Public School Spending has Doubled in 40 Years
Public school spending has doubled in 40 years, and yet some people are bothered by the fact that an education analyst said that schools ought to be "productive."

I offer a look at this fact, and the reaction, in an op-ed that the Kansas City Star published over the weekend.

Labels: K-12 education

(permalink)

Teachers union sees budget crisis as opportunity to kill charter schools

President Obama made news last week for trumpeting charter schools. He called for states that have caps on the number of charter schools to lift them, arguing that placing a limit "isn't good for our children,our economy or our country."

While the head of the Democratic Party was praising charter schools,some of his DFL counterparts in Saint Paul were trying to bury them.

First came a proposal to forbid the creation of new charter schools within one mile of a closed district property. That attempt to protect incumbent district schools does nothing to help students or the economy. Fortunately, on March 10, members of the K-12 Education Finance Committee of the Minnesota House voted that proposal down, though only by a vote of 11 to 9.

Ironically, the day after President Obama's speech, Sen. Kathy Saltzman (DFL-Woodbury) proposed an amendment to a senate subcommittee that would ... impose a cap on the number of charter schools in the state. Of all the restrictions that legislators across the country put on charter schools, a cap is the bluntest and most damaging. Other restrictions contained in amendments offered by Saltzman and other legislators would impose additional shackles on existing charter
schools.

So what's going on here? Concern for children? Not exactly. The very existence of charter schools threatens the control that Education Minnesota has over public education. Though charter schools are public schools, only a handful in the country are unionized, and by design they operate free from many of the bureaucratic deadweight that is larded on traditional public schools by the bureaucracy and teacher unions.

Minnesota was the first state to implement charter schools, and its laws have been--at least until now--among the best in the country on the subject. If legislators enact the proposals being discussed in Saint Paul this week, they will have strangled the best hope that education reformers have.

(First published in the Weekly Update, from the Minnesota Free Market Institute, on March 20, 2009)

Labels: K-12 education, MNFMI

(permalink)

Public School Children are "Captured" Audience
Large, bureaucratic organizations, especially government agencies, are well known for using words to shape public perceptions and obscure their own failures. (George Orwell's "1984" was simply an extreme literary example.)

I realized this truth again when I was reading one of the local newspapers published in Dakota County, Minnesota. Various editions of the newspaper "This Week" published an article that could have come straight from the marketing machine of Independent School District (ISD) 196.

The article praised the ISD 196 for being of such high quality that virtually every school-aged student who lives within its boundaries attends one of its schools. It's a variation of the age-old marketing appeal: the WhizBang Gizmo simply must be great, because everyone owns one.

Thanks to some quotes from district officials as well as some rather kind words--and some words that could have been said but were not--the article amounted to a puff piece for the district: Isn't it grand?

I instantly saw several major logical problems with the argument, starting with the fact that the consumption of the service being offered--a seat in a school--is mandatory. If 90 percent of the population owns an iPod music player, that fact is a tribute the to merits of that the product. Nobody is required by law to own an iPod.

Let's turn to education. Since children are required by law to "purchase" schooling, the fact that 90 percent of them actually attend school X, or even any school at all, tells us nothing about the school(s) in question.

The argument put forth by ISD 196--and I suspect, many other districts--has many other holes in it, too. So many that I dashed off a letter to ThisWeek. They chose to not publish my letter, but they did run a letter that expressed similar sentiments.

In a letter printed in the the January 22 edition of This Week, Rosemount resident Larry Goedtel properly called the newspaper and the district to task:On Page 2A of the Jan. 16 edition, there was the headline "District 196 Residents prefer public schools." The article indicated that the "capture rate" of students in District 196 is 88.6 percent.

It appears that Superintendent John Currie is pretty happy with that number since he's quoted as saying, "I think everybody read a lot about students flocking away from public schools to other options, and that's not necessarily true in our district."

Right now public school has a monopoly on education. Sure a child can go to a private school, or a parent can choose home schooling, but it is done primarily at that families own expense. Oh, and that family is still forced to pay taxes to support public education. So the "capture rate" statistic is totally meaningless.

Let's make it more fair. If tax money followed the child and not the "public monopoly," would public schools still maintain their current "capture rate" of 88.6 percent? I highly doubt it. So to use this figure and the interview with the superintendent, to support the headline that "District 196 residents prefer public schools," is at best a joke.

We'll never know how good our public schools really are until they have to compete on an equal footing with private schools and home schooling. Until then, please, save me the propaganda.

By the way, I thought it was totally fitting that it is called "capture rate" and not "choice rate."

Mr. Goedtel nails it.

(First published by the Minnesota Free Market Institute, February 6, 2009.)

Labels: K-12 education, MNFMI

(permalink)

More Money for Schools has not Increased Test scores
The political culture of Kansas was stirred over the last decade over a controversial proposition relating to education. And no, I'm not talking about the debate over what happens in biology class.

School districts there--no different from school districts elsewhere--complained that they weren't getting enough money. Some even took the Legislature to court. The state's highest court ordered the Legislature to cough up more money.

But that was just the latest in a series of moves to bolster school spending, in the belief that doing so would improve student performance.

It hasn't.

I comment on this situation in an op-ed published by the Wichita Eagle that runs today. The link will last for a week or less, but I'll eventually put a PDF version in the publications archive.

