Fear and Loathing in Carson City

May 8, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I authored a study released by the Nevada Policy Research Institute this week on the Silver State’s education system. Nevada’s education system must address two urgent problems: an ever-growing quantity of students and the low average quality of schools. In spite of these problems, Nevada’s State Board of Education has moved to clamp down on a reform which could help with both problems: charter schools.

Between the year 2000 and the year 2005, Nevada’s school age population increased by 21 percent. This decade began with about 340,000 school age children, but will be nearing 550,000 by 2016.

Nevada is struggling to keep up with these demands. Nevada’s public school spending going for capital outlay in 2003 was over 40 percent higher than the national average on a per pupil basis.

Nevada’s school quality issue represents an even more serious problem. According the Nation’s Report Card from 2007, 43 percent of Nevada 4th graders scored “Below Basic” in reading.

Research shows that children who fail learn basic reading skills in the early grades very often fall further and further behind grade level with each passing year. Moving into middle school, they can scarcely read their textbooks. They begin dropping out in larger numbers in 8th grade.

In other words-the Nevada dropout class of 2015 is moving through the pipeline.

Nevada’s quality and quantity problems are interrelated. The need to construct new public school facilities ultimately draws educational funds out of the classroom. Likewise, the percent of per pupil funding going to service school debt was over sixty percent higher in Nevada than the national average.

A comparison between Nevada and its neighbor, Arizona, however proves that there are solutions to both the quantity and quality problems. Like Nevada, Arizona’s surging population has required a large increase in the supply of schools.

Despite similar rates of enrollment growth, Nevadans spent almost twice as much per student on capital costs as Arizonans in 2003-$1,468 compared to only $776 per pupil in Arizona. Arizona’s interest payments per pupil were also about half of what is paid in Nevada.

How has Arizona managed to manage its quantity problem so much more successfully than Nevada?

In 1994, Arizona lawmakers passed legislation creating choice between public schools and districts, and also one of the nation’s most liberal charter school law.

In 2007, Arizona has 482 charter schools educating over 112,000 children. Arizona charter schools have proven to be extremely diverse- focusing on everything from the arts to back to basics academics to the veterinary sciences.

In addition in 1994, Arizona lawmakers passed a very robust open enrollment law which thousands of students use to transfer between district schools and between school districts.

In 1997, Arizona passed the nation’s first scholarship tax credit law. This program gives individual taxpayers a dollar for dollar credit against state income tax for donations to nonprofit groups giving private school scholarships. In 2007, this program raised $54,000,000 and helped almost 25,000 students attend 359 private schools around the state. Arizona lawmakers created three new private choice programs in 2006.

Arizona’s ability to keep capital costs below the national average came about largely because of this embrace of parental choice in education. Choice options have relieved the need for Arizona’s school district to incur debt in the process of absorbing the increase in the student population.

What has parental choice done for school quality in Arizona? Charter schools comprise an amazing nine of the top 10 publicly funded high schools in the greater Phoenix area. The lone non-charter school on the list is a magnet school, also a choice based school.

Nevada, by comparison, has been hesitant in expanding parental options. In the five states surround Nevada (Arizona, California, Idaho, Oregon and Utah) and these states have 482, 710, 30, 81 and 60 charter schools respectively, collectively educating hundreds of thousands of students. With only 22 charter schools, Nevada is the tortoise of the region.

On November 30 of 2007, the Nevada Board of Education voted 8-0 to impose a moratorium on the approval of new charter schools. Board members told the press that the freeze was necessary because the state Education Department is being “overwhelmed” by 11 charter applications.

Arizona’s State Board for Charter Schools oversees 482 Arizona charter schools with a staff of 8. Nevada’s board overseeing cosmetology currently has 14 full time employees.

In addition, the Nevada legislature created a funding stream for charter school oversight of 2% of the per capita funding. Nevada policymakers must come to recognize the dire need for new high quality schools. Currently, even ultra-high quality charter school operators like KIPP are frozen out of opening schools. If those top 10 schools from Phoenix wished to replicate their success in Nevada, they would be shut out, an absurd denial of opportunity for children.

Nevada policymakers should loathe the status quo and fear the future unless they can radically improve learning, especially for the state’s rapidly growing Hispanic population. They shouldn’t fear or loathe charter schools.

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Posted by matthewladner

Grab a Brew- Don’t Cost Nuthin’

May 7, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

On May 1st, the Arizona Senate Higher Education committee held a hearing on the university “stimulus plan.” The idea is to have the state borrow $1.4 billion to build new buildings on the state’s three public universities. Governor Napolitano, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and Arizona State University President Michael Crow all spoke in favor. One thematic message: this borrowing can more than pay for itself by increasing the percentage of Arizona workers with a college degree.

Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman stole the show, noting that ASU students have a high per capita beer consumption rate, providing an economic stimulus to Tempe.

Hallman’s observation however might help to explain graduation rates. Don’t get me wrong- I drank my share of beer as an undergraduate. Someone else’s too. Nevertheless, I managed to graduate in 4 years, something 73 percent of ASU students fail to do. Education Trust rated Arizona State University against 7 similar peer institutions and found Arizona State had the lowest 6-year graduation rate of the bunch.

If we did need additional graduates, more focus on absurdly low graduation rates could do the trick. A fraction of the eighty million dollars a year in debt service would pay for a tremendous amount of financial aid, tutoring, and even the additional course offerings that some students might need to graduate on time. I’ve yet to hear the sad story of the student who dropped out for lack of fancy new facilities.

However, it is far from obvious that the state “needs” additional college graduates, given that many graduates currently work in jobs which do not require degrees.

This begs the question: do Arizona universities need new buildings, or new priorities?

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Posted by matthewladner

The Way of the Future in American Schooling

May 2, 2008

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

In the Aviator, director Martin Scorsese tells the story of Howard Hughes, had perhaps the biography of Howard Hughes been written by Ayn Rand. Hughes is portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio as obsessively pushing the envelope forward in aviation, breaking both technical and legal barriers to progress.

Hughes’ pursuit of progress runs him into conflict with Pan-American airlines and their minion in Congress, Senator Brewster, played by Alan Alda. Brewster seeks to protect the monopoly status of Pan American in providing trans-Atlantic flight, and uses the investigative powers of Congress in order to coerce Hughes. Consumers will be better served by a monopoly, Brewster explains, a position that Hughes finds “Un-American.”

Hughes asks Brewster “do you really want to go to war with me?” Brewster replies:

“It’s not me, Howard. It’s the United States government. We just beat Germany and Japan. Who the hell are you?”

This being a movie, of course, our rugged individualist hero prevails, decisively crushing Senator Brewster and Pan-American in dramatic fashion in a Senate hearing showdown. Travelers enjoy the enormous benefits of aviation competition to this day.

Sadly, in the real word, other monopolies have rather more staying power than Pan-Am, including sadly our education laws. A fine line exists between stability and stagnation. In education policy, we have been content to sail well past that line. Our answer to all education problems was to put in more money. In 1960, the average spending per pupil was $375 (around $2300 in inflation adjusted dollars). Today, we spend close to $10,000 per pupil. Even after adjusting for inflation, spending per pupil in the public school system as more than tripled since the first baby-boomers attended schools.

Our education problems worsened despite the increased spending. Today, 38 percent of our 4th graders have failed to learn basic reading skills, and around a third of our high school students dropout of high school. As today’s dropouts are largely those students who failed to learn to read in elementary schools, tomorrow’s dropouts are already in the pipeline.

Andrew Coulson recently noted that the last great innovation to transform American classroom instruction came with the invention of the chalkboard in 1801. Consider this level of stasis in comparison to the computer industry. Today, you could literally throw a dart in the computer section of a department store and have it land on a personal computer which is more powerful and cheaper than what was available two years ago. By comparison, the school system continues to plod along, always spending more but often producing less.

The productivity of spending in our public education system has collapsed over the past half century. We spend beyond the dreams of avarice for a public school superintendent of the 1960s, but we don’t produce better results. For decades, we have been throwing money at our public schools and failing to notice that students were failing to benefit.

Fortunately, this status-quo will not endure forever. A growing consensus on both left and right recognizes that our most disadvantaged students suffer most from the shortcomings of our schools. Children relying most heavily on schools to prepare them for the future are tragically the most likely to be shortchanged.

Our nation’s poorest families cannot afford to buy into high-quality suburban school districts, or to pay private school tuition in addition to their school taxes. Policymakers from both parties have therefore increasingly embraced policies creating options for parents. Nationwide, nearly a fourth of K-12 students won’t be attending their neighborhood public schools this fall, opting instead for an array of public and private options- including magnet, charter, private and home schooling. Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, Rhode Island and Utah have all passed new school choice programs in the last two years. For many, especially for inner-city children, however, these options remain far too scarce and this momentum must accelerate.

Charter school operators such as KIPP, Yes Academies and Amistad have proven definitively that low-income inner city children can learn at an accelerated pace, and can even outperform our complacent suburban schools and attend elite universities. These innovators face huge political and practical obstacles in making these schools more widely available, but don’t bet against them. Already, they have settled the question of whether we must settle for today’s failed status quo: we don’t. Our students can learn. We adults simply have to learn how to follow the example of those who are getting the job done.

Our students need a market for K-12 schools. The market mechanism rewards success and either improves or eliminates failure. This has been sorely lacking in the past, and will be increasingly beneficial in the future. The biggest winners will be those suffering most under the status-quo.

