John J. Miller Smacks Half Sigma

October 29, 2008

National Review columnist John J. Miller smacks a blogger known as “Half Sigma” for “dis”ing special education vouchers.  Half Sigma wrote: “Republicans applaud themselves for doing stuff that the left has been pushing for. We nominated a woman for Vice President. How wonderful of us. The female candidate talks about how she’s going to help “special needs” children, and the so-called conservatives applaud the conservatism of it. How wonderful of us. We are going to fight global warming. How wonderful of us.”

Miller then responds on The Corner: “I love those sneer quotes around “special needs.” Would it be better if we called them “retards”?

But that’s just a style point. The substance itself is vaporous. Sarah Palin — oops! “the female candidate” — is calling for the voucherization of special-education spending. This is a very good idea. It’s modeled on one of Jeb Bush’s best market-oriented reforms in Florida, where McKay Scholarships have gotten kids out of lousy public schools and into good private ones, saving taxpayer dollars in the process. School choice has been an elusive public-policy goal of conservatives for a long time; this is a promising path to securing more of it. I urge you to read NRO’s editorial; also this NRO article by Jay Greeneand my article in the Oct. 20 NRODT.”

Besides, The Notorious JPG and DJ Super-Awesome may give Half Sigma a whooping for not having read the post about how bloggers shouldn’t have rapper names

2 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Palin Backs Special Ed Vouchers

October 24, 2008

In a speech in Pittsburgh today, Governor Palin endorsed the idea of special ed vouchers saying, “In a McCain-Palin administration, we will put the educational choices for special needs children in the right hands — their parents’. Under reforms that I will lead as vice president, the parents and caretakers of children with physical or mental disabilities will be able to send that boy or girl to the school of their choice — public or private.

Under our reforms, federal funding for every special needs child will follow that child. Some states have begun to apply this principle already, as in Florida’s McKay Scholarship program. That program allows for choices and a quality of education that should be available to parents in every state, for every child with special needs.”

1 Comment | politics, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Memo to Rhee: McKay Scholarships for DCPS!

October 19, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Erin Dillion over at the Quick and the Ed has posted a copy of a table on Special Education private placements from a recent research report on parental choice in Washington DC (see below).

So, is it just me, or would a McKay Scholarship program be a fantastic idea for DCPS? Rich kids are already getting private placements with the help of specialized attorneys, often Cadillac placements. McKay creates a maximum amount per pupil matched to their funding, and democratizes the private placement process: no lawyers necessary.

DCPS, like other school systems, has likely been complaining about “inadequate” special ed funding for decades. Typically this narrative involves shunting millions out of general ed funding into special ed. In DC, this story has been reinforced by private placement lawsuits, which often result in far more than the normal per capita funding, and create legal costs.

A  approach would substantially improve this. No lawsuits, no massive awards. If the parent of a child with a disability is disatisfied, they simply walk away with a predetermined maximum amount.

Alternatively- we can leave private placements as mostly something the rich white kids with attorneys access, at a sustantial cost to DCPS.

Leave a Comment » | vouchers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Did Milton Friedman Support School Choice Tax Credits?

October 15, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Did Milton Friedman support school choice programs where the financing runs through the tax code rather than the treasury? He always made it clear that if he had a choice between them, he preferred vouchers (funded through the treasury) over either of the two alternatives forms of school choice that use the tax code (direct tax credits for families to offest thier tuition costs or scholarships distributed by charitable organizations and funded by donations that make the donor eligible for a tax credit). But that doesn’t mean he didn’t support the tax-code alternatives or didn’t consider them to be “true” school choice programs.

I bring this up because Robert Enlow of the Friedman Foundation has dug up a letter that Milton wrote in support of Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program. The letter was written on May 17, 2005 and was addressed to a Florida corporate leader who was considering whether or not to support the program.

Milton wrote:

I agree with you completely that the tax code should be used solely to raise revenue to fund necessary government spending and not to create social policy. Unfortunately, in schooling, the tax code is already being used to create social policy, by devoting tax funds to maintaining a socialist education system. If the state decides to subsidize the schooling of children, the straightforward way is to provide a voucher to each parent and let the parent choose the school that he believes is best for his or her children. Let the private market provide the schools. If the state wants to set up schools, let them charge tuition and compete with private schools on a level playing field.

