The Education Gadfly Weekly

National Center for Education Statistics
July 2004

Everyone knows that home schooling has grown in recent years, but real data are famously hard to come by. So this latest issue brief from NCES is welcome. It concludes that about 1.1 million U.S students were home schooled in 2003, or 2.2 percent of the school age population - a 29 percent increase since 1999. The survey also takes a crack at discerning the reasons parents choose home schooling, and here the data are instructive: Just 30 percent of home schoolers cite religious or moral instruction as their primary reason, while close to half say they are concerned about either school environment or the academic quality of the schools their children would attend. Clearly, home schooling has become a choice option that springs from some of the same motivations as charters and vouchers. So can we please drop the religious nut jokes? (Jay Mathews of the Washington Post reached the same conclusion from his recent anecdotal survey.) To view this short research brief, click here.

Karen Hawley Mills, Education Resource Strategies and Marguerite Roza, University of Washington, Center for Reinventing Public Education
July 15, 2004

Karen Hawley Miles and Marguerite Roza co-authored this 33-page "working paper" that is well-summarized in its own abstract: "This paper uses a newly developed analysis tool called the student-weighted index to assess how the shift to student-based budgeting has affected the pattern of resource distribution within two districts: Houston Independent Schools and Cincinnati Public Schools. In the two districts studied, the use of staff-based budgeting resulted in varying degrees of inequitable resource allocation, while the introduction of student-based budgeting yielded significant equity gains in both districts." Though the study points to equity gains via student-based budgeting, it also explains other factors that hamper this effect and that would also need to be addressed in a thoroughly revamped district-wide budgeting system. You can find it online here. 

Christopher W. Hammons, Alabama Policy Institute
April 2004

Every time our K-12 education system fails to educate a child, it costs us. Perhaps the most direct cost is the money spent on remedial education. According to this report, in Alabama, 42 percent of community college students and 18 percent of regular college students require such courses (the national figures are similar). But society also pays in other ways to cope with folks like the "employee who 'invented' her own filing system because she lacked the skills to alphabetize folders by name." After tallying the cost of training and technology provided by employers, of reduced productivity, etc., the true cost to society balloons: in Alabama between $304 million and $1.17 billion per year (depending on the methodology), with a best estimate of $541 million. (Alabama contains about 1.5 percent of the U.S. population, which would mean the national cost is in the tens of billions each year). What's the solution? This report offers commentaries by Jay Greene and Matthew Ladner, arguing that graduation standards and school choice would help. (Alabama lacks public school choice, vouchers, tax-credits, even charter schools.) Greene contends that K-12 systems should bear some costs of remedial education, via "some sort of 'money-back guarantee' for high school diplomas." Unfortunately, those hoping for an intriguing analysis of the economic benefits of education will be disappointed by this report, which does not examine education's impact on prison populations, welfare programs, future earnings, and the like. But its methodology is simple: it assumes that the benefit of education must be at least as much as its cost to the state (because, to an economist, the state wouldn't otherwise make such an investment). Of course, this ignores the reality that school funding decisions are political, not economic, in nature. Still, the report tackles a difficult problem and reports some staggering costs created by a deficient K-12 system. To read more, click here.

The Evergreen Freedom Foundation
July 2004

This report is an odd mix of level-headedness and paranoia. The story of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's legal and PR battles with the NEA and its Washington state affiliate makes for especially interesting reading. The discussion of Senator Kerry's change of heart on "performance pay" for teachers is judicious. Regrettably, the authors' claims often have more passion than proof, such as the undocumented assertion that "the NEA actually has veto power over the direction and goals of the [Democratic] party." (Might be true, but this report offers no evidence.) And while there is much to be learned from the travails of Washington teachers who dare to ask where their union dollars go, the report's black-helicopters tone overshadows some of its serious points. Still, there is useful information to be found by clicking here.