Labels: K-12 education

(permalink)

Smaller Classes Lead to Better Schools? Not Quite.

For many students, the new school year will begin within a month. So here's a reprint of an article I wrote elsewhere about a popular but flaws method of improving schools.

September 24, 2007
Is small beautiful? Evaluating classroom size

A perennial fad in education policy is the idea that smaller class size improves student achievement. In 2002, Florida went so far as to write a class-size program into its constitution. Earlier this year, governors in states as politically diverse as New York and Utah embraced smaller class sizes in their state-of-the-state speeches.

School districts, meanwhile, warn that the public’s failure to endorse larger tax bills will lead to larger classes. The logic is simple enough. Teachers are important. A smaller class lets a teacher pay more attention to each student. Ergo, students in small classes do better.

There’s one problem, though. We know less than we should about the effects of class-size reduction, given its financial and opportunity costs.

Perhaps the most well-known study of smaller classes was Project STAR, conducted in Tennessee during the late 1980s. More than 6,000 students in 79 schools from rural, suburban and urban schools were involved. They were placed into one of three types of classrooms: a smaller class (on average, 15 students), a larger class (22 to 25 students), and a larger class with a full-time teacher’s aide. The experiment continued for several years, though only one-third of students continued in the same kind of classroom for three or more years. The students, who entered the project as kindergarteners, were given two different tests, and the numbers were crunched in various ways.

The researchers concluded that students benefited from being in smaller classes. Inner-city children gained the most. For students overall, most of the gains came in a student’s first year in smaller classes; by the eighth grade—long after students had left the experiment—the gains over other students were minimal.

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, applauded the findings. (As well it should: a smaller workload is in essence a pay raise.) “The results: At every grade level, in every subject, at rural, suburban, and urban schools, children in small classes outperformed their peers on standardized tests every time.”



Doubters

As far back as 1996, though, doubts have crept in. The California Research Bureau warned that “since other recent demonstrations around the country have not shown results as dramatic as those found in Tennessee, any evaluation regarding the effects of class size reduction on student performance should be viewed with caution.”

Chief among the critics has been Eric A. Hanushek, an economics professor who has worked at Yale University, the University of Rochester in New York and Stanford University (and as deputy director of the Congressional Budget Office during the 1980s). Hanushek has lodged several complaints about the methodology of Project STAR, including its lack of a pre-test. It’s hard to know how well a treatment works (in this case, smaller classes) if you don’t have a benchmark to start with. He has also argued that lower-achieving students tended to drop out of the project, thus inflating the results.

Ludger Woessmann, of the Institute for Economic Research, a German organization, and Martin B. West, a research fellow at Harvard, took a cross-national approach to the question. In 2006, the European Economic Review published findings from a study of theirs that examined countries including the U.S., several in eastern and western Europe and Asian countries like Japan, Singapore and Korea. Their work found that important “class-size effects are observed only in countries with relatively low teacher salaries.” (The U.S. is not considered a low-salary country.)

Carolina Milesi and Adam Gamoran, both sociologists at the University of Wisconsin, concluded in one of their studies that there was “no evidence of class-size effects on student achievement in either reading or mathematics.” Further, they found this was true across several demographic categories, including socioeconomic status.

Practical Questions

Even if we brush off criticisms of Project STAR, there are serious questions about its merit as a guide to policy. For one, it’s very expensive. According to the Education Commission of the States (http://www.ecs.org), the federal government’s Class Size Reduction Program spent $3.5 billion on class-size efforts in a single school year, 1999-2000. In addition, the program, established in 1998, is providing roughly $1.2 billion a year to help states hire and train new teachers as part of an overall goal of lowering class size in grades one to three to at most 18 students per classroom nationwide—still higher than the Project STAR number.

But finding money to hire more teachers is just the beginning. Smaller classes work only if they are taught by quality teachers. Reducing class size by diluting the quality of the teacher pool—which a rapid expansion in the number of teachers could easily bring—is a self-defeating measure.

Class-size reduction efforts can reduce the quality of teachers in another way. Smaller classes mean more classrooms, which means significant one-time capital costs and increased and ongoing maintenance costs. Where will those funds come from? It would likely come from money that could be used for increasing teacher pay, increasing teacher training and purchasing additional technological tools, to start with.

If there’s one reform idea that seems to have nearly universal support, it’s that teacher quality must be improved. There are of course competing ideas of how that can be done. Merely ramping up the number of teachers, though, favors quantity over quality.

Labels: K-12 education, Legal-Ledger

(permalink)

States grading themselves on the curve
Since the latest issue of Education Next mentions how some states set low standards for schools, it's time to bring up an article I wrote on the subject last year. Nothing much has changed since then.

November 5, 2007
'No Child' leading to grade laxity

We all know about the old problem of “grade inflation.” Lately, when it comes to following the federal No Child Left Behind law, some states have been getting into the act.

Under NCLB, every state must test students to make sure each is proficient in mathematics and reading by 2014. But the law gives each state a lot of flexibility: States are free to use their own tests to comply with the law. They can also determine what score constitutes “proficient.”

That’s where things get interesting.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute (www.edexcellence.net) is a Washington, D.C.-based organization that is generally pro-school choice. (The Institute is unrelated to Fordham University in New York.) Yet unlike school choice advocates who assail NCLB or a federal role for education, Fordham supports both the law and national (though not necessarily federal) testing.

