ACLU misleads public about vouchers

Nevada’s lawmakers this week were subjected to a few half-truths about the governor’s proposed education voucher program from school superintendents and the ACLU of Nevada. Vouchers are tax dollars that are given to parents so they can send their child to any public or private school they choose. School funding is thus directed by parents rather than central bureaucrats.

Vouchers do not result in discrimination as the ACLU claimed. In fact, private schools are better at serving low-income students, teaching mentally handicapped students, increasing racial diversity, and teaching tolerance and civility:

• One and a half percent of special-needs students are placed in private schools by public schools that cannot meet their needs.
  
• Public schools do not have to teach every child. Public schools expel 1 percent of their students every year and send another 0.6 percent to special schools for troubled kids.
  
• Seven respected academic studies have found that vouchers increase racial diversity.
  
• Thirty-three studies found that private-school students possessed more “democratic values” like tolerance, civic knowledge, political participation and volunteerism.

The ACLU misrepresented vouchers by claiming that the program would only help the wealthy because the voucher is not enough to cover private-school tuition. This is intellectually equivalent to claiming food stamps don’t help the poor because they don’t cover the full cost of food.

It is true that vouchers are set below the cost of traditional public schools, but most voucher programs require that private schools do not charge additional tuition. Nevertheless, in 2004 the U.S. Department of Education actually estimated that the average private school cost $3,300 less per pupil than traditional public schools. Furthermore, 15 states plus Washington, D.C., offer voucher/tax-credit programs that are designed specifically to serve special-needs students, foster-care students, autistic students and low-income students.

• The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program offers scholarships of up to $7,500, while D.C. public schools spend over $20,000 per pupil. Only low-income students are given access to the vouchers.
  
• Florida and Arizona offer special-needs scholarships. The average scholarship in Florida is just $6,500 — $3,000 less than the cost of a public school. The average scholarship in Arizona is $8,100 — roughly the same amount a public school receives per pupil.
  
• Florida and Arizona also offer low-income scholarships financed through corporate and personal donations. The scholarships average just $3,900 and $2,500, respectively — far less than what the public schools receive.

Furthermore, nine out of 10 random assignment studies have shown that vouchers improve student achievement. Studies also show that vouchers improve graduation rates and improve a student’s chance of attending college. Sixteen out of 17 studies even show that public schools improve when faced with competition from vouchers.

The reality is public schools have done a terrible job at serving those who need help the most. Fewer than half of low-income, black and Hispanic students in Nevada can read at grade level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Clearly, public schools have failed these underserved communities as well as every other Nevadan.

While it is true that Nevada has a constitutional provision prohibiting tax dollars from funding religious schools – we note this amendment was added to Nevada’s constitution as anti-catholic bigotry swept the nation in the 19th century – Nevada can avoid a constitutional challenge by either offering vouchers for secular education or implementing a tuition tax-credit program, as no parental choice opponent has beaten tuition-tax credits in court. The Institute for Justice, however, is confident that vouchers could pass constitutional muster in Nevada. Afterall, vouchers are aid to parents and students, not to churches.

The governor’s voucher proposal is a workable solution that promises to improve student achievement by empowering parents with real choices.

Read more about parental choice programs at the Foundation for Education Choice.

Money matters, if you spend it the right way

*Money only matters if you use it in ways that produce results. Sometimes spending more money - like on education - doesn't produce a higher-quality service.

The legislature is rejecting the governor's proposed reductions to higher education - an amount that was a mere 5 percent of total state appropriations. The governor's prosal left higher education with about the same amount of money as in the 2005-07 biennium - a period when UNR spent over $30,000 per pupil and UNLV spent over $16,000 per pupil and neither university graduated even half its students within six years. See for yourself at The Education Trust's higher education database.

Race to the top

Nevada has to eliminate a provision in the law that prohibits student testing data to be used in teacher evaluations. Eliminating this prohibition puts Nevada in competition for between $60 million and $175 million in additional federal funds.

