Update on Fiscal Impact of Milwaukee Vouchers

December 15, 2008

(Guest Post by Robert Costrell)

Does the funding formula for the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) adversely affect Milwaukee taxpayers, even as it benefits taxpayers statewide?  The answer I gave in my recent Education Next article is yes, based on data through the 2007-08 school year.  Since publication, some confusion has arisen as to whether this result still holds for the current school year, as reported in the news and opinion columns of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (“Fairness is in the Eye of the Beholder,” by Alan J. Borsuk and “Taxpayers, Parents on the Same Side,” by Patrick McIlheran) as well as an early version of Greg Forster’s post, since corrected here.

So let me update my Ed Next figures to the 2008-09 school year (hereafter FY09, for fiscal year).  The answer, in short, is still yes:  the adverse impact of the MPCP formulas on Milwaukee taxpayers continues unabated, even as the statewide benefits grow.  This is true, despite some modest efforts over the last two years by the Wisconsin legislature to address the problem.

First, let’s consider the size of the pie — the net savings available from the voucher program.  These savings derive from the fact that voucher expenses are $6,607 per child, while state and local revenues for MPS are set by the revenue limit at $9,462 per child.   These public savings are partially offset by the voucher expenditures on students who would have attended private schools anyway.  My best estimate is that these students comprise 10 percent of MPCP’s 19,500 students (see my full report for an explanation of this estimate, as well as my evaluation of different estimates).  Under this assumption, the net savings available to taxpayers totaled $37.2 million in FY09, up from $31.9 million in FY08 (the figure given in my Ed Next article).

The problem lies in the distribution of these benefits.  The savings accrue entirely to property taxpayers outside of Milwaukee and to Wisconsin state taxpayers:  Milwaukee property taxpayers do not share in these savings. 

The fiscal impact of MPCP on Milwaukee property taxes is driven by the fact that 45% of voucher expenditures are deducted from MPS aid, even though MPS receives no aid for these students.   As I explain in Ed Next, it certainly made sense to remove MPCP students from MPS enrollment counts when the system was reformed in 2000, but it made no sense to continue to deduct any of the voucher expenses from their remaining aid.  Milwaukee is allowed to raise its property taxes to recoup this deduction (the “choice levy”), and has to do so if it wants to maintain MPS’ per pupil revenues at the level specified by the revenue limit formula.   That is the essence of the “funding flaw.”

This is partially offset by 2 things.  First is that the removal of MPCP students from MPS enrollment counts saves the state aid money and some of that is passed on in statewide property tax relief; Milwaukee receives a small share of this.  The other offset, which began last year, is “high poverty aid,” an ad hoc appropriation to alleviate a portion of Milwaukee’s choice levy.

For FY09, these 3 pieces are $58.0 million (45% of voucher expenditures) minus $3.4 million (my estimate of Milwaukee’s share of statewide property tax relief) minus $9.9 million (“high poverty aid”) equals $44.7 million.  This is the adverse impact on Milwaukee property taxpayers of the voucher funding mechanism. 

It is worth emphasizing that this impact is on property taxpayers, not Milwaukee Public Schools.  Per pupil revenues available to MPS are unaffected by the voucher program, so long as Milwaukee fully utilizes the tax capacity granted to it under the MPCP formulas.   Milwaukee did utilize its tax capacity in FY09 (as it has done in all other recent years, with one exception noted below).

The picture is different for the rest of the state.  For FY09, I estimate the net benefit to property taxpayers outside of Milwaukee at $52.0 million, and the net benefit to state taxpayers at $30.0 million.   (The assumptions underlying these calculations and the basis for them are laid out in my Ed Next piece and my longer report for the School Choice Demonstration Project, along with details of the calculations.)

Taken all together, the net benefit to Wisconsin and Milwaukee taxpayers from the voucher program is $52.0 million (benefit to property taxpayers outside Milwaukee) plus $30.0 million (benefit to state taxpayers) minus $44.7 million (adverse effect on Milwaukee taxpayers) equals $37.2 million.   This is the net savings figure given above.

The pattern of winners and losers is depicted below, in the update of my Ed Next Figure 4.  The loss to Milwaukee property taxpayers is depicted by the blue bars in negative territory; the gains to other property taxpayers and state taxpayers are depicted by the maroon and tan bars in positive territory.

What was the impact of the “high poverty aid” program, enacted last year to alleviate the “funding flaw?”  As the diagram indicates, because of this additional aid, the adverse impact on Milwaukee property taxpayers for FY09 is no worse than in FY07, which is to say it did not grow as it would have without the aid. 

