Students’ Test Scores Unchanged After Decades of Federal Intervention in Education

Federal “Highly Qualified Teacher” mandates. Adequate Yearly Progress requirements. Smaller learning communities. Improving Teacher Quality State Grants. Reading First. Early Reading First. The dozens of other federal programs authorized via No Child Left Behind. School Improvement Grants. Race to the Top. Common Core.

All of that has been just since 2000. Over those past two decades, while federal policymakers were busy enacting new federal laws, creating mandates for local school leaders, and increasing the Department of Education’s budget from $38 billion in 2000 (unadjusted for inflation) to roughly $70 billion today, the math and reading performance of American high school students remained completely flat. That is to say, stagnant.

The U.S. is now above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average in reading, but alas, not because U.S. reading performance has improved. Rather, other countries have seen declines in reading achievement, despite increases in education spending.

In mathematics, however, U.S. performance has steadily declined over the past two decades.

Those are the findings from the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA exams, released last week.

As The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein reported:

About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old, according to Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the exam.

What’s more, the achievement gap between high- and low-performing American students has widened.

The international findings mirror last month’s National Assessment of Educational Progress report, which revealed that math and reading scores across the country have continued a yearslong stagnation, with students largely showing no progress in academic achievement.

Just one-third of students in the fourth and eighth grades reached proficiency in math and reading nationally on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is administered every two years.

As with the Programme for International Student Assessment’s findings that the achievement gap stubbornly persists for American students, the National Assessment of Educational Progress highlighted similar findings within the U.S.

The scores of students who are among the lowest 10% of performers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have dropped significantly since 2009.

The stubborn achievement gap is not new, but the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Programme for International Student Assessment provide additional data points on its persistence.

As Harvard professor Paul Peterson writes in The Heritage Foundation’s new book “The Not-So-Great Society”:

The achievement gap in the United States is as wide today as it was in 1971.

The performances on math, reading, and science tests between the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged students differ by approximately four years’ worth of learning, a disparity that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly half a century.

One of the more recent, major pieces of federal intervention sold as a way to improve American standing in education was the Common Core State Standards Initiative promoted during the Obama administration.

Common Core national standards and test, proponents argued, would catapult American students to the top of the math and reading pack. It was time, they argued, for the U.S. to have the same “epiphany” Germany did in the late 1990s, and adopt centrally planned national standards and tests.

Germany now lags the U.S. in reading, according to the new Programme for International Student Assessment data, and is far below Canada, a country that does not have national standards.

Indeed, our neighbor to the north has performed consistently well on the Programme for International Student Assessment since 2000, significantly outpacing the United States, and has neither national standards, nor a federal education department.

Canada’s is a decentralized education system, in which Canada’s 10 provinces set education policy.

The fact that Common Core didn’t catalyze improvements in the U.S. isn’t surprising. Large-scale government programs rarely, if ever, do.

But neither have the myriad federal programs created since No Child Left Behind in 2001, nor have the more than 100 federal K-12 education programs created since President Lyndon Johnson launched his Great Society initiative in 1965 designed, ostensibly, to narrow opportunity gaps between the poor and the affluent.

Heritage’s Jonathan Butcher and I detail Yuval Levin’s theory of government failure in “The Not-So-Great Society.” Levin explains that large-scale government programs fail for three reasons:

“Institutionally, the administrative state is ‘dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety.’”

“Culturally and morally, government efforts to ‘rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility [have] undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government.’”

“Fiscally, large-scale federal programs supporting the welfare state are simply unaffordable, ‘dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.’”

Federal government efforts to improve education have been dismal. Even if there were a constitutional basis for its involvement—which there isn’t—the federal government is simply ill-positioned to determine what education policies will best serve the diverse local communities across our vast nation.

The sooner we can acknowledge that improvements will not come from Washington, the sooner we’re likely to see students flourishing in learning environments that reflect their unique needs and desires.

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Cutting Tuition Prices So Students Can Borrow Less

In the past few years, large public universities have garnered headlines by freezing tuition. Purdue University, the Pennsylvania State System, and every public four-year university in Virginia have all frozen tuition and fees. And three University of North Carolina schools—UNC Pembroke, Western Carolina University, and Elizabeth City State University—have cut tuition to $500 per semester for in-state students. That reduction is a boon to students and parents who must foot the tuition bill. But it is made easier by taxpayer subsidies; state universities aren’t entirely tuition-dependent for their revenues.

Small private universities often find it more difficult to keep tuition down, but it can be done. Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina is one example. Belmont Abbey cut tuition 33 percent in 2013-2014, to $18,500, where it has stayed for six years. In an interview with the Martin Center, Belmont Abbey president Bill Thierfelder and CFO Allan Mark explained how and why they made such a dramatic change.

