicago teacher is $43,702 plus $3,059 in pension contributions. Is that really so much, considering that 1) Chicago is an urban area, where the cost of living will be high, and 2) teachers have to have a college degree and specialized training in order to enter the profession?

Freddoso goes on to note that once these starting Chicago teachers gain four years’ experience, they’ll make $60,000, not including increases for additional education credentials. Since the large majority of teachers do pursue (educationally worthless) additional credentials in order to get these “pay for paper” salary increases, it would be good to know how much those salary increases are worth in Chicago. But setting aside that question, given that the empirical evidence suggests teachers get significantly more effective in their first few years, a bump up to $60,000 doesn’t seem all that bad (remembering again that we’re in an urban area).

In short, while teachers in Chicago – like teachers nationwide – are certainly paid well, they aren’t benefitting from “systemic corruption” a la Tony Rezko or the disgraced management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the “Friends of Angelo” at Countrywide, all of whom are connected to Obama.

Yet Freddoso writes about teacher pay as though being a teacher is some sort of scam. “Chicago teachers have terriffic pay and hours, and summer vacations,” and we should ask whether Obama’s link to the Chicago teachers’ union is “corrupting,” since this link is “part of a much braoder pattern that characterizes his political career, as with his backing of Chicago’s machine bosses, his sponsorship of legislation and earmarks to help such donors as Tony Rezko, and his support for special-interest subsidies in Washington.”

Freddoso is right that in addition to salary, teachers enjoy extremely strong job protection and shorter work hours, and this should be factored in when we consider whether or not they are “underpaid.” Still, it’s hardly fair to lump them in with Tony Rezko. Moreover, if the issue is not per se whether teachers are well paid, but accountability for the use of taxpayer funds (as the “corruption” meme suggests), then teachers’ job security and summer vacations don’t seem very relevant.

The real problem with teacher pay is not size, but technique. That is, it’s not primarily how much we pay, but how we pay. Teachers in the U.S. aren’t paid like professionals, they’re paid on a factory worker scale, with ability and performance totally unrelated to compensation. (Even calling this a “factory worker” scale is unfair to factory workers, since many factories have now adopted some reforms to the old pre-globalization pay system.) And it’s this pay structure, not the amount we pay, that’s the real problem. The system is designed to attract the lowest performers – since high performers can always earn more elsewhere while low performers always earn more by becoming teachers.

Freddoso mentions the subject of merit pay in passing, but only so he can assert that, on account of his alliance with the union, Obama’s merit pay plan is a toothless tiger. Whether it is or it isn’t, merit pay is a much more important issue than pay levels. If pay were tied to performance, high teacher salaries would be good – in fact, given the large role that teacher quality has been shown to play in student outcomes, if pay (and hiring) were linked to performance I would say the current pay levels would be too low.

Having said I would steer clear of evaluating his record as a whole, I will note that Obama’s openly supporting merit pay represents real progress, even if we agree with Freddoso that this support is only for show. It’s more of a show than any previous Democratic nominee has made, if I’m not mistaken (though I don’t trust my memory too far on this). Obama was actually booed by the NEA when he mentioned his views on differential pay during his speech accepting their endorsement. He didn’t have to mention teacher pay reform in his endorsement acceptance, but he did. That counts for something.

It’s also worth mentioning that the unions benefit far more than individual teachers from the direction the system has been moving in. Over the past few decades, while teacher salaries have stagnated, the number of teachers hired by the system has soared. That’s a mixed bag for teachers – it presumably means less work for each teacher, but it also exerts downard pressure on salaries. However, it puts big bucks in the unions’ pockets, with no real downside for them.

If I had to guess, I’d say Freddoso is overreacting against the widespread claim that teachers are “underpaid.” Since teachers are in fact well paid, this myth certainly does grate on anyone who knows the facts – especially so since this myth is even more obviously at odds with the facts than most education myths, and yet (or perhaps I should say “and therefore”) challenging it tends to produce an especially nasty and vicious response.

