Voice For Liberty

Tag: Education

  • School choice would save, not cost, Kansas

    As reported in my post Moving Kansas schools from monopoly to free choice, the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy has recently reported how school choice programs could give Kansas a better return on its education dollar. Here’s some additional evidence that Kansas is missing out on an opportunity.

    Two years ago the The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released the study School Choice by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006. According to the executive summary: “Every existing school choice program is at least fiscally neutral, and most produce a substantial savings.”

    How can this be? The school spending lobby and the teachers unions would have us believe that vouchers would kill public education. They say that school choice program drain scarce resources from the public school system.

    But when researchers looked at the actual effects, they found this: “In nearly every school choice program, the dollar value of the voucher or scholarship is less than or equal to the state’s formula spending per student. This means states are spending the same amount or less on students in school choice programs than they would have spent on the same students if they had attended public schools, producing a fiscal savings.”

    So at the state level, school choice programs save money. They don’t cost money to implement; they save money.

    At the local level, schools districts have more money, on a per-student basis, when school choice programs are used: “When a student uses school choice, the local public school district no longer needs to pay the instructional costs associated with that student, but it does not lose all of its per-student revenue, because some revenue does not vary with enrollment levels. Thus, school choice produces a positive fiscal impact for school districts as well as for state budgets.”

    Also, when schools are overcrowded, school choice programs can provide a way to solve this problem at no cost. This is illustrated in my article Will the Wichita Public School District Consider This Method of Reducing School Overcrowding? (The arithmetic of school choice in Wichita)

  • Moving Kansas schools from monopoly to free choice

    Paul Soutar of the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy has released a report that tells how Kansas could get better value for the money the state spends on K-12 education. Charter schools and school choice programs could — if not for opposition from the existing public school lobby and teachers unions — provide flexibility and and impetus for improving all Kansas schools.

    Kansas doesn’t have many charter schools. Part of the problem in Kansas, Soutar reports, is the law that governs charter school authorization: “… unlike most other states, Kansas charter schools are not truly independent. State law says they can only be authorized by school districts. That’s like Burger King having to ask McDonald’s for permission to open down the street. Even when local school districts authorize a charter school, there are obvious problems achieving the independence and educational difference charter schools are intended to offer.”

    The article also explores the battle over school choice programs in Kansas.

    (This is a Scribd document. Click on the rectangle at the right of the document’s title bar to get a full-screen view.)

  • Kansas NEA questions legislative candidates, reveals agenda

    In Kansas, as across the nation, the teachers union is an important political force. Using a powerful message that no one can oppose — the welfare of schoolchildren — teachers unions press their real agenda.

    In Kansas, the agenda of the Kansas National Education Association (KNEA, the teachers union) includes these items:

    • Increasing taxes to support more spending on schools.
    • Opposing any form of school choice, including charter schools.
    • Opposing the Kansas legislature’s ability to set school spending levels, as the Kansas Supreme Court has shown it is willing to spend more than the legislature will.
    • Increasing teacher salaries.
    • Opposing any form of merit pay, incentive pay, or differential pay.
    • Opposing any weakening of teacher tenure.

    Most of these items might be what you expect from a labor union that depends on government spending to pay its members’ salaries. But that doesn’t mean these items advance the cause of schoolchildren in Kansas.

    Consider differential teacher pay and charter schools, for example. These are being promoted by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, but the existing public education bureaucracy and teachers unions are firmly opposed to these reforms.

    So we really need to wonder if the message of the teachers union — “it’s all about the kids” — represents the union’s true mission and agenda.

    Here’s some evidence to help you decide. Candidates for the Kansas Legislature, if they want to be considered for an endorsement by the KNEA, complete a lengthy questionnaire. This document is really more a manifesto telling candidates what they must believe and do to get the union’s endorsement and a contribution. It appears at the end of this article.

    In the past, I’ve analyzed a few of these questions. Here are links to these articles:

    (This is a Scribd document. Click on the rectangle at the right of the document’s title bar to get a full-screen view.)

  • Articles of Interest

    Kansas liberal Republicans, student rights, greenwashing, historic preservation, Sotamayor.

    Can we please send Steve Rose to a political science class?

    The northeast Kansas blog Kaw & Border has a few words of criticism for Johnson County Sun publisher Steve Rose. Specifically:

    In this case, the “adjusted fact” was his view that tax cuts have put Kansas in a financial crisis, the few good observations were some long overdue spending cuts, his strawman was the Kansas Chamber and “conservatives”, and his nonsensical point that drastic spending cuts in Calfiornia will be so terrible that Kansans won’t want it and, as he puts it “citizens will rebel, even if it means increased taxes.” He seems to imply that a high tax, high spending state, even one in a budget crisis, is preferable to one where our government spends within our means, people have money in their pockets, and government size is in line with what people really need.

