Jay P. Greene's Blog

[Guest Post by Jason Bedrick]

Enrollment in Wisconsin’s voucher program doubled for the second year in a row and members of the public education establishment are not happy.

“Private school vouchers aren’t making our kids smarter — but they are spiking our property taxes and siphoning money away from our kids’ public schools,” Mary Young, president of Support Our Schools Wauwatosa, said in a statement.

If the vouchers aren’t making kids smarter, then neither are the district schools. A longitudinal study found that they score about the same on test scores, with advantages for the voucher students in some years. The major difference is that the voucher students graduate at a higher rate and cost about 40 percent less per pupil — important facts that somehow didn’t make it into the Journal-Sentinel‘s coverage.

The Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated this year that the [school voucher] expansion could shift $600 million to $800 million from public schools over the next decade.

State Schools Superintendent Tony Evers said at the time that the plan would hurt public school budgets and students.

“You lose two or three kids, it doesn’t mean you can lay off five teachers,” Evers said. “It will have major negative impacts.”

First, it must be the case that Evers was misquoted. There’s no way he actually believes that a school losing “two or three kids” will suffer “major negative impacts.” If two or three kids moved out or town or started homeschooling and the resulting fiscal impact was anything approaching “major,” the town should fire the principal and impeach the school board for gross incompetence.

But wait, what about that “$600 to $800 million” that will shift “from public schools over the next decade”? Isn’t that a lot of money?

Well yes… and no. Here the Journal-Sentinel reporter yet again fails to provide the crucial context: how much the state and local governments currently spend on education. According to the latest figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, the Wisconsin public school system cost more than $10.6 billion per year (about half of which is state spending). Even assuming no growth in spending, that’s more than $106 billion over the next decade. In other words, the voucher program expansion is projected to result in a reduction of about 0.56 percent to 0.75 percent of public spending on district schools. (The precise amount may vary slightly depending on the data source and growth assumptions, but we’re still talking about a fraction of one percent.)

Moreover, this calculation does not factor in the reduction in costs associated with students who leave the system. Plus, as Marty Lueken recently detailed at the Friedman Foundation blog, under the current school funding formula, “school districts that lose students to the parental choice program actually end up with more revenue for each student who remains in their schools.”

In summary, the projected fiscal impact of the voucher expansion on district schools is minuscule overall and district schools may even see an increase in their per-student funding. Of course, that’s not the impression that a context-free mention of “$600 to $800 million” gives, which is why providing that context is so essential. Readers who don’t crunch the numbers themselves aren’t just uninformed, they’re misinformed. Failure to provide that context is journalistic malpractice.

The toy company Lego has refused to fill a bulk order from Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, claiming that it “cannot approve the use of Legos for political works.”  You see, the artist has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government and has produced works using Legos depicting fellow dissidents.  Meanwhile, Lego has a financial interest in a company that plans to open LegoLand, a theme park in Shanghai.  Political criticism wouldn’t be good for business.

So, Legos, which had never previously refused to fill a bulk order, has now decided to take a firm stand against being involved in politics, which itself feels very political.  As Ai Weiwei has said, “Everything is art. Everything is politics.”

It’s no small irony that the villain in The Lego Movie was called Lord Business.  The internet is buzzing with offers to donate Legos so that the art works can still be made.  Looks like Lord Business may be defeated again.

There are many ways a nominee for The Al could improve the human condition.  Some, like Matt’s recent nominee Malcolm McLean, are inventors of products or methods that make us better off by increasing economic prosperity.  Others, like Greg’s winning nominee Wim Nottroth, improve the human condition by fighting for greater liberty.  My nominee for this year’s Al didn’t do either of these things.  Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), made a significant contribution to improving the human condition by giving us license to continue “playing pretend” into our adolescence and adulthood.

How does it improve the human condition for teenagers and adults to continue playing pretend?  Well, mostly because it’s fun.  Children love playing pretend, but traditionally we’ve been socialized to abandon these childish things as we assume adult responsibilities.  That might make sense when every waking moment had to be devoted to making a living, but society has grown remarkably wealthy.  That wealth has created significant opportunities for leisure, most of which people now consume by passively sitting and watching movies and TV.  D&D involves story-telling, just like movies and TV, but it is more active and social.  It is collective story-telling, with each participant adding details and shaping the plot.

I won’t bother to defend the benefits of story-telling other than to note that it is as old as human beings and universal in its appeal.  We obviously need to do it.  By inventing a new way for people to tell stories and giving us a mechanism for continuing that activity beyond childhood, Gary Gygax made a significant contribution to improving the human condition.

Let’s be clear.  D&D really is just playing pretend, not a formal game — at least if you are doing it right.  Even Gary Gygax, who made his living mostly by selling rulebooks for D&D, understood that the rules were really unnecessary when he conceded: “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don’t need any rules.”  Gygax is also reported to have said, “A DM only rolls the dice because of the noise they make.”  To play D&D you don’t need to follow rules and it doesn’t really matter what numbers the dice roll.  All you need is a group of people willing to tell a story together.

I haven’t played D&D in many years, but I remember it fondly.  In fact, I first played D&D in 1979 — the same year that the first Dungeon Master’s Guide was published.  The “game” for which I was DM was loosely based on David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.  The players had to fight the spiders and ultimately defeat Ziggy by “crush[ing] his sweet hands.”  Yep, we were incredibly geeky… but pretty cool geeks.  And we used to make fun of Gary Gygax at the time for what we thought were his stupid books and rules.  We didn’t understand that he just meant them as suggestions to get us started.  At that they succeeded.  So, thank you Gary Gygax for getting geeks everywhere to keep on playing pretend and telling stories.