A Stitch in Haste

I have no problem with people who have a problem with No Child Left Behind. Elementary and secondary education is historically the domain of the states. It should be administered (though, in a utopian world, neither provided nor funded) by the states. The federal government should have no role whatsoever -- financial, regulatory or otherwise -- in basic education. Indeed, under the (dead) doctrine of fiscal federalism, NCLB would never even have been proposed, let alone enacted.

Okay fine, so why am I upset about this New York Times article?

Report Faults Bush Initiative on Education

Concluding a yearlong study on the effectiveness of President Bush's sweeping education law, No Child Left Behind, a bipartisan panel of lawmakers drawn from many states yesterday pronounced it a flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that has usurped state and local control of public schools.

Now I am certainly no apologist for this President, but the last time I checked Congress played a role, quite a big one, in passing laws, including NCLB. (Remember "I'm just a Bill"?).

Yes, Bush pressed for NCLB, but is it really fair to call it "his" law? It's the federal government's law. It's Congress' law every bit as much as it's the President's law.

Note also how the Times describes the criticism of the law as "bipartisan," but not the law itself (which passed 384-45). Go figure.

Nitpicky, perhaps, but with the Times that comes with the territory.

Fault Bush for NCLB all you want -- you'll here nary a peep from me. So long as you also fault every Senator or Representative, Democrat or Republican (or Socialist), who voted for it back in 2001.

After all, fair is fair.

Hat tip to Government Bytes.

The single-topic blog JuryGeek has an excellent post on the increasing prevalence of "jury illiteracy" --

[W]hy are 95% of students not receiving an education on the branch of government they are most likely to personally participate in?

The answer is obvious: the jury system is not mentioned in the standardized achievement tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind act.

I'm actually a big fan of standardized aptitude tests such as the SAT, GMAT and LSAT. But standardized achievement tests, such as college AP exams or of course the bar exam, cannot escape some element of content bias, a/k/a "teach the test."

Now if the body of knowledge within a field is clearly demarcated and universally agreed upon, then perhaps a standardized achievement test poses little downside risk. AP Chemistry is, um, chemistry — there's little if any debate about exactly what a student should have learned going into the test. Even the bar exam is probably defensible on those grounds. There may be too much material subject to testing, but exactly what that material is has been very clearly delineated, at least on the Multistate Bar Examination if not on the state-specific portions.

It's hard to imagine how value judgments or personal preferences could find their way onto an AP Chemistry exam, or even the MBE. But when you expand standardized achievement testing to more nebulous concepts such as "American History" or "English Literature" or "Economics" or "Third Grade," the external canonical constraint on the examiner is no longer present. Choices about content now have to be made and priorities set. Of course, such choices had to be made before NCLB too — but they were made by the teachers, and the school districts and the states and maybe even the parents. Now they're made by Washington.

And that can't be good.

Perhaps the exclusion of jury instruction was merely a case of benign neglect — an oversight. Perhaps it will be changed some day. But how long will that take? How much more quickly can teachers and the local educational bureaucracies correct oversights and adapt to changing curricular needs and priorities? But with NCLB, it will all become about "teaching the test." And it will be Washington's test.

That idea flunks the smell test.

UPDATE: To clarify, and to address a concern raised in the comments, NCLB does not create a single, federal set of standardized tests. Rather, it requires the states, as a precondition to receiving federal education funding, to implement a standardized testing scheme of their own choosing -- so long as that scheme meets NCLB requirements.

I'm not sure the distinction between "federal tests" and "state tests that meet federal standards" is very meaningful. Either is troubling.

A detailed description of NCLB's testing requirements prepared by the Congressional Research Service can be found here.

If old habits die hard, then centuries-old habits might well be immortal:

Through grass-root groups like Save Georgia Summers ... Save Our Summers in North Carolina and Texans for a Traditional School Year, parents are barging into state legislatures, demanding change. In some cases, they are prevailing. Last year in North Carolina, a petition and e-mail drive led to a new law that says public schools cannot start their year before Aug. 25. Wisconsin recently set its start date as any time after Sept. 1. Beginning next year in Minnesota, public schools cannot open before Labor Day.

