The Big Con

I'm reading the new book from New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait, The Big Con. It's really good, describing how "American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane." Chait shows how a combination of crackpot (i.e. supply-side) economics, big business interests, and Republican political strategy led to a unified theory of governance monomaniacally centered on tax cuts for the wealthy, the cost of which the nation is only beginning to pay.

While this ostensibly a book about taxes and politics, there are also several important lessons for education.

First, tax policy matters. Education finance analyses generally takes place at one of three altitudes: There's the 500-foot perspective, which looks at how school districts distribute funds among schools. There's the always-popular 5,000-foot analysis of how states distribute money among school districts. And there's even the 20,000-foot look at how the federal government distributes funds among states.

But school funding analysis rarely rises to the upper-atmosphere perspective of tax and budget policy writ large. Which is too bad, because these issues often matter most of all.

Illinois is a perfect example. The state has what is widely acknowledged as a terrible school funding system. Gaps in per-student funding between the richest and poorest districts are among the highest in the nation, as are disparities between high- and low-minority districts. Not surprisingly, achievement gaps for disadvantaged kids are also unusually large.

The solution to this problem is also widely known. The state needs to increase state taxes, preferably by increasing it's 3.0 % income tax, which is low and--unlike federal and most other state income taxes--flat, with the richest Illinois resident paying the same rate as the poorest. It then needs to use that money to replace local school property taxes, the source of the inequity.

This could be accomplished in a completely revenue-neutral way--a dollar reduction in local property taxes for every dollar increase in state income taxes. But because Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich--a Democrat--ran for election on the standard "no new taxes" pledge borne of the virulent anti-tax mania Chait describes, needed school finance reforms in Illinois have been stymied at every turn. What began in the 1970s as a Wall Street Journal editorial page fantasy--the "Laffer curve" idea that cutting taxes on the rich could raise revenues--is damaging the education of millions of disadvantaged students in Illinois and similar states today.

Second, irrational tax hatred hurts students in lots of ways beyond short-changing the schools themselves. Some people think we expect too much of public education when it comes to poor kids, that we'd be better off strengthening the income, housing, health care, and nutrition of low-income families. If that's your take on things, Grover Norquist-type tax haters are still your enemy, since they pretty much confine their animus to taxes on rich people and huge corporations. As a result, the income of low- and middle-income people is reduced because they pay more taxes (mostly payroll and sales taxes) than they should. Plus, the haters have undermined the fiscal integrity of states and the federal government, reducing resources available for the housing, health care, food, etc. that disadvantaged children need.

Finally, The Big Con is in many ways a primer on the power of ideas. In this case, an unbelievably bad idea, but those are important to understand too. As Chait notes, the anti-tax orthodoxy that has come to define the Republican party has neither a theoretical nor a popular foundation. Supply-side economics are bunk and always have been, and poll after poll shows that given a choice, most Americans don't want to slash taxes for the well-off when they could use the money to cut deficits or invest in schools instead.

Yet anti-tax crusaders have won victory after victory by linking superficially compelling rhetoric with political interests and a general willingness to lie. The magnitude of the result in reshaping the nation's political and fiscal landscape for the worse is hard to overstate. The lesson is clear: ideas make a difference. Bad ideas need to be understood and dealt with, and good ideas can move mountains, if they're expressed and used in the right way. If, as Chait makes clear, an unforgivably wrong idea can make education and many other things much worse, a correspondingly great idea could make it that much better.

Wrong Said Fred

Long-time actor, occasional politician, and allegedly viable presidential candidate Fred Thompson has this to say about NCLB (via HuffPost):

"No Child Left Behind _ good concept, I'm all for testing _ but it seems like now some of these states are teaching to the test and kind of making it so that everybody does well on the test _ you can't really tell that everybody's doing that well. And it's not objective" Thompson said. Instead, he said the federal government should be providing block grants as long as states set up objective testing programs. He said his message to states would be, "We expect you to get objective testing done and publicize those tests for the local parents and for the local citizens and suffer the political ramifications locally if things don't work out right."