The legislature has approved a bill that allows student testing data to be used, but the governor is considering vetoing it because the law seems to say that teachers should not be disciplined if their students perform poorly (i.e., don't learn anything).

The provision reads,

The information must be considered, but must not be used as the sole criterion, in evaluating the performance of or taking disciplinary action against an individual teacher, paraprofessional or other employee.

So the question is whether or not the data can be used to dicipline bad teachers. At the very least, it appears that the new law would prohibit student testing data from being the sole criterion used to discipline teachers. If other criteria must be used, then what would be necessary to discipline or to get rid of bad teachers? Teacher attendence?

Still, legal writing can be confusing, so the main concern is whether or not teachers can be disciplined if they fail to actually teach their students anything. If teachers can't be disciplined (or fired) if they can't teach students, what is the point?

Additionally, the law needs to go a step further. Removing the old prohibition is meaningless if the school districts don't take action and use student testing data as part of teacher evaluations. In fact, we'd bet they won't do it unless ordered. Nevada needs to evaluate teachers using testing data because we need to know who the good teachers are and how to make average teachers even better. Importantly, we need to get bad teachers into a new profession.

Teachers fired

A Rhode Island school district voted 5-2 to fire all the teachers at one low-income school after years of repeated failure. The school district wanted teachers to spend more time with students and the teachers union demanded an extra $90 an hour for their teachers - on top of the more than $70,000 a year the average teacher in the district earns.

Bad teachers have to go, it is good to see some school district leaders standing up for students.

Spending more money won't produce results

Everyone agrees that Nevada's education system is a mess. What we don't agree on is how to fix it. One side claims (and always will) that the system doesn't work unless we give it more money.

But at some point Nevadans will have to ask,"how much is enough?" As you can see from the charts below, Nevada has increased education spending considerably. Where are the results?


*K-12 operating budget expenditures in Nevada (excludes capital expenditures and debt repayment). Source: Legislative Counsel Bureau. Each graph has been adjusted for inflation.

The total operating budgets from all districts have increased over 45 percent since 2001. Don't think population growth is the only reason for budget growth - education expenditures outstrip both inflation and population growth combined.


*"Current spending" per pupil (excludes capital expenditures and debt repayment). Source: U.S. Department of Education

Spending per-pupil grew 15.2 percent between 1998 and 2007. The tax increases in 2003 produced a rapid rise in education expenditures.


*K-12 operating budget expenditures in Nevada (excludes capital expenditures and debt repayment). Source: U.S. Department of Education

This final graph shows that Nevada's per-pupil spending has increased 180 percent since 1959. That means we've nearly tripled education expenditures PER PUPIL. That growth rate is so large that if Nevada had ONLY DOUBLED per-pupil expenditures, we wouldn't have a budget shortfall today!

Spending more money on education only funds the failed status quo. Fixing education is going to require some serious reform. Why not try to be more like Florida? Read NPRI's full report on Florida's education reforms here.

Public education is its own tragedy

*Shakespeare could not have written a greater tragedy than what American public education has written for itself.

The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) is putting together a petition to raise taxes on mining. Apparently it is because Nevada's tax system is "a tragedy" for children and the poor.

PLAN has it all wrong. The tax code isn't the problem. In fact, take a look at the U.S. Department of Education's own figures on public education expenditures in Nevada from 1959 to 2007 - we've increased PER-PUPIL spending by more than 160 percent, and that is after adjusting for inflation.

The problem with Nevada's public education system is that is an uncompetitive, unaccountable, centrally directed bureaucratic monopoly. Spending more money and getting the same results isn't a PLAN - pun intended.

For reform ideas, check out these links:

Florida's education reforms
School Decentralization
Tuition Tax Credit Program (Parental Choice)

Competition is good, even in public education

Economics in one lesson

*If focusing on jobs and spending was the smart thing to do, then we should hire people to dig ditches and fill them in again. But what does a ditch filled with dirt do for the economy?