In addition, last year Milwaukee chose, for the first and only time in recent years, not to tax all the way up to the limit allowed by law.  There was $15.1 million of unused tax capacity.   Consequently, the diagram’s blue bar depicting the adverse impact on Milwaukee property taxpayers is shorter than it would otherwise have been for FY08.   This means that MPS received less than the per pupil revenue limit.   The figure attained was $8,978 instead of the revenue limit of $9,141.  The per pupil revenue still exceeded the FY07 figure, but did not increase as much as state law allowed.  In other words, this $15.1 million represents the shortfall for MPS, relative to the per pupil revenue limit.  This is depicted in the figure by the green bar for FY08, in negative territory. 

This year, Milwaukee has resumed its past practice of taxing up to the revenue limit, so the green bar disappears and the blue bar is no longer truncated:  there is no adverse impact on MPS, as the property taxpayers of Milwaukee make good on the full amount of the choice levy.

To summarize: 

(1)  Net savings from the Milwaukee voucher program continues to grow along with MPCP enrollments, and the widening gap between the voucher and the MPS revenue limit.   I estimate the net fiscal benefit at $37.2 million for FY09, up from $31.9 million for FY08.

(2) Milwaukee property taxpayers do not share in these benefits.  I estimate the adverse impact for FY09 to be $44.7 million.   The “high poverty aid” enacted in FY08 has kept the adverse impact from growing beyond its FY07 level, but has not materially reduced it either. 

The “funding flaw” persists.  As I stated in the conclusion of my Ed Next piece, “It remains to be seen whether, as the program grows, this flaw will undermine it or instead lead legislators to complete the reforms … so the benefits can be shared by all.

bob-3

 (Note 1:  the bars depicted for FY08 are revised from those published in Ed Next.  There I assumed Milwaukee taxed up to the revenue limit, as it had for preceding years.   This one-year departure from past practice came to my attention when the article was in press, too late to amend Figure 4.)

(Note 2: Alan Borsuk’s article, “Fairness is in the Eye of the Beholder,” includes a short summary of my Ed Next article, which states that I conclude “MPS is losing money […] on a per-pupil basis.”  My article actually states, “To avoid this result [MPS revenue loss on a per-pupil basis], MPS is still allowed to offset the [voucher] deduction by raising property taxes and it has chosen to do so.”  As the diagram above shows, the loss is for Milwaukee property taxpayers, not MPS, except for FY08, when Milwaukee chose not to offset the entire choice levy.)

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Posted by Jay P. Greene

Correction on MJS and the “Funding Flaw”

December 12, 2008

white-out

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Yesterday I posted an analysis of a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article. The article reported as fact, not opinion, that the Milwaukee voucher program has a “funding flaw” because it fails to pay the Milwaukee public schools to teach students whom the Milwaukee public schools do not teach.

The occasion for the article was a debate over whether it was still true, as it had been in previous years, that the Milwaukee voucher program increases costs for local property taxpayers – this is what people had always meant in the past when they talked about the “funding flaw” in the program.

The claim made by the local voucher movement that the program no longer increased costs for property taxpayers seemed solid to me at the time, and the voucher opponents quoted in the article tacitly accepted it by desperately trying to change the subject. To my knowledge, nobody else had disputed the claim. So I reported the claim as true.

Robert Costrell, who knows more about this than anyone, now says he thinks the claim that vouchers no longer cost extra in local property taxes is incorrect. Apparently it comes down to whether a certain element in the formula varies by enrollment or not.

So I’ve attached a correction to the original post, and I apologize that I didn’t wait longer to hear from more people before reporting the claim as true.

That said, the bulk of my post was on another subject (the attempt by some Milwaukee politicians to use the voucher program to fleece state taxpayers, and MJS’s docility in reporting their obviously specious claims as true) and on that subject I stand by everything I wrote. I only hope my carelessness on this other point doesn’t help get MJS off the hook for its irresponsibility.

(Edited to more clearly differentiate Costrell’s thoughts from my own.)

(UPDATE: Bob Costrell’s new analysis is here.)

1 Comment | blogging, journalism, school funding, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

MJS: Failure to Steal Money Is a “Funding Flaw”

December 11, 2008

pickpocket

“I beg of you, Monsieur, watch yourself. Be on guard. This place is full of vultures . . . vultures everywhere. Everywhere.”

