Jay P. Greene's Blog

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Mix in a few out of context quotes, make a few things up, and sprinkle in a healthy dose of confirmation bias and you get this strong with the lefty conspiracy theory side of the Force.

Milton Friedman never made his preference for universal choice a secret, quite the opposite. I don’t know what “talking points” the writer is referencing (a link would be nice unless they are in his coat pocket next to Joe McCarthy’s list of State Department spies) but ALEC has multiple school choice bills with either means-tests or sliding scales to give greater resources to children from low-income families.

A central flaw in the piece is a false assumption that school choice can’t serve kids in the inner city and suburbs at the same time, or that trying to do so cedes equity arguments. It can and it need not- lawmakers can and have structured choice programs to provide (in stark contrast to the public school systems of many states) greater total resources to low-income and otherwise disadvantaged children. I know it would be far more useful to school choice opponents if school choice supporters went around passing laws that offered greater resources to rich kids, but search the dozens of private choice programs from top to bottom and you won’t find such a thing. Dig around in public school finances for a few minutes and you’ll easily find examples of leafy suburbs spending far above statewide averages.

In a state spending an average of $15k per child, I’d be happy to offer free and reduced lunch kids an ESA of $20k. I’d offer the non-FRL kids an ESA of $10k so they could generate the savings for the economically disadvantaged. Feel free to persuade me otherwise, but if you think that offering that $10k ESA to non-poor kids shows that I don’t care about poor kids you’ll have to forgive my initial pained expression as I wonder what color the sky is in your world.

With all of the discussion over the anti-testing backlash to Common Core over-reach on JPGB lately, I thought I would just take a moment to note how perfectly predictable this all was.

I can’t even keep track of how long I’ve been warning about this, but this post from nearly a year ago nicely captures the point I’ve been making:

Even if you are a standards and test-based accountability person, you are better off not seeking total victory as the Common Core people have.  Yes, some states had lousy standards.  And yes, some tests were poorly designed or had low thresholds for passing.  But trying to fix all standards and tests, everywhere, all at once is the wrong approach.  Seeking this total victory has more fully mobilized the opponents of all standards and testing.  In response to a more heavy-handed and top-down national effort, more previously un-involved people have flocked to the anti-testing side.  Not only will these folks undermine effective implementation of Common Core, but in their counter-effort to roll back national standards, they will destroy much of what was good about state standards and tests.  The whole idea of standards and test-based accountability is being undermined by the imprudent over-reach of Common Core.

And this:

But in the rush to a clear and total victory, supporters of Common Core failed to consider how the more than 10,000 school districts, more than 3 million teachers, and the parents of almost 50 million students would react.  For standards to actually change practice, you need a lot of these folks on board.  Otherwise Common Core, like most past standards, will just be a bunch of empty words in a document.

These millions of local officials, educators, and parents often have reasons for holding educational preferences that are different than those dictated by Common Core.  Common Core may call for things like more focus on “informational texts”  and delaying Algebra until 9th grade, but there are reasons why that is not already universal practice.  It’s not as if local officials, educators, and parents are unaware of the existence of informational texts or just waiting to be told by national elites about when they should start teaching Algebra.  They have interests and values that drove them to the arrangements that were in place prior to Common Core.

Having the Secretary of Education, state boards, and a bunch of DC advocacy groups declare a particular approach to be best and cram it into place in the middle of a financial crisis with virtually no public debate or input from educators or parents did not convince local officials, educators, and parents to change their minds.  These are the folks who need to be on board to make the implementation of Common Core real.  And these are the folks who are organizing a political backlash that will undo or neuter Common Core.  A direct path to victory by Common Core supporters sowed the seeds of  its own defeat.

The unraveling of Common Core makes this flop the most obviously ill-conceived and doomed-to-fail reform effort since the Annenberg Foundation threw $500 million away in the 1990s.  I assure you that while the money was flowing from Annenberg that effort had plenty of defenders, just as Common Core does today.  After Common Core fails, everyone will say how they knew it was flawed, just as they currently do with Annenberg.  Victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan.

The unraveling of the bipartisan coalition supporting the informational benefits of standardized testing became inevitable as soon as a a new crop of reformers arose afflicted with PLDD who were determined to use those tests to identify the right ways of teaching, the right ways to hire/fire/compensate teachers, and the right ways to authorize and close schools of choice.  This over-reach wasn’t a bridge too far; it was a thousand bridges too far.  And in a perfectly predictable fashion it has failed and begun to take down the reasonable use of tests along with it.