In October, the Institute released a report that criticized states for having lax testing standards. The title of the report—“The Proficiency Illusion”—gives away the game.

The report starts with the story of a mythical family in Michigan. Susie Smith, a fourth-grader, scores very low on the state math test and yet is declared proficient. Her parents, seeing only the “proficient” label, are pleased, thinking that she is on track to doing well throughout her school years.

As a result of her state’s very low standard, however, her performance, and that of her school, is inflated. As a result, say the Fordham authors, “if Susie lived in California or Massachusetts or South Carolina, she would have missed the ‘proficiency’ cut-off by a mile.”

Imagine not just a single Smith family, but a school of Smith children, and you have a school that despite doing well by the standard of NCLB, isn’t learning much. Imagine a state of such schools, and you have a state that is systematically dumbing-down education.


Methodology
Given that states have their own tests for NCLB compliance, how did the Institute come to criticize Michigan? What prompted it to applaud both Massachusetts and South Carolina, two states not normally spoken of in the same category in education?

Twenty-six states administer the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress), which is produced by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA, http://www.nwea.org). In simplest terms, the analysts from the NWEA compared a state’s performance on the MAP with its reported performance for No Child Left Behind. Then they determined which MAP percentile a student would have had to achieve to be labeled “proficient” in each state. They is the “cut score.” One limit of the report is that the MAP is given in only 26 states.

The analysts then asked three questions of each state, including “How easy is it to be proficient?”

Colorado set the lowest bar. As a matter of policy, it declared that students scoring “basic” on the state assessments would be declared “proficient”—a higher level of performance—for the purposes of NCLB. Under the law, that was its right.

Not surprisingly, the cut score for Colorado was very low. Colorado’s third-grade students had to score in only the 6th percentile on the MAP to be deemed “proficient.” The state with the highest expectations was Massachusetts. In the Bay State, a fourth-grade student who was in the 76th percentile was not considered proficient. (The cut off: 77th percentile.)

On the whole, Minnesota is more rigorous than average for both math and reading, with third grade the only grade where the state falls below the average. But for grades four through eight, Minnesota cut scores are higher than the sample average. Its least demanding cut score was third grade reading, in which the state ranked 16 out of 26. Its most demanding cut score was fifth grade mathematics, which placed at fourth out of 26.

Even so, there’s some laxity in Minnesota standards. The most demanding standard was fifth grade mathematics. There, scoring proficient on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment II translated into the 54th percentile on the MAP. The least demanding test was third grade math, which required only a performance at the 26th percentile.

So what does this mean for parents, voters, educators and lawmakers? For all the protests and heartache of NCLB, we’re not necessarily getting much return. States are setting the bar low, and in some cases, setting it very low. As China, India and other countries enter the world economy, though, being “better than Mississippi” doesn’t cut it anymore.

The focus on increasing student achievement is good. The stated purpose of improving the performance of all students, especially the lowest performing ones, is just. But No Child Left Behind, at least as practiced, is falling short.

The law could reap many social and economic dividends if it actually produced results. But the number of loopholes in the law, including the ability to set low thresholds for proficiency, should give observers pause. It may turn out that the most enduring legacy will be the law’s demonstration of the limits of standards-based education reform.

Labels: K-12 education, Legal-Ledger

(permalink)

From "A Nation at Risk" to "Cities in Crisis"

School's out for summer. But for many kids, school's out forever--and they still don't have a diploma. Here's an article I wrote about the problem of high school dropouts.

May 5, 2008
From "A Nation at Risk” to “Cities in Crisis"

First we had "A Nation at Risk," launched a new era of school reforms. Millions of dollars and almost 25 years later, we have, according to a new report on high school dropouts, "Cities in Crisis." The more things change … the more they stay the same.

This new report is from America’s Promise Alliance, a child-welfare advocacy organization founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The report has received a lot of attention. One reason is the sheer scope of the problem that it outlines: 1.2 million students should graduate with a diploma each year, but don’t. While some people do just fine without a diploma, dropouts as a whole tend to create tremendous social costs.

While dropouts occur everywhere, author Christopher B. Swanson focused on the 50 largest cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas, whose dropout rates are twice those of student enrollment as a whole. The cities range in size from New York City (population 8.2 million) to Wichita, Kansas (population 357,698). Minneapolis was the only Minnesota city on the list, coming in as the 47th-most populous city.

Here are some of the most significant findings of the report:

The graduation rate for all students was 70 percent. Three out of 10 students don’t graduate on time—and most of those 30 percent don’t graduate at all.

Urban districts had worse graduation rates. Among the principal districts serving the largest 50 cities, the graduation rate was 52 percent.

Girls were much more likely to graduate than boys. The graduation rate was 74 percent for girls but only 66 percent for boys.

Graduation rates were much higher in suburban districts. The rate in the suburbs was 75 percent—nothing to crow about—but 60 percent in urban districts.

The racial gap is significant. Graduation rates vary greatly across groups, from 49 percent for American Indians to 80 percent for Asian-Americans.

In the Midwest, graduation rates for the largest districts ranged from 25 percent (Detroit) to 60 percent (Wichita). Minneapolis (44 percent) did worse than all but five other districts. The rate for the Twin Cities was 77 percent, putting it tied with or behind 8 other metro areas.

The reactions of various public officials were as interesting (and distressing) as the results of the report.