Thompson thus joins Bill Richardson among the ranks of grasping candidates who chose this week to not even try to be coherent, meaningful, or useful in discussing the education law.

The Enduring Hope*

Our public schools are increasingly segregated for Latino students, according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center report. So I'm not sure what to make of this new stamp.

As Hispanic Heritage Month begins (tomorrow), the U.S. postal service commemorates the 1945 Mendez v. Westminster case, which successfully challenged the school segregation of Mexican children in four California districts. Great video on the Mendez case here. In short, the lawsuit was filed on behalf of 5,000 Mexican-American children, Sylvia Mendez among them, who were denied entry into all-white elementary schools. The district court ruled in favor of Mendez, the decision was appealed and two years later upheld. The 1947 ruling stated that it was discriminatory and unconstitutional to send children of Mexican descent to separate schools. Many folks don't know that this case laid the groundwork for Brown vs. Board of Education seven years later.

I want to be happy about this stamp-- Mendez case deserves its props--but I can't help but think what a sad coincidence it is that we are commemorating desegregation efforts amidst reports about how segregated our schools still are, particularly for Latinos, and on the heels of the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to strike down school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville. Maybe it is a call to reflect in a "lest we forget" or "at least we tried- didn't we?" way. Either way, it's a sobering reminder that this isn't over, even if we want it to be.

*in Justice Kennedy's opinion, that race should not matter but too often does.

Poor George

Poor George Miller. The chairman on the House education and labor committee seems to need a new friends and family plan in the wake of his proposed revisions to NCLB. First one of his closest confederates during the drafing of NCLB in 2001, the Education Trust , attacks Miller's plan as "flawed, flimsy, and phony." And now the California Teachers Association, the mega-powerful union in Miller's home state and a natural ally of the liberal Democrat, is launching a media campaign savaging NCLB, Miller's proposed revisions, and Miller himself.

The Trust is bent out shape about Miller's proposal to base NCLB's school-rating system on more than statewide reading and math skills tests, and the CTA has gone nuclear because Miller wants to experiment with performance-based pay for teachers.

Miller deserves better. He has acknowledged NCLB's many flaws and is making a determined effort to fix them.

It would be nice if the good folks at the Trust--and they are a great group of people--did the same thing. Their man George could use the support.

The CTA, on the other hand, may be a lost cause. Trashing Miller is a truly self-destructive exercise. There's no one in the Congress who cares more about teaching and teachers. And it's not his fault that he gets the fact that only if we find ways to make teaching more attractive work are we going to draw the sorts of people into the nation's classrooms who can make traditional public schools worth attending, preserving teachers' jobs and teacher unions in the process. The CTA's honchos should read Rick Kahlenberg's new biography of Al Shanker. Shanker figured out the basic union reform calculus two decades ago.

Lost in fray is a smallish provision in the new Miller NCLB blueprint that may have the biggest impact on the direction of public education. It's one that gives states incentives to craft new, tougher standards and tests pegged to national and international benchmarks. If it survives the NCLB firefight in the coming months, it would move the nation's badly fragmented public education system one step closer to the sort of coherent national system that has produced so many well-educated citizenries in Europe and Asia. For reasons that are explained here, Miller's NCLB plan is exhibit A for why we need national standards and tests.

The Purpose of Testing

The Post reports today that Maryland will replace written-response questions with multiple-choice questions on its high school exit exams so they can be graded more quickly. All of the districts want to get their test results back faster than the month or so it currently takes so there's near unanimity for this change among superintendents. And the state's deputy superintendent for academic policy claims that advances in test development means that we can now make multiple choice questions "as good or better" than constructed (written) responses. True that tests are far more advanced and sophisticated than they once were. But even with the best tests, there is still the question of what it is we're trying to measure. I find it hard to believe that there is a multiple choice test that can meaningfully assess a student's writing ability or, in the state's own language, a student's ability to "read, review and respond to texts". In part I'm frustrated because I've spent countless hours at home hearing from my Maryland English teacher husband about the poor quality of students' writing and watching him (and admittedly helping him) review hundreds of "brief constructed responses" or "BCRs" because that's what the state has decided was good practice. So what now? It's good to practice but okay not to master? Are we okay with Maryland high school students knowing the elements of good writing but not knowing how to actually write? I'm not.