But let’s not get drawn into the opposite error. As Martin Luther is said to have said, if a man falls off his horse on the left side, the next time he rides he’ll fall off on the right side. Teachers aren’t paid too little or too much – they’re paid the wrong way. The problem here isn’t teachers, it’s unions.

6 Comments | politics, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

PJM Column on the Education Agenda

August 2, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I have a column up on Pajamas Media noting that education just flared up in the presidential race recently, and then asking (and answering) the question: Just what can a president do about education, anyway, given that it’s primarily an area of state authority rather than federal?

It’s a question worth asking, because education is going to come up again before this campaign is over. Well, here are five things the next education president (they’re all “education presidents” these days) can do to improve the nation’s schools without expanding federal authority over education beyond its current level.

Leave a Comment » | NCLB, politics, teacher pay, teacher quality, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Teacher Contracts: Blame States, Too

July 30, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The National Council on Teacher Quality has published a new report on the sausage-factory process behind teacher contracts. (HT EIA, or as I like to call him, ALELR.)

Readers of Jay P. Greene’s Blog will probably not need to be told that reformers have long identified teacher contracts as one of the most important root causes, if not the single most important root cause, of the system’s ills. It is because of these contracts, for example, that pay scales, quality control and disciplinary procedures in education resemble those of a factory (even a factory circa 1965) more than those of a profession.

Defenders of the system sometimes argue that teachers should recieve the deference that is due to professionals. Personally, I’d love to see that – but not until they’re compensated and held accountable like professionals.

When that day comes, teachers will be able to say, “Now we have freedom and responsibility. It’s a very groovy time!”

Until then, you can’t expect to have one without the other for very long. The universe doesn’t work that way.

Reformers have long argued that the fundamental problem is disproportionate union influence on school boards. Union members have a much stronger motive to vote in school board elections than anyone else, especially when the elections are held separately and require a special trip to the polls. Thus, at contract renewal time the union ends up “negotiating with itself.”

However, the NCTQ report’s main argument seems to be that we should be griping less about the actual bargaining process between districts and unions, and more about the laws passed by state legislatures mandating certain provisions in those contracts. The unions find it easier to extract what they want in the statehouse, NCTQ argues: “As unions have matured, their leaders have realized that it is more efficient to lobby state legislatures on particular provisions than to negotiate district by district every few years as contracts expire.”

The report collects a lot of useful information on the subject, and any contribution to knowledge on this badly understudied subject is valuable. And clearly NCTQ is right when it observes that bad state mandates ought to be deplored alongside bad district/union negotiations, and they currently aren’t.

But if I may play devil’s advocate (“When don’t you?” the unions may ask), I think NCTQ overstates its case on the importance of state mandates vis-a-vis district negotiations.

The report’s opening concedes that “the teacher contract still figures prominently on such issues as teacher pay,” but asserts that “on the most critical issues of the teaching profession, the state is the real powerhouse,” citing how teachers are evaluated, when they get tenure, their benefits, and the notorious issue of firing procedures. But are benefits really that important as an obstacle to reform, so long as compensation is structured on a factory-worker scale? And does the procedure for evaluating teachers matter as an obstacle to reform so long as evaluations play no role in compensation – again because compensation is structured on a factory-worker scale? When teachers get tenure and how hard it is to fire the bad ones are obviously important as obstacles to reform. But are they really so much more important than the factory-worker scale? Whether teachers get tenure early or late is less important than the fact that they get it. Disciplinary procedures only affect a small number of teachers. Even if we include the absence of a more widespread deterrent effect, we’re still not talking about something that affects all or even most of the profession.

I also think NCTQ is barking up the wrong tree when it argues that lobbying the state for goodies is more “efficient” than fighting for goodies district by district. As Hamilton, Madison and Jay (the “Three Founderos”) observed in the Federalist Papers, selfish interests will always find it easier to extract goodies from the public fisc in a whole bunch of little local places than in one big place. While centralization does provide one-stop shopping, it also creates more intense scrutiny and greater opporutnities for opposition.

In fact, in the case of the teachers’ unions, I’m not even sure why it would take more resources to extract goodies on a district-by-district basis. They have to “negotiate district by district” anyway. They get coerced dues payments from millions of teachers precisely to pay the costs of negotiating in every district. And conditions on the ground in those districts are more favorable than those in the statehouse.