Some districts disputed the numbers. The superintendent of the Cleveland Public Schools said the numbers “are not accurate.” He got some support from the Ohio Department of Education, which includes graduates of summer school in its calculations.

Both Minneapolis and Atlanta administrators said their rates were 8 percent higher than the ones calculated by Swanson.

School officials might be motivated to say such things because their budgets and jobs are on the line. But they can make these claims because there are various ways of counting students in these statistics. Are special education students included or not? What counts as “completing high school?” It is completing a diploma in four years? Four years plus an extra summer school session? Is a GED good enough?

The National Center for Education Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov) recognized four different methods of calculating rates in its publication "Dropout Rates in the United States: 2005." The event dropout rate covers students who leave school during a single year. The status dropout rate reports people in an age range who are not in school and do not have a diploma or GED. The status completion rate covers people in an age range who have earned a diploma or GED, even if they took more than four years to do it. Finally, the averaged freshman graduation rate, or cohort rate, estimates the percentage of students who complete high school in four years. Swanson used this approach, which produces the largest numbers. The event rate, by contrast, produces the smallest numbers.

In response to the report, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced federal efforts to standardize reporting requirements. Her position is understandable: How can the federal government do its part in administering No Child Left Behind if you can’t easily compare Ohio with Texas? The move to standardize calculations represents a further federal intrusion into what many people think should be a matter at the state level. Yet NCLB is the law of the land, and in the ways of government, one law tends to lead to another.

In addition to pointing to their interpretation of the numbers, some state and school officials pointed to their good intentions. An official with the Kansas City, Mo., schools said “It’s not the place where we want to be. What matters is where we are going.”

Others emphasized recent actions they’ve taken. Officials in Kansas City, Kan., said they have moved in recent years to deal with dropouts. Leaders of the Boston school district said they did their own study last year, and have started new efforts. An official with the Minneapolis Public Schools told the StarTribune "We've improved a lot since then."

Certainly, some schools have seen improvements, and graduating three months later (see Ohio) is better than not graduating at all, even if that does imply extra public spending.

Regardless of who you count or how you crank the numbers, there are still far too many students who aren’t completing high school on time. What can be done about it? Various and competing proposals abound, but I hope that we won’t have to read a similar report in another 25 years.

Labels: K-12 education, Legal-Ledger

(permalink)

With a new book on "disruptive changes" for education on the horizon (see Education Next for a preview), it's time to print an essay I wrote about virtual schools.

May 7, 2007
When going to school means going online

With Internet-based technologies challenging business models in many industries, it was only a matter of time before they started to challenge K-12 education. Policymakers who feel the need to catch up with these changes should resist the temptation to blindly apply old-school regulations to the new environment.

Online learning is growing rapidly. “Education Week,” the trade magazine of K-12 education, says that its use may have grown 20-fold during the last five years. There are now anywhere from 750,000 to 1 million registrations for online courses.

Some online tools involve people interacting at the same time, such as chats, Web seminars or simulations. Others applications, such as e-mail or discussion forums, are used at a participant’s leisure. Depending on the tool and instructional method, an online student may interact with a teacher only occasionally or on a fixed schedule. Interaction among students taking online courses, meanwhile, can vary from little to extensive.

Online learning is more than simply playing a videotape in a classroom. Thanks to charter school laws, an entirely new institution has been born: the virtual charter school. These public schools, free from some of the regulations that hamper traditional schools, are free to draw students from around a state, country or beyond.

Online learning can have several advantages for students. The most obvious is a flexible schedule for those people who for whatever reason (sports, a budding business, family obligations) cannot be present in a classroom on a regular basis. Students can use online schooling to their local school experience, or replace it entirely. Some parents might find online learning, with its ready-made curriculum and instructional support, an attractive alternative to home schooling.

School districts and communities can benefit, too. School districts with small enrollments can supplement their class offerings, making small schools viable. A small but enterprising district that creates an attractive product, it can snare state dollars from students who enroll from other districts.

Online learning can also be used to help a school help meet various state or federal requirements. The Louisiana Virtual School, for example, offers a hybrid class that pairs classroom teachers who are not certified in algebra with an online teacher who is.

Communities also benefit when parents, who no longer feel like they must move to offer their children more educational options, can remain as employers, business owners, and participants in civic life.

Challenges for Policy Makers
While virtual schools can be a godsend to many people, they present a lot of questions for policymakers—as well as a challenge to the status quo.

Denver-based Evergreen Consulting Associates has been tracking the development of online learning. Its annual publication “Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning” reviews the questions that states are asking. Let’s discuss a few of them now.

How much does online schooling cost? There is no agreement on whether online virtual schools should cost less than bricks-and-mortar schools. Some observers argue that virtual schools don’t cost less, they just have different costs.

How should online schooling be funded? Options vary. The Michigan Virtual High School was given $18 million in seed money from the legislature and is still partially funded by annual appropriations and grants.

The Florida Virtual School, on the other hand, receives money based on full-time equivalent student enrollment, similar to a traditional school. As the Evergreen report notes, this approach offers a more predictable funding stream than annual appropriations, which are more often discretionary and subject to budget cycles.

Can a student enroll in an online course anywhere? Some states require students to obtain the permission of their local district before taking online classes elsewhere; others do not.

