I first posted on Rouse et al and the Florida study back in February. That study [PDF] showed clearly that vouchers improve the performance of the public schools, not just the lucky student escapees.
Today I discover that the lead author of that study is rumored to be a CEA candidate to replace Austan Goolsbee. Because she is a woman?
I suppose it would be good news if it signaled Obama’s determination to unchain the US school system via a national voucher program [probability .00001%]. But the bad news is that Goolsbee is an expert on taxation and capital formation. Who would you rather have advising the president?
Or do you prefer diversity in the WH? On the Rouse rumor, Megan McArdle wrote
Needless to say, given that Obama’s sterling choice of highest-caliber economic advisors was one of my main reason for supporting him, my regret is mounting faster than ever.
Economist Mark Perry produced the above graphic illustrating something the teachers unions don’t advertise
Public school teachers send their own children to private schools at a rate more than twice the national average–22% of public educators’ children are in private schools compared to the national average of 10%.
Do the Obamas send their children to public schools? No, like the Chicago and D.C. teachers, they choose private education — because they are wealthy enough to have “freedom of choice”. We can hope that they will support free school choice for all citizens, not just for the wealthy. I can’t think of a more powerful tool to upgrade US education performance than a national voucher policy that allows every family to select the best schooling for their children — ending forever the education monopoly. That would be real Change.
The education world is waiting to see whether Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10, will be sent to private school while their father continues to oppose tax-supported programs that offer a similar choice to less-fortunate parents. The question of vouchers as an alternative to public schools crosses color lines, but it is particularly appropriate for the nation’s first African American president.
Black students disproportionately find themselves in under-performing schools. In fact, opinion polls by think tanks like the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies have found black parents favor vouchers by larger majorities than white parents do.
Yet teachers unions lead opposition to such alternatives, even though studies like a 2004 Thomas Fordham Institute report find big city public school teachers to be more likely than the general population they serve to have their own children in private schools.
In Obama’s hometown, Chicago, for example, 38.7% of public school teachers sent their children to private schools, the Fordham study found, compared to 22.6% of the general public. In Washington, D.C., 26.8% of public school teachers sent their children to private schools, versus 19.8% of the public (see chart above).
Michelle Obama offered a clue to what her family’s choice will be. She flew to Washington this week (Monday, Nov. 10) ahead of her husband and toured the private Georgetown Day School. Another clue: Their daughters currently attend a private school in Chicago.
~Clarence Page
As I wrote in 1995, in the article The Educational Octopus:
What would you conclude about the quality of product or service X under the following circumstances?
1. The employees of Airline X and their families are offered free airline tickets as an employee benefit. The employees refuse to travel with their families on Airline X and instead pay full fare on Airline Y when flying.
2. The employees of Automaker X are offered a company car at a substantial discount and they instead buy a car at full price from Automaker Y.
3. Employees at Health Clinic X and their families are offered medical care at no additional cost as a benefit and yet most employees of Clinic X pay out-of-pocket for medical services at Clinic Y.
In each case, the employees’ willingness to pay full price for a competitor’s product or service and forgo their employer’s product or service at a reduced price (or no cost) makes a strong statement about the low quality of X. What makes the inferior quality of X even more obvious is that the employees at Firm X, since they work in the industry, would have better information about product (service) X and product (service) Y than the average person. What then should we conclude about the quality of public education in the United States given the following facts?
You probably know the rough rankings — but thanks to Greg Mankiw we have an accurate picture. If you need a bit of support for your thesis that your children should not be taught math and physics by a typical teacher with an education degree…
“President Summers asked me, didn’t I agree that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?” [former dean Peter] Ellison told the Globe.
Here (via Mark Perry, posted two days ago) are GRE scores by field. Economists rank number 4. Political scientists are number 17, and sociologists are number 23.
In last place is public administration.
(Click on table to enlarge.)
As you would expect from Mark Perry, here is the source data: EconPhd.net, based on 2002 data.
Good stuff, I thought:
Two weeks ago, I spent a day with Dr. Ellen Shelton and her 11th grade Advanced Placement English students at Tupelo High School in Tupelo, Mississippi. Ellen’s students are participating in Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future, an online writing and publishing project sponsored by Google and the National Writing Project.
During the U.S. presidential campaign season, thousands of middle and high school students (ages 13-18) are writing persuasive letters and essays to the presidential candidates about the issues and concerns that they’d like the next president to address. Teachers are using Google Docs to incorporate online editing, peer review, and revisions, and students are publishing their letters online for their peers, parents, and the public to read.
