All I could think was, here we go again.

If you’ve followed education policy for any length of time this routine looks familiar. Researchers or policymakers visit some other country that performs better than we do on international assessments and then come back with the secret sauce that makes them do so well. The recommendations are so anodyne that that anyone with a passing knowledge of the education system will probably agree with them. The policy flavor of the month (national education standards, universal pre-K, etc.) is usually highlighted. Rinse and repeat.

For a while we were told to emulate Shanghai—until we learned that Shanghai systematically excludes disadvantaged students from its testing pool to juice its scores. Then it was Finland, at least until Finland’s scores dropped precipitously on the very test that ushered in its rise to prominence.

Here is the problem with this approach, and why it never actually yields the information we’re looking for: it violates the basic precepts of research design. If you want to know if a certain policy affects an outcome, you develop a hypothesis and test it. You follow children that are subject to the policy and children that aren’t—doing your best to make sure all other aspects of the two groups’ educational environments are identical—and you see what happens. If the children who were subject to the policy do better than those who weren’t, then you have reason to believe that the policy caused the improvement.

“Do what the best schools do” research does the exact opposite of that. It sees a result it likes and then tries to work backwards to the cause without isolating other variables that might also explain the outcome. That is not how science works. Are there places, for example, that do the very things that Finland or Shanghai or any of these other countries do that don’t meet with success?  Are there countries meeting with success that don’t do these things? As I’ve written before, the Netherlands is a very high-performing country that is marked by an incredible degree of school choice. So why does a universal voucher system always seem to be missing from the list of recommendations? In short, we have no idea whether the policies these folks advocate are really behind these countries’ successes.

I don’t want to say there’s nothing we can learn from other states or other countries about how to improve education here at home. However, if we are going to make claims that one policy or another causes a particular outcome, we need to back those claims up with research done the proper way. 

The post Not This Again appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One topic of discussion was pay for teachers. Flinders asserted that Kansas City teachers are paid lower than the state average. She is most likely correct, and there is something we can do to fix it. In previous posts we suggested reforming teacher pay schedules to increase the incentive for teachers to stay on.

But the district actually can pay teachers more if it cuts back on hiring non-teacher personnel. According to my colleague Brittany Wagner,

Over the past 60 years, schools have increased non-teaching personnel positions by 702 percent. [A report] also found the U.S. spends more than double what Korea, Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, and Spain spend on non-teaching staff salaries and benefits.

Recall that upon arriving Superintendent John Covington asserted that the district was too big, and in 2010 KCPS closed 30 buildings and eliminated 1,247 full-time equivalent positions. Doing so freed up a great deal of money. According to Wagner,

One study showed that if non-teaching personnel grew at the same rate as the student population, American public schools would have an additional $24.3 billion annually.

This impacts pensions as well, which is far greater than the immediate cost of this educational bloat on salaries. Show-Me Researcher Michael Rathbone writes,

Non-teaching personnel also accrue pension benefits through the Public Education Employee Retirement System of Missouri (PEERS). According to the PEERS annual report, “PEERS is a mandatory cost-sharing multiple employer retirement system for all public school district employees (except the school districts of St. Louis and Kansas City), employees of the Missouri Association of School Administrators, and community college employees (except St. Louis Community College).” Members of the plan and their employers both contribute to the pension.

Over the last five years, the unfunded liabilities (liabilities minus assets) of this plan have increased by more than $64 million. Pension benefits like PEERS benefits are guaranteed and must be paid out. If PEERS can’t make those payments, taxpayers (i.e., you) will have to.

By spending too much on non-teacher personnel, KCPS is draining resources from both funds to pay teachers in the short term and teacher pension funds in the long term. Cutting back on non-teacher staff—or perhaps just restricting growth—would allow school districts to better meet their financial responsibilities to teachers and to demonstrate a real commitment to the children in the classroom.

The post Ideas for Kansas City Schools: Focus on Teachers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Sparkly, purple, and lined with a shiny metal band, my retainer was wrapped in a napkin while I ate my school lunch throughout elementary school. “Don’t you lose that retainer,” I can still hear my mother saying. Inevitably, I lost it at lunch, and I knew there was only one place it could be.