    If it weren’t for the fact this man influenced the opinion of thousands of Johnson Countians who rely on his weekly column for information and insight into what is going on with Kansas politics, we wouldn’t waste our time disecting his drivel.

    Rather, we’d take up a fund to send Mr. Rose to a political science class — because his ignorance of the facts and political realities of the present do a great disservice to his readers.

    Do Student Rights Interfere with Teaching and Learning in Public Schools?

    “We have unwittingly transformed K-12 schools from places where educators are expected to shape character, set boundaries, and foster respect to ones where they are hesitant and unsure of their authority. … The survey firm Public Agenda has reported that 47 percent of superintendents would operate differently if ‘free from the constant threat of litigation’ and that 85 percent of teachers indicate that “most students suffer because of a few persistent troublemakers. … Fully 77 percent of teachers report that ‘if it weren’t for discipline problems, I could be teaching a lot more effectively.’”

    The American Enterprise Institute articles reports more on this topic.

    Claims of ‘Greenwashing’ on the Rise

    “The so-called green movement has sprouted a fresh crop of lawsuits: greenwashing claims, in which companies are getting sued for making bogus eco-friendly statements about their products. Lawyers, environmentalists and marketing groups say that, during the past year, they’ve seen an uptick in greenwashing suits, which are questioning everything from household cleaners to automobiles for their greenworthiness. No surprise, they note, given the thousands of purported green products flooding the market.”

    Consumers and environmental groups challenge eco-friendly statements on products reports on the details of this trend.

    Historic Preservation Tax Credits Under Review in Jefferson City

    More recently, Washington, D.C.-based economist and historic preservation proponent Donovan Rypkema has estimated that during the last decade, state historic tax credits led to more than $2 billion in rehabilitation of old buildings, brought Missourians $1.3 billion in additional income, and helped create 40,000 jobs.

    But critics of tax credits, such as University of Missouri–Columbia economics professor Joseph Haslag, zero in on the total money returned to the state. He figures that the state receives just 3 to 4 cents for every dollar of goods and services produced in Missouri. So, for every dollar of a tax credit, the state would have to produce $25 to $22 of final goods and services for the state to get its money back.

    “I think the only justification for historic preservation tax credits is the existence of an externality — we like to look at old, well-maintained buildings,” said Haslag, who is also executive vice president of the Show-Me Institute. “There is no economic development justification for the preservation tax credit.”

    Read more at Policy Pulse, a publication of the Show-Me Institute.

    Sotomayor’s bias against private property

    From The Washington Times:

    If you thought Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s controversial stances on racial issues were problematic, you should get a gander at the Supreme Court nominee’s apparent hostility to property rights.

    Judge Sotomayor served as the senior judge on one 2006 case, Didden v. Village of Port Chester, which respected University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein described as “about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined.” Her judicial panel’s ruling might be the worst violation of property rights ever approved by a federal appeals court. It is part of a pattern of Judge Sotomayor’s pro-government rulings that run roughshod over the most basic of private property rights. …

    These cases are extremely worrisome. Judge Sotomayor’s apparent bias against private property does not recommend her nomination for the nation’s highest court.

    The Sotomayor Rules: Some were made to be broken.

    From Kimberly A. Strassel in the Wall Street Journal.

    Rather, it is Judge Sotomayor’s biography that uniquely qualifies her to sit on the nation’s highest bench — that gives her the “empathy” to rule wisely. Judge Sotomayor agrees: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said in 2001.

    If so, perhaps we can expect her to join in opinions with the wise and richly experienced Clarence Thomas. That would be the same Justice Thomas who lost his father, and was raised by his mother in a rural Georgia town, in a shack without running water, until he was sent to his grandfather. The same Justice Thomas who had to work every day after school, though he was not allowed to study at the Savannah Public Library because he was black. The same Justice Thomas who became the first in his family to go to college and receive a law degree from Yale.

    By the president’s measure, the nation couldn’t find a more empathetic referee than Justice Thomas. And yet here’s what Mr. Obama had to say last year when Pastor Rick Warren asked him about the Supreme Court: “I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation.”

  • Are Kansas school test scores believable?

    Kansas public school officials are proud of the achievement of Kansas schoolchildren on state tests. We need to ask, however, whether this accomplishment means that Kansas children are really learning.

    In the document Kansas Education Summary: A Snapshot of Kansas by the Numbers from January 2009, Alexa Posny, Ph.D., the Kansas Commissioner of Education, wrote this about our state school test scores: “Across all of Kansas, the percent of students reading at the proficient level or above has risen from 59% in 2000 to 84% in 2008. This is a 25% gain. Math has risen from 50% to 81%, a 31% gain.”

    But when we look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), we see a different story that’s in seeming conflict with the commissioner’s glowing assessment.

    The chart below shows the NAEP test scores for Kansas students. The message we get from this chart is that some scores have gone up, but some have gone down. Overall, we can say that the scores are on a slight — very slight — upward trend.

    These scores are a different metric than what Commissioner Posney cited. There, she referred to proficiency, not a score on a scale. Proficiency means the state has judged that a student scored well enough to be called, well, proficient.

    But here’s the question that needs an answer: How can the percent of students judged proficient be rapidly increasing at the same time that NAEP scores are barely increasing or decreasing?

    Across the country, states are reporting rising scores on their state tests, but NAEP scores don’t match that record. What’s happening? There could be a number of causes, the most likely being a large dose of window dressing by state education officials.

    My post Even The New York Times Recognizes Testing Fraud quotes that newspaper as follows:

    [A study by Policy Analysis for California Education] analyzed state-level testing practices from 1992 to 2005. It found that many states were dumbing down their tests or shifting the proficiency targets in math and reading, creating a fraudulent appearance of progress and making it impossible to tell how well students were actually performing.

    The article also referred to the NAEP tests as “currently the strongest, most well-respected test in the country.”

    It’s a question that deserves an answer: Is Kansas dumbing down the test or shifting proficiency targets?

    Posney, in her report, also wrote “I have used the word phenomenal when describing the achievement of our students across all grade levels in Kansas.”

    I hope that the performance of our state’s public school students is truly that: phenomenal. The evidence, however, is not in favor of such a glowing assessment.

    Kansas NAEP scores

  • When informed, attitudes toward public school spending change

    One of the problems with forming public policy is the lack of information possessed by the general public, and, sometimes, even by elected officials. A recent research report published by the Hoover Institution titled Educating the Public measures the problem.

    Importantly, this report shows the changes in people’s attitudes after they receive correct information.

    I’ve experienced the lack of information about basic facts myself. Last year a colleague and I conducted some “man-on-the-street” interviews during the bond issue campaign. Very few people knew how much the Wichita school district spent. Most estimated levels of spending less than half of actual spending.

    It’s not just the public. Elected officials like Rep. Melody McCray-Miller and Wichita school board member Lanora Nolan have disputed the total amount of spending by the Wichita school district when presented with the actual figures.

    The following excerpt from the press release gives more information.

    When Provided with Accurate Information, Public Support for Increased Spending on Schools and Teacher Salaries Declines, Researchers Find

    Cambridge — The better informed people are, the more likely they are to oppose increased school spending. That is a key finding in a newly released survey, “Educating the Public,” conducted by Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University. The survey is posted on the Education Next website: www.educationnext.org. (The direct link to the study is Educating the Public.)

    Survey results indicate that if the public is given accurate information about what is currently being spent on public schools, their support for increased spending and their confidence that more spending will improve student learning both decline. Education researchers William G. Howell of the University of Chicago and Martin R. West of Brown University also found that knowing how much the average teacher earns lowers support among the general public for salary increases.

    To understand how public opinions shift, Howell and West embedded a series of experiments within the Education Next/PEPG survey by dividing respondents into randomly chosen groups: some were simply asked their opinion about school spending and teacher salaries, while others were first provided with accurate information about each of these issues.

    The average per-pupil spending estimate from respondents to the 2008 Education Next/PEPG survey was $4,231, and the median response was just $2,000; but for these respondents, local average spending per pupil at the time exceeded $10,000. When told how much the local schools were spending, support for increased spending dropped by 10 percentage points, from 61 percent to a bare majority of 51 percent.

    Howell and West find that these differences in opinion based on exposure to key information are consistent across a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, views about the local public schools, and political ideologies.

    “It’s clear that the American public is quite willing to update its views in light of new information about public schools,” Howell and West said.

    Interestingly, note Howell and West, differences also appear among teachers, whom one might believe already have deeply entrenched and well-informed views about public education. Whereas 35 percent of teachers not specifically informed of spending levels claimed that spending should “greatly increase,” only 22 percent of those who were told the amount of money spent to educate a child in their district thought so. Additionally, 29 percent of uninformed teachers expressed strong confidence that increased spending would boost student learning. When exposed to the current spending in their district, however, that confidence dropped by 9 percent.

    As with per-pupil expenditures, the public significantly underestimates how much their states pay public school teachers. On average, Education Next/PEPG survey respondents underestimated average teacher salaries in their state by more than $14,000, nearly one-third of the actual average salaries of $47,000.

  • ‘Story of Stuff’ video attempts to shame us into depression

    A video claiming that American-style capitalism is ruining the earth is making its way into our nation’s schools as “a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation,” according to a story on the front page of the New York Times in May.

    It’s produced by one Annie Leonard, described in the Times as “a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer.”

    It’s a depressing video to watch. For example, extraction is equal to “natural resource exploitation” which is the same as “trashing the planet.” Leonard says “We are running out of resources. We are using too much stuff. … We are trashing the place so fast, we are undermining the ability of people to live here. … We’re using more than our share.”

    But then I realized that many of the claims are exaggerated or false. Here’s an example of one of the many dubious claims Leonard makes: “Where I live, in the United States, we have less than 4% of our original forests left.” While this may be true, it’s misleading. She wants you to believe that after logging companies cut trees, they leave the land bare. The reality is the companies replant and manage the forests. So yes, they’re not the original forests. They might even be better.

    She leaves out the fact that these forests provided raw materials for heating our homes, for building those houses, and for printing books and newspapers.

    During production, “we use energy to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products.” Somehow this leads to whole wasting of communities. Also, the amount of pollution admitted to by industry is probably less than actual emissions, because well, you know how industry is.

    Then there’s distribution. It’s a problem because big box stores don’t pay their employees well and they skimp on health insurance as much as they can.

    She wonders how a radio can be sold for just $4.99. The answer, of course, is exploitation. She didn’t pay for the radio. Others did, by being exploited. (An example is workers paying for their own health insurance.)

    She makes more dubious claims, such as 99% of the “stuff” that is “run through the system” is “trashed” within six months.

    It’s all a plan, Leonard says, to make consumption of consumer goods the cornerstone of our lives. It’s accomplished through planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. That’s where we’re persuaded to throw out stuff that is still useful, but not fashionable.

    The progress in computers is criticized because what changes in a new computer is just a small chip in the corner. I think she’s referring to the processor, which leaves out all the advances in other parts of a computer, such as memory, storage, and communications. She learned this at “a workshop called ‘The Literal and Figurative Story of the Computer’ at the Environmental Grantmakers Association’s annual retreat in Mohonk New York in September 2005.”

    Advertising, she says, is designed to make us unhappy with what we have, so that we go shopping. That leads to a spending treadmill.

    “Yes, yes, yes, we should all recycle,” but it’s not enough, according to Leonard. Even if we could recycle 100% of our household waste, it wouldn’t be enough because of all the waste generated upstream in the production process. “70 garbage cans of waste were made upstream just to make the junk in that one garbage can you put out on the curb.” Really?

    Here’s what the Heritage Foundation’s blog had to say about this video: “The Story of Stuff highlights the very extreme left’s Greenpeace view of America. Essentially it tells the story of how America is not a nation to be proud of, and in fact, your child should be ashamed for living in it.”

    This video is really a masterful piece of propaganda, and I mean that in the worse sense of the word — an impartial presentation of information meant to influence. The stereotyped images used in the drawings that make up the film are sure to impress young children.

    The video’s anticapitalist message fails to recognize all the good that capitalism has done to raise the standard of living in the countries where it has been allowed to flourish. The grim picture that Leonard paints is largely a result of exaggeration and falsehoods. To the extent that harm has come to the environment in America, things are getting better. We in America, because of the tremendous wealth that capitalism has provided, have the luxury of considering the impact of our lives on the environment. In countries that don’t have freedom and capitalism, concern for mundane things like daily bread and heat take precedence over the environment.

    If you decide to watch this video, I recommend as an antidote reading Some Fundamental Insights Into the Benevolent Nature of Capitalism by George Reisman, in which he states: “Capitalism is a system of progressively rising real wages, the shortening of hours, and the improvement of working conditions.”

    Another good essay to read is Everything You Love You Owe to Capitalism by Lew Rockwell.

  • Kansas school spending lobby pot calls kettle black

    After the 2009 Kansas Legislature ended its session in May (notwithstanding the formal closing in June), the Kansas National Education Association (KNEA, the teachers union) produced a document wrapping up the session and setting the stage for the future. It’s titled What’s next? (Legislatively speaking).

    Kansans need to be aware of the agenda of this organization and its allied school spending lobby partners. Using an unimpeachable issue — “it’s all about the kids” — this organization seeks to increase spending on public schools at great cost to Kansas taxpayers. This is at the same time it works hard to keep the government school monopoly on public dollars for education in place, stomping out any form of school choice programs that are found to be cost-saving and effective in many states.

    What’s really telling about this document is its complaining of the political power of groups like Americans For Prosperity and Club For Growth. That’s because without a doubt, the richest and most powerful lobby in Kansas is the school spending lobby. Browse through the finance reports filed with the Kansas Secretary of State, and you’ll see that the KNEA spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in support of candidates for the Kansas House and Senate, and other offices too.

    The document criticizes Kansas economic development spending for not producing “economic expansion or significant job growth.” But the school spending lobby is quick to highlight the purported economic benefit of government spending on schools. They don’t tell us that a dollar spent on public schools is a dollar taken through taxation. If left in the hands of its original owner, economic activity would have taken place, too.

    What is the problem in Kansas?

    The KNEA and the school spending lobby believes that Kansas has a revenue problem. They call it a “structural deficit.” What it means is that Kansas taxes are not high enough: “The plain fact is that the tax policy of the legislature is designed to keep Kansas in a fiscal hole. … You see, the Kansas revenue system has something that tax folks call a ‘structural deficit.’ Structural deficits result when spending increases outpace revenue collections.”

    Many Kansans, including Americans For Prosperity, believe that Kansas has a spending problem. According to Kansas state director Derrick Sontag, if Kansas spending had increased by even as much as 5% each year for the last five years, our state would have a $2 billion surplus.

    Instead, spending has increased so rapidly that Kansas, at the start of this year, faced a $1 billion deficit.

    The school spending lobby also believes that tax cuts are a “cost” to Kansas government that we can’t afford: “In a memo prepared by legislative research in response to a legislative inquiry, a list of 70 new tax cuts have been enacted between 2000 and 2008. Eighteen have come in the last four years with a total cost to the state through 2013 of $1.135 billion. This does not include $87 million in foregone revenue due to a decision to not decouple from the federal tax code last year.”

    Instead of believing that money first belongs to those who earned it, the school spending lobby believes that letting people retain more of their earnings is an expense we can’t afford.

    Where is the political power in Kansas?

    The KNEA complains: “But it [increasing taxes] won’t happen until legislators put the good of Kansas ahead of an endorsement — and the political money that comes with it — by Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth.”

    It’s ironic to hear the school spending lobby complain that their opponents are using “political money.” KNEA is one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Topeka. Large school districts like USD 259, the Wichita public school district have their own full-time lobbyists — paid for by taxpayers. There’s all the campaign contributions, as mentioned above.

    Plus, an endorsement by the KNEA is highly sought after. Candidates complete a lengthy questionnaire to earn its endorsement. That document is really more a manifesto telling candidates what they must believe and do to get the union’s endorsement and a contribution. You can read last year’s version by clicking on KNEA legislative questionnaire.

    The single-minded goal of the school spending lobby is to spend so much that Kansas is put out of business. They aren’t shy about using political money — and taxpayer-funded lobbying and lawsuits — to achieve that goal.

  • The effectiveness of court-ordered funding of schools

    As the school spending lobby in Kansas beats the drums of a new school funding lawsuit — see Kansas school spending lawsuit possible and Kansas school funding lawsuit proposed for details — we ought to consider whether these lawsuits have any merit. That is, have they produced positive results in the classroom? Or do these suits serve only to increase spending?

    In research just published by the American Enterprise Institute, researchers looked at four states (Kansas was not among them) and found disappointing results in terms of educational outcomes.

    What’s needed is more fundamental reform. Things like differential teacher pay and charter schools, for example. These are being promoted by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, but the existing public education bureaucracy and spending lobby are firmly opposed to these reforms.

    Here’s the introduction to the study:

    Since the late 1980s, state court judges in over twenty states, deriving their authority from the education clauses of their respective state constitutions, have struck down school finance systems as not “adequate.” Pointing to evidence of unacceptable student achievement outcomes, especially among poor and disadvantaged students, advocates of court intervention argue that student outcomes can be improved with additional funding; that is, all children can learn, given sufficient resources. Many courts have accepted this premise and have ordered legislatures to provide unprecedented increases in state appropriations for K-12 schools. Unfortunately, the track record of these judicial interventions suggests that increased funding without other more fundamental changes typically does not lead to improved student performance.

    Key points in this Outlook:

    • Advocates of court intervention in school finance argue that student achievement can be improved with additional funding.
    • Achievement data from four states show that court-ordered funding does not necessarily raise student test scores.
    • When coupled with more fundamental reforms, funding increases show some promise.

    The entire report, which is not long, is available by clicking on The Effectiveness of Court-Ordered Funding of Schools.