What billions can buy

Warren Buffett will soon give $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose chief domestic priority is education. If the money is used to promote free market reforms, it could change the world. But if it is poured into the existing system, Mr. Buffett himself may well outlive its effects.

Mr. Buffett and the Gateses are not the first to invest over a billion dollars in an ambitious school reform plan. Ambassador and TV Guide mogul Walter Annenberg trod this path during the 1990s, donating $500 million of his own money and another $800 million in matching funds to the "Annenberg Challenge." Mr. Annenberg's goal was to create exemplary schools and districts that would act as models for the nation. He sought not incremental change, but systemwide transformation. He didn't get it. Though some Annenberg Challenge projects showed promise, at least for a time, their impact on the system as a whole was negligible.

Why? The Wreck of the Annenberg can be attributed to a single fundamental flaw in the ambassador's approach: he assumed that excellence, once demonstrated, would automatically be imitated. It is easy to see why people who have amassed riches in the private sector might assume that successful models are always mimicked on a broad scale. That is what happens in competitive markets – including competitive education markets.

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith praised the vigorous education industry of classical Athens, noting that: "The demand for ... instruction produced, what it always produces, the talent for giving it; and the emulation which an unrestrained competition never fails to excite appears to have brought that talent to a very high degree of perfection." But the "emulation" that Mr. Annenberg was counting on never happened because there was no competition to "excite" it. Absent market forces, America's public school monopoly has no mechanism by which excellence can be routinely identified, perpetuated and disseminated. As a result, there are myriad examples of public school excellence achieved and then lost.

Many readers will remember the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, celebrating real-life Los Angeles public school teacher Jaime Escalante. Mr. Escalante painstakingly built a rigorous math program at Garfield High School, enabling an unprecedented number of its low-income, mostly Hispanic students to take and pass the Advanced Placement calculus test. His results were so good that many observers literally couldn't believe them, and his students were forced to retake the test – on which they succeeded admirably once again. In a competitive industry, a star like Mr. Escalante would have been rapidly promoted. He would soon have been designing curricula and training teachers for the benefit of thousands or even millions of children. He got threats and hate mail instead.

Because he successfully taught difficult material to classrooms of 50 or more students, Mr. Escalante drew the ire of his own colleagues. The local union contract stipulated that teachers could not serve more than 35 children per class, and Mr. Escalante's achievements made that stipulation seem gratuitous and self-serving. The union balked, the threats started, and Mr. Escalante's chairmanship of the math department was revoked in 1990. He left a year later.

The dysfunctional incentive structure of our public school monopoly is not only incapable of sustaining excellence, it actually works to crush it by setting the interests of school employees against those of students and parents. Countless other exemplary teachers and model schools have failed to transform the system for this reason. So the $30 billion question is: Will Mr. Buffett and the Gateses pursue the same ill-fated course? These are brilliant people, but there is reason to worry. Echoing Walter Annenberg, Melinda Gates recently told a reporter that she "thought, if you get enough [small schools] going across the country, people will realize they're good, and more and more will pop up."

It's a promising idea. In both atmosphere and test scores, small schools often enjoy an edge over institutions enrolling thousands of students. The problem is that, without altering the dysfunctional incentive structure that produced our current low-performing, Titanic-sized schools, the Foundation's successes are apt to be isolated and short-lived. As Adam Smith argued and Mr. Annenberg demonstrated, you need competition to drive the spread of good ideas.

But if there is reason to worry, there is also reason for hope. What did the Gateses present Mr. Buffett as a thank-you for his unprecedented generosity? A copy of The Wealth of Nations. So Mr. Buffett and the Gateses have a choice of futures. They can risk frittering away the largest philanthropic donation in history on a system they know, on some level, to be bankrupt, or they can work to introduce the same market forces that are responsible for growth and innovation in every other field – and that made classical Athens the wellspring of Western culture.

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It's time to give parents a chance

Post lifted from Betsy Newmark

Clint Bolick writes in the Wall Street Journal (subscription req'd) about a suit being filed in Newark, NJ seeking to give 60,000 students trapped in failing schools by giving their parents the money to transfer their children out of the horrible schools to attend schools of their choice.