Unfortunately, for reasons we are both well aware of, ranging from unions to school administrators and religious concerns, that ideal solution is not feasible.** Where it has been feasible to any significant extent, as in Milwaukee and the Florida Opportunity Scholarship Program, it has worked well. But again and again, as currently in Florida, an inferior tax credit program seems the only political option. Tax credits are an indirect, and I believe less efficient, way to do what vouchers do more directly. But they do promote the basic objective, of expanding parental choice and thereby introducing more competition into the educational industry. As a result, I have reluctantly supported tax credit programs in a number of states.

Let me just repeat, the tax system is being used for social purposes with both vouchers and tax credits.

**I think we may take it as given that he means “not currently feasible in Florida.” Any attmept to attribute to Milton Friedman the view that vouchers were “not feasible” in general would be absurd in light of his continuing active support for voucher efforts right up to the end of his life.

Milton was always completely open about his opinions, even to a fault. If he was thinking about whether to change his mind about something, but wasn’t yet sure whether to change his position, he would say so – and this would sometimes drive people to claim he had in fact changed his position.

We see that openness in this letter. He admits that his support for tax credits is only as a second-best option and even says the he supports them “reluctantly.” But if you knew Milton even a little bit – and I was only privileged to know him a little bit before he died – you know that he wouldn’t say he supported them at all unless he really supported them. The emphasis here is on the support, not the reluctance; the reluctance only comes in because (as the opening sentence makes clear) he’s addressing an audience that shares his concerns about tax credits.

Leave a Comment » | personal tax credits/deductions, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

PJM on Civics Ignorance

October 6, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over the weekend, Pajamas Media carried my column on the centruy-long failure of public schools to teach civics effectively:

On the other hand, just because the school system’s failure has been going on for a long time doesn’t mean it isn’t a failure. And school failure always has consequences.

Just think how much better American life might have been over the past century if we had been a nation of citizens who knew what citizens ought to know, rather than a nation whose schools failed so miserably and so consistently at their jobs. Would fewer people have succumbed to the siren song of isolationism in the 1930s, while Hitler and Stalin built their empires of mass murder and Mao took control of the Chinese revolutionaries? Would the triumph of the civil rights movement have come sooner and with less toil and bloodshed, and left behind fewer of the unresolved problems that still fester in our politics? Would there have been a clearer understanding of the nature of communism, meaning less denial and excuse-making for Soviet and Maoist atrocities, perhaps even leading to an earlier and more complete victory for freedom in the world? Who can say what horrors we might have avoided if our citizens had all along understood the intellectual and historical foundations of liberty?

Moreover, if the failure is so long-term, we can’t attribute it to transitory phenomena like 1960s radicalism. We have to expect it to be rooted in the basic structure of our educational institutions — whatever we’re doing wrong, it’s something we’ve been doing wrong for at least a century.

2 Comments | civic values, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Palin’s Palein’ on Education

October 3, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

I didn’t bother watching the debate, but from the comments around the web it looks like my prediction that there would be nothing really worth watching was accurate.

Cruising through the commentary, though, I came across this from Mickey Kaus:

Palin sounded like she was campaigning in Iowa for the teachers’ union vote when she talked about education. We need to spend more money. Pay teachers more. States need more “flexibility” in No Child Left Behind (“flexibility” to ignore it). I didn’t hear an actual single conservative principle, or even neoliberal principle. Pathetic.

So much for all that talk about how the McCain staff was overcoaching her. It’s remarkable – yet few seem to be remarking upon it, which is also remarkable – that Barack Obama is more of an education reformer than Palin. (At least, on paper he is. In practice they’re probably both about the same, which you can take as a compliment to Obama or as a criticism of Palin according to preference.) At any rate, her approach to education is pretty hard to square with McCain’s.