Inside the trash can, remnants of sloppy joes and sour milk splattered the edges of the bag. A cafeteria worker, realizing what had happened, pulled the trash out and began to dig. “Here you go,” he said and returned the retainer to me.

I recalled the cafeteria worker who helped me find my retainer after I read Fordham Institute Research Analyst Matt Richmond’s report, The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don’t Teach.

The report’s findings are startling. Over the past 60 years, schools have increased non-teaching personnel positions by 702 percent. It also found the U.S. spends more than double what Korea, Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, and Spain spend on non-teaching staff salaries and benefits.

As the study’s title, and my own personal vignette, suggests, these workers are both seemingly underappreciated and overlooked. We know little about the non-teaching part of the education industry, except that it has grown at a much faster rate than students. One study showed that if non-teaching personnel grew at the same rate as the student population, American public schools would have an additional $24.3 billion annually.

This is not to say that schools would be better off with less non-teaching personnel, but if Missouri schools want to get serious about spending efficiently, then collecting specific data on non-teaching staff is a good place to start.

The post New Study Looks at Growth of Non-Teaching Personnel appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Here are five market-oriented resolutions for a more prosperous 2014:

1. Privatize the United States Postal Service (USPS). The United States should follow the lead of other Western nations, including Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain, in deregulating and privatizing mail service. It is a form of economic insanity, which can only be explained by the power of the postal union and its political friends, to require daily delivery of mountains of mostly junk mail to U.S. households. The USPS should have to compete with FedEx, UPS and other private concerns in the delivery of first-class mail.

2. Follow suit with other public services. Look for other ways to benefit consumers and taxpayers by deregulating or privatizing other public services, with airports, roads and public utilities at the top of the list. There is a reason vacation travel is much cheaper and more convenient within European and Mediterranean countries than it is in North America and the Caribbean. Europe has widespread airport privatization and greater reliance on market forces to allocate scarce resources. As travel writer Rick Steves says on his website, “Ryanair routinely flies from London to any one of dozens of European cities for less than $20” (through its most heavily discounted fares paid weeks or months in advance).

3. Do not buy the “living wage” rhetoric. Recognize the folly of calls to increase the minimum wage — now $7.25 nationally — to $10 or more at a time of sky-high youth and minority unemployment. Why would a fast-food restaurant — or any other business — want to hire someone for $10 an hour who adds, say, only $6 an hour in additional profit, before counting the cost of his or her wages? To do so would be to accept a $4-an-hour loss. Raising the minimum wage thus has the perverse effect of causing unemployment. It artificially reduces the demand for labor and makes the first rung on the job ladder higher than it ought to be for young and unskilled workers.

4. Break the health insurance oligopoly. The next stage in the seemingly never-ending debate about health care, now entering its sixth year, might be between full-scale nationalization — as one way of rescuing the Affordable Care Act from going into a full-scale “death spiral” in 2014 — and the creation of a much more market-oriented system than the status quo ante. The starting point for a market-oriented approach should be in freeing — and, indeed, forcing — insurers to compete across state lines on both price and range of product offerings, without a great assortment of government dictates or mandates at either the state or federal level.

That would give individual consumers the right to buy low-cost, low-price health insurance — from a far larger universe of sellers. And it would cause big insurers to lose the monopolistic or oligopolistic positions they have built up over the years through assiduous lobbying at statehouses around the country. Their cozy arrangements with state regulatory offices have resulted in mandates to cover everything from hair pieces and contraceptives to acupuncture and marriage counseling. Opening the insurance market to open-ended interstate commerce will cause all producers — both insurers and health care providers — to reduce costs and look for more and better ways to satisfy the health care customer.

5. Choose growth over class warfare. Be prepared for the proponents of big government to try to turn every debate — whether it is about health care, privatization, the minimum wage, entitlement reform, curbing the power and privileges of public sector unions or any other issue — into another rant on what President Obama has called “the defining issue of our time”: namely, income inequality. However, the president and others greatly exaggerate income disparities between different quintiles in the distribution of income by ignoring the effects of high taxes on high earners and, for lower earners, the effects of income tax rebates, food stamps and other welfare. One study finds that income inequality actually declined between 1993 and 2007, after adjusting for taxes and transfer payments.

