Tag: Wichita and Kansas schools

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Supporters of the proposed bond issue for USD 259, the Wichita, Kansas public school district, portray Wichita’s public schools as a “public good.” Therefore, the entire community should pay for — and be happy to pay for — the ongoing operations of the schools, and should be willing to invest in a large bond issue to pay for capital improvements and new facilities.

But is public education a public good?

Economists tell us that one characteristic of a public good is that people can’t be excluded from consuming it. This is the case with national defense. No one can choose not to benefit from it. Schools are different, though. It is possible to exclude people from schools simply by locking the doors. Businesses of all types do this. In fact, USD 259 chooses to deny service to about 0.5% of its students each year (average expulsion rate for the last 11 years).

Another characteristic of a public good is non-rivalrous consumption, meaning that consumption by one person doesn’t diminish another’s ability to consume. Broadcast radio and television are such goods. But public education is not this type of good. Overcrowding is given as one of the reasons for this bond issue, and education bureaucrats continuously clamor for smaller class sizes. So overcrowding must — at least according to public school administrators — reduce the quality of the education experience. Consumption, therefore, is rivalrous, and public education fails this test as a public good.

These two characteristics are the traditional definitions of a public good, and public education fails both tests. But today a different, murkier, definition is often applied. I quote at length from Is High School Football a Public Good? by Jim Fedako, published at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. While this article speaks of football, we may remember that athletics are a large portion of the proposed bond issue for the Wichita public schools. His argument also applies to most aspects of the public schools.

But no one really applies the technical definition to derive public goods. … Instead, the collectivist definition — the vacuous, yet now standard, definition — applies the general welfare argument to elevate football from a private activity to that of a public good. The argument goes something along these lines: football is beneficial because it prepares boys for adulthood, keeps them off the streets after school, and provides them with a place where they can excel.

The public goods argument as currently stated says that the benefits that accrue to the child also accrue to society in general. In this collectivist view, raising children is the role of society since society benefits when it’s done right — a better work force — and suffers when it’s done wrong — more crime and criminals.

But this argument can be applied to almost any expenditure that parents make while raising their children. Better to be jumping on ice or practicing a roundhouse kick than to be out loitering on street corners. Why limit the concept of public goods to football, basketball, baseball, softball, etc? Based on recent history, it is only a matter of time before public goods subsume more activities, with the costs spread over the community in the form of increased taxes: the complete socialism of parenting.

The problem with the concept of public goods is that it misdirects the debate. In modern society, every action I take has a perceived positive or a perceived negative external effect on other members of society, and most of the time there are perceived positive and negative external effects occurring simultaneously. When I mow my lawn, one neighbor perceives the noise as a negative — reducing calm and tranquility — while another neighbor perceives my well-kept lawn as a benefit — invoking calm and tranquility.

I use the qualifier “perceive” because the whole public goods argument for coerced funding of football teams is based on the perception of the observer. The parents of the football player, the player himself, as well as local high school football fans, perceive the team and games as a positive for the community. Some say that it benefits the kids, while others say it strengthens the community. Both views see tax-funded sports, football in particular, as a winner for the community.

Yet the parent struggling to make ends meet each month, the retiree living on an inflation-robbed pension, the lover of freedom, etc., see their ever-increasing tax bill as a negative. For the parent, a child’s dental appointment goes wanting for the sake of the football team; for the retiree, the higher tax bill comes at the cost of a colder house in the winter; for lovers of freedom, additional money lifted from their wallets is another slap in the face by collectivists.

A popular measure proposed to produce better educational outcomes in public schools today is to reduce class size. The Wichita, Kansas public school district is currently proposing a bond issue with a partial goal of reducing class size. At least some of the recently-mandated increase in school spending in Kansas was used to reduce class size.

It seems that smaller class sizes should be great for students. Research, however, doesn’t always verify this assumption. The Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby, now at Stanford, has stated this about her research into class size:

I have a study in which I examined every change in class size at every elementary school in Connecticut over a 20-year period. In schools, class size varies from year to year because enrollment varies. Therefore, with 20 years and 800-some schools, there is a tremendous amount of variation in class size to examine.

I found there was no effect of class size on achievement at all, even when children were in small classes for all six years of elementary school.

There is, however, one study that shows increased student performance with smaller class sizes: the Tennessee STAR experiment. It is probably the study cited most often by education bureaucrats, so learning a little about it is useful. In this experiment, students were assigned to either a regular class with about 24 students, a class of the same size but with a teacher’s aide to assist the teacher, or a smaller class of about 15 students.

Jay Greene has written about the problems with the STAR experiment. The first problem he finds is that “students were not tested when they entered the program. Such point-of-entry tests would establish a baseline for each student’s performance as it stood before the experiment began. Without this baseline measurement, we cannot confirm that the STAR project’s random assignment method was successfully carried out.”

Second: “[there is] an anomaly in the research findings: the improvement in test scores was a one-time benefit. … This is an unusual and unexpected finding, because if smaller classes really do improve student performance we would generally expect to see these benefits accrue over time.”

The STAR program produced a one-time improvement in tests scores that are the equivalent of a student in the 50th percentile moving to about the 58th percentile. Greene says this increase “may not amount to an educational revolution, but it is not trivial.”

One interesting aspect of the STAR program is that participants, particularly the teachers, knew they were part of an experiment. Caroline Hoxby describes the implications of this:

More importantly, in the Tennessee STAR experiment, everyone involved knew that if the class-size reduction didn’t affect achievement, the experimental classes would return to their normal size and a general class-size reduction would not be funded by the legislature. In other words, principals and teachers had strong incentives to make the reduction work. Unfortunately, class-size reductions are never accompanied by such incentives when they are enacted as a policy.

Education bureaucrats and teachers often claim that schools are not like a business or other areas of human endeavor, so incentives don’t work. Education, they say, is somehow different. But it appears in the STAR program that teachers had a powerful incentive to make the small class sizes work, and they responded to that.

Reducing class size is a very expensive measure to implement. The STAR program reduced class sizes by a large amount: from 24 to 15 students, a reduction of 38%. Many more teachers and classrooms are needed to implement reductions of this scope, and that’s why it is so expensive.

That leads to an aspect of the problem that’s not often mentioned. Right now Wichita has a teacher shortage. The district can’t hire and retain enough teachers. Implementing class size reduction programs requires more teachers and makes the shortage even more acute.

Compounding this problem is that research shows that teacher quality is a very important factor in the success of students. If we can assume that the most highly-qualified teachers are hired first, then increasing the number of classrooms means hiring more less-qualified teachers. So some students will be taught by poor teachers, and since class sizes are smaller, fewer students will be in the classrooms led by good teachers.

There is no doubt that teachers and the education establishment like smaller class sizes. Smaller classes mean an easier workload for teachers, larger budgets for school district administrators and politicians, and more teachers union members paying dues. The local board of education can tell parents that they have “saved the children” and the parents will believe them. The research, however, is not settled on the benefits of smaller class sizes, and the unintended consequence of more students being taught by less-qualified teachers is a large negative effect.