65 Cent = Bad But Effective Policy 101

Eduwonk recently wrote about the backlash of conservative criticism directed toward the increasingly popular 65-cent solution. It’s a good piece, and I say that not just because Eduwonk links to an op-ed I wrote and also happens to sign my paycheck.

In a nutshell, the 65-cent solution proposes to require every school district in the nation to spend at least 65 percent of their operating dollars in a group of federally-created accounting categories collectively defined as “instruction.” I won’t go into the great number of reasons this is a mind-boggingly bad idea; the post and the numerous links within in it lay that out in gory detail. Less explored, but no less important, is the fact that the 65-cent movement is working. Policies are being implemented and laws are being passed. Indeed, the long run value of the 65-cent solution will not be it's impact on public education, which will be negligible, but as an object lesson in what happens when you get everything right except the policy itself. Here's what we've learned so far:

1) Start with a real problem. Public K-12 education is a $500 billion enterprise, and there are doubtless many ways in which it wastes money that could be better spent in the classroom. I live in Washington, DC, and the local newspapers are filled with that-would-be-funny-if-it-wasn’t-so-tragic examples of how DC Public Schools squanders the taxpayer dollar. My favorite: the principal who got busted for allegedly selling a school bus to a used car dealership in Panama.

2) Create a simple solution. The 65-cent solution is a marvel of brevity and political logic: According to the federal government (a neutral, inherently credible data source), only X percent of school spending is for “instruction.” All you have to do is make it X plus something, and you’ve increased funding for something voters value (classroom instruction) by taking it from something they don’t value (bureaucracy), as opposed to taking it from some other thing they also value (health care, public safety, their wallets).

3) Validate the idea. George Will got the ball rolling last year with a laudatory column (adding this to the long, long, list of things for which George Will must someday be held to account). Polls were conducted showing that 70 – 90 percent of people surveyed agree that painlessly increasing funding for classroom instructions sounds great.

4) Go directly to the people who matter. The 65-cent advocates have done a great job taking the issue directly to the governors, legislators, candidates, and other state policymakers in a position to put the issue on the public agenda and make the policy happen. There are really only a few people in any given state who can do this; once you’ve got them on your side you can afford to….

5) Ignore your critics, don’t engage them. The 65-cent solution has been roundly criticized in education policy circles by everyone from Gerald Bracey to Rick Hess and Checker Finn, and that, let me tell you, is a Grand Canyon-sized range of opinion. When the people who want to change nothing about public education and the people who want to change everything about public education both think you’re wrong, you’re not merely mistaken, you’ve created a towering monument to wrongness. But I’d be surprised to see any public response from 65-cent advocates to their growing chorus of conservative critics. Why bother? If the people writing the laws are on your side, everyone else can go pound sand.

The bigger lesson here is that this kind of thing wouldn’t be so easy to pull off if public officials weren’t so desperate to have something useful to tell their constituents about education, and so starved for new ways to do so. Anyone running for office knows that voters care about public schools. But the policy choices offered by traditional education interest groups tend to be frustratingly marginal (boutique programs and pilot projects), blindingly expensive (across-the-board class size reduction and/or teacher pay raises) or far too politicized, antagonistic, and controversial (vouchers). The 65-centers instead came along with an easy-to-explain, allegedly cost-free, superficially pro-teacher way to address an ostensibly legitimate problem. No one should be shocked by what happened next.

A few years from now, all of this will be forgotten. The policy will do nothing to help students; it’s just going to create a lot of tedious paperwork for accountants, regulators, and bureaucrats. In other words, it will do nothing other than create more of the non-instruction-related expenditures it's designed to reduce. Eventually somebody will get around to taking these useless laws off the books. By then the “First Class Education” Web site will be defunct and the 65-cent backers will have long since moved on. The best we can hope is that in the meantime somebody takes their winning playbook and used it to implement policies that will actually improve public schools.