The Difference Between the Public and Private Sectors

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Jonathon Braden at the Columbia Daily Tribune‘s Homeroom blog reports on Sylvan Learning Center closings in Columbia and Jefferson City. This is a feature of private-sector education that we might not notice when times are good, but that’s apparent during recessions: Private schools and tutoring centers that can’t attract enough students end up closing. Public schools don’t. There are budget cuts, teachers are laid off, summer school is canceled — but the school stays.

I think that difference explains away the “mystery” set forth in this piece at TCSDaily. Why has state spending on education failed to make things better? The answer is not educational “fads” or teachers who are “nitwits,” as the article suggests. You can find them in private schools as well as in other sectors, so their existence can’t account for the inefficient use of public education funds. The problem is that the traditional districts have no mechanism to get rid of them, and no incentive to support the best teachers and expand practices that work.

Any organization contains some good and some bad. Private tutoring centers have to identify and reward the good — otherwise, they go out of business. Traditional districts that aren’t threatened by an exodus of students have no incentive to distinguish the good from the bad. If they expand their worst practices and ignore the best ideas, they’ll still get money to keep doing the same thing.

Somebody at SLPS Gets It!

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Or, at least, someone doing marketing for them has read the writing on the wall. I just watched the elementary school commercial for SLPS, which is available on the district’s website. It touts “magnet schools and choice schools.”

I’m not thrilled about the magnet schools’ complex, racially biased admissions process, but I love choice schools. Parents should have the option to choose schools within the traditional district, and I’m sure many will. SLPS needs to recognize this and focus on offering attractive choices for parents. It needs to move away from the “one address, one school” model that determines which school you attend based on your street rather than on your preferences. And it needs to  learn from charter schools, and try to understand why parents like them so much.

One positive development is the SLPS virtual school, which opened in 2008 to students throughout the St. Louis area — including those who attend charters. It would be interesting if many students attend charters during the school day, then go back to SLPS for online classes after school.

Handle Stimulus Funds With Care

Posted on by Josh Smith

The Columbia Missourian has an op-ed from the Show-Me Institute’s Joe Haslag and David Stokes. It addresses the question of what legislators should have done with the federal stimulus money coming to Missouri.

Haslag and Stokes recommend using the funds as an opportunity to reduce taxes, rather than increase spending. I enjoyed the piece — it makes a good case for something I briefly blogged about before.

Choice Allows Schools to Better Meet Individual Student Needs

Posted on by Abhi Sivasailam

Public education didn’t work for me.

The schools I attended were “great,” or so I’m told. My elementary and middle schools were heralded as model schools of the district and the region, and each produced impressive student results as measured by test scores. My high school was ranked by Newsweek as one of the top 300 schools in the country and produced respectable graduation and college enrollment rates, as well as enviable advanced placement scores.

I started out well enough, but by the time I entered high school, I was of that breed of students that elicit a teacher’s dread. “Over”-intelligent, undermotivated, rebellious, and insufferable. I never credited my progressively worsening underachievement with a specific flaw of the institutions; the system just wasn’t a good fit for me. In it, I felt restrained by the slow pace of the teaching, and repressed by rules that I saw as limiting creativity and independent learning. When I finally left during my junior year of high school to enroll in the University of Missouri’s excellent Center for Distance and Independent Study, my effort improved, “outside” learning accelerated, and I was able to grow — both intellectually and as a person — far more than I could have while “trapped in the system.”

My rambling boils down to a simple observation. School choice proponents and critics alike spend a great deal of research and time arguing about school choice and how it affects students in poorly performing schools. It’s important to remember that improving school choice will afford students from all types of educational backgrounds the opportunity to determine the type of institution that would serve as their very best fit. The society as a whole could be improved if we simply cared that students get the specific education they need for the specific growth they seek.

The Post-Partisan Age of School Choice

Posted on by Eric D. Dixon

Over at Cato@Liberty earlier today, Andrew Coulson commented on how school choice is becoming an increasingly post-partisan issue, as politicians from both sides of the aisle increasingly realize that allowing parents to choose the best schools for their children results in both better opportunities and better actual educational outcomes:

Christopher J. Christie just decisively won New Jersey’s Republican gubernatorial primary, but had to veer away from his middle-of-the-road plan and venture into some traditionally conservative territory to do it, according to news accounts. Will that be a problem for him in the general election? Not necessarily. As NorthJersey.com’s Charles Stile observes, Christie’s ardent support for private school choice is not the polarizing stance it once was: these programs “once championed by conservative ideologues, are being embraced by urban Democrats.”

As we’ve been saying at the Center for Educational Freedom for some time now, the post-partisan age of school choice is well within sight, and draws closer every day. The last politicos to see that will find themselves on the wrong side of history, and the wrong side of voters in both parties.