The lack of attention to this rather glaring contradiction, even by Palin detractors (and McCain/Palin detractors) who presumably have a motive to pay attention to it, shows just how irrelevant education has become as a national issue, at least for this cycle. Remember how big education was in 2000?

Good thing real reforms like school choice are winning big at the state level. The movement was wise not to bother showing up in DC for the big NCLB hulaballoo eight years ago. Now they’re not tied to NCLB or in general to the fortunes of education as a federal issue. I’ve heard some conservatives bash NCLB because it lacks serious choice components. But NCLB was never about choice. It seems clear that the choice components in Bush’s original proposal were only there to be given away as bargaining chips. The important question is, where would the school choice movement be now if it had tied itself to NCLB?

1 Comment | money myth, NCLB, politics, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Just a Mint? One Mint?

October 1, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Great news! Our schools are saved.

Billionaire Eli Broad is spending $44 million to start up a new Harvard center to figure out what’s wrong with public schools.

That’s right; the first $500 billion a year we spend on K-12 education didn’t do the job, but spending another $44 million (not per year but only once) will put us over the top.

Just like that after-dinner mint in the Monty Python sketch, I guess.

Larry Summers will head the center’s board. The Wall Street Journal reports that Summers was asked whether opening the new center was a rebuke to all the other education research centers which have been doing exactly the same thing for decades and have produced no tangible improvements in education to show for it.

Summers replied: “It’s not a rebuke to any individual.”

With respect to the fine people who work at these cushy “education laboratories,” the real education laboratories are the private and charter schools taking advantage of school choice programs to experiment with new approaches to education.

Milton Friedman always used to comment that education is the only thing we still do the same way we did it 100 years ago. Innovation in education has been stifled not because we lack comfortably endowed research centers but because education is controlled by a government monopoly. He would go on to comment that the real innovation in education won’t come until school choice programs are expanded to include all students – because only with universal choice will you get a more robust market that will produce bigger innovations. And once free-market schools begin discovering better educational techniques, others can copy them. Doctors improve care by copying other doctors who devise new and better treatments – and it’s not the doctors who work for the free, government-issue providers who devise new and better treatments, but the doctors who serve the middle and upper classes and have the opportunity to make more money if they provide better treatment.

The best thing we can do for the education of the poor, Milton would conclude, is to extend school choice to the middle class. Schools for the poor can’t improve service until the education sector as a whole figures out how to improve service, and that isn’t going to happen without a universal market.

4 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, vouchers | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Revenge Is a Dish Best Served on Live TV

September 30, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Joe Biden wishes Bret Stephens didn’t have such a long memory:

Debate Questions for Joe Biden

Finally, senator, something from the more distant past. In 1981, at the outset of the Reagan administration, you took the lead in cross-examining William ‘Judge’ Clark for his confirmation hearings for deputy secretary of state. Mr. Clark’s job was explicitly intended to be managerial, not policy oriented. Nevertheless, you asked him for the names of the prime ministers of South Africa and Zimbabwe, both of which were second-tier posts in presidential systems.

In the same spirit, Sen. Biden, and as a longstanding leader of the Foreign Relations Committee, can you give us the names of the prime minister of France and the president of Germany? Just to be clear here, senator, I am not referring to President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel.

Ouch!

Too bad we Americans never developed a tradition of real debate in politics. The only reason you’ve heard of the Lincoln/Douglas debates is because they’re unique. People might actually tune in and watch – even at 9:00 on a Friday night – if there were some prospect of interesting questions being asked. But there isn’t. And that’s why even this Thursday’s VP debate is likely to be anti-climactic.

Having picked on Joe Biden, which is too easy anyway, I’ll now show my spirit of evenhandedness (and also bring this blog post back to an educational topic) by picking on Sarah Palin.

Suppose there were some prospect of Sarah Palin being asked the following questions:

Governor Palin, during your term you have developed a working alliance with Alaska’s teacher union – throwing more money at schools even with no prospect of improvement, opposing real reforms like school choice, and shifting state funds into archaic and unaffordable “defined benefit” pension plans that you actually opposed when you ran for governor. In return, the state and national unions have praised you, and the state union stayed out of the governor’s race, effectively endorsing your candidacy.