Does the money follow the student? In Minnesota, an online program that enrolls a student gets only 88 percent of the general education revenue normally allocated for that student. The balance goes to student’s district of residence on the theory that the district still incurs certain costs for students who attend elsewhere.

Two years ago, the Ohio legislature put a moratorium on the creation of virtual charter schools. Among the reasons, says Evergreen: “Enrollment in eCommunity schools has contributed to decreased enrollment in many public school districts.”

Given the poor quality of many schools in Ohio, it’s not surprising that nearly 21,000 students enrolled in the state’s virtual charter schools.

As the technologies grow, teachers adapt and word of online learning spreads, policymakers will face many challenges in responding to competing claims on public dollars. As the Ohio cases bears witness, policymakers must ask the question: how can the public best finance not merely schools, but education?

Labels: K-12 education, Legal-Ledger

(permalink)

Wealthy School Districts, Lousy Schools
If you want good schools, spending a lot of money is no guarantee. That's true whether you're talking about aggregate spending numbers, or a more personal concern--the amount of your mortgage. Here's something I wrote on the topic last year.

California Dreamin': Delusions About School Performance can Hurt Families in the Pocketbook

December 10, 2008

If the three most important words in real estate are “location, location, location,” the most important question for families might be “How good are the schools?”

Think about how many families you know who paid as much or even more than they could afford to buy a house because they believe the house is in a neighborhood with good schools.

The poor performance of many high-poverty schools is well known. But in a recently released book titled “Not As Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice,” the San Francisco-based conservative think tank Pacific Research Institute (www.pacificresearch.org) warns that middle and upper-class suburbanites might need to reconsider whether their outstanding schools are in fact outstanding.

Authors Lance T. Izumi, Vicki E. Murray and Rachel S. Chaney focus their attention on California schools, but their work is valuable to anyone interested in real estate or education.

The single largest section of the book describes the academic state of what the authors call “underperforming” schools. First they identified “nonpoor schools,” or schools in which less than one-third of students participate in the school lunch program. Then in a crude but powerful test, they identified as underperforming any school that “had over 50 percent of students below proficiency in at least one grade level” on the state’s English or mathematics exam.

The result is “The Upscale Real Estate Guide to Underperforming Schools,” a pull-out feature of the book that lists 284 “underperforming” public schools, some with rather upscale demographic profiles.

Nearly all the schools on the list have a ZIP code in which the median home value is more than $300,000. More than half have a value above $500,000. One even has a median value of $1.63 million. Clearly, many people pay lot of money for the opportunity to send their children to these schools.

The book contains narrative descriptions of famous and wealthy communities in which these schools reside. They include Silicon Valley; Burbank (home to NBC); Huntington Beach (known as “Surf City USA”) and several towns in wine-producing Sonoma County.

We read, for example, that the San Francisco Bay area city of San Mateo is home to Hillsdale High, which boasts a ZIP code where the median home price is $867,000. Not even 8 percent of students are in the federal lunch program, yet only 40 percent of 11th-grade students are proficient in English. More troubling, performance on that test drops 27 points between the ninth and 11th grades.

The underperforming schools are found throughout the state, in both the more expensive coastal cites and the less expensive interior ones.

Political allegiances make no differences. Underperforming schools are found in “red” areas such as Orange County, in Southern California. They are also in the famously “blue”—and famously wealthy—San Francisco Bay area. By the way, those schools are not in poorer Oakland, but in prosperous Marin County, where George W. Bush lost twice, both times by a landslide.

Some schools on the list are in cities that host the state’s leading institutions of higher education, including Berkeley, San Diego, and Santa Cruz. Carlsbad and Chino are among the cities in which close to a quarter of the population has a graduate degree. In other words, these are not communities of struggling-to-survive families with minimal education.

In an illustration of the schizophrenic nature of school ratings, some of the schools on the underperforming list have been dubbed by the state as a “California Distinguished School.” One example is the Richard Gahr High School in Los Angeles County. Only 47 percent of ninth-grade students there are proficient in English. And don’t blame immigrants: only 6.5 percent of the students are “English-language learners.”

As with any study, there are some limitations to this book. The narratives read too much like a travel guide at times, even if they do show that famous cities can have weak schools. One sharp feature of the narratives is the interspersing of positive parent-written school reviews from the web site Great Schools (www.greatschools.net). The proximity of warm words and cold, hard, facts is jarring.

I wish the book had put the real estate prices into perspective. California’s real estate prices are legendary, and I found nothing in the book to compare the home values of the selected districts to the state.

The online version of the book repeatedly mentions the “Upscale Real Estate Guide.” I had to rely on a web search to find it, however. As it turns out, a blogger had a link to the guide as a separate document, which is back on the Pacific Research site.

The book has other large sections that I haven’t touched upon here, so there is much for policymakers and citizens alike to consider. The costs, both emotional and financial, that homeowners incur by getting into “good schools” may cause them to overestimate actual school performance. That can lead to a complacency that is harmful to us all, especially the children.

Labels: K-12 education

(permalink)

Two Reports on Education
School's out for summer, but school taxes are collected year-round. So here's a column I wrote about schools.

March 27, 2008

Minnesota No 1. for charter schools
New report questions whether more money translates into scholastic achievement

Minnesota has been garnering some national praise for education of late. One piece is significant; another, less so.