If there was any doubt that government’s primary focus (whether conscious or subconscious) is on growing itself rather than on serving taxpayers, last week’s Interim Finance Committee meeting should lay those doubts to rest.

At least four times during the meeting, the term “multiplier effects” was mentioned. Multiplier effects are like ripples in the economy. Someone spends money and someone else gets the money to spend on something else, and on and on.

Senator Bob Coffin, Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Dan Klaich and Clark County School District Superintendent Walt Rulffes all worried that cutting jobs would have a devastating impact on Nevada’s economy. Eliminating those jobs would mean those people would not be able to spend money in other areas of the economy.

But this raises a question: From whom did the government take the money in the first place, and what are the negative multiplier effects that resulted from that loss of money?

Only Rulffes gave any indication he was on the right track on that issue. Rulffes argued that if the state took Clark County’s bond revenue to avoid laying off teachers, then the effect would be a need to lay off construction workers.

But he still didn’t go far enough. In order to get that bond revenue, the Clark County School District relies on tax increases. Every dollar spent by the district on school construction is a dollar that citizens can’t spend in the private sector on things they need.

This brings us to the major problem with focusing on spending and multiplier effects: production. Coffin, Rulffes and Klaich believe that cutting government jobs would be the worst possible thing for Nevada to do. Yet they believe this only because they’ve apparently forgotten where the money came from in the first place.

The only way their assertion could be true is if the money were used more productively by the government than it would have been by those who originally earned it.

Quite frankly, they’d have a hard time proving that. Today, the Clark and Washoe county school districts employ one adult for every eight students. Yet the results, as measured by quality of education, have been stagnant. And higher education does no better. The Nevada System of Higher Education saw its funding increase at a rate of 7.9 percent per year from 2001 to 2008, yet the quality did not improve. Fewer than half of all students at UNR and UNLV graduate after six years.

At the very best, funneling loads of money into education has done nothing for our economy. It certainly has done nothing for the quality of education. But since the government’s confiscation of that money means people in the private sector have less to invest in goods and services that improve their lives, it is most certainly the case that the increases in education spending have damaged Nevada economically.

Educational opportunities for all children

*Click here to watch the video

Dr. Howard Fuller, of Marquette University, is coming to Las Vegas on March 19 to speak at NPRI's education summit. Dr. Fuller has an amazing background. He began his adult life as a community organizer and was even affiliated with the Black Panthers in the 1960s. Later in life he became involved in trying to improve the quality of education. He was made the Superintendent of the Milwaukee Public School District and later formed the Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University and the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

While he is a supporter of Barack Obama, he strong disagrees with President Obama's education policies. Dr. Fuller is a strong supporter of charter schools and vouchers. He believes parental choice must become an integral part of any education reform movement.

Watch Dr. Fuller present his opinions and ideas at Marquette University here. (Video should start playing at the link; you may have to scroll down to see the picture once the page opens.)

Economic growth and student achievement

New research by Dean T. Jamison, Eliot A. Jamison, Ludger Woessman and Eric Hanushek demonstrates a relationship between economic growth and student achievement. The researchers examined student test scores across 12 international tests for 50 countries since 1964. They found that improving the cognitive skills of students has a robust impact on growing a nation’s economy.

Interestingly, the research found no relationship between economic growth and the amount of time a student spends in school. The reason is simple. Spending additional years in a school system where students are not achieving to begin with will not produce results. This is why pre-K and kindergarten programs are doomed to fail. (Health and Human Services already released a report showing the pre-K Head Start program has done virtually nothing to improve student achievement in the long run.)

The research also noted that a high-quality public education has the biggest effects on open economies. This is one reason why the United States has remained a global economic powerhouse, despite having one of the worst systems of public education among developed countries.

But what would have happened had the United States become a top education performer in math and science, as promised by the Governors Association in 1989? The researchers found that the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would have grown by an additional 4.5 percent. By 2015 the GDP growth would have been large enough to pay for all K-12 expenditures across the nation. Meaning: Public education would finally produce the student achievement necessary to pay for itself.