Do you agree with Senator McCain that school choice “is a fundamental and essential right we should honor for all parents”?

If a constitutional provision such as Alaska’s bigoted Blaine Amendment (your excuse for opposing vouchers as governor) violates people’s “fundamental and essential rights,” which should prevail?

Do you agree with Senator McCain that Obama’s opposition to vouchers is “tired rhetoric” that “went over well with the teachers union” but leaves children “stuck in failing schools,” and that “no entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity”?

Do you agree with Senator McCain that it is “beyond hypocritical that many of those who would refuse to allow public school parents to choose their child’s school would never agree to force their own children into a school that did not work or was unsafe”?

Whom do you think he is talking about when he says that?

Do you think this would be a better country if we had that kind of debate?

Of course, we would need to have politicians who could give as good as they got. As in:

Biden: Mr. Stephens, I asked that question because I thought it was important. If Mr. Clark felt the question was unfair, he could have just said so. In that spirit, if I need to know the name of the prime minister of France when I’m vice president, it will probably be because I’m going to his funeral, in which case I’m sure I’ll have no trouble finding out the name before I show up.

Or:

Palin: Mr. Forster, as governor, I don’t have the privilege of rewriting the state constitution at will. I have to govern according to the laws as they are. I’m glad that bloggers like you have the freedom to call those laws into question. And I suppose being governor of the nation’s largest state is a little bit like being a blogger . . . except that I have actual responsibilities.

Think either of them would be up to that kind of answer?

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

Dogs and Cats Are Living Together

September 12, 2008

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

No, this isn’t a photo of Greg, Matt, and me (but if it were, I’m sure I’d be Egon on the right). 

This is what came to mind when I heard that Doug Tuthill, the former head of the teacher union in Pinellas County Florida, was named the new president of the Florida School Choice Fund, an organization that raises money for and promotes tax-credit supported vouchers.  And Jon East, the former St. Pete Times editorial writer and prominent voucher critic, has signed on to be  the Fund’s communications director.  There must be a cataclysm of biblical proportions going on here.  Dogs and cats are living together!

Add this to the Democrats for Education Reform hosting an event at the Democratic Convention where “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.”

Rick Hess, Mike Petrilli, Diane Ravitch, and Sol Stern may be jumping off the school choice train (or at least hanging dangerously off the side), but Adrian Fenty, Marion Bary, Al Sharpton, and a bunch of Democratic delegates are jumping on.  (OK, you can insert your Marion Bary or Al Sharpton joke here).  But these are signs of a possibly dramatic political realignment. 

I wonder what’ll happen if we cross the streams?

2 Comments | politics, tax-credit scholarships, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Bruce Fuller Knows Better

September 11, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In the New York Times campaign blog, Cal-Berkley education professor Bruce Fuller makes some wildly inaccurate assertions.

Fuller asserts:

Yet only three publicly financed voucher programs — Cleveland, Milwaukee and Washington — have survived since the early 1990s.

Fuller needs to check his facts. There are three voucher programs in Ohio alone. Two more in Arizona. Oh, and then there are voucher programs in Utah, Georgia and Louisiana. Oh, and Maine and Vermont. Also Florida. And of course this ignores the nation’s tax credit programs.

Worse still, Fuller writes:

On early education, Republican leaders have been silent, even though quality preschools pack a strong punch in boosting young children’s learning.

This is an artfully written sentence indeed. The phrase “boosting young children’s learning” deftly avoids the question as to whether these gains are ultimately sustained. Fuller himself however wrote the following in opposing Hillary Clinton’s preschool plan:

Three recent studies, conducted with national data on more than 22,000 young children, have shown significant benefits from preschool for poor students, especially those who find their way into higher quality elementary schools. But cognitive gains from preschool quickly fade out for middle-class children; social development slows for those spending long days in centers.

I am reading Fuller’s book Standardized Childhood and must say I’m finding him more credible as a scholar than as a proponent of the Obama campaign.

 

1 Comment | instructional reform, politics, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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