But the real takeaway here is what the poor and the middle class really need to achieve a better life for themselves and their children. That is faster growth, not more income redistribution. It is the opportunity for self-improvement, not the fallback of welfare dependency.

Andrew B. Wilson is resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post Let Market Guide Us To Prosperity In ’14 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Mad in America” tells the story of a hardworking baker who moved to the United States for employment opportunities several decades ago. Now, his grandchildren are losing their jobs because businesses are hiring Asians who will work for less.

Bob Compton of 2 Million Minutes reacts:

Lacking an understanding of how competitive advantages must be upgraded over time with more education, constant innovation and personal creativity, the song simply laments reality – that ideas, jobs and capital are mobile.

And while that mobility is more pronounced now because of computers, cell phones, and the Internet, it has always been there. After all, the baker in the song didn’t stay in his native Finland — he came to America, where he competed with Americans and earned a low wage! The opening of the song undermines its message. “Mad in America” implies that it’s bad for jobs to go offshore, while immigration to the United States is fine. The website with the lyrics further emphasizes that its campaign is not about U.S. immigration policy. But what does it matter whether the competition comes to your job or your job goes to the competition? Either way, if someone is willing to do your work for less money, you’re in trouble.

It should be noted that workers can avoid this problem to some extent if they do a better job than anyone else. I realize this may not be quite so inspirational as A Message to Garcia, but for example, Delta decided to bring its customer service back to the United States because customers had trouble communicating with Indians. Businesses look at more than dollar amounts when they make decisions; they also care about quality. Of course, in a bad recession, even the best workers suffer. To quote General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, “We are living through history, and I don’t mean that in a positive sense.”

I love Compton’s post, but I’m confused by one of his comments. He contrasts the U.S. economy of a century ago with the economy today:

We were the cheap laborers with the strong work ethic, the desire for a better life for our children, the commitment to building schools for compulsory education.

We still have compulsory education, and it hasn’t prevented the outsourcing problem. In fact, 2 Million Minutes is constantly pointing out our education system’s failures.

That quibble aside, it’s a great post and I highly recommend reading it.

The post So True appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Rothstein is right that we shouldn’t look to Asian countries, panic, and try whatever last-ditch effort comes to mind. But he’s wrong when he claims the education system doesn’t need major reform. He rests his contention on the rise in NAEP scores, particularly in math, over the past 35 years. But as Michael Strong points out in his reaction essay, the gains have gone to elementary- and middle-schoolers. That’s better than nothing, but not good enough; nobody hires a fourth-grader. And we shouldn’t conclude that there’s no education crisis just because the schools were once even worse. Students’ inability to identify key cultural references and facts, and their poor performance relative to other countries, show that school quality is way below what it should be.

The United States has enjoyed spectacular economic growth despite the mediocre school system. Rothstein takes that as evidence that schools don’t matter for growth. But economists who study the relationship between education and growth have found that schooling does matter. In this article in Education Next, the authors first consider the effects of time spent in school on growth across countries, then find that math and science test scores have an even larger effect:

When we performed the analysis again, this time also including the average test-score performance of a country in our model, we found that countries with higher test scores experienced far higher growth rates. If one country’s test-score performance was 0.5 standard deviations higher than another country during the 1960s?a little less than the current difference in the scores between such top-performing countries as Finland and Hong Kong and the United States?the first country’s growth rate was, on average, one full percentage point higher annually over the following 40-year period than the second country’s growth rate.

The U.S., with high growth rates and low test scores, has been an exception. We shouldn’t count on being an exception forever. Our free institutions and stable rule of law have given us a head start over many countries. As their institutions catch up to ours, academic achievement is going to matter more.

So improving education is a worthwhile issue to ponder. I’m looking forward to reading the plans for improvement in the upcoming essays.

The post Rothstein: School Improvement Has Been Hunky-Dory appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.

Finnish teachers are encouraged to improve the curriculum and try new things; contrast that with the SLPS’ ambivalent reaction to a math teacher who brought up his students’ MAP scores with a creative approach.

That’s not to say we should adopt all aspects of the Finnish system. I don’t think cheerleading, school bands, and competition to get into colleges are necessarily bad. But it wouldn’t hurt the U.S. public schools to give teachers a little more leeway.

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