New technologies and practices, self-paced instruction and data-based merit pay for instructors, may hold enormous promise. Before the current era of choice based reforms, they didn’t fit the 19th Century/unionized model of schooling, so they weren’t seriously attempted. Bypassing bureaucracy, a new generation has begun to offer their innovative schools directly to parents. Some have already succeeded brilliantly. Some states have been much keener than others to allow this process. Expect the laggards to fall in line eventually. We can hardly continue to cower in fear that someone somewhere might open a bad school when, in reality, we are surrounded by them now.

A market system will embrace and replicate reforms which work, and discard those that fail to produce. A top-down political system has failed to perform this task. Where bureaucrats and politicians have failed miserably, however, a market of parents pursuing the interests of their children will succeed in driving progress.

We cannot feel satisfied with a system that watches helplessly as a third of pupils drop out before graduation each year. We can do much better. The key lies in matching disadvantaged students with high quality teachers and school leaders. Parental choice programs help to achieve this by providing new education delivery methods.

While there will be enemies to fight this progress, but they won’t prevail. America is rousing itself from a century long slumber of stagnant schooling practices. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain from the coming education renaissance, so long as we have the wisdom to embrace it.

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Posted by matthewladner

Anywhere But Here!

April 30, 2008

(Guest post by Matthew Ladner)

In the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, Captain John H. Miller (played by Tom Hanks) leads a group of American soldiers in storming the beach at Normandy. Pinned down behind inadequate cover and facing extremely heavy enemy fire, Miller orders his men to move out, prompting one of his soldiers to ask where they should go.

Miller bellows to his men: “ANYWHERE BUT HERE!”

Facing the task of reauthorizing No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Congress also faces an unsustainable status-quo. Although fashioned with the noblest intentions, NCLB created a perverse incentive for states to lower their academic standards — an incentive that will become increasingly powerful in coming years.

The law reflects contradictory urges regarding education policy. On the one hand, some want Congress to act to improve education, and on the other, some wish to preserve the tradition of state and local control of schools.

In NCLB, Congress attempted to finesse this contradiction, but failed to do so successfully. The law requires states to test almost all students, and to have an ever-increasing percentage of them reach proficiency in all tests by 2014. However, NCLB leaves the content and the passing thresholds of these tests to the states.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in game theory to see the problem with this, just a little common sense. As “proficiency” requirements have risen, states have begun to dummy down their tests to avoid federal sanctions.

Congress must now make an actual choice about which level of government should predominate in education policy — or the price will be very high.

Scholars have already noted the beginnings of a “race to the bottom,” as states lower passing thresholds and otherwise make the tests easier to pass.

Congress has set up a looming train-wreck in public schools. If allowed to play out, every child in America may “pass” state proficiency exams by signing their names to completely meaningless tests. American schools would return to the dark age in which no one has meaningful data concerning school outputs. Parents, teachers, administrators, policymakers and taxpayers will be flying blind on school reform. The racial achievement gap will be closed- but only as a complete fraud.

Congress can either become far more intrusive in the setting of state education policy, or let the states lead. Federal education policy must move in one direction or the other, but cannot remain stationary.

Senator Barry Goldwater opposed the first bill to provide federal funds to public schools, which was the antecedent of NCLB. Goldwater’s warning rings prophetic: “Federal aid to education invariably means federal control of education.”

Evidence regarding the effectiveness of federal aid to education has remained scant through the years. In 2004, Secretary of Education Rod Paige bluntly noted “We have spent $125 billion on Title I programs for disadvantaged students in the past 25 years, yet we have virtually nothing to show for it.”

Today, the total federal share of the K-12 education budget remains under 10 percent of the total K-12 budget, but serves as a vehicle for a huge number of federal mandates on schools. Fully 41 percent of the administrative costs for state education bureaucracies are spent on complying with federal mandates, the General Accounting Office estimates.

Despite this record, some see the race to the bottom as an opportunity to expand federal control over local schools. Some have begun to make the case for “national standards.” The logic is simple: states can’t lower standards that they don’t control.

We need to move precisely in the opposite direction. Above all else, first the federal government should do no harm in education policy. The mess of NCLB inspires no confidence in the ability of Congress to fashion standards, even if it were constitutionally appropriate, which it decidedly is not. With a good deal more modesty, the federal government might take on the role of maintaining transparency as a condition of federal funds, rather than undermining it.

The states have begun to function as labs of reform on education. States like Florida and Massachusetts have made a good deal of progress in recent years, far beyond anything which can be attributed to NCLB. Ironically enough, NCLB threatens this progress by all but ordering states to dummy down their tests- or else.

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Posted by matthewladner

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