Complaining about the destruction of reasonable uses of testing is like complaining about the heat in Phoenix in July.  The problem isn’t that it’s a hot day.  The problem is having decided to move to Phoenix in the first place.  At this point there is nothing really to do about it except learn from this error to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.

(Guest Post by Eric A. Hanushek)

Considerable prior research has failed to find a consistent relationship between school spending and student performance, making skepticism about such a relationship the conventional wisdom. Given that skepticism, new studies that purport to find a systematic relationship between school spending and student performance get disproportionate attention.

There is in fact great demand for results linking funding with favorable outcomes.  Knowing that a strong relationship existed would mean that policy makers outside of the schools – legislatures, governors, and courts – only have to concern themselves with how much money was provided to schools and not with how money was used.  And, meeting our education challenges by providing more money appears from history to be easier than pursuing more fundamental changes in schools.

Kirabo Jackson, Rucker C. Johnson, and Claudia Persico offer a new study suggesting that a clear money-performance relationship exists if you just look in the right place. Their overarching conclusion is that “methods matter.” Their discovery of a money-performance relationship is attributed to analyzing the effects of spending that emanates from court decisions (exogenous variation in spending), tracing the effect of this spending to long run outcomes (completed schooling and wages), and focusing on the right subgroup (disadvantaged students).

From a methodological viewpoint, details are important here. How court decisions are dated given long and repeated legal involvement in many states; how the spending reaction to court decisions is measured; whether the court decisions are unrelated to the character of schools before court involvement; and how court-mandated spending differs from other increased spending are a few of the details.  Nevertheless, while these are important methodological issues, it is more useful to focus on the substance of their findings.

Jackson, Johnson, and Persico reach the following conclusions about the impact of a 10 percent increase in spending for all 12 years of schooling:  1) It would increase years of schooling by 0.44 years for poor children and by an insignificant 0.075 years for non-poor children, implying that a spending increase of 22.7 percent would eliminate the average education gap; 2) It would increase high school graduation rates by 11.6 percentage points for poor children and 6 percentage points for non-poor children; 3) It would increase subsequent family incomes by 16.4 percent for poor children and zero for non-poor children; 4) It would reduce subsequent adult poverty rates by 6.8 percentage points for poor children and zero for non-poor children.

Their analysis covers schooling experiences for the period 1970-2010.  Thus, it is useful to connect these estimates to actual funding patterns over the period.  Between 1970 and 1990, real expenditure per pupil increased not by 10 percent but by over 84 percent.  By 2000, this comparison with 1970 topped 100 percent, and it reached almost 150 percent by 2010.  No amount of adjustment for special education, LEP, or what have you will make these extraordinary increases in school funding go away.

If a ten percent increase yields the results calculated by Jackson, Johnson, and Persico, shouldn’t we have found all gaps gone (and even reversed) by now due to the actual funding increases?  And, even with small effects on the non-poor, shouldn’t we have seen fairly dramatic improvements in overall educational and labor market outcomes? In reality, in the face of dramatic past increases in school funding, the gaps in attainment, high school graduation, and family poverty have remained significant, largely resisting any major improvement.  And, the stagnating labor market performance for broad swaths of the population has captured considerable recent public and scholarly attention.

What could reconcile these apparent inconsistencies?  Here are some possibilities:

• There might be sharply diminishing returns to spending so that their estimates apply most clearly in 1970 when spending (in 2011-12 $’s) was just $4,500 as opposed to 2010 when spending was $11,000. Thus, by implication, spending today might be expected to have a much smaller impact than they estimate.

• Only spending induced by the courts might have the large impacts they identify, with spending not related to judicial rulings having a negligible impact. The likelihood of this is a little questionable since, with a few exceptions such as NJ and WY, the courts have done little to look into how any legislature responds in terms of specific spending programs.  But, if true, normal spending increases by state legislatures and by local taxpayers would not be expected to have any impact on outcomes.

• The estimates of Jackson, Johnson, and Persico might simply be very wrong.