HT mcgady.net

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Update: Robert Costrell says he thinks the claim that vouchers are now saving money for local taxpayers is incorrect. Apparently it comes down to a question of whether a certain item in the funding formula varies by enrollment or not. Costrell knows this stuff better than anyone, so I’m happy to defer to him.

At the time I wrote this post, I only had the MJS story to go on, and even the school choice opponents quoted in the article (Mayor Barrett and Superintendent Andrekopoulos) weren’t disputing the savings claim. So I wrote the post as though the savings claim had been implicitly accepted by voucher opponents because it had, in fact, been implicitly accepted by them. But I shouldn’t have actually reported the claim as true just because voucher opponents were implicitly accepting it as true, and I apologize for my carelessness.

That said, the MJS story is still amazingly irresponsible and I don’t regret a word of what I said about its complicity in Barrett and Andrekopoulos’s attmept to fleece Wisconsin taxpayers. I only hope that my own carelessness doesn’t help get MJS off the hook for printing this stuff.

(This update has been edited to more clearly differentiate Costrell’s thoughts from my own.)

For years, the Milwaukee voucher program had what the locals call “the funding flaw,” under which some local Milwaukee property tax revenues were diverted for every student who used the voucher. When the program was first enacted in 1990, there was no “funding flaw,” and it saved money for both the state and local Milwaukee taxpayers, just like most voucher programs. But in 1999 the rules were changed, and the program began diverting property taxes; the state profited handsomly at the expense of the city, using the voucher program as an intermediary. As a result, from 1999 until 2007, the program was a drain on local resources. The school choice movement in Milwaukee never supported this practice and worked to help stop it, but of course state politicians were never interested in helping, and the voucher program was always blamed for the local tax drain.

But now things have changed. This year, the program is once again saving local money – the amount the city loses from the program is now down below what it saves in reduced educational costs because it doesn’t have to teach the students in the program. So there is no more “funding flaw.”

Not so fast! Over the weekend, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a very strange story claiming, not as opinion but as fact, that the “funding flaw” was never just about property taxes. Another, much more serious “funding flaw” has been lurking unnoticed in the bushes for all these years – namely, that the program fails to steal money from state taxpayers and transfer it to Milwaukee public schools.

I’m not sure anyone had ever heard about this “other” funding flaw before now. Call it the super double secret funding flaw.

1) The article begins by citing an argument between voucher proponents and opponents over whether the “funding flaw” still exists. It evenhandedly reports the claims on both sides: on the one hand, the school choice movement has facts and figures showing that voucher kids are now a net gain, not a net drain, for Milwaukee taxpayers. On the other hand, property taxes are going up and the people who run the public school system “associate a lot of that increase” with the voucher program. Facts and figures on one side versus mere assertion on the other – well, obviously there are two equally valid points of view about this controversial question! Who says the media aren’t evenhanded?

 

2) The article then lays out the facts: the “funding flaw” was always that a voucher student cost Milwaukee more than a public school student in property taxes. Now that’s not true anymore. The school choice folks are pointing out this inconvenient truth and saying, reasonably enough, that there’s no more funding flaw.

Then we get this: 

[Milwaukee Mayor Tom] Barrett and MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos dismiss that notion, saying the amount of property tax dollars per student illustrated only one part of the flaw. It was the main thing they pointed to because, frankly, it was easier to understand than other aspects. But, they say, the other aspects are actually a bigger deal.

So all these years they’ve been making a big deal over less important issues while concealing the real problem, but now, at last, they’re prepared to come clean and talk about the real problem.

Did you catch the casual insertion of the word “frankly” in the second sentence? This is the MJS reporter speaking in his own voice rather than quoting – but he’s such a puppet of the system’s defenders that their “frankly” comes out of his mouth. When Barrett stubs his toe, do MJS reporters say “ouch”?

 

 3) Then comes the really amazing part. MJS reports, as fact and not opinion, that the funding flaw always consisted of two problems. The first was the property tax issue, which now favors vouchers rather than public school kids – although when the story gets into the details of this, it never directly admits this as fact; it is reported as a claim being made by school choice proponents, and only sophisticated readers will be able to figure out from the reporter’s convoluted words that what the school choice proponents are saying is, in fact, indisputably true.

The alleged other part of the funding flaw, the super double secret one, is that voucher students are not counted as students being educated in Milwaukee public schools for purposes of setting the funding levels for Milwaukee public schools.

 

Got that? MJS reports as fact, not opinion, that the voucher program is flawed because it fails to force the state to pay Milwaukee public schools to teach kids that Milwaukee public schools do not, in fact, actually teach.