Of all the problems we face in this country regarding our children, being in school too much is not among them.

This ancient agrarian nonsense about giving kids the summer off serves no purpose whatsoever in the Twenty-First Century, but does generate significant disadvantages. As the Times story mentions, "summer learning loss" is well documented. We do our kids a huge disservice by imposing this unnecessary educational burden on them.

Summer vacation apologists offer two different justifications for the obsolete school calendar:

--It interferes with vacations, summer camps, youth sports leagues and similar "enrichments." Which is fine -- if parents can afford them. But the reciprocal effect is also present -- summer vacation is often a burden for working-class or single parents rather than an "opportunity."

--It costs too much to run air conditioning in southern schools during the summer. That doesn't even deserve the dignity of a response. It costs money to heat northern schools during the winter -- why not give northern kids the entire winter off too?

School should imitate life as much as possible. Kids should learn, as soon as they're ready, the lessons of adult life above and beyond the three R's: some people are taller, or smarter, or more talented than others; some families have more money than others; sometimes bad things happen to good people; effort usually leads to success; and so on.

Showing kids that "life is year-round" certainly couldn't hurt either.

How is this possible?

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.

"It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college," Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday.

I guarantee you private high schools are not contributing to these shortfalls. If they did, then the government (not to mention tuition-paying parents) would swarm down on them like a plague of flaming hail. But public schools always seem to get a bye, No Child Left Behind notwithstanding.

First and foremost, schools must eradicate the scourge of "social promotion." It does neither students nor society any good to create socially-accepted illiterates.

Second, all bilingual education must end. Teach English as a Second Language to be sure. But every study and anecdote shows that total immersion is the only effective way to learn a language. And of course the wholesale child abuse of bringing Ebonics into the classroom must also end.

Third, make the teachers unions accept their fair share of the blame.

Fourth, vouchers would be nice.

The sole argument for public elementary and secondary education is that there are substantial positive externalities to having a universally-educated populace. So what happens to that rationalization when schools aren't actually creating such a populace?

I thought it was the libertarians who went around "shrugging" all the time — not the educrats. Go figure.

ACT's data available here.

Other thoughts at Atlantic Blog.

Have you heard of the College Board's Center for Innovative Thought?

Have you heard of their recent report, "Teachers and the Uncertain American Future"?

You know, the one that wants to make education even more subject to federal command-and-control, more socialist, and more expensive, than it already is:

We recommend a national fund, a Teachers’ Trust, devoted to supporting these reforms and financed by a federal appropriation, matched by state and local revenues and a special assessment on corporate windfall profits.

The total recommendation is for an extra $64.5 billion dollars per year, every year, just for teacher salaries.

The very next sentence after the numbers are broken down:

The increases described in this document are modest.
I'd hate to see their idea of a "bold" increase.

A guest blogger at Joanne Jacobs sums it all up nicely:

[I]f we're going to have the political capital for a Teacher's Trust (complete with big signs and official letterhead and all that jazz), why not just legislate a minimum wage for high school teachers at $70,000 entry, and automatic $7,500/year raises for the first ten years? Because that's how much money you're going to have to pay to attract the sort of teachers I know you want — people like my friends from law school who are brilliant, enthusiastic, personable, creative, knowledgeable, and making a quarter of a million dollars a year at age 30.

Indeed — a minimum wage for ultra-unskilled workers is a "human right," but a minimum wage for ultra-skilled teachers that obviates the need for a massive new federal educational bureaucracy is apparently too simple a solution for this task force. Go figure.

By the way: what if there are no "corporate windfall profits" to tax? Then what?

Meanwhile, here's my version of "why not just" — Why not just give parents vouchers? Why not give the power of the educational purse to parents rather than some new and ominous federal bureaucracy? The financing details would be ancillary; the fundamental outcome would be that if parents could choose their kids' schools without the disruption of relocation to another school district, then I suspect the "teacher salary crisis" would promptly take care of itself.