Neal McCluskey, Cato Institute
July 7, 2004

As you'd expect from the libertarian Cato Institute, this short report argues that virtually all federal spending on education is unwarranted: "for almost 40 years the federal government has broken with both precedent and the Constitution by inserting itself into American education, an area that is traditionally and legally the domain of state and local governments." And, perhaps even worse than overstepping its bounds, "all the federal government really does is take money from taxpayers and redistribute it, only with millions lost in bureaucratic processing and the remainder returned to states laden with inflexible restrictions." Not a surprising assessment to anyone concerned (or impressed) that federal ed spending grew from $25 billion in 1965 (in today's dollars) to $108 billion in 2002. What is more interesting and useful about this report is its brief history of the government's involvement in education, dating back to Massachusetts's Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. Readers might also appreciate the categorization of federal education spending, tracking the major programs as of 1965, 1980, and 2002, the first two years representing, respectively, the birth of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the promotion to cabinet status of the Department of Education. (Only about half of federal education dollars flow through that Department, however; many programs such as Head Start, Job Corps, and ROTC are run by other agencies.) Perhaps most enjoyable are the examples of indefensible pork, such as funding for basket-weaving as a vehicle for teaching math and the $8.5 million "exchanges with historic whaling and trading partners program," a favorite of both Gadfly and Senator Kennedy. None of this folly is justified under Cato's strict Constitutional interpretation of the feds' role, but, this report argues, it isn't even defensible under the Department of Education's own stated purposes: to promote access and excellence in education and to serve as an "emergency response system" for critical needs. As for whether No Child Left Behind meets any of those criteria, Cato's position is crystal clear. Click here to see if you agree.

The U.S. keeps hiring scads more teachers. Their ranks have swollen markedly faster than school enrollments. As the Education Intelligence Agency interprets data recently compiled by the NEA, "for every 20 additional students enrolled in America's K-8 schools in the last 10 years, we hired three additional elementary school classroom teachers."

Are more teachers compatible with better teachers? I doubt it. In most of life, we make such trade-offs all the time. Think of buying clothes or cars or pastry - and deciding whether to shop for something at Target or Saks. Think of hiring staff. You may go for better quality, which usually means you have fewer options and the unit cost is greater; or you go for greater quantity, which generally translates to cheaper (per item) and lower quality. Econ 101, right?

Isn't this also true of school teachers? See below. First, though, a bit of stage-setting.

Not long ago, I took part in a small conference hosted by Michigan State University's Education Policy Center. My panel centered on a fine new report called Public Policy and Teacher Labor Markets: What We Know and Why It Matters, by Stanford education economist Susanna Loeb. In 60 pages, Loeb objectively reviews much of what's known about this important subject - and is candid about how much more ought to be known but isn't. She offers useful reminders, such as the interplay of salary and non-salary factors in determining teachers' school preferences and the important fact - especially for cosmopolitan policy types who spend their lives trotting around to conferences like this one - that most teachers opt to work near where they grew up.

Loeb's paper is also informative about salary comparisons, noting, for example, that average teacher pay resembles that of social workers and clergymen, not engineers and attorneys. And it provides welcome perspective on some issues, such as pointing out that today's young college graduates are inveterate job- and career-switchers. In other words, teaching isn't the only occupation that has trouble retaining new recruits. Nobody who knows twenty-somethings will find this point startling, yet it seldom enters into discussions of the teacher workforce.

As for Loeb's policy recommendations, three are noteworthy. First, the importance of targeting reforms at hard-to-staff schools and hard-to-fill teaching posts rather than laboring to make across-the-board changes in this immense enterprise. Second, differentiating among teachers on criteria that matter in the labor market (e.g. subject specialty) rather than treating everyone alike. Third (and perhaps most controversial), lowering entry barriers to teaching rather than raising them.