 

But of course the story doesn’t say this as clearly as I’ve just put it, or it would be obvious that this is sophistry in the service of a naked political agenda. A reader who didn’t already know the ins and outs of school finance would never realize from the article that the supposed other “flaw” is that the program doesn’t pay Milwaukee schools to teach students whom they don’t teach.

 

4) The article then goes on to note that fixing the super double secret funding “flaw” would be deeply unpopular because it would take money away from other areas of the state. The unstated implication is that it would be much more sensible to scrap the unworkable voucher program altogether.

Well, no kidding it would be unpopular for MPS to try to use the voucher program as an excuse to take money from state taxpayers to teach students that MPS doesn’t teach. Taking money to do something that you don’t do is called stealing.

What’s really galling is that this attempt to steal from state taxpayers is framed (by MJS as well as by Barrett and Andrekopoulos) as an attempt to “fix” an alleged funding “flaw” – the implication being that money is somehow being unfairly withheld from MPS. So the guy warning you about thieves is in fact the thief. I think that may actually be Andrekopoulos’s picture at the top of this post.

 

5) The article then parades Robert Costrell’s big cost analysis showing that vouchers cost more than they save for local taxpayers. At the very end of the paragraph, it quickly notes that this analysis “does not include figures from this fall.” In other words, the conclusion that the voucher program costs Milwaukee money is out of date because the facts on the ground have changed, and it has no relevance to the story (except by confusing readers who aren’t paying close attention).

 

6) Finally, at the end, the school choice movement is allowed to come back onstage and point out that Milwaukee public school spending and state aid to Milwaukee have both been growing relentlessly for years. Then we get this:

 

Andrekopoulos said in an interview that the main point is that something has to be changed, and the state funding system, including how vouchers are paid for, is the place to turn.

He said that Milwaukee residents are facing a 14.6% tax levy increase this year, even though the actual MPS budget went up less than 2%.

“Doesn’t that seem wrong?” Andrekopoulos said. “Something’s not right.”

This, like the previous claims about the super double secret “other funding flaw,” is sophistry pure and simple. Property taxes pay for much more than just schools, and the MPS budget gets a lot of revenue from sources other than property taxes. So these figures are apples and oranges; you can’t compare the two.

 

It would be like the UAW arguing that Rick Wagoner’s salary costs GM more than the UAW jobs bank, because budget category A (which includes spending on Wagoner’s salary, engine parts, steel bolts, and the company health plan) costs more than budget category B (which includes spending on the jobs bank, tires, car doors, and lunches in GM company cafeterias).

 

Until you break down the categories and look at what the individual components cost, you’re just blowing smoke. And when you break down the categories, vouchers save Milwaukee money – which is exactly what the MJS article established all the way back at the beginning.

I’ve seen a lot of irresponsible journalism, but this article just leaves me dumbfounded.

(UPDATE: Bob Costrell’s new analysis is here)

2 Comments | journalism, school funding, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

AFT suggests LBO for Public Schools

December 11, 2008

end-wall-st-bull-collapsed-slide

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Leo over at EdWize (the AFT blog) has posed the question: “When you have spent that last decade telling everyone who would listen that public schools should be for sale, on what grounds do you complain about someone who would sell a Senate seat to the highest bidder?”

Leo has a different recollection of my past decade than I do, as I don’t remember ever telling anyone that public schools ought to be for sale, much less doing it constantly. Never mind that however, I think that Leo is on to something here. The prime targets for leveraged buyouts are companies whose stock valuation falls below the value of their assets. This of course only occurs through gross mismanagement, where companies become worth less than the stuff they have lying around. The management of such companies should be seen at best as incompetent, and at worst as rent-seeking leeches drawing paychecks while destroying value.

Many American school districts likely fall squarely into just such a state of mismanagement- taking $10,000 per year per student, but failing to teach 36% of 4th graders how to read, and failing to get half of African American and Hispanic student to graduate from high school. These are simply averages, and obviously many districts contribute far more than others.

Leo, you are a genius. We can put together a LLC to do the LBOs once the credit crunch ends. Who could be better at defeating the poison pill strategies of the leeches than a former AFT guy?

Leo, you do not yet realize your importance: with our combined power, we can destroy the leeches- they have foreseen this. Join me, and we can put an end to this destructive conflict, and bring learning, order and profit to the nation’s schools.

It is your destiny.

6 Comments | teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Arizona Supreme Court Hears Voucher Arguments

December 9, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

dec-2008-009

The Arizona Supreme Court heard arguments today in the case against the two voucher programs for special needs students, and for children in foster care. You can read the Arizona Republic account here.

