The poor and parental choice

Dr. James Tooley has released a new book, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.

Dr. Tooley’s research has taken him across the globe, visiting several of the world’s poorest countries and studying the world’s poorest people. He finds, all over the world, that parents care for their children and that parents will make choices and sacrifices to improve the livelihood of their children.

Interestingly enough, he found that even families living on just a few dollars a day gave up a portion of their income to send their kids to local private schools, despite the availability of free, state-owned public schools. These parents believed the private schools, which charged as little as $2 a month for tuition, provided a better quality education than the public schools.

Not surprisingly, the parents were right. Dr. Tooley’s research suggests that the private schools, often ill-equipped compared to the public schools, outperformed the free, state-owned schools.

Visit this link on Wednesday to watch the book forum at the Cato Institute live: http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6015.

Hiding evidence...again

*The superintendent of Springfield public schools (from the TV show The Simpsons) is holding Bart Simpson's test and congratulating Bart for being a genius.

In the Simpsons episode “How the west was won” Bart Simpson is told he’s a “genius” after he “aces” a practice test. In reality, the school administrators were trying to hide bad students like Bart in order for the school to get a passing grade to prove the school actually teaches the children.

While this was just a cartoon on the Fox network, the parody isn’t far from reality. Except in reality, school administrators aren’t hiding evidence of failure, but hiding evidence of success — in particular, the success of a voucher program.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan likely buried evidence that the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program improved student achievement while Democrats in Congress voted to all but kill the program. Interestingly enough, Arne Duncan’s kids attend very good public schools ... in Arlington, a wealth suburb in northern Virginia.

So while Arne Duncan is wealthy enough to afford a home in an affluent neighborhood near a good school, he makes it difficult for poor children to receive small scholarships to help them afford tuition at a local private school.

Helping the children or serving the teacher union? You decide.

Munchausen by Proxyocracy

Guest post, by Dr. Matthew Ladner

Goldwater Institute economist Byron Schlomach and I argue that Americans suffer from battered taxpayer syndrome.

Remember the girl in the Sixth Sense whose mother, suffering from Munchausen by Proxy, poisoned her to gain sympathy and attention?

That in a nutshell is what much of American politics is like.

What Did Arne Duncan Know, and When Did He Know It?

Guest post by Dr. Matthew Ladner,

The United States Department of Education has been funding a scientific evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship voucher program. They sat on the report while Congress voted to suspend the program, and then released it on a Friday afternoon with a negative press release in an attempt to bury it. Nice try, but it didn't work...

Read about it in today's Wall Street Journal and in a piece yours-truly wrote for National Review Online.

A "Master's" pay despite no relationship to achievement

Good teachers should be paid really well, unfortunately, Nevada does not.

Clark County School District (CCSD), teachers with a master's degree earn an extra $5,655 annually, while teachers who also have an advanced certification receive $8,845 more. Nationwide, most school district contracts provide higher salaries based on extra coursework and advanced degrees. Indeed, it is estimated that about half of all teachers in the United States have such an advanced degree.

Applying that estimate to Nevada would suggest that CCSD each year spends approximately $51 million paying teachers extra for having obtained a master's degree. But does this extra spending produce results or simply waste taxpayer money?

Eric Hanushek, of Stanford University, and Steven Rivkin, writing in the 2006 edition of the Handbook on the Economics of Education, cite the "most ... remarkable ... finding" from numerous studies "that a master's degree has no systematic relationship to teacher quality as measured by student outcomes" (page 11 of the article, "Teacher Quality"). Advanced degrees are not likely to increase the quality of the teaching and, more importantly, there is no evidence that they increase student achievement.

This suggests that the Clark County district is simply wasting about $51 million each year. Instead of cutting all teacher salaries by 6 percent (and angering all teachers), Nevada should end these additional payments for advanced degrees and certifications and substitute a merit-pay system that rewards teachers for measurable improvements in individual student achievement.

It is hardly fair to cut all teachers' salaries equally, considering the fact that some teachers make considerably more while providing no extra benefit to their students. The fairest way to make the budget reduction would be to eliminate this waste.

Doing so statewide would save an estimated $72 million a year. Then, when the state economy recovers, the current, rigid pay grid should be replaced with merit pay, a system that actually rewards high-quality teachers, and schools, for their efforts.