But one huge point shines through Loeb's data, though she does not dwell on it: for at least half a century, America has invested in more rather than better teachers. Between 1955 and 2000, the number of K-12 teachers in the U.S. almost tripled while school enrollments rose by about fifty percent. Instead of paying more money to a relatively smaller number of people, we chose to pay lots more people a more-or-less constant wage. Surely America would have found it easier to recruit, hire, and place better educated and more generously compensated instructors in its public-school classrooms if we hadn't set out to hire so many millions of them. Budgets (and labor pools) are finite. Choose guns or butter.

This trade-off has been noted by just a few analysts, such as Darius Lakdawalla in Education Next. Yet it's central to future teaching policy deliberations.

The unions don't want to hear about tradeoffs, however. Also present on my panel at the MSU conference was a senior staffer from the American Federation of Teachers who made clear that she and her organization demand cake AND ice cream AND fudge sauce AND a cherry on top. She said that America ought to (a) hire still more teachers (to reduce class size further), (b) pay them all more money across the board, (c) pay yet more in added incentives and rewards for teachers in hard-to-staff schools and scarce specialties (which differentiation she insisted can be done via collective bargaining) and, along with all that, (d) boost preparation requirements, elevate entry barriers, and strengthen training opportunities so that teaching becomes more of an honored and coveted profession.

If only we could turn lead to gold, we might do all those things at once. Otherwise, even this non-economist can see that it's a fantasy. We need to talk about choices and tradeoffs. Then we need to make them.

To see Loeb's excellent paper, click here. For the EIA commentary on the NEA data, click here. For the recent NEA Rankings and Estimates, click here. And for Lakdawalla's thoughtful discussion of tradeoffs, click here.

Gadfly adores poetry, especially when memorized. This is, no doubt, a hangover from his days in fly school, when he was forced to memorize "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Walrus and the Carpenter," and other favorites. Today, such memorization is widely considered a form of oppression if not child abuse. But we agree with Michael Knox Beran that memorizing poetry, speeches, and other literature exercises the young mind and inculcates a natural sense of the power and rhythms of the English language. "As educators have known for centuries, these exercises deliver unique cognitive benefits, benefits that are of special importance for kids who come from homes where books are scarce and the level of literacy low," Beran writes in the summer issue of City Journal. "In addition, such exercises etch the ideals of their civilization on children's minds and hearts." Memorization deepens the well of language that writers, professional and otherwise, can draw upon to find exactly the right word or phrase or tone. It's not too far-fetched to suggest that the general abandonment of memorization worsens the creeping inarticulateness of American culture.

"In defense of memorization," by Michael Knox Beran, City Journal, Summer 2004

We're not sure if our endorsement helps or hurts, but we'd love to see Samuel Freedman, now filling in for Michael Winerip as the "On Education" columnist for the New York Times, get the job permanently. By contrast to Winerip, who has only two gears - frothing and grumbling - Freedman is calm, clear, and open-minded. Two weeks ago he wrote a super piece on bilingual education. This week's column is a great example: he cuts through the wailing about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to hold back underperforming third-graders to pose the crucial questions. What's wrong with demanding high performance and the mastery of basic skills? Isn't it, in fact, a greater crime to graduate a student utterly unprepared to navigate the world? We never thought we'd say it: right reason has found a home at the Grey Lady. 
 
"No more social promotion? Studying instead of criticizing," by Samuel G. Freedman, New York Times, August 4, 2004 (registration required)

"Latino parents decry bilingual programs," by Samuel G. Freedman, New York Times, July 14, 2004 (registration required)

Analysts beyond counting, beginning with the late, great James Coleman, have shown beyond peradventure that increased spending on education is not related to increases in student achievement. Yet the conventional wisdom still resists that powerful insight. An editorial in last Friday's Wall Street Journal tried again, this time drawing on spending statistics recently released in a report by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute for Government and student achievement data released by the National Center for Education Statistics. According to the Journal's analysis, despite the fact that real education spending (adjusted for inflation and enrollment) between 1997 and 2002 rose 17 percent, there was "virtually no link between spending and performance" when the per-state spending increases were cross-referenced with National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores. As the Journal notes, the one question no one addresses this campaign season - or any - is this: "Is there any other part of American life that would receive tens of billions of more dollars if it kept showing no improvement in performance?"