Andrew Morrill, Vice President of the Arizona Education Association, notes in the article that public schools are “transparent.” Well, the NAEP does find that 74% of children with disabilities in Arizona public schools score below basic in 4th grade reading, which is significantly worse than the 64% nationwide average. So…Morrill has got me there, but unfortunately for him, the transparency of which he boasts reveals an appalling lack of effectiveness.

If we’d like to equal the amount of transparency for private school students, well, we will need to get the NAEP to increase the size of their private school sample. The state’s testing system…well, don’t get me started.

I had the opportunity to listen to about half of the oral arguments. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on TV, so I was awfully confused by many of the assertions made by the bad guys. As it stands, plenty of Arizona students are educated at private schools at public expense and have for many years, and that is okay, so long as it is the school districts doing the choosing of private schools.

If you have the parents do the choosing, however, the ACLU would have you believe THAT, now that is unconstitutional.

3 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Replication, The True Test of Research Quality

December 2, 2008

When people can’t argue the facts, they argue peer review.  That’s been my experience when I’ve released non-peer reviewed reports.  Without peer review, folks wonder, how can we know whether to trust these results?

The reality is that even with peer review people still need to wonder whether to trust results.  Peer-review is by definition irresponsible — by which I mean that the reviewers have no responsibility.  By being anonymous, reviewers offer their opinions on the merit of research without any meaningful consequence to themselves.  Many reviewers do a laudable job, but there is nothing to stop them from using their reviews to advance findings they prefer and block findings they dislike regardless of the true merit of the work.  Peer-review is often little more than the anonymous committee vote of a panel composed of some mix of competitors and allies.  It is about as reliable as the Miss Congeniality vote at a beauty contest.  Do we really think she’s the nicest contestant or did the other contestants voting anonymously have ulterior motives for burying her with faint praise?

The true test of research quality is replication.  Science doesn’t determine the truth by having an anonymous committee vote on what is true.  Science identifies the truth by replicating past experiments, applying them to new situations, to see if the results continue to hold up. 

I’m pleased to say that several pieces of my work have been successfully replicated.  By successful replication I mean that the basic findings are upheld.  Replicators almost always make new and different choices about how to handle data or run an analysis.  The question is whether the same basic conclusion is found even when those different choices are made.

The evaluation I did with Paul Peterson and Jiangtao Du of the Milwaukee voucher experiment was successfully replicated by Cecilia Rouse.  The evaluation I did of the Charlotte voucher program was successfully replciated by Josh Cowen.  My study of of Florida’s A+ voucher and accountability program was successfully replicated three times — by Raj Chakrabarti; Rouse, et al; and West and Peterson.  And my graduation rate work has been successfully replicated by Rob Warren and Chris Swanson.

The interesting thing is that every one of my studies above was initially released without peer review.  And every one of them was attacked for being unreliable because they were not peer reviewed.  When they were all later published in peer reviewed journals (except the grad rate work) and successfully replicated I don’t remember ever hearing anyone retract their accusations of unreliability. 

(edited for typos)

4 Comments | research reports, school accountability, vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Moe in WSJ

November 24, 2008

Terry Moe has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal today.  He suggests that the Democrats (including himself as an early Obama supporter) are the logical source of education reform.  He writes:

“If children were their sole concern, Democrats would be the champions of school choice. They would help parents put their kids into whatever good schools are out there, including private schools. They would vastly increase the number of charter schools. They would see competition as healthy and necessary for the regular public schools, which should never be allowed to take kids and money for granted.”

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

Who Cares Where Obama’s Kids Will Go to School?

November 10, 2008

Even worse than the tedium of lame election coverage is the tedium of lame post-election coverage.  Did I really have to hear 10,000 news stories on what kind of dog Obama will get? Or how about the 10 thousand million gzillion stories about where the Obama children will go to school? Ugh.

Even worse, education bloggers have joined this lame-fest offering endless opinions and interpretations about the significance of whether the Obama children will attend public or private school.  We’ve seen postings over at Flypaper, Eduwonkette (the posting was actually by Aaron Pallas, a grown man and otherwise respectable scholar who chooses to call himself “skoolboy”), Jay Matthews at the Washington Post, Joanne Jacobs, ….  The list goes on but I got so bored typing it that I dozed off for a while.