In February, the Center for Education Reform (www.edreform.com) ranked Minnesota as having the best laws governing charter schools. The state’s high ranking came from several factors that the center says correlate with a vibrant charter school environment, including placing no cap on the number of charter schools in the state and using multiple authorizers to oversee charter schools. Last year, legislators were wise to refuse a proposal to place a cap on these schools, some of which produce results that cannot be replicated by traditional public schools.

Also in February, Minnesota earned another No. 1 ranking when the American Legislative Exchange Council (www.alec.org) issued its 2007 report card for the states. ALEC, as it is commonly known, is a voluntary membership organization of conservative state legislators.

The ALEC report is chock-full of data that lawmakers and parents might wish to chew on. Most of the data come from the usual official sources such as the National Center for Education Statistics and are conveniently assembled in one place.

There is, for example, a snapshot of data for each state and the District of Columbia. The one-page summary includes information on achievement, spending, demographics and charter schools.

After the snapshots come the data tables, and lots of them. Chapter 1 has 12 tables dealing with inputs into public schooling, such as the number of instructional staff and per-pupil spending.

Chapters 2 and 3 cover various measures of achievement for both the country as a whole and for each state. It’s an alphabet soup of scores: the ACT, the SAT, and the NAEP.

What has happened to performance over time?

Scores on the NAEP (“the nation’s report card”) have been flat over the long run despite increases in spending; SAT scores have declined 2.1 percent. The ACT has been recalibrated fairly recently, so long-term observations are not possible.

Simple plots of each state’s inputs and outputs suggest that the relationship between the two is less straightforward than you might think. For example, the correlation lines between pupil-teacher ratios and NAEP scores or per-pupil spending and NAEP scores are nearly flat, not upward sloping as suggested by the theory that “you’ve got to spend more to get more.”

The report offers the raw score on the NAEP mathematics and reading tests for both fourth and eighth grade, as well as the percentage of students in the state who score proficient or better on these subjects. It also has each state’s average score on the ACT and SAT. (Since states tend to use either the ACT or SAT, it also gives the percentage of students taking the test).

Finally, each state is given a rank on each piece of data. On eighth-grade math, for example, the Top 5 finishers in terms scale score and percentage of proficient students are Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, Vermont and Kansas.

Resulting questions
Looking at the various tables raises some questions. Massachusetts, for example, scores first in eighth-grade math but only 10th in students per teacher. Is there something about the curriculum in the Bay State that makes up for not having the lowest class sizes? Are the teachers better in math than elsewhere?

The most interesting and controversial element of the report is the attempt to construct a composite rank of each state’s effectiveness, which combines scores on NAEP, the ACT and the SAT. It’s here that Minnesota gets the No. 1 ranking, followed by Massachusetts and Vermont.

Andrew T. LeFevre, the report’s author, then uses regression analysis to test two propositions.

The first is that a state’s ranking on inputs (money and staff) during the 2005-06 school year can predict its academic performance during the 2006-07 school year.

The second is that changes in a state’s inputs will predict its changes in SAT score between 1985 and 2005. In short, can money buy results?

The short answer, says LeFevre, is no. “More schools, more school districts, a lower pupil-to-teacher ratio, higher expenditures per students, higher teacher salaries, federal involvement in primary and secondary education together do not improve performance as measured by average standardized test scores.”

When it comes to individual inputs, having fewer students per school does help, as, oddly enough, does having more students per class.

So what do we make of this report? I happen to agree with the report’s conclusion that expanded school choice is an important part of improving education.

But the analysis supporting it problematic. Take, for example, the ranking of states on either a single measure (eighth-grade math) or on a composite one. Is the difference between the 10th state the 11th state on the NAEP statistically significant? If not, running a regression of spending against math scores doesn’t help us.

Neither does adding many such ranks to form a composite rank.

Perhaps those rank differences are statistically significant, which is to say, real and not a result of chance or measurement error. But it’s impossible to tell from the report.

Proposals to improve education typically center over how much to add to inputs without much regard to the structure.

The charter school idea, enunciated by the Center for Education Reform, does focus on structure. It promotes changes on both on the supply side (by making it easier for educators with new ideas to get them implemented) and on the supply side (giving parents more options to choose from).

For that reason, the lessons of the charter school report card may be the most significant and enduring.

Labels: K-12 education, Legal-Ledger

(permalink)

If we remove schools from the culture wars, maybe we'll find better schools

Since this next item came out on Christmas Eve, it was rather topical on its date of publication. Nothing much has changed since then, however.

December 24, 2007

One reason why children don’t know as much as they should may be that we expect public schools to do too much—or at least do things they aren’t suited for.

We expect schools to teach science, math, and literature. But we also want them to promote social cohesion and national unity.

The National Education Association says “A pure voucher system would only encourage economic, racial, ethnic, and religious stratification in our society. America’s success has been built on our ability to unify our diverse populations.” The group People for the American Way agrees, saying “public education is the cornerstone of a democratic society.”

Meanwhile, some conservative groups such as the Eagle Forum assert that public schools have lost their way by venturing into multiculturalism and undermining parental authority.

Regardless of their specific position on questions of the day, then, various groups of different stripes agree that promoting social unity is a key role of schools.

But Does it Work?
Do schools in fact serve a cultural as well as an academic purpose? The notion that our public schools are an essential factor in creating an essential unity in this country was challenged earlier this year by Neal McCluskey, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute (www.cato.org). McCluskey’s report, "Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict,” offers a catalog of school-centered social conflicts that stretches back more than 160 years.