By 2064, U.S. GDP would grow another 40 percent beyond its current projections. Of course, this assumes the United States retains a relatively free economy — another, more recent, sore spot for our country.

2010 Education Conference

Less than half of low-income and minority students in Nevada can read at grade level according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress fourth-grade reading exam. Large achievement gaps exist between white students and minorities in math and science across all grade levels tested. Achievement gaps also exist between the "haves" and "have nots." But what can be done to improve student achievement, regardless of race or income?

Learn more at the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s Second Education Policy Summit: "Success for Every Nevada Child" on March 19 at the Orleans. Click here to RSVP for the conference. Below you will find a list of the speakers for this year’s education summit.

Anthony J. Colón
Education Consultant

Anthony J. Colón is one of the most widely recognized leaders in the school choice and education reform movements. His extensive experience designing cutting-edge education programs that target special needs and underserved students has put him at the front line of local and national education debates over the past 30 years. From 2005 to 2007, Colón served as Senior Manager for Education Investment Strategies at Fight For Children (FFC), a Washington, D.C.-based, local nonprofit organization dedicated to preparing urban youth for post-secondary education and careers.

Robert C. Enlow
President & CEO
Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice

In January of 2009 Robert Enlow took over the role of President and CEO of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, an organization dedicated to promoting universal school choice. Previously he had been the Executive Director of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice since late 2004. He joined the Friedman Foundation when it first opened in 1996, serving as fundraiser, projects coordinator and vice president before being named executive director. Under his leadership, the Friedman Foundation has become one of the nation's leading advocates for school choice, working in dozens of states to advance the issue by disseminating research, sponsoring seminars, undertaking advertising campaigns, organizing community leaders and providing grants.

Howard Fuller
Director
Institute for the Transformation of Learning (ITL), Marquette University

Howard Fuller is Director of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning (ITL)at Marquette University, supporting exemplary education options that transform learning for children, while empowering families, particularly those of low income, to choose the best school options. He served as Superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools from June 1991 through June 1995, as Dean of General Education at Milwaukee Area Technical College from 1986-1988, and as Associate Director of the Educational Opportunity Program at Marquette University from 1979-1983. He is also Chairman of the Board at the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

Jay P. Greene
Chairman
Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas

Jay P. Greene is the Chairman of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, a position he has held since August 2005. He was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research from January 2000 through August 2005, an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas, Austin from July 1997 through May 2001, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston from July 1994 through July 1997. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.

Matthew Ladner
Vice President of Research
Goldwater Institute

Dr. Matthew Ladner is vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute. Prior to joining Goldwater, Ladner was director of state projects at the Alliance for School Choice, where he provided support and resources for state-based school choice efforts. Ladner has written numerous studies on school choice, charter schools and special education reform. Ladner is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and received both a Masters and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Houston. Ladner previously served as director of the Center for Economic Prosperity at the Goldwater Institute and as vice president of policy and communications at Children First America.

Helen Littlejohn
Senior Regional Public Affairs Specialist
U.S. Department of Education

Helen Littlejohn, a native of Cheyenne, Wyoming, is currently the Senior Regional Public Affairs Specialist for the U.S. Department of Education, based in Denver, Colorado. She serves as a liaison to the department for several western states and is responsible for community outreach and engagement for federal education initiatives. She also serves as an advisor to the Secretary on Indian education and rural issues and promotes the department's efforts to support the academic success of under-served student populations throughout the United States. Her 30-year federal career includes service with the Departments of the Army and Air Force. She started her present position at the U.S. Department of Education in February 2000. She graduated from the University of Denver in 1976 with a degree in Education and Psychology.

Paul E. Peterson
Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the Koret Task force on K-12 Education, and editor of Education Next: A Journal of Opinion and Research. He is also the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. His research interests include educational policy, federalism, and urban policy. He has evaluated the effectiveness of school vouchers and other education reform initiatives. He is the author of Saving Schools: From the Little Red Schoolhouse to Virtual Learning (forthcoming).