At its peak Corinthian Colleges had over 100 colleges throughout the United States and Canada, including Everest College campuses in Earth City, Kansas City, and Springfield. Last month Corinthian Colleges, Inc., a large for-profit post-secondary education company, announced it would cease operations in all remaining U.S. locations effective April 27, 2015. The closure of Corinthian has left 16,000 students in quite the predicament. Many have taken on burdensome student loans, and now their school is closed.

In response, the Department of Education (DOE) announced a plan to wipe the debt slate clean for all students that attended these schools, a move that potentially could cost taxpayers $3.6 billion. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan defended the plan saying, “You’d have to be made of stone not to feel for these students.”

While I agree wholeheartedly that it is more than a minor inconvenience to have your school close, this is the wrong course of action. Indeed, this plan is wrongheaded and will simply encourage more of the behavior that created this crisis in the first place.

First, there is no need to forgive loans for courses students have already completed. They did not spend their time at Corinthian schools in vain. These students are still eligible to transfer their credits to other schools and continue their educations. Countless universities have made it clear that they want to help and are willing to open their arms to students who take the initiative to transfer credits and continue their pathway toward a better life. Long Beach City College President Eloy Oakley summed it up perfectly back in April: “They have options and no matter what, at the end of the day, we want them to finish their education, stay in the community and become economic assets to the community.”

Unfortunately, one of the catches of the DOE’s plan is that closed-school debt relief is only available to students who have not transferred their credits to another university. This bailout encourages students to throw away the years they have dedicated to attaining a degree and bettering themselves.

Second, this is potentially the largest debt relief program the government has ever offered students, and it sets a bad precedent. Taxpayers should not be held accountable for the billions of dollars students borrow in full knowledge of the consequences. Most of these students never would have attended a Corinthian College if it were not for the government’s subsidization of college loans. This bailout essentially means students bear no risk when making college selections; they can easily obtain college loans, and the government will forgive them if things go badly.

The students of the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges certainly got a raw deal, but that is no reason to enact measures that will encourage the same type of behavior in the future.

The post Corinthian College Crisis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There also was good news for some teachers in Dieckhaus’ 2011 legislation. The proposal called for the best teachers to be paid at least twice as much as the poorest-performing teachers. While this may seem like common sense (why not pay the best teachers more, as a reward for their effort?), it runs contrary to the current system of paying Missouri public school teachers.

The 2011 legislation did not pass. However, Dieckhaus is considering submitting tenure reform legislation again this year. The bill is not yet available, but I have listed two areas of reform that are needed to help improve student academic achievement in Missouri. Our priority should be educating  children, not rewarding those who happen to have been teaching for the longest period of time.

Let’s pay good teachers more: In Missouri, teachers are paid under what is known as a “teacher salary schedule.” Broadly, teachers who have more years of experience and higher levels of education are paid more (here is an example). At many school districts, these are the only components of teacher pay — teachers who teach difficult subjects, at-risk students, and teachers who have the best track record of helping students learn do not get a pay boost.

Teachers who do a poor job of teaching students can actually earn more than the good teachers if the poor teachers have a higher education level and/or more years of teaching experience.

Dieckhaus told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2011 that “It’s time we move away from paying people based on how long they’ve been teaching and what piece of paper they have hanging on the wall.” I certainly agree.

Paired with the issue of teacher compensation is the question of how to deal with teachers who have a track record of failing to teach students. Right now, those teachers can stay at a district for years, if not indefinitely.

Let’s help school districts get rid of bad teachers: State law awards teachers “indefinite contracts” if they have taught at the same school district for at least five years. These “permanent teachers” can be terminated, but only through a lengthy process. If a school district terminates a teacher (after going through all of the notification requirements specified by state law), that teacher can appeal the termination, triggering a court case. If the teacher wins in court, the school district must pay that teacher all of the compensation he or she would have received had he or she stayed at the district during the period of appeal.

I suppose that if you are trying to discourage teacher termination, the above makes sense. But, as a state, our concern should not be to hire and keep on as many teachers as possible. We should instead be concerned with how to provide quality education to students. Allowing failing teachers to continue to teach students does nothing to help students, and may be hurting them.

It is an uncomfortable truth, but one we must acknowledge. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put it, “We can no longer pretend that all teachers or all principals are from Lake Woebegone where everyone is above average.” Many academic studies have shown that teacher quality matters. Eric Hanushek, an education economist at Stanford University, has shown that good teachers can teach students three times as much as bad teachers — in a single year. Improving student academic achievement can be achieved in part by attracting more good teachers to the profession, and encouraging the bad teachers to leave the field.

I hope that the 2012 teacher tenure reform legislation can help enable school districts to have more autonomy when it comes to rewarding good teachers and terminating the worst teachers. When the full text of the bill becomes available, I will post my take on it here.

The post It Is Time To Reform Teacher Tenure In Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Even if we won the full amount, it would only run our schools for two days, so for that we weren’t going to cede control over our curriculum standards,” Mr. Scott said.

One-time cash awards won’t be very helpful to Race to the Top winners in the long term, as Texas officials can foresee. Nor will the process give reforms a chance to sprint ahead. Race to the Top asks states to make changes on paper that might not affect what goes on in schools at all. For example, to be competitive, states have to remove legislative caps on the number of charter schools that can operate. But they don’t have to approve any new charters. So, states could lift their charter caps, win cash and praise from Arne Duncan, and then turn down all charter proposals for spurious reasons. The states would have more money, but students wouldn’t have any more choices than what they started with.