McCluskey’s report has three main components. The first is a catalog of cultural disputes during the 2005-06 school year. The second reaches back to the American founding and moves toward the present to discuss reformers and controversies. The third section argues that economic and freedom, not public schools, has brought social integration.

McCluskey clustered the events of 2005-06 into eight “national flashpoints.” Intelligent design was the turning point for school board elections in and Kansas and Ohio. Freedom of expression, or the perennial dispute between students’ desire to speak out on political issues and administrators’ interest in keeping social peace, was a second. The remaining flashpoints were race, book banning, multiculturalism, sex education, homosexuality, and religion.

The segment on American history shows that these controversies are timeless. A community is divided over whether schools should have bilingual education or practice immersion. Is this a scene from 2005? Could be, but it’s not. Actually, it’s from the 1880s, when ethnic Germans in Illinois and Wisconsin vigorously opposed a plan for compulsory education that would have mandated English-only instruction.

The desire to see religious views represented—or removed—from schools is nothing new, either. Violent confrontation wracked Philadelphia in 1844. The dispute? Should the Catholic Bible or the Protestant one be used to teach reading?

Government was instrumental in perpetuating slavery, and Jim Crow laws regarding education continued the legacy, until Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. One response to the shameful legacy of slavery, the forced busing of children for racial purposes, has been met with grumbling among blacks and whites alike, if not worse. In the 1970s, the mayor of Boston compared the dispute over busing there to the atmosphere of Belfast, Ireland. So much for schools being a source of unity.

Government=Politics
The lesson behind these examples? When the schools are run by government—and that’s what we mean when we talk about “public schools,”—differences in opinion will inevitably be political. Government officials make the decisions about school speech, religion, and other subjects on behalf of students and the taxpayers who fund the schools. How can politics not be involved?

Politics means disagreements, and disagreements over education can get especially nasty. The political debate over education can heat up for several reasons, which might be summed up as “That’s my money;” and “This is my country,” and “That’s my child.”

“That’s my money” refers to the taxes that one pays to schools. Many people will some decision of the school that they don’t like, and object to how the money is spent. That’s true of any unit of government.

“This is my country” refers to the desire to see one’s views on value questions reflected in public policy. As long as a unit of government is in the business of endorsing a particular view of sexuality, for example, people are going to pay attention to that unit of government. In this case, it’s the schools.

“That’s my child” is of course the most personal concern and provides the strongest of motivations. Opting out of a local school district can incur substantial costs, leaving plenty of motivation to fight.

McCluskey argues that school choice is the only solution to social disputes, and that the pursuit of commerce can promote social integration. I tend to agree with him. A one-size-fits-all system has not brought about social peace. Benjamin Rush, one of the founders of America, proposed that states aim to produce a “more homogenous” population through a system of government schools. That strikes me, and I suspect people of various political stripes, as a profoundly unattractive idea.

Voluntary associations such as churches and synagogues, neighborhood associations, business groups, trade unions and fraternal organizations, on the other hand, promote social bonds without the entanglements of government. McCluskey adds that commercial interchange among various groups promotes these other bonds.

If we abandon the idea that the political process is the best way to determine curriculums and run schools, perhaps we’ll have enough energy to make sure that Johnny can read after all.

Labels: K-12 education, Legal-Ledger

(permalink)

Educational Choice in Minnesota
Minnesota is among the leaders in school choice in the country, though that's not saying much.

Charter schools flourish, and the state has both a tax credit and a tax deduction program for education expenses.

A new report from the House Research department describes the two different tax plans.

Minnesota has both a tax credit and a tax deduction provision. A tax credit, of course, is better for the taxpayer than a tax deduction. The former reduces your tax obligation dollar-for-dollar, while the latter works only on the margins.

(For example, a $1,000 tax credit reduces your tax obligation by $1,000. A $1,000 deduction reduces the obligation of the person with a tax rate of 5 percent by, roughly speaking, $50. Big difference!)

Minnesota being Minnesota, the plans are "progressive." The tax credit is available only for those with lower incomes; those households with an income above a threshold must make do with the tax deduction.

But the deduction has this going for it: it can be applied towards private school tuition. The credit cannot.

The deduction is not "refundable," meaning that you must actually have a tax burden to qualify for it. That's a blow to low-income families, who would be helped the most by any measure to allow for payments to private schools.

In either case, the tax provisions are modest: the average credit was $269 in 2005; the average deduction was $73.

One useful part of the House Research brief is a listing of similar provisions in other states.

Labels: K-12 education

(permalink)

The Moral Case for School Choice.
There are many reasons for enacting school choice. Improving educational achievement and saving money are two of the big ones. But Richard John Neuhaus points us to another one that doesn't get as much play as it should: Enacting choice is the moral thing to do.

He points to an earlier essay by John Coons, who writes:

Shifting educational authority from government to parents is a policy that rests upon basic beliefs about the dignity of the person, the rights of children, and the sanctity of the family ....

Coons argues that school choice is often touted in largely economic terms: School choice will produce better-educated children who will in turn serve us well in a competitive world economy. The danger, he sees, is that we could in theory produce spectacular academic results by retaining the government-control model.

Now, Coons is writing in 1992, before school choice programs got off the ground (at least much off the ground), so his ignorance of the proven benefits of choice can be forgiven, even if it is a bit jarring.

