Voice For Liberty

Tag: Education

  • Markets could guide Wichita school district

    Yesterday I had a discussion with a person who had an idea how to save money in USD 259, the Wichita public school district.

    He believes that there are too many highly-paid administrators. It’s also a common complaint leveled by many people. Reduce either the number of administrators or their salaries, and that would make more money available for other things, such as teachers. Currently the district needs to cut its budget, however, so the savings would more likely be used to meet that demand.

    This brings up the broader question of staffing in the Wichita public schools. How does the district know how much management it needs? For that matter, how many teachers, custodians, etc. does it need?

    There is a simple solution that provides an answer to these questions. The public school lobby, however, resists this solution at every step. They spend huge sums in the political arena to make sure they aren’t subject to the discipline that this solution would impose.

    Market competition is the solution. It provides the incentive and imperative for firms to organize themselves in the way that will best meet the needs of their customers.

    Under the dynamic discovery process that market competition provides, we might learn that in some cases, under some circumstances, it might be best for students if more was spent on administration and management. Laws like the “65% laws” that dictate how school funds should be spent would prevent this discovery from being made.

    Market competition, if the public schools faced it, would give them a huge incentive to structure themselves to meet the needs of the customers, which are their students, parents, and the public at large.

    Public schools don’t face these market incentives. They organize themselves based on their own needs rather than the needs of their customers. I don’t think there’s much way to change that except for schools to face market competition, and they resist that in every way they can.

  • The inevitability of parental choice

    By Howie Rich

    A year ago, the nation’s largest newspaper wrote in an editorial that it was time to “move beyond vouchers” in the debate over America’s educational future.

    Although it did not reject any particular solution outright, the paper’s recommendation at the time was that America focus its energy and attention on less controversial education reforms. In other words, it was a victory for those who have spent years — and expended untold taxpayer resources — in an effort to demonize parental choice and its supporters.

    Then, two weeks ago, USA Today suddenly changed its tune.

    Not only did the paper enthusiastically embrace parental choice — it also roundly criticized our nation’s teachers’ unions for “protecting failing schools.”

    “Twenty million low-income school kids need a chance to succeed,” the USA Today editorial board wrote. “School choice is the most effective way to give it to them.”

    What caused the turnaround?

    While there’s certainly no shortage of reasons, the initial impetus for the shift appears to stem from President Barack Obama’s rank hypocrisy in closing an effective parental choice program in Washington D.C. to new applicants.

    “Teacher unions, fearing loss of jobs, have pushed most Democrats to oppose vouchers and other options that invite competition for public schools,” the USA Today editorial board wrote. “Put another way, they oppose giving poor parents the same choice that the president himself — along with his chief of staff and some 35% of Democrats in Congress — have made in sending their children to private schools.”

    Of course, it’s not just about failing schools and low-income students. It’s about giving all parents a choice in their child’s academic future, no matter where they live.

    With each passing day, the mountain of evidence attesting to the futility of our nation’s failed status quo grows higher. Correspondingly, in those rare instances where choice has been permitted to take root and flourish, its success is undeniable.

    According to the most recent data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), America’s per pupil expenditure on public education is the highest of any industrialized nation in the world.

    Unfortunately, we are not receiving anywhere near a commensurate return on our investment.

    On the most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, American students scored well below the average of other industrialized nations on both the math and science portions of the exam – just as they did the last time the tests were administered. And the time before that.

    And in a telling nod to the sort of institutional incompetence that has long plagued our public system, America’s reading scores on the most recent PISA exam had to be thrown out due to a printing error by the company that the U.S. Department of Education hired to administer the tests.

    But our crisis is much bigger than poor standardized test results and bureaucratic errors. Over 12,000 schools across America currently rate as failing or below average — with hundreds of thousands of children trapped inside of them. Of course, each year when organizations like “Teach for America” try to place talented, highly-motivated college graduates in teaching positions within higher-risk school districts, their efforts are always rebuffed by the unions.

    Each year, the purveyors of this country’s education monopoly continue failing children at a record clip – and yet in a perfect example of precisely what’s wrong with our system, they are rewarded for their poor performance with additional taxpayer resources.

    In fact, according to President Obama’s plan — the more children you fail, the more money you get.

    This self-perpetuating cycle serves no one. It doesn’t serve our children, it doesn’t serve their parents, and it doesn’t serve the best interests of our country.

    Nor are we well-served by pretending that our “average” public schools are meeting the needs of most middle income children.

    In an increasingly competitive global economy, we cannot afford to maintain a failed status quo on one hand and mediocrity on the other.

