Read Jay Greene's Blog

In "Education and Citizenship On The Left And Right" (Jay Greene's blog), Greg Forster writes

It’s widely known that one of the major reasons America adopted the government monopoly school system in the first place was hysteria over the cultural foreignness of Catholics. However, there’s another tidbit worth knowing. As Charles Glenn documents in The Myth of the Common School, one of Horace Mann’s motivations for pushing the “common” school system was his vitriolic contempt for evangelical Protestant Christianity. The hicks in the rural Massachusetts countryside with their backward and barbaric adherence to traditional Calvinist theology – which had survived down through the centuries from the Puritan settlers – was repugnant to civilized and enlightened Boston-Brahmin Unitarians like himself.

Someone had to do something to rescue these culturally deprived children from their unenlightened parents! That’s why Mann’s schools had such a heavy emphasis on teaching the Bible – teaching it in a very particular way. Part of the school system’s purpose was cultural genocide against evangelicals, to use the power of the state to indoctrinate their children with unitarianism.

Provision of History and Civics instruction by State (government, generally) employees threatens democracy. The roots of the current US (and world) financial difficulty go very deep, to the establishment of the State-monopoly school system.

Comment at Joanne's Place (2010-06-21)

Joanne Jacobs notices a new confirmation of an old result: Kids Get Computers; Scores Fall. Harriet left a comment.

TIMSS results, among others, as long ago as 14 years indicated that computers add little to basic instruction. This result parallels a similar assessment of the contribution which early use of calculators makes to Math performance. These are statistical results–”facts”, if you will–which admit various explanations and suggest various extrapolations.

First, note that most of these studies of school performance use standardized tests of reading comprehension and Math. As a wise lady from the ETS once said: “We can’t measure what’s important so we measure what we can.” When Chubb and Moe determined to study the relation between institutional structure and school performance, they used student gains between 10th and 12 grade on standardized tests of reading, Math, and Science. They did not use Social Studies scores because Social Studies scores did not correlate with anything (which is pretty funny if you know anything about statistics).

Second, computers have transformed so many industries one might reasonably project that they will transform the education industry when decision-makers face an incentive structure which rewards the choice of effective means. At Jay Greene’s blog, guest blogger Matthew Ladner described a successful charter thus:

Carpe Diem is a 6-12 school with 240 students. A value added analysis of test scores found that they have the biggest gains in the state of Arizona. Their math results are really off the chart, with some grades averaging at the 98th percentile on Terra Nova. Carpe Diem is a hybrid model school, rotating kids between self-paced instruction on the computer and classroom instruction.

Perhaps in the Vigdor and Ladd study we see the result of inept implementation and not a defect in the principle.

Third, skills improve with practice, and people will practice what they enjoy. When programs adjust the practice which they present to any student to that student’s skill level and when programs compose infinitely variable practice routines, it’s hard to see how they will not enhance student performance. Consider computer chess.

As usual: “What works?” is an empirical question which only an experiment (a decentralized public-policy regime or a competitive market in goods and services) can answer.

Try This At Home.

Cato entitles a post "Don't Try This At Home, Kids", which contradicts the intent. Do try this at home. Conventional school is a huge waste of time for any child of normal-or-above ability. A loving parent can teach a normally bright infant to decode the phonetic alphabet before that child can speak. A loving parent can teach a normally bright child to add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers by age six, and to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions and decimals by age eight. With this preparation, children can start of the material high school teachers call "Algebra I", and with basic literacy and basic Algebra children can work independently on self-paced, self-selected studies. The conventional K-12 curriculum is a make-work program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel. Compulsion detracts from education.

A "Standard" Con

Joanne Jacobs observes the publication of Education Secretary Arne Duncan's national standards, in "Core Standards: The Final Version". Harriet left a comment, expanded below.

Arne Duncan is either stupid or dishonest, or both. The same goes for all other serious promoters of national standards. Amateurs who accept the arguments for government-imposed education standards succumb to magical thinking.

Some years ago Harriet took the grades which the Education Trust and the Fordham Institute gave to individual US States for their standards, converted these grades into numbers on a 0-4 point scale, and applied the EXCEL correlation function to these numbers and State-level NAEP scores. The correlation was negative.

A "standard" is a unit of measurement. A kilogram weight is a standard. A meter stick is a standard. A mark on a thermometer is a standard. Academic standards are to intellectual growth what kilogram weights are to physical growth. Platinum meter sticks will not make children taller and elaborate academic standards will not make children smarter.

"Uniformity shall prevail" say the control freaks, who would turn civilian society into an industrial army. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell argued that socialism originates in a hypertrophied sense of order, like compulsive handwashing or obsessively rearranging the socks drawer. Elsewhere, (e.g., "Raffles and Mrs. Blandish", "Inside the Whale"), Orwell suggests that a preference for authoritarian politics indicates vicarious sadism. In Socialism, Ludwig von Mises suggests that socialist leanings originate in a primitive revenge fantasy.

The State (government, generally) cannot subsidize education without a definition of "education". Public frustration with the ever-rising cost and marginal performance of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools (the "public" schools) prompts legislators and administrators to deflect criticism of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools with distractions such as "standards", which voters apparently expect authorities to wield against failing schools, as a nun would yield a ruler in catechism class. Problem is, insiders get to define the standards and wield the ruler. Internal accountability mechanisms fail, through a process which economists call "regulatory capture". In the case of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools the industry starts the process several steps along the path. The most effective accountability mechanisms that humans have yet devised are policies which give to unhappy customers the power to take their business elsewhere.

Humans are not standard.

Profit in Education

In "Not Welcome Sign = No R&D" EdReformer Tom Vander Ark relates the hostility of public sector employee organizations toward parent choice in education to the slow pace of innovation in the education industry. Vander Ark quotes an Oregon statute:...