At Tupelo High, Ellen’s students told me that they were writing about issues such as health care, education, the economy, and the price of gas. I was impressed not only by the variety of issues they were covering, but also by how they were able to describe how these issues affect their lives as well as their family and friends. Although most of Ellen’s students will be too young to vote on Nov. 4, it is heartening to know that they were making a difference by voicing their thoughts through their writing.
So far, 962 students from 46 schools have published letters on our project website, and during the next few weeks, there will be thousands more. You can also find out what issues matter to Ellen’s students and students from other parts of the U.S.
Do check out the project website.
Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers [left] as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.” Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC.
…”I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has done a bit of research on Obama and Ayers. No doubt your newspaper has kept you well-informed on the true story, right? Since the NYT has had a team going through Sarah Palin’s garbage, and investigating the ancient driver’s license suspension of Joe the Plumber, surely they would be thoroughly researching Obama’s background, right?
Here are excerpts from what Kurtz learned:
Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never writte n about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama’s first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers’s home. [see here for the evidence]
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.” Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I’ve recently spent days looking through them.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago’s public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation’s other key body, the “Collaborative,” which shaped education policy.
The CAC’s basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s “recruitment” to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto.
In works like “City Kids, City Teachers” and “Teaching the Personal and the Political,” Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist,” Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, “Sixties Radicals,” at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).
Mr. Obama once conducted “leadership training” seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama’s early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC’s in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
CAC also funded programs designed to promote “leadership” among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children’s education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama’s alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents “organized” by community groups might be viewed by school principals “as a political threat.” Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber’s objections.
…The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming “guilt by association.” Yet the issue here isn’t guilt by association; it’s guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
Definitely read the whole thing - then see if you can reconcile the truth with Obama’s just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood”.
Andrew Coulson, Cato’s education policy guy, on the Obama policy
Senator Obama launched a major education counter-offensive today, in a speech laying out his vision for the future of American schooling. Calling for a renewal of the public school system to “meet the challenges of a new time,” Obama held up the National Defense Education Act of 1958 as a model for what he has in mind. He told the Dayton, Ohio crowd that “Eisenhower doubled federal investment in education after the Soviets beat us to space. That’s the kind of leadership we must show today.”
The trouble is, the NDEA was an expensive failure. Congress’ goal was to improve achievement in math and science following the Soviet Union’s launch of the Satellite Sputnik. There are no nationally representative science results from the time, but high school mathematics performance actually fell in the eight years following passage of the law, according to national norm studies conducted by the College Board, which administers the SAT and PSAT (see figure below). By 1983, math scores had still not returned to the level they had been at before the NDEA was passed.
Math Scores, National Norm PSAT Studies
(11th graders), 1955 to 1983
Could the problem be that federal, state, and local governments have not spent enough on programs like NDEA and its successors? No. Here’s the inflation adjusted history of public school revenues, in 2008 dollars:
A union guy crosses over to lead a school choice group
The new head of the leading voucher group in Florida is a former teachers union leader who once said vouchers were “based on false assumptions and faulty logic.”
His hiring may be another sign that the bitter political lines over vouchers are not as hard and fast as they were just a few years ago.
Doug Tuthill, 52, is the new president of the Florida School Choice Fund, which raises money for the state’s $118-million corporate tax credit voucher program and awards vouchers to low-income children. He was hired by John Kirtley, a Tampa businessman who rivals former Gov. Jeb Bush as the most influential voucher advocate in the state.
“I don’t think the enemy is educators or parents or public schools or private schools,” said Tuthill, who headed the Pinellas union from 1991 to 1995. “The enemy is ignorance and poverty and hopelessness and despair.”
As does a St. Petersburg Times pundit
Tuthill isn’t the only new blood at the Florida School Choice Fund.
Joining him as communications director is Jon East, a former St. Petersburg Times editorial writer. Until his retirement last week, East for years was a persistent critic of vouchers.
Cato-at-liberty writes:
The two have just signed on as the new president and new communications director, respectively, of the Florida School Choice Fund. The Fund accepts taxpayers’ donations and then offers tuition assistance to low income families who want to send their children to private schools. The taxpayers making the donations can then claim dollar-for-dollar credits against state taxes.
As noted twice before on this blog in just the past several months, the times they are a changin’ Support for private school choice was once a thoroughly partisan affair, and seen in some quarters as a threat to the ideals of public education. That is becoming less and less the case. Sooner or later, educational freedom will reign in this country.