Moreover, the old saying goes “the crime is what’s legal.” In this case, the big obstacle to reform is what the teachers don’t have to bother negotiating for: the factory-worker structure of compensation. It’s not like they have to go back and win that all over again every time the contract comes up for renewal.

Finally, it’s not clear that state-mandated and district-negotiated provisions can be separated all that clearly. For example, check out this chart from the NCTQ report, illustrating how the process for firing teachers is mandated by state law in California:

Pretty nice graphic! But check out the contents of the first box:

School district must document specific examples of ineffective performance, based on standards set by the district and the local teachers union.

And the third box:

If the school board votes to approve dismissal . . .

And the fifth box:

School board must reconvene to decide whether to proceed . . .

And the seventh box:

. . . and persons appointed by the school board . . .

And the ninth box:

If . . . the school district appeals the decision . . .

See what I mean? The larger reality of the union/school board relationship will influence the board’s behavior in discipline cases. And the standards for documenting misconduct are subject to union/board negotiations.

I don’t mean to diminish NCTQ’s important contribution here. We should absolutely be paying more attention to state teacher contract mandates. But I think NCTQ goes too far to argue that they’re more important than the dysfunctional school board system.

4 Comments | politics, research reports, teacher pay, teacher union | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Private Choice and the Disruptive Technology Model

July 24, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Christensen has made the case that online learning is a disruptive technology: competing against non-consumption, filling niches, and on the way to becoming a much more prevalent practice. I have been thinking lately that a similar model may apply to the private school choice movement.

One big difference: private choice often competes against demonstrable failure in the public system rather than non-availability of schooling at all. Inner city students in Cleveland, for example, have access to public schools. The problem isn’t that they don’t have access to schools at all; it is that the schools they do have access to often perform outrageously poorly.

Thus we experience political difficulty in promoting private choice. It would be much easier to compete against non-consumption. Ironically enough, a Democratic State Senator in Texas proposed just this sort of bill last year: a school voucher bill for dropouts.

The modern choice movement began in Milwaukee in 1990 when a group of frustrated inner-city Milwaukee Democrats teamed with Republican Governor Tommy Thompson to create the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

Since 1990, we’ve seen the creation of Milwaukee-like programs in Cleveland and Washington DC, failing school vouchers in Louisiana, Ohio and Florida. Lawmakers have created broad eligibility tax credit programs in Arizona, Illinois, Georgia and means-tested tax credit programs in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Voucher programs for children with disabilities have passed in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Utah, and Arizona passed the nation’s first and (as yet) only voucher program for foster care children.

Some in the movement would look at this list and say the movement needs to refocus on inner city programs. Some resentment towards the success of the special needs programs (5 and counting) has been expressed. These sentiments reflect deeply held value preferences.

I however disagree with them.

The passion of the progressive private choice movement is to provide the opportunity for low-income inner city children to have the chance to attend a high quality school. This is a passion I share, obsessively. Low-income inner city children are too often trapped in schools so dysfunctional that no one reading this would even think having their own children attend. Using the Rawls criteria of justice- if those schools aren’t good enough for your children in theory, then they aren’t good enough for disadvantaged children in practice.

Children with disabilities, however, have an equally compelling case for choice, and may in fact be the most poorly served children and frustrated parents in the public school system. Pop quiz: would you rather be born to a low-income family in an inner city, or the son of a billionaire with autism? The current IDEA system promises an “Individualized Education Plan” for children with disabilities, but all too often involves simply filing out the paperwork to prevent a successful lawsuit. Children- especially minority children- are often mistakenly shunted into special education due to poor reading instruction and effectively if not purposely left to rot academically in the most blatant and vivid example of the bigotry of low expectations imaginable.

In case for foster children is also compelling- having already rolled snake-eyes in their opening roll in life, children in foster care bounce from home to home, and thus because of attendance boundaries, from school to school. Ultra-frequent transfers between schools effectively destroy any chance they have to make academic progress.