"What money can't buy," Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2004 (subscription required)

K-12 Education, Still Growing Strongly, Donald J. Boyd, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, June 2004

We've made the case that local districts should not charter schools, since it ordinarily makes one competitor responsible for another's existence - a classic fox/henhouse situation. Some have suggested that this line of thinking is too cynical and doesn't give districts enough credit. Maybe. But consider these two news items: The Pennsylvania department of education recently began to dole out $200 million in block grants to school districts to help schools with large populations of underperforming students. In Pittsburg, the district decided to deny charter schools access to these funds because, as district spokeswoman Pat Crawford explains, charter schools are their own local education agencies and therefore "could have applied for some of the money" themselves. Alas, not true, says state department of education spokesman Brian Christopher. Instead, Christopher explains, state law requires districts - not local education agencies like charter schools - to apply for the money, which means districts would have to apply on behalf of charter schools. In a similar move, the Kansas City (MO) school board voted recently to deny contracts for food service to two local charter schools. In the heated debate, member Marilyn Simmons argued that "charter schools only want to recruit away district children and do not want a true partnership that benefits both sides." Let them eat cake, we guess (but not from the district's food service).

"City charter schools excluded from education block grants," by Amy McConnell Schaarsmith, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 29, 2004

"Anger over meals for charter schools," Kansas City Star, August 2, 2004

Talk about "defining success." For years, all 32 of Michigan's teacher-training institutions reported that 100 percent of their graduates passed state certification exams. However, a report from the Michigan education department found that those pass rates actually ranged from 66 to 97 percent for first-time test takers. Turns out this discrepancy is caused by the colleges' habit of reporting only those who pass the certification test as "graduates" of their programs. Perfection is easy when your logic is circular! Jerry Robbins, head of the Michigan Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and dean of education at Eastern Michigan University, described the report as "meaningless," since the passage rates include scores for all kinds of tests averaged together. Maybe, but perhaps not so meaningless as what his college has heretofore reported.

"Michigan's 32 teacher college grads not as perfect as schools report," by Judy Putnam, Associated Press, August 3, 2004

Christopher W. Hammons, Alabama Policy Institute
April 2004

Every time our K-12 education system fails to educate a child, it costs us. Perhaps the most direct cost is the money spent on remedial education. According to this report, in Alabama, 42 percent of community college students and 18 percent of regular college students require such courses (the national figures are similar). But society also pays in other ways to cope with folks like the "employee who 'invented' her own filing system because she lacked the skills to alphabetize folders by name." After tallying the cost of training and technology provided by employers, of reduced productivity, etc., the true cost to society balloons: in Alabama between $304 million and $1.17 billion per year (depending on the methodology), with a best estimate of $541 million. (Alabama contains about 1.5 percent of the U.S. population, which would mean the national cost is in the tens of billions each year). What's the solution? This report offers commentaries by Jay Greene and Matthew Ladner, arguing that graduation standards and school choice would help. (Alabama lacks public school choice, vouchers, tax-credits, even charter schools.) Greene contends that K-12 systems should bear some costs of remedial education, via "some sort of 'money-back guarantee' for high school diplomas." Unfortunately, those hoping for an intriguing analysis of the economic benefits of education will be disappointed by this report, which does not examine education's impact on prison populations, welfare programs, future earnings, and the like. But its methodology is simple: it assumes that the benefit of education must be at least as much as its cost to the state (because, to an economist, the state wouldn't otherwise make such an investment). Of course, this ignores the reality that school funding decisions are political, not economic, in nature. Still, the report tackles a difficult problem and reports some staggering costs created by a deficient K-12 system. To read more, click here.