Thierfelder said that making tuition affordable has always been a priority for him. When he arrived at Belmont Abbey in 2004, he cut tuition for the college’s non-traditional program. As a Catholic institution, Belmont Abbey has always prioritized keeping its doors open—a tradition that began with the Benedictine monks who founded the institution. Belmont Abbey has always attracted students from the middle class and those with large families. Keeping it affordable was a necessity.

Thierfelder and his team considered cutting tuition for the school’s traditional program in 2004 as well but found that other small private schools that had tried to do so had failed.

“It’s the Chivas Regal effect,” he said. People often associate higher tuition costs with a better standard of education, even if that’s not the case. But after the recession, parents and students starting looking for universities that were less expensive. Now, Thierfelder says, “65 percent of the market stops looking at schools with a sticker price above $24,000.” It gave the school an opening—an opportunity to lower tuition without being hurt by it.

The plan worked. Belmont Abbey saw its revenues actually increase in the first year after the tuition cut. The increase allowed the school to start an Honors College and offer Honors College Scholarships. It also provides institutional aid to more than 90 percent of its students. At the same time, students are borrowing less. According to Thierfelder, it’s a form of good stewardship—for the students and for the college.

The school has always paid careful attention to its expenditures. “General administration is very lean,” Thierfelder said. “We don’t have layers. We just have very hardworking people who believe in our mission and vision.”

Thierfelder also noted that many colleges and universities are in debt because of their buildings. “We are different,” he said. “Very cautious about expansion. We refurbish, expand, reuse. We are keeping things up to date, but we won’t overspend on it. We’re very careful about the financing. And always looking at the bottom line.”

The tuition cut spurred additional changes to make the school even more efficient by integrating departments, cross-training people, and recapturing unused space. The changes saved $1 million in general administration.

Enrollment has also increased since the cut. This year’s freshman class was the school’s largest-ever at 430. Ideally, Thierfelder said, enrollment will grow to somewhere between 1,800 and 2,200. That size will allow Belmont Abbey to remain personal but also offer students more options.

“Our students leave with Aristotelian friendships. We don’t want to lose that,” Thierfelder said.

Those friendships are just one part of what makes Belmont Abbey special. And one reason that Thierfelder believes the school will be able to weather the coming demographic decline.

Belmont Abbey differentiates itself from many universities today that give students almost unlimited choice—with little direction. It focuses on the kind of education that prepares students to “lead a good life.”

“Foundationally, we believe in seeking the truth, wherever that is found—sciences, humanities,” Thierfelder explained. Belmont Abbey professors teach students to “think, reason, follow the truth.”

But that’s not all. “Getting a technical education is good, but does not teach you to live a good life. The ability to make a living and provide for yourself and your family is important, but not enough,” Thierfelder said. Belmont Abbey includes moral formation in its mission. “It’s more than just the intellectual,” he explained. “It’s body, mind, and soul.”

Belmont Abbey believes its plan will continue to attract students even as the market shrinks. “The challenge for all small liberal arts schools is to be true to your mission and responsive to the marketplace,” Thierfelder says. “If your mission isn’t noble, honorable, and worthy, you probably won’t make it. If you just offer a generic product, you won’t survive. Small, personal liberal arts colleges must inspire, compel, draw people in. That’s what we do.”

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Did You Know? College Textbook Prices Have Increased 88% Since 2006

Among presidential candidates, many campaign platforms have a plan to lower college costs. There’s no question that college costs have increased, but textbook prices have seen the sharpest increase—88 percent since 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Textbook companies work the same as any other large corporation: They strive to maximize their profits. When researchers at the University of Michigan looked into why prices have increased so much, they found that the textbook market has some similarities to the prescription drug market. Both markets rely on third parties (student loans or health insurance companies) to pay for textbooks or drugs for the consumer. When the person paying for something isn’t the person using it, the seller can increase their price without losing a customer.

As journalist Noam Cohen explained in The New York Times:

A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it.

Statehouses have tried to control pricing by legislative action. Since 2007, more than 85 bills in 27 states have been proposed to deal with high textbook prices. And many universities have begun taking matters into their own hands by creating affordable textbook options, such as digital textbooks, renting textbooks, and open textbooks that are free to use. On an individual level, professors have also taken action to keep textbook prices low for students by being more judicious in what books they assign.

If colleges made policies to purchase books directly from publishers, it could help students avoid higher prices in bookstores. They could also create a student marketplace where textbooks could be resold to students who need them. Already, 67 percent of students buy used textbooks, according to a 2017 survey, so the demand exists. But state laws and more action by college officials and professors can’t rein in textbook prices. So long as buying textbooks are a requirement for class, and students have the ability to pay thanks to student loans, prices will remain high.

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