Anyone for giving these kids a chance to attend a stable set of schools over time free from the disruption of attendance boundaries? Good- me too.

Thinking again of the disruptive technology model- inner city poor children are a niche that we should passionately seek to aid through parental choice. They do not however constitute the entirety of students extremely poorly served by the public school system. Children in failing schools, dropouts, English language learners, foster care children, free and reduced lunch children, functional illiterates, and special needs children are all demonstrably poorly served in the public school system.

One argument made used to be that special needs programs could not demonstrate systemic effects on public schools. This is no longer true. Nor is the case for the failing schools model. Don’t get me wrong: I prefer larger and broader programs to smaller ones, every day of the week. I’m most interested in helping as many poorly served children to get as much access to a broad array of school choices as fast as possible.

The passage of special needs bills were followed by choice bills with a broader set of eligibility in both Utah and Georgia. From a disruptive technology perspective that is a good thing.

From a disruptive technology perspective, the problem with say, Wisconsin would be that they haven’t moved on to new aid disadvantaged children in different niches. There are low-income children in places like Racine, for example, moving through dropout factory schools. Children with disabilities around the state could benefit enormously from a special needs voucher bill.

Ohio, on the other hand, started with a means-tested bill focused on Cleveland, and then moved on to a bill for children with autism and a statewide failing schools bill. Choice efforts in the state now focus on moving to a full blown McKay bill. Bully for them.

Florida’s programs focused on free and reduced lunch eligible children (Step Up for Students Tax Credit), special needs students (McKay Scholarship Program) and students in failing schools (Opportunity Scholarships). That’s a good start to build on, and Florida has overcome a very contentious debate on choice to develop bipartisan support and strong statewide public school improvement.

Once again: I’ll have what Florida is having.

(edited to correct typo)

3 Comments | politics, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Bolick on School Choice and the Election

July 17, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Clint Bolick, recovering from an accident in Wyoming, nevertheless managed to hit the Wall Street Journal this week on education and the Presidential election:

Education is slipping in priority among many voters but not among Hispanics, many of whom see school choice as a deciding factor in whom to vote for this fall. This has implications for the presidential election.

A new poll shows that 82% of Hispanics consider education as one of three most important issues facing this country. The survey also shows that, even while Hispanics trust Democrats over Republicans on education by more than a two-to-one margin, that ratio could change if Republicans heavily promote school choice while Democrats oppose it.

The poll was conducted last year among more than 800 registered Hispanic voters for the Alliance for School Choice and the Hispanic Coalition for Reform and Educational Options, but never publicly released. It was conducted by two polling firms, The Polling Company (which works primarily for Republicans) and the Ampersand Agency, (which polls mostly for Democrats).

This survey found that although Hispanic voters generally consider public schools to be effective, they also favor, by a wide margin, school choice (defined as allowing parents a choice in whether to spend their children’s education dollars in public or private schools).

Fifty-two percent of Hispanic voters have a favorable view of school choice, according to the poll, while only 7% had an unfavorable view. When asked about vouchers specifically, 32% expressed a favorable opinion compared to 13% unfavorable.

But where the poll really gets interesting is on school choice as an electoral issue: 65% of those surveyed reported that they would be more likely to support a candidate for office who supports school choice, including 35% who said they would be “much more likely.” Only 19% said they would be less likely to vote for a pro-school choice candidate.

These numbers were high regardless of whether the person was of Mexican, Puerto Rican or Cuban descent. They also transcended party affiliation: 67% of Republicans, 70% of independents and 63% of Democrats preferring pro-school choice candidates. And 70% of those who prefer pro-school choice candidates — including 66% of Democrats — said they would cross party lines to vote for a candidate who supports school choice over one who opposes it.

Barack Obama has hinted at being open to serious education reform. Before the Wisconsin primary in February, he praised Milwaukee’s highly successful school-voucher program. But, facing furious criticism from the establishment, which is disproportionately influential in Democratic politics, he backtracked.

John McCain has been a consistent supporter of school choice and passionately endorsed it during one of the Republican debates, although the issue is far from a mainstay of his campaign. His appointment of pro-school choice former Arizona Superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan as his campaign’s top education adviser may signal a new emphasis.