How is "more money" the answer to education reform? How does "more money" smash the teachers unions? How does "more money" abolish the long-obsolete agrarian school calendar? How does "more money" end the counterproductive mainstreaming of special-needs students? How does "more money" stop ineffective bilingual education programs from being substituted for rigorous English as a Second Language instruction?

"More money" is not the answer, and certainly not in the guise of more tax-and-spend masquerading as a faux "Teachers' Trust."

There can be no "reform" without, um, reform.

Call it my "minority report."

I've noted previously that it took less than 25 years for the Republican Party to go from calling for the abolition of the Department of Education to No Child Left Behind.

With no end in sight:

Out of respect for federalism and mistrust of Washington, much of the GOP has expected individual states to set their own academic standards and devise their own tests and accountability systems. That was the approach of the No Child Left Behind Act — which moved as boldly as it could while still achieving bipartisan support. It sounds good, but it is working badly.
...
Washington should set sound national academic standards and administer a high-quality national test. Publicize everybody's results, right down to the school level.

So says — oh my goodness — former Reagan Education Secretary William J. Bennett.

Besides the fact that there is nothing in Article I of the Constitution that even remotely suggests that Congress has any authority to regulate education. Besides the fact that the Tenth Amendment was long thought to preclude federal regulation of education. Besides that fact that essentially every aspect of NCLB has been a dismal failure. Besides the fact that education is not obviously a public good in the first place.

Besides all that, we still get — from Bill Bennett — the assertion that "the cure for the failures of big government is ... more big government."

Madness. Sheer madness.

And besides, there is an obvious and proven alternative to federal testing of schoolchildren. Two in fact.

The lesser answer is simply private testing. Like the infamous "Iowa Tests" that many of us took as grade schoolers.

The even better answer would be the same answer that works perfectly well — amazingly well — for colleges, law schools, medical schools and business schools — private accreditation:

Accreditation is a voluntary, independent review of educational programs to determine that the education provided is of uniform and sound quality. Being awarded accreditation ensures that an institution has been evaluated and that it met set standards of quality determined by the accrediting organization granting the accreditation. A college or university's accreditation is maintained by continued adherence to the set criteria.

Isn't that precisely what Bennett, the educrats — oh, and parents — want? Go figure.

And it wouldn't cost a single federal tax dollar — schools pay for accreditation themselves. So the time-honored principle of "local control, local finance" is preserved.

If the federal bureaucracy absolutely must involve itself, somehow (in the same sense that an addict absolutely must obtain his narcotic, somehow), then it could provide oversight of the accrediting agencies themselves — they have some experience with that.

Private accreditation — even with federal regulatory oversight — would not be adding a layer of educational bureaucracy to our schools. Quite the opposite: it would serve as a buffer, a layer of insulation, to shield students from the micromanaging, Warm Fuzzy Feeling politics of Washington. And it would cost less.

Watching the Republicans self-destruct on education policy is a bit like watching the polar ice caps melt — you're pretty sure it's a bad thing, you think you might know the cause, you think you might even know the solution. And still, all you can do it sit by and watch it happen, because the people who need to listen won't.

More thoughts from the CATO Institute. To The People.

The Bush Administration is preparing to relax restrictions on single-gender classes.

Under the change taking effect Nov. 24, local school leaders will have discretion to create same-sex classes for subjects such as math, a grade level or even an entire school.

"Some students may learn better in single-sex education environments," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. "These final regulations permit communities to establish single-sex schools and classes as another means of meeting the needs of students."

Which invites the question: why did the federal government restrict single-gender classrooms in the first place? Why is the federal government micro-managing education at all?

"To prevent gender discrimination" is not an answer. If and when there is a demonstrated gender-based inequality in a particular school, then that particular instance can be addressed — in the courts, if necessary. Anti-discrimination laws should not be imposing pre-emptive "one size fits all" policies out of a fear of potential inequities, especially in an area such as a elementary and secondary education that has historically been administered at the state and local level. "Pre-penalizing" schools for discrimination that isn't happening is akin to "pre-fining" whites for racial discrimination that they have not yet committed.

And it bears repeating: In twenty years the Republican Party has gone from calling for the abolition of the Department of Education to No Child Left Behind. Libertarians should naturally default to the GOP — why?