Nothing to See Here

Bill Richardson has a remarkably useless op-ed in USA Today today, calling for the abolishment of No Child Left Behind. Why does he want to "scrap it"? I have no idea. The piece is just a series of unsupported cliches and selective statistics that could be rearranged in random order to no discernible effect. If Richardson has better ideas about how to improve education, it apparently didn't occur to him to implement them in New Mexico, which has some of the lowest NAEP scores in the country for low-income and Latino students. That the op-ed concludes by Richardson essentially saying "I'll do whatever the NEA wants me to do" at the same time that he's running at 2 percent percent in the latest Washington Post / ABC News presidential primary polls is, I'm sure, just a coincidence.

Note to High Performing High Schools: Mind the Gap

On the front page of the Washington Post today, there’s an article about racial achievement gaps in SAT scores at local “high performing” high schools. The gist of the article is that high overall SAT scores at some high schools hide the fact that average scores for African American students at these schools are much lower. This is precisely why NCLB requires data to be disaggregated by subgroup—so that even the “good” schools have to make sure that every student is at least reaching proficiency in reading and math.

The article focuses on the role of families—that parents need to make sure their children aren’t falling through the cracks, that they’re taking advantage of honors and AP courses, and that they receive extra help when needed. But what the article doesn’t mention is that parents don’t have to wait until their child is a junior in high school to find out whether achievement gaps are a problem. State assessment scores can provide a warning sign before students sit down for the SAT.

Last year, I wrote about big achievement gaps on the state assessment at the much-vaulted Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County, Maryland—in Algebra 2, the gap between white students and African American students is over 50 percentage points, and in English it’s over 40 percentage points. These are the two primary subject areas on the SAT, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that at Whitman white students score on average 315 points higher than African American students on the SAT.

Some might say that the number of African American students in these schools is just too small to make these kinds of comparisons, but there’s a difference between statistical significance—having enough students to make a statistical judgment on the difference between two groups—and practical significance, which asks whether the difference between two groups is large enough to be meaningful. And an achievement gap of 50 percentage points on the state assessment is absolutely meaningful.

Perhaps articles like this one will spur some "high performing" high schools to pay more attention to these gaps and ensure that students in every group--however small that group may be--receive the academic support they need to perform well on the state assessment and SAT.

Debating NCLB

As Elena notes below, the House Committee on Education and Labor had a big full-committee hearing today on No Child Left Behind reauthorization, focusing on the recent discussion draft which we've been discussing at length (here and here) at Q&E for the last week. I had a chance to testify on the first panel (there were four more as the day went on) along with John Podesta from CAP, Jack Jennings from the Center on Education Policy, Standford's Linda Darling-Hammond, and others.

It was fun; committee member attendance was high and there's always a lot of energy in a hearing with a packed audience and many more waiting in line outside to get in. You only get five minutes to talk, though, and there's this little backwards-counting digital clock thing (like the ones they use for bombs in the movies) on the desk in front of you that lights up red when your time is up. Stressful! So my comments were a very abridged version of this, but with many more uses of the word "Um."

There's definitely a middle-groundedness to the proposal; when you read the statements of advocates like Ed Trust and CCCR on the one hand, and the NEA on the other, they read like mirror images: everything the one likes the other hates, and vice versa. I'm generally not a fan of the "if we're getting it from both sides we must be on track" trope--a lot of times that just means you've split the difference in the worst possible way--but in this case I think there's truth in that, particularly as a starting point for the politically perilous negotiations to come.

Right Now: House Hearings on NCLB

The House Committee on Education and Labor is holding hearings all day today on NCLB 2. Check out the schedule and listen to the live webcast, going on right now.

Update: Read Kevin's full testimony to the committee here.