Karen Hawley Mills, Education Resource Strategies and Marguerite Roza, University of Washington, Center for Reinventing Public Education
July 15, 2004

Karen Hawley Miles and Marguerite Roza co-authored this 33-page "working paper" that is well-summarized in its own abstract: "This paper uses a newly developed analysis tool called the student-weighted index to assess how the shift to student-based budgeting has affected the pattern of resource distribution within two districts: Houston Independent Schools and Cincinnati Public Schools. In the two districts studied, the use of staff-based budgeting resulted in varying degrees of inequitable resource allocation, while the introduction of student-based budgeting yielded significant equity gains in both districts." Though the study points to equity gains via student-based budgeting, it also explains other factors that hamper this effect and that would also need to be addressed in a thoroughly revamped district-wide budgeting system. You can find it online here. 

National Center for Education Statistics
July 2004

Everyone knows that home schooling has grown in recent years, but real data are famously hard to come by. So this latest issue brief from NCES is welcome. It concludes that about 1.1 million U.S students were home schooled in 2003, or 2.2 percent of the school age population - a 29 percent increase since 1999. The survey also takes a crack at discerning the reasons parents choose home schooling, and here the data are instructive: Just 30 percent of home schoolers cite religious or moral instruction as their primary reason, while close to half say they are concerned about either school environment or the academic quality of the schools their children would attend. Clearly, home schooling has become a choice option that springs from some of the same motivations as charters and vouchers. So can we please drop the religious nut jokes? (Jay Mathews of the Washington Post reached the same conclusion from his recent anecdotal survey.) To view this short research brief, click here.

Neal McCluskey, Cato Institute
July 7, 2004

As you'd expect from the libertarian Cato Institute, this short report argues that virtually all federal spending on education is unwarranted: "for almost 40 years the federal government has broken with both precedent and the Constitution by inserting itself into American education, an area that is traditionally and legally the domain of state and local governments." And, perhaps even worse than overstepping its bounds, "all the federal government really does is take money from taxpayers and redistribute it, only with millions lost in bureaucratic processing and the remainder returned to states laden with inflexible restrictions." Not a surprising assessment to anyone concerned (or impressed) that federal ed spending grew from $25 billion in 1965 (in today's dollars) to $108 billion in 2002. What is more interesting and useful about this report is its brief history of the government's involvement in education, dating back to Massachusetts's Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. Readers might also appreciate the categorization of federal education spending, tracking the major programs as of 1965, 1980, and 2002, the first two years representing, respectively, the birth of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the promotion to cabinet status of the Department of Education. (Only about half of federal education dollars flow through that Department, however; many programs such as Head Start, Job Corps, and ROTC are run by other agencies.) Perhaps most enjoyable are the examples of indefensible pork, such as funding for basket-weaving as a vehicle for teaching math and the $8.5 million "exchanges with historic whaling and trading partners program," a favorite of both Gadfly and Senator Kennedy. None of this folly is justified under Cato's strict Constitutional interpretation of the feds' role, but, this report argues, it isn't even defensible under the Department of Education's own stated purposes: to promote access and excellence in education and to serve as an "emergency response system" for critical needs. As for whether No Child Left Behind meets any of those criteria, Cato's position is crystal clear. Click here to see if you agree.

The Evergreen Freedom Foundation
July 2004

This report is an odd mix of level-headedness and paranoia. The story of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation's legal and PR battles with the NEA and its Washington state affiliate makes for especially interesting reading. The discussion of Senator Kerry's change of heart on "performance pay" for teachers is judicious. Regrettably, the authors' claims often have more passion than proof, such as the undocumented assertion that "the NEA actually has veto power over the direction and goals of the [Democratic] party." (Might be true, but this report offers no evidence.) And while there is much to be learned from the travails of Washington teachers who dare to ask where their union dollars go, the report's black-helicopters tone overshadows some of its serious points. Still, there is useful information to be found by clicking here.