So why is the topic of where the Obama kids will go to school politically irrelevant?  Supporters of choice try to use the fact that anti-voucher presidents choose private schools rather than DC public schools as evidence of hypocrisy.  I don’t buy that argument.  There is no more hypocrisy in saying that public dollars should only go to public schools even if I choose to use my own dollars at private schools than in saying that public dollars shouldn’t go to think tanks even if I donate to them with my private dollars. 

Folks hostile to vouchers worry that the Obamas choosing a private school is part of a broader problem where the public purposes of education are being undermined by private consumption.  Skoolboy goes so far as to worry that private education might be contrary to the public goal of “producing citizens prepared for life in a democracy” and entertains the “provocative” proposal from one of his students to “eliminate private schooling altogether [to] reduce both the temptation and the capacity for members of privileged groups to use their resources to maintain their advantages.”  He dismisses the proposal as not “feasible” but we could only imagine how wonderful everything would be if skoolboy and his students ran the world.  Not only could we do away with private schools but we could also all have really cool blogger rapper names, like The Notorious JPG and DJ Super-Awesome. 

Skoolboy seems to believe that private education undermines the public purposes of education, while public schools do not.  And I can only assume that the airtight logic behind his view is that both public education and public purpose have the word, public, in them.  Because if he bothered to familiarize himself with the empirical evidence on the relationship between private education and the production of citizens prepared for life in a democracy, he’d find that private schools better serve that purpose.  Patrick Wolf has an excellent summary of that literature.

Folks may want to score points for or against vouchers with the Obama children, but let’s just leave them alone and ignore them like we did during most of the campaign.

15 Comments | vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Looking Abroad for Hope

November 5, 2008

hope

HT despair.com. Looking for a Christmas idea to suit the new reality? Why not a despair.com gift certificate – “For the person who has everything, but still isn’t happy.”

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Looking around for something to give me hope this morning, I find the best place to turn (for today, at least) is outside the U.S. Specifically, I turn to the recently released study in Education Next by Martin West and Ludger Woessmann finding that around the world, private school enrollment is associated with improved educational outcomes in both public and private schools, as well as lower costs.

Well-informed education wonks will say, “duh.” A large body of empirical research has long since shown, consistently, that competition improves both public school and private school outcomes here in the U.S., while lowering costs. And the U.S. has long been far, far behind the rest of the world in its largely idiosyncratic, and entirely irrational, belief that there’s somthing magical about a government school monopoly.

And private school enrollment is an imperfect proxy for competition. It’s OK to use it when it’s the best you’ve got. I’ve overseen production of some studies at the Friedman Foundation that used it this way, and I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t think the method were acceptable. However, that said, it should be remembered that some “private schools” are more private than others. In many countries, private school curricula are controlled – sometimes almost totally so – by government. And the barriers to entry for private schools that aren’t part of a government-favored “private” school system can be extraordinary.

That said, this is yet another piece of important evidence pointing to the value of competition in education, recently affirmed (in the context of charter schools, but still) by Barack Obama. Who I understand is about to resign his Senate seat – I guess all those scandals and embarrasing Chicago machine connections the MSM kept refusing to cover finally caught up with him.

Leave a Comment » | competitive effects, methodology, money myth, politics, research reports, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

PJM on Candidates’ Education Flip-Flops

November 3, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over the weekend Pajamas Media carried my column on how Obama and Palin have flip-flopped on education:

Suppose I told you Candidate A has supported rigorous academic standards, has stood up to the teachers’ unions — even been booed by them at their convention — and proclaimed the free-market principles that schools should compete for students and better teachers should get higher salaries. On the other hand, Candidate B says that competition hurts schools, that kids should be taught a radical left-wing civics curriculum, that we should throw more money at teachers’ unions — excuse me, at schools — and that rigorous academic standards should be replaced with the unions’ old lower-the-bar favorite, “portfolio assessment.”

Candidate A is Barack Obama. So is Candidate B.

Meanwhile, Candidate C has made an alliance with the teachers’ unions, opposed school choice, thrown money at the unions — excuse me, at schools — and even helped undermine a badly needed reform of bloated union pensions. On the other hand, Candidate D has broken with the teachers’ unions, demanded that schools should have to compete for students, and endorsed the most radical federal education reform agenda ever proposed by a national candidate, including a national school choice program for all disabled students.

Candidate C is Sarah Palin. So is Candidate D.

Important disclaimer:

None of this implies anything about the overall merits of any of these candidates. One can love a candidate overall while hating his or her stand on education, and vice versa.

1 Comment | competitive effects, money myth, politics, school accountability, social promotion, special ed, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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