There’s good reason to be skeptical of Race to the Top demands including abolishing caps on charters. As we’ve seen in Oregon, legislative caps are not always the main barrier to opening a charter. Oregon requires charter proposals to be submitted to school boards. These boards govern the same districts that the proposed charters would compete with, were they approved. Understandably reluctant to admit competitors to their districts, the boards deny charters on weak grounds or force them to resubmit proposals with minute improvements.

The Department of Education can’t correct this problem with a blanket directive to all states. It would have to examine each state’s charter approval process and identify which policies are holding back charter expansion. And it’s the same for other Race to the Top priorities: In some states, laws separating teacher data from student data may rule out merit pay, while for other states, merit pay may be illegal or difficult to implement for unrelated reasons. And so on.

Thus far, Missouri hasn’t shown Texas’ discretion — the state plans to apply for a Race to the Top grant. I hope Race to the Top won’t distract the state from meaningful reforms. Missouri officials should bear in mind that the ultimate goal is to make substantive policy improvements, not to win an award.

The post Texas Keeps Out of the Race appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Indeed, the practice of finding and highlighting innovative solutions that exist somewhere outside Washington seems to be at the core of Duncan’s approach. It’s the rationale for the $5 billion “Race to the Top” stimulus money, which he hopes to use to reward schools that are centers of successful innovation.

The “Race to the Top” would reward innovation if it gave schools money for implementing programs that the schools came up with on their own. Administrators would think, “We need to create something innovative to get the money.” They would experiment, and the best ideas would earn “Race to the Top” dollars.

That’s not how the “Race to the Top” actually works. Duncan has decided in advance which practices he prefers, and he intends to use the “Race to the Top” money to induce schools to conform.

An extended school year is one such favored policy:

“Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

National standards are another:

“We need national standards, and assessments to measure them,” Duncan said. “The idea of having 50 states designing their own standards is crazy.”

Duncan is right when he says the best ideas often don’t come from Washington. Unfortunately, schools sometimes ignore good ideas when Washington pays them to follow the crowd.

The post Ideas Don’t Come From Washington, But Money Does appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Charter schools and lab schools would have a framework within which to experiment.

This is put forward as an argument in favor of uniform education standards across states — that a national standard will help charter schools experiment better!

I can’t imagine how any government standards would do that. But even if I’m wrong, and standards are an important ingredient in innovation, charters already have the state standards to work from. Currently, charters can choose from 50 different standards and pick whichever ones would help them innovate best.

(How does that work? They look at the traditional district standards and say, “This is what we need to not follow if we want to experiment?”)

Besides a benevolent desire to help charters experiment, which assistance no charter I know of has requested, standards enthusiasts are motivated by cold, hard cash. I call it “Race to the Tax Dollars;” Arne Duncan calls it “Race to the Top.” A Post-Dispatch editorial describes the matter with customary candor:

More than $4 billion in federal stimulus funds are being devoted to a national “Race to the Top Fund” to support innovation and leadership in the nation’s public K-12 schools. Some $350 million of that will go to states that have signed onto the new standards.

Notice that bribing all states to do the same thing is called “innovation.” I think this is the kind of innovation standards supporters have in mind for charter schools.

The post A Nonexistent Benefit of Uniform Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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.

The post Standard Bearers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“In too many places, including Illinois, we are lying to children now. [When] we tell a child they are meeting the state standards, the logical implication is that child’s on track to be successful. In too many places, including Illinois, if you are meeting state standards you are barely qualified to graduate from high school and you are totally unqualified to go to a university and graduate,” he said.

I agree that the standards are low and don’t reflect what students need to know for college or life. Many parents are happy when their children do fine on state tests, not realizing that in a few years, their children will be competing with people from China, Singapore, Sweden, and other countries with more rigorous school systems. Another drawback is that school use the low standards as an excuse, saying they can’t teach anything more advanced because they have to prepare students for the (easy) state tests.

I disagree with Duncan’s proposed solution. He wants the federal government to tell the states what to do — imposing his favorite ideas, like a longer school year, with threats like this:

“Illinois has a chance to compete for hundreds of millions of dollars. I would love to see Illinois compete,” Duncan said. “But Illinois has to change its behavior.”

Rather than bringing in the federal government to pick winners, mediocre public schools should get out of the way and let parents act as consumers. Parents with the opportunity have been choosing schools with longer school years, like KIPP schools, long before Duncan decided to impose that reform from above.

You can read my thoughts on Duncan’s charter school remarks here.

Feel free to make more blogging requests in the comments, or to email me with requests at sarah.brodsky@showmeinstitute.org.

The post Sarah to Arne: Let Parents Choose appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

He wants Illinois to lift its cap on charter schools. State law says there can be no more than 60 charter schools in the state, but there is demand for more than that. Why the cap? Because charter school teachers usually don’t have unions, and the teachers unions see that as a threat.

“Great charters make a huge difference in kids’ lives. What I loved about charters is they’re a school of choice,” Duncan said. “If kids stop showing up, we’ll take the school out. The money follows the kid.”

Hear, hear. I still don’t think the federal government should tell states how long their school days or years should be. Nonetheless, enthusiasm for charters and choice is welcome from all corners.

The post Wise Words on Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.