Sen. Obama will count heavily on teachers’ unions for support. The unions, though, have nowhere else to go. Hispanics do. If Mr. Obama opposes school choice, he will cede to his opponent a huge opportunity to make inroads among Hispanic voters — if Sen. McCain seizes it.

Hispanic votes will be crucial in key battleground states, including Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. George W. Bush won 40% of Hispanic votes in 2004, but support slipped to 30% for GOP congressional candidates in 2006. Mr. Obama fared poorly among Hispanics in the presidential primaries, while Mr. McCain carried 74% of Hispanic votes when he won re-election to the Senate in 2004. All that adds up to this: Hispanics voting on school choice could tip the balance of the election.

Hispanic voters are overwhelmingly young and have exhibited a propensity toward political independence — and no issue is more tangible for them than educational opportunity. If Hispanics align their voting with the educational interests of their children, it could alter the electoral landscape — not merely for this election, but permanently.

5 Comments | politics | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Have You Heard About the Latest Thing in Education? Fads!

July 2, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In a number of recent discussions, we’ve tangentially touched on the subject of educational fads: some new idea will quickly gather a huge following, tons of money will pour in to support it, and then a few years later everyone will forget about it – not because anyone actually bothered to measure whether the hot idea worked, but because a new fad will come along, and the cycle will start over. As a result, the demand for improvement that ought to be producing political capital for real reforms instead gets dissipated in the mad rush for fad after fad. Meanwhile, as educators see fads come and go, they become less receptive to all proposed ideas – even ideas that would accomplish real reform and/or have solid science showing they work. It seems to be pretty widely agreed upon that this has been one of the major problems in education over the past century.

I’m tempted to say that complaining about the problem of fads has become a hot fad among reformers. But fads are things that don’t last! Complaints about the fad problem, by contrast, are perennial. Recently I’ve noticed a couple more contributions to the genre: Roger Frank Bass of Carthage College provided a sharp-edged overview of the educational fad phenomenon in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Sunday. Meanwhile, last Monday America’s last education labor reporter noted the juxtoposition of two headlines – “The Next Big Thing: Small Schools” in Baltimore, and “Small School Experiment Doesn’t Live Up to Hopes” in Seattle. “Maybe they were just on the wrong coast,” quips Antonucci. (Come to think of it, I was shocked back in May to see Newsweek pimping small schools on the front cover – this, not months but years after the failure of the Gates Foundation’s extraordinary investment in small schools had become clear even to the Gates Foundation. There’s nothing sadder than people who desperately want to be cool but are always wearing last year’s outfit.)

What I don’t see very often, though, is reformers asking why we have this problem. There are no other socially urgent functions (from law and emergency services to the production and sale of consumer goods) that have remained basically unchanged and unimproved for a century because they’re crippled by an inability to 1) stick with one idea long enough to 2) objectively measure whether it works and 3) make a deliberate decision on whether to keep it. Only education spins its wheels this way; everywhere else in society, “fads” are either the province of children and adolescents (for whom they are probably beneficial, since they harmlessly dissipate dangerous youthful energies) or else are shunted off into the realm of “fashions,” which are not supposed to accomplish anything serious and thus do nobody any harm if they constantly change.

So what’s different about education? Well, if you’ve read your homework assignment, or if you’ve spent any time here on Jay P. Greene’s Blog (or “JPGB,” as all the kids are calling it when they text each other about it), you already know the answer: accountability for results. Educational decisionmaking exists in an “outcome vaccuum” to a greater extent than decisionmaking in just about any other field.

Of course the vast majority of people in the system are well-intentioned, but we all know where the road paved with good intentions leads. Flitting from one promising idea to the next promising idea is precisely the kind of thing well intentioned people can end up doing when they lack the disciplining force imposed by firm outcome-based incentives.

“Incentives again? What, are you proposing a unified field theorem of educational problems, where everything that’s wrong with our schools traces back to this single cause?” Well, maybe not – but if there’s an alternative explanation for the unique prevalence of the fad problem in education, I’d be open to hearing it.

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

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