All materials would become the property of the OVSD and the State of Oregon. OVSD would run all logistics for maintenance of this program (contracting, rate-setting, procurement, etc.).

The impact on incentives should be clear. Why would investors support the development of effective instructional methods if the State will steal them and deprive investors of any chance to recoup? One might draw an analogy to the disincentives to minerals exploration in countries where the State claims all sub-surface resources.

Joanne Jacobs noticed the Vander Ark article. A visitor (ceolaf) asked about the role of profit in the education industry and Harriet left a comment, with a botched link (the Joel Fried article, repaired in the expanded and revised comment below).

Thomas Sowell (Knowledge and Decisions) and Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom) discuss, in abstract, the role of markets in allocating resources to meet human wants. Myron Lieberman (Privatization and Educational Choice) discusses the role of market incentives in the education industry in particular. Friedrich Hayek addresses the role of markets (freedom, really) in generating information on human wants and resource availability, here. Please make time to read Hayek's brief essay.

“Profit” is a bookkeeping term, the difference between total revenues and total costs. An organization which has no line in its balance sheet for profit must attribute all revenues to costs. This says nothing about the motives of people in the organization.

Joel Fried
Pots and Kettles: Governance Practices of the Ontario Securities Commission, part 2 The Government’s Principal – Agent Problem.

2. The Government’s Principal – Agent Problem
The principal-agent problem for the private sector is well known: the owner/principal delegates to a manager/agent the responsibility to provide some services for the principal. The problem is one of structuring contracts and institutions to insure that, in carrying out her duties, the agent acts in the principal’s interest rather than her own.

Citizens of a country also face a principal – agent problem. Citizens “own” the machinery of government and employ bureaucrats to act as their agents in running this machinery. To reduce the costs of monitoring, the principals choose a legislature/board of directors to oversee the agents. Monitoring mechanisms are similar to those in the private sector: there are financial accounting standards that are met for each budgetary unit, and an external auditor checks these internal accounts. Transparency is maintained, in part, through freedom of information regulations. Compliance with procedures and other regulations are met both through internal monitoring and checks by units external to the bureau. Finally, contracts are structured, at least in a limited manner, to align the incentives for agents with those of the principals.

There is, however, an additional problem in the public sector that does not exist for private firms. The firm has a well defined objective function – the maximization of profits – whereas the apparent objective for the government is the maximization of some index of a (weighted) level of welfare of the electorate. An unambiguous index of social welfare has been impossible to construct (bold mine, HT) and, in its absence, monitoring the public sector is further complicated because data is generally lacking on whether or not the objective was actually approached and/or achieved and what the costs are that are linked to any specific objective. In effect, because of distribution issues and public goods, the cash flows measured with traditional accounting procedures will be, at best, only superficially correlated with that objective. Thus, looking at cash flows will provide the principals an extremely poor method of monitoring their public sector agents.

[As an aside, this last point: "...looking at cash flows will provide...an extremely poor method of monitoring...public sector agents" is why Harriet expects only marginal results from the popular "audit the DOE" imperative. As Harriet explained here, the difference between the demands which public-sector providers of education services make on taxpayers and students, on the one hand, and the tuition charged by schools in competitive markets, on the other, firmly establish the existence of gross waste and fraud in the US State-monopoly school system.]

Governments do not need to recognize “profit”; they could tax every dollar-denominated transaction. Markets do not need “profit”; contracts with investors could promise a percentage of receipts or a percentage of the amount lent (like a bond). Accounting rules which recognize “profit” allow a business to shield some revenue from taxation by deduction of research costs or capital expansion costs.

A market economy (a legal system which protects title to property and, by extension, enforces contracts) calibrates the rewards for the solution to resource allocation questions to the magnitude of the resources at issue and to the urgency of the question. “What do you want to eat for lunch?” is a question which becomes more urgent with every hour that passes since your last meal and which involves, over a nation of 300 million people, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food and prep time. A marginally better answer, such that several thousand people will spend an additional dime on lunch, or which saves a dime for each meal served to several thousand people, can make the person who finds that answer wealthy.

“What History (or Math, or poetry, etc.) should thirteen year-olds study?” is as inappropriate a question for citizens to pose to a State (government, generally) bureaucracy as “What size shoes should thirteen year-olds wear?” would be, as becomes obvious when one rephrases the question: “What Math material should my neighbor’s 13 year-old daughter study?” (what size shoes should she wear?). Remote authorities do not know this child. There is no good argument for taking from her mother the power to answer this question. Even if her mother needs help finding the answer, there is no good argument for restricting her choice of advisers to State (government, generally) employees.

As Harriet has written many times before, the US taxpayers' $555 billion+ per year age 5-18 education subsidy ($2.9 billion, Hawaii) significantly understates the cost of the current US State-monopoly school system.

The cost of the US State-monopoly school system includes the opportunity cost to students of the time they spend in school. It does not take 12 years to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. This opportunity cost appears as lost productivity in two forms: absent child labor and less practiced adult labor. Just as few adults will exhibit native fluency in language without early experience, "fluency" in carpentry, masonry, machine tool use, or other vocational skill depends on early experience.

The cost of the State-monopoly school system includes the cost of prison for the children of poor and minority parents who are ill-served by a school system designed by and for academics.

In support of the bureaucratic imperative to regulate and in the name of "equality" and "standards" the US State-monopoly school system imposes a uniformity of treatment upon an enormously diverse student population with a wide range of interests and aptitudes. Obvious costs include apathetic scholarship and perfunctory effort as adult workers. The cost of the US State-monopoly system also includes the opportunity cost to society of the lost innovation in instructional methods and individualization of curriculum which a competitive education industry would generate.

We walk over the Comstock Lode every day, unaware of the wealth beneath our feet.