We’ve seen this same phenomenon in Missouri, with prominent Democrats like Kevin Chavous (who is a partner at a law firm with offices in St. Louis and Kansas City) and Rodney Hubbard leading the charge to bring real educational choice to Missouri’s children.

Here’s an interview with Chavous, in which he explains how school choice became such an important issue for him while serving on the D.C. City Council:

And here’s part two:

Followup Articles on Pork ‘N Earmarks

Posted on by David Stokes

Two more articles about what makes an earmark, what defines pork, and when are they justified, are in the Missouri media. Dave Catanese has an interview over at KY3 with Rep. Roy Blunt on the subject (link via Combest), and the Columbia Daily Tribune had a story a few days ago about the Jeff City legislative process used to spend the stimulus funds. I particularly recommend the interviews with two former Missouri legislators at the end of the KY3 story.

It is pretty clear that the stimulus money turned Jeff City’s budget process into something a little more like Washington’s. That was probably unavoidable. When you tell legislators to spend a lot of money quickly, it is not going to be pretty. I don’t mean this as a criticism of the people in Jeff City, but I certainly look forward to the return of the old ways next year, when the General Assembly doesn’t have hundreds of millions to throw around. We had considered in the past doing a report on pork spending by the General Assembly, but we never did, because, frankly, there is not a lot of pork or earmarking in Jeff City. The stimulus money changed that, but hopefully only for one year. Former Sen. Wayne Goode put it well:

“The way it works in Missouri, is that you always need a majority vote somewhere — either in committee or on the floor. It doesn’t really work like it does in Congress. The process is tighter, more structured on the state level.”

I am excited to see these discussions taking place in the public, media, and campaign spheres. I applaud everyone participating in the conversation about how our governments decide to spend what they spend. The budget process in Missouri needs to remain much stricter than it is in D.C., and more of our elected officials in both parties need to swear off both earmarks (which I am defining as spending items put into place after the committee process has ended) and pork (which I am defining as using general tax dollars to benefit very limited interests).

Term Limits

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

I’ve heard good arguments on both sides of the term limits debate. The opposing side contends that voters should be able to elect the candidate they prefer, even if that person has already served a few terms. Arbitrary limits could make politicians less responsive to voters if they know they won’t be up for reelection. And term limits haven’t transformed politics into the honest and impartial process some hoped they would.

People in favor of term limits counter that politics works to the advantage of incumbents. Term limits give other people a chance to be elected. Term limits also reduce the returns to bribery and corruption, because any politician whose vote is bought will be out of office in a few years. And term limits can keep politicians from getting too comfortable and insulated from the real world.

Those arguments all have some merit — unlike the arguments against term limits put forth in this article. Here’s why the Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives opposes term limits:

Over time, Richard said, lawmakers develop the institutional knowledge and personal fortitude to become powerful enough to stand up to the executive branch and the hordes of lobbyists who try to influence legislation.

The longer you wield political power, the more personal fortitude you develop? Tell that to Lord Acton!

Cape Girardeau’s Wise Choice

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Combest links to an encouraging article about the August sales tax holiday. I find it encouraging, because I don’t like the holiday, and the article reports that Cape Girardeau won’t participate this year.

Nobody likes paying sales taxes, so what’s the big deal if the tax is lifted for a couple days each year? The problem is, the tax isn’t really lifted. Directing consumers to out-of-the-way places or less convenient shopping dates is itself a kind of tax. The state doesn’t receive any sales tax revenue during the holiday, but consumers lose money and time. They pay a little more to buy gas and drive to a participating municipality. They stand in line a little longer in a store that’s extra-busy thanks to the arbitrary holiday.

I suppose you could say that the holiday is good because, although it’s wasteful, the money that people lose doesn’t go to the state. That’s a little less tax revenue for the state to use in expanding its activities. But, by that reasoning, you might as well throw your money out the window rather than give it to the government. A tax holiday amounts to the same thing.

Standard Bearers

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Missouri is one of four holdouts from the coalition to draft national education standards.

I’m glad Missouri hasn’t signed on. Beware of states bearing standards. No state by itself has particularly good standards, so the chances are slim that all of them together will come up with something better. And bad standards could serve to solidify the near-monopolistic state of the education market. After standards are adopted, textbook companies that go along with them are rewarded and competing curricula are crowded out.

I fear my rejoicing may be short-lived, though, because when Arne Duncan includes the standards in his “Race to the Tax Dollars” — I mean, “Race to the Top” — scheme, Missouri will have little choice but to go along.

There is one reason for optimism: Standards on paper don’t necessarily affect what happens in a classroom. Within a single state, some districts teach beyond the standards, and others lag far behind. That pattern will continue to hold if standards are adopted at the national level.

For more on national standards, and to learn why they’re like unicorns, see Neal McCluskey’s post at Cato@Liberty.

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