    USA Today’s acknowledgment of this fact – and its support for parental choice – is yet another example of the inevitable march toward a system of education that promotes true academic achievement, a system built around a competitive, parent-driven marketplace where schools are held accountable for their performance.

    The author is Chairman of the Parents in Charge Foundation.

  • School choice is a civil rights issue

    Why does America tolerate this?

    In his commentary Dumbest Generation Getting Dumber, Walter E. Williams reports on some new research about our public schools:

    McKinsey & Company, in releasing its report “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools” (April 2009) said, “Several other facts paint a worrisome picture. First, the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent cross-country comparisons of fourth grade reading, math, and science, US students scored in the top quarter or top half of advanced nations. By age 15 these rankings drop to the bottom half. In other words, American students are farthest behind just as they are about to enter higher education or the workforce.” That’s a sobering thought. The longer kids are in school and the more money we spend on them, the further behind they get.

    Williams reports that for black and Latino students, the situation is far worse, with these students being two or three years behind in learning. It’s such a problem that even traditional black leadership is noticing:

    Al Sharpton called school reform the civil rights challenge of our time. He said that the enemy of opportunity for blacks in the U.S. was once Jim Crow; today, in a slap at the educational establishment, he said it was “Professor James Crow.” Sharpton is only partly correct. School reform is not solely a racial issue; it’s a vital issue for the entire nation.

    We need the type of competition in education that school choice provides. In Kansas, the public school lobby — firmly opposed to even the gentlest of reforms such as charter schools — retains its firm grip.

    Wichita and Kansas schools claim years of rising test scores. But when we get test results that the Kansas school bureaucracy doesn’t control, we find that test scores are flat. There’s a discrepancy there that needs investigation.

    In the meantime, schoolchildren, especially minority children, remain stuck in a failing system.

  • Study of public and private school teachers reveals sharp differences

    Last week the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice published research that examines how teachers feel about their jobs. In particular, the study compared how public school teachers and private school teachers viewed their jobs and working conditions.

    The study, which you can read by clicking on Free To Teach: What teachers say about teaching in public and private schools, uncovers a huge problem in our nation’s public schools. Here’s a passage from the executive summary:

    These are eye-opening data for the teaching profession. They show that public school teachers are currently working in a school system that doesn’t provide the best environment for teaching. Teachers are victims of the dysfunctional government school system right alongside their students. Much of the reason government schools produce mediocre results for their students is because the teachers in those schools are hindered from doing their jobs as well as they could and as well as they want to. By listening to teachers in public and private schools, we discover numerous ways in which their working conditions differ — differences that certainly help explain the gap in educational outcomes between public and private schools. Exposing schools to competition, as is the case in the private school sector, is good for learning partly because it’s good for teaching.

    Here are some revealing results from the research (response levels are given in the study document):

    Private school teachers are more likely to say:

    • “I plan to remain in teaching as long as I am able.”
    • “I have a great deal of control over selecting textbooks and other instructional materials in my classroom.”
    • “I have a great deal of control over selecting content, topics, and skills to be taught in my classroom.”
    • “I have a great deal of control over disciplining students in my classroom.”
    • “Necessary materials such as textbooks, supplies, and copy machines are available as needed.”
    • “I am given the support I need to teach students with special needs.”

    Public school teachers are more likely to say:

    • “I plan to remain in teaching until I am eligible for retirement”
    • “Routine duties and paperwork interfere with my job of teaching.”
    • “The level of student misbehavior in this school interferes with my teaching.”
    • “The stress and disappointments involved in teaching at this school aren’t really worth it.”
    • “A student has threatened to physically injure me.”
    • “A student has physically attacked me.”

    The study concludes “Private school teachers consistently report having better working conditions than public school teachers across a wide variety of measurements. Most prominently, private schools provide teachers with more classroom autonomy, a more supportive school climate, and better student discipline. It appears that the dysfunctions of the government school system — long evident in mediocre educational outcomes — are a problem for teachers as well as for students.

    A question I have is this: Since nearly all public school teachers belong to a union and practically no private school teachers belong, what are the teachers unions doing? Don’t the unions care about the working conditions of their members?

    A bigger question is why we continue to pour increasing resources into a system where the workers feel so negatively about their jobs when an alternative is available. Government monopolies like the public school system rarely do a good job. We need to give Kansas parents a choice as to where to send their children, and we need to give Kansas teachers better places to work. The government school system has had plenty of time and huge amounts of money at their disposal. Widespread school choice in Kansas deserves a chance to correct this dismal situation.

  • Schools need to be more productive

    John LaPlante
    Flint Hills Center for Public Policy

    If your blood test comes back with bad results, do you address the problems it reveals — or do you blame the doctor who interprets the test?