Maybe there are other ways to reconcile the Jackson, Johnson, and Persico estimates with the aggregate data on spending and outcomes.  But in the end they themselves state what is now commonly accepted: How money is spent matters.  Indeed, by simple consideration of their evidence, how money is spent is more important than how much is spent.

Of course, it is always important to recognize that none of this discussion suggests that money never matters.  Or that money cannot matter.  It just says that the outcomes observed over the past half century – no matter how massaged – do not suggest that just throwing money at schools is likely to be a policy that solves the significant U.S. schooling problems seen in the levels and distribution of outcomes.  We really cannot get around the necessity of focusing on how money is spent on schools.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Heading toward the Independence Day weekend, OCPA’s Perspective has just come out with my article on school choice as an embodiment of the principles of the Declaration of Independence:

The schools this country was founded upon saw themselves as responsible to families, churches, and, in a broad way, the local community. They were not government-owned or government-run…Government control over the minds of the young would have been seen by the founding generation as intolerable tyranny…

I argue that the creation of the government school monopoly involved a rejection of the principles of the founders, including religious freedom. One of the motives of Horace Mann and his Unitarian friends in creating a government school monopoly was to stamp out the old religion of the Puritans and establish Unitarianism in Massachusetts. Whatever you think of the relative merits of Calvinism and Unitarianism, government control of education for the purpose of religious indoctrination is not what this country was founded on.

Fortunately, by the time they tried to play this trick on another religious minority, the cat was out of the bag:

Thank heaven our Roman Catholic friends were smart enough to see what was going on when the government monopoly was turned against them. Not many Americans in the mid-19th century shared the Boston Brahmins’ contempt for evangelicals, but a lot of them did want to purge Catholic immigrants of their filthy popery. Catholics weren’t having any of it; in the great tradition handed down from the American founding, they ignored the government monopoly and started their own schools. America’s newcomers were more faithful to the principles of their adopted home than America itself was.

I not only support free speech but enjoy it, and I welcome your comments, whatever your view!

Over the last week I’ve seen some nice recognition of two projects with which I’ve been involved: school name research and the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  Robert Pondiscio has a column in US News in which he reiterates our recommendation that school names are an important opportunity for communities to articulate and learn about their values:

There are nearly 200 K-12 schools in America named after Confederate leaders or places named after them. There have been calls to strip the names from those buildings too.

I don’t have the standing to tell people in schools I will never see or set foot in whose names their institution are fit to bear. But as a teacher of civics and history, I know a good teachable moment when I see one. So here’s a challenge for every school in this country named after a president, military figure, athlete, civic leader or any prominent person: Commit the coming school year to a close examination of the life and work of your school’s namesake. For starters, there’s no excuse for ignorance. And your students might learn something – good, bad or ugly – that will create a sense of pride or discomfort. At the very least, it will provide a first-rate lesson in history, civics and democratic processes to an education system where both are in short supply.

Amen, brother Robert.

And in the Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler has a column that nicely captures the spirit of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award.  He argues that capitalists are often the ones who do the most to improve the human condition, not the philanthropies and foundations named after them.  He writes:

Everyone should stop focusing on an entrepreneur’s wealth and instead focus on the value the customers gained from his products. I can’t dig for oil, let alone frack, but I am happy to pay Exxon a premium for my high-test gas. Collectively, we are richer because of Exxon. So inequality is not a bug of capitalism; it’s a feature.

The Ford Foundation plans to focus on six areas of inequality: civic engagement and government; creativity and free expression; gender, ethnic and racial justice; inclusive economics; Internet freedom; and youth opportunity and learning. Hard to argue against all that namby pamby. But none are productive, none drive profits, and none will achieve the huge leaps in public welfare that Henry Ford pulled off so long ago.

At the end of the day, there are only four things you can do with your money: You can spend it, pay it to the IRS, give it away or reinvest it. Consumption is on the receiving end of productivity—furthering personal instead of public welfare. Government spending is by definition not productive, as you realize every time you step into a DMV. Same goes for charitable giving—no profit means no measure of value or productivity.

And so the most productive thing someone can do with his money—the only thing that will increase living standards—is invest. If the Ford or Clinton foundations really wanted to help society, they’d work on lowering barriers to business formation and cutting the regulatory chains that inhibit productive hiring in the U.S. and globally. But what fun is that? Better to boast about reducing inequality, public welfare be damned.

The Al Copeland Humanitarian Award selection committee could not have said it better.