For now, there are still politicians who send their own children to private schools while opposing programs that would bring that same choice within reach of lower-income families. Perhaps, in the long run, they may be forgiven by posterity. In the medium term, though, they are likely to pay a price at the ballot box.
In the NY Times “Education Watch”, Sandra Tsing Loh discovers that fervent anti-school-choice Obama has his kids in expensive elite private schools. Since his campaign is heavily funded by the public teachers unions, how can we expect any leadership for school choice reform from this man?
As usual, Bruce Fuller and Lance Izumi , my fellow Education Watch contributors, make some fascinating points, none more startling to me than Lance’s casual throw-away that Barack Obama sends his children to private school. As a rabid public school Democrat, I crumpled in despair at the news.
Look, I am not in politics, I get no money from foundations, I do not get invited to lecture on third world eco-sustainability on luxury cruises. I have no highly placed blue-state friends and I will soon be a divorced woman because my die-hard Democratic husband will not brook any dissent, public or private, about our party.
Fair enough, fair enough, but here’s the thing: I do not know why Barack and Michelle Obama cannot send their children to a nice public school in Hyde Park. You understand that I am a bit unstable this election season (I voted for Hillary) and I do my research by erratically Googling from home. And all I know about Hyde Park — and, readers, I’d love to be corrected if I’m wrong — is that even though real estate prices seem high, the brave little public schools in its ZIP code seem to be flailing. Their scores on www.greatschools.net are largely 2’s and 4’s (on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best). When you read the tea leaves as manically as I do, those low numbers suggest that few children of educated, middle-class children are attending the local schools. Rather, they’ve withdrawn, with nary a ripple, into their whispery private enclaves.
Let us not even touch the term “community organizer,” so buffeted about, by both sides, like a balloon at a rock concert. Let us just say that if Mr. and Mrs. Obama — a dynamic, Harvard-educated couple — had chosen public over private school, they could have lifted up not just their one local public school, but a family of schools. First, given the social pressure (or the social persuasion of wanting to belong to the cool club), more educated, affluent families would tip back into the public school fold. And second, the presence of educated type-A parents with too much time on their hands ensures that schools are held, daily, to high standards.
Conn Carroll notes that Obama’s rhetoric on education sounds pretty good.
Speaking in Dayton, Ohio, yesterday, Barack Obama hit the right rhetorical notes on the current state of education in the United States:
If we want to keep building the cars of the future here in America, then we can’t afford to see the number of Ph.D.s in engineering climbing in China, South Korea and Japan even as it’s dropped here in the United States. We can’t afford a future where our high school students rank near the bottom in — in math and science among industrialized countries, and our high school drop-out rate is one of the highest in the industrialized world.
At times he even voiced conservatives themes on education reform, including:
We need a new vision for a 21st century education — one where we aren’t just supporting existing schools, but spurring innovation.
And:
Now, one one of the things that we’re going to have to do — and this is something that I know sometimes is difficult — but teachers who are doing a poor job, they’ve got to get extra support. But if they don’t improve, then they have to be replaced.
And finally:
This leads me to my final point. As president, I will lead a new era of accountability in education.
As great as all this rhetoric is, the details on how this “new era of accountability” will be brought into reality are extremely vague….Got that? Obama wants accountability, but not based off standardized tests. Instead he wants accountability based off some unidentified mechanism that has not yet even been invented.
AFAIK Obama will not support any of the free market education reforms that can actually improve school performance.
Megan McArdle links to Mickey Kaus discovering some chinks in the Democrats love affair with the teacher’s unions:
…So the schools have a gigantic, powerful bargaining bloc. Who doesn’t have a bargaining bloc? The kids.
Of course, the customers of corporations don’t bargain with unions either–but they have the right of exit, which is what prevents the unions (or their corporate bosses) from turning them upside down and shaking them until the last nickel falls out of their pockets. Unsurprisingly, the schools in this country that function worst are the ones where the kids have no realistic ability to exit. So for whom are those schools run? The teacher’s unions, the principal’s unions, the janitor’s unions, the friends and relations of people with seats on the school board. The children have the least powerful voice. Which is why, as far as I can tell, every single thing that is proposed by any of these groups “for the children” has the primary side effect of employing more teachers/janitors/principals, paying same more, or making their jobs more pleasant.
Moreover, if you talk to reformers in urban schools–ardent Democrats all!–every single one of them will say that they can’t get anything done with the unions blocking them. Nor are they merely looking for an excuse. They always come armed with ample, and chilling, cases in point.
Technorati Tags: School Choice
Latest Comments
RSS