Still, he's onto something. Even if, by some odd twist of fate, a civil servant somewhere came up with a magic cure for public schools that still squashed parental choice, it would be lacking. "Choice," he says, "needs to be loved for its own sake, or at least for a reason more noble than its capacity to make life better for the producers."

Among the reasons for the moral superiority of choice:

The current property-based system is filled with economic and racial injustices and religious strife. Meanwhile, it limits the ability of parents to exercise their free speech rights: "Children are the books written by the poor."

Lack of school choice, further, robs the poor of dignity by reducing them to a passive status in their children's education: Shut up, the school professionals say, because we will determine where which school your child attends, and what happens there.

Neuhaus, by the way, introduces the topic by pointing to the concerns of middle-class parents:

The reality is that most parents in America are, wisely or not, more or less satisfied with the government schools that their children attend. They may have a twinge of conscience about their selfishness, but the teachers-union propaganda about vouchers taking money away from their own schools is powerfully effective. And, they understandably ask, whether caring about your own first is really selfishness or the exercise of parental responsibility. The brutal fact is that twinges of conscience can be easily stifled when they come up against self-interest.

What to say in response? One fact is that those schools are not nearly as good as those parents believe. Another sad fact for school reformers is that there's a great misunderstanding and ignorance of how markets can improve education.

(Thanks to Chad at FratersLibertas for the pointer to Neuhaus).

Labels: K-12 education

(permalink)

Billions for Schools. And what for taxpayers?
Are courts going out of the school budgeting business? Maybe, though I have my doubts.

Back in October 2006, Sol Stern wrote about what happens when a politician, beholden to a teachers union, must then find a way to pay when the union's demands threaten to impose significant burdens on the state.

A group in New York sued the state for another $5 billion in school funding, and won. And there we get the strange world of lawyers determining school budgets.

Anticipating the results of the next month's election, Stern had this to say: "[Soon to be Gov. Elliot] Spitzer knows all the reasons why this case has been a perversion of the judicial process, why it has nothing to do with education improvement and why it poses a grave threat to the state's fiscal future.

After all, it was Attorney General Spitzer, acting as the state's lawyer, who noted that the court started down a perilous path when it decided that a single sentence in the state Constitution - one that merely requires New York to provide a "system of free common schools" - allowed judges to substitute their judgment about school funding for that of the legislative and executive branches."

The journal Education Next, by the way, offers a review of these sorts of lawsuits in its 2007 Summer edition.

The New York group didn't get the $5 billion, but "only" $1.9 billion. Josh Dunn and Martha Derthick see in the New York case, as well of others, signs that courts are growing wearing of handling such cases.

"Staring into the political abyss of adequacy litigation has apparently prompted some state courts to step back from the edge. Over the past two years, the highest courts of New York, Texas, and Massachusetts have decided to end or limit their support for adequacy plaintiffs. These decisions have all professed respect for separation of powers. However, the rulings seem motivated just as much by the recognition that courts lack the capacity to solve the problems of education and the institutional resources to enforce their decisions."

The state's highest court recognized that budgetary questions belong with the legislature. "Deference to the legislature is especially necessary where it is the State’s budget plan that is being questioned.... The Legislative and Executive branches of government are in a far better position than the Judiciary to determine funding needs throughout the state and priorities for the allocation of resources.”

On the other hand, the high court in Kansas went in the other direction (PDF), forcing the state into spending hundreds of millions of extra dollars. Once again, the legislative function of determining budgets was outsourced to courts and hired guns.

Labels: K-12 education

(permalink)

(Repeat)More Money for Schools Does Not Mean Better Performance: Stateline.Org
(Sorry for the duplication from yesterday if you're an RSS subscriber. I'm reposting this in hopes of resolving a technical glitch.)

If you think that the argument that increased school spending doesn't equate into higher student achievement is only one of alleged opponents of education, think again.

Stateline.org observed earlier last year that the connection between free spending on schools and student achievement is fairly weak.

"Maine," writes Kavan Peterson, "spends nearly twice as much on a comparable student population -- $9,300 a student vs. $4,800 in Utah. But fewer Maine fourth-graders improved their math scores -- and their reading scores actually declined in the past decade."

What's even more remarkable is that Utah earns plaudits for improving its scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), sometimes called "the Nation's Report Card."

So much for money being the answer. In fact, so much for any one fact in the current education mix being the answer. Says Peterson, "It's difficult to prove what actually makes one state outperform another. Key factors such as per-pupil spending and student demographics vary widely, even among top-performing states."

One possible reason why there's no strong link between performance and money: the number on spending is based on systems as a whole. There's little information on how much money actually goes into the classroom. In other words, there could be a lot of waste, which is what you would expect from organizations that have government-granted monopolies for specific geographic areas.

Labels: K-12 education

(permalink)

How Much Does Your School District Spend?
For most homeowners, the single largest recipient of their property taxes is the local school monopoly. Yet numbers on school finance can be hard to find and worse, difficult to figure out.

The Goldwater Institute has set up an interactive database that gives a look at district finances. Unfortunately, it's of use only if you're looking at districts in Arizona. But it might serve as a model for groups in other states.

There appear to be some bugs that need to be worked out. The first few times I selected a grade level, some computerese error messages came up on the screen. Take that as a sign that the information is not relevant or available.

Labels: Education, K-12 education

(permalink)