Seeking to vindicate the state constitutional guarantee of a "thorough and efficient" education, the plaintiffs in Crawford v. Davy ask that children be allowed to leave public schools where fewer than half of the students pass the state math and language literacy assessments that measure educational proficiency; and that the parents of these children be permitted to take the pro rata share of the public money spent on their children, to seek better opportunities in other public or private schools. Supporting the families are three prominent New Jersey groups: the Black Ministers Council, the Latino Leadership Alliance, and Excellent Education for Everyone.

Sounds like groups that care more about students' education than the public school teachers' union. Note that these parents have gone beyond what such suits normally ask for - more money for the school districts to equalize what one school district receives compared to more successful districts. Perhaps that is because New Jersey is already spending huge sums of money on their public schools and not seeing the results they desire.

New Jersey courts have for their part repeatedly recognized that the state constitution's education guarantee is judicially enforceable; and the state itself has set the minimum proficiency standards to which the defendant school districts in Crawford v. Davy fall appallingly short. New Jersey is also the state that has traveled farthest down the path of pursuing educational adequacy through new school funding and programs -- starting in 1973, when the state Supreme Court first declared the state's school finance system unconstitutional in Robinson v. Cahill and again in 1985 in Abbott v. Burke. Today, dozens of schools in the so-called Abbott districts remain under court control. With abundant funding, some Abbott schools have improved, while others haven't. On balance, however, the New Jersey experience demonstrates that money alone cannot solve the ills of public education.

One of the defendant school districts in the new suit, Englewood City, spends $19,194 per student, well over twice the national average. But at Dismus Middle School, over two-thirds of the students do not have basic proficiency in math and fewer than half are proficient in language arts literacy. Newark, a recipient of massive Abbott funding, spends $16,351 per student and pays its teachers an average salary of $76,213. Yet in 24 of its schools, fewer than half the students demonstrate basic proficiency in math or language arts. At William H. Brown Academy and at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School, fewer than one of every 10 students demonstrates basic math proficiency. It's time to try something else for these children.(emphasis added)

Those are amazing numbers of per-student spending. Clear evidence that increasing spending doesn't correlate with improving student performance. As Bolick says,

New Jersey courts have for their part repeatedly recognized that the state constitution's education guarantee is judicially enforceable; and the state itself has set the minimum proficiency standards to which the defendant school districts in Crawford v. Davy fall appallingly short. New Jersey is also the state that has traveled farthest down the path of pursuing educational adequacy through new school funding and programs -- starting in 1973, when the state Supreme Court first declared the state's school finance system unconstitutional in Robinson v. Cahill and again in 1985 in Abbott v. Burke. Today, dozens of schools in the so-called Abbott districts remain under court control. With abundant funding, some Abbott schools have improved, while others haven't. On balance, however, the New Jersey experience demonstrates that money alone cannot solve the ills of public education.

One of the defendant school districts in the new suit, Englewood City, spends $19,194 per student, well over twice the national average. But at Dismus Middle School, over two-thirds of the students do not have basic proficiency in math and fewer than half are proficient in language arts literacy. Newark, a recipient of massive Abbott funding, spends $16,351 per student and pays its teachers an average salary of $76,213. Yet in 24 of its schools, fewer than half the students demonstrate basic proficiency in math or language arts. At William H. Brown Academy and at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School, fewer than one of every 10 students demonstrates basic math proficiency. It's time to try something else for these children.

This puts the courts in a quandary. They have recognized that it is a violation of students' rights to send them to such awful schools. They've tried over and over to improve the schools by spending scads of money on them. So, clearly, more money is not the answer, but I don't expect to see the education blob to recognize that. However, Bolick is right that it is time to try something new. It's not enough for a child to say that we hope schools will improve sometime in the future. Children don't have the time to wait if they're stuck in terrible schools and every year puts them further behind. They need a change now, before it's too late and the gap in their education becomes insurmountable. This is a case to watch for what it could mean. Why shouldn't we apply competition to education just as we do in other aspects of our lives. We've tried everything else. Let schools realize that if they fail their students, they will lose the students and the funding attached to those children. But at least, let those parents who wish, get their kids out of these failed schools. Now.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

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