    The U.S. Department of Education just released the latest long-term results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The NAEP, an important diagnostic tool for measuring the performance of America’s schools, did have some good news. For example, the reading and mathematics scores for 9 and 13-year olds were higher in 2008 than they were in the early 1970s.

    But there was also bad news. The average scores for 17-year olds, students near graduation, were no better. And even with the improvements, many students aren’t doing well: fewer than one in three students reads at grade level in fourth and eighth grades, and the record isn’t that much different in mathematics. (Kansas scores are somewhat better but still unacceptably low, with roughly half of all students at grade level in mathematics but only one in three reading at grade level.)

    When Education Week, the newspaper of record for people working in public schools, printed a story on the results, it quoted several analysts and experts, including Andrew J. Coulson, an education analyst with the Washington, DC-based Cato Institute. Coulson said that the results “reveal a productivity collapse unparalleled in any other sector of the economy.”

    That article provoked a sharp rebuke from one subscriber, who described herself as “extremely irritated.” Oddly enough, she was irritated not by the opportunities lost by high school students who graduate with an incomplete education, but by Coulson’s reaction.

    “That word ‘productivity,’ she wrote, “is a perfect indication of the fact that many conservatives look at education as if it were a manufacturing plant producing a ‘product,’ i.e. students.” The reader, who is a professor of education, called the comparison “terribly dehumanizing” to students.

    Dehumanizing? “If you don’t like the word “productive,” substitute the word “effective,” as in “Are schools effective in doing what we ask them to do, which is to educate students?”

    The answer, unfortunately, is “not especially.” Coulson, in a remark not included in the Education Week article, said that “at the end of high school, students perform no better today than they did nearly 40 years ago, and yet we spend more than twice as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted terms.”

    Can schools rise above mediocrity? Some do. The American Indian Public Charter School, in Oakland, California, is the fifth-highest scoring school in California. It’s also among the top 200 public schools in the country, despite the fact that nearly all of its students are both poor and minority, two groups that usually do poorly in school. And when John Deasy became the superintendent of schools in Prince Georges County, outside Washington, DC, he brought in changes that sent test scores up, even though half of the students are poor and many are immigrants.

    So making school budgets bigger isn’t the answer, but how leaders use the money available to them is very important. Do they reward teachers for good performance and back them up when disciplinary problems arise? Do they set high expectations and cultivate a culture of “no excuses?”

    Some public school leaders do these things, but many are unable or unwilling to cut through the red tape, and public bureaucracies are prone to protect their employees rather than serve the public. Leaders in public charter schools and private schools often have more room to maneuver, to the benefit of students.

    No change in education will quickly, easily or painlessly lead to graduating classes of students who are equipped to face the challenges that universities and the work force present. Clearly, money alone isn’t sufficient. Getting rid of ineffective teachers and rewarding excellent ones is a good place to start.

    John R. LaPlante is an Education Policy fellow with the Kansas-based Flint Hills Center for Public Policy. A complete bio on Mr. LaPlante can be found at www.flinthills.org/content/view/24/39/, and he can be reached at john.laplante@flinthills.org. To learn more about the Flint Hills Center, please visit www.flinthills.org.

  • Education reformer to speak in Wichita

    Noted education activist and reformer John Taylor Gatto will be appearing in Wichita on May 22.

    Gatto will present an insider’s perspective on problems within public schools.

    He is the author of The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling, which may be read online at the preceding link.

    The event will be held at Northfield School of the Liberal Arts, 701 E. 37th St. North in Wichita. The time is Friday May 22, at 10 a.m.. (Click on a Google map to the location.)

  • Articles of Interest

    Wichita school funding, Wichita city property, Kansas campaigns, Great Depression, No Child Left Behind.

    Grant funds middle-school rocket lessons (Lori Yount, Wichita Eagle) Grants of privately-raised money fund science classes in a Wichita school. With some $13,000 per student to spend each year, it’s still not enough to adequately fund our schools, I guess.

    Wichita has no map, poor system of tracking city property (Brent D. Wistrom, Wichita Eagle) “… a disjointed records system leaves city officials and the public unable to quickly spot sellable land, say which department is responsible for upkeep or distinguish between parks, rights of way and corporate grounds the city holds title to as collateral for tax incentives, a weeks-long examination shows.”

    One Way or Another, Kansas Will Have a Lot of New Faces in 18 Months A little coverage of Kansas campaigns from National Review.

    Did FDR Make the Depression Great? (David Gordon at Mises Daily) A review of the new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal by Robert P. Murphy. “Robert Murphy demonstrates in this excellent book a penetrating ability to explain the essence of fallacious economic doctrines. As he notes, three theories offer competing explanations of the Great Depression: the Keynesian account, which stresses a lack of aggregate demand; Milton Friedman’s monetarism, which ascribes the severity of the early years of the Depression to a drastic cut in the money supply by the Fed; and, of course, the Austrian theory that Murphy himself favors.”

    The Future of No Child Left Behind (Diane Ravitch and John E. Chubb in Education Next) “Diane Ravitch: It is time to pull the plug on No Child Left Behind. … NCLB has produced meager gains in achievement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assesses student achievement in reading and mathematics every other year. Despite the intense concentration on reading and mathematics required by the law, the gains registered on NAEP since the enactment of NCLB have been unimpressive. … Educators and the public are getting wise to the uselessness of the testing regime that has been foisted upon them. … NCLB may in reality be dumbing down our children by focusing the attention of teachers and administrators solely on basic skills. Our students are not being prepared to compete with students from high-performing nations in the world.” John Chubb disagrees. In Kansas, the NAEP scores are flat or register small gains, yet the state-managed assessments show big gains. Something isn’t right with this picture.

  • Kansas City charter school succeeds in urban environment

    USD 259, the Wichita public school district, doesn’t want them.

    The Kansas National Education Association (KNEA) — the teachers union — doesn’t want them either.

    But where they’re able to exist, charter schools usually do a good job. They often excel. And where they don’t do a good job, they usually go out of business.

    200 miles from Wichita, in Kansas City, Missouri, a charter school is doing a great job with urban children. Watch the following video about KIPP Endeavor Academy.

  • Wichita-area school superintendents make flawed case

    Sunday’s Wichita Eagle contains an op-ed piece by several Wichita-area public school superintendents that calls for the Kansas Legislature to spare K-12 education from budget cuts. (Superintendents: Avoid further cuts to public education, April 26, 2009 Wichita Eagle)

    The piece starts with a recognition of the importance of education. I don’t think that anyone will disagree with this assertion. From then on, however, there’s little that I can agree with.

    The op-ed states “In the past eight years, student proficiency in math has increased by 30 percent, and reading proficiency has increased by 25 percent.” Numbers similar to these appear in the “Executive Summary” portion of the Kansas Education Summary dated January 2009. (You may read this report by clicking on Kansas Education Summary.)

    The problem is that these numbers may not be believable. At the same time Kansas school test scores are steadily rising — the Wichita school district’s scores follow the same trend (see Wichita Test Scores Largely Mirror Kansas) — our state’s performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress is pretty much flat over a similar time period. A few measures have improved, but not by nearly the magnitude measured on the Kansas tests. Other measures have improved only slightly, or not at all.

    (To view NAEP results, click on NAEP state profiles and select “Kansas.”)

    I’ve recently asked the Kansas State Department of Education how these results can be reconciled.

    This op-ed also tells us how public schools are “our area’s largest employer next to our aviation manufacturers.” This is a problem, not a reason or justification for plowing more money into schools. The more that is spent on public schools, the fewer dollars families have to spend on other types of education.

    Then, there’s this: “Additional cuts will leave school districts with few options but to increase class sizes and eliminate or reduce crucial services that allow all students to receive a world-class education and be the future economic drivers in our communities.”

    Are our students receiving a “world-class” education? Are we measuring based on Kansas test scores or the NAEP test scores reported above?

    Then, President Obama certainly doesn’t think our schools are “world-class.” In a March 10, 2009 speech he said: “We have everything we need to be that nation … and yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us.”

    There’s also the focus on class size, which was a large reason for the bond issue in the Wichita school district last year. Small class sizes — important to teachers unions and education bureaucrats — turn out to have little or no effect on student achievement. An excerpt from the Report Card on American Education published by the American Legislative Exchange Council and given to me by a newly-elected member of the Kansas State Board of Education states this:

    Surprisingly, the data show that academic achievement cannot be accounted for by any of the measures of public investment used in this study (pupil-teacher ratio, per pupil expenditures, teacher salaries, and funds received from the federal government), either singly or as a blend. This conclusion is borne out when variations in average SAT scores per state are tracked over the past two decades alongside changes in these measures of public investment. If anything, this statistical analysis demonstrates a positive, but weak, relationship between student success and percentage of federal funding, and pupil-teacher ratio — yet not in the manner one would anticipate. … The information shows that higher student scores on standardized tests correlate mildly with more pupils per teacher and less federal involvement with public school budgets.”

    The course that the Wichita public school district, in particular, is taking doesn’t show much promise for increasing educational outcomes, at least according to current research. When the public schools make their case to be exempted from the sacrifices that other Kansans